Skip to content
Technology & Innovation —

This CSA Supports Artists Instead Of Agriculture

The same model used to bring farm-fresh produce to urban dwellers is being applied to art, with members purchasing shares and receiving works from local artists. 
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

What’s the Latest Development?

Last weekend some New York City residents saw their first harvest from a new type of community-supported organization: As shareholding members of Brooklyn Community Supported Art and Design (CSA+D), they received a select number of original works from local artists working in a range of media including watercolors and ceramics. Each artist received $3,000 for producing 50 pieces, all of which had to be relatively small — able to fit into an 18x12x12 box — to accommodate the typical apartment-dwelling, non-driving shareholder.

What’s the Big Idea?

Community-supported agriculture has been around since the 1980s, but it’s only been in the last few years that the model has been applied to other items, like seafood and flowers. Brooklyn CSA+D isn’t the first art CSA; founder Dianne Debicella borrowed the idea from a similar organization in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The benefits are the same as for other CSAs, she says: “It’s exciting for [the artists] that their work is out there with 50 different people that they don’t know.” Another share is scheduled for next month, and at least one share will take place in the spring.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com

Read it at The Atlantic Cities

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people
Related
Guest Thinkers
Happy New Year
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth). Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay. Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
Culture & Religion
Reflexive urbanism
This essay describes a model for urban development that takes into account and makes use of the externalities that exist in the built environment. Buildings and the people that inhabitat them makes neighborhoods and vice versa the value of a building is in its locations. How can better frame this relationship between an object and its environment? How can develop strategies for a integral area development that learn from the best global examples?
Up Next