Under the scorching midsummer sun in Kassel, Arief Yudi, the founder of rural West Java-based Jatiwangi Art Factory, stood with an Indonesian cigarette in his hand and asked me pensively, “What is the currency of poor people?” Around him, a dozen youngsters from the collective, all wearing straw hats, were busy setting up booths to sell coffee beans from Indonesia and preparing a sound performance using face bricks.

In recent years, the socioeconomic condition of the contemporary art field has been scrupulously examined, so much so that there is a growing consensus that material conditions (co-)determine the reproduction of the art system, be it funding systems, labor relations, or cultural political agendas. Much ink has been spilt on the ideological “critical virtue” of art,[1] while engagements with different forms of economies beyond the rather parochial art market are proliferating, though long overdue. This article looks closely at examples of artists probing into and prototyping economies at documenta fifteen, driven by the perennial question: how is value produced and accounted for? And more pragmatically, how to claim value and inject liquidity into a system where there is none?

Currencies Looking for Liquidity

Jatiwangi Art Factory has brought the local clay roof tile factory in rural West Java back to life, successfully keeping it afloat for more than twenty years. JAF established a practice of making music with clay tiles and has implemented it in school curricula. With local and international support, the collective has opened a terracotta museum and art biennale and hosted spectacular live performances for enraptured audiences. The local governor is considered part of the JAF ecosystem, and indeed, JAF invited him, along with more than forty colleagues and collaborators, to Kassel. To save on costs, since many of them did not receive a per diem, they brought ingredients and cooked for everyone. Cigarette supply was, of course, vital. Economy was on everyone’s mind, since the mega-exhibition did not necessarily translate into economic opportunities for the group—most of the budget needed to be spent on production and travel.

 

Case Study: Dayra

The Palestinian collective The Question of Funding has been working at the intersection of art and economy for some time and seized the opportunity to present Dayra,[2] a community economic model and currency, at documenta fifteen. Meaning “circle” and “circling” in Arabic, Dayra enables individuals, local businesses, and organizations that lack financial resources in fiat currency to exchange material, physical, or intellectual resources denominated in Dayra. An exemplary circulation looks as follows: a graphic designer rents a space from a cultural institution to give a workshop. The cultural institution depends on rent to pay salaries. A farmer takes part in the workshop to enhance their communication abilities but doesn’t have money to pay for it. A Dayra is minted by the cultural institution and validated by the graphic designer, and another is minted by the graphic designer and validated by the farmer. The crediting and debiting will be done using blockchain technology, provided that both the participating parties involved verify the transaction. Like many blockchain-based social initiatives,[3] Dayra reconnects the on-chain with the off-chain world.

Thus, Dayra creates a monetary supply in places where there is no liquidity. Like other complementary community currency proposals, the focal point is to juxtapose the economy of abundance with that of scarcity, the richness of social relations, skills, and offers with that of marketization and commodification. There is evidence that, by restricting the purchasing power of money locally, community currency encourages local exchange and circulation of economic and social activities, thereby boosting local economies and solidarity, while incentivizing ecological practices of production and consumption.[4] The issuance is not dictated by a central bank or a similar authority, but protocolized peer-to-peer.

When the system starts working, it will need to be adjusted to situations arising from concrete use cases. How can the equivalency-formation process work beyond the mere measurement unit of time?[5] Should there be a demurrage mechanism to promote circulation[6]? Does the complementary community currency have the ambition to be used to secure essential goods and services, or does it overly rely on consumer transactions[7]? Translocal operations, so central to art’s current business model, remain a challenge to translate into exchange mechanism design, given there are few good examples of exchanging local currencies so that they scale up to become a viable ecology of currencies, despite theoretical proposals.[8]

In any case, Dayra presents a viable alternative currency design that creates full circles of exchange and enfolds adjacent sectors and forms of value production in its circles. It also creates a tangible and meaningful way for artistic and cultural production to spill over into other sectors such as food distribution. As is the case with other alternative currencies, the decisive test will be whether it achieves wide adoption.

 

Case Study: BeeCoin

BeeCoin,[9] also referred to as BeeDAO, is a project borne out of a collaboration between KW Berlin and ZK/U. As with the Dayra project, what was presented at documenta was primarily an artistic (re-)rendering of the larger work which exists on the blockchain. The BeeCoin project works together with Hiveeyes, who develop monitoring toolkits for beekeepers. BeeCoin is conceptualized as a way of linking the real-time monitoring data of beehives to tokens on the blockchain to attach economic value to the well-being of bees. However, throughout the process of development, BeeCoin has been moving further away from the initial concept of a currency and autonomous economic system, focusing more on the aspect of the BeeDAO as an organizational tool for environmentalist activism (which currently is maintained by human, hence hDAO). Consequently, the BeeCoin as an economic token has all but disappeared from the project’s public self-presentations. Instead, there exist so-called beeholder NFTs that act as membership tokens which allow the owners to make proposals and vote on decisions made in the BeeDAO. In addition to human members, beehives hooked up to Hiveeyes monitoring systems can become part of the DAO, with their beekeepers acting as representatives. The activities of BeeDAO are financed by the revenue generated from selling NFT memberships which thus functionally become one-time donations collected in “the Pot.” The Pot funds proposals such as improving local ecosystems for bees, expanding to include more beekeeping territories, and system overhauls.

This funding model results in a liquidity problem running through the system and limits its scalability beyond those willing to take active part in the DAO by purchasing a NFT. This reliance on goodwill seed money limits the pool of funding but hedges the project against potential charges of an “economization of nature”—as well as against the dangers of volatile speculation that comes with tokens becoming assets on a secondary market. Surely, there is much greenwashing in the financial sector. But can there be ethical money beyond the shallow pockets of our own savings? The regenerative fund designed by Curve Labs[10] is more daring in this regard. They propose a scheme that tokenizes the natural capital of Posidonia, a kind of Neptune grass occupying and stabilizing the seabed in the southeast of France. One GeoNFT is assigned to each Posidonia meadow and reef, and sales of the fractured tokens go into the Regen Fund to be used for regeneration and maintenance. Hence, a token’s value increasing means better ecological conditions (but not the other way around). On top of this, there is an ecological state token which is used as collateral in a reserve, a Decentralized Exchange Trading System that manages a complementary community currency. Since the locals are stewards of the material ecosystem, they have a stake in its wellbeing and are hence rewarded with the community currency, which can be used for daily exchange in local goods and services. The double-loop structure connecting both the tech and financial layers, with its decentralized governance, with the material and social strata makes this design one of the most interesting and potentially viable proposals in the Green DAO space. 

One may wonder why the scheme relies solely on private pledges through sales, rather than tapping into governmental funding sources that back the fund when the ecosystem is in better condition, especially in a field where public and private interests align. This may be counterintuitive for the green-minded crypto anarcho-libertarians. For those who are not, there is equally something counterintuitive: in the interest of raising capital for and incentivizing practices of natural protection, some forms of “quantification,” or for lack of a better word, self-justification might be necessary. This is a challenge art practitioners will have to find ways to face, which I will come back to later.

 

 

documenta fifteen: lumbung Coin, Harvest from Abdul Dube, 2021.
Source: https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung-currency/.

 

 

Case Study: lumbung Coin

 

Compared to Dayra and Beecoin, the aborted lumbung coin was patently more artistic and poetic.[11] Its point of departure is the issuance of other values, not harmonized to price and not even to a single denomination. Originally, it was going to add an economic layer to each of the groups at documenta fifteen that they could define for themselves. Each group, if they so chose, could organize this economy in their own manner, and disperse a kind of token and include anyone they wished in their “economy,” whether audience, volunteers, or the wider economy beyond documenta.

This could prefigure a radical future, in the philosophical musings of Jonathan Beller, one of the group’s associates, in which “we receive liquidity over the same medium we use to communicate; we receive it from our trust-worthy network of peers, who will share stake in our activities as we share stake in theirs.”[12] The techno-economic-poetics clearly draws on the abundance of affects and the generosity of gifts. Yet, without steadfast uptake beyond the art circle, not to mention real assets backing the currency or viable routes of circulation, what remains of the coin for now would be its souvenir quality.

Not all the art world’s problems can be undone by currency designs. Most of the time, it takes grounded practices of feminist and solidarity-based economies. Various artistic initiatives participating in documenta fifteen can be read as enacting such diverse economies, by working on maintaining and replenishing natural and cultural commons, by learning from cooperative governance structures, and by engaging in solidarity-based distribution mechanisms. These are propositions for “taking back the economy”[13] in situated local contexts.

Yet, as much as it is galvanizing, vigilance is also in good order. Studies have shown how “social surplus,” or community resilience that traditionally provides mutual aid in underprivileged parts of the world, can be co-opted by financiers issuing micro-debt and using the very communal network for policing and shaming those failing to repay the debt.[14] It is not a pessimistic outcry, but a reality check to confirm that these community prototypes essentially function “off the radar” from the predatory logic of capitalism.

Here is a change of perspective: Why do there appear to be moral obligations in the art world that impede one from thinking big and systemically? In coming up with community currency designs, “small is beautiful” may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The last thing anyone should want is for a funder to look at “grassroot resilience,” i.e., the communal safety net, and say, “Well, you are doing just fine, and we don’t need to give you funding anymore.” This may yet be forthcoming in the Global North funding ecosystem, but if we are to draw a balance of demands from neoliberal NGO funding in the Global South, it is already a bitter pill some art initiatives must swallow.[15]

Nathan Schneider, one of the foremost advocates for cooperative movements and platform cooperativism, sees a need for cooperatives to be entrepreneurial, that is, to identify needs where they arise and be good at responding to them.[16] The counter-intuitive is not too bad to start with. As Common Coin proponents Tiziana Terranova and Andrea Fumagalli argue, financialization has a potential to “reveal how money can function as an intervention and that it can also account for different ways of organizing the production and distribution of wealth.”[17] In the art world, this could translate into how we could create conditions for ethical and sustainable funding streams.

From “Another World Is Possible” to “Another Speculation Is Possible”

 

The political core of documenta fifteen, relative to its aesthetic throwback to anti-globalization movements, is the subject of another debate.[18] However much we may lament it, it appears that “another world is possible” has lost traction. More recently, “another speculation is possible” has emerged as a potential demand that captures the imagination of the disenfranchised today. Philosopher Michel Feher reminds us that we are all “investees” in financial capitalism, where our endeavors are rated as assets in a scale of creditworthiness to be invested in, more than our labor being priced as commodities. This leads to “investee activism” as an avenue for counter-speculative resistance organizing that appropriates the credit dispensation of financial capitalism.[19] The Debt Collective is a prime example, where a “union” of debtors leverage their collective bargaining power to cancel debt.

We can formulate our demand emphatically as how to socialize finance, instead of financializing the social. What can we do in the arts beyond “reproducing the means of production” of the same art world over and over again? Can we project the fictionality of art, so infrastructural to its own existence,[20] onto the real—i.e., real money, real policies, real social institutions?

 

Case Study: Inland

The documenta fifteen lumbung member Inland is a case in point. Inland, an art and agriculture initiative based in Spain, advises the EU on the use of art for rural development policies while facilitating shepherds’ and nomadic peoples’ movements. It is also reconstructing an abandoned village for collective artistic and agricultural production. Over the years, they have set up a Shepherds School and a multidisciplinary syllabus shedding light on the relationship between art, farmers’ know-how and agro-ecology. To highlight how their practice aligns with larger public and private interests, my colleague Vienne Chan and I have designed a Social and Environmental Investment Plan to create sustainable funding for the Shepherds School.

Inland, Vienne Chan, and Mi You, Social and Environmental Investment Plan, 2022.

In this scheme, a financial mechanism is proposed in which the private sector’s investments are given a public mission direction through Inland’s projects and are paid back by the government upon successful development of these missions. Using Shepherds School as a case study, we are developing a holistic approach based on measuring capabilities in which the private sector, the government, and Shepherds School are given defined roles beyond monetary contribution.

Some are right to notice that this investment plan is a creative development based on the cogent analysis of Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) made by Emily Rosamond.[21] While there has been much literature critiquing impact investment, Rosamond is visionary in pointing out the insinuation of impact investment in the art world, whereby the “investor” is a speculative one, i.e., professionals who participate in the discourse-making and partake in the symbolic value chain of the artworld. Rather than taking the “financialized social” as a starting point to see how the geometry is reproduced in the artworld—which is largely given—our interest is how to make realizable alliances of social actors beyond the art world.

The Inland scheme thus differs both from the speculative reading of SIBs and conventional financing that relies purely on monetary supply for results. We make a case for capability development to examine how private investment can reinforce governmental efforts beyond financial contributions. Capability is a term in human development studies in which what individuals are capable of is a combination of skill sets and social conditions, suggesting that social competencies are important for individual flourishing.[22] Therefore, successful rural development occurs through training people to live and work in rural areas, as much as the conditions for revenue and access to health care in rural areas. Previous policies that attempted to increase a specific area’s population have met with little success. There has been the suggestion that policies should be oriented towards capability building, so that people feel they can live wherever they want, an approach that also respects people’s freedom of movement.[23]

Shepherds School contributes to increasing capabilities through education in modern sustainable farming techniques, understanding of ecological landscape and its management, motivation and resilience through learning techniques, and fostering a community interested in rural areas. With its pre-existing network, the private sector can be in a better position than the government to develop a supportive network and access to markets for sustainable goods. For example, Babaà, a clothing company and current investor in Shepherds School, procures wool from the School, providing a path to both ecologically and financially sustainable businesses and the diversification of employment in rural regions.

The proposed design acts as a subtle form of investee activism by attending to the missing social dimension in the debtor-creditor relation of SIBs. It aims to leverage the network from the private sector beyond a pure logic of money and channel governmental funding from non-art sectors for long-term art and cultural practice. Investors whose rationale is beyond mere investment returns can and should be engaged in the process of increasing the capabilities of the community in question. In the larger scheme of things, this may prepare the ground for a more mission-oriented and strategic embedding of artists in society: artists can act as brokers between private and public interests and create communication channels where these interests do align.

 

Measurement of Impact

The metrics are the most contentious element in impact investment, through which social returns are financialized.[24] Shepherds School is conducting sessions with its alumni using Narrative Practice, a counseling technique that places individuals as experts in their lives, and through conversations help people identify their skills and examine issues within the social structures of dominant discourse.[25] Through Narrative Practice, there will be a better understanding of how students’ capabilities have changed with the program and what obstacles remain, identifying conditions to be improved through intervention from the government or the private sector. From these sessions, the School will develop a methodology for the uniqueness of rural development and its challenges, which can be used to measure the new financing program’s success.

No doubt, to cement the elusive power of art as impact is itself a form of reductionism. But just because governmental agencies readily cast creative workers as de facto social workers tackling social issues[26] doesn’t mean we art and cultural workers should shy away from articulating the social relevance of what we do in nuanced ways. If anything, we should preemptively answer these questions before they are demanded of us in the future, given the already strained cultural funding.

To be sure, quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but a tool to be used for left-wing politics. The tools found in social network analysis, agent-based modeling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models are “necessary cognitive mediators” for understanding complex systems of the modern economy and subsequently acting upon them.[27] Similarly, for investee activism, the reign of credit is not a curse to reverse but a challenge to meet: what ultimately matters is who gets credit, and for what.

Funding for Art 2.0

 

In order to develop a sustainable funding system beyond individual efforts, we need to go upstream. Some funders have started reflecting on their stakes in the ecosystem and strive to create more enabling environments.[28] One recent proposal, the commons.art ecosystem (2022-2023)[29] co-initiated by Binna Choi and Aiwen Yin, ventures a system-wide reconfiguration to instigate a sustainable economy for socially engaged art. It does so through the lens of “maintenance” as a means of (re)production, which entails maintaining an artistic idea, a project, or a piece of artwork by diverse groups of participants over time. This differs from the prevalent productionist model (producing new artworks in each commission) and the preservation model (preserving existing artworks in its initial condition and context), both historically self-sufficient within the enclosed art economies. Socially engaged art presents an inherent paradox: while any social impact requires long-term engagement with a broader societal sector, socially engaged art cannot sustain itself beyond the show business logic predicated on international presentation, biennale-cum-tourism, and productionism. In other words, the inadequacy of socially engaged art is more of a systemic deficit than an individual responsibility. Commons.art strives to include upstream players to design policies for the art and cultural sector. To start, can public funding from education, health, and urban/rural development be shared with long-term art and cultural projects?

 

Aiwen Yin and commons.art, analytical diagrams of art funding ecosystems, 2022.

 

Diagram 1 shows a linear chain of funding distribution (usually downward) and of significance (partially upward), typical of socially engaged art projects in the contemporary art world. In contrast, Diagram 2 sketches other possible loops of exchange, funding dispersion, and accountability, if the art funding ecosystem is diversified. This may help us, as researcher and consultant on cultural policy Jordi Baltà Portolés points out, to move beyond the narrow alleyways of the instrumentalism of art and simple explanations about the power of art, and instead recognize “plural, multidirectional intersections of diverse intensity, and the potential of each actor to interpret different factors, and their confluences, in their own terms.”[30]

Let us not shy away from talking about the economy for real. Once we do, the field of social practices in the art cedes to be merely “informal,” and we can aspire for such art practices to be sustainable. For that, we need to instill new forms of economies, one speculation at a time.

 

The author would like to thank Vienne Chan, Aiwen Yin, Binna Choi, and Andreas Niegl for their contributions to the text.

Mi You is a professor of Art and Economies at the University of Kassel/documenta Institute. Her academic interests are in the social value of art, new and historical materialism, as well as the history, political theory, and philosophy of Eurasia. She works with the Silk Road as a figuration for re-imagining networks and has curated exhibitions and programs at the Asian Culture Center in Gwangju, South Korea; Ulaanbaatar International Media Art Festival, Mongolia (2016); Zarya CCA, Vladivostok (2018); and the research/curatorial platform “Unmapping Eurasia” (2018-) with Binna Choi. Her recent exhibitions have focused on socializing technologies and “actionable speculations,” such as Sci-(no)-Fi at the Academy of the Arts of the World, Cologne (2019) and Lonely Vectors at the Singapore Art Museum (2022). She was one of the curators of the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020-2021). On the social front, she serves as Chair of the Committee on Media Arts and Technology for the transnational NGO Common Action Forum.