Saturday morning I read that Bank of America will be charging its customers $5 a month to use their debit card, starting next year. And as about 700 protesters were arrested for occupying Wall Street Saturday, I was sitting in on this fantastic little Living as Form workshop called Economics as Form.

Economics as Form was led by Amy Whitaker, an artist with an MBA. Her main point was that Beuys was right, everyone is an artist, and that it logically follows that everyone is also a businessperson. We all operate creatively in a social space, and we are all bound socially by material needs, around which we all transact. As artists and businesspeople, we can all operate creatively within an economy to positive effect.

This talk was hosted by the OurGoods team, one of many projects at Living As Form that create an alternate economy. I look forward to ...

There’s a funny conversation going on at Real Clear Arts right now about what constitutes radical art.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti - Futurist Manifesto, published in Italian newspaper Gazzetta dell'Emilia, 1909

I’ll sidestep the nitty gritty because it’s terribly predictable. Judith Dobrzynski finds an artist asserting that he is radical because he’s making landscape paintings, and this unleashes a small flurry of art clichés ranging from the notion that avant garde art shocks because it’s really truly original, to the basic impossibility of learning art in school.

I know, it’s boring. But can anything be squeezed out of this ancient argument? Can it get us anywhere new? Just because this argument is old… does it necessarily follow that we shouldn’t have it?

I think arguments continue until everyone has reached a satisfied state, and there is no satisfaction here yet. The search for ...