Access to Tools

Nina Sarnelle
Spring 2021

As Gods_

The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was a magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often called the “bible of counterculture,” the publication advocated for self-sufficiency, back-to-the-landism, alternative education models and holism, centering around the slogan “access to tools.” The Whole Sell is an interactive art publication that reframes WEC as a kind of e-commerce site, confronting contradictions inherent to the Catalog that were present all along, but further crystallized as its logic (and founder) became central to the development of Silicon Valley over the last 50 years. Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs once famously referred to the publication as “google before google.” In 2018, Anna Wiener reflected on the Catalog’s relationship to tech culture in the New Yorker:

Stewart Brand doesn’t have much to do with the current startup ecosystem, but younger entrepreneurs regularly reach out to him, perhaps in search of a sense of continuity or simply out of curiosity about the industry’s origins. The spirit of the catalogue—its irreverence toward institutions, its emphasis on autodidacticism, and its sunny view of computers as tools for personal liberation––appeals to a younger generation of technologists. Brand himself has become a regional icon, a sort of human Venn diagram, celebrated for bridging the hippie counterculture and the nascent personal-computer industry.

Today, the Whole Earth Catalog invites both adoration and criticism. It’s a beloved hipster coffee-table book, with iconic graphic design and a dreamy kind of charm, but I cannot flip through the pages without a certain degree of cynicism. Did Stewart Brand really believe he could instigate cultural revolution with a catalog? Does anyone see anything wrong here? To anyone thinking critically about concepts like “ethical consumption,” “corporate responsibility,” and “sustainable growth,” the idea of tackling planetary problems by connecting people to more rugged boots seems laughable, at best. But the most epic fail of all Whole Earth clippings has to be the opening line from it’s statement of purpose, on the inside cover. “We are as gods and might as well get used to it.” I had to go back a few times to make sure I read that right. Meant to empower the self-made homesteader to “conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, and shape his own environment,” this statement blasts through the WEC’s typical hyperbole toward a much more unsettling hubris. Sure, some things just don’t age well; but I believe this miscalculation is not a matter of semantics. It is precisely this kind of unbridled, adventurous—even arrogant—spirit, threaded throughout the Catalog, that has inspired the technocrats we know today.

And the limits of WEC’s rhetorical imagination are also drawn up right in this opening paragraph, in its ardent belief—above all else—in “personal power,” in the “power of the individual.” Here we can identify the seeds of a neoliberal revolution, which, in the decades that followed WEC, would cast the individual as the root of all success and failure, choice and responsibility. This ideology would develop in the West through Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the dismantling of the welfare state, the war on crime/drugs, big tech monopolies, racist state violence—and it helps to explain some of the deep inequalities of our time.

Soft Organic Sell_

The Whole Earth Catalog was particularly ahead of its time in the way that it integrated commerce with essays on ecology, community, resilience—that is, with cultural and intellectual content. According to a Garage Magazine piece, WEC’s creators positioned themselves as “not only idealists but as curators and tastemakers.” Information on where to purchase hand tools might live comfortably next to the “Mind of the Dolphin.” The Catalog’s densely-packed pages instructed readers not only on what to buy, but what to know about, what to care about, and what to want.

Products were not directly sold in the Whole Earth Catalog but rather ‘reviewed,’ and always in a first-person, conversational tone. Today I’m reminded of this approach whenever I’m listening to a podcast and the host pauses the story to read advertisements aloud—infusing them with personal anecdotes, and using their own voice. This voice feels so close, intimate and real: it’s the voice I’ve come here to listen to. Maybe I should try this one-time Squarespace offer code? For the critical consumer, a casual reco from a friend or 'like-minded' celebrity is infinitely more persuasive than an unsolicited YouTube ad. There’s a whole industry of guerilla & viral marketing built around this premise. It’s about trust—and a kind of self-identification that flows through the vernacular and handmade. The Whole Earth catalog is filled with this idiosyncratic feeling, from its hand-written chapter headings to its denouncement of the elitist 'white space' of traditional graphic design. Indeed, the aesthetics of quirk appealed to late-sixties “rebel” consumers long before it leaked through the cracks in my armor. Fifty years later, savvy contemporary ad agencies have honed an arsenal of techniques akin to those sprouted in the Catalog, at times even replacing commercials altogether with branded content or cultural programming. In the age of the “lifestyle brand,” strategists know very well that they are no longer just selling products, but rather, ideas, critique, vibe, stories, identities, values… Sometimes they fall on their face, but more often than not, they end up selling a shit-ton of sneakers.

And it’s worth taking a moment to consider who exactly the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking to. After decades of damage reaped by colorblind, ableist, gender-normative universalism that functions to prop up the false meritocracy of the neoliberal apparatus, today we must pay attention to basic demographics. Who were the Catalog’s writers and readers? Over the years, the WEC’s editor list includes names like Lloyd Kahn, Gurney Norman, Gordon Ashby, Paul Krassner & Ken Kesey, alongside Stewart Brand. Now, what demographic consistencies might we find among these individuals? A couple quick google searches will answer that question. And a casual flip through the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog also illustrates a clear distinction between depictions of its presumed audience, and depictions of ancient knowledge to be consumed, or exoticized cultures to be appropriated: the “us” and the “them.” In Daughters of Aquarius: Women of the Sixties Counterculture, Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo describes the hippie movement in starkly racial and socio-economic terms: “Well more than half came from middle-class families, and fewer than 3 percent were non-white.” It’s no wonder that, amidst all of the Whole Earth Catalog’s radical whimsy, one can nonetheless detect a pinch of uncritical settler mentality (although it’s subscribers might prefer the term “pioneer”). From the Catalog’s spreads devoted to L.L. Bean, Sierra Club & National Geographic, to today’s #VanLife enthusiasts and survivalist preppers, the roots of self-reliance culture are deeply colonial and individualistic; they reach far back to the invention of “nature” as an oppositional force to be cultivated or tamed by white cis masculinity.

Alongside scientific exploration and new age philosophy, the WEC peddled a quasi-libertarian ethos based on a naive blend of DIY meritocracy and tech optimism, the same ethos that underwrites the founding fathers of Silicon Valley. These nerdy garage “visionaries” publicly performed a kind of upwardly-mobile American Dream that blandly denies systemic injustice & inequality. Are we supposed to believe it mere coincidence that nearly all of our early tech innovators were upper/middle-class white men with a similar education, many of them even coming out of the same university? As if people of color, poor people, women, disabled folks were just not “into” computers? And yet, in a revolting twist of circumstances, poor laborers, workers of color and women—often unseen, often overseas—would eventually fill the ranks of dehumanized labor responsible for manufacturing the consumer tech products invented in California.

WEC’s tagline “access to tools,” like so many of Silicon Valley’s products and ideologies, has by now been problematized by 50 years of real-world complications. The sentiment is there, but the words ring hollow, especially to those excluded from the imagination of tech utopianism. Continents away from the Catalog’s cybernetic dreaming, a critical mind today might ask: What have all of these tools brought us? Surveillance, mass data collection, algorithmic oppression, the commodification & gamification of every part of our lives, the heightened alienation and polarization of our filter bubbles, a hierarchy of clicks that elevates hate, abjection and lies… While Silicon Valley imagined future humans shaping their world with tools, over time we’ve begun to better understand the ways in which these tools shape us. And the trajectory of consumer tech design has shifted decidedly toward obfuscation of ‘how things work,’ replacing what Brand imagined to be empowered learners/makers with passive, dependent consumers.

Donut Holes_

All of this is not to disregard the affection many creative people still hold for the Whole Earth Catalog. It’s just not possible these days to live in a world described by its selective optimism. We are less enamored with Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, than with Adam Curtis’s 2012 series of the same title. Gazing contemplatively back toward the spirit and hope contained within those soft covers, The Whole Sell provides an update for the world we understand today, with consideration for who was—and often continues to be—excluded from such utopian visions of the future.

The “Whole Earth” of the Catalog’s namesake comes from Stewart Brand’s 1966 performative project, in which he campaigned for NASA to release the first satellite image of the entire Earth taken from space. When the photo was released in 1967, it was used to create the Catalog’s iconic cover design. The Whole Sell has adopted a more recent breakthrough in cosmic imagery: the first photo representation of a black hole. The “donut,” as it’s been called on the Internet, was met with equal parts awe and disappointment when first published in 2019. But perhaps we should not be surprised by the unphotogenic quality of a phenomenon that can’t actually be seen. What exactly are we 'seeing' when we 'look at' a black hole? Is the metaphor of vision even relevant? As explained in Benjamin Bratton’s The Terraforming:

The thing we see as an “image” was constructed from data produced not by a conventional camera, but by Event Horizon, a network of telescopes harmonized to focus on the same location at the same time...The mechanism is less a camera than a vast sensing surface: a different kind of difference engine. What we see in the resulting image is the orangey accretion disc of glowing gas being sucked into the void of M87*, outlined by all the non-void it is about to consume… The Black Hole image is a kind of “world picture” that is crucially not a picture of our Earth, but rather a picture taken by the Earth of its surroundings—for which we served as essential enablers.

The Blue Marble and other NASA images of Earth became a symbol of the 1960’s growing environmental movement. Stewart Brand had high hopes for the potential of this imagery to shift perception from localized concerns toward an ecological planetary consciousness. Indeed, psychologist Frank White coined the term “Overview Effect” to describe the cognitive shift in awareness that results from the astronaut’s experience of viewing Earth from afar. Brand characterized these photos as a kind of mirror, suggesting that seeing the whole Earth “might tell us something about ourselves.”

And yet, the lofty poetics of WEC were, of course, always silently circumscribed by privilege and anthropocentrism. One needs look no further than Gil Scott Heron’s 1970 Whitey’s on the Moon for an eloquent reminder of how much easier it is to “think globally” when your immediate survival is not in question. At the same time, Bratton’s writing offers a reading of the “whole earth” viewpoint as a kind of reprise of the centrism and exceptionalism of the flat earth/center of the universe theories that dominated Western thought until Copernicus. Indeed, notions of precarity and preciousness described by astronauts experiencing the Overview Effect can only be understood from a narrow human subjectivity, rendering the blue marble “an icon of geocentrism” (Bratton).

And so we turn, instead, to the blurry, bewildering, fundamentally empty cosmic image of our day. Perhaps this spiraling, inescapable implosion, markedly underwhelming on Twitter, is as fitting a current cultural symbol as the blue marble was to the psychedelic awakening of its time? It’s worth considering why the black hole image elicited such a negative public response. Disappointment derives from the indecipherable quality of the image: how little it resembles the high-res simulations we’ve seen in action movies; how little it tells us about ourselves and the world we know. It’s a really crappy mirror. Or is it? Perhaps we might benefit from a bit less time mirror gazing. In this age of climate collapse and accelerating crises, it could be worth taking a realistic look at the future of this star we call the Sun, the actual center of our solar system. The “donut” provides a sober reminder that life only exists in relation to its opposite, an opposite both vast and indifferent to our existence. Bratton calls it a “terrifying image.”

The darkness of a black hole is absolutely empty, so part of what makes this image significant is that it signifies true nothingness. The image is the opposite of what they call a mirror, in that it shows them not themselves in the world, but the abyss in which they can never be reflected...

Money on the Wall_

Enter The Whole Sell and you are confronted with the architecture of a simple online store. And yet, like the original Whole Earth Catalog, no money changes hands on this site. The items on offer are artworks, and the means of purchasing include neither credit card nor Paypal. Appraising artists’ production using alternative forms of currency, the project explores the relative value of interaction, exchange, creative response, and conversation, leaving both buyer & seller with more questions than answers... What is cultural capital? How and why do artists sell ideas? What’s the difference between interaction and transaction? And perhaps, most fundamentally: is it possible to subvert capitalism from within, using its own tools, platforms and language?

Artists must be paid for their labor. So long as we live in a society that requires money for survival, that interprets the value of a human life as an individual’s ability to sell their own labor-power for a wage, it would be ludicrous to demand that artists live in any other way. And many inspiring artists have taken up precarity and injustice as material, or as a mandate to organize in solidarity. These projects help to dispel the myth of the artist as solitary genius, immortalized in Oscar Wilde’s quip: “art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.” Sarah Jaffe’s 2020 book Work Wont Love You Back explains that it can be “difficult for artists themselves to conceive of their problems as collective issues, rather than individual ones. Artists...tend to be more anti-authoritarian than explicitly political.” In the 1930’s, the editor of the influential Art Digest, found the idea of unionization antithetical to the artistic impulse. The artist, he argued, is not a “group man… the very nature that leads him to be an artist makes him intensely individualistic. To such men the very thought of unionization is distasteful. They are not the same as coalminers. The loss of personal initiative means the loss of creative spirit.” (Jaffe, via A. Joan Saab) Here, Peyton Boswell's equating of freedom and creativity with individualized participation in a capitalist market, unbound by the burden of collective organizing, becomes the perfect alibi for neoliberalism. Is it worth articulating how exactly artists differ from coalminers? The elitism of Boswell’s statement serves to obfuscate its true meaning: that artists are not deserving of solidarity or collective bargaining, because the work they do is not really work.

Jaffe’s book articulates the many ways that substituting love, fulfillment, meaning, or relationships for compensation in the workplace can become a dangerous proposition—historically gendered and racialized—for domestic workers, teachers, non-profit workers, service workers and artists alike. The “labor of love,” as she describes it, is a contemporary form of coercion that has grown up alongside the neoliberal work ethic; and it serves to turn workers’ passion against them.

Sociologist Andrew Ross calls this “sacrificial labor,” the way that one gives up certain facets of stability in order to pursue work that is seen as meaningful… Work would be exciting, fulfilling, creative, a place for self-expression, but you had to give up knowing where your next check was coming from. [Artists] have been sold the idea that not having a boss is liberation… [but it also] limits their ability to organize for better conditions. Upon whom are their demands to be made? (Jaffe)

And as I sit here hammering out this essay late into the night—because I “want to,” not because anyone is forcing me, or even paying me—the irony is not entirely lost.

I am particularly drawn to Jaffe’s formulation of art as a privatization of creativity, which is something that we otherwise might hold in common. The artistic discipline under capitalism, with all of its interlocking systems of education, professionalization, institutions, nepotism, fetishism and celebrity, functions to commodify one of the most basic attributes that make us human. Sarah Jaffe writes:

Creativity ... has been turned from a basic human quality, one that anyone is capable of expressing, to a private preserve, enclosed behind the boundaries of its own world. The narrative that artists will create solely for the love of it...is used to justify a variety of exploitative practices rather than to call for an opening up of art worlds to all.

And in the years immediately following the release of the Whole Earth Catalog—as Stewart Brand championed the self-made, non-conforming individual—the art world's emblematic meritocracy accelerated. According to Jaffe, the 1970’s saw a boom in the private art market, “fetishizing the individual artist while cutting off all the legs of state support.” And of course, this flood of capital, like most “trickle-down” phenomena, provided far less than a trickle for most artists and art workers. “Almost nobody could pay rent from art,” Lucy Lippard said at the time. Jaffe, again:

A few stars became famous and sold works for fabulous sums; the rest of the field looked on longingly from their part-time jobs and crumbling apartments. Art stars became mini-industries in themselves, hiring workers themselves in order to produce works of art. How could such artists be in solidarity with the working class?... The artist became the ideal worker for the neoliberal age just as neoliberalism made it harder and harder to succeed as an artist…it is necessary to have a few superstars visibly raking in the money, and it is necessary to continue to depict art as an end in itself. In the space between these two joys—the anticipated thrill of success, and the pleasure of the art-making itself—most artists get lost.

It is against this complex history that The Whole Sell attempts to create a space for momentary freedom from the free-market; to poke a hole in the suffocating fabric of capitalist realism, and dance for a moment in the light that pours through. The artworks housed on this site are intentionally small, quick gestures—some of them can be found freely elsewhere online—and many were not made specifically for this platform. For most publications, this non-exclusivity would not be something to celebrate, but here it functions as anti-exclusivity. This publication is engaged in eroding basic pillars of supply and demand: the foundation of scarcity, authenticity, and celebrity that the art world’s value system is built on.

At the same time, the The Whole Sell's yard-sale mentality is meant to provide a low-risk environment for artists to play—with the ways that they ascribe value to their own work, and value work of others. In adapting their projects for the website, each artist was asked to articulate, in non-monetary terms: what is this piece worth? what might someone do or give to access it? And what would I like to receive in return? Might a transaction be as much about generosity, reciprocity or wit, about sharing a moment, an idea or a joke, as it is about fair payment? Does it matter if the price is somehow equal to the labor of producing the artwork?  In this way, each piece becomes a small act of generosity to be “repaid” in reciprocal acts, a kind of barter-system designed to initiate what we hope could amount to much wider discussions of value in art, culture and relationality.

And this type of discussion is certainly not new to artists and cultural thinkers. From Warhol to Duchamp to Edward Kienholz’ trade watercolors, the canon is filled with artists prodding at the absurdity of art sales, destabilizing the tenuous edifice on which their livelihood depends. More recent interventions include Kenya Robinson’s 2013 Remitting Default: a Psycho-Economic Performance of Getting Skoooooled, which records and publishes “the artist’s two-year experience as a Black MFA student at Yale University while struggling to maintain her personal finances and secure fiscal support.” Valentina Karga and Pieterjan Grandry’s 2016 Market for Immaterial Value is a small coin-like sculpture in which people can buy equity, where “the sum of all individual investments determines the total value of the artwork,” owning it collectively and determining together whether to keep it or sell. And, perhaps most effectively, many artists today with social/relational practices work to circumvent the hierarchy and exclusivity of the art world altogether, by investing directly in their communities instead.

The practical ambivalences of art and commerce are well articulated in a 2016 interview with Martine Syms, in response to a question about her use of the term “conceptual entrepreneur.”

When I came up with that term...I was running Golden Age, a project space in Chicago, and people were always asking me. 'Is this part of your practice?' And I was like, no. I was cleaning cigarettes off the sidewalk; it was hard for me to glamourise it. I felt like a small business owner… I think my main interests and ideas have always come from independent music, black-owned businesses, and the idea of self-determination through having a sustainable institution, through institutionalizing yourself. Now I'm more aware of the problems and theoretical issues with that. And obviously, with the tech industry, where entrepreneur has kind of a horrible air surrounding it, I'm definitely more conflicted. But I'm still very interested in self-determination and being able to actually survive doing the work I want to do. So it's important to talk about some of things I'm doing as labor, as work, but I also understand the limitations of that and of using that language. I'm not resolved on it now.

Fumbling to pin down the ever-slippery contradictions of art & capitalism, I take a detour to revisit Andrea Fraser’s 2005 essay From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique. In this text, Fraser discusses contradiction specifically within a single art-historical movement (“institutional critique”) that precedes and informs her own practice, but her analysis contains useful implications for The Whole Sell. Perhaps most relevant is Fraser’s reflection on the attempt to escape a system in which one is clearly embedded, in order to criticize it: the question of critique from within. This struggle to reconcile the deep entanglements of art and commerce, to make objects and meaning outside—or ‘alongside,’ or ‘in opposition to’—capitalism, finds The Whole Sell, like Fraser, “enmeshed in.. contradictions and complicities, ambitions and ambivalence.” Furthermore, in a manner that might help account for artists’ persistent attraction to the WEC, Fraser reports “a certain nostalgia for institutional critique as…an artifact of an era before the corporate megamuseum and the 24/7 global art market, a time when artists could still conceivably take up a critical position against or outside the institution. Today, the argument goes, there no longer is an outside.” Ahh, the good old days of wholesome Whole Earth counterculture, back when there was an “outside.” Or, at least, when some of us still believed there was an outside.

The impulse to abandon ship is powerful. But for Fraser, contradiction is not a reason to stop trying. As she laments, “now, when we need it most, institutional critique is dead, a victim of its success or failure, swallowed up by the institution it stood against.” In this way, The Whole Sell makes a modest appeal for not getting swallowed. The project’s dark humor is balanced by sincere experimentation with alternative forms of art transaction. Rather than sulk around indefinitely in our murky event horizon, we’ve decided to propose a few alternatives.  As an artist with a primary stake in ideas, critique, resistance, I’ve long felt adverse to selling work as either luxury commodity or populist amusement. But this does not mean that I have no ambition to share my work. The Whole Sell provides an interface for distributing art outside of commerce, asking participants to define value in concrete, non-monetary terms. What other kinds of exchanges between artist and audience could constitute a transaction? How else might we understand consumption in relation to the intellectual, aesthetic, even subversive “products” of our labor? And how useful is the metaphor of online shopping—with it’s familiar lexicon of carts, customer service and captchas? Perhaps most interesting are the moments in which these conventions cease to function, unfit to contain the mushy subjectivity stuffed into The Whole Sell’s databases for pricing and order history.

Art is not peculiar for its function as commodity production, but only in its denial of that function. I often relish the blow that Fraser deals to the guarded integrity and exceptionalism of art. “Every time we speak of the ‘institution’ as other than ‘us,’" she writes, “we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions… It's not a question of being against the institution: We are the institution.” But if we are the institution, how then should we go about critiquing ourselves? Can this reflexivity constitute meaningful action, can it move towards change? Or is it simply a way of making us feel better about our work.

As an artist, I often find myself longing for an ideological purity that is common also to activists, intellectuals, and idealists of all stripes. As Audre Lorde describes in her 1982 speech Learning from the Sixties,“We were poised for attack, not always in the most effective places. When we disagreed with one another about the solution to a particular problem, we were often far more vicious to each other than to the originators of our common problem.” Listening to progressives today bemoan the fractured, self-destructive in-fighting of their peers, we might understand the artist’s ideological scramble for uncompromised footing as, at times, also counterproductive. I certainly understand the desire to cleanly escape a system that you’re trying to destabilize; it’s also pragmatic, like exiting the building before setting it on fire. But in her analysis of institutional critique, Andrea Fraser seems to argue that getting “outside” the institution might not even be the goal. In her words, “what we do outside the field, to the extent that it remains outside, can have no effect within it.”

Representations of the "art world" as wholly distinct from the "real world"...maintain an imaginary distance between the social and economic interests we invest in through our activities and the euphemized artistic, intellectual, and even political "interests" (or disinterests) that provide those activities with content and justify their existence. And with these representations, we also reproduce the mythologies of volunteerist freedom and creative omnipotence that have made art and artists such attractive emblems for neoliberalism's entrepreneurial, "ownership-society" optimism. (Fraser)

Perhaps nowhere does this “volunteerist freedom” and “entrepreneurial optimism” function with as much aesthetic clarity than within the weird and brainy pages of the Whole Earth Catalog. In typically down-to-earth terms, Kevin Kelly, one of the catalog’s editors, described the project’s early days when Stewart Brand was selling products out of the back of his truck:

“Here's a tool that will make drilling a well, or grinding flour, easier,” Brand would tell [the hippies,] pointing it out in his catalog of recommended tools. But his best selling tool was the catalog itself, annotated by him, featuring tools that didn't fit into his truck.

It’s interesting to note the interchangeability of “tool” and “catalog” here: the former, a thing that makes, the latter, a thing that sells. It is precisely this subtle conflation that we can follow to better understand the evolution of consumer technologies post-WEC. From the advent of computers to the Internet to YouTube, each new technological breakthrough arrives with the promise of revolutionizing one’s access to tools, and ends up providing, more often than not, access to sales. Far from the self-empowering “tool” promised by the revolution of personal computing, an iPhone today is no more effective as a means of creation or communication than it is a tool for consumption. Following the business model of giants like Google and Facebook, every “free” service or network we’re grown accustomed to using on the web operates as a front for massive global industries in advertising and data collection. There’s no such thing as a free social network, a free search engine, or a free lunch. This is what we call the whole sell.

 Access to Tools_

A closer look at one of Audre Lorde's most famous texts provides a useful rethinking of building and demolishing, inside and outside. While Lorde was writing directly about existing and interlocking architectures of white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia, it is not hard to imagine her metaphor extending to the inescapable conditioning of life under global capitalism. I'd like to be careful here appropriating her use of "master" which invokes the particular brutality of chattel slavery in the Americas. But at the same time, Audre Lorde’s intellectual contributions are critical to the development of what we now call ‘intersectional’ analysis, and even within this famous speech the term "master" stands in for many forms of oppression related to gender, sexuality, class, and age. Furthermore, there are many ways in which our present techno-capitalist class can be understood as heirs to a lineage (and even active/current practitioners) of white supremacy, settler colonialism and grotesque wealth accumulation. These few individuals hold inordinate power over the tools that shape our lives, with minimal democratic regulation or community oversight. Time and time again, their tools have proved supremacist, authoritarian or exploitative (see: search engine bias, surveillance architectures, misinformation), building a strong case for social networks, smart devices, e-commerce, and other recent innovations as a set of "master's tools."     

Lorde's speech was written to call out white feminists who, in ignoring or subsuming difference proposed by Black & queer feminism, end up aligning themselves with white-hetero power structures. "What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?" she asks. In her scathing critique of the NYU conference to which this speech was first given, she calls into question the way the conference was organized, who was invited to speak, and how. To Lorde, it is not simply the talks & papers that should be scrutinized, but also the process and the framework—the means as well as the ends. Indeed, what does it mean to use the tools of the oppressor to try to confront, contradict or undermine oppression? For me, Lorde's statements also haunt the practices of artistic appropriation, satirical readymade & institutional critique that are essential to contemporary art as we know it, and to The Whole Sell as well. When artists misuse or subvert “master’s tools,” does this begin to constitute a dismantling, or just a superficial renovation?

Frameworks inherited, designed and funded by those in power will never be repurposed to burn that structure down—nor even, to take it apart brick by brick. And it would be foolish to insist that we live anywhere but here, squarely inside (à la Fraser) the master’s house: we use smartphones, we drive cars, some of us even periodically resort to buying something on Amazon. However, Lorde’s language offers agency in the creation of new tools, designed by new kinds of people, with new objectives in mind. Inspired by the critical words of Lorde and Fraser, The Whole Sell has thus been engineered as a kind of tool, providing an alternative framework for art distribution, valuation, exchange and interaction. We've borrowed aesthetics and language from the Whole Earth Catalog, from art sales, and from any ordinary Shopify web-store, but reconfigured them to function neither in the service of selling, nor in upholding models of “success” based on competition and scarcity. We hope “buyers” will find tools here suited not just for construction, but perhaps more importantly, for deconstruction.

However, this essay also recognizes the limitations of projects like The Whole Sell—and, more generally, the impulse of artists to confront problems by “making art about them.” Perhaps we would be better off dissolving the murky exceptionalism that sets artists apart from other workers. We might not be able to sustain our current privatization of talent, or the professional aura of competitive MFA degrees, which serve to benefit a handful of artists by fetishizing everything they touch, but the rewards of redistribution, increased survival and widespread access would undoubtedly outweigh the ‘costs.’ And, as workers in every other sector can attest, the direct action needed to win rights and build power may not be achievable on the job (i.e., within the artwork itself). Rather, it might require the kind of committed, straightforward organizing that has developed over hundreds of years through labor struggles around the world. In this spirit, I will leave you with a few words from artist Kerry Guinan (quoted in Sarah Jaffe’s book) who I think provides just the right mix of inspiration and kick in the ass:

“The majority of people who work in the arts will identify themselves as liberal to left-wing, often radically left-wing. This is going from the poorest artists to the highest paid curators in institutions… But, if this is the case that we are a field in which everyone is all left-wing values, then why are we all agreed that the art world is a piece of capitalist shit that is relying on private capital that exploits its workers, that exploits artists, relies on unpaid labor? This, to me, is living proof that art cannot change the world and that is why we need to organize. Artists need to realize how little power we all really have and how power needs to be built. It doesn’t come naturally and it is not a divine gift you get by being an artist.”

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