Download the pdf here:
http://theclassofthenew.net/3.html

Netizens, elancers, cognitarians, swarm-capitalists, hackers, produsumers, knowledge workers, pro-ams... these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to the new social class emerging from the networked workplace.

In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society – ‘the class of the new’. Announcing a new economic and social paradigm, this class constitutes a ‘social prophecy’ of the shape of work to come. From Adam Smith’s ‘Philosophers’ of the late 18th century, down to the ‘Creative Class’ celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and beyond capitalism.

Art Workers Coalition join striking workers at the
Museum of Modern Art, NYC (from an ArtForum cover, 1973)

DARK MATTER: Activist Art and the Counter-Public Sphere (2003)
Gregory Sholette
http://gregorysholette.com

Download the pdf:
http://gregorysholette.com/essays/docs/05_darkmattertwo.pdf

Abstract:

The central question this essay raises is this: how might a critical, materialist analysis of visual culture be enhanced by factoring in what I term creative dark matter? It is my contention that the majority of creative activity in our post-industrial society remains invisible to the institutions and discourses — critics, art historians, collectors, dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators — who manage and interpret contemporary culture. My central argument however seeks to relate this creative Dark Matter to the practices of artists who self-consciously work outside the parameters of the mainstream art world for political and socially critical reasons. Among the latter include the art-based organizations Temporary Services, RTmark, REPOhistory and Ultra Red as well as several others that will serve as examples of alternative artistic forms throughout my paper. These informal, politicized micro-institutions have made art that infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate Web Sites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for either art world discourse or private interests. It is the emergence of these autonomous groups of activist artists into a broader visual arena, one where they become visible not only to each other but also to the centralized institutions of the art world, that presents new possibilities for critical resistance, as well as traps and opportunities for self-delusion.

Amnesty International Firefly Project (AI Firefly) is a New York City-based collective of artists and activists affiliated with Amnesty International USA as local group #704. In an effort to support Amnesty International’s global advocacy and educational work and provide a forum for critically considering the intersection of the human rights framework and contemporary artistic practices, AI Firefly has announced a juried $3,000 commission for the creation of a new art work to be presented on or around International Human Rights Day, December 10, 2006.

Application deadline: Friday, August 4, 2006

http://www.aifirefly.org/commission/index.html

The Extra Element: Organization
An Exclusive Interview with Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos: Part I

By Sergio Rodri'guez Lascano
Rebeldi'a Magazine
May 30, 2006

This is a translation of the first part of an interview that appears in the current issue (#42) of Rebeldi'a magazine, a special edition about Atencothat is available throughout Mexico and will soon be available online at its website
http://www.revistarebeldia.org/html/index.php

GASOLINE
Hubert Dobler
Friday, June 2 – Sunday, July 2, 2006
Opening, Friday, June 2, 7–9pm
Jack the Pelican Presents
487 Driggs Ave, bet N. 9 and N. 10
Brooklyn, New York

In “Gasoline,” Hubert Dobler’s first NY solo show, he assaults the polite electronic façade of our postmodern service-industry landscape with his mean machine Honda CB550 Four, 1976. It is gasoline, the return of the repressed. No brakes. Muscular energy.
http://www.jackthepelicanpresents.com/doblerpr.html

Be sure to check out the video on the site.

Whitney Biennial 06: An Afterword

Judith Rodenbeck and Trebor Scholz

The articles have been written and the doors of the Whitney Biennial are now closed.

It is an historical truism in cultural production that after World War II, but especially after the freedom struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s, to think of art along traditionalist lines as devoted to beauty (or even only to itself) became suspect. More pressing were questions of authority and interest, of exclusion and inclusion, and critical art practices took on such post-Duchampian topics as "Who conditions the context in which artworks are situated and by which they are certified?" Aesthetics for many became a productive problematic for art rather than a field delimited by notions of "the beautiful" as its proper expression; no longer attached to the ineffables of the beautiful or the sublime, a new aesthetics was, rather, addressed to the play of cognition and sociality. And this has been the case in advanced practices of the last 50 years.