Yes I know that not all bias is negative. That's my who point with respect
to contemporary art: positive bias created by the media, marketing and the
star system, creates household names of some artists. This is not something
new. However the Duchampian turn and conceptual heritage of contemporary
art gave the artist the very possibility to work for social and political
change.
However the very positive cognitive bias toward said artists bypasses
critical thinking processes, and focuses the attention on their persona and
not the content or underlying message of their work.
There's another main issue: most art is produced and disturbuted under the
unchecked assumption that 'The artist shows us the ways, as a kind of
teacher and we should learn from him, and therefore progress on this long
road of becoming aware of an issue, learning, and then changing'.
Here's a reference to a paper from 2011 that criticizes this 'pedagogical
turn' of contemporary art: Stud Philos Educ (2011) 30:211–223
DOI 10.1007/s11217-010-9216-5
I would propose that 'artists should help create other artists' instead of
just strive to be recognized by the very elitist small art circle that
gives them the artist status to begin with.
In order to do that however, artists would have to antagonize the very
system that makes them artists, and in a way give up becoming recognized by
the art crowd. Not many artists would want to do that, which brings me to
my second proposal that 'to do art one must do away with the established
artists altogether'.
When I took part in the GulfLabor.org initiative (I'm on week 26 btw),
Thomas Hirschorn's letter (you can find it on their website and in the book
they've published at OR books) struck me as the very dilemma recognized
artists face when they go against the establishment.
On Sun, 9 Jul 2017 at 10:32, roger malina <rmalina@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> Georges
> Thanks for your intervention and let me pick up on your comment:
>
> "Speculative art bubbles, and the whole art pricing dynamics is
> based on positive bias towards a group of
> > contemporary artists, making them hot commodities, but emptying all the
> while the political value of their artworks.
>
> It seems to me there is a larger context for the discussion on 'bias'
> = which we could tie to the
> discussion on what the mediterranean cultural heritage means in the
> context of digital culture.
> As i understand the literature all 'systems' display various forms of
> 'bias' either explicit ( eg the new us
> travel bans from certain countries) or implicit when we react
> something we like or dont.
> ( i was in paris last night on a very hot night and the city was alive
> with the kind of feeling I
> associate with 'mediterranean' from the years i lived in Marseille.
> And the architecture itself and city
> design seemed to encourage the outdoor bonhomie.
>
> In cybernetic theory all systems have bias because only certain kinds
> of inputs can be reacted to- these
> can be by systems design, or be side effects of system evolution. In
> humanities research there is much discusison of quantitative vs
> qualitative data= digital systems are biased towards quantitative
> methods- though perhaps with deep learning software we see new
> approaches.
>
> I think I mentioned on this list i just read an interesting book
>
> Collaborating with the Enemy; How to Work with People You Don t Agree
> with or Like or Trust
> https://www.bkconnection.com/books/title/Collaborating-with-the-Enemy
> by Kahane ( who worked in colombia and south africa in the reconciliation
> work)
>
> He talks about the natural tendency to 'enemyfy" within which racial
> and other stereotypes
> function. ( eg you are enemifying the art establishment )- its much
> easier to enemyfy rather
> than to figure out how to collaborate and change a culture.
>
> I think that one of the arguments for cultural heritage is that it is
> an implicit and explicit bias
> that we think should be encouraged in some way, since the development
> of ones cultural
> identify draws on ones cultural heritage ? and the diversity of
> identity is important for human
> culture. Not all biases are negative.
>
> roger malina
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 7, 2017 at 4:27 PM, Art PlusSign <georges.rabbath@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hey Yasminers!
> >
> >
> > First time posting anything here. Been receiving discussion posts ever
> > since a friend in Beirut subscribed me to the discussions back in 2011
> when
> > we were planning an action at the Venice Biennial. At that time, I was
> > finishing up my second book about an artist's project dealing with
> implicit
> > racial bias, and the idea hit me that the final frontier, and quite
> frankly
> > the first place to start, when engaging in contemporary art, is the
> > unchecked positive bias towards the established artist. Implicit
> cognitive
> > bias can be of course measured using functional brain imaging.
> >
> >
> > My working hypothesis was: the functional mapping of positive or negative
> > bias can definitely be construed as an artwork, which not only has an
> > aesthetic dimension, art conceptual dimension, but also and more
> > importantly an informative dimension that can hopefully lead to a
> leveling
> > of the playing field in contemporary art. Speculative art bubbles, and
> the
> > whole art pricing dynamics is based on positive bias towards a group of
> > contemporary artists, making them hot commodities, but emptying all the
> > while the political value of their artworks.
> >
> >
> > I did not see however how to go about doing art but asking art collectors
> > and art professionals to willfully go into a fMRI machine while we do
> > primed sessions of Artworks allegedly associated to famous or non famous
> > artists and map the brain activity. Not practical, not constructive. The
> > only thing I could do was to create a thought experiment by creating a
> > negative bias situation towards myself. That way, I'm not taking
> advantage
> > of anyone, and I ending up paying the price of being ostracized.
> >
> >
> > I wanted to see whether I could still be able to keep doing art, against
> > all odds, while I was being actively ostracized by the local art
> community.
> > You can call it performative research. At any rate, a project that was
> > bound for Venice with 11 artists to represent a country like Lebanon,
> ended
> > up with no artists, but as we had previously reserved space smack in the
> > middle of the Arsenale, Lebanon and its art community was represented
> > non-mediately, by their very bias, through void.
> >
> >
> > I went on to get some recognition through mentions in collective
> > publications (as the one of the GulLabor.org initiative) and
> institutional
> > commissions such as the United Nations Information Center in Beirut,
> > notwithstanding the continued domestic blindness from the local art
> > community. As I move to Europe to launch community building participative
> > art projects, I definitely intend to go on exploring negative bias from
> the
> > art establishment in Europe and the discrepancies one might observe with
> > respect to the recognition coming from social activists and
> > non-professionals using contemporary art for social and political change;
> > like the colleagues occupying Cavallerizza Reale in Turin, since 2015,
> and
> > with whom I had initiated a movie project.
> >
> >
> > I would really like to get feedback and suggestions from anyone who finds
> > this initiative worthwhile, and I'm adding some links below pertinent to
> > the discussion. And it would definitely be great to be part of a research
> > network in Europe invested in similar problematics.
> >
> >
> > Kind regards to all.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > G.H. Rabbath Ph.D.
> >
> >
> >
> > Some Links:
> >
> >
> > - A recent piece about 'flipper' Simchowitz:
> > https://www.1843magazine.com/features/art-market-vs-predator
> >
> > - The book I did about Iraqi artist Mahmoud Obaidy and his racial
> profiling
> > in Houston airport:
> >
> https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Obaidi-FAIR-SKIES-Corporation/dp/9953017069/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1499431034&sr=8-1&keywords=g.h.rabbath
> >
> > - My personal account of the road to Venice: ghrabbath.wordpress.com
> >
> > - The performance/conference I gave at the Sharjah March meeting, right
> > before the 2011 Venice Biennial: https://vimeo.com/30417940
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > G.H. Rabbath Ph.D.
> > writer | videographer | artist
> > _______________________________________________
> > Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> > Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> > http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
> >
> > Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
> >
> > SBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In
> the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and
> password in the fields found further down the page.
> > HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter
> your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on
> the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
> > TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set
> Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
> > If you prefer to read the posts on a blog go to
> http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/
> _______________________________________________
> Yasmin_discussions mailing list
> Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
> http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
>
> Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
>
> SBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the
> page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and
> password in the fields found further down the page.
> HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter
> your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on
> the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
> TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest
> Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
> If you prefer to read the posts on a blog go to
> http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/
>
--
G.H. Rabbath Ph.D.
writer | videographer | artist
_______________________________________________
Yasmin_discussions mailing list
Yasmin_discussions@estia.media.uoa.gr
http://estia.media.uoa.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions
Yasmin URL: http://www.media.uoa.gr/yasmin
SBSCRIBE: click on the link to the list you wish to subscribe to. In the page that will appear ("info page"), enter e-mail address, name, and password in the fields found further down the page.
HOW TO UNSUBSCRIBE: on the info page, scroll all the way down and enter your e-mail address in the last field. Enter password if asked. Click on the unsubscribe button on the page that will appear ("options page").
TO ENABLE / DISABLE DIGEST MODE: in the options page, find the "Set Digest Mode" option and set it to either on or off.
If you prefer to read the posts on a blog go to http://yasminlist.blogspot.com/
