One December day, when the sun didn’t reach above the treetops, and the nights quietly grew even longer, the latest issue of Konstnären (“The Artist”, journal of the Swedish Artists’ Association) landed in my letterbox. In it, I found a piece by editor-in-chief Robert Stasinski, in dialogue with New York-based artist/writer/activist Gregory Sholette. The text evolves around an idea, put forth by Sholette in his book Dark Matter (2010); in the interview, he talks about “the accepted surplus of informal, dissident, and failed art producers”, sustaining themselves by working in other professions. As such, they constitute a “hidden mass”, which is “absolutely essential to the basic function of contemporary art”… Sholette’s suggestion is to “give this shadow-diversity of creative work the exceptional status of dark matter”.

NASA’s website informs me that dark matter, together with dark energy, makes up for 95% of the Universe we know; and that the dark matter freely lets the light through, seemingly without reflecting or absorbing it, or radiating any of its own.

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Hereby, I proudly declare myself an Elementary Particle of the Dark Matter of Art.