[With around 5+ subgroups each tacking different issues concerning the labor of artist, Art & Labor (http://artsandlabor NULL.org/) is perhaps the only arts working group within NYGCA that is still holding regular meetings. If you would like to join, they meet every Tuesday 7pm @ 60 Wall St, with the exception of the last week in every month when they meet on Wednesdays]

ARTS & LABOR IN THE AGE OF OCCUPATION
http://www.readperiodicals.com/201203/2635902591.html (http://www NULL.readperiodicals NULL.com/201203/2635902591 NULL.html)

Publication: Afterimage (http://www NULL.vsw NULL.org/ai/)
Author: Schwendener, Martha
Date published: March 1, 2012

In the fifteen years I have been writing and publishing art criticism, I’ve seen a few shifts in the art world. There was the rise of participatory art and social practice, and a version of these that flourished at biennials labeled “Relational Aesthetics,” which a fellow critic, Howard Halle, recently called “conceptualism for oligarchs.”1 There was the rise of interest in performance and calls to end object-making – although an artist friend recently asked, “Does that mean we’re going to leave it to Nike, Sony, and Walmart to put all the objects into the world?”

And then came the worldwide Occupy movement, influenced by the Arab Spring, the European Summer, and, in the fall of 2011, Occupy Wall Street (OWS). I was not involved in earlier iterations of OWS, like Bloombergville, an encampment near City Hall in New York that started in the summer of 2011. I became involved with OWS shortly after September 17, when the occupation started, and some of the questions it raised, naturally, involved how it might relate to the present and future of art. Continue reading →