All Burning Man Images reduced to Printing Cost

[Cabana Springs]

I win!

[AntiM]

Gee thanks Bob.

[Zhust]

I've been thinking about this and it ties pretty closely to my friend Sondra Carr's essay about money and art on Tribe.net.

I think of money as an extension of barter -- a tool that allows grand things to be created and sold. I mean, if you wanted to buy a car, what good would 3,000 geese do? It's much more convenient to shuffle around this semi-permanently-valued, non-perishable, exchangeable icon.

I find that money is perfect for things that are comodities or could become comodities -- you know, products ... toasters, hammers, cheese, gasoline. Comodities tend to converge on ideal forms ... they evolve toward one or more similar designs that are more similar than they are distinguishable. Also, they have desirable traits that are intrinsic to the item itself and identical items can be distinguished by price.

Things that are not comodities don't have these traits: your mother's voice, a waterfall, a sculpture ... a photograph. In none of these cases is there a trend toward an idealized form. And these kinds of things are not suitable for trading with money.

If I were to go out west and take a perfectly exposed picture of a snow-capped mountain with a field camera, no matter how perfect it is, an otherwise extremely similar photograph that was taken by Ansel Adams would be much more valuable. If I were to mass-produce a floor fan with solid granite blades that offered no more utility than one with plastic blades but cost 100 times more, it would be heralded as an absurdly terrible product. [mental note: what a cool art project ...]

So to me, Burning Man (in part) is an experiment in reversing the default trend of trying to comoditize and "monetize" everything. Not only does it profess to permit participants to experience art for "free", it goes further in attempting to anti-comoditize commodities themselves: a Pabst Blue Ribbon is never exchanged for money, even though it has a well-established calculable dollar value.

My own irritation with karlbaba's offer is the attempt to disect comodity (printing costs) and non-comodity (photographic artistic merit) elements of his work. I find it peculiar because I can look at some things, like a junked dishwasher, and see it immediately for the value of its component parts (valves, motors, switches, basin, etc.) but I find it nearly offensive to consider art in the same frame -- there is no way to convert the value of a photograph to the value of the paper and chemicals used to make it.

It's as if art becomes like people. The $10 or so in chemicals that compose the average human is an offensive way to measure the value of a man. In reverse fashion, an artist can transform some collection of materials with a fixed dollar value into something that has an undefined value, save for the attempts by art experts (in my mind the word "expert" is always bracketed by quotation marks of sarcasm) to convert the quality of an artwork to dollars.

So I leave it open-ended and maybe somebody else agrees with me and can go further: I don't know why it irritates me to see works of art compared to the dollar cost of the materials. Maybe it's not even that. I don't really know.

[philosopher]

I think part of the reason this thread has so much energy is because a lot of us are trying to balance financial factors and artistic or spiritual impulses.

While the initial post crossed the line of acceptability for me, the subsequent discussion is valuable for laying out difficulties that are of broad concern as well as attempts at accommodation that will be instructive in the ways that they work or do not work.

Also instructive, for me at least, is how some of our more tightly-wound comrades find such abjection in what may be simple variations in judgment and awareness. True, what we love about burner communites can be easily lost to assertions of commercial consciousness. But don't we also risk a big loss when someone who is clearly disposed to belong (whether here on the eplaya or at a BRC theme camp or wherever) is not first and foremost recognized as inclining to this most fundamental of burner decisions?

[karlbaba]

I think part of the reason this thread has so much energy is because a lot of us are trying to balance financial factors and artistic or spiritual impulses.
..snip

I was thinking something similar.

I've always had the goal of doing what I love to support myself, but there are others, who do what they love in their space time, who sometimes feel that making money at what you love threatens the loved thing.

I'm not mainly talking about Burning Man here, I guide Rockclimbing, Photograph in National Parks and so on. These are valid questions and I try my best to examine them and strike a good balance.

jaycerochester wrote

".....I find that money is perfect for things that are comodities or could become comodities -- you know, products ... toasters, hammers, cheese, gasoline. Comodities tend to converge on ideal forms ... they evolve toward one or more similar designs that are more similar than they are distinguishable. Also, they have desirable traits that are intrinsic to the item itself and identical items can be distinguished by price.

Things that are not comodities don't have these traits: your mother's voice, a waterfall, a sculpture ... a photograph. In none of these cases is there a trend toward an idealized form. And these kinds of things are not suitable for trading with money."

Aside from the obvious practical reality that Mom needs to eat or her voice suffers, some of this comes back to the questions philosopher raised. If Sculptors and Photographers can't make money from their work, (much less their costs) then we will only have amatuer ones.

While this might not be a bad thing (if Brittany Spears went away, folks would still make music for it's own sake) I have to admit, I'd hate to go back to doing work that nobody enjoyed doing enough to do it for it's own sake.

So there's a profit issue, but also a cost issue. Images are free to look at on my site.but if somebody wants a hard copy, money IS going to change hands between somebody and my printing company. Commerce will take place. The way the forum rules are set up, it's OK if I buy my own images from my printing company to give you, but not OK if you do the same thing with my images. No money gets back to me either way. Since I can't afford to give out unlimited free images, I'll skip this venue of notification next time.

No big deal I suppose. Worth it to have at least one venue free of such things (Outside of selling tickets and other shared resources)

Peace

Karl

Edit

Here's a quote from my trip report that regards Commerce

"This was the beginning of one of my first big lessons in the Burning Man difference: This was a culture that stature and motivation emerged from how much a person could give, from how much they were contributing. The outside world’s culture teaches us to compete, accumulate and eventually exploit. At Burning Man, people were always looking for a way to help and collaborate. I could see that as this cultural difference begins to sink in, our relationship with our community changes radically.

Besides the sales of ice and coffee to benefit local causes, there is no commerce allowed at Burning Man. People are radically self-reliant (defining principle) and yet share their art and resources in a unique economy of simply giving: (another defining principle)."

That's what the non-commerce part means to me personally, not looking at people as objects of exploitation and seeing what one can contribute (and what one can't) Bring that to the outside world is a bigger challenge that's requiring compromises. Doing it at the event is critical, and I'm very impressed at the labor folks expend to contribute at Burning Man, but the materials part, right now that's just saving up in the commerce world to expend in the non-commerce event.

PEace

Karl