Confronting the Comfort of Corporate Sponsorship - Open Discussion

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Red Channels

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Sep 5, 2011, 6:59:07 PM9/5/11

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Confronting the Comfort of Corporate Sponsorship
- Open Discussion

Comrades,
Let's talk!

Time: Wednesday, September 14; 7.30pm
Location: ABC No Rio, 156 Rivington Street, New York, NY

Event on Facebook: here

A multinational car corporation and a multinatinal art institution partner to provide “a community center” and a “public gathering space” for radical politics, culture and arts in the Lower East Side / East Village New York:

“…The theme of the Lab’s first two-year cycle is Confronting Comfort—exploring notions of individual and collective comfort and the urgent need for environmental and social responsibility…Part urban think tank, part community center and public gathering space, the Lab is conceived to inspire public discourse in cities around the world …The public is invited to attend and to participate in free programs and experiments at the Lab…”
BMW Guggenheim Lab

The calendar of the BMW Guggenheim lab offers a wide spectrum of events with radical content: The NY Leftover Bailout: Squatting time Sit-In ; screening of The Take by Naomi Klein, The Garden by Don Normak, The Starlite Project: We Came to Sweat by Kate Kunath and Sasha Wortzel; Beyond Segrification: Models for Equal Glocalization, Sustainism as the New Modernism?, Saskia Sassen: Talking back to your Intelligent City (...)

“So are we to assume that corporate culture doesn’t suck because it is giving us access to things we once started and now can’t afford to maintain: bike shops, print shops, recording studios, experimental art spaces, etc? But what happens when the marketers have moved on to the next marketing methodology and we are left without their infrastructure, or ours?”
Dara Greenwald, Does Corporate Culture STILL Suck?

Red Channels invites everybody to an open discussion on corporate sponsorship for radical initiaitives and its implications for DIY culture in New York. We want to examine the specific example of the BMW Guggenheim Lab and at the same time analyze it within the broader context of global capitalism and current austerity measures. How can we respond to the commodification of anti-capitalist initiatives and the depoliticization of politics? How can radical spaces collaborate to confront the comfort of branded initiatives that are offering participatory and social experiences?

Join us at this event as we analyze our own entanglements in capitalist structures, refuse participation in the branded Participatory, and develop strategies of cultural struggle.

Further information:
- Official website of the BMW Guggenheim Lab
- Dara Greenwald’s critique on the BMW Guggenheim Lab "Does Corpotate Culture STILL Suck?"
- Protest against the BMW Guggenheim Lab "Gentrification is Class War. Fight Back!"