[International Fine Art Moratorium Project]

Fellow artists
and art practitioners,
interested persons:

Our global community has reached a state of cultural crisis.
And as you know desperate times often require desperate means.
Our Colleges and Universities, around the world, have since
the late forties been producing trained professional artists,
craftspersons, as well as related management and historians
at an increasing and unprecedented rate.In turn, this has resulted
in a tremendous growth in the number of tangible artworks i.e.:

*paintings *sculptures
*prints *photographs *video tapes *etc...
as well as related materials, i.e. *books *magazines *
and other promotional materials

The past fifty years has seen the creation of some of the greatest individual artistic
achievements in history. But unfortunately, it has been accompanied by an inevitable
declining the overall quality of the Art produced. The shear volume of Art students
enrolled in our academies in proportion to the number of trained instructors precludes
the controls required to produce the caliber of Art our world desperately needs.

Ordinarily, market forces would prevail in a Darwinian selection process, weeding out the dross.
But a combination of factors have combined to skew natural tendencies:

1. The application of excess capital and revenue in the form of private and public grants,
foundations endowments, and scholarships during the sixties and seventies.
2. The proliferation of national and provincial museums, public Art mural and community
colleges in a competition of civic pride.
3. And the overzealous international Art market investment boom of the eighties.
These have all contributed to the present crisis:

The ART Glut

That?s right. Now fess up: We?ve just got too much Art.

And it?s accumulating at an alarming rate. These are not your rare masterpieces or works of genius,
most of which get absorbed into the aesthetic mainstream. We?re talking about studies, machetes,
second rate paintings, multiples, and literally millions of dated creative exercises and personal
statements which have far out lived their usefulness in today's society.

Lacking sufficient wall space and pedestals to accommodate this mass of Art, we are needlessly
warehousing the Art Converting our decaying but valuable inner-city industrial corridors from
potential housing to storage spaces for these cultural baggages and artifacts.

And we?ve lost our creative focus along the way.
Precious energy and resources are wasted.

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