Reposted from Platform for Pedagogy, June 2010

In what ways can public pedagogy strengthen communities as an alternative to consumer-exchange based relationships?

Intellectual work and culture can certainly create communities and collectivity—politically motivated or otherwise. Pedagogy itself is usually associated with some kind of process of socialization—a lovely word, really. The echo in your question seems to be about the reification of community making—at least in densely metropolitan areas—into lifestyle brands, products and industries. Orienting a cultural project against this sort of historical development in culture and popular taste on a foundational level to me seems a bit academic and uninspired. Can we imagine, instead, imparting moral and intellectual questions as a critical component of popular taste—rather than simply pushing them out into the world as that taste’s solvent?

Full interview… Read the rest of this entry »

7:30 Wednesday April 28 - 5651 San Pablo Ave, Oakland

Kultural Kapital is a class that was first held at The Public School in Los Angeles.
A variation of this conversation is now being organized as an informal reading / discussion group in the bay area.

The idea is to explore how social/cultural capital operates within the arts.
In other words, how value, authorship, credit, and symbolic power is distributed across collaborative projects or among people within a particular “scene” and especially for those who imagine themselves in opposition to traditional capitalist forces.

This discussion would reflect on current trends (in the bay area?): collaborative, curatorial, pedagogical, involving alternative-economies, celebrating “community” and de-authored production, and so on. In the context of an ongoing financial crisis, it also seems important to understand how cultural capital is related to real economic flows, to grants and art markets, for non-profits and established art institutions, and within the field of marketing or advertising.

The “class” will not have a teacher. Hopefully, it will be conversational: Informed by the readings but not circumscribed by them.
For the first get-together you may want to read:
+ Pierre Bourdieu - The Field of Cultural Production (highlighted excerpt)
+ Diedrich Diederichsen - On (Surplus) Value In Art
+ Marysia Lewandowska & Neil Cummings - An Economy of Love
download

Each meeting will include brief presentations by people who have special relationships to cultural capital (like case-studies or story-time).
On the 28th, it will be Luke Fischbeck and Joseph del Pesco talking about some of the projects they are working on…

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Sight School
Luke
Joseph
The Public School, KK Klass in LA
a.aaaarg for additional reading

THE THING Quarterly is a periodical in the form of an object. Each year, four artists, writers, musicians or filmmakers are invited by the editors (Jonn Herschend and Will Rogan) to create an everyday useful object that somehow incorporates text. This object will be reproduced and hand wrapped at a wrapping party and then mailed to the homes of the subscribers with the help of the United States Postal Service.