# Not Art  *Adding the final red underline to NOT ART during the November 17, 2016 broadcast at the Ashton in Austin. The still and its history are preserved in the [[photo journey/2016-11-17 - Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton|Photo Journey]].* [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream|Livestream]] | [[collections/Livestreams Collection|Collection]] | [[collections/Livestream Lessons|Lessons]] | [[collections/Simple Reminders|Reminders]] | [[livestreams/comments/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Comments|1,776 Comments]] *From the livestream broadcast recorded November 17, 2016, at the Ashton in Austin, Texas.* Tonight Jenni and I took red paint to the large abstract canvas hanging behind us and wrote **NOT ART** across its face. I had announced the plan in March; the painting had been bothering me almost from the moment we brought it home. We had just moved in, the walls were bare, I could not find a local artist quickly enough, and so we did what people are trained to do: we went to a gallery and bought something ready to hang. It cost four or five hundred dollars and looked competent. That was precisely the problem. It had been made on an assembly line in a monoculture for an indistinguishable buyer, and it carried every feature of art except the presence of an artist. The paint was not a stunt added to a lecture about art. It was the lecture. I wanted to show how value enters the world, how a person is taught to misprice the work of another human being, and how common culture converts creators into consumers while allowing them to believe they are exercising freedom. Once the words were there, I added the underline and stood back. The canvas had finally acquired a decision. ## Conditioned austerity The first subject of the broadcast was money, because the assembly line on the wall was also a price lesson. Years of buying from enormous systems teach people that the resulting price is the natural price of a thing. A local craftsperson then asks to be paid for time, skill, materials, rent, thought and risk, and the same buyer who pays a large brand without reflection suddenly calls the neighbor greedy. The price environment has trained the judgment before the maker ever arrives. +**Conditioned austerity** is a zero-sum relationship with value installed by repeated exposure to prices no individual maker could reproduce. It does more than make handmade work seem expensive; it makes proper compensation feel morally suspicious, prosperity feel like an offense, and the success of another person feel like a subtraction from one's own prospects. {{A culture that teaches people to expect an impossible price teaches them to resent the human being who asks to be paid.}} The remedy is not to despise money. I believe in **[[wiki/Capitalism|conscious capitalism]]**, in enterprise that serves people, and in creators receiving enough to keep creating. Material needs must be met if a person is to accomplish a mission; poverty does not make the mission purer when it prevents the work from being done. A caring person with resources can carry care farther. The answer to irresponsible wealth is responsible wealth. ## Monocultures create mind monopolies A franchise is a machine for creating identical uniformity for equally indistinguishable buyers. The same store, same menu, same wall decoration and same expected price can be reproduced until one city becomes difficult to distinguish from the next. Variety disappears first from the street and then from expectation. People no longer ask what could exist; they ask which version of the familiar they would like delivered. +A **monoculture** becomes a mind monopoly when it narrows the available examples from which thought can be formed. The loss is not only aesthetic. Every local maker removed from view takes a possible way of living with them; every craft replaced by an anonymous product removes evidence that a person can make, price and exchange something of their own. {{A monoculture does not merely make every place look alike; it teaches every person to imagine from the same inventory.}} This is the theme ride I have been describing. A fixed track supplies movement while withholding navigation; scenery arrives on schedule, and the rider mistakes passage for travel. Common culture offers the same arrangement as a life. It provides the brands, ambitions, identities and acceptable forms of success, then calls the selection among them freedom. The truth is not somewhere farther along the track. The truth begins where a person steps off it. ## A gallery is a fossil record of living souls +A handmade object is information held in matter. The decisions of its maker remain in it: where the hand paused, which imperfection was accepted, which alternative was refused, how many years of practice allowed one movement to look effortless. A book preserves the same thing in language. It is a fossil record of a formerly living person, and a gallery is a room full of such records. {{A gallery is not a room full of objects; it is a fossil record of living souls.}} That is why people are drawn to what other people make. The buyer of a handmade pair of boots is not merely buying leather arranged around a foot; the buyer is meeting the knowledge of the person who learned to make them. The reader is not buying paper. The reader is entering the preserved decisions of a mind. A conveyor belt records a process; craft records a person. The distinction also places a responsibility on the creator. A person who remains an unexamined product of another process will reproduce the assumptions of the cultural creator who formed them. Technique alone cannot solve that problem. Before the work can carry a soul signature, the maker has to find out which parts of the soul were supplied by a manufacturer. ## What makes value is contribution The canvas became useful when someone contributed what the production line could not. Red paint was cheap; the decision was not. The factory could reproduce the ochre, gray and black surface indefinitely, but it could not decide that the surface was fraudulent, name the fraud and risk ruining the object in order to tell the truth about it. {{What makes art is contribution, and what makes value is contribution; everything else is inventory.}} Marcel Duchamp approached the same boundary from the opposite direction. His readymades treated an industrial object as art because an artist selected and situated it; *Fountain* made the act of choice impossible to ignore. I began with an object manufactured to resemble art and refused the resemblance. Duchamp raised the factory object by choosing it; I raised the factory painting by violating it. The direction was reversed and the principle was the same: **[[wiki/Authorship|authorship]]** lives in the human decision. Walter Benjamin described the uniqueness of a work as its aura, the history gathered into its existence in one place. Mechanical reproduction thins that aura because the copy belongs everywhere and therefore arrives from nowhere in particular. The red letters gave this canvas a place, a night and two people who had decided something. A copy became singular when a human act made repetition impossible. ## The consumer is the consumed +The usual account of consumer culture places an active buyer in front of passive goods. The deeper mechanism runs in both directions. Systems study appetites, amplify insecurities, install wants and provide the identities through which the wants are interpreted; the goods are consumed, but the person is also being shaped into the kind of component the system can continue to use. {{The consumer becomes the consumed when an appetite installed by a system is mistaken for a private desire.}} The canvas was therefore not only like the culture. It was like the person standing in front of it. Each of us has been produced on an assembly line called common culture, collated into a product disciple and a brand disciple from birth. Commercials, institutions, families and social rewards deposit their preferred arrangements until a borrowed design feels like a personality. The task is not to hate everything received from the culture. The task is to inspect it closely enough to choose what remains. That is what I meant when I asked the audience to identify what was not art within them. Which conviction arrived ready-made? Which fear keeps an inherited system intact? Which desire belongs to an advertiser, a family script or a status economy rather than to the person carrying it? Desecration is a strong word, and sometimes the inherited falsity has been treated as sacred for so long that only a strong word will reach it. ## Observation is a creative intervention Months ago I predicted that a hundred people could enter this room and perhaps one would notice the canvas; after the red words, all hundred would walk toward it. The difference is not the quality of the pigment. People search surfaces for evidence of another mind. A refusal, an interruption and a choice reveal that someone was here and meant something. +Observation is not always passive reception; the way a person apprehends something can alter what the thing is allowed to become. The same power operates in relationships. A child repeatedly apprehended as bad is given badness as a role, while a child held inside the expectation of goodness is given room to return to it. Words carry the judgment, and so do posture, attention, patience and every quieter channel of communication. {{Every judgment is a brush; people are always painting one another, so they may as well learn to paint with care.}} The responsibility of perception is not that every observation invents its object. The responsibility is that a social being responds to the field in which they are seen. Careless people can therefore injure others without intending harm, simply by broadcasting a low expectation through every available channel. The observer leaves brushstrokes whether or not the observer believes they are holding a brush. ## The honest economy Getting off the conveyor belt does not mean withdrawing from exchange. It means restoring relationship to exchange. The local maker knows where the consequences land; the buyer can know who was paid, what was learned, what will endure and which household the transaction supports. That proximity creates accountability, but it also creates affection. A Main Street full of makers is not charming decoration around the real economy. It is an economy in which people can still encounter one another through what they do. +An honest market allows skill, service and compensation to remain visible in the same transaction. It does not ask a craftsperson to pretend that labor cost nothing, and it does not ask a buyer to confuse the cheapest receipt with the lowest cost. {{The honest economy begins when people stop worshipping brands and begin paying one another for the value of their real work.}} The obligation runs both ways. Makers deserve fair compensation, and artists must think seriously about reach. A price that protects the dignity of the work but prevents nearly everyone from living with it can defeat the work's reason for existing. The aim is neither proud scarcity nor disposable abundance. It is circulation: enough return for the creator to continue, enough access for the creation to enter many lives, and enough relationship for both sides to remember that a human being is present. ## The soul signature After Jenni painted the words, I added the long red underline. The gesture was small, almost comic, but co-creation was part of the instruction. A real being had acted upon the object; then another real being acted upon it. The canvas now held a sequence of decisions that could not have come from the line that produced it. The same operation is available to a life. Violate what is false, retain what is true, and convert what was inherited into a version of beauty that carries your own contribution. The world can reproduce a product. It cannot obtain your particular combination of perception, history, craft, care and judgment from anywhere else. That is not flattery. It is the economic and creative fact from which a person must begin. The finished canvas still says NOT ART. It is the most honest thing the painting has ever said. {{Every life begins on an assembly line; a life becomes a work of art when its owner leaves a soul signature on what the line produced.}} --- [[about/About Bryant McGill|Bryant McGill]] is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author, systems architect, technologist, and strategic advisor, as well as a Congressionally Recognized Ambassador of Goodwill and United Nations–appointed Global Champion. His work spans naval intelligence systems, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital transformation, and civilizational governance architecture. His forward analysis on U.S.–Israel Pax Silica frameworks has appeared in Jewish/Jerusalem News Syndicate (JNS). --- ## References - [Marcel Duchamp](https://www.moma.org/artists/1634-marcel-duchamp), Museum of Modern Art: *Fountain* as an industrially produced object whose selection altered the parameters of art and authorship. - [*The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction*](https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/hum-1-modern-humanities/resource-collection/chapter-2-the-roaring-twenties-the-great-fall-1920-s-1945/resource/the-work-of-art-in-the-age-of-mechanical-reproduction-by-walter-benjamin), Walter Benjamin: mechanical reproduction, uniqueness and aura. ## Related books and Reminders - [[books/Voice of Reason Book (2009-2012)|Voice of Reason]]: the earlier argument that people cease being free consumers when systems shape them into consumable products. - [[books/Simple Reminders Book (2014-2018)|Simple Reminders]]: individuation, self-cultivation and the refusal of assimilation into a monoculture. - [[reminders/Creativity/Creation Carries the Value of Its Maker by Bryant McGill|Creation Carries the Value of Its Maker]] - [[reminders/Originality/Authenticity Is the Creator's Irreplaceable Advantage by Bryant McGill|Authenticity Is the Creator's Irreplaceable Advantage]] ## Related blogs - [[blog/20170722 - The Atmosphere of Our Identity|The Atmosphere of Our Identity]]: how environments and associations continue the work of shaping the person after the assembly line has done its first pass. - [[blog/20261030 - Hacking a New Social and Psychological Firewall|Hacking a New Social and Psychological Firewall]]: the broadcast method understood as a multivector attempt to return systems literacy, dignity and agency to the audience. ## Related Photo Journey - [[photo journey/2016-11-17 - Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton|Bryant Painting Not Art at the Ashton]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: the video still of the final underline and a reflection on the act. ## Related Livestream Lessons **Directly related.** These broadcasts supplied the material cited in this piece and are documented with timestamps in the source notes below. - [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream#Conditioned Austerity Is a Price Environment|Conditioned Austerity Is a Price Environment]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: repeated exposure to industrial prices becomes a moral judgment against the maker who asks to be paid for human time, skill and continuity. - [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream#Monocultures Create Mind Monopolies|Monocultures Create Mind Monopolies]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: material sameness narrows the examples from which a person can imagine, until a restricted inventory is experienced as the whole field of possibility. - [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream#What a Price Conceals and What a Maker Carries|What a Price Conceals and What a Maker Carries]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: a handmade object records a particular mind working under constraint, while its mass-produced equivalent records a repeatable process that never imagined the buyer. - [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream#The Consumer Can Become the Consumed|The Consumer Can Become the Consumed]] *(Nov 17, 2016)*: consumption becomes absorption when a system installs the appetite, supplies the identity that interprets it and mistakes the resulting behavior for private choice. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2 - Livestream#Manufactured Need as an Installed Appetite|Manufactured Need as an Installed Appetite]] *(Mar 29, 2016)*: advertising amplifies ordinary uncertainty into deficiency and then sells the proposed remedy; an installed appetite is experienced as private self-knowledge. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2 - Livestream#Why a Defaced Print Draws a Crowd|Why a Defaced Print Draws a Crowd]] *(Mar 29, 2016)*: attention follows costly evidence that a mind has made a decision; a human gesture can make a mass-produced surface suddenly worth crossing the room to examine. - [[livestreams/Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2 - Livestream#Observation Is a Creative Intervention|Observation Is a Creative Intervention]] *(Mar 29, 2016)*: social perception does not merely classify a person; repeated expectation becomes part of the field within which that person learns to act. - [[livestreams/Escaping the Artificial Theme Ride and Connecting With What Is Real - Livestream#The Theme Ride and the Difference Between Movement and Travel|The Theme Ride and the Difference Between Movement and Travel]] *(Oct 13, 2015)*: a manufactured experience supplies motion while withholding navigation; the fixed track becomes a model for mistaking managed passage for travel. - [[livestreams/Directed Attention and the Discipline of Creation - Livestream#You Are the Artist and the Art|You Are the Artist and the Art]] *(Jun 18, 2016)*: a human life places the creator, material and accumulated record of creation inside the same person; each decision also shapes the instrument making the next one. **Indirectly related.** These broadcasts carry the same mechanisms without being cited in the body, and each one has its own developed lesson. - [[livestreams/Creativity, Entrepreneurship, and Inner Wealth - Livestream#What a Made Thing Carries of Its Maker|What a Made Thing Carries of Its Maker]] *(Aug 13, 2015)*: making records a particular mind's decisions in material; that deposited history is why objects with the same function can carry profoundly different value. - [[livestreams/Worthiness, Durable Value, and the Psychology of Money - Livestream#Throwaway Culture Is the Real Materialism|Throwaway Culture Is the Real Materialism]] *(May 2, 2016)*: materialism is measured by throughput; one durable object can demand far less of the world than a modest-looking cycle of cheap replacements. - [[livestreams/Consumer Choice, Better Goods, and the True Cost of Cheapness - Livestream#Where the Price Difference Is Actually Paid|Where the Price Difference Is Actually Paid]] *(undated)*: a low price relocates its missing cost into lifespan, material, wages, environment or repeated replacement; the difference disappears from the receipt rather than from the world. - [[livestreams/Gratitude, Negativity Bias, and the Value of Durable Things - Livestream#An Object That Keeps Reporting Its Maker|An Object That Keeps Reporting Its Maker]] *(Jan 13, 2019)*: a well-made tool repeatedly communicates the skill and care that produced it; ordinary use becomes continuing contact with an absent maker. - [[livestreams/Opulence, Self-Worth, and Refusing Weaponized Humility - Livestream#Opulence Is Resolution Rather Than Accumulation|Opulence Is Resolution Rather Than Accumulation]] *(undated)*: opulence is information density in experience, nourishment, environment, craft and mind rather than the count of accumulated possessions. - [[livestreams/Investing Attention in Work That Keeps Serving - Livestream#Unclaimed Attention Gets Spent By Someone Else|Unclaimed Attention Gets Spent By Someone Else]] *(Mar 13, 2016)*: unallocated attention does not remain idle; gossip, conflict and engineered feeds compete to spend that surplus on purposes chosen by someone else. - [[livestreams/Enthusiasm, Identity, and the Emotional Energy of Creation - Livestream#Authorship Claimed Before It Is Granted|Authorship Claimed Before It Is Granted]] *(undated)*: a creative identity must be self-assigned because the work that could justify the title can only be produced after someone begins behaving as its holder. - [[livestreams/From Dream Chasing to Patient Creative Practice - Livestream#Presence Is the Variable, Not Polish|Presence Is the Variable, Not Polish]] *(Jul 18, 2017)*: a listener detects the presence of the performer before technical precision; imperfect work can transmit a person where flawless execution transmits only competence. ## Related topics - [[wiki/Abundance Economics|Abundance Economics]] - [[wiki/Attention Economy|Attention Economy]] - [[wiki/Authorship|Authorship]] - [[wiki/Authenticity|Authenticity]] - [[wiki/Commodification|Commodification]] - [[wiki/Conformity|Conformity]] - [[wiki/Capitalism|Capitalism]] - [[wiki/Creator Economy|Creator Economy]] - [[wiki/Creativity|Creativity]] - [[wiki/Curiosity|Curiosity]] - [[wiki/Fossil Record|Fossil Record]] - [[wiki/Originality|Originality]] - [[wiki/Self-Fulfilling Prophecy|Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]] > [!quote]- Broadcast source notes > **Primary broadcast: [[livestreams/Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1 - Livestream|Craft, Value, and the Recovery of Fair Compensation, Part 1]] (November 17, 2016).** This is the night the canvas was defaced. The broadcast was captured under the working title *Money Blocks Part 1: Not Art! Understanding Your Value*. The painting hangs behind Bryant and Jenni throughout; the paint comes out about forty-five minutes in, after the argument has been established through conditioned prices, local craft, Main Street, monoculture and fair compensation. > > 1. **2:50–3:54:** Bryant announces "a not art project" intended to show the audience where their value is and how it was robbed from them. He names assembly-line culture as a legacy of the Industrial Revolution and calls its poverty frame **conditioned austerity**: reaching reflexively for scarcity instead of wealth for everyone. > 2. **15:23–17:23:** Bryant names the local stakeholder, then explains that people have been produced by entities that understand and exploit their appetites. He moves from the conveyor belt's inability to make with love into the formulation "monocultures create mind monopolies." > 3. **22:45–23:44:** A handmade product is an extension of its maker. Bryant calls a book the fossil record of a formerly living person and a gallery a fossil record of living souls, then asks how someone can create an original life while remaining unaware that they are the product of another process. > 4. **24:11–25:17:** Bryant reads from his own work on social mind-diseases arising from limited choice spaces in artificially homogenized environments. He calls the result an inbreeding of ideas and tells the audience to stop worshipping brands and pay tribute to their sacred selves, communities and neighbors. > 5. **25:46–26:47:** Bryant names the pricing double standard. People hand money to a big-box store without reflection, while a neighbor who opens a shop and prices the work to include a proper wage is accused of greed. > 6. **31:07–31:59:** Bryant reads his line that nothing is higher class than craftsmanship, diversity, originality and the service of skilled human hands. A craftsperson's hands create authenticity and truth, including the blemishes and imperfections that a production process removes. > 7. **34:34–35:20:** Bryant recalls going to local art fairs and judging the work expensive because big-box shopping had taught him what prices were supposed to look like. He realizes that the inherited comparison cheated both the makers and himself. > 8. **38:06–39:07:** Bryant refuses the premise that commerce is shameful. Creating useful work, building a store and accepting compensation are honorable; supporting local makers is how people alter the character of the economy they inhabit. > 9. **39:07–40:46:** Bryant introduces the painting as an assembly-line object made in a monoculture for an indistinguishable buyer. It looks like art while belonging to the theme ride. He turns from the object to the audience: their truth is the one thing the world cannot obtain anywhere else. > 10. **40:49–42:35:** Bryant calls each person their own greatest asset and undiscovered adventure. He then states the governing principle of the demonstration: what makes art is contribution, what makes value is contribution, and the mass-produced object becomes something when a person adds what the line could not. > 11. **42:39–44:28:** Practicing an art deepens respect for the time another artist spent learning. Bryant then identifies common culture as the assembly line that produces product disciples and brand disciples, and tells the audience to violate the falsity installed within them and become their own art. > 12. **44:48–47:39:** Jenni paints NOT ART across the canvas. Bryant calls the original object fraudulent and says the intervention will add authenticity and make it real. He turns the act toward the listener, repeats "we believe we are the consumers, but we are the consumed," and asks what within them is fraudulent. Once the words are finished, he states that the canvas is now art because a real being converted it into something the assembly line did not make. > 13. **47:42–49:04:** Bryant adds the long underline so the work is co-created. He tells the audience to convert inherited falsity into their own version of beauty, put a **soul signature** into their craft, and understand the matchless value of what no other person can supply. > 14. **49:38–52:18:** Bryant returns the lesson to the economy. In a mercantile society, people cannot prosper while fearing exchange or refusing to value their creations. The antidote to irresponsible wealth is responsible wealth; the success of another person is evidence that success remains possible. > > **Related broadcast: [[livestreams/Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2 - Livestream|Constructing Genius by Recognizing and Developing Your Gifts, Part 2]] (March 29, 2016).** > > - **6:14–6:32:** Bryant tells the audience they have been sold the lie that they are not good enough, calls it the ultimate public-relations operation and names the mechanism directly: a false need is created inside the person. > - **27:08–28:16:** A viewer types "boring" and leaves. Bryant answers that scientists and artists can find material on a park bench or while watching paint dry because curiosity changes the resolution at which the world is perceived. > - **28:48–29:40:** Bryant points to the mass-produced painting, explains that he bought it because he could not find a local artist and announces the future broadcast: red paint, the words NOT ART, graffiti, defilement and spit. > - **29:45–30:46:** Bryant gives the reasoning in advance. Defiling the canvas will make it art because the act will become a statement about the conveyor belt, produced society and the theme ride. He predicts that a hundred people will ignore the original and approach the altered version because a mind made a decision upon it. > - **31:04–32:40:** Bryant extends observation from objects to people. If he finds someone boring, he has not dug deeply enough; telling a child they are bad helps create badness, while holding space for goodness allows goodness to organize. The judgment travels through body language and total communication as well as words. > - **54:17–54:59:** Bryant closes the thread by telling the audience that who they are deep down is good enough and simply not favored by a popular culture pursuing different objectives. He rejects the canvas because it becomes art only when he calls it not art. > > **Related broadcast: [[livestreams/Escaping the Artificial Theme Ride and Connecting With What Is Real - Livestream|Escaping the Artificial Theme Ride and Connecting With What Is Real]] (October 13, 2015).** > > - **27:38–28:24:** Bryant describes American cities becoming the same sprawling strip mall, then gives the Disneyland figure: a little boat passes a staged Cajun bayou, but the rider is not in Louisiana, the music is not a living local culture and the movement occurs on a theme ride. > - **34:52–35:03:** Bryant says the truth is not on the theme ride; a person has to get off the track in order to touch it. > > **Related broadcast: [[livestreams/Directed Attention and the Discipline of Creation - Livestream|Directed Attention and the Discipline of Creation]] (June 18, 2016).** > > - **2:24–3:04:** Bryant introduces his line that a person is both the artist and the art, clarifying that the figure concerns the artistry of a life rather than the literal ability to draw. > - **4:14–4:50:** Every situation is a canvas; every situation and person in a life receives the brushstrokes of attention and conduct. > - **10:38–10:43:** Bryant reminds the audience that those brushstrokes are being placed now rather than at some future moment when a person feels ready to begin.