[spectre] // The State of Art //

[Louise Desrenards]

Hi!
Sorry but you are making a use of Baudrillard to contribute to your
thesis but from a misunderstanding about him and about his text.

Baudrillard has not written The conspiracy of Art from a reformist
point of view nor from economic point of view, but as an act of
critical art -- of critical active poetry itself -- walking itself as
entropy into the contemporary. It is a symbolic challenge. It does not
concerns --in nothing-- your subject.

(Same misunderstanding than about Forget Foucault)

Best



On 6 August 2011 16:04, Julian Oliver <julian at julianoliver.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>
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