Occupy Museums

Hi,

attached I am sending you a letter from Noah Fischer, visual artist from
New York, who is very involved with Occupy Wall Street, he initiated Occupy
Museums (took the whole assamblea to the MoMA), which got a lot of
attention. We collaborated with him a couple of time, now we made a
Dutch-Flemish-German theater production called "de (komende) opstand naar
Schiller" which will be presented at Theater Frascati on this weekend:
http://www.andco.de/index.php?context=project_detail&id=5859

best regards,
Alex Karschnia&Co.
(andcompany&Co.)

please circulate wildly:

LETTER FROM NEW YORK TO DUTCH ARTISTS

I guess it's possible that you guys first discovered capitalism in a golden
tulip, but we Americans really developed it. Our industries invented
products that everyone didn’t know they needed; a booming consumer culture
built into Europe’s foundations after the war. But this still wasn’t
enough. Our bankers began making money from money itself: packaging debt
and betting against these deals. And when this wasn’t enough, we went to
war with ancient civilizations, destroying them just to rebuild them into
shopping malls for huge profits, but that was also still not enough. So
finally, our wealthiest elites began to actually eat the American public.
In the US we are experiencing a viral attack on everything that should be
commonly owned, or not owned at all: our security, care in old age,
education, natural resources, democratic government, our very culture. As
we lose these things, our society is becoming un-glued, we are turning
against each other like wolves. Unfortunately, we have exported this virus
back to you, where it first originated. Here in New York, my Dutch friends,
we may be living in your future. I’m writing to tell you that things have
gotten really ugly on this side of the Atlantic, and we need your help
before its too late.

Despite a perception by New Yorkers that we are at the center of the
cultural universe, times have been tough for artists here. The glamorous
art markets have not saved us, in fact they have enslaved us by our
desires, making us so “hungry” that we’re willing to bite each others faces
off for opportunities to enter this market which in reality only has a few
winners and lots of losers. We had forgotten that as culture workers, we
have a constant responsibility to stay vigilant against those who want to
position us as jesters in their royal courts. We had fallen asleep. We
dreamt that “political art” meant an expression of our favorite politics
for a stage, or on a canvas, to be bought and sold and speculated on by the
winners of capitalism. Waking up, we realize that there is no such genre as
political art. In our times, only the economic structures around things are
political. By letting the commonwealth of our culture morph into a big
pyramid shaped market, by participating in this market, we were actually
supporting a nasty position while we slept.

On September 17th, we finally woke up, came together, and opened up a space
for protest and dialog in Zucotti Park. At Occupy Wall Street, we shared
democratic tools developed in Egypt, Spain, Greece, and Brazil that would
aid in this new culture. Our aim was to re-discover a culture of the
commons and it caught on all over the place. Now we are involved in a
global movement.

As it turned out, many of us occupiers are also artists. And now we have
expanded the zone of protest into the cultural realm. We have begun
occupying museums because economic injustice is as pronounced in the
culture sphere as it is in the housing market. Museums claim to serve the
public. They contain the symbols and narratives and treasures that we are
all taught to believe in. But they have been co-opted by the 1% who sit on
their boards influencing culture on one hand while also sitting on the
auction house boards and speculating for personal gain on the other. In
this way, power in the arts is concentrated and corrupt and this deeply
disempowers most artists. So we held general assemblies at the gate of the
Museum of Modern Art and Lincoln Center. Soon we were joined by large
crowds. We aim to re-direct art away from the luxury markets and toward the
common struggle and vision of the 99%.

I hear troubling rumors across the Atlantic. There are accusations in
Holland that artists are sucking up public wealth like subsidized babies.
This kind of rhetoric is a red flag for US artists. We know that in reality
the wealthiest receive structural corporate welfare and keep their
expanding riches offshore and immune from politics. To deflect criticism,
they make artists into punching bags, that’s what happened years ago in our
“culture wars” of the early 1990’s. I fear that the artists of
Europe—especially our friends the Dutch, who have so long enjoyed support
from the state that we New Yorkers could only dream of, will lose their
autonomy from these hungry markets. The virus that wants to eat away the
bonds that holds our society together is now infecting you. If you lose
this battle, it will be a major setback for all of us.

But this nightmare need not become our reality. Let’s wake up and fight
together!

Let’s not separate our art from this struggle, but use our creativity in
the service of it.

noahfischer.org