Residency 1, Day 11: 'When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it.' - Maya Deren

So, at last I figured out how to set up Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). Three works are for sale here: https://opensea.io/collection/mocksim. I posted the following on ABC Artists' Books Cooperative's Slack: 'Just trying it out - if not a rich person in a few weeks, I have got a few plots.' Have I though? Another fabulous discovery today is depicted below. It fell off a sign. It's a sign in its own right. 'It is what is says on the tin!'. I cleaned it up with warm water and other solvent, held it, looked at it and took some photos. As Michelangelo put it “The sculpture is already complete... before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.”

I was having a chat with composer Stace Constantinou when muso John O'Shea turned up and a good conversation resulted which included references to The Butter Road and/or Famine Roads. I found myself listening better.

I am angry with myself for having missed a London Group Working Committee meeting this afternoon. There is no excuse: I was so absorbed in things and did not notice the calendar notification. Part of me imagines the London Group could find a new prominence for itself as a containing entity for a variety of qualities associated with the word 'art' today. The so called elitism which is not elitism at all but familiarity with a particular body of knowledge and experience can be defended. The cultural knowledge many have about Gaelic football or soccer or driving on motorways or vintage clothes is not seen as elitism but is exclusive, and what's wrong with that? The tensions and varying degrees of snobbery noticeable between different art scenes in London, and generally I suppose, are funny to observe. There's a certain careerist route: you get your BA or MA at a UAL place or the RCA, or Goldsmiths, ignore the fact that much of what goes on in these institutions is highly neoliberalised now, and to an extent are dining out on past glories; only hang out with that usually privately moneyed gang afterwards, take drugs with the right people, network exclusively with them, don't touch certain bodies or institutions or galleries with a bargepole, want a show at, for the sake of argument, Matt's and similar but not anywhere else. Then there are aesthetes and hero artists operating as if the 1950s never ended, the new generation of art activists, the digital/web/technology art and sci-art crowds, and so on: there isn't time here to list all the subsections. The fact is that even the much derided Sunday painters and also the craftspeople and hobbyists are part of YOUR art world.