WS2MS: Co-organizer's "End" Notes

Catskill Chocolate Shop

WS2MS Closing Weekend
A Note from OwA Co-organizer Paul McLean

...Can one ask questions about the strange fact that, after several revolutions and century or two of political apprenticeship, in spite of the newspapers, the trade unions, the parties, the intellectuals and all the energy put into educating and mobilising the people, there are still (and it will be exactly the same in ten or twenty years) a thousand persons who stand up and twenty million who remain "passive" - and not only passive, but who, in all good faith and with glee and without even asking themselves why, frankly prefer a football match to a human and political drama? It is curious that this proven fact has never succeeded in making political analysis shift ground, but on the contrary reinforces it in its vision of an omnipotent, manipulatory power, and a mass prostrate in an unintelligible coma. Now none of this is true, and both the above are a deception: power manipulates nothing, the masses are neither mislead nor mystified. Power is only too happy to make football bear a facile responsibility for stupefying the masses. This comforts it in its illusion of being power, and leads away from the much more dangerous fact that this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a collective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recommended ideals, however enlightened.

- Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities

Berlin, Germany ["We the People" at Brik Gallery]

Dear friends,

On March 17, 2012, Wall Street to Main Street launched in Catskill, NY. Since then, Occupy with Art's partnership with Greene Arts/Masters on Main Street has offered the community a diverse program of exhibits, installations, performances, readings, demonstrations, workshops, seminars, and more. We even had our own single edition newspaper! Participants have ranged from celebrated (or controversial) artists with art-world-recognizable names like Andres Serrano, to locally- (and internationally-) recognizable artists like Matt Bua, to collectives like Bread & Puppet Theater and abcdefgCORPS, to poet/writers, like Sparrow, who spans the spheres of Occupy and the Hudson River region, to those folks who brought pieces for the absolutely inclusive "People's Collection," whose participation required no artistic self-definition at all. From the beginning our objectives included generating a rich sample of Occupy arts, commingled with works originating from the region's impressive artist base. In some fair measure, that goal was attained, although to what extent the potential interchange was tapped is an open question. Estimating the populations of possible collaborators versus actual ones won't permit us to congratulate ourselves too much.

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