"On April 19, 2014, The Arts Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley will stage a day-long Practicum entitled Valuing Labor in the Arts. The gathering invites registered participants to select from the 8 Artist-led Workshops; each is a small-group practicum devised to spur dialogue, action, and art-making around questions of art, labor, and economics. They will also spend some portion of their day in “The Power of Demands and Transparency,” working to develop a Bay Area cultural survey and to expand their own thinking in relation to the Bay Area’s broader labor history. In the early evening, registered participants will re-convene together en masse at the David Brower Center to debrief, to share insights, and to share a meal. In addition to the workshop prompts and featured essays in this issue, we have included here a selection (and a reminder) of some recent and some not-so-very-old manifestos of artists who found themselves asking how they wanted to be valued and wondering whether the available value systems were up to the task. Some worried about authorship and ownership, some about invisibility, some about whether an artists’ union could combat a highly individuating art market that kept artists from working with each other."
(By Shannon Jackson, Helena Keeffe)
