[spectre] // The State of Art //

[Julian Oliver]

Hi Mattyo,

Thanks for your comments, that was a good read. 

For what it's worth I myself am not European. I'm a European resident from New
Zealand. There we have very little arts funding. Students often come out of
university degrees with 30-40k loans, artist fees are very rare and exhibiting
in galleries is only free if you are well known, in almost all cases. 

I've also travelled extensively and have lived in Australia, in East and West
Europe and also spent plenty of time in the United States. Many on this list
will be the same I think; part of doing what we do requires travel and taking
residencies and work abroad. We're all old hands at it..

Based on my experiences I most certainly don't think the New World offers a
better model in general and my text doesn't express that. Artists I know in
America are some of the hardest working I've ever met, often having a full time
day job while still managing to produce incredible work. Several media artists
I know in the U.S work in advertising, or as software engineers, for instance.
As regards crowd-sourcing, while a fan I am also wary of it, not least in that
the Right is ever quick to cast crowd-sourcing in a patriotic light while
washing their hands of a need to support the arts directly. Corporate
sponsorship and funding is also problematic, for a great many reasons.

I am very interested in artist's relationship to money in their given political
and economic context. I see money as a root, steering power in the movements,
creative directions and choices artists make. Money has us moving countries,
rationalising our work, making it more acceptable to reach a 'broader audience'
or positioning it as an 'answer' to a funding call.  We're terrified of money,
if only for the fear of not having it. Funding calls and awards have us
competing with each other to get it, maldistributing it in our favour. I
compete against other artists for funding myself. I love receiving funding but
am not shy of discussing its deep impact on my work, how I feel about it, how I
make and distribute it. 

I am interested also in the differences between corporate, community and state
arts funding, as felt by the artist in relation to their work by way of a
natural desire to 'please' the funder. This pleasing expresses a power relation
and takes different forms: corporate (brand bolstering, corporation as public
good), community (popularity contest, utility) or state (cultural tourism,
stimulation of new markets etc). 

Funding calls are made, and we dance to the tune. Of course we do. At worst we
may even read a CFP and invent a project to fit that call in an attempt to win
the money; great new work can come out of this too. Here the CFP is akin to
inspiration. Funding has us positioning our work in an economic and strategic
frame and we feel rewarded and even valued when we are funded. In this way,
funding expresses a teleology, one endemic to the arts today.

In New Zealand the state is not considered a reliable partner of the arts. It's
a non-committal, occasional, unreliable source of these rare numbers we call
money.  Festivals, publications and media-labs really do run on extremely
little funding, if at all. In Australia the situation is much better but there
is always (at least in the 6 years I lived there) a felt instability; it could
always be cut in half with a change of government or simply disappear in a
snap. To build a 'career' as an artist is a felt risk whereas in some European
countries there is even a sort of social welfare for artists, something still
miraculous to me. These differences are important.  In the 7 years I've lived
in Europe, I've seen a root, accepted understanding that culture is funded and
that it should and always will be, a wonderful thing indeed. This is expressed
in the shock and surprise at the Dutch cuts. Such a thing was clearly simply
unimaginable for many, as though the sun had turned off.

Unlike painting, drawing or even musical production, the expense and complexity
of media art binds it closely with money, a vital organ. Because of this money
further sets the frame in which media art is developed, impacting the kind of
work we make, the risks we take.

If the risks we wish to take are political in nature, funding is itself
consequential.  When we make work that offends the state (as I have) one faces
the law, perhaps even citizenship may be called to question. When we offend the
corporation our work may be positioned as libel. When we offend the community
we offend our peers.  These borders are symptomatic of funding itself and are
widely and keenly felt by artists, I believe. We work with them in mind.

Interestingly, because the contemporary art market situates works as a capital
commodity the 'radical' is already anticipated and cast into capital value. In
this way the market absorbs and quarantines transformative potential, keeping
it safe by deferring it to commentary. "It's just art", people say, expecting
the radical in display. Baudrillard's excellent 'The Conspiracy of Art' details
this problem.

For many media artists the economic and political simplicity of positioning
one's work as a capital commodity is increasingly attractive and will become
more so as state funding is increasingly cut, here in the EU.

Cheers,

-- 
Julian Oliver
http://julianoliver.com