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Lippard -13

-  money-power

the present gallery structure is so strong that it's going to be very difficult to find a viable alternative to it. The artists that are trying to do non-object art are [[strikethrough]] trying [[/strikethrough]] introducing a drastic solution to the [[strikethrough]] situation [[/strikethrough]] problem of artists being so easily bought and sold, along with [[t]]heir art. Not, god knows, that the object artists want that any more than anyone else, but their work unfortunately lends itself to capitalist marketing devices. The people who buy a dematerialized work or art that they can't hang up or have in their garden are less interested in possession. They are patrons, rather than collectors. That's why museums seem to inapplicable to all of this, because museums are basically acquisitive. Even modern museums (and the modern museum) are interested in grabbing anc collecting and holding on to as much as they can.

UM: The one-world idea constradicts [[contradicts]] any sort of central establishment. You have so many centers that are made by living artists rather than one chauvinistic art enterprise. [[strikethrough]] That's a beautiful anti-art idea.[[/strikethrough]]

LL: [[strikethrough]] It's not anti-art. [[/strikethrough]] The Art Worker's Coalition, for instance, ins't [[isn't]] anti-art but pro artist and anti artist-exploitation, which makes it primarily anti-art world, or art world establishment as opposed to art community. I was kind of politicized by a trip to Argentina in the fall of '68, when I talked to artists who felt that it was immoral to make their art in the society that exists there. It becomes clear that today, everything, even art exists in a political situation. I don't mean that the art itself has to be seen in political terms or look political, but the way artists handle their art, where they make it, the chances they get to make it, how they are going to let it out, and to whom- it's all part of a life-style and of a political situation. It becomes a matter of artists' power, of artists achieving enough solidarity so that they are not at the mercy of [[strikethrough]] museums and  [[?]] [[/strikethrough]] a society which doesn't understand what they are doing. I guess that's where the other culture, or alternative information network comes in. A two-party system, a choice of ways to live without dropping out.

December 1969