Street Performers Protocol

the Street Performer Protocol, an electronic-commerce mechanism to facilitate the private financing of public works.

Using this protocol, people would place donations in escrow, to be released to an author in the event that the promised work is put in the public domain. This protocol has the potential to fund alternative or "marginal" works.

Proposed by Bruce Schneier and J. Kelsey at http://www.schneier.com/paper-street-performer.html

Background: The 1963 Protocol Proposal by Francois Hers

Francois Hers:

"The Protocol

The protocol sets out to shape the relationships between society, its artists and their works in a contemporary way. More than two centuries after the first cultural revolutions resulting from the invention of a new way of organizing society and the exponential development of science and technology, those relationships are still being established by default.

The protocol is a work that gives concrete expression to a novel relationship involving three protagonists: the artist, the citizen as patron and the mediator. That relationship is the basis of a new model of political economy for art.

The new patron and the mediator

The protocol opens up to all citizens who so wish the opportunity to take on responsibility for commissioning a work of art in any field of creativity (1). The legitimacy of that right has its origin in the invention of a democracy which has the founding ambition of enabling every individual to emerge from his position as a spectator of history that is beyond his control to become a fully involved protagonist. In the name of that ambition, producing works which give shape and meaning to our experience of the world becomes a collective responsibility. It is everybody’s responsibility. No special knowledge is required to call upon an artist and negotiate the making of a work with him. The citizen, acting alone or in a group, becomes a patron when he recognizes within himself what lies at the basis of creativity for the contemporary artist: the same desire to express himself freely, the same determination to resist standardisation, the same need to imagine himself in a different way and to invent new paths.

The "new patron"? created by the protocol discovers that experience of his own period makes him as legitimate to express needs or designate sensitive cultural situations as anybody else. He realises that he is capable of carrying out work involving recognition of individual or collective needs and that his hesitancies and awkwardness hardly matter. It is the strength of his conviction or his desire that win the support of those he talks with. If his voice is heard, he will be in a position to assess the relevance of his initiative and the justification of the financial investment he is asking the group to make to produce a work; he will then have to take it upon himself to bring about its appearance and its installation in his community.

The knowledge needed to go from word to deed is supplied by a third party who knows artists and the demands of contemporary creativity. That expert is in a position to draw up a contract, and to harmonise and manage the different sources of public or private funding devoted to culture. He also knows the practical and administrative constraints bound up with commissioning in which these patrons are involved. In the protocol, that expert is described as "the mediator"?, as his primary role is to create links between the protagonists involved, however different they may be. He listens to the ideas and convictions of each party and ensures they are respected. He helps translate them into deeds. He also manages the tensions and conflicts naturally provoked by the expression of desires and demands. On the basis of cultural and technical specifications drawn up by the patrons, the mediator determines the means of creation and the artist that seems most appropriate to him. He thus brings his responsibility as a "connoisseur"? into play. However, the patrons have to approve his choice, since it is they who are committing themselves and entering into dialogue with the artist on the basis of the critical thought put into defining their expectations. The artist makes a proposal and, in the ensuing discussion, the artist and patrons jointly invent a use value for contemporary art. A work of invention, renewed with each commission, which enables artists to find ways of becoming involved in the life of the city, and citizens and their elected representatives to find out how they can establish a free relationship with the art of their time.

This role of "mediator-producer"?, as it is defined here, is not intended to replace the functions of the various people currently involved in contemporary art, but to enrich those functions with new missions. The role of mediator entails independence, and recognition of his autonomy makes decision-making easier. If negotiations run into difficulties, it is up to the mediator to define how the project can be continued in a different way or to decide to break it off. He is acting within a small organisation, capable of guaranteeing the flexibility of management essential in order to remain as close as possible to the desires expressed and the realities on the ground. The works produced in this way will be displayed in places laid down by the patrons and the artists. Works that are not ephemeral in nature will become the property of the community and will be registered in the inventory of a body close to the patrons, capable of making sure they are looked after.

The artist and the producer of art on behalf of the community

The protocol opens up to all artists who so wish the opportunity of talking to someone who can be as involved as they are in the responsibility for producing a work and understanding why it exists. The artist’s legitimate right to ask for help in taking an initiative and society’s interest in granting him that help are linked to recognition of the purpose of art, recognition which is becoming all the more crucial because of the development of unprecedented cultural shifts. In order to live and work, we depend ever more exclusively on a flood of representations - images, words, figures and sounds - whose validity we cannot check from our own experience. Paradoxically these representations enable us to act more and better because they increase our capacity to know and understand, but as a result of being produced in quantity they make our ways of apprehending reality uniform to the point of emptying it of all substance. In this situation of dependency, the artist offers original forms of emancipation whose requirements help give us a basis for judgement. The work unveils the issues behind the confusions inherent to periods of change and, in a life in which reality and representations of it are being merged in an irreversible movement, experience of art becomes fundamental. But, to pass judgement and make his work, the artist is looking for tangible experience, and cannot dispense with experimenting endlessly with new forms in order to imagine how to make his mark in the movement and inhabit the world.

To answer those needs for experience and experimentation, the scale of which goes beyond the existing support arrangements, the group appoints a mediator and asks him to handle negotiations with the artist. The mediator, by acting on behalf of the general interest, with public resources and private patronage, takes on the role of a "producer of art on behalf of the community"?. Only the intuition and boldness of an attentive negotiator can recognize the consummate originality of an artist’s intention and the reality of his needs behind the violence of the creative tensions. That role of delegated producer enables the group to manage its financial resources more discerningly than through the filter of invitations to tender, juries or any other standard procedure. By their nature, it is hard for arrangements of that kind to take account of the special characteristics of a creative work and it is impossible for them to establish a direct dialogue with the artist.

The mediator will be judged by the work that is produced and that commitment gives him the necessary credibility to assess with the artist the relevance of his intention and his ambition. He also has responsibility for measuring the financial needs he has to help put in place to carry out the experiments the artist wishes for, and implement the work. This delegated producer helps the artist to negotiate the methods of distribution suited to the purposes of the creation, so as to preserve its freedom. If the work has to integrate the constraints and normal practices of distribution at the time when it is conceived, it is as much the form of the work which is likely to be subject to them as the very concept artists have of their role and the role of art.

The protocol contributes towards making a distinction between the producer’s responsibility and that of the distributor. They do not have the same objectives, and by confusing them we run the risk of using creative necessity as an instrument. We reduce the artist to becoming an interchangeable supplier of institutions and of a speculative market, models of whose work are reproduced in an identical way. To act effectively, the mediator works within structures that allow for the appropriate management of resources and make it possible to take account of the risks of failure inherent in creative work. His activity reinforces that of persons and structures which ensure the recognition of works or market them to make sure artists have the resources they need. A return on the group’s investment may take place, if it so wishes, by assigning the works produced or copyright in them wholly or partly to public or private bodies involved in a cultural activity of general interest.

Recognizing the need

The protocol has arisen from the need felt by artists since the 1960s to get out of a situation that had become self-referential; after playing a crucial role in winning their autonomy, it was no longer adequate. While the majority of artists today reaffirm that need, it is not out of the question that a new generation may decide to ignore the systems that have been set up to look for the conditions they require wherever they may find them, in order to hold on to the initiative and answer the questions they are faced with. We are no longer in a phase of heroic conquest of modernity. Artists are now confronted on a daily basis with an output of representations made by talented professionals the effectiveness of which directly questions the special nature of art and the social role of the artist. That competitive situation in which art’s reason for being is permanently at stake does not allow any pretences.

One doesn’t create in order to enrich the stock of a museum; biennals, festivals and shows of all sorts are only events. It is not in social life where he is perpetually thrown back on himself that the artist can give meaning to his commitment, any more than the ever increasing number of people professionally engaged in art can. Creativity requires experience of the world, and artists need to engage in methods of exchange and production able to adapt to the development of needs, methods of exchange and production that justify giving them resources that keep pace with the real costs of their research, which is not only formal but fundamental. But in order to get art out of the museums which protect it, its excessively fragile status has to be consolidated, giving it back legitimacy for the whole of society. And society has to be taken out of its abstract status as the public to get down to the individuals who constitute it, allowing them to emancipate themselves from their forced role as consumers.

With the protocol, it is a question of altering a situation in which art is still perceived as a tool of power or as a consumer product, admittedly a demanding one the importance of which is widely proclaimed, yet still perceived as an investment of only relative importance compared with priorities such as economic development, health or defence.

Art is one of the key elements in building a culture, and it is impossible for human beings to imagine themselves without culture. But the very awareness of its role has never been weaker at a time when we have to adapt to what is no longer merely a change in form but a change in nature. We are not succeeding in recognizing art’s vital and decisive role in constructing our identity, in recognizing other people, in our conception of space, in our control of time and, at a more concrete level, in our capacity to act. People talk of the absence of God, they regret the lack of an enlightened temporal authority, they suspect there is a constitutional weakness in democracy, they stigmatise the attitude of artists, they take exception to their works, they denounce a generalised lack of artistic education. As cultural transformations become more profound and lead art to play a vital role, its revolutionary capacity is weakened by assimilating its forms to the entertainment industry. This process of assimilation seems all the less questionable because it is often carried out by competent professional artists with considerable success in terms of audience and financial reward. In fact, it is no doubt in the very nature of the model set up to manage cultural affairs at the time of the French Revolution that the reasons for these difficulties must be sought.

In the infancy of modern democracies, was it possible to conceive that, following on from the prince, the bishop or the well-to-do, the simple citizen would be able to become the person with whom artists preferred to converse? That any one of us could take on the role of spokesman for the needs of our society and have the legitimacy to commit ourselves to the high expenditure that the major artistic workshops have always given rise to? Unable to imagine that such citizens could ask for everything, cultural policies, both private and public, have favoured a continuous enrichment of what is on offer. They no longer invest the major part of the resources devoted to art in creativity, as all the periods of change that preceded us did, but in the dissemination and conservation of works, without it being possible for a link to be established with the need that underlies their creation. These policies are of course not unaware that wants are unpredictable, and carrying out a policy of assistance creates fewer ripples than undertaking to negotiate; what is on offer is easier to control.

To take effect, the protocol turns the current priorities upside down and suggests ways of relating to art which dispense with arguments about authority. In it investments promoting the conservation of the heritage works which constitute our memory, promoting the various forms of dissemination and artistic training intended to allow each and everyone to have access to those works, are no longer regarded as ends in themselves but as support measures for a movement of creativity to which we are irredeemably constrained. Thanks to the creation of original forms, artists have helped the society they live in to enter modernity by freeing itself from the standards of centuries-old tradition. They were able to act with all the freedom allowed by the anonymous relationships afforded by the market and museums, and the concept which they consecrated of art that has become its own subject or "a commodity in its own right"?. They have turned the past two centuries into one of the richest periods in the history of art, Marcel Duchamp precipitating the work of emancipation with a simple bicycle wheel. He revealed the key role of the spectator and showed the extent to which, rather than condemning art, the development of technology and the mechanical reproduction of objects opened up an infinite prospect of formal and conceptual inventions to artistic creativity.

The protocol, by proposing to turn the democratic utopia into a work in its own right, opens up a second prospect. It turns the spectator into a fully involved player who establishes with the artist a model of modern dialogue between free citizens who feel solidarity towards one another. It brings art back from the periphery to which it had moved to the centre of our lives. It makes it possible to give rise ad infinitum to as many works as desires and to create a common culture, without any fear that art may become a tool of enslavement, because it always finds its origins in the singularity of a person, a community or a place.

After having been tried and tested by an exceptionally violent history, the concept of democracy has reached maturity. It is no longer possible to refuse individuals the capacity to participate directly in working out their culture. There is now a widespread awareness that a creative work constitutes a commitment and involves taking risks. The desire for art, with its aesthetic and critical demands, remains unscathed, and is even violent, behind the pleasures and desires for knowledge satisfied by the entertainment and information industries. And because it is in the nature of art to transcend the trivial conditions that have given rise to it, the only other limits to the development of this prospect are those a community imposes on itself. A policy which responds to demand is less costly than a policy based on supply. It makes it possible to give new meaning to culture absolutely anywhere in a territory, even in the most marginalized areas, whereas the continual enrichment of supply is confined to rich countries, and within those countries to the most prosperous centres and regions.

The production of works of art, despite the demands it makes, is the field of action which makes it possible to give concrete expression to the democratic ambition in the simplest way. It means that equal responsibility can be shared among all the social protagonists without making distinctions: from the ordinary citizen to the artist, from local elected representatives to members of associations, from town councils to public administrative bodies and private businesses. The protocol specifically opens up to businesses and administrative bodies the opportunity to take upon themselves the cultural dimensions associated with their practical activities and to share the financial burden. The field of work of creativity is impressive since henceforth it is a matter of reinventing all our forms of relating to the world, without any certainties. In this situation, it is an illusion to believe that one power can be determining. It is just as much of an illusion to think that the Ministries of Culture or benefactors of the arts, however well funded they may be, can succeed in responding to the current challenges on their own. It has now been accepted that the artist’s responsibility, like his work, can take any form. The institutions along with the market are no longer the sole judges in society of what can or cannot be described as art. Nor does universal suffrage any longer invest elected representatives with the role of arbiter. On the other hand, elected representatives - who can be patrons like anyone else - play as decisive a role as artistic mediators do in developing the initiative. They have no need to know about the history of art to carry out the mission entrusted to them in a democracy: that of acting as political mediators, capable of creating the link between the needs of a community and those who can respond to them in a tangible way by deciding on priorities in the way resources are used.

Finally this sharing must be open to intellectuals. With their own experience, they are better placed than anyone else to develop an analysis of what artists and patrons reveal, in order to create an exchange and make people want to proceed to action. It is not a question of increasing the number of commentaries on works but of developing a shared critical awareness of contemporary cultural needs and dimensions. That awareness is as necessary as courage, to give shape to the unknown.

Developments

The protocol is becoming a reality thanks to the commitment of an ever increasing number of people. It is they who give answers to the many questions raised by its implementation: questions which have to do not only with art and art history, but also with human relationships, and with the political, economic, legal, administrative and practical dimensions which are raised by any production of a work and any new way of acting. The work of mediators, as it is defined in the protocol, will be difficult because it is they who actually hold the key to the movement. To build utopia, they will henceforth act with the help of foundations (4) and wealthy benefactors, elected representatives and public administrative bodies who have opted for creativity with all the risks associated with it. As of now, under the headings "New patrons"? and "Artist’s initiative"?, the protocol has made it possible for over one hundred works to be produced in France, and the model is starting to be taken up in other countries where it is established in their specific contexts."

Author: François Hers Tervuren 1963 / Paris 2001