Between the Ferme du Buisson and the galerie Continua...

I've been thinking more and more about Nassim Nicolas Taleb's ideas concerning "Anti-fragility" in terms of how this concept relates to artists and creation. Taleb considers artists to be extremely robust in the sense that they usually don't care about fashion, markets etc but rather follow their vision in the process of creation.

In thinking about this, I happened to notice that some members of this community decided to define this location as being :

...between the Ferme du Buisson and the galerie Continua...

...While this might be true, it seems to me that in defining this location in terms of an established state-funded cultural institution and a multi-national art gallery, that there might be quite a bit of implications in this definition. My question is : in these days of financial turmoil, doesn't defining location according to the established Art market sort of defeat the purpose of what could be a "black swan" heavy zone of "wild randomness"?

...Just a question, of course...

Burning Man, social dynamics and "Wild Randomness"

A couple of days ago, the Wall Street Journal published an article about this year's "Burning Man" event, a "happening" organized every year in the desert of Nevada. The original event took place over thirty years ago on a small beach in San Francisco. It grew so big that the event had to be relocated to the more remote location but was still the kind of DYI, spontaneous event that took place outside of all considerations of commerce and marketing. It would seem that this has radically changed over the years. To quote one person in the article :

People have less and less time to be radically self-reliant,

Having followed this type of social experiment several times, through the rise and fall of MP3.com and also through interaction with Wikipedia (and also indirectly, following Kildall and Stein's "Wikipedia Art" project.), it seems apparent to me that some sort of process takes place to metamorphose social structures which are evolving freely, along organic structural lines into social structures which become hierarchical, forcibly controlled from above by a set of social conventions which purport to be based on the idea of free expression, but which are manipulated by interior and external forces into artificially controlled structures. The emphasis on commerce and marketing is a principal symptom, but is not (in my mind) the primary cause.

I was rereading Nassim Taleb's essay in Art de Vamy's "Evolutionary Diet" today and was taken with Taleb's idea of "Wild randomness", but he derives from his work with Benoît Mandelbrot. It seems to me that this concept can be developped as a means of explaining this type of process...