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"The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist." --Ananda K. Commaraswamy "How hard I find it is to see what is right in front of my eyes!" --Ludwig Wittgenstein "To be an artist is not a matter of making paintings or objects at all. What we are really dealing with is our state of consciousness and the shape of our perception. The act of art is a tool for extended consciousness..." --Robert Irwin "From the traditional point of view, there could hardly be found a stronger condemnation of the present social order than in the fact that the man at work is no longer doing what he likes best, but rather what he must, and in the general belief that a man can only be really happy when he gets away and is at play." --Ananda K. Commaraswamy |
About The Magazine And Our Website
In the early 1990s, Richard Whittaker set out to explore artists' experiences and reflections about their own art making. What came from that is a series of deeply thoughtful interviews with a wide range of artists, and a magazine called works & conversations.
Although humble in its subscription base, the magazine attracted a growing number of readers touched by a quality of content missing in other artworld publications. Institutional subscribers, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum, SFMOMA and the Kandinsky Library at the Pompidou Center in Paris to Harvard, Stanford and Columbia University, and from to RISD, The Art Institute of Chicago to CCA, SVA and SFAI, subscribed and archived all of the back issues in their libraries.
In early 2007, Richard met with two friends at a local Taqueria for an agenda-less conversation. That conversation radically turned a 15-year-old subscription model into a gift-economy effort.
A gift economy is an economic system in which goods and services are given freely, rather than traded. In a market economy, one can hoard one's goods without losing wealth; indeed, wealth is increased by hoarding -- although we generally call it "saving." In contrast, in a gift economy, wealth is decreased by hoarding, for it is the circulation of the gifts within the community that leads to increase -- increase in connections, increase in relationship strength.
That is to say, the magazine is now offered as a gift; in turn, the subscribers are invited to pay-forward a subscription to another reader. It is a bold experiment, and to this day, the magazine costs are covered entirely by unsolicited donations from grateful readers.
Our website is a project of CharityFocus, a fully volunteer-run effort that aims to empower gift-economy efforts. Carrying no advertising, making the entire texts of past interviews available on-line without charge, and running a monthly newsletter that reaches over 28 thousand readers, ours is a humble effort to "be the change we wish to see in the world."
This effort simply can't sustain itself without your active participation. To support us, you can spread the word about our 150+ original interviews on this site, make a donation to support our gift-economy experiment, contribute an interview with a social artist in your community, or contact us with any other ideas you have!
Thank you for your readership.
