Money makes free

[imomus]

"I like the free feeling of the art here!" says Klara. "And I like the no rules policy!" says Jan. They're from the Czech Republic, and they're visiting the Design Festa Gallery in Harajuku, Tokyo. Other gaijin, from other countries, are impressed too. Many of them have read about this place in their Tokyo guides.

"It's great to be able to wander about the various rooms so freely!", says Karen, from the UK. Anja, from San Francisco, says "This gallery is like a big box, exploding with free expression". Eva from Barcelona agrees: "I really like how young people are free to do what they want here". Swedish Julia says the place "reminds me of Berlin - the freedom and creativity". Ed from America says "To find such a great sub-culture that is rich in expression and artistic freedom is very refreshing in a city like Tokyo". Jamie, also from the US, echoes the thought: "Free for everyone even in most expensive city of Tokyo. Love to see free thinkers. Tokyo needs a place like this. This is a heaven!"

Design Festa isn't free, though. It's a pay-to-display gallery. The fees are listed here. I've visited Design Festa's building in Ura-Hara a couple of times, and it does indeed look like a funky Berlin squat on the outside, covered in colourful street art and spiky scaffolding. It's hardly a retreat from the world of commerce into a world of freedom, though. The organization behind it, like Takashi Murakami's Geisai, also organizes massive pay-to-display events. The next one takes place in three halls at Tokyo Big Sight on the first weekend of December. You can see some sample works here.

It may seem strange to find young Japanese people considerably less naive than gaijin, but the local visitors to Design Festa strike a much more pragmatic tone. They seem as interested in the cafe as the gallery -- for the Japanese, food counts for more than art, and neither are expected to be free. "Luckily, we could take part in the tea ceremony today. The macha tea was awesome! This gallery is very homey and cozy. The atmosphere here today reminds me of the milk bar they used to have here before," say Mayu, Hiroko and Sunaken. "Tomato mousse was really yummy, and having it was my first time," says Sato Kanako, adding, as an afterthought, "a variety of artwork are also inspiring me". Keisuke Sakurada doesn't beat around the bush: "This building really stands out. I am thinking of exhibiting at Design Festa, but isn't it bit pricey for a booth? Now I cannot afford it, but I will exhibit some day!" Michiko Tachimoto says: "Today, I am here to look over the room for my exhibition. It's a great opportunity to show my work for a cheap rental fee!"

The Japanese visitors all know that Design Festa is a pay-to-display gallery. What's more, they don't seem to mind. Just as you pay to eat delicious food, you pay to show your art to the world. I wonder if the Westerners would mind if they did know? Would it make them shut up about freedom? What's so great about freedom anyway?

In some ways, a totally commercial gallery system is totally liberating. The absence of gatekeepers, quality control, curators or professional art qualification requirements seems, to many, like giving the finger to the elitist art world. Anyone with $50 to spare can stick their stuff up on the walls of a room and sit there all day like a spider in a web, hoping to sell something to a "creative tourist". Take that, David Elliott! You're disintermediated!

Personally, though, I saw nothing interesting at Design Festa on my visits there, just as I've never seen anything interesting at Geisai. As a consumer of art, I actually want curators to sort the wheat from the chaff. I trust them to know, to some extent, what's good, new and interesting. I like the professional art world. And I like the idea that merit, not money, should determine what gets seen. So I suppose what we have here is "freedom through money" versus "freedom from money". But of course money also accompanies you every step of the way through the professional art world. It costs money to go to art school, and successful graduates earn money. The only difference is that they don't, generally, pay to display. It isn't money alone which determines, in the West, who gets seen. You also have to be good.

But things get more complex. It seems to me that the comments about "freedom" that we started with are part of a culture we could call "Phatic Commercial Affirmation". To know what I mean by that, think of multi-cultural Benetton ads. Think of any statement Paul Smith has ever made about Tokyo street fashion. Think of the opening exhibition at the Mori Museum in 2002, Happiness. Think of Merry, the big show and book project at Laforet Harajuku. Or just think of any TV commercial, full of stretched eyes, white smiles, and over-saturated colours. The word "free" appears in a lot of those, too.

Phatic Commercial Affirmation is an airbrushed, unrelentingly positive view of life in which, ironically, commercial logic is both nowhere and everywhere. It's a world of admirable positivity and accessibility. No matter what colour or creed you are, you too can join this world -- and, by extension, the happy, affirmative family of Man -- just by buying the required product. What it isn't is cynical or critical, although its exclusion of those things almost begs them to spring forth, roaring. For this reason, Moronic Cynicism is Phatic Commercial Affirmation's grumpy cousin.

I think a lot of the "creative tourists" who visit (and sometimes settle in) Japan are profoundly attracted by this commercial world where all conflict, all cynicism and all critical activities have been suspended. It does, after all, have a lot to recommend it. It seems free, cheerful, accessible, materialist, non-elitist. Happiness is a cake and a cup of coffee. Fulfillment is a new pair of shoes. And why not? There's the same kind of "liberation into banality" going on here that we see in the work of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons or Takashi Murakami, the same kind of utter surrender to consumerist popular culture -- in other words, culture created by, with and from money, and money alone.

I wonder if these Westerners -- the ones who, like Bill McKible, are increasingly retreating from a frightening West into a reassuring Japan -- aren't slowly learning from the Japanese. Learning how to be non-cynical, non-metaphysical consumer-citizens. Perhaps they're currently in a transitional phase. They still want to talk about "freedom" as if it were freedom from the money system, and as if individuality were freedom from the demands of society. But, given a bit more time, they'll see liberation as being freed into the money system, and fulfillment as an utter identification with social role -- an identification that the West, with its metaphysics, its cynicism, its discrimination, won't quite allow.

I wonder if, one day, gaijin won't call Design Festa "free" because they don't know it's pay-to-display, but precisely because they do. On that day, perhaps we'll discover whether the market means quite what we do by words like "save" and "free". Personally, I hope it has some really big plans for us. We deserve them.

Comments

two thoughts:

[niemandsrose.livejournal.com]

1) Money can be a considerably lower barrier to entry in the art world than talent...

2) Re: "It isn't money alone which determines, in the West, who gets seen. You also have to be good": Sometimes you don't have to be good, you just have to be new enough. Reminds me of how I have to characterize the difference between theatre in Chicago and theatre in New York: In New York you just have to be new; in Chicago you have to be new and good.

Re: two thoughts:

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

my soul feels fine...i bet your one doesn't...that's ok...as long as da punze is fine. luv ya. NPK.

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

From an entirely pragmatic view, I personally prefer having the "gatekeepers" acting as filters just as you do. However, sometimes genius is so ahead of it's time - and curators/repertoir reps/etc are typically behind the times - that the gatekeepers dismiss it entirely. For these rare birds, they have the pay-to-play galleries as stages to show their work and outclassing the bad art that pay galleries usually fill with is typically a rather easy task for genius. I'm sorry that there were no rare birds on your trip.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

nick doesn't trip. don't rub it in. watch the drug tzar of the elk lodge.
son of a bootlegger.

http://www.marmalade-skies.co.uk/

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

Of all people Nick really should. On my vast and endless list of "people who should do LSD occasionally", Nick is at the very top.

[(Anonymous)]

Paul Smith has also reportedly said (in private company), "Selling to the Japanese is like taking candy from a baby."

[(Anonymous)]

Ummm, Design Festa IS essentially free. 500 Yen a day? Cmon Momus...

[(Anonymous)]

Thats not true. Design Festa charges 500 yen for a 80x80 cm square on a wall in a room shared with 20-some-odd other creators. The high end of their fees runn well over ¥100,000 per week for a 4.5 tatami room. Not including access to electricity which is another fee. The event at big site is about 30,000 per day with even more hidden charges.
Though admittedly Design Festa charges considerably less than Murakami's Geisai: which is the epitome of exploitation in Japan's artworld.

And if one considers their work wheat why seek to hide it in the chaff - ah, I do love agricultural metaphors!

In agreement

[(Anonymous)]

I love how you are becoming so much more pragmatic in your 40's. I am in my 50's and absolutely loved you writing: "As a consumer of art, I actually want curators to sort the wheat from the chaff. I trust them to know, to some extent, what's good, new and interesting." But in my 20's and 30's I would have absolutely READ you here for it!

[(Anonymous)]

Momus, in what ways have you sought "fulfillment as an utter identification with social role"? You've abandoned your native country; you've never had a job; you don't want a family; you're a writer and musician who largely works on his own; you identify as an "artist", with all the Romantic assumptions of individualism that this implies in our post-Enlightenment culture; you rail against your own society and exoticise another's... or is "utter identification with social role" something only for others?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I think you're not picking up that the last two paragraphs are a sort of devil's advocacy or unreliable narration. They're meant to evoke the Winston Smith who loves Big Brother, or the Alex who's undergone Ludovico's Treatment. Of course I can and never will be the superlegitimate train driver (http://imomus.livejournal.com/36990.html) so identified with his work that his wife (and even the sea) calls out to him "Good morning, Mr Train Driver!"

But I think Westerners -- including myself -- have a tendency to neglect, disregard or attack the vision of collectivist, social happiness. Our conception of individuality and freedom as forms of distance and detachement is pretty useless. We posit all our ultimate values (up to an including God) as things that are real and yet absent, things outside society. We condemn other societies which locate ultimate value in social, collective things.

And yet there is no outside. There is no place outside society we can step to, or convince others to step to. It's all trompe l'oeuil. We Westerners are fantasists. That's why our forced conversions of others to our religion and our metaphysics have been -- and continue to be -- so utterly barbaric. We're selling snake oil, and anyone who buys it simply becomes maladjusted and unhappy.

[(Anonymous)]

hmmm, speak for yourself big man ;)

[(Anonymous)]

Point taken, to a certain degree. The irony is that it's you who's making the point. Because you're almost a caricature of how you present Western metaphysical individualism. Most Westerners identify with their social roles far more than you do (ie, they don't leave their country, they do enter into the social network known as having a job, they do have kids, they don't give themselves transcendental labels such as 'artist' etc., etc.).

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But in another way I think -- and this is something Marx said -- that artists are the only people in the West who actually can feel wholly identified with their social role, and not feel alienated. I am Momus, and Momus is my job. The project of Marxism is to give the workers the full fruits of their labour, and to allow them to overcome the alienation that results when someone else owns and splits up their making activity, and turns it into wage slavery. In other words, Marxism can be seen as a project to make everyone into an artist -- homo faber, man who makes. And, as a psychological corollary, to allow everyone to identify as much with his or her job as a Momus -- or a Tokyo train driver -- does.

[(Anonymous)]

You're making the assumption that people in general feel alienated from their work. I'm not so sure. What might have been the case for the 19thC proletariat is not necessarily the case in the rich post-industrial West. Also, you're making the assumption that people should or should want to 'become' their work in they way you have 'become' Momus. Again, that's quite a Romantic conception of work. Most people have their work, their outside interests, their family, etc., etc. all in the mix of who they are.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I'm very much against this sort of half-heartedness. I agree with David Byrne's lyric "if your work isn't what you love then something isn't right". We spend a large part of our life working -- if you don't love it, what's the point? Why live at all, if fulfillment just comes in little packets of time at the end of the working week, or little packets of white powder? This isn't a Romantic attitude, it's common sense.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And I want to add: what this "half-heartedness" leads to is one of the worst things about life in the West. That everybody is permanently "semi-detached". They're mentally elsewhere, uninvested, "absent without leaving". This is the practical result of the belief that what's real is also absent, and what's absent real. The "absent" thing might be God, or it might be love, or it might be the weekend, or it might be "the real me". But if you're not living, daily, in "the real you", forget it. There is no real you, there's just this ongoing refusal of the here and now.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I agree and I disagree. Personally, I am attracted to the concept of "work" that you outline. At the same time, I wouldn't at all want to be prescriptive about it. I recognise that other people may want to organise their lives in different ways. Some women may be most emotionally occupied in bringing up kids, but also do part time work (to earn money, to get out of the house, to meet people...).

I think you also miss out on the structuralist aspect of work here. For a lot of people, it's not the content of work that's ultimately important. They could be working for a phone company or the tax office or whatever. It's the way work structures their days and lives, it's the human contact, it's the feeling of being part of society rather than cut off and on the dole, etc. And I think all that's legitimate.

Ironically enough I have some "work" to do so I'll sign off now, but I want to say just one other thing. You toss around some interesting ideas in your blog, but the one objection that always forms in my mind is that there's something very solipsistic about your reasoning. You always seem to want to extrapolate your ideal world from yourself. The world should ideally mirror Momus's tastes and drives and prejudices etc. You like wearing colourful clothes, therefore everyone should, and what's more black and monochrome is about death whereas colour is about life, and so on and so forth. In some ways you're not relativist enough!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, you're a good critic of some of my stances, but you've now involved yourself in a contradiction. You started by saying that I was advocating one thing (collectivism) and living another (Western metaphysical individualism). Now you're saying that I advocate only the life I myself lead!

[(Anonymous)]

Touché...

Collectivism seems to be a kind of fantasy world for you, your own (dare I say it) Platonic ideal, but not a feature of your day-to-day existence. I guess my "solipsism" critique is something different.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But in general, is it bad to advocate a life you don't lead, or bad to advocate a life you do? Or perhaps both are bad?

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

You're assuming that "Good" and "Bad" exist at all. How metaphysically Western of You! Heh.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

(Sung in the manner of "Lady is a Tramp"):

Puts gray and black clothes/right back on the shelf

Loves sushi for dinner/and dresses bright as an elf

Always seems to extrapolate/his ideal world from himself

That's why the Momus is a fop.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I thought a better song for this thread would be:

I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev'rything free in America
For a small fee in America!

(West Side Story)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I'd have gone with:

'I feel pretty, oh so pretty! I feel pretty, and witty, and gay!'

But I thought it might have been an awkward moment.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

how come u've been in america, nick?
why did you ever go there? honestly. we all know that 9/11 self-portrait, you in the front, twinnies burning in the background. WHY DID YOU GO????
FAME!!!!! YOU WANTED 2B FAMOUS !!! LOADSA MONEY...etc. geldzahler !!!!
pennies from heaven for da artie sweetie. jutta koether, my old bird. we sort something out.

[(Anonymous)]

Taking pride in your job is important, and it's become much harder with the division of labor. How can you be proud of a job where you screw a piece onto an unfinished widget which will ultimately be completed in some other factory in another country? Where is your incentive to care?

Certainly there were some things wrong with the guild system, but it gave a man an opportunity to take pride in turning out a quality piece of craftsmanship. This becomes harder, the larger and more faceless the corporation that employs you. And, of course, there's nothing larger and more faceless than the state; and nothing could provide less incentive to a working man.

It's true what Loverboy said about everybody working for the weekend. It used to be that a man had a sense of his role outside of the week-to-week grind -- that he had a responsibility to the generations that came before him and the ones that would succeed him to work and to not just selfishly throw it all away.

If you remove this bond of history, and you isolate man by excessively dividing his labor, then you are left with the modern individual who must binge on sensual pleasures every five days to make it through life.

Have a nice weekend.

-henryperri

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

I try to remember the line of Kahlil Gibrans, that work is the way we show our love to the world.

The idea of homo faber is a beautiful one. Beuys also avocated something similar, that we are all artists. But it remains in the realm of the ideal. (Just like my hope that the gallery system could somehow exist seperately from the need to sell) Most people work, unfortunately, to amass money to pay their rent and feed themselves. It requires compromise and very quickly leads one away from the ability to choose what one does. If all we had were fast food restaurants, we would all have to flip burgers. Sadly in America atleast, this comparison almost holds true.

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Exactly why I left as soon as I was able.

[bikerbar.livejournal.com]

I don't think the professional art world always allows the greatest art to rise to the top - it creates an environment where profesional behaviour and networking skills can get you in to the group show, perhaps, a bottom rung of a long ladder. It's not about talent as much as connections .. who you know matters the most. Ones social networking skills (coporate gladhanding) matter more than the art they make in such an environment. One has to be in the right place at the right time and know the right people. Be prepared to grasp the opportunity. If you don't possess the ability to outmaneuver the other determined art grads .. goodbye.

Paying to play is another manifestation of the same capitalist mindset .. turn the gallery wall into real estate and rent it out. Its not that the artist is then a spider waiting for a fly. The rich artist eclipses the rest by having more wall space, showing more frequently.

It's odd to me that you post about how wonderful the Frankfurt School is, and then swing over to advocating money as a great social organizing principle. You might say the Frankfurt School were only deluded in their Western idea of freedom from the constraints of capital. The East is more pragmatic. Maybe. But you've covered your bases well by providing this extra argument. Your suggestion that pay-to-play is a type of liberation into capital offends me - but only because I am a deluded Westerner. Poor me I wasn't born Japanese so I could blissfully (and without guilt) charge exhorbitant rates to other artists the way Murakami does, apparently. I don't see how their capitalism is any different than ours ...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

It's odd to me that you post about how wonderful the Frankfurt School is, and then swing over to advocating money as a great social organizing principle.

Well, again I have to say that I was playing devil's advocate somewhat with that thought. It's one which both attracts and troubles me. I think it's only in Japan that I've found a sort of capitalism I felt I could trust, but I think that's for extraneous reasons. My very first column for Wired News, Reading green tea leaves in Tokyo (http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68580,00.html), goes into some of the reasons why I felt this way, and quotes Larry McCaffery:

"One of the good things about capitalism is that it's blind to what it sells. It's willing to sell anything.... The system isn't really the enemy. It's blind, all it wants is to replicate and do more things."

Only in Japan have I felt that there might be a benign sort of capitalism that could be trusted. It could be trusted here because it had been de-coupled from the war machine, because of the fundamental decency of most Japanese people, because of a benign sense of guilt and constraint on the part of individual Japanese, and because of a peculiar religious and philosophical system in Japan which locates value in the here and now, not in the elsewhere. Also, of course, it's possible because of Japanese social harmony, ingenuity and organization, relative equality, the inherently refined taste of the Japanese, the widespread acceptance of the market system there, the perception that it's not a Western invention but something local, and government encouragement and subsidy of small businesses -- the co-existence of the megalithic and the minuscule. In other places (eg Russia) I think capitalism is disastrous, and brings out the worst in people.

[desant012.livejournal.com]

Pay-to-display sounds like the concept behind the internet - pay for webspace, put up your junk. But in the physical world. So, in relation, it's the difference between putting up your own material on a website for $$50$$, or submitting your work and having it approved by a prestigious magazine, publisher, gallery, whatever. It's all about perception, which is why the "approved by prestigious institution" option seems to give something weight and significance.

Institutions, credentials, etc.. they do matter in the public perception of something's quality, whether it's related to the actuality or not. They seem to matter much more in the West .. at least, we're obsessed with meeting credentials here.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

my bird (nice princess supreme) doesn't give me enough pocket money.

[(Anonymous)]

This has nothing to do with what you've posted here, but I feel you might want to check this out.

Edwyn Collins is on myspace, and actually blogging occasionally. He answers his email. :)

http://www.myspace.com/wwwmyspacecomedwyncollins

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

rowenta for clare grogan. maximum respect for billy mackenzie. what a dandy. no fucking opportunist chancer. sulk. that's it. breakfast and winter academy.

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

NEWSFLASH:

http://www.apple.com/

[nicepimmelkarl.livejournal.com]

what's your yearly income, nick?