Anthony Davies

Wealth of Negations, Please Take Generously. (The past: domestic violence. The present: anxiety attack. The future: desertion, mutiny or more of the same?) Nothing is going right. Place your bets), Utopian Pulse-Flares in the Darkroom at Secession, Vienna, 2014. [1]

Anthony Davies (b 1965) is a London based writer, independent researcher and organiser, currently working in the Fine Art department at Central Saint Martins College, and with the Wealth of Negations group, coordinating communications for the migrant-led Cleaners & Allied Independent Workers Union (CAIWU).

As a writer on art, politics and economics Davies has published in numerous journals. In the late 1990s, along with Simon Ford, he developed a series of critical debates on young British art (yBa) and the Creative Industries, introducing the dystopian figure of the cultural entrepreneur or ‘Culturepreneur’. This was followed by a series of articles in Mute Magazine on the neoliberal transformation of cultural and educational institutions and later texts including "There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised Parts 1 & 2", co-written with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen, can be found in various publications.

In addition to Wealth of Negations, Davies is also a founder member of MayDay Rooms (2011-2016), an educational charity based in London and set up as a safe haven for historical material linked to social movements and experimental culture. He has co-organised or participated in a range of self-organised initiatives including Posterstudio, Infopool, Copenhagen Free University, Flaxman Lodge, The School of Walls and Space [2], social-crisis-social, Rosa Kerosene and 10th Floor. More recently, with James Stevens and Reverso, he set up a DIY wireless communications and self-archiving platform with autonomous cultural spaces in the Peripheries/Favelas and Workers Occupied Houses of São Paulo, Brazil - culminating in a series of events Distributed Spaces 1-5 and Vagabundo Social, an online international forum over the period 2020-2022.

Publications

• "Art Capital" (with Simon Ford), Art Monthly 213, February 1998, pp 1-4. [3]

• "Art Futures" (with Simon Ford), Art Monthly 223, February 1999, pp 9-11.

• "Art Networks. Fin-de-siècle" (with Simon Ford), March 2000.

• "Culture Clubs" (with Simon Ford), Mute 1:18, London, September 2000, pp 23-24.

• "The Surge to Merge Culture with the Economy", Copenhagen Free University 3, Copenhagen, September 2001, 20 pp, PDF.

• "Basic Instinct: Trauma and Retrenchment 2000-4", Mute 1:29, London, Februar 2005.

• "Take Me I'm Yours: Neoliberalising the Cultural Institution", Mute 2:5, April 2007. [4]

• "There is No Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised" (TINA1; with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen), June 2005.

• "There is No Alternative: The Future is (Self-)Organised. Part 2" (with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen), February 2012.

• Terms and Conditions: Welfare Edition, London: Wealth of Negations, March 2012, 46 pp.

• Terms and Conditions: Management Edition, London: Wealth of Negations, March 2013, 51 pp.

Links

• Wealth of Negations

• Vagabondo Social, [5]