Art Production Environment

Artists need to be able to professionally construct and present their art, yet they usually lack access to adequate faculties. Furthermore artists tend to work in isolation, which is self-limiting and can be depressing. By combining efforts socially into a production environment, artists can share the ideas that are expressed in their individual artworks on a much greater scale by producing versions of their art themselves in large quantities in a factory-like production environment.

Supporting economic rationale: Capital Structure

Why use a wiki to organize a group?

What is a wiki?

Wikis contain highly-structured, succinctly-presented information that is continually and collaboratively updated. Built from collaborative contributions, wiki information lives not in the thoughts of individuals, but in the shared space of the group's knowledge, or the community of knowledge. True to Science, successfully integrated information produces knowledge that in turn creates a need to gather more information. Wiki information may be developed as an individual effort, but its inclusion into a wiki structure gives it holistic, and hence universal, meaning.

Wikipedia vs. Wikiversity

Wikiversity is in a respect bigger than the Wikipedia, as big as the Wikipedia is. The Wikiversity embraces the full meaning of the wiki, knowledge construction and information development, whereas the Wikipedia only reports existing information in the context of past events and previous research. The Wikipedia does unintentionally construct new views of human phenomena at higher levels in ways that show the power of wikis, but one has to be exceedingly careful inserting information into the Wikipedia as "original research" is forbidden.

This wiki

In the case of this wiki, whose purpose is to map the development of a work environment, its writing should not be an individual effort, as the model for the group is the historical and advanced: it is constructed from the natural societal model, the village, and it is constructed using the most recent research material available from humanist and constructivist social scientists.

Like the powerful wikis, the Wikipedia and the Wikiversity, this model, the art production environment, can easily be described in two tenses: what it is, and what it is not. And like these wikis, the "is not" list is actually as important, if not more important, than the list describing what it is.

What the production environment is maybe difficult to conceive for many people, and for those who cannot naturally conceive of what a socially-based work environment is, then this type of work environment is not for them; they will find it impossible to contribute collaboratively, and hence may attempt alter the a work group's meaning to exploit it for personal or familial benefit. For these people, their difficulty in conceiving of the the basic idea may actually be beneficial for both them and the group, as attempts at exploitation invariably lead to conflict. And, in this case, a exploitative individual cannot possibly expect to win a conflict, as the power of a democratic group is collaborative.

Describing the art production environment

Here called in short the "environment," it is based in Torrington, Connecticut and intends to allow for the mass production of individual art pieces at a low cost with a high level of built-in integrity. It is mutualist in that it is purely supportive, but it is not e-mutualist, as the Internet is used here only provides ways to organize the environment's information layer, and document the environment's progress; significant interaction is in person.

What art production environment is

• Social
• Productive work space, as in a factory
• Crafts mode, as in the pre-industrial guild period
• Low-cost, high-quality product that is business-friendly and encourages art investment
• Hand of the artist is in every phase of production and distribution
• Whoever shows up because they want to
• Every participant finds the place and role that makes them feel confident
• Frequent interactive events to garner ideas to develop products and their journeys to market, and to promote the rise of novices to expert level
• An economic model that is finalized collaboratively at the milestone of financial success, with the goal of gratitude for those who contributed to development phases
• Close range between experts (artists) and novices (apprentices) in pay, a maximal factor of 2X
• The magical "fairy dust" that high art provides to bring a region to the level of cultural Renaissance

What the art production environment is not

In preliminary development discussions there has been a tendency to attempt categorize the environment using common existing definitions, such as collective, cooperative, project, or even company.

What the environment is not:

Collective

• Collectives are a communist idea, and communism has for the most part failed, and success, of course, is the goal of the environment.
• Communist successes have been for the most part been social community models such as this one, and have been based on social work values, and have consistently been exploited by communist hierarchies.

Cooperative

• Cooperatives typically succeed in food production, such as farmers' coops, or as buying cooperatives, such as food coops.
• Like communist collectives, cooperatives have largely vanished.

Company

• Present economic conditions will in no way allow a company to form, as it will be taxed to death long before it can make a profit.
• Experience in the art market shows that nearly everyone has their hand out, that only artists and patrons are actually contributing, and that most artists live, or have lived, in poverty. Present economic conditions in combination with the existing artistic economic model can only contribute frustration, and hence failure.

Project

• A project by definition is a single cycle event; sort of like making a movie. At then end of a movie production cycle, there is party; everyone celebrates unemployment.
• The goal of the environment is permanence, and desire for others to form similar production environments, hopefully with a better "cash roll" than art can provide

Competition

• Collaboration is not about tearing people down allowing for the formation of an elite top layer; it is entire about mutual support.
• The environment only uses the traditional supportive mutualist model found in tradition communities, such as socially healthy communities.
• Economic competition is said to be necessary to provide product quality, but the reverse has been true especially in globalism: product quality has decayed steadily over the past few decades.
• Re-invention as it is practiced in capital cities is likewise rejected, as it works on a model of annexing and/or destroying the investments of life-long residents, thereby preventing the natural development of societal morality.

Commune or cult

• Communes may resemble collectives but tend to isolation; the production environment hopes to create similar initiatives for more typical factory products.
• Cults likewise isolate themselves and hence cannot influence nor embrace the surrounding economy. They are often relgious-based, and therefore may be biased against parts of the surrounding culture that the production environment hopes to embrace.

Emotional criteria for the art product

For art to be successful and have investment value that is not simply an anomaly due to the whims of curators or some other kind of fluke, it has to be genuine. It has to have emotional value, which means that it has to convey some deep-felt experience or value of the artist that is received by the viewing art-lover. Art can sometimes be successful simply it has high aesthetic content, and somehow triggers an emotional response, but that is unusual.

Emotional development

As the collector evaluates art with respect to emotional criteria, it would be the group's responsibility to try to help artists develop their production concepts with high emotional value to assure their success. There is no reason the collaboration process could not get emotional value from one member, and then pure aesthetic value from another, and then construction integrity from a third as part of the creation process, and then pure painting talent from another, combining all the talents of the group into groups of related pieces that could actually be described as "super art." Most important to the collector, and hopefully curator, is the emotional value, however, and ideas surrounding this criteria should initiate a production project.

Development of emotional criteria as a model for other environments

Since this production model is as much meant to encourage all kinds of socially-based production environments, the refinement of emotional criteria in product design and production as an extension of social responsibility should be well-enough developed to be transported to unrelated areas of production, such as manufacturing. The relationships between aesthetics, functionality, collaboration, and emotional value are psychologically-based, and hence socially relevant. Given the choice between products that have these kinds of emotional value, and products that simply do the job for the money, buyers will tend to the product that they can emotionally connect to, specifically trust. Behind a trusted product are people who buyers trust; a product that is pleasing gives buyers a good feeling; a relationship between the buyer and the manufacturer assures a buyer that problems can be resolved and that suggestions will be taken seriously. These are all examples of emotionally-based responsibility and open communication that is at the core of fine art.