[spectre] // The State of Art //

Sat Aug 6 16:44:04 CEST 2011

The conspiracy of art is a lampoon -- and all the contrary of your
view this text could be a real hommage toward the wide

On 6 August 2011 16:25, Louise Desrenards <louise.desrenards at free.fr> wrote:
> 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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