The Yes Men support Artout.

Andy Bichlbaum, artist, activist and founder of The Yes Men expressed his support for the Artout Project. So did Nic Nicosia, Jens Haaning, Steven Kurtz, Sarkis, Judith Hopf, Dmitry M. Shostakovich and many others. Thank you to all of you.

ARTOUT participant Alexander Kosolapov

Artout participant Alexander Kosolapov in front of his sculpture at the openning of Sotz-Art show, Maison Rouge, Paris, 19 October 2007

New ARTOUT participant

ARTOUT is proud to welcome its new participant Georgy (Gosha) Ostretsov. The multi-media artist Georgy Ostretsov has worked in the Moscow art scene since the mid-1980s, when he advanced the so-called “man style” (chelovek-stil') of avant-garde fashion, and participated in projects of the Detskii Sad group. At that time he also formed a partnership with the artist and komiksist Georgii “Zhora” Litichevskii, one of the very few Russian artists to utilize comics iconography in his work as early as the 1970s. They called themselves “George & George” a creative partnership that remains active to this day. From 1988-1998 Ostretsov lived in Paris, working for the fashion designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. He also took part in projects by Jean Paul Gautier and Luc Besson. Georgy is currently participating in the Sots-Art show at the Maison Rouge foundation in Paris.

Regarding our pricing

We are cheap in comparison to these guys:

Mariah Carey private performance - $1,000,000
Usher private performance - $1,000,000
Dr. Phil speech - $750,000 - $1,000,000
Nicole Kidman party appearance - $500,000 + jet
Jessica Simpson private performance - $400,000
Scarlett Johansson party appearance - $200,000
Demi Moore party appearance - $200,000
Nick Lachey party appearance - $100,000 (negotiable)
Pam Anderson party appearance - $75,000 - $250,000
Adrian Grenier private performance with band - $35,000
Tara Reid party appearance - $10,000 - $50,000.

Source: http://www.hollyscoop.com/

On Artout and Economy

ARTOUT is an experimental art service that allows those (with the financial means) to spend time with an artist. To get into their minds and hear first hand what they believe and how they represent it through their work. A novel idea, but not an insane one. Like it or not, we are in the thick of capitalism, which means that any and everything we as consumers can conjure up to ‘need’ have and will be addressed and cured. But it’s not just the collectors and lovers of art that will benefit from such a service. Artists too, being sales people in their own right, can also gain perspective in the mysteries of art through the lens of those who adore it. For the artist, art is and outlet for the recreation of the mindful feelings, observances, ideas, and commentaries of society and life. Given the opportunity to see these reflections from another the point of view, that of those who buy it.

The law of the capitalist market with its emphasis on the ever-narrowing specialization of labor and maximization of profits invites artists to reinvent themselves over and over in order to escape the market-imposed limits to their identity. This limited identity confines artists to seek satisfying the ruling class’ demand for the special commodity fetish known as ‘Art’ and reproduce institutionally-defined ideology of culture. In both cases the producer and the consumer of ‘Art’ are limited in their freedom by the traditional modes of material exchange.

We, at ARTOUT, believe that art is an open concept and artistic praxis is the process of becoming that corresponds to the totality of individual temporality. Artistic creativity results from the dialectical relation between the acceptance of the market as the underlying principle of social reality, and the need to escape its imperatives of obedience and consensus; its locus is the individuality of the artist. The artist plays the “messenger” and the “message”, the self-medium that finds its legitimacy through the charismatic negation of conventionality and in the process renegotiates his identity.

We believe that the individuality of the artist is far more significant than the material end-product of his/her labor. As Dimitry Prigov used to say "Artist is more important than his art. Man is more important than the artist." We are extending the limits of the traditional market-model to recognize the artist as the self-defined commodity whose value resides in the immateriality of artist's “creative becoming”. Spending time in the company of the artist is a creative act; it reveals power relations within the existing artist-patron paradigm and leads to the mutual liberation of both artists and art-patrons from the condition of simple material production and accumulation to the next level of the direct creative exchange and immediate human solidarity.

ARTOUT is the first to create such an open forum of exchange between the art producer and the art consumer and help the artists to retake the economic territory that is rightfully their. This is the territory of instant utopia and today we are here to claim it.

By Olivia Wadsworth

Artout Particpant Kate Pendry as Dead Diana.

Kate Pendry, born in London, currently resides in Oslo. Multi-artist/performer. Winner of Best Stage Performance 2003 – National assoc. for Performing Arts (Norway); Woman Of The Year 2003 – Radio Orakel (Oslo).

Trained at Mountview Theatre School (London) and the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain.

Within the electronic art field has exhibited at Kunstnerneshus Oslo, the Melbourne Biennale 99; “Electra 96” at Henie-Onstad Art Centre, the 5th International Biennale in Istanbul, DEAF-Rotterdam; Awarded an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica ’96 for “sense:less” (w. mork/stenslie/watz)

Curator of “Cunt Club”, an alternative World Women´s Day Celebration including women´s fight club and pornographic embroidery exhibits.

Current solo works include “Sex In The Warzone” and “Marilyn Peepshow” and “Tales From a Wicked Child” - all performance/installations involving a degree of ‘extreme art’, and exhibited internationally.

Currently writes and presents the DDC World News (Dead Diana Corporation) a satirical, maverick weekly radio show on Radio Orakel, Oslo.

Dr. B, an Artout participant

Photo by Rodney Ascher

Staging Cultural Prosperity

by Jon Refsdal Moe

There is general agreement now that culture is capitalism. Whether their value is financial or symbolic, the processes and products of cultural expression are widely acknowledged as submitted to an advanced network of capital transactions. The processes of global capitalism have long since invaded the sphere of artistic production.

Cynical as it may seem, this assertion has never been acknowledged by artists themselves. From the cut-up paintings of the early avant-garde to the degradation of the body in contemporary performance, art has always challenged the ideological concept of its own autonomy: the idea that aesthetics is secluded from the processes of commercial and cultural production. In the early 00’s, the scrutiny of art’s socio-economic and ideological premises that the nineties knew as postmodernism, has led to the development of a new aesthetics, based on a deconstruction of boundaries between aesthetic, political and intellectual experience, and on the consequential cultural interchange between artists, intellectuals and political activists. Be it publications, exhibitions or concrete pieces, traditional institutions of modern art have become vehicles for political as well as aesthetic discussion, allowing these discourses to interweave.

Despite repeated efforts to recycle its political relevance, no similar development can be said to have taken place in European theatre. There is little critical discourse surrounding the traditional institutions, and aesthetic experimentation as well as political discussion is left to off-off companies, operating in the margins of both subsidy and publicity. Theatre in Europe seems not to have undergone the same deconstructive process as that of the visual arts, and one might ask whether theatre is still protected by the modernist illusion of artistic autonomy that once governed the art institution as a whole. The answer to this question is yes, but only insofar as artistic autonomy is a viable currency; an appropriate means to increase theatre’s market potential in the symbolic economy of culture.

Theatre in Europe has never reached the visual arts’ level of aesthetic autonomy. More than artistic presentation, theatre has always been a re-presentation: a more or less pertinent display of something prior to it. For this reason, governing principles of theatre have always been sought beyond the borders of the theatrical event. Theatre’s own worth has been examined only in its ability to conform to an ‘exceeding logic’ ( i.e. a logic that goes beyond the boundaries of the specific discourse in which one is operating). Consequently, there has not been much of an autonomous discourse to deconstruct in theatre.

Historically, theatre has played an important part in the nation building of young countries throughout Europe. And although its ambitions may no longer seem so lofty as establishing a supreme national essence, theatre still holds a primary function in representing national identity. This identity, however, is not an imagined common ground for the citizens of a particular nation, but rather an indicator of the nation’s cultural prosperity, its assets in the circuit of the symbolic economy.

European theatre today works mainly as a provider of symbolic capital, not only to the respective countries in intra-continental competition, but also to Europe itself as a continent and economic union. Through a high level of high culture, the challenges to European identity presented by the culture industry of Asia and the US are kept at bay. As are the challenges raised by contemporary aesthetic and political theory, which have long since left these ideological notions of art and culture behind.

Based on the assumption that commercial interest is an impediment to artistic excellence, theatres throughout Europe are sustained financially as autonomous institutions. However, this simulated autonomy actually becomes destabilised, as theatre simulates its own submission to the market economy!

This tendency that emerged in the early nineties has been central to the cultural politics of small countries like Norway and Denmark. Demands are made of the heavily financed theatre institutions of these countries to exercise a certain amount of hard-headed economic competence, in order that they regain some small share of what they have been given through public subsidy. And so, with a paradoxical twist to classic culture consecration, European theatre simulates market submission, to render its own withdrawal from the market legitimate.

All this has meant that Theatre has become a showcase of successes from other media. It has submitted to the circulation that renders the products of other media as trademarks, and, because it has withdrawn from the same circulation, it is deprived of the possibility of producing similar trademarks of its own. Which might explain last year’s production of Jerry Springer: the Opera at Britain’s Royal National Theatre, and the movie star Emanuelle Seigner playing Hedda Gabler in Paris, not to mention the many state-financed re-stagings of movie blockbusters on national theatres in Scandinavia, such as A Clockwork Orange, The Celebration and even The Full Monty.

Withdrawn from the circulation of cultural capital, theatre is deprived of the discussions governing contemporary aesthetics. Nevertheless, as a result of demands for its economic self-sufficiency, it is submitted to the same circulation. Through this double strategy, European countries maintain their theatres as impotent institutions, without commercial potential, but with strictly commercial boundaries. This mixture of withdrawal and submission ensures that theatre is kept alive as a symbol of cultural prosperity, while a discussion of theatre’s aesthetic, political and socio-economic premises is kept at bay. Now, as this discussion has been crucial to the proceedings of contemporary art, there is good reason to insist that theatre, not least from an aesthetic viewpoint, should be its next object of scrutiny.

Original Artout Participants

Kate Pendry, Serguey Bolmat, Mark Boswell, Petra Groen, Alexander Kosolapov, Yevgeni Nikitin, Peral & John, Per Platou, Eric Pougeau, Mike Rimbaud, Meike Schmidt-Gleim, Ira Waldron, Anthony Zito, Jon Refsdal Moe, Anton Koslov.