For the past year, Caveat Magister has traveled around to different Burning Man communities, offering to work with local artists and creators to collaborate unique art experiences and global events. Guided largely by his book Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic from San Francisco’s Underground, a how-to manual for creating “transformative” art experiences without much of a budget, Caveat has something to offer people who want to do just that: turn their life into art! In this new Decommodification series, Caveat dives deeper into how art doesn’t ask permission from commerce.
Decommodifying Permission: Participation vs. Commodification
Since I started this series, I’ve gotten a few messages from people saying (more or less): “YES, I want to be part of a decommodified culture! But also, I need to fundraise for my art project. Does that make me a bad person?” No. No it does not. It means you are struggling to do …Read More
To Reconcile Art and Commerce, Take Them Less Seriously
My first post in this series explored the way in which Decommodified art can do things that commodified art can’t. That it’s not just that one’s “free” and one “costs money” — the act of decommodifying something create a difference in kind as well as accessibility. The second post was a closer look at why …Read More
Everyone’s an Artist; Artists Need to Make a Living Like Everyone
This is part III in Caveat’s series about “decommodifying permission” and figuring out how to square the needs of a decommodified art culture with the difficulty making a living as an artist. Read the whole series here. A while back I was having tea with an artist I admire, and he mentioned that one of …Read More
Anything Commercial Art Can Do, Decommodified Art Can Do Better!
In my first post in this series, I said that decommodified art can do things that commercial art can’t. But what does that mean? Here’s how I put it in Turn Your Life Into Art (with snippets from a few different sections, lightly edited below): Consider Disney World. Imagine the most impressive, impossible ride that …Read More
Decommodify Permission: Make Incredible Experiences With What You Have
For the past year I’ve been visiting different Burning Man communities and offering to work with local artists and creators to collaborate on some kind of weird art experience for everyone who wants to participate. The reason—at least at the time—was that since publishing my new book Turn Your Life Into Art: Lessons in Psychomagic …Read More