What Is the "Soul of Occupy?" [Draft/BETA][Pt.3-1, Intermezzo]

By Paul McLean

[Video by Liza Bear]

[Narrative]:

New York City, May 1 2012-- Occupy Guitarmy musicians, led by Tom Morello, play Willie Nile's "One Guitar" before marchikng down Fifth Avenue to Union Square as part of May Day 2012. Filmed by Liza Béar, Squaring Off, Mobile Broadcast News. @owsmusicgroup@nothingofficial

[Morello/Guitarmy photo by Theodore Hamm]

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I think a lot of the people involved in the globalization movement, myself included, felt this was a continuation of our efforts, because we never really felt the globalization movement had come to an end. We’d smash our heads against the wall every year, saying “Oh yes, this time we’re really back. Oh wait, maybe not.” A lot of us gradually began to lose hope that it was really going to bounce back in the way we always thought we knew it would. And then it happened, as a combination of tactics of trying to create prefigurative models of what a democratic society would be like, as a way of organizing protest or actions that were directed against an obviously undemocratic structure of governance. - "The movement as an end-in-itself?" An interview with David Graeber by Ross Wolfe http://platypus1917.org/2012/01/31/interview-with-david-graeber/

Planning for May 1 in New York began in January in a fourth-floor workspace at 16 Beaver St., about two blocks from Wall Street, [Marisa] Holmes said. The date serves as an international labor day, commemorating a deadly 1886 clash between police and workers in Chicago's Haymarket Square. - "Banks cooperate to track Occupy protesters" by Max Abelson for Bloomberg [posted at SF Gate, and elsewhere] - http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/26/BUTK1O9L88.DTL

The worsening of the artificial and coercive debt problem was used as a weapon to attack an entire society. It is proper that we speak here of terms related to the military: we are indeed dealing with a war conducted by means of finance, politics and law, a class war against society as a whole. And the spoils that the financial class wrestles away from the "enemy", are the social benefits and democratic rights, but ultimately it is the very possibility of a human life that is taken. The lives of those who do or do not consume enough in terms of profit maximization strategies, should be no longer be preserved. - Alain Badiou, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Étienne Balibar, Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Avital Ronell. Save the Greeks from their Saviors! February 22, 2012. Translation into English by Drew S. Burk and Anastazia Golemi. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/alain-badiou/articles/save-the-greeks-from-their-saviors/

If so, for the art world to recognize itself as a form of politics is also to recognize itself as something both magical, and a confidence game—a kind of scam. - "The Sadness of Post-Workerism..." by David Graeber

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Ethnic Groups of Madagascar

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David Graeber in his essay on Post-Workerism develops an argument about art in the section titled "the art world as a form of politics" that every artist associating herself with OWS should read, since Graeber is a self-described "author" and creator of central facets of it, or even the movement itself, if I understood him correctly at a talk I attended at NYU's Hemispheric Institute recently. Graeber's view of art is grim verging on toxic, but also thin as black ice in Madagascar, the island that he made his anthropological bones on, so to speak, and which is always going to be mentioned whenever Graeber talks or writes, it seems.

Madagascar.

Graeber starts the section by commenting on Negri. Forgive the long quote. Really, Occupy artists must read the whole thing, but let's at least drill into this much:

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The resulting analysis is revealing no doubt, even fun if one is into that sort of thing, but it sidesteps the obvious fact that the production of art is an industry, and one connected to capital, marketing, and design in any number of (historically shifting) ways. One need not ask who is buying these things, who is funding the institutions, where do artists live, how else are their techniques being employed. By defining art as belonging to the immaterial domain, it’s materialities, or even its entanglement in other abstractions (like money) need not be addressed.

This is not perhaps the place for a prolonged analysis, but a few notes on what’s called “the art world” might seem to be in order. It is a common perception, not untrue, that at least since the ‘20s the art world has been in a kind of permanent institutionalized crisis. One could even say that what we call “the art world” has become the ongoing management of this crisis. The crisis of course is about the nature of art. The entire apparatus of the art world—critics, journals, curators, gallery owners, dealers, flashy magazines and the people who leaf through them and argue about them in factories-turned-chichi-cafes in gentrifying neighborhoods...— could be said to exist to come up with an answer to one single question: what is art? Or, to be more precise, to come up with some answer other than the obvious one, which is “whatever we can convince very rich people to buy.”  
 
I am really not trying to be cynical. Actually I think the dilemma to some degree flows from the very nature of politics. One thing the explosion of the avant garde did accomplish was to destroy the boundaries between art and politics, to make clear in fact that art was always, really, a form of politics (or at least that this was always one thing that it was.) As a result the art world has been faced with the same fundamental dilemma as any form of politics: the impossibility of establishing its own legitimacy.
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[Animation still for BONE by Paul McLean]

A few things. First is appreciation for Graeber's revisiting "fun" for those of us "into that sort of thing." Second, that the boundaries between art and politics were exploded by the avant garde is the zombie dream of the European Left, the same one that eventually became inextricably intertwined with the very neo-Liberal 1% machine-monster that Graeber insists he is fighting globally. Which is to say, same as it ever was for the colonialist Continent. Graeber teaches at Goldsmiths - did I mention that already? The old Protestant Rule of no graven images manifests in neo-protestantism as the casting as contraband of images with gravitas, unless an image serves the express purpose of the Revolutionary Reformation of the status quo, which, when all is said and done, in one form or another, remains. A good illustration is Thomas Hirschhorn's installation in the Swiss pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011. I've written about this culture/finance/politics bait & switch elsewhere, and the "scam" is a much more serious manipulation than Graeber describes. It has nothing to do with art, as such. It has much to do with exploiting an artificial simulation of art to promulgate propaganda (in this case acceptable anti-American propaganda, when a real indictment would have targeted Switzerland itself, which, more than any country has benefitted from endless imperial war and the gutting of the world's free societies by banksters over the past several decades), and to disconnect democratic masses from free expression. The almost completely unregulated economies underpinning the 1% "artworld" and a spectacular/symbolic or avant garde poster-boy phenomena represented by the Hirschhorn "collective" intervention are much more complex and filthy than Graeber indicates. The American pavilion exhibit was an even more brazen corruption. It had nothing to do with politics, as such. The Allora and Calzadilla expo was systematic tyranny disguised as brave democratic political art. The conflation of art and politics only serves the politician, just as the conflation of art and art market only serves the marketeers and their prime beneficiaries, who devote themselves secondarily to art as prime benefactors, for many reasons, almost all of them destructive to both art and everyone else for whom art exists as an intrinsically free human expression. Conflating the dimensional and complex exchanges that art catalyzes among the object and people with the exchange of dollars or whatever artificial currency, sometimes hundreds of millions of them, only serves those for whom the exchange of huge sums in fungible and immaterial currency for some real thing, as a contractual action amongst those of their own 1% tribe, can function as a hedge, entertainment, laundering device, etc. In short, the 1% experience "art" just as Graeber describes, as just another utility in the extraction/exploitation/waste industry. This utilitarian thing of theirs certainly does not limit art's real value to humans, which persists in our visual matrix, as legacies, from Chauvet to Uluru.

Third is Graeber's interesting spin on art and immateriality. There's no question that Graeber is a brilliant thinker, whose inquiries span a breathtaking breadth of subject matter. Which is why I find his non- or ana-answers to my questions, asking him to define art and artists, and his apparent incapacity or unwillingness to do so, especially in light of his writings on the subject, questionable. I've posed the same questions (What Is Art? Who's an Artist? What Is Art for?) to hundreds of people from all walks of life, and to notable experts in the humanities, like Sylvere Lotringer, Frank Stella and Richard Tuttle. Artists usually have very rich answers. Art critics prevaricate the most, followed in short order by cross-disciplinary social scientists like Graeber. Graeber is an instructor at Goldsmiths, which would encourage one to expect a developed set of ideas on the nature of art. In analysis of his writings and many interviews, I have come to the conclusion, open to modification, that David Graeber defines art the way a very capable and cagey career criminal testifies without immunity at trial. The opportunities to incorrectly assign a reducible epistemological PoV to Graeber as a one-liner aesthetic are plentiful. Whether or not he possesses any refined aesthetic he's willing to apply to art and artists as a conditional is not clear. What's clear is that he has great interest in purveying art as an open question, which he projects on the art world as its own inherent crisis of definition as "legitimacy." I would suggest Graeber needs a fungible definition for art for the same reasons Žižek, Adbusters and many others do. They prefer art to be anything and everything in human behavior that can in some aspect be linked to adaptation or interpretation, and a "pure" imaginary or idea, in order to immaterialize art enough to make it a compressed asset in their cultural derivations, which depend on art as such. The mind in such an architecture is operating in relation to action not as a packager of a more or less derivative representation of the actual, but more as a compressing or flattening device. Post Continental Theory, post-Adam, then the re-naming of any object, action, process, etc., affords the immaterialist the power to conflate art with anything, which is a gross social norm now. That something is normative does not of course make it correct or good or real. We all can think of a lie that everyone believes, probably. Time is probably the best example.    

Exit Art, ca 2002 [d. 2012] - photo/animation still by Paul McLean

If Occupy is an immateriality - an unevictable idea, say - but still real in the sphere of its own imaginary or virtual iteration, or at least real enough to require or at least sustain defending, we ought to consider the nature of that occupational immateriality as a conceptual art form, at least as a conjecture, since the similarity of the two propositions - that Occupy is immaterial, but real, and the same is true of art - is substantial enough for a comparative reference. OWS could be conceived of as an immaterial driver, or force, bound to and moving a collective meta-corpus of material attachments (wetware, or people) and the actions thereof. The same can be said of art and artsies. As such Occupy can be fitted with a native sentience as a concept, too, construed to contain a creative communal essence, or, in the vernacular of the West used to describe immaterial bindings or ties, a shared soul. Adbusters appears to presume such a configuration. If we accept such a presumption, then we can ask about the nature or qualities of an OWS soul. We can also ask whether someone's definition of that soul is adequate, rational or fair. Such questioning can be situated in metaphysics, the political, or other domains of exchange, negotiation, arbitration and interpretation. With respect to an Occupy spirit, then, is Adbusters' conceptual projection of Occupy true, in the Hegelian absolute sense, or progressing at least in that direction? Might it exist in the ether as a Platonic or Aristotelian ideal form, the corruption of which we must criticize? The metaphysical is prone to poetic expansion. Is then Adbusters' proclamation really more a poetic eruption than a staunch prohibition against the dirtying of Occupy by commodification or co-optation? Other points of view might be considered as qualifiers. Occupy might be the utilitarian fabrication for George Soros, as the conservative blogosphere would have us believe, a misguided anti-Capitalist Trojan Horse couched in a nebulous faux agenda, which Occupy-as-art could be said to be. We could resituate Occupy-as-art-falsity in a different cultural latticework, for example: Occupy might be Maya, a terrible illusion to keep the cycle of suffering turning, for if Occupy is art, in one aesthetic seam, it would be useless beyond itself and in itself ultimately sublime. Or is Occupy now merely a figure of speech? Occupy this. Occupy that. Can we think of OWS as a matrix of social derivatives, the "sediments of past civilization," as David Graeber described culture in his recent YesLab talk at NYU? Would that make Occupy artists silt? Or is Occupy an extract, a golem-like creature, an anthropomorphism encasing a presumption of divine nature, disguised as a protestant exhortation ["Tear down that wall!"] directed by indirection to an angry, unspecified or at least 99% unspecified mob. Or is OWS a new head of the perpetual wack-a-mole-like foe of the divine corporate Hero, just another emergent iteration in a waveform revolution that someday will rise tall enough to flood the mansions on the hill? Or is OWS a new wave of irrational and savage  domestic Terror, as pundits like the Washington Post's Gerson seem to fear, whatever the inconsistencies between fact and reality?

Skull from the collection of the LA Natural History museum [Photo/animation still by Paul McLean]

Maybe Occupy is all and/or none of this. Maybe Occupy is what one is doing right this moment, as in, "What is one's current occupation?" I would argue that the main reason that Adbusters' ideal anti-Capital Occupy has not congealed into the immediately potent force for broad systemic change that still seems doable, is a function of Adbuster's vision for Occupy lacking real artist soul, at least soul that the "leaderless" leadership is willing to embrace. Let's face it. A soul-less movement doesn't have the same ring as a leaderless one. Because the old Left is where Adbusters still lurks large in the imagination of the old Right.  Adbusters, in an Internet age timeframe, is ancient. What does it take to optimize a nascent reformation that's already succeeding, by some measures? Noam Chomsky, as usual, is worth asking.*^*

INTERMEZZO

[May 1] I was following the media coverage and Ustreams of the May Day actions all day. My main occupation was my 4 month-old, whom I watched while my wife was at work. By late afternoon, when my shift was done, I was exhausted. Via the web, I enjoyed the Guitarmy's mobile rendition of "This Land Is Your Land." The scenes from Oakland were infuriating. Here in Bushwick, there was no General Strike. I kept asking myself, "Was all this worth 5 months of planning and the organizational focus, resource allocation, etc.? To stage a concert in Union Square? To have a parade and block traffic? While the kid was napping I finally surrendered to Facebook's enforced Timeline format, and built a new image for the banner. I'm thinking of Haymarket, of the 8-hour workday, of the "anarchists" the FBI stung, foiling plans to blow up a Cleveland bridge (and the obvious timing of the bust). I'm thinking of that torturing CIA scumbag Jose Rodriquez, who is on a book tour, instead of in prison. I read the interview with Alan Moore in the April Brooklyn Rail, the analysis of France's elections and conjectures about the upcoming Greek elections, and I must admit, that all in all, the stress on the seams of the big brutal plutocrat/corporate syndicate/endless war/police-surveillance-prison state are showing. I hope Bloomberg is shitting gold bricks, after his endorsement meeting with Romney (!). The NY Times and Washington Post as of 10:36PM had not acknowledged that 30-75000 people had taken to the streets in NYC, and the stock market closed at a 4-year high. Obama was out of the country, signing something in Afghanistan to the effect that America was really, really about to end the war there - in 2014. Really. No joke this time. Gas in this state is well over $4 per gallon. EXXON is awash in cash. A significant study indicates that Republicans are responsible for the polarization and gridlock in governments Federal, state and local in the USA. Alan Grayson, whom I will probably write in with my vote for President (although today in comments fields of one livestream channel, occupiers were recommending Mike Check as the best write-in) suggested that George W. Bush wasn't endorsing Romney, because W's poll numbers were worse than "venereal disease." Lots of Occupy books are hitting bookstores, at least the few remaining ones. I'm looking forward to tomorrow's media gaggle on the re-emergence of OWS. The buzz will last at least a day or two.

This sympathetic engraving by English Arts and Crafts illustrator Walter Crane of "The Anarchists of Chicago" was widely circulated among anarchists, socialists, and labor activists. (Wikipedia)

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Oops. Spoke to soon. The NY Times pretends nothing happened outside its offices on May Day. The only coverage there, in the supposedly Liberal flagship media outlet, is on the protests in Europe. On May 1, itself, NYT pushed a story about the academic angle for Occupy, focusing on social scientists (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/books/academia-becomes-occupied-with-occupy-movement.html?pagewanted=all). A passage that caught my eye was this one:

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Edward Maguire, a criminologist at American University who is leading a study of attitudes toward the police and the law among Occupy protesters in six cities, cited an incident in which one research assistant at a demonstration in Washington in March “handed in her ID, turned in her clipboard and within minutes got arrested.”

“Part of where our research is heading is making recommendations to police departments,” he said. “When they look at our research, I want them to trust it. Having people involved in the movement wouldn’t work for us.”
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Reblogged from Door Mouse

I couldn't help but think of David Graeber, who evidently marched yesterday, tweeting about some poor kid having his head smashed on the concrete repeatedly by NYPD, who were doing it just because they could. The Washington Post produced a more balanced piece, (http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/occupy-movement-returns-for-may-day-protests-in-dc-new-york-and-around-us/2012/05/01/gIQASDqQvT_story.html), which was fairly easy to find on my mobile phone, but in the online version of the Post was buried in Post Local via the Politics section. Which is amazing, given that tens of thousands of protesters in the Big Apple, and many more in communities across the US, interrupted the news cycle using a diversity of tactics, ranging from street theater to violence. The UK's Guardian, naturally, produced plentiful and rich coverage all day May Day, and excellent analysis the next day.

It's like being in old Russia, Slavoj.

Down with religious holidays! (Wikipedia)

CNN offered a story on their top line of online videos about why Occupy May Day "fizzled" (http://www.cnn.com/2012/05/02/opinion/etzioni-occupy-tea-party/index.html?hpt=hp_c2). The URL itself is worth noting, because stupid binary reporting insists that the Tea Party and OWS be conflated, even though they have almost nothing in their trajectories that support any such linkage. The tell-line in Etzioni's CNN hack-job: "In the United States, the last general strike took place in 1946. While some 100,000 workers from 142 unions participated, it did not lead to concessions by the powers that be, let alone bring down anything." Last night for the evening's march on Wall Street in NYC the crowd estimates ranged from 20 or 30K to as many as 50-75,000 souls. U.S. News on MSNBC published this account:

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The New York protesters then streamed downtown, in an early evening march heading past the former Occupy Wall Street home, Zuccotti Park, to Bowling Green park near the southern tip of Manhattan. Occupy sent out a text message saying 30,000 people were in the streets, though it was not possible to determine how many were and police do not give crowd estimates. At one point, the protest appeared to stretch about 15 city blocks.
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Few in the corporate-monopoly/MSM care to admit how huge and peaceful the demonstration was. Only thirty (later reports were slightly higher) of the tens of thousands who gathered were arrested. The NY Daily News followed the events start-to-finish, with embedded reports uploaded all day and night. The photos are great, although the vantage points don't include the many overhead shots that clarify just how massive the evening march was. "From Kerry Burke: As thousands march down Broadway, the odd anarchist marching band can be heard playing Dixieland over the whistles. Lots of cowbell. It's more parade than protest." (http://live.nydailynews.com/Event/Occupy_Wall_Street_May_Day_Protests#ixzz1ticSxV8z) The Occupy coverage (via NYDN) was much more colorful: "Massive, massive, massive march heading down Broadway toward Wall Street. Nearly all unions. #m1gs"

Which is a good point. One must wonder whether the alliance between the leaderless leaders of OWS and the unions and other groups for the M1 direct action had more to do with mobilizing bodies, than it did natural affinity. Although it's arguable that making a deal isn't, in nature, a function of "mutual aid," to use the OWS terminology.

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Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Art Is My Occupation announced its grantees on May Day, and Occupy with Art's collaboration with Greene Arts in Catskill, NY, "Wall Street to Main Street" was one of the recipients. God bless AMO, and Gan Golan. Last weekend in Catskill, WS2MS hosted several terrific events, including presentations by Jenjoy Roybal on the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, a couple by the folks who developed the OWS Grey Water System and one by an artist who worked in the OWS Kitchen, as well as a demo by Jos Sances of the notorious Great Tortilla Conspiracy, who flew to Catskill for WS2MS at curator Geno Rodriquez' invitation. The two have known each other for ages. There was much more on the WS2MS card on the 28th & -9th, and an opening for "Transmittal" at the Greene Arts community gallery that was just plain excellent. Outside the carnivalesque vortex of attention swirling around the May Day stuff, OwA and our collaborators have been building an important prototype in upstate New York (and indeed all over the world, if we consider our other projects, like Low Lives: Occupy! too), in the historic and culturally significant Hudson River Valley. OWS/NYCGA seems committed to ignoring our efforts, even though we are doing exactly what Chomsky recommends for the movement. The BFI teach-in provides a potent sample of what's possible in the realm of Occupational Art School programming. OwA's movement-marginalized effort is not unlike many, many other similar efforts to platform info-sharing among visionaries inside and outside Occupy. Whereas other disciplines receive some modicum of organizational support from inside the anarchist-driven structures of the movement, we haven't. Today on the OWS main website, an intervention by Occupy Museums/Art & Labor with the art handlers union, slated for the May 2 auction at Sotheby's (which includes Edvard Munch's iconic "The Scream") got splashy billing in the OWS blog.  

UPDATE: NYT published a brief about arrests. Found Alternet's great coverage (http://www.alternet.org/story/155240/%27festive%2C_righteous_anger%27%3A_occupy_makes_may-day_comeback_with_massive_demonstrations/?page=entire), which starts with a passage that may or may not have something to do with the Times' failure to - once more - adequately report on one of the biggest news stories of the day.

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Sideways 8 (Animation still by Paul McLean)

[May 2] Talking tonight to Ted Hamm, who attended the festivities: he confirmed that Guitarmy indeed was ultra-cool, and admonished me about not participating. He also described a recent CUNY event at which Graeber appeared in a gladiator costume. Also, Anonymous has curated "Festival of Optimism (AKA Anarchist Art Fair)" at the Peanut Underground: Studio + Project Space at 215 East 5th Street. The press release is very clever. The collective represented will include the living and dead artists, some of them very 1%er, like Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, but who knows if this is true or not? Lee Wells of Perpetual Art Machine's one of the living ones. So is Dread Scott, whom I called a fuck-pump not long ago, though I've not met him (Ted has, and says he seems like a nice person), based on his flag-/Constitution-burning art scene phlegmatics. The group's symbol is the sideways 8, so anything from anytime could happen. The graphic for the Facebook Event page depicts an auld Maypole festivitie. )http://www.peanutunderground.com/ Occupy PR posted a link on our OwA Facebook page to really, really terrific May Day slideshow. I'm tempted, due to their complete lack of support for OwA to take it down, but the photos are just amazing. No one can say that Occupy isn't photogenic. )http://www.owspr.com/blog-the-revolution-will-be-editorialized.html

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[AUTHOR'S NOTE]: Brooklyn is now the home of the NBA Nets. I went to the University of Notre Dame for undergrad studies (Go Irish). After several months of observing the constructing of the May Day operation by OWS, and then its manifestation, I realized I had some revealing comparisons for the phenomenon. They include Notre Dame football games; a Lady Gaga concert in the late Oughts, when she opened for New Kids on the Block at Staples Center in Los Angeles, when she was on the verge of mega-stardom; personal, anecdotal stories by US Veterans of wars in Europe, Korea, Vietnam and more. I think we could add public executions to the list, or AA and Rotary conventions. Essentially, #1M direct actions resulted from event planning, which is a viable occupation in the US today. It's why the musicians did so well. They and their managers and producers know how to put together large scale events. The participation of the unions and other groups for whom collective public marches and protest gatherings and events have been an important tool in their organizational toolbox for decades was similarly helpful to the overall success of the NYC May Day action. What I'm getting at here is that the organization of large scale collective actions such as the Occupy May Day festival is hardly an innovation for Americans. In fact such formations are routine. They happen all the time all over the country.

What's new about Occupy's gathering orders and mechanisms? Well for one thing, if you adhere to Graeber's version of things, which is in flux, this is an anarchist/academic social science enterprise, conducted in the manner of relational aesthetics, as a curated event or, in my own terminology, a dimensional media event. This angle can be explored in depth. What's the purpose of Occupy May Day, and Occupy itself, as a movement that generates such events? Well, Occupy has refuted the need for a singleness of purposes so far, but Graeber basically argues (as creator/author) that Occupy is in sum an end in itself. I tend to not believe that, based on the evidence. If that had been the case, OWS would have abandoned Liberty Square in late October or early November of 2011, refusing to be evicted and choosing to disband in an orderly fashion, when the opportunity was still available. This option was definitely possible at the time, and was discussed at GAs and in working groups. There were several main reasons why the occupation continued, in spite of the obvious inevitability of the encampment's forced dissolution, given both the potency of the coordinated top-down (read Obama-down) authoritarian onslaught and the coming of winter (which actually, thanks to global warming, turned out to be not bad at all, although huge resources were wasted by the money handlers in the movement on nice gear for arctic conditions - not art, etc.). These reasons for digging in at Liberty Square included entrenchment by the occupants in their fucked up tent city, which was the main one. Comparing what happened here in the "village" and what happened in the LA occupation is helpful to understand the seriousness of the problem. OWS in aspects became a gated community. The anarchist clans were some of the most exclusive and worst offenders, in protecting their turf, in the assemblies, around the money and in the actual Occupy tent-cities, while throughout the working groups silo-ing the Occupy culture to their liking or format. None of this appeared to be organized as a strategy, which is why it all was so shitty. The whole mess was clearly not conforming to the "soul" of the movement, as it had been expressed early on, pretty spontaneously. Of course it didn't help that cops, FBI, CIA, private security/contractors and who knows who else, operating under the permissions and auspices of the highest authority in the land, were infiltrating and pressurizing every aspect of the movement/moment. Provocateurs abounded. Disruptions were plentiful, and it was impossible to tell what was artificially induced externally and what arose out of ideological conflicts, or conflicting needs of various occupant sects, etc. The money was one of the most corrosive facets in the mix.  

[Photo from Storefront for Art and Architecture - click image for details, more]

The default turned out to be staying put. Instead of Occupy's leaving for "home" on its own terms, OWS decided as a collective that Liberty Square was its home, its "property," which was at that point conflated wrongly with a commons. Consequently, the ruckus, the crackdown clearance/eviction of OWS on #N15 went down, followed by that beautiful 99% Bat Signal moment of Mark Read's N17 projection, in conjunction with the big two-month birthday party/wake for OWS, including the Brooklyn Bridge crossing en masse. Anyway, ends-in-themselves have ends. OWS denied itself that course. Which is to say, no intellectual like Graeber can claim to create or author Occupy. I'm pretty sure he accepts that, himself, more or less, based on his qualified pronouncements on that subject. He is after all a brilliant guy, right? Which isn't to say that intellectuals, or idea-people, aren't working diligently to manage the movement. They most certainly are. Whatever Occupy is dimensionally, it isn't really functioning rationally all the time, which one could argue is a sign of bad management.  

One could also argue that Occupy is unmanageable. One could also argue that it's powerless.

"The Scream" sold at auction for $120 million.

To put that in relation to OWS, in a dollar-to-dollar comparison, Occupy's war chest accumulated about $1 million. Occupy Museums, Arts & Labor and the art handlers didn't put a dent in that operation. Pre-auction estimates for the sale I think were around $80 million.

What does art have to do with either action? ...Let's see how the frieze art fair interventions work out. And the Berlin Biennial. And the unpaid intern market.

I think I'll end the intermission with this excerpt from Badiou, from "The Event As Trans-Being" (Badiou/Theoretical Writings, pp.101): "I have called this fragment the evental site. There is an event only in so far as there exists a site for it within an effectively deployed situation (a multiple). ... Therefore, the abstract definition of a site is that it is a part of a situation all of whose elements are on the edge of the void."

*^* http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/30/noam-chomsky-what-next-occupy

[NOTE 3: Footnotes at the end of the final segment]