Summary presentation Rudi Laermans SOS Relief Webinar 26/06/21 (Flemish sociologist, professor at the KU Leuven, and an active participant in SOS Relief)

1. - ‘the capitalist context’: money as medium to express solidarity = give, share, redistribute… money formally or informally, anonymously or personally - danger that within a formal-anonymous setting the link money-solidarity gets lost, see welfare state - SOS Relief combined minimal formal organisation (i.e., coordinating function) with personalized giving to someone with whom one has no personal relationship

2. - art = monetary economy + symbolic economy = economy of gift and counter-gift (Mauss), cfr. collaboration, live relation artists-audience (role of applause) - SOS Relief = monetarization of the primarily symbolic gift economy in the relation artists-audience

3. - SOS Relief = elimination of the intermediary role of ‘institutions’ in art’s monetary economy: need and, if so, ways to re-articulate this more structurally? - note the monetary-symbolic role of the voluntary tip in the service economy (though to a lesser extent in cashless times)

4. - the long-term perspective: SOS Relief = relieving conjunctural ‘surplus-precarity’ vs. structural precarity in the arts - hence going for institutionalization, e.g. via co-op?