Artist Lecture - Brad Troemel

Brad Troemel, in his lecture "Free Art" (February 4, 2011) at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, discusses that even through Duchamp's Fountain market value has always been the value measure of art.

Beginning with Readymade and three rules the readymade reveals about the arts
- authorship
- context that declares it to be art
- property

These happen to be the same rules that govern capitalism and capitalist exchanges. Aesthetizied commodities and commodified aesthetics. "Our IDEA of what art is follows capitalist policies".

Art's discourse is dictated through the art market's buying power.

We are so reliant on businesses to define art's canon that we as producers lost the ability to define ourselves.

The challenge for art is to unlock its long-tail.

Art is inherently utopian idea, the beauty of art comes from the fact that it's unnecessary. We involve ourselves in art in a way that we've never seen it. The perfect impossibility = utopia.

Art is not a job, it's a utopian fascination.

Profit motivations are a form of self-censorship.

Two different ways that art may be distributed separate from current models = capitalist or socialist (one to many)
- dual sites - decentralized network, selling is not goal or motivation, smaller audiences but more people involved, foot traffic is supplemental to online presence

- rhizome network - art as meme
As an artist is included on more websites, the concentric circles of a viewer-percieved image tug increasingly further from their middle point. This rhizomatic pull is even capable of severing the relation of an artist to a work entirely as each entity lives its own existence without many viewers' recognition of who made the work in the first place. Anonymized art usually comes in the way by images that have been recirculated deep in the networks of web 2.0 users. Just as a tire's treads wear away with use, the contextual backing of an art image is stripped by its own applicability among networked bloggers. In this way, the removal of an artist's name, and work title or date, is the highest honor bestowed upon today's networked producer. It is this art that has resonated so well that its image has preceded its own description.