FOREWORD 12
This is a tricky question in an era of late hypercapitalism
when the CEO of the world’s largest shadow
bank, Blackrock, declared that the ‘greatest stores
of wealth internationally today is contemporary
art…’ ⁴ This highlights a huge disparity in how we
value our cultural outputs in relation to the pool
of capital, while suffering its inaccessibility.
Step in Social Practice.
Here we find the radical creatives who have taken
this system of value and usurped it through their
focus on dematerialised practices that sit outside
the market economy. To support this is to join a
creative movement that offers an antidote to the
stranglehold of validation from market forces.
This ‘radical imagination’ as political act is defined
by Khasnabish and Haiven as ‘a driving force in
the dynamics of our political moment … not an
individual possession but a collective process …
that social movements depend on it to navigate
our rapidly changing times.’ ⁵
To delve into this meshwork is to begin to understand
what I see as the true form of the avantgarde
in today’s art world. Saint Simonian Olinde
Rodrigues first offered us the call to arms in 1825
to use the arts as a tool for socio-political reform
4 Robert Frank, ‘Art and real estate are the new gold, says Blackrock
CEO’ (last accessed 13th March 2020) https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/21/
art-and-real-estate-are-the-new-gold-says-blackrock-ceo.html
5 M. Haiven, and A. Khasnabish (2014) The Radical Imagination: Social
Movement Research in the Age of Austerity. Zed Books Ltd. London.