What is maintenance art?
In 1969 the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles typed a four-page Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!. It divides the world into two systems: development and maintenance. Then it asks why culture honours the first and ignores the second. Ukeles went on to spend decades as the unsalaried artist-in-residence of the New York City Department of Sanitation. In Touch Sanitation (1979–80) she shook hands with 8,500 sanitation workers and thanked each of them for keeping the city alive.
This site asks WordPress and open source projects Ukeles’ question. It’s here to make maintenance more visible and to get maintainers thanked, credited, and compensated.
Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!
How I got here
I was taken with Stewart Brand’s early drafts of what is now Maintenance: Of Everything, the first volume of a planned three. Its opening chapter, “The Maintenance Race,” retells the 1968 Golden Globe solo yacht race around the world through three sailors and the way each kept his boat going. Robin Knox-Johnston dealt with problems as they came and won the race. Donald Crowhurst hoped for the best, faked his position, and never came home. Bernard Moitessier prepared for the worst, then skipped the finish line and kept sailing.
I wrote about the race and its maintenance styles for Post Status. Then I took Ukeles to PHP and WordPress for 24 Days in December, where deprecations and backward compatibility are maintenance by another name. I carried the idea into a piece on PHP 8.2 for iThemes, which has since been replaced on its site; the link below goes to the archived original.
Elsewhere
- Lessons in Maintenance: Maintenance Styles That Can Lead You to Victory, Liberate, or Kill You (Post Status)
- Maintenance Art (24 Days in December)
- PHP 8.2: What Does it Mean for WordPress, Plugins, and Developers? (iThemes, archived)
For more to read, see the Blogroll and the Bibliography.