From Fluxus to Event Marketing
From Fluxus to Event Marketing in Swedish

Karin Hansson is project co-ordinator for Bäst före http://www.art.a se/best_before

Description: Artist in new media
Purpose: To grow
Content: The activity of the collective unconscious
Technique: Anything goes
Price: 1600 skr\hour
Context: Lunch meeting with PR strategist

I know that he has not turned thirty yet but it is easy to forget once you sit face to face with this self-assured careerist. One of the Stenbeck strain, American trained. He orders efficiently and our luncheon is quickly and discretly served. The food is well acompanied by an extensive view of the city. We sit high above the crowd at Slussen.

-So tell me about some of your exciting art projects. What was it now... some immigrant at the Moderna Museet?

-Not an immigrant, a union representative. But nothing ever happened. It was considered to be too far from the subject.

-To bad, it was a magnificent idea to exhibit the union at a museum, that's exactly where it belongs. Those are the kind of ideas we need, something that makes people stop and think. As I said earlier, we're moving into a new building this spring, and it is so tiresome with these environmentally correct Room-furnishings everybodies using nowadays. We'd like something fresher, more radical. An installation; that would be something. What do you think your union representative charges per hour?

- He's unemployed.

- He's unemployed? Good! That's even better. A true son of the people, and probably cheap to boot. Do you think he has any friends? It would look good with a crowd. Yeah, maybe not every day, but on Fridays or something. You wouldn't believe what it's like in the media business, people are bending over backwards to be innovative but they always end up doing the same things and they're all still dressed in black. We need some real art, people like you who do some really flipped-out stuff. It's not easy getting media coverage, as you well know. It takes at least one Don Juan with HIV or a pedophile taking advantage of some soap star to get any kind of effect. By the way, wasn't that guy on Robinson an artist? Brilliant, you don't happen to know the name of his agent? But pedophiles are old news, and everything is being overshadowed right now by NATO's PR-apparatus. It would be better with some kind of war victim. You don't happen to know any Kosovo Albaniens, do you?

On the way to my next meeting I am still thinking about the agent question. Perhaps I should change professions and become an agent for artists? Unforeseen happenings to the highest bidder!

That I continue to call myself an artist is just for lack of a better definition. It gives me the freedom to study the world in my own way. When Åsa Andersson and I started [a:t] Association for Temporary Art in 1995 the purpose, among other things, was to take a closer look at the hyped-up information market. The method to create artistic exchange by placing artists within various IT companies was timely, and justifying art through its applicability in the development of new media was as popular then as it is now. We believed in this, and our need to prove the usefulness of our own existence was great - even outside the art world's secure framework.

Several years have gone by and I am a few experiences richer. I am still not completely disillusioned but pretty tired of the focus on utility. In the long run, utility must inevitably lead to profitability. My longing for the unexploited, the nonfunctional is growing. And one thing is for sure...if I find it first, I'll be rich.

Translation by Melinda Bergman