Here's a photo of The Tourist in front of the window of a grocery's produce section. Speaking of produce, this is

what artists do: they produce work. Photographs, drawings, paintings, video, these are all documentation of this

project. They are the "proof" and they are the objects, which supposedly convey the artist's concepts or ideas.

Within our current systems of capital labor and production, artists must produce - if you want to be a

"successful artist" then you are making work and regularly selling it. I see and hear it all the time from other

artists, either they are doing "really well" because they are selling, or they are "struggling" because they

haven't sold any work in awhile. I find this approach limiting and non-sustainable. This approach has also led to

artist-run bureaucracies, where an artist more or less runs their studio like a corporation, acting as CEO with

assistants and subordinates who produce the actual work. Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, and Thomas Kinkade are a

few examples of this model. This paradigm reduces art to commodity, whether as luxury objects for the wealthy or

mass-produced home decoration. When I talk about this to people, the common refrain is "what else can an artist

do? We’ve all got to make a living." I do not have a universal answer for this, except that acknowledging this

paradigm, and perhaps re-orienting one's self-worth as an artist away from it, can be liberating. The use of

Kickstarter for this project is a method in which to explore this question. New models of artist patronage are

being created and explored. A key may be in the term "artist patronage", creating relational paradigms and models

that include the artist being in relationship together with others. Community building. Not with the artist as

genius surrounded by acolytes but artist as servant, teaching, exploring, and finding meaning in the world with

others.