How to reclaim the economy using artistic means: the case of Company Drinks

The chapter proposes a critical and practical approach towards acknowledging that most artists not only support their practices through a diverse range of incomes and support systems, but that an increasing number of artists conceptualize and enact artistic practices which resist the extreme commodification of mainstream arts, and are creating new plausible art worlds based on the concept of usership versus the conventional and dominant model of spectatorship. These new art worlds reorganize the relationships between art and everyday cultures, and are thus reorganizing their economic underpinnings and interrelationships. To illustrate such a practice the authors use Company Drinks, an East London based community-led drinks enterprise which is also art whilst re-claiming the different meanings of the word company. Company Drinks also hosts the Centre for Plausible Economies, which was set up by the authors Kathrin Böhm and Kuba Szreder in order to map and re-imagine economic systems in the arts and beyond.