Recently, I had a meeting with a director of an artist-run space in Philadelphia. At many points in our discussion we touched on the issue of selling artwork. This led to reflections on the state of the art market in Philadelphia and the strong anti-commercial ethos of sections of the Philadelphia DIY art community. It strikes me that this opposition is a good place to start, not least because it forms the elementary premise on which a number of conversations that I have had with people from the arts community here in Philadelphia about the state of art in the city and the rest of the United States are based.
Read MoreArt is not an “autonomous” realm of cultural production that is cut off from, or outside, the unfolding of everyday life. Rather, it is something that takes place within reality at a given socio-historical moment. I would like to build on these initial reflections by developing the very idea of this “taking place within”. I will refer to this, more precisely, as art’s immanence (I take this word to mean here, quite simply, a status of “being within something,” a kind of “indwelling”).
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