Sometimes I build the writing in these posts around the images I have, but then someone’s comment gets me to say my central idea more directly than I ever got to in the original post. Thanks for making it a dialogue!

And then reading further on (can you tell I was excited about this article?) we read the snippet that closely brings home your point about art as a gift to the audience “aboriginal societies in which the person of consequence — the man or woman who is deemed worthy of adulation, respect and emulation — is not the one who accumulates the most goods but the one who disperses them”…

And it’s also interesting how in his current book he’s trying to rewrite our idea of history by debunking the myth that Ben Franklin was a self-made man (his discoveries were based on “pre-existing knowledge and scientific collaboration”).

And I’m now going to share this article with a poetry friend because he explains “why he devoted so much of his time and energy to something as nonremunerative as poetry”.

Thank you for the brain food this morning! And I hope no readers take my comments as a crib sheet – read the article!
-Lori

Edisa’s work is just one small example of what I see as an important movement in art in the last two decades, a movement to see art as a gift from artist to audience. Lewis Hyde has been the most important theorist behind the movement, and the Burning Man festival the most important event. The art establishment represented by museums and curators and critics has almost entirely missed this movement, more taken with the shiny objects of bubble-economy artists like Koons and Hirst.