HEART OF

DARKNESS
A Journey into the Dark Matter
of the Art World

We can measure the waste [of artistic talent] not only in the Temporary Services , One Week
thousands of “failed” artists--artists whose market failure is Boutique, Chicago 2000
necessary to the success of the few--but also in the millions
whose creative potential is never touched... This glut of art
and artists is the normal condition of the art market.
—Carol Duncan

All men are intellectuals one could say: but not all men
have in society the function of intellectuals
—Antonio Gramsci.

1. Invisible Worlds

A
n estimated ten thousand hopeful artists entered graduate
level art programs within the United States in 1998.3 Assum-
ing a modest graduation rate of sixty percent the total num-
ber of academically trained professional artists holding Master of Fine
Arts degrees between the dates of that statistic and the time of this
writing must hover around twenty four thousand individuals. The MFA
was initiated under the GI Bill in 1944. Extrapolating from these past
four years we might therefore expect the total number of artists with
such degrees to top several million people.4 But this number would be
greatly amplified if we add to it individuals who received a non-degree
certificate in programs such as the Art Students League in New York
or the Philadelphia Academy of Art. The size of this pool of cultural
producers grows larger still if we include artists who only hold under-
graduate degrees and the figure virtually explodes beyond enumeration
if amateur and self-trained practitioners are included in the statistics.5
Clearly the size of the art producing masses in the US is nothing
less than astronomical and like other informal regions of social life may

This text is being made available for scholarly purposes only. You are free to copy
an distribute it, but never for commercial profit. Please attribute the author whenever quoted
or cited. All illustrations are included here solely for educational purposes.
This essay was first published in the book Visual Worlds, John R. Hall, Blake Stimson &
Lisa T. Becker editors, (NY & London: Routledge, 2005), Pages, 116 - 138.
 2 GREGORY SHOLETTE

prove impossible to gauge.6 What is unequivocal however is the way

this multitude greatly exceed the small coterie of artists visible within
the formalized region known as the art world. This is true even if we
focus only on those practitioners who have received graduate level
training in the past four years. Is it the case therefore that the majority
of creative activity in our post-industrial society remains invisible to
the institutions and discourses -the critics, art historians, collectors,
dealers, museums, curators and arts administrators-- which manage
and interpret contemporary culture? If we set aside the standard art
historical explanation that significant cultural production takes place
only within a narrow zone inhabited by visionaries, several additional
questions arise. First, just where are these other practitioners, these in-
formal artists and shadow creators and what impact might they have on
contemporary culture if any? Second, how would the hegemony of the
art world be affected if scholars began to discuss, classify and assess
the work of “Sunday” painters, amateur artists and hobbyists in terms
similar to those used for “professional” artists? It is worth noting that
specific examples of this work are far from invisible, we encounter
Panamanian bus with home-made them far more often than we do “serious” art. Rather what remains out
decorations 1986
of bounds is any consideration of this work as complex or compelling
or forming its own cultural category. This taboo extends especially to
the sort of irregular systems informal culture has evolved for circulat-
ing work outside the dominant art market. This paper will not only
address these issues, it will argue that the gravitational force of this in-
definite shadow realm is already having a definite affect on the elite art
world. If this essay seeks to open these questions up for examination
however, it does so not with the aim of expanding the hegemony of the
art world into this shadow zone. Instead the hope is to find within this
nether world what Walter Benjamin understood as the explosive power
of the inconspicuous and overlooked. 7
The term I choose to give to this vast and heterogeneous pool of
conspicuous yet unseen artistic activity is “Dark Matter.” It is a term
borrowed from the science of cosmology. Dark Matter is what cosmol-
ogists call the enormous quantity of non-reflective material predicted
by the Big Bang theory. Theoretically, this unseen matter makes up
most of the universe and provides an explanation for why the universe
will not continue to expand indefinitely. In a sense, cosmic Dark Mat-
ter serves as a sort of counter-weight to the powerful thrust of the Big
Bang explosion that initiated time and space eons ago. Yet despite
the omnipresence of DM so far its presence has only been inferred
indirectly by observing the motions of visible objects such as plan-
ets, comets, stars and nebula.8 Like its astronomical cousin, artistic
Dark Matter makes up most of the cultural universe in contemporary,
post-industrial society. Yet, while cosmic Dark Matter is actively being
sought by scientists, the size and composition of artistic Dark Mater
is of little interest to the men, women and institutions of the art world.
This apathy would be of little significance if it were not the case, or so
 DARK MATTER 3

I shall argue in this paper that the art world is highly dependent on its
Dark Matter much in the same way the physical universe depends on
the presence of cosmic Dark Matter.
By the term art world I mean the integrated, trans-national economy
of auction houses, dealers, collectors, international biennials and trade
publications that, together with curators, artists and critics, reproduce
the market, as well as the discourse that influences the appreciation and
demand for highly valuable artworks. I prefer this admittedly stingy,
even economically determined notion of art world to the often-cited
definitions coined by sociologist Howard S. Becker or philosopher Ar-
thur C. Danto respectively. Becker explains his term art worlds as:
“The network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their
joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the
kind of art work that art world is noted for.”9 And while I agree with
Becker that there are multiple, overlapping art worlds more or less
collaboratively organized he looses a great deal of analytical power by
ignoring the historical and class-based antagonism between different
conceptions of art that make up these “art worlds.” Dantoʼs coinage
of artworld on the other hand from his influential 1964 essay “The
Artworld” states that “in order to know one was in the presence of art,
one needed to know something of the recent history of art and be able
to participate in the defining theoretical discussions of the moment.”10
Danto mystify art practice. He does so when he emphasizes the accu-
mulation of specialized information a viewer must possess in order to
recognize what is and what is not art rather than the key role played by
the highly privileged art market in defining its products and services.
Ironically, by providing credibility to the hermetic expert culture sur-
rounding art he contradicts the claims of avant-garde artists who once
sought to democratize culture under the slogan, “art into life.”
Because I am interested in socially critical and activist art I per-
ceive the role of engaged artists, scholars and critics as an interven-
tionist one within an already antagonistic field. The initial focus of
this paper therefore is on the relationship that Dark Matter has to the
most visible of art worlds, more accurately understood as the elite art
world. The latter is dependent on the accumulated wealth of the eco-
nomically privileged and it has hegemony over the very idea of cul-
ture. But why if forms of cultural Dark Matter are already successfully
operating outside this hegemony should one bother intervening in the
art world at all? There is no easy answer to this question. In fact, to a
large degree many artists are self-consciously doing just that, turning
their collective backs on the formal art world and exploring alternative
and somewhat autonomous systems of exchange and production of art.
However there is a danger in thinking that one can achieve autonomy
in a cultural environment as rapacious as ours simply by ignoring the
obvious forms of institutional power. From my own experience in
New York in the 1980s, it did not take long for the art world to se-
lectively choose its political art “stars” during a similar wave of col-
4 GREGORY SHOLETTE

laborative and socially engaged art activism as that of today. Nor am I

proposing that one merely work “within” the art world. It is instead a
question of first knowing where the existing pitfalls of building alter-
native operating platforms lie and second of finding ways to leverage
both the actual and symbolic power of the elite art world for purposes
other than the aggrandizement of art collectors and large art institu-
tions. In other words, it is a matter of historical analysis coupled with
a strategic practice.11
At the very least the elite art world is a significant site of critical
intervention because of its near-virtual hegemony it wields over no-
tions of “serious” cultural value. Such values may be generated by a
relatively small group of individuals including collectors, dealers and
curators, but the influence on everything from public policy to the di-
rection of art education takes its queues from who and what the elite
art world draws into its inner circle of light.12 It is key to my argu-
ment however to understand that the line separating prominent artistic
value from all other artistic production is, in theory, an arbitrary one.
I will return to this important point in more detail in the section on
value. But first, what might the general lack of interest, even selective
contempt expressed by the art world towards this realm of informal
art suggest? Is it the case as I am suggesting that within Dark Mat-
ter there is a hidden, counter hegemonic potential? Considering that a
once socially dissident avant-garde now asserts itself as a marketing
prototype for hip fashion designers, advertising agencies and informa-
tion technocrats even the possibility of critical opposition is refreshing.
I hope to do more than intimate such an appearance while avoiding the
typically dispassionate forms of “academic insubordination.” Indeed,
this essay asks that we not only understand the subordinate ranking of
informal artists as equal to the “glut” of professionally trained artists
who remain in the shadow of the mainstream art world, but it insists
we take careful aim and overturn the way cultural values are gener-
ated. One weapon in this destructuration is the theoretical and practical
mobilization of Dark Matter. And this means doing more than chal-
lenging the exclusion of specific groups of people from the art world
which has been the dominant “oppositional” practice of the last ten to
fifteen years. Rather it means defining the possibility of an inclusive
and liberatory artistic practice that: 1. moves beyond the elitist dis-
course of the art world and its markets, and 2.constitutes a politically
radical challenge to the increasing privatization of the public sphere in
general. This paper will examine several specific “shadow” practices
in light of this agenda. First however there is one additional aspect of
the Dark Matter phenomena that is important to my argument: Dark
Matter it seems is getting brighter.
The demise of modernist formalism and the legitimation of ver-
nacular and “outsider” art are no doubt two reasons for the increasing
visibility of informal art. It is my argument however that these are
minor reasons and do not account fully for the shift in status we are
 DARK MATTER 5

seeing for some forms of Dark Matter. In-

stead, it is my contention that the visibility
of informal art is due in large part to the
increasing accessibility of inexpensive dig-
ital technologies that allow for the precise
replication, appropriation and virtually free
distributing of information and images.
However before expanding on this asser-
tion I want to explain why the increasing
visibility of non-professional art has not yet
brought about the undermining of the elitist
art world as promised. Let me start with a
definition of the way the elite art world pro-
duces artistic value in the first place.

2. Art Worlds CNN Headline News showing the

The art world is structured like a pyramid. Most practitioners are 27.4 Million Dollar record-breaking
massed at the base and a select group of artists occupy the apex near- price fetched for Brancusi’s sculp-
ture, Bird in Space at Christies, May
est the light. Superficially it is similar to other competitive fields that 4th, 2005
employ highly educated workforces. Specialized filters regulate up-
ward mobility. Those who reach its summit are well rewarded and
find themselves made extremely visible to those beneath. In this sense,
the art world is not greatly different from the culture of academia or
politics or other professions such as medicine, science, engineering or
law. However, if we look more closely at the structure we find strik-
ing differences. For one thing these other professions provide most of
the many individuals gathered at the base of their salary pyramid with
reasonable employment in the field. Not true of the art world. Unlike
these other highly educated professionals, artists typically work two or
three jobs, often in other areas than art, just to make a living wage. In
1990, as many as half of all artists earned less than $3000 from mak-
ing art. A quarter earned only $500 from art sales! 13 Not surprisingly
unemployment is chronic amongst artists with a “drop-out” rate far
than in other specialized professions. Remarkably, those who give up
making art actually tend to earn more money than those who continue
to practice it.14
All of which indicates what many of us artist knew already: that
artists are over-educated, overworked, and structurally unemployable.
Bu just what differentiates the practice of the small number of success-
ful artists from the many who “fail”?
According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner this phe-
nomena can be explained by applying what is known as the Tourna-
ment Model to the art world. It works like this: In many sporting com-
petitions just one athleteʼs performance will be recognized even if it is
a mere fraction of a second faster or better than that of other competi-
tors. This one individual wins “the prize” and many others loose de-
spite achieving outstanding athletic performances. Plattner insists that,
6 GREGORY SHOLETTE

“this model is relevant to the art market because it describes a situation

of workers receiving payments that donʼt seem related to their input
of effort.”15 In other words, given a group of similar looking aesthetic
products there will ultimately be just one that is considered truly sig-
nificant in art historical and therefore art collectible terms. However,
if this “winner takes all” formula offers an explanation for why nearly
identical objects or activities can wind up at radically different loca-
tions on the sloping sides of the art world pyramid, it does not provide
how this happens. In other words, how are often minute differences in
artistic practice evaluated by the art industry thus producing profound-
ly dissimilar values? Unlike in the Tournament Model, in the art world
there are no clear goal posts or records to compete against. Therefore
what criteria are used in the art world to judge winners?
This question becomes especially interesting when we think about
the pricing of art works. Unlike other commodities, the cost of an art
object can not be evaluated simply by using patterns of supply and
demand or other, traditional means of determining market value. Once
again Plattnerʼs work is useful as he applies the notion of Consump-
tion Capital to explain the paradoxical nature of the art commodity.
Consumption Capital is the accumulated knowledge one requires in
order to become an efficient consumer of a given commodity (Plattner,
14). One way to explain why artists with similar looking work are
valued differently, or why well-crafted and labor intensive work is of-
ten less costly than an informal installation made on the cheap, is to
consider the way accumulated consumer knowledge or Consumption
Capital is used for determining what art is collected and what is criti-
cally rewarded. A collector, who compiles a great deal of Consump-
tion Capital about an artist, not only increases the pleasure of purchas-
ing a high-end, luxury item such as a painting or installation, but this
informational accumulation also helps insure the long-term value of
an acquisition. Since every consumer inevitably wants to economize
the process of gathering knowledge about what they consume, most
collectors inevitably focus more attention on those artists frequently
referred to within the art world itself. This “insider knowledge” is cir-
culated amongst other collectors as well as critics and curators who are
know to already hold substantial amounts of Consumption Capital.
Curiously however, the art worldʼs dependency on Consumption
Capital also leads to a paradox in which the artist who lowers the price
of a given work looses value in the market because a drop in price
signals to collectors not a bargain but a loss of demand. Compare this
quandary to purchasing almost any other commodity such as groceries
or computers but also most luxury items such as high-priced cars or
even stocks. This paradox means that in the art world, a large dollop of
oily fat scooped into the corner of a white room, or a stitched together
clump of discarded dolls can command a higher price in the art market
than a skillfully rendered realistic painting or sculpted bronze. Note
that if we revisit for a moment Arthur Dantoʼs artworld in light of this
 DARK MATTER 7

Consumption Capital model we can see that his ideal artworlder , the
expert who knows when they are in the “presence” of art, has acquired
a different, more realistic countenance. Far more insightful is the work
of artist Hans Haacke whose installations offer a more precise defini-
tion of the art world.
For the purposes of my argument however, it is enough to assert
that establishing value in the most elite strata of the art industry has
very little to do with the quality of workmanship, the caliber of ma-
terials used, or the amount of labor time invested in making the art.
Instead it is dependent on such intangibles as the network of journals,
dealers and institutions most highly regarded by the wealthy collectors
of contemporary art. Returning to the question of Dark Matter,: in
what specific ways is the art world dependent on the realm of informal
art and does this have significant consequences? In order to answer
this question, let us imagine that cultural Dark Matter, including hob-
byists and home crafts-people as well as “failed” artists, simply ceases
to exist as of tomorrow morning? In other words, the shadowy base of
the art pyramid is disappeared. In order to offer a picture of why this
would be a problem for fine artists let me turn to an important study
by Columbia College of Chicago entitled “The Informal Arts: Finding
Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places.
“ The study asserts that the formal and informal arts,
“operate on a two-way continuum, upon which information,
personnel, financial benefits and other resources flow
back and forth....the informal arts create employment
opportunities for professionally working artists,
play a “research and development” role, and provide
knowledgeable and committed audiences for the formal arts
sector.”16
The report admits that, “despite its popularity, informal arts prac-
tice remains largely hidden from view.” And certainly what I call Dark
Matter does provide professionals in the arts with opportunities such as
teaching all those artists who feel they are not yet professional enough
or who simply want to learn more about a specific art technique. The
visual arts in particular offer a unique set of employment positions
ideally suited to people with some art skills already in place. These in-
clude the studio assistant and the art fabricator, two niche jobs that take
advantage of Duncanʼs “glut” of trained artists within the marketplace.
Another aspect of this co-dependency are those artists who make a liv-
ing photographing the work of other artists for portfolios and for grant
applications. And there are artists who take on administrative tasks
such as grant writing or curating. One can see why the Columbia study
uses the phrase “two-way continuum.” To look at this question of how
the formal arts are dependent on Dark Matter, consider the impact on
the availability and cost of art supplies if hobbyists, Sunday Painters
and “failed” artists stopped producing work. Should the demand for
 8 GREGORY SHOLETTE

art supplies suddenly become limited to the small group of success-

ful artists, inevitably the cost of canvas, pigments, and brushes would
skyrocket. 17
There are still other ways Dark Matter directly and positively af-
fects the art world and its institutions including subscriptions to art
journals and museum memberships. All of which leads the Columbia
College study to finally recommend that these shadow practices be
brought into the light and to be recognized as vital to the entire cultural
community. Among the studyʼs specific recommendations include a
call for further research into the informal arts as well as the suggestion
that informal arts receive direct assistance from cultural foundations
and public arts agencies. In light of this apparent symbiosis you may
ask where is the radical conflict between formal and informal art that I
have insisted upon? What became of the potential for sweeping change
that Dark Matter secretly harbors? To answer this, I turn offer a pas-
sage in the same Columbia College study. It reads as follows:
“It will be helpful to understand the “informal” in informal arts
as involving the “process” and the “context” of art-making, not, as a
threshold matter, the “product” of the activity, nor the characteristics
of the artistʼs training.”18
How to read this inelegant sentence? For one thing it appears that
the members of the research team had difficulty agree on some defini-
tions and key aspects of their findings. More importantly it asserts that
before informal art can hope to shed its pejorative associations embod-
Mike Kelley installation with found ied in words such as amateur, unskilled and dilettante, those who mold
stuffed toys cultural values will have to shift their emphasis away from a reverence
for collectible objects and brand names and towards
the far more ephemeral practices of creative activ-
ity itself. In light of I have written so far about the
way art world value is constructed the kind of shift
proposed here is nothing less than radical. It chal-
lenges the very heart of the modern art market and
its roots in capitalist society dating back at least to
the 18th century. With our attention now hopefully
drawn to the potential “oppositional” charge hidden
in Dark Matterʼs gravitational field, let me next of-
fer an explanation for how the formal and elitist art
world is already being contorted by this dimly seen
mass, this Dark Matter.

3. Slack Art and the Illumination of Dark Matter

In his book Avant-garde and After: Rethinking Art Now, the British
art historian Brandon Taylor adopts the term “Slack Art” to describe
the way certain younger artists use ephemeral materials, a marked dis-
interest in skilled craftsmanship and an extemporaneous approach to
organization and display in their installation works. Unlike the concep-
 DARK MATTER 9

tual artists of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the new
disinterestedness in artistic craft does not appear aimed
at either democratizing the practice of art or a rejection
of the art objectʼs status as a valuable commodity.19
Taylor describes the politics of this self-consciously
adolescent slack art style as an anarchy that percolates
but “never exceeds a slow boil.”
In other words, this new species of de-skilled artist
(to borrow a term from the late Ian Burn) may indeed
be aware that rejecting formalism once implied a politi-
cal act on the part of artists. Nevertheless today, at least
prior to the events of September Eleventh, there has been little desire Makeshift memorial post-911
to move oneʼs artistic focus beyond the self-absorbed and seemingly
autonomous art world itself. In this sense at least, Slack Art is a recent,
conservative reaction to the informally constructed but highly political
work of artists such as Martha Rosler (garage sale), or Mierle Lader-
man Ukeles, or more recently the art of Renee Green.20
To restate my earlier contention, if informality is one of the out-
standing features of contemporary art, this fact is due to the increas-
ing visibility of the creative activity I am referring to as Dark Matter.
Indeed, could we not just as accurately describe the direction that art-
ists including Mike Kelley, Julie Parsons, Jason Rhodes, Sarah Luckas
or Thomas Hirshhorn to name only some of the better exemplars of
“slack art” as an amateurization of high art practices? As if what is
taking place is some form of mimicry by which the art world responds
to the danger of Dark Matter by reflecting its appearance if not its
substance. In order to put a finer point on the arbitrariness of where
these lines are drawn I will turn to a specific form of visual culture that
appeared in the streets following the tragic events in New York City,
September Eleventh, 2001.
A month after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers I
visited the Firemanʼs Memorial on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
It is a limestone monument designed by H. Van Buren Magonigle in
1913 to honor those fire fighters killed in the line of duty and several
miles from ground zero. What I discovered was that the memorial had
become host to a spontaneous shrine for the victims of the September
11th. Like numerous other sites around the city, this shrine consisted
of flowers, candles, and childrenʼs drawings not unlike those that ap-
pear at the sites of automobile accidents along highways. Attached to
the side of the monument is a plastic covered photographic depicting
some of the New York City fire fighters lost when the towers collapsed.
For the purposes of this essay I want to call attention to a grouping of
soft toys bunched together like silent mourners, in the middle of this
informal memorial that included a frayed teddy bear and at least one
character from the television series Sesame Street. All of the toys had
become soiled and stained from a month of sitting out of doors. In
spite of, or perhaps because of this desolate condition they managed
10 GREGORY SHOLETTE

to reflect quite powerfully the theme of the Firemanʼs Memorial itself:

the veneration of civic responsibility even at the price of personal sac-
rifice. Now the unambiguous, signifying force of this informal display
is an important reminder that the art world holds no monopoly on ex-
pressiveness, even if this particular kind of statement is dismissed by
“serious” artists and critics as mere sentiment or kitsch. (I hope to deal
with the role played by sentiment in the informal arts in more detail in
a future essay.)
More importantly for my argument here however is to consider
exactly how this impromptu shrine with its polyester-filled homun-
culi differ from the stitched together stuffed-toys displayed by the well
know artist Mike Kelley in museums, and prestigious art galleries?
Specifically, why is there a volume of art writing about the way some-
one such as Kelley produces significant cultural and artistic value while
the display of toys by grieving neighbors is relegated to the status of,
at best, noteworthy social phenomena noted by journalists or anthro-
pologists? Now the aim of this paper is not to open up another tired
discussion about high versus low art or the use of Duchampian irony
by the neo avant-garde. To do so means uncritically accepting the same
narrow conditions set up in Dantoʼs version of artworld. My interest
in comparing these outwardly similar arrangements of commonplace
objects is to raise what I hope is a broader set of questions, including
why the elite art world requires the separation between “professional”
and amateur art and how precise is the partition?
What if there exists work by artists who have “professional” cre-
dentials, yet who extol not merely the look, but also the less visible
value structure of Dark Matter? Consider as an example of this self-
conscious informal art practice the project One Week Boutique. It was
produced in July of 2000 by a group of Chicago based artists that go
by the name Temporary Services . Like the work of Kelley and com-
pany, One Week Boutique or OWB was “rendered” in an informal,
amateur-like mode. But unlike such “Slack Art” it did not aim for an
ironic, artistic naïveté or sink into an intellectual melancholy or play
at radical politics by indulging in “luke- warm” anarchism. Rather
OWB self-consciously stepped outside the exchange economy of the
art market while seeking an audience indifferent to the self-reflexivity
of contemporary art.
One Week Boutique or OWB was promoted Via email, word of
mouth and photocopy flyers and consisted of donated clothing, neatly
hung within the small office space the group rented at that time in the
Chicago Loop area. It is important to note that the Loop is the cityʼs
office district. It is located far from Chicagoʼs art gallery scene. Dur-
ing the OWB exhibition, Temporary Services invited the public to
“come by, drink coffee, look at our booklets,21 try on clothes in our
dressing room and take whatever clothing they want.” OWB actually
wound-up lasting several months with a constant stream of visitors
many whom apparently came because they needed clothing more than
 DARK MATTER 11

craved “art.” This attention prompted Temporary Services to realize

several other versions of the project including one in the streets of San
Juan, Puerto Rico.
As Temporary Services member Brett Bloom explains, the intent
of OWB involved,
... a conscious decision to make One Week Boutique hard
for the art world to participate in- not so much to discourage
them, but not to cater to their expectations. OWB wasnʼt
an installation...we didnʼt steal the aesthetics from these
situations “found in the world”, but used them to create a
unique and interesting social situation. OWB was intended
to exist somewhere between a high-end boutique and a thrift
store. The clothing was all in good condition. ...We talked
about the project in terms of the aesthetics of expected
situations...[and] tried to articulate things in terms of applied
aesthetics of daily, lived experience. People up off the street
interacted immediately as they would in any clothing store.
The questions and strangeness of the situation came only
when the economics were discussed.22

It is crucial to my argument to understand that the reason OWB

does not fit comfortably within the current bias of the art world is NOT
because the work lacks “quality,” at least as this is defined by current
art world discourse. Nor is it because the project looks radically differ-
ent from what is currently being exhibited in established museums and
leading art galleries. Temporary Services project One Week Boutique
is less recognizable as “art” because it focuses on the process and or-
ganization of creative work itself rather than the production of objects.
It is my contention that such self-governing yet still experimental prac-
tices are most similar to the kind of creative self-validation typical of
much amateur and informal art but no longer conceivable within most
of the contemporary art world. Nor is Temporary Services unique. A
partial list of artists and organizations operating in the various shadow
zones of the art world include the on-line collaborations of RTMark
and Critical Art Ensemble; counter-globalization activists and urban
interventionists such as Reclaim the Streets (located internationally),
Ne Pas Plier (France), Las Agencias (Madrid & Boston), and The
Reverend Billy (NYC); the list also includes organizations that focus
on re-mapping space such as Ultra-Red, The Center for Land Use In-
terpretation (both LA), and REPOhistory (NYC); in addition there are
educational activists such as Jim Duignan and The Stockyard Institute,
as well as Video Machete (both Chicago); and finally there are groups
centered on alternative forms of exchange or institutional infrastruc-
ture including Collectivo Cambalache (London), and Dan Petermanʼs
Experimental Station (Chicago).23
 12 GREGORY SHOLETTE

All of these informal institutions challenge the uniquely authored

collectible art necessary for sustaining art world hegemony. Further-
more, these informal, politicized micro-institutions make work that
infiltrates high schools, flea markets, public squares, corporate Web
Sites, city streets, housing projects, and local political machines in
ways that do not set out to recover a specific meaning or use-value for
either art world discourse or private interests. To put this more suc-
cinctly: the work of informal, collective, politicized artists, includ-
ing Temporary Services , might be seen as structurally closer to the
anonymous, installations I witnessed at the Firemanʼs Monument than
to the very similar looking work made by any number of highly vis-
ible, contemporary artists recognized by the art world. In this sense, I
offer Dark Matter as an alternative narrative to the now conventional
genealogy of avant-garde and neo avant-garde art. At the center of this
counter-interpretation are the informal and often perverse social ex-
change systems Dark Matter spawns for circulating work.

4. Dark Matter as A Gift Economy

Today, one can hardly escape an encounter with informal art. It is a
vast and heterogeneous bounty of production radiating from homes
and offices, schools and streets, community centers and cyberspace,
especially in cyberspace. Furthermore, Dark Matter exhibits qualities
that are anathema to notions of serious or high art including fantasy,
nostalgia, and sentiment. This informal artistry ranges from the whim-
sical to the inspired, from the banal to the absurd and to the obscene.
And it is incontinent. Unlike the art worldʼs market Dark Matter does
http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/about. not impede its own production in order to create a fictional scarcity.
html?9986 Most important to my argument are those species of Dark Matter that
partake of what Georges Bataille described as a “principle of loss,” a
pathological economy of expenditure without precise utility. Bataille
borrows some of his perverse anti-capitalist concepts from the anthro-
pologist Marcel Mauss whose concept of gift giving among Native
American cultures is focused on strengthening social relations rather
than optimizing oneʼs position in a market. In many instances the gift
economy serves to level-off differences of power and wealth amongst
individuals in the same social group.24 An example of Dark Matter
built around the form of a gift economy is Elfwood.
Elfwood is an on-line art gallery that serves non-professional art-
ists who produce images and stories about dragons, witches, wizards,
and of course elves. An amateur artist named Thomas F. Abrahams-
son hosts the site. Abrahamsson lives in Sweden and makes a living
as a computer specialist. Elfwood claims to host some 14,968 artists.
(That is more than half the number of estimated MFA graduates in
the US since 1998!) Not unlike Temporary Services and the other
groups mentioned above, Elfwood is financed with enormous amounts
of in-kind labor as well as donated cash. Nor does it appear to provide
any direct income to Abrahamsson or any of the artists who use the
 DARK MATTER 13

site. Several additional features make Elfwood relevant to my discus-

sion of Dark Matter. For one thing it has several levels including one
called Lotherlorien that is named for an imaginary place described in
the writings of J.R.R Tolkien. Lotherlorien is governed by a stringent
policy whereby the only art accepted onto the site is made by amateurs
who make no money off their work. The rules for Lotherien state that
“you may not use Elfwood to promote yourself...” At the same time
Elfwood imposes few “aesthetic” filters on the art stating that “we are
not the ones who judge if art is good or bad.” The Elfwood mission
statement re-affirms this commitment to a judgement free exchange of
ideas and images stating:
“Showing pieces of art from the wonderful world of fantasy
to the general public. Letting all amateur fantasy artists
show their work for free, helping them to get a name and
reputation. Helping other artists with inspiration by giving a
chance to look at fellow artistsʼ art.”25

One lesson drawn from this is that the capacity of the internet
to host a large volume of images and information in an inter-active
format has made it possible to create a virtual art community that is
the size of a large museum. Because the cost and skills required for
capturing and processing images, sound and text from a wide variety
of sources continues to spiral downwards, the growth of Dark Matter
such as Elfwood is inevitable. One last example of Dark Matter offers
still another form of gift giving only made possible by this increasing
accessibility of digital technology.
The fan cut is made by and for the viewing pleasure of aficionados,
who share an interest, some might say an obsession, with a particular
film or television program. If the better known fan zine takes advan-
tage of the first generation of copying technology such as photocopiers
and facsimile machines the fan cut consists of a digitized copy of an
original media product re-edited to suit a particular group of fans. One
of the largest fan networks centers around George Lukasʼs Star Wars
series. Participants occupy hundreds of web sites and chat rooms as
well as meet in person whenever possible. Recently a fan cut known
as the Phantom Edit circulated within the Star Wars fan community as
a free download. The Phantom Edit is based on Lukasʼs Star War epi-
sode, the Phantom Menace. According to reports it eliminates twenty
minutes of the studio version of the film including most appearances
by one animated character uniformly disliked by Star Wars fans. Ac-
cording to one on-line star wars web site the new version has “fixed
a large number of things the fans are upset with in Episode One.”26
Significantly this unauthorized cut was made on a Macintosh G-4, 400
megahertz computer using Final Cut Pro, a professional quality pro-
gram for editing digital images that is nevertheless relatively inexpen-
sive and “user friendly.”
 14 GREGORY SHOLETTE

Temporary Services project Free For

All, one day art give away in Chicago,
February , 2000.

Selling art in an auction

Elfwood and the Phantom Edit indicate how digital technology can
amplify the social networking and gift economy typical of informal art
practice. In the second part of this paper these qualities will be con-
nected to certain activist and oppositional cultural practices including
the growing counter-globalization movement. I conclude with a sum-
mation of the key points outlined in this paper.

5. Summary
HIGH ART VALUES
The elite, high art market is stabilized by the routine production of
minor differences. These differences are based less on formal char-
acteristics of art works than on a systematic segregation of non-com-
modifiable practices such as those I have detailed in this paper. Seem-
ingly identical products are valued in radically different ways in a
process that, from the perspective of a non-participant, seems entirely
arbitrary. However, as I have attempted to show, there are ways to ac-
count for this activity if we understand the economy of the art world as
predicated on the concentration of knowledge and capital rather than a
wholesale expansion of the market for artistic goods and services.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE DARK MATTER

At the same time, it is clear that most of the people who graduate with
professional degrees in art as well as all of the people who identify
themselves as hobbyists or amateurs, represent a far larger and hetero-
 DARK MATTER 15

Temporary Services brochure of

Product Placements monthly public
event flyer, circa 1985

geneous mass of creative activity than that which appears within the
limited sphere known as the art world. It is this vast pool of largely in-
visible art making that I have provisionally called Dark Matter. Mean-
while, this nebulous region is getting brighter thanks in part to ever
more affordable information related technologies. And not only does
this increasing visibility permit informal art to be seen by art world
institutions, but it permits informal artists to better see one another.

ART IN THE SHADOWS

By contrast, the work of Temporary Services and the other groups
I have presented perceive not only the visual intensity of these “in-
formal,” amateur practices, but also the economic subversivness they

Political Art Documentation and

Distribution (PAD/D) and Prisoners’
Inventions by Angelo
16 GREGORY SHOLETTE

theoretically exemplify. And it is this engagement with how Dark Mat-

ter behaves rather than what it looks like that segregates such practices
from those of the elite, art world, no matter how similar they superfi-
cially appear. Meanwhile, this simultaneously forces the work ofTem-
porary Services, REPOhistory, RTmark and other non-conventional
groups into an alignment with the vast majority of cultural practices
unrecognized by the art world described here as Dark Matter. n

Gregory Sholette is a NYC based artist, writer and a co-founder of the artist col-
lectives REPOhistory and PAD/D. He is co-editor with Nato Thompson of The In-
terventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (MIT:
2004 & 2005); and Collectivism After Modernism co-edited with Blake Stimson
(University of Minnesota Press, 2006)

NOTES
1. Carol Duncan “Who Rules the Art World?”from the Aesthetics of Power:Essays
in Critical Art History. Cambridge University Press: 1983. 172 & 180.
2. Quoted by Carol Becker in her book “The Artist as Public Intellectual” from
Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art,
Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, US & UK: 2002, 14.
3. Andrew Hultkrans and Jef Burton, “Surf and Turf,” Artforum, Summer 1998,
106-9.
4. The MFA degree was initiated under the “Servicemenʼs Readjustment Act of
1944” better known as the GI bill. see MaLin Wilson-Powell, “After Theyʼve Seen
Paree,” Art Issues, No 64, Sept/Oct. 2000, 23-6.
5. According to the 1997 National Endowment for the Arts Survey entitled Public
Participation in the Arts some 31 million people paint, sculpt or draw pictures while
33 million make photographs. Compare this very statistic to the just under 2 mil-
lion who self identified themselves as “artist” for the 1997 U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics. All figures taken from the Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts
research brief “the Informal Arts: Finding Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural
Benefits in Unexpected Places.” Spring, 2002.
6. Compare the problem of defining the informal art world with that of economists
facing the informal or “shadow” economy. To some degree the questions raised can
be equally applied to culture: “The lack of consensus in formulating a unified theory
of the shadow economy, or even a precise definition of the components that comprise
it, suggests that important questions remain unanswered. To what extent does the
exclusion of shadow economic activity distort official estimates of macroeconomic
variables, including output, employment and inflation? What are the policy ramifica-
tions of these exclusions? What is the distribution of shadow economic behavior be-
tween unrecorded, but legal, and illicit activities? Can the overall size of the shadow
economy be estimated, and is it changing over time? Do countries at different stages
of development possess different types of hidden economies? What is the relationship
between regulatory (in)efficiency and the size of the shadow economy? “ from the
The Shadow Economy by Matthew H. Fleming, John Roman, And Graham Farrell
*http://www.britannica.com/magazine/article?content_id=171785&query=currency
See Benjaminʼs essay “Traumkitsch” in Volume 2 of his selected writings pub-
lished by Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1999.
An excellent piece by Vera Rubin called “Dark Matter in the Universe” can be
found on the Scientific American website at: http://www.sciam.com/specialissues/
0398cosmos/0398rubin.html
 DARK MATTER 17
Howard S. Becker from his introduction to Art Worlds. University of California
Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1982.
Aurthr C. Danto, “The Artworld” The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 61 (1964)
I have written elsewhere on these themes and humbly refer the reader to the fol-
lowing four texts: On the complications of collective practice see “ʼCounting On
Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice,” Afterim-
age 11/99. On the issue of institutional autonomy see my essay “Fidelity, Betrayal,
Autonomy: In and Beyond the Contemporary Art Museum” forthcoming from Third
Text, Summer 2002 as well as the essay “Some Call It Art: From Imaginary Au-
tonomy to Autonomous Collectivity” forthcoming from Social Text and also acces-
sible at: http://www.eipcp.net/diskurs/d07/text/sholette_en.html. On the issue of the
co-optation of 1980s activist art by the art world please see my essay “News from
Nowhere: Activist Art & After.” Third Text Winter #45, 1999 and in the book Kunst,
Kultur und Politik in den Großstädten der 90er Jahre, ed. by Jutta Held.
Not only do we find more and more museums displaying exhibitions of popular art
and commercial art including Armani fashions, star Wars props and even Hip Hop
culture, the latter dispossessed of its potentially abrasive, socio-economic context,
but according to a 1992 NEA report U.S. museum attendance figures topped 164
million in 1992. With close to half the population attending institutions specializing
in exhibiting culture the influence of the visual arts is practically unprecedented.
Nevertheless it is important to note that the national as well as even international art
market remains anchored in a handful of global cities including most prominently
London and New York. According to the economic anthropologist Stuart Plattner
“only elite-gallery exposure in New York creates art historical significance” Plattner
points out that over 80% of artists do not live in NYC, despite the fact that what he
terms the “gatekeeper galleries” are located there. Furthermore, 94% of the artists in
New York City are “not significant sellers of work in the high end, elite market. “ To
drive home the idea of hegemony: it seems clear that most of the thousands of art
world actors in New York have more in common with their St. Louis counterparts
than they do with the well-publicized, but extraordinarily few, art stars represented in
the national media.” Staurt Plattner, High Art Down Home: An Economic Ethnogra-
phy of a Local Art Market, University of Chicago Press: 1996, 3,8.
Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall, More Than Once In a Blue Moon: Multi-
ple Jobholdings by American Artists, Research Division Report #40, (Washington:
NEA, 2000), p. 97.
A study of 300 graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago were tracked
between 1963 to 1980 by researchers Mihaly Csikszentimihalyi, Jacob W. Getzels
and Stephen P. Kahn in Talent and Achievement (Chicago:1984, an unpublished
report), p. 44.
See Plattner:12, 13.
Columbia College Chicago Center for the Arts research brief “the Informal Arts:
Finding Cohesion, Capacity and other Cultural Benefits in Unexpected Places.”
Spring, 2002.
7. According to the Hobby Industry Associationʼs Nationwide Craft & Hobby Con-
sumer Usage and Purchase Study from 2000, 70 % of US households reports that at
least one member participates in a craft or hobby. Meanwhile, the total sales hobby
supplies was 23 Billion dollars in 2000. Inevitably manufacturers of high-end art
supplies depend on sales by less demanding hobbyists simply to remain in business.
See the Hobby Industry Association website at www.hobby.org.
8. Columbia College Study, Ibid.
9. Brandon Taylor, Avant-garde and After : Rethinking Art Now, H.N.Abrams, New
York:1995, 153.
10. For more on the connection between informal art practices and radical, femi-
nist theory I refer you to a short yet provocative essay that parallels some of my
18 GREGORY SHOLETTE
arguments here entitled, “Making Something from Nothing (Toward a Definition or
Womenʼs “Hobby Art”) by Lucy R. Lippard. The essay first appeared in Heresies,
no. 4, Winter 1978 and is reprinted in the book Get the Message by Lucy R. Lippard
. New York 1984. Dutton Books. 97, 104.
11. All quotes about OWB are taken from an October 2001 email sent to the author
by Brett Bloom, a founding member of Temporary Services. The booklets Bloom
makes reference to are self-published, zine-like brochures the group produces about
each of its public art projects. A selection of these photocopied booklets include the
documentation of a stealth installation involving artists books the group inserted into
shelves of the Harold Washington Library in Chicago. Another booklet describes a
one-day “give away” of donated art called Free For All. And still another brochure
detailed the results of the groupʼs Public Sculpture Opinion Poll in which citizens
were given the opportunity to respond “in the street” to an abstract public art work
sponsored by the city. (One copy of this booklet of mostly negative opinions was
sent to the cityʼs Public Art Department.) SEE: http://www.temporaryservices.org/
12. Ibid.
13. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings 1927-39, University of Minnesota Press, 1985. See also Bruce Barber and
Jeff Dayton-Johnson, “Marking the Limit: Re-Framing a Micro-Economy for the
Arts,” Parachute, no. 106, April, May, June 2002, 27, 39.
25. See the Elfwood web site at: http://elfwood.lysator.liu.se/
26. While the maker of Phantom Edit distributed his fan cut for free, others were
not so “gift” oriented. Bootleg copies of the Edit were soon being made and sold.
Meanwhile, Lucas has taken legal action against the distribution of the new edit and
formally requested ebay, the largest online auction site, to voluntarily not list the
Phantom Edit, an action that further underscores the potentially destabilizing power
of Dark Matter especially when it collides with the formal, cultural economy.