Criptic Critic Conscience and Known for it

Thursday, December 18, 2014

You are not the radical avant-garde! You are the mainstream, you are the standards that the status -quo has demanded. Wake up State Paid Artists! Get over it and on to it. You have been afforded great powers, use them or like arts everywhere, see your self out of a job at our collective expense.


" - being paid by the state to make art that couldn't sell. And, because it's totally isolated from the market, simply doesn't change. "

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  • Rob McLeod Shit? Why aren't they paying me?
    Like · Reply · 14 hrs

  • Roger Boyce Thank dog they aren't.
    Like · Reply · 2 · 14 hrs

  • Matt Blomeley Dave Hickey. Nice.
    Like · Reply · 1 · 13 hrs

  • David Alsop From Kathryn Ryan's interview ?
    Like · Reply · 13 hrs

  • Matt Blomeley Ten or so years ago. Several links online - here's one http://www.laalamedapress.com/davehickey.html
    Like · Reply · 13 hrs

  • Brit Bunkley This is a particularly American sentiment, and why, in my opinion that US influence has been eclipsed by other nations. State funding is frowned upon in the USA in arts (as in everything else except “defence”) and only was initially enacted through the cold war as a form of defence spending – the US had as of stats in 2005...with spending .2 of GDP, as compared to .14% in NZ and Australia and .47% in Finland. A bit misleading since states kick in a bit but it is still off the charts as being the lowest by far of developed nations.
    Like · Reply · 1 hr · Edited

    • Roger Boyce I thought the Hickey quote might be seen, by some, as politically reactionary and as a monotonic paean to market forces. But I think the subtext is more nuanced than that. Public funding for the arts is typically via committee-think. And deeply wedded to status quo supporters - or in thrall to audience predicates and expectations. Those shapers of giving (and withholding) of public support tends to shape the arts in ways I've seen to be counterproductive ( or, better yet, counter-revolutionary). On the other hand with the dramatic up-tick in wealth disparity and with a new Belle Époque (on steroids) demanding high-production-value spectacle we, the artworlders, find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. But given the choice of publicly funded, squalid, puritanical, anti-aesthetic ( stud walls, flouro-painted pot plants, piss-stained bed sheets, various op-shop and domestic midden heaps piled in clean well lit spaces) installations or Rococo meringues fit for modern day Versailles I'll take Versailles every time. Working class roots elitist that I am.
      Like · 56 mins

    • Brit Bunkley You have no argument here, as a latent anarcho-syndicalist that the state often gets it wrong and that committees are wedded to nationalism, nepotism and other factors that remain unchecked and have little to do with art. But I believe that it is good to have both for now. The market, outside of the 1% gives us big eyed children paintings wheres public art (not the misguided public art that blotches our cities) give us Simon Starling exhibitions and the Biennale of Sydney.
      Like · 24 mins

    • Roger Boyce I appreciated Starling's Autoxylopyrocycloboros. But is his work supported primarily by public dollars or a combination of dirty and virtuous gelt?
      Like · 22 mins

    • Wells Tao what a lot of misdriection a salary affords! If State paid artists would just get over themselves and get on with the JOB they are employed to do, Democratic propaganda! YES OK... it is actually an important job and all this self analysis is really beside the point.
      Like · 17 mins

    • Brit Bunkley I'd wager its a combination of dirty and virtuous gelt - some public.
      Like · 15 mins

    • Wells Tao That Market isolation is carefully created! IDIOTS You are suppose to promote your finicail ties to the state so that the state can critique society. The hiss and wine of State funded teachers is little more than neo-liberal flatuance from 25 years of self satisfying silence! Selfish bastards!
      Like · 10 mins

    • Roger Boyce Sour fucking grapes, I'd guess, Mr. Wells. My opinions pre-date, and have survived, my salary-man status. I teach and generally propound the same shite in and out of the institution ... which is probably why I have at least one grim 'meeting' a year with an 'overlord'. BTW: I make almost as much $$$ ($ not afraid of the term) from art production as I do from my salary. And I try to teach my students how to negotiate the somewhat puritanical world of public and the wild west world of private art markets. The best of my students are managing just fine...with and without the ballast of virtue, theory, or obligation to any sort of intellectual construct. A cat may look at a king.
      Like · 10 mins

    • Wells Tao You and almost every other "company man" can be pickled with that same self righteous CV.
      Like · 9 mins

    • Wells Tao You are not the radical avant-garde! You are the mainstream, you are the standards that the status -quo has demanded. Wake up! Get over it and on to it. You have been afforded great powers, use them or like arts everywhere, see your self out of a job at our collective expense.
      Like · 6 mins · Edited
       
    • Roger Boyce Translation please. I can't hear you for the professional jealousy and resentment. I hardly claim to be the "radical avant-garde" ha ha ha ha (particularly since anyone, off-island, at least, understands the avant-garde is well and truly dead). As for company man - I am indeed a salary man, as I said earlier in the thread. And will use the green paper I'm paid to cushion the floor of my cage. Considering all these institutions (including the fictive, free-floating therapeutic institution you repute to represent) will soon be pre-history. The pre-history of the neo-barbarism to come. I hardly think it worth bothering with ideas of earnestness, self-righteousness, virtue, corruption, etc. We are all collectively fucked. The best we can do is to fertilize what is to come with the phosphorous and nitrate from our collectively composting corpses. I've never given one hot shit for what I'm supposed to do ("suppose to promote your finicail ties to the state so that the state can critique society."). I do what's expedient, and of the moment, situationally. And at the moment I'd suggest the expedient course is to get while the getting's good and 'promoting my financial ties to the state' is so far down my to-do list, I can't even see it. I understand it is your idée fixe ... but that sort of johnny-one-note virtuous mine-canary shite's a little late, young son. There's been a funeral and memorial for the canary and the mine's pert near flooded - with water and methane - so I'd suggest you start stealing some of the mine's shoring-timber and make thyself a raft - instead of wasting you energy and time critiquing the building of rafts. A cat can look at a king.
      Like · 36 mins

    • Wells Tao nice, cute even. And apart from a confession/ submission to guilt, entirely spin!. It's not about you Roger! Or even me, these ideas are larger than both of us.
      Like · 32 mins

    • Brit Bunkley Just out of curiosity, who do you consider the avant-garde and what is it? interesting debate.
      Like · 28 mins

    • Wells Tao again with the misdirection.
      Like · 27 mins

    • Brit Bunkley What do you mean?
      Like · 27 mins

    • Brit Bunkley Wells how do you support yourself?
      Like · 26 mins

    • Wells Tao I used the term in a broad historical way, we could nit pick eternity on the definition of terms.
      Like · 26 mins

    • Roger Boyce "these ideas are larger than both of us." spare me the neo-adolescent appeals to non-existent (never actually existed) virtue. These all important ideas you chronically bleat about are about to die with is. Which will be sooner than most of us think. As far as I'm concerned it actually IS all about me. The world began with my first breath and will end with my death rattle. History, posterity, be damned. I care mostly for the natural world .... and once it shakes us off like head-lice I reckon it will be just fine. Albeit different.
      Like · 25 mins

    • Brit Bunkley no nit picking - what is your definition? And who in your opinion makes up the avant-garde?
      Like · 25 mins

    • Wells Tao Gardening, child care
      Like · 25 mins

    • Roger Boyce Now you're making sense, young son.
      Like · 24 mins

    • Wells Tao Seriously Brit, another time and place. Not here. You are one of the State Academics I am critzising right? So my statement above sizzles right? Well the point is that you are the status quo's standards, yoiu up keep them with your teaching your marking, your social cool chat being.. (;)) what is "avant-garde" is a point of endless posturing. I used the term to refer to an unknown critical entity.
      Like · 22 mins

    • Brit Bunkley I moved furniture for many years and photography (in my own "businesses" in NYC)... but I don't have any gripes with publicly education in itself... and as you knwo have never been silent -neither has Roger.
      Like · 22 mins

    • Wells Tao Well I would like to argue about that! The specific quality of silence around state paid art! Yes please
      Like · 20 mins

    • Brit Bunkley I don't knwo what you mean " specific quality of silence around state paid art "
      Like · 19 mins

    • Brit Bunkley Gotta go and weed wack...later.
      Like · 19 mins

    • Wells Tao sure, no time limit on this. I'll just drop this one, You both claim to be not silent about your position as State employees, but in the promotion of your work how important is it that the public know that the work you make as a condition of your employment, KNOW that you are working for them. Paid by the public to make art?
      Like · 16 mins

    • Roger Boyce I think Brit has 'retired' from teaching. Unless I'm wrong? Nothing young Tao says about my wage-slavery "sizzles" (ha ha ha ha ha ha ha) as I know just what I'm doing, and what I was doing, when I first got into teaching. I'm in it for the $$$ although I do generally enjoy teaching and try to do right by my charges - by teaching them how to practically negotiate the artworld's realities ... rather than its fictive theories. "State paid art" ha ha ha ha ha... how can one respond to that red-herring with anything approaching seriousness. I guess if I was on the benefit I could be accused as well of making "state paid art". I have to go to ... and make some "state paid art" I'm going to piss myself from laughing, otherwise. Be well Brit and Tao.
      Like · 14 mins

    • Wells Tao It's a rhetorical question becaue I know by your actions that you can proclaim "caring' but as a group, state paid artists make work and no one knows that they are paying for it. I know this because in the brief opportunity I was given to make art as a state paid artist (as a beneficiary), where I actively promoted my financial base, we were immediately engaged with some of the most pressing issues of the day, at a national level and IN COURT battling out definitions of individual rights vs institutional abuses etc etc.. We even won, with no legal support, against TEAMS of state paid lawyers,
      Like · 7 mins · Edited

    • Wells Tao Now if you were doing your job, ie a lot more instances of people exposing their publi economic base in their art making there would be a very different context/ argument in existence. Now I have a lot of ideas and experience about exactly why this is so, I understand the impossible position 'employees' are put in, I simply am trying to find a way through this. As obviously this applies to a great number of people.
      Like · 8 mins
       

    • Wells Tao "State paid art" funny, cause it's uncomfortably true. NZ universities are State funded. And the art you make is part of your job.
      Like · 39 mins

    • Wells Tao As for this arguments lack of traction. I'd accept that my particular contribution hasn't been very simple, I have many other concerns to address. I think that the arguments lack of acceptance on behalf of those it critisises is hardly surprising. And as the argument is linked so seriously to many societal development conumdurms, I haven't felt the need to 'rush' or 'get results" as Roger and I'd say many others would like to measure me by. There is a certain effortlessness to the arguements logic that affords me some breaze.
      Like · Just now · Edited
       
    • Wells Tao However, the nature of the "Academic Art Fraud" argument has been I believe been sucesfully designed as a type of fish hook, there is no way around it, and engaging with it only further necesitates engageing with it.
      Like · 10 mins

    • Wells Tao As for actual traction, as far as I am aware, Massey University mysterioulsy added to its job contracts, since my efforts, a clause referring to the legal argument ot "accepting a role as critic and conscience of society". There has also been a nationwide conferenceby one of the unions representing University staff on this specific clause, since my agitiation. Last year I tried to publicise the idea in an ad in Art New Zealand, but at the last minute had my show mysteriously cancelled. And with any luck I'll get to publish internationally on the idea very soon thanks to shifting circumstances. Plus, NO ONE, despite engaging with a fair number of Artists employed by universities has dis-proved the assertion. In fact the consistent style and content of the rebuttle suggest little more that an accumlation of unexamined habbits, simply being exposed for what they are.
      Like · Just now · Edited

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