The Book: ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery

CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO VIEW THE E-BOOK.

ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery
Edited by Alan Moore and Marc Miller
New York: ABC No Rio with Collaborative Projects, 1985

Excerpt:

ABC No Rio Dinero: The Story of a Lower East Side Art Gallery is a catalogue of the gallery's first five years as well as an exploration of the broader artistic context from which No Rio emerged. Although No Rio never followed a strict agenda, it viewed itself as an interactive space where art, politics and community mixed. As such, the gallery was linked to artist groups like Colab, Group Material, and PADD, as well as the South Bronx gallery, Fashion/Moda. No Rio found inspiration in its Hispanic neighborhood, but it also connected with the East Village's newly burgeoning music and club scene, and the wave of commercial art galleries that opened in the area soon after No Rio began. During No Rio's first years, shows were generally organized by artists, and open to all who wanted to participate. The gallery specialized in theme exhibitions and was the launching pad for new ideas as well as for the careers of many successful artists.

IMMERSION INTO NOISE

Immersion Into Noise

Joseph Nechvatal

Open Humanities Press, 2011

Excerpt:

Some claim that art, as entertainment-spectacle, participates in the dumbing-down values that have proved useful to big business, values that address all communications to the lowest common denominator. I tend to agree. Therefore my feeling is that today art must indict—or at the very least play the role of the noisy jester who unmasks the quietly persistent lies of the powerful. Corporate and government propaganda is often designed to deceive and victimize us—and if art cannot rebuff and contest this by fueling the political will and imagination of resistance, I wonder why we need it at all. So for me, an intricate art of noisy resistance is increasingly valuable to an analytical social movement based on skepticism as it strengthens unique personal powers of imagination and critical thinking through self-perception, while undermining market predictabilities. Such art noise counters the effects of our age of simplification—effects that have resulted from the glut of consumer-oriented entertainment messages and political propaganda, which the mass media feed us daily in the interests of corporate profit and governmental manipulations.

This look at self-perception is the impetus behind this book.

Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture

By Gregory Sholette

Pluto Press (2011) - Paperback - 304 pages - ISBN 0745327524

Art is big business, with some artists able to command huge sums of money for their works, while the vast majority are ignored or dismissed by critics. This book shows that these marginalized artists, the "dark matter" of the art world, are essential to the survival of the mainstream and that they frequently organize in opposition to it. Gregory Sholette, a politically engaged artist, argues that imagination and creativity in the art world originate thrive in the non-commercial sector shut off from prestigious galleries and champagne receptions. This broader creative culture feeds the mainstream with new forms and styles that can be commodified and used to sustain the few artists admitted into the elite. This dependency, and the advent of inexpensive communication, audio and video technology, has allowed this "dark matter" of the alternative art world to increasingly subvert the mainstream and intervene politically as both new and old forms of non-capitalist, public art. This book is essential for anyone interested in interventionist art, collectivism, and the political economy of the art world.

Alternative Art Economies: A Primer

[Submitted by Erin]

To download the PDF (34MB), click HERE.

Erin's introduction:

Over the course of several workshops this spring, several artists and I compiled the Alternative Art Economies Primer, a 962-page pdf of links, articles, essays, and further bibliographies related to art, activism, and imagining a different economy.