It's one of the reasons we've designed Founder Collective around the seed stage of funding.
Located above the trendy Japanese restaurant Morimoto in Center City, the gallery regularly invites art collectives from around the world to collaborate on large-scale projects.
And they in turn invited more than 70 independent art spaces, nonprofit organizations and artists' collectives from around the world to create a festival of sorts, with performances, music, film and installations.
There are small-scale festivals; there have been major installations such as the Barbican's excellent Game On exhibition in 2002, and there are several video game hubs and shared working collectives dotted around the country.
But the paradigm I'm putting some hope in is one that briefly came into view in June when the nonprofit X Initiative in Chelsea hosted "No Soul for Sale: A Festival of Independents," a four-day jamboree of artist collectives from around the world.
Founded by visual artist Swoon and members of art collectives from around the country, Swimming Cities began in 2006 as the Miss Rockaway Armada, three scrap rafts that floated down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to New Orleans, treating towns along the way to a sort of punk-vaudeville musical theater medicine show.
"In these darkest of hours cricket puts its collective arms around the Hughes family.
When his large, athletic frame appeared on the touchline against Germany with England 4-1 down, you could almost hear the collective groan around the country.
The next lot were mall builders, who came to be known as the Millstones because they were a collective weight around the neck of the public.
There was clearly a collective euphoria around the success of the British athletes, but for that to happen there needs to be a common, unifying cause that compels people to care in the first place.
