Benjamin Lotan

How do we as artists interface with the institutions outside of the art world proper?
Where is the public? And where are they looking?

Perhaps companies like Walmart, like Tumblr, Like Pornhub.com, like General Mills, apple, CBS, and Time Warner all have a significant stake in organizing resources, negotiating policies, and shaping our minds and the minds of others. They have an extreme ability to organize matter and circumvent institutional protocols to facilitate the flow of capital, or individual employees, or food, cars, or data. They have reached a certain scale which allows them to bypass simple or traditional models of artistic or cultural production and tap into a different kind of thing altogether.

Question, again, what kind of things are we working on, and what are our tactics?
What material, constructive, or theoretical capacities do we employ? And what methodologies? Clearly we know how to read, and to sit or stand inside of cool and dark air-conditioned rooms. We understand how to sculpt, how to paint, how to write, to perform, to teach, to talk and to listen.

Sponsored by GSA and UCSD Vis Arts