Discussion about Collaborative Art in TheBroth.com

[redbeana]

I am new to this broth.com and I just had some questions that I thought I would bring up after looking at [url] http://www.thebroth.com/art31810.html#c35802 [/url]

I am just trying to get some discussion/friendly debate going. What do you guys think

P.S. let's please be courteous in here, we don't have to be mean or negative to get our opinions across.

So this is my comment that I originally left in the comments section but was advised to post here instead.

Is this art ? Those of you who have come in to the piece and erased everything and made the canvas white, why ? Why not just start your own new piece ? Art is supposed to be creative and constructive, those of you who came in here and erased, aren't you being destructive ? Are you really collaborating if you are just erasing ? Are you still a collaborator if you put something in the piece but you don't see it in the end product ?

And to the original creator of this image, do you care if people come in erase everything, or are you just enjoying the process and don't care about the end product ?

[devilsadvocate]

Thanks for moving the discussion here, redbeana!

As I said before, thebroth.com is supposedly about "collaborative art" & I realize we can do our drawings in a "Locked" room if we don't want people to destroy the art we've made. What I'm interested in understanding is: if we're engaged in collaborating with each other on art outside of the locked areas, that is with the public, shouldn't we have some kind of rules about the finished project? Shouldn't there be a goal in mind in collaborating? If you don't like rules, could we at least agree that collaborative work ought to be made in a spirit of positivity? Jumpingbuffalo said, "Everyone is open to doing what they want there." This seems to defeat the purpose of collaboration entirely because if you're just doing your own thing then you aren't really collaborating.

[xreko]

Yes, TheBroth is about collaborating, but what JB meant by "Everyone is open to doing what they want there." She meant specifically the graffiti room. The /graffiti room is "the public room" for everyone. This is different from "public rooms" with owners where people can join in.
In /graffiti, you (or anyone) can basically do anything that's allowed in the terms of service at thebroth. In a user-created room, the owner generally decides what goes on in it.

Here are some examples of collaboration from back in the day

[devilsadvocate]

Thanks, xreko. So there's no "collaboration" going on in the public rooms with "owners" who clearly retain authorial control over what is or isn't "art."

But in the "graffiti" or "public" room you say you can "do anything that's allowed in the terms of service at thebroth." This still avoids my question of whether or not TheBroth.com is truly "collaborative art." If you can do anything you want in the graffiti room, including destroying previous drawings, then how is that "collaborating?"

What you're really describing is a bunch of different "authors" expressing themselves by literally drawing over another artist's work. It reminds me of children in a sandbox when one child creates something & another kid steps in it & messes it up. This is not collaboration, it's every man/woman for themselves. Even in street graffiti their are rules that govern dissing another's tag.

[devilsadvocate]

"This expanded field of relational practices currently goes by a variety of names: socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based, or collaborative art. These practices are less interested in a relational aesthetic than in the creative rewards of collaborative activity—whether in the form of working with preexisting communities or establishing one’s own interdisciplinary network...This mixed panorama of socially collaborative work arguably forms what avant-garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life. For Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (1998), the defining text of relational practice, “art is the place that produces a specific sociability,” precisely because “it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV.” For Grant H. Kester, in another key text, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (2004), art is uniquely placed to counter a world in which “we are reduced to an atomized pseudocommunity of consumers, our sensibilities dulled by spectacle and repetition.” For these and other supporters of socially engaged art, the creative energy of participatory practices rehumanizes—or at least de-alienates—a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalism. But the urgency of this political task has led to a situation in which such collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art."
From Claire Bishop's essay in Feb. 2006 Artforum.