Conversations

"Creativity isn't the monopoly of artists, this is the crucial fact I've come to realize, and this broader concept of creativity is my concept of art." - Joseph Beuys In the early 1990s, Richard Whittaker set out to explore artists' experiences and reflections about their own art making. What came from that is a series of deeply thoughtful intervie... ws with a wide range of artists, and a magazine called works & conversations. Although modest in its subscription base, the magazine has attracted a growing number of readers touched by a quality of content missing in other artworld publications. Institutional subscribers, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMOMA and the Kandinsky Library at the Pompidou Center in Paris to Harvard, Stanford and Columbia Universities and RISD, The Art Institute of Chicago, CCA, SVA and SFAI, subscribe and have archived all of the back issues in their libraries. In early 2007, Richard met with two friends at a local Taqueria for an agenda free conversation. That conversation resulted in the radical change of turning a 15-year-old subscription model into a gift-economy experiment. A gift economy is an economic system in which goods and services are given as a gift, rather than traded for money. In a market economy, hording and wealth go together while, in contrast, in a gift economy, giving and wealth go together. The circulation of gifts increases relationships, connections and a spirit of reciprocity. Now the magazine is offered as a gift; in turn, the subscribers are invited to pay-forward a subscription to another reader. It's an experiment in generosity, and to this day, the magazine costs are covered entirely by unsolicited donations from grateful readers and supporters. Our website is a project of ServiceSpace , a fully volunteer-run effort that aims to empower gift-economy efforts. Carrying no advertising, making the entire texts of past interviews available on-line without charge, and running a bi-monthly newsletter that reaches thousands of people, ours is a humble ...Read More