creativity and social interaction should be encouraged without thought of profit.

all parties are capable of creative equity. nothing is limited/scarce/precious.

design embraces categories and unique skill sets, but eliminates divisions between them.

skills and knowledge, like commodities, are meant for redistribution amongst all parties.

as facilitators and cultural producers, our main commodity is social interaction and its perpetuation/stimulation.

never leave an interaction not having learned something, or questioned previously held beliefs.

encourage generosity over exclusivity.

there is never a reason to stop or end because there is no failure.

the design center is a flowchart where everything circles back to the beginning.

there is no shame in desperation or frustration or disagreement. these are natural in the social sphere.

there will be no progress without ingenuity. if there is no budget, how can it be done for free? if there is no space, how can one be created? if there is no know, how can parties listen harder until there is an answer?

there are no requirements to traffic in traditional definitions of received concepts, including, but not limited to: space, performance, media, need, or collaboration

ideas and production are more important than hierarchy, and action determines infrastructure, not labels.

the end of over-stimulation is boredom.

Leshinsky includes an article originally published in Artforum from 2006, Claire Bishop’s “The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents”. It’s appropriate that this article is itself a kind of dialogue, not only between the various art practices outlined by Bishop, but between her and another critic, Grant Kester. Their discussion of the relative importance of aesthetics, ethics, and engagement in art mirrors in many ways the conversation surrounding the BDC’s work.

But things are not so easy here, Bishop’s call for a more precise set of criteria to evaluate the success or failure of service-based art is more nuanced than the simple opposition that a brief skim of her article would appear to indicate. She is calling for even more dialogue between “aesthetes”, and “activists”, a dialogue that would only enrich and broaden the traditional disciplinary boundaries of art and practice:

“The former, at their most extreme, would condemn us to a world of irrelevant painting and sculpture, while the latter have a tendency to self-marginalize to the point of inadvertantly reinforcing art’s autonomy … Is there a ground on which the two sides can meet?”

I was reminded again of this tension between aesthetics and engagement, by the rediscovery of another classic piece of art criticsism: Rosalind Krauss’ essay on The Grid (pdf). Just as Bishop is using an survey of service-based art practices to look for more aesthetic criteria, Krauss is using an examination of that most abstract and formal devices, the grid, to bring the broader context of psychology, optics, and social history into a conversation about aesthetics.