P2P Art Collection

[*Note: Below is a short summary extracted from a text I wrote for Alana Kushnir's exhibition catalogue for the show PARAPRODUCTION. It's a bullet point overview of something myself and others enacted in 2011/2012, to enormous personal success for those who participated, it intentionally acted as an anonymous entity. Things fell apart because there were no ethical guidelines and individual actions ended up destroying trust. At the time though I saw it as a prototype - I have a feeling that now would be a good time to act on establishing a scaled up (entirely) revised version.

Since increasingly small bottom-up networks are giving over enormous power, knowledge and access to existing gatekeepers and incumbents running on outdated models. Where I'm positioned now I see it daily, close up - but without a critical mass of individuals seeking and/or working hard to develop new models there are actually few alternatives. They will at least not come from this generation, judging by the current rate of activity, which seems odd at a time in which some of your peers are accumulating very large sums of personal wealth and influence.

When the idea below was initially developed, there were less tools and a lack of awareness for possibilities. Now there's a whole suite of tools for distributed and decentralist organisations - there also exists a greater degree of general knowledge for 'how to get shit done' and understanding what's at stake.

The question that continues to perplex me is; Why in this moment -of all moments- is there a total lack of effort towards the revitalisation and reinvigoration of the cooperative form within the artistic field? Particularly when the few institutions and organisations that many of us respect rest on such foundations.

Anyway, see below, the discussion on twitter today (https://twitter.com/benvickers_/status/481346779406168064) and the #PaddlesON event discussion provoked me into wanting to revisit some of this stuff before it's to late and hold myself to account by posting this online.]


"The model could operate as follows:
* Each of us would invite 5 artists to join the collection, artists whom we shared an affiliation or respect;
* Thus the collection would discretely represent 24 artists in total;
* Entry to the collection would require only that each artist reserve an artwork and upload an image to a shared Dropbox - these works would define the ‘collection’;
* The collection would have no public face, it’s existence is intended to travel exclusively via word of mouth;
* Members of the collection would be encouraged to extend opportunities not applicable to them to others in the collection - effectively pooling various forms of social capital;
* During press opportunities or interviews it would be encouraged that members name-drop other artists in the collection;
* The group should be structured with similar aged artists, to emphasise the invisible hand of a possible new movement;
* Individuals would ideally be distributed between different capital cities;
and The promotion of others in the network would be incentivised by an equal distribution of profit generated by sales from the collection - 10% retained in the collection fund, 40% divided between the 24 artists, 50% to the individual artist selling."