The following piece was commissioned for the book
"Being Public - How Art Creates the Public Domain" (
http://valiz.nl/webshop/en/categorieen/product/120-being-public-how-ar
t-cre= ates-the-public.html) ,a volume containing essays chiefly by
Dutch art researchers on the status quo of art in the public sphere.
I had been asked by the editor to investigate this subject more
specifically in relation to the Internet and digitality. The book, as
such, addresses a traditional arts audience that may be completely
unfamiliar with the subjects I cover, including free software,
copyleft, net.art, UbuWeb etc.
The publication of this volume happens to coincide with (a) my 20th
anniversary of being a user of Debian GNU/Linux and involvement in
one of the first conferences on the interrelations of Free Software
and culture (Wizards of OS in Berlin), (b) the defense of Aymeric
Mansoux's monumental PhD thesis on Free/Libre/Open Source Software and
its complex appropriations and misreadings in the arts, at Goldsmiths
in London.
- Hence, the first half of the essay is an introduction into the
subjects of anti-proprietary models of authorship and distribution,
pointing out that they weren't invented by Free Software copyleft, but
had important precursors in art movements like lettrism and Fluxus.
The second half is a more pensive consideration of where the practical
success of Free/Open Source software has led to (among others,
low-cost infrastructures for Internet monopolists and the crapularity
of throw-away gadgets), and to which degree artists' concepts of
cornucopian gift cultures (from Bataille via the Situationists to
Kenneth Goldsmith and Hito Steyerl) and ecologists' concepts of the
commons aren't fundamentally at odds.
-F
% Does the Tragedy of the Commons Repeat Itself
as a Tragedy of the Public Domain?
% Florian Cramer, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences
Gift Economies
==
‘Potlatch’ is a traditional Native American gift exchange ceremony. In
the twentieth century, the word was adopted for a radical politics and
aesthetics of the public domain. The *Lettrist International*, a group
of poets, artists and political activists that preceded the Situationist
International, published its periodical *Potlatch* free of charge and
free of copyright. From 1954 to 1957, *Potlatch* appeared in Paris and
the Dutch section of the Situationist International published its own
issue of the bulletin in 1959. In an essay included in the Dutch
edition, Guy Debord explained gift exchange as a way in which to
‘reserve and surmount’ the ‘negativity’ of modern arts.[^1] With
‘negativity’, he not only meant aesthetics, but also economics. The
successor to *Potlatch*, the journal *Internationale Situationniste*,
was free of copyright too. This way, Lettrists and Situationists sought
to pre-emptively undermine the collector’s and art market’s value of
their work, at least in theory. In practice, none of the major
participants kept up anti-copyright.[^2]
Around the same time, in the 1960s, Fluxus sought to fundamentally
rethink the economics and public accessibility of art when it focused on
street performances and on its own genuine invention ‘multiples’: the
production of artworks (from artists’ books to small sculptural objects)
in affordable editions. Fluxus’ founder and theorist George Maciunas did
not literally use the terms ‘access’ or ‘accessibility’, yet radically
addressed them on both an institutional and aesthetic level. By moving
contemporary art from museums and galleries to bookshops and streets,
Fluxus sought to give it ‘non-elite status in society’.[^3] This, by
itself, does not differ much from other programmes of bringing art into
the public space, for example as open air sculpture. But Maciunas also
sought to radically change form and language of contemporary art for
this purpose. He wanted art to become ‘Vaudeville-art’ and
‘art-amusement’.[^4] Art should become ‘simple, amusing, concerned with
insignificances, have no commodity or institutional value … obtainable
by all and eventually produced by all’.[^5] This eventually lead to
Fluxus being perceived, like Situationism, as counterculture rather than
as contemporary art in its own time. Today, both are mostly seen as
forerunners of contemporary performative, conceptualist and political
art, although their radical anti-institutional agenda is being
overlooked. Little attention has been paid to political-economic visions
in both movements: a radical public domain without commodities and
private property.
This did not prevent Lettrist, Situationist and Fluxus work from ending
up (or even being produced) as collector’s items wherever this work had
a conventional material form, such as auto- or serigraphs, objects,
installations, performance remnants, photographs or original copies of
*Potlatch*. When the World Wide Web became a mass medium in the
mid-1990s, the first avant-garde and contemporary art that became
available online were Situation
