A new model of action to invent new modes of art production and exchange by establishing a direct dialogue between the artist, the citizen-commissioner and the cultural mediator, outside the museum and apart from the art market.
Keeping capitalism out of the game while works and their contexts are reinvented: this book is about the possibility of a new chapter in the history of art, in which the “public” allows itself to become a patron of the arts, and people from all walks of life begin to speak the raison d'être of art works. Artists are faced with undreamed of situations in which the mediators of contemporary art play an avant-garde role. Responsibility for the common good is shared between citizens and their elected representatives, while a “gift economy” (public grants and private donations) provides the means to engage freely in a new adventure: the advent of an “art of democracy”.
A visual conceptual artist, François Hers (born 1943 à Uccle) used for a long time photography to carry out his research before focusing on public action. From 1983 to 1988, he conceived and directed the photographic mission of the DATAR. Director of the
Hartung-Bergman Foundation from its creation in 1994 until 2014, responsible for culture at the Fondation de France since 1989, he is the founder of the
New Patrons protocol.
Xavier Douroux (1956-2017) is the co-founder of Les presses du réel and
Le Consortium, art centre of Dijon.
