VARA

"(...)It would be tempting to conclude that what the manifesto was for the avant-garde,  the artist agreement/contract was for conceptual art(...)

The genealogy of the manifesto in the arts can be traced back to political proclamations – documents which put forth an agenda of certain political programs and goals. This is not surprising as artists and intellectuals have been increasingly involved in political affairs since the 19th century. Agitating for political/artistic claims was therefore a natural process embraced by avant-garde artists who arguably inaugurated the use of manifestos in the arts. Art manifestos have become so important that the avant-garde was canonized largely relying on the self-identification scriptural practices of different artistic groups expressing their programs and goals. For example, Alfred Barr’s famous 1936 diagram for the MoMA exhibition “Cubism and Abstract Art,” which presented the development of modern art in the West, singled out several early modernist and avant-garde movements, at least half of which were self-identified groups around their respective manifestos.
Even though they were developed from the rhetoric of social and political agitation, the proclamations espoused in art manifestos have been largely embraced by the art world – perhaps as a consequence of their straightforward way of address. Indeed, art manifestos have come to be more commonly perceived as art ephemera or as art works in and of themselves, rather than operative ideas to be put into practice in order to achieve certain goals. To be sure the manifesto reflects individual or group agendas of what the art world and even the world is and what it should become, often using agitational rhetoric to prescribe future developments. 
Approximately at the same time as the art manifesto emerged, a different type of textual promotion of artistic practices arose in the context of the Russian avant-garde. In line with the ideals of the 1917 Russian revolution, Kazimir Malevich drafted one of the earliest documents dealing with artists rights entitled “Deklaratsiya prav khudozhnika: Zhizn’ khudozhnika” (Artists Rights Declaration: The Artist’s Life) published in Anarchya (Anarchy) in June 1918. Oriented towards art as labor and artists as workers, Malevich’s text defines artistic practice in the context of the legal and economic frameworks at play after the art work leaves the possession of its producer. This type of agreement, even though in many ways similarly utopian in its goals as the art manifesto, was nonetheless grounded in a
legal rhetoric. "