Give It Away Now
by Nato Thompson
If history is written by the winners, then who needs art history? We all know most artists are losers. Forget artists for a second. Most people are losers. We are all losers in a game of a few winners pretending that they actually deserve to get where they are. I suspect miseducation has something to do with this grand problematic. In a world where everyone is a cultural producer, how can we still hold onto dominant canons and forms of critique? Well we don’t.
So what now? Lately, the world feels like that Mac computer ad where the Red Hot Chili Pepper guy who represents Mac is out there showing how stilted and annoying the corporate PC guy is. Everyone is the Red Hot Chili Pepper guy! We are all radically embracing our individual creative desires! Down with Coca-Cola! Down with cubicles! Down with the art market!
Top down narratives certainly play the hand of centralized power, but destabilized narratives also play the hand of destabilized forms of power. Miseducation, it seems, isn’t only a top down problem, but one that attaches itself laterally across narratives of resistance. Smuggled inside micro-economies of resistance, alternative education models grapple with the same forms of power acquisition that once were the domain of the big institutions.
So, how to miseducate? In that terrifying lacuna that is contemporary thinking we find a world of possibility and ambition. As centralized critical power collapses, capital rewards those whose critical bite remains largely ambiguous, from the hip, subjective, and strangely, a lot like the Red Hot Chili Pepper guy. Power craves outsiders whose energy still feeds the center. Miseducation must reverse the flow of power as it gravitates back toward the center.
Miseducation swirls around the production of alternative infrastructures and people. It flips the switch and lets the condition of being a loser exist as the starting point for an alternative history. It brings people together to think critically about who people are, how they can make unexpected connections and how they can not replicate the types of problems that they find so tedious and damaging. Miseducation educates from the periphery and is always aware of how this struggle shifts the balance of the educator at every turn.
Nato Thompson is paradoxically Chief Curator at Creative Time and an activist. His book Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Age of Cultural Production is due this summer by Autonomedia.
