Al's comments on "What we want is free"

Some thoughts on What We Want Is Free after our discussion

Gift-based practice uses the idea of an artwork to frame an alternate organization of social relations and resources.

The "resource space" might be negligible (how important will a few weeks of bus service to the city really be) but the "idea space" is meant to be transformational (it suggests a change in social priorities).

This would be the difference between social work and social art.

Growing hothouse tomatoes for the hospice has a conceptual twist to it which gets people talking, wondering. The project has elements of incomprehensibility and conceptual complexity to it that gets us talking and wondering.

The real gift is a foregrounding of a possibility ˆ the free frame of reference Peter Coyote describes - which has always been present.