I’m being interviewed for the local rag this afternoon on the Free Art Friday movement which I know a little about, but I’m interested in the history of the concept..

My google fu is not great this morning, doubly hampered by a knackered keyboard and mouse pad

Does anyone know of any periods in the history of art or of any great artists from the 20th century or earlier that were known for giving away art to the public?

Equally.. What the blinking nora should I be typing into google to find this sort of info?

Banksie innit!

yeah.. I’m looking at pre-banksy really.. I’m pretty genned up on the graffiti movement.. 🙂

And we wonder why newspapers are so full of rubbish, even the ‘experts’ the incompetent journalists interview dont have clue 😀

I’m not an expert.. thankfully, and I don’t think for a minute that the old biddies in the local arts group are expecting one either!

I’m being interviewed as an artist.. but I’m trying to make the interview a bit more interesting..
‘I likes fridays, and I likes making art and I likes giving stuff away’ is gonna make a pretty dull read no?

Although I suspect that I may be an expert by the end of the week 🙂

You try finding an expert on free economies and the importance of art outside of the market economy on damp afternoon amidst the somnambulistic torpor of a dreary seaside town

It’ll be a 70s thing. There was a rebellion against the gallery/dealer/patron system in the 70s and its where a lot of art forms that are for the ‘public’ rather than for the ‘patron’ come from. So its where a lot of the art forms that take art out of the frame / off of the plinth and out of the gallery come from

Public Art (as opposed to civic statury), Community Art, Land Art, Live Art and Performance Art and so on they are all movements and practices about artists address the broader public directly rather than the private buyer.

Public collecting funds – buying art for public display and ownership all pretty much stem from that era too. The various Arts Councils around the UK began their support for visual art (the were all about opera and theatre originally) by buying it for the public rather than funding its creation.

I’m not sure thats the same as an artist make in a piece of work and giving it away to someone rather than everyone has any really history though. Graffiti art has the same aims public art at its heart maybe but without giving consideration to invitation or permission from the ‘public’.

Marcel Duchamp made having a pee a work of art (also having a drink from a furry cup).

In the UK have a google of the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation City Sculpture Project – it was the progenitor of the public art movement in the UK. Unlike today where the public sector commissions work the City Sculpture Project commissioned works then loaned them to cities and gave them a chance to decide to keep them. A lot of it was a car crash really partly because the artists didn’t all really know how to address that kind of work and some just made big version of their gallery work. But some pieces had a really interesting life – Nicholas Munro’s King Kong

Thankyou.. More useful than STATO’s sage words 🙂

It was the subject for my degree thesis 🙂

Mail art?

Mail art?

Oh god thats a blast from the past. I wonder if anyone still does it. And Fax Art. Self publishing on the internet kind of makes that sort of thing redundant.

Great interview.. really happy with the piece 🙂

‘town’s artists to leave paintings and sculptures as ‘gifts’ to the public.. concerned residents can contact crimestoppers on 0800000000 if they suspect people of littering offences’

I was struggling to remember a name when this thread first came up…. It was Adam Neate – finds junk in the street – takes it home, paints it and puts it back where he found it so people will take it away. Even has / had gallery exhibitions where you could just pick up the work and walk out with it.

I first came across him when I curated and exhibition of skateboard graphics. He’d done a project with Clown skates where he made 100 artworks on decks and then just put them in with the distributed stock so anyone buying a deck could end up with one his paintings by accident. – It made tracking one down to exhibit a bit of a challenge

Niiice 🙂

That’s exactly the sort of thing
I did manage to get Mydogsighs to donate a couple of pieces for the first event at the end of May

I’ve done work with D*Frost down in your neck of the woods. Stencil Graffiti on old fridge doors that we found in the street – very long time ago though.

cave paintings, aboriginal art would be the source, no?

disclaimer, i know nothing! 😆

Sometimes if I’m bored on a train journey, I’ll make an origami crane out of my train ticket and leave if for someone to find.

Does that count? 😆