"Enoughness"

I tend to keep a lot of tabs open on my browser - lots of unread articles that I plan to finish, lots of ideas that catch my attention. Too often those get lost when the thing crashes, or maybe they get chucked in the Facebook stream and never thought of again. By keeping them open, I am trying to keep mulling them over. They belong here. I'll try to be better about posting.

Abigail Satinsky's April 3, 2014, essay on Art Practical (Appropriate Technologies) is one of those things...while I don't share Satinsky's enthusiasm for subscription-based marketing, I was taken by an idea she addresses early in the piece:

appropriate technologies [is] a term coined by the Buddhist economist E.F. Schumacher in his book Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered, first published in 1973. Schumacher calls for economic solutions to globalization that are founded on principles of self-empowerment, self-reliance and decentralization, and local control. He advocates for decentralized working methods, or “smallness within bigness,” in which interrelated but autonomous units work together toward a greater goal. Furthermore, he presents the philosophy of “enoughness,” a Buddhist approach to economics that advocates for self-sufficiency: producing from local resources for local needs at a modest scale, appropriate for a balanced life.

What attracts me to this is the notion of 'enoughness' - an idea almost completely foreign to contemporary American thought. Perhaps inspired by James Elkins' musings on the 'average, normal, mediocre artist', I've been reflecting on what a realistic life in the arts looks like and why it seems not to be enough for so many people who insist that the market is 'too small' or too 'artist-centered.'

In a funny way, it also reminded me of seeing Gerry Lenfest speak at Temple University a few weeks ago, and hearing him mention how the sale of his cable company gave him "enough" money to be philanthropic.