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[Video: SUPERFLEX trailer]
Danish collective Superflex has created a series of films about the financial meltdown in which the artists treat the crisis as a form of psychosis to be treated by a hypnotist. The offering is a sort of therapeutic device that has a correspondence with the theatrical devices of art that have been employed in recession’s past.

This is no longer a seller’s market.
There have been claims that the art market will remain immune to the global financial crisis. However, a recent report by the USA’s National Endowment for the Arts, for example, finds that artist unemployment peaked two years after the last US recession had ended.

The International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies put out a report that found respondents expect that the downturn will induce changes in consumer behaviour that will be both positive and negative for the arts.
• Less travel/cultural tourism, particularly international tourism (with an additional effect
in the USA where travel tax revenues, such as motel taxes, are often put toward the
arts).
• A shift to less expensive arts experiences.
• A shift to the arts away from more expensive leisure pursuits.
• Reduction in spending on theatre tickets, particularly single ticket purchases rather
than subscriptions (‘loyal supporters via subscription tickets likely to remain’).
• Fewer art purchases by both individuals and institutions.
• Consumption of quality and major arts experiences will be stable, but smaller local arts
may experience a decline in consumption (‘Consumers will cut back on discretionary
spending in anticipation of economic difficulties, which will skew arts attendances
towards bigger, more mainstream and crowd-pleasing fare as smaller personal budgets
make audiences more discriminating and risk-averse in their arts spending).
• Sales and private sponsorships declining in value

Positive outcomes from the downturn:
The majority of respondents expect some positive or ameliorating factors to arise from the
downturn. Three possible factors were provided in the questionnaire to stimulate thought:
• Local cultural tourism may increase, offsetting an expected decline in international
tourism.
• People will turn to the arts in times of turmoil for the arts’ ‘feel good’ factor, so demand
for the arts may not drop as much as in other sectors.
• Innovation, creativity and flexibility in the arts sector will allow it to respond better to the
downturn than other economic sectors.

Synoptic Version: The total results of the report were “mildly negative” regarding the effect the global economic downturn will have on the arts sector.

Yet, an alternative perspective is that some are considering this crisis a time for rebirth, or a pruning of unessential and/or reckless tactics of the art world’s inflation. Some critics are admittedly supporting the optimistic attributes of the crisis by referring to the problematic situation as a sort of cleansing of their excessively prompted critical capacities and bankrupt attentions. “Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art,” writes Saltz. “The ’40s, ’70s and the ’90s, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted, but it was also reborn.”

Additionally, since the 90′s, there has been a massive collective push in art that celebrates interpersonal exchange and monetary-free [via representation] models for the collective trafficking of ideas. Personally, I’m unable to reason whether or not this concern was caused by the pattern-recognition of artists, as early-adapters, or if this focus was caused by [the somewhat] newly developed exchange principles of the internet. In the past, I’ve mentioned that I was glad such times had descended upon us, as the rate in which we find creative and more self-sustaining practices of production increasing as a matter of survival. The test of this perception [one that I find myself now thoroughly engaged with] is the elasticity of hypothesis and the level of passion that the holder of such perceptions is willing to invest. I find the most important aspect of the test, to be that the understanding of such an investment must remain within the abstract terms in which the investment’s resources are culled. The difficulty of such pursuits then becomes a matter of faith, regarding the collective’s abstract equity and that equity’s relationship with an individual’s personal value system. Meaning: is it possible to really even claim self-sustainability, on the front of any ideological crisis? Or, is such a claim imaginary, and therefore empty of material resource beyond the ability to simply bring things together [conceptually]?

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