Continuous Project Altered Quarterly | December 2024
All flourishing
is mutual.
“I lament my own immersion in an economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts gifts to commodities in a currency that enables us to purchase things we don’t really need while destroying what we do. …another model [is possible], one based on reciprocity rather than accumulation, where wealth and security come from the quality of our relationships, not from the illusion of our self-sufficiency. … All flourishing is mutual.”
This passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry encapsulates a tension at work within Continuous Project and within the practices of many of my clients and colleagues. I struggle daily with the notions of art as commodity and artist as entrepreneur, and based on what I observe in my daily work, I know I’m not alone. Even while acknowledging the reality and necessity of the art market and the valuable role it plays in sustaining artists and the businesses, institutions, and organizations that present, protect, interpret, buy and sell art, and support artists, I also see how the commodification of art changes its very nature, and how it adversely impacts artists and art workers.
Like Kimmerer, I lament my own immersion—and complicity—in an art economy that grinds what is beautiful and unique into dollars, converts artifacts of personal exploration and spiritual reflection to commodities. I long for release from the bind of consumer capitalism and an alternative to the grind of neoliberal economic policies and systems that hold us in that bind. This longing is fuel for the work of Continuous Project, where the guiding vision is to transform how we perceive, acknowledge, value, and compensate cultural labor. And this transformation is the art world analog to the natural world that Kimmerer is focusing on in her petite yet infinite new book, based on her 2022 essay. It’s a transformation from the individual to the collective; the transactional to the relational; from scarcity to abundance.
People come to Continuous Project seeking sustainability for their life’s work and advice for navigating a calling that has become a career, mostly not by choice but out of necessity in a world that is increasingly hostile to generative creativity and human flourishing. Artists listen to their calling and follow their path to be truth tellers, beauty makers, culture bearers, and world builders, not to become capitalists. Yet because of the economic structures our society has made and the policies our governments have established to shepherd us through them, if artists want their work to be public-facing at scale, they have no choice but to also be business owners. And that leads to complicity in the manufacturing of scarcity.
“What if scarcity is just a cultural construct, a fiction that fences us off from a better way of life?... It is manufactured scarcity that I cannot accept. In order for capitalist market economies to function, there must be scarcity where it does not actually exist.” Kimmerer is writing here about natural ecosystems and the manufactured scarcity of natural resources like energy, water, and food, but she could just as easily be speaking about any product or service, including art and the functions of cultural enterprises. Her perspective maps neatly onto the art world, where the psychology of scarcity drives the art “ecosystem.” But competition for scarce resources—collectors’ and donors’ dollars, gallery representation, museum exhibitions—is harming art and artists, and by extension, culture. Competition for scarce resources alienates people from one another and is ultimately unsustainable.
Ecologists have established that evolution is not simply about survival of the fittest but also about adaptation and mutuality. It’s true that natural scarcity happens, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t abundance elsewhere. “‘If there’s not enough of what you want, then want something else.’ This specialization to avoid scarcity has led to a dazzling array of biodiversity, each species avoiding competition by being different. Diversity in ways of being is the antidote.” When we engage deeply with our work, we can find out how we may contribute to the diversity that makes not only ecosystems but also the metaphorical ecosystem of the art world endure. When we can attend to and elevate diversity in ways of being, we inspire each other to grow and thrive, we cultivate reciprocity, resilience, and mutual flourishing. This is the antidote to scarcity.
The shared and pervasive difficulty of sustaining both individual creative lives and the larger economies of the art world is slowly bringing people back together in powerful ways. Many of my clients and colleagues have expressed a need for a sense of belonging this year, hearing a calling toward connection, and harboring a desire to be supported and to support others in kind, a desire for reciprocity. I feel this, too. It seems to me that, the larger the art world grows, and the more money that circulates through it, and the more commercial and corporate exposure contemporary art gains, the more isolated we become. But if art is our common bond, and if art inherently brings us closer together, we have a significant role to play as the world grows increasingly factioned.
Relationships are everything and always have been, but there is a dimension to connection in this intensely divisive and increasingly scary time in our collective history that is even deeper, more affirming, more life-giving for its rarity. I think this is why Kimmerer’s expanded essay has been on the New York Times best seller list from the moment it was released in November: disconnection and alienation have become devastatingly common, and we crave a sense of belonging and relationship—to ourselves, our purpose, each other, our communities, our work; to culture and to nature.
Kimmerer writes, “I cherish the notion of the gift economy, that we might back away from the grinding system, which reduces everything to commodity and leaves most of us bereft of what we really want: a sense of belonging and relationship and purpose and beauty, which can never be commoditized. I want to be part of an ecosystem in which wealth means having enough to share, and where the gratification of meeting your family needs is not poisoned by destroying that possibility for someone else. I want to live in a society where the currency of exchange is gratitude and the infinitely renewable resource of kindness, which multiplies every time it is shared rather than depreciating with use.”
Me, too.
We are facing a time of even more extreme diminution in public care, atop a half century of the systematic deconstruction of public support for human and more-than-human life, our planet, our economy, and our culture. Now more than ever we must cultivate our self-care and our connections to community; without these, fear and competition will drive us further apart. We must take care of ourselves authentically and thoroughly, and we must take care of each other with respect and compassion. We must all take a look at what we’re doing and what we’re wanting and ask ourselves, what are we giving? How are we contributing to the diversity in ways of being that makes not only natural ecosystems but also the art world ecosystem thrive? What can we do—together—to support our mutual flourishing?
One last quote from The Serviceberry that’s inspiring my world view on the winter solstice, as one year passes and another begins, written not by Robin Wall Kimmerer but Charles Eisenstein in his book Sacred Economics: “In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources. The next stage of human economy will parallel what we are beginning to understand about nature. It will call forth the gifts of each of us; it will emphasize cooperation over competition; it will encourage circulation over hoarding; and it will be cyclical, not linear. Money may not disappear any time soon, but it will serve a diminished role even as it takes on more of the properties of the gift. The economy will shrink, and our lives will grow.”
