[NetBehaviour] Is it art?

[dave miller]

Last saturday I stood outside the Camden Centre, where the ‘Europe
against Austerity’ conference took place. I handed out my hand made
booklets, my “Instructional Guides for Difficult Times”, to anyone who
would take one. I didn’t dare try to charge, I just wanted people to
take them. I thrust them into their hands. It felt good when people
took my “art”.

But I’m not really sure where the art is in what I’m doing. Have I
actually stopped doing art? Am I now a political activist? Or
worryingly, because I don’t belong to any political group or
organisation, have I become like that man who used to walk up and down
Oxford Street each day, predicting the end of the world? Or the man
who used to hand out leaflets warning us all not to eat eggs?

As the financial crisis has got increasingly urgent and desperate, I
have been sucked into it. I feel a moral duty to understand the
subject, and to do something about it, to fight back. The best way,
the natural way, for me is through my creative skills – to inform and
explain and empower. In this way I’ve become obsessed with making
critical commentary on the financial and political crisis.

For me, this is both political action and artistic expression, but I’m
not sure if it’s art I’m making.

What do you think?