Frank Chimero, a man full of good ideas, shared another one recently: a text playlist. Basically, it’s a selection of readings that he revisits on a regular basis, “almost a pep talk in text form,” as he describes it. Frank’s list included a ton of good stuff (I’ve done some thinking about “stock and flow” myself), and the wonderful Liz Danzico responded in kind with a great list of her own.

I’m still working on my list, but while I’m in the process of pulling it together I decided I had to share one reading that I’ve been revisiting a lot over the last few days. It’s from Lawrence Weschler’s incredible book Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, which is about the artist Robert Irwin. Chapter 15 is called “Being Available in Response,” which is also the name of a project initiated by Irwin.

The first time I read this chapter I nearly lept out of my chair — I got so excited I reread it three or four times right away.

Rather than trying to explain the project too much, though, I’ll let Irwin (and Weschler) tell you about it as they do in the book. Here’s Irwin:

“I just sort of let it be known that I was available, in a way like I’m saying it to you. I mean, I didn’t put out any ads or anything, but word got around. And you could be, let’s say, up at UCLA, and you’d say, ‘Well, let’s take advantage of that. We’ll have him come up and talk to the students.’ And that’s what I’d do. Or, ‘We’ll have him come up and do a piece on the patio.’ And I would just come up and do that.

“There’s an important distinction to be made here,” [Irwin] continued, “between organizing and proselytizing, on the one hand, and responding to interest, on the other. I was and continue to be available in response. I mean, I don’t stand on a corner and hand out leaflets. I’m not an evangelist. I’m not trying to sell anything. But on the other hand, if you ask me a question, you’re going to get a half-hour answer.’”

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Michael Pollan’s talk at The Long Now Foundation includes a glimpse of the gift economy at work in the business of agriculture:

A lot of it depends on redefining our sense of what a clever technology is. And what I suggest is that a really smart rotation — like that eight-year rotation in Argentina— is as clever and as powerful a technology as the latest genetically-modified seed. And we need to look at it that way. The question is why don’t we look at it that way? Well by in large because there’s nothing to sell, in the case of the rotation. And what makes agriculture really work in a sustainable direction are processes more than products, which is why there’s very little R&D that goes into developing these technologies.

Reminds me a bit of what Lewis Hyde has to say about textbooks in The Gift:

Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return […]. But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in [Sociologist Warren] Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of renumeration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because a unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community.

Contrast the natural process Pollan describes in which the land renews itself but no value is extracted to one in which the land is managed by commercial fertilizers that are sold at a price. The cycle of nature, like the circle of gift-giving, ensures its own success, but weakens when cash value is extracted at any specific point. It’s unmonetizable, but, as Pollan points out, learning from it might be the key to healthier eating and better food.

See also: Pollan’s writing about pioneering farmer Joel Salatin in Omnivore’s Dilemma.

The School of Life’s Catherine Blyth weighs in on the peculiar mechanics of diplomatic gift-giving:

As each exchange is a diplomatic act, similar rules apply to presents as to flattery. When Gordon Brown welcomed Barack Obama to Britain with a pen holder whittled from timbers of a sister ship of the Resolute, out of which the Presidential desk in the White House is made, plus a seven-volume, first edition Churchill biography, Obama gave him 25 DVDs including Psycho. Commentators scorned Obama’s ‘insult,’ but the error was Brown’s. His presents were too great to be returned.

Seth Godin channeling Lewis Hyde at Cool Hunting on behalf of his new book, Linchpin:

What’s a gift? If I see a Chuck Close painting in a museum, I didn’t pay for that painting, I just get the benefit of seeing it. If I see a Karl Lagerfeld outfit walking down the street, it didn’t cost me anything to see it. If someone takes the time to use a beautiful Bodoni typeface kerned properly, it doesn’t necessarily communicate the words more clearly, but there was a gift element associated with it. We need to start with this idea that there isn’t just a transaction every time—I do something, I get money, we move on—that what gifts do is they create a connection, because they’re not even. Someone gave me something, I couldn’t give them anything in return. We’re not even-steven.

Also worth noting is Godin’s innovative PR model:

We started by offering a review copy to the first three thousand people who gave a donation to the Acumen Fund, which is a charity I support. And it didn’t take very long to have more than 2,000 people do that. We raised $100,00 in about a day and a half, exceeding our goal. So those books went out yesterday. We also sent 250 people who live internationally a shorter digital version (about a fifth of the book) so that they wouldn’t have to wait for shipping. It’s already showing up on Twitter. It’s already being reviewed. Some people don’t like it, some people like it a lot. What will end up happening, my prediction is, that between 500 and 1,000 reviews of one sort or another will get posted online, which will certainly reach far more people than a review in The New York Times ever could. My principle goal is to leverage personal interactions so that this book reaches the people it needs to reach, the people who are open to hearing what it has to say.

Two readings on the economics of attention. First, last week Design Observer posted Michael Erard’s A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention. The takeaway from this article will surely be Erard’s suggestion that we start “attention festivals: week-long multimedia, cross-industry carnivals of readings, installations, and performances, where you go from a tent with 30-second films, guitar solos, 10-minute video games, and haiku to the tent with only Andy Warhol movies, to a myriad of venues with other media forms and activities requiring other attention lengths.”

But, as creatively playful as that might be, I was most interested in the end of his essay, where he speculates on the price of attention:

I’m inspired by Lewis Hyde in The Gift, who says that what distinguishes commodities is that they’re used up, but what distinguishes gifts is that they circulate—the gift is never trapped, consumed, used up, contained or confined. That seems like the best basis for cultural production to thrive.

Erard’s starting point is Chris Anderson’s Free, and he describes Anderson’s concept of “free” as “the gift’s ugly negation.” A very thoughtful point, and one both Cory Doctorow and I have tried to make as well.

Second, via Fred Wilson, comes this article by John Hagel, in which he describes the article The Attention Economy and the Net, written by Michael Goldhaber. Here’s Hagel:

Goldhaber is close to viewing attention as a flow, rather than a stock—something that must continually be refreshed, if it is to be maintained. One can only continue to attract full attention if one offers something new along the way.

These are two sides of the same coin, of course. But I like the contrast of stock to flow, especially in business contexts like Anderson’s where “stock” is a more native term. Stock is static value, but the value of flow is only maintained through constant circulation.

More from the debate about Chris Anderson’s Free, this time from Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow writing in The Guardian:

There’s a pretty strong case to be made that “free” has some inherent antipathy to capitalism. […] There’s plenty in our world that lives outside of the marketplace: it’s a rare family that uses spot-auctions to determine the dinner menu or where to go for holidays. […] But for the sizeable fraction of this material—and it is sizeable—that was created with no expectation of joining the monetary economy, with no expectation of winning some future benefit for its author, that was created for joy, or love, or compulsion, or conversation, it is just wrong to say that the “price” of the material is “free.” The material, is, instead, literally priceless. It represents a large and increasing segment of our public life that is conducted entirely for reasons outside the marketplace.

I think Doctorow totally nails it, suggesting that Anderson’s misreading of Hyde is actually the heart of the problem with Free. Where Hyde sees two economies, a commercial economy and a creative economy, Anderson sees only one. Doctorow:

And here’s where Free starts to trip up. Though Anderson celebrates the best of non-commercial and anti-commercial net-culture, from amateur creativity to Freecycle, he also goes through a series of tortured (and ultimately less than convincing) exercises to put a dollar value on this activity, to explain the monetary worth of Wikipedia, for example.

Complete with a Salvation Army-inspired shield, Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s Significant Objects blog has been widely posted by now, but is notable nonetheless. Do the stories we tell about the things that surround us add value to those things? Of course. So far, Significant Object’s added value seems to be around $231.90 worth of profit, which rightly stays the stories’ authors after an eBay auction is done. Smart idea for a hooky, book-ready blog about penny-pinching in a downturn, chaps—the real mint will surely be the Significant Objects blog itself.

The Walker Art Center produces a pamphlet series called “A Labor of Gratititude,” after Lewis Hyde’s concept from The Gift. Emmet Byrne writes,

Four pamphlets dedicated to four people who for some reason or another had failed to be heard, or had been overshadowed, or had been unsuccessful in their ambitions, but had nonetheless given us inspiration. Michael Chang: the youngest male tennis player to ever win a Grand Slam championship, never to win again. Michael Collins: the third, relatively unknown astronaut of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. Anaïs Nin: an obscure literary figure for most of her life, only later receiving widespread attention. And Levi Eshkol, the progressive prime minister of Israel who delivered a passionate but disastrously stuttered radio address and then died shortly thereafter. The four pamphlets were bound together and were also distributed individually to coffee shops.

Touching, lovely, and now circulating gracefully in Minneapolis.

Hal recommends you read this article on newspapers, gift economies, bloggers, and the problem of “free.”

Regift is a show curated by artist and writer John Miller and opening at the Swiss Insitute in New York on February 18th. With some of my favorite artists including Sophie Calle, Trisha Donnelly, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Dan Graham, Louise Lawler, Allen McCollum, Lawrence Weiner, and many more, this show is one I’m very much looking forward to checking out. The press release includes an invitation to participate in a project by Berlin-based artist Maria Eichhorn. It reads: “[Eichhorn] will initiate an exchange of recycled gifts. For this, we are requesting submissions from the public, the Swiss Institute staff, and participants in the exhibition. Eichhorn asks that each submission meet these criteria: 1) The gift shall have been given to the participant. 2) The gift shall not have been used. 3) The gift shall be re-wrapped. 4) The gift shall be exchanged with another participant. Please send or drop off your gift before January 24 2009 [info here].” The gifts will be on view through the end of the exhibition on April 4th at which point they will be exchanged by participants in Eichhorn’s project. Let’s Regift!