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regarding survival : questions 7-9
The last three of the Oliveros questions:
How do we get them to fund us?
I'm presuming that "them" here means government institutions, corporations, etc. A government that's spent sixty billion dollars on missile defense programs over the past twenty years might appear to be the proverbial fool easily parted from its money, but I know that poetry doesn't have the cultural cachet of weapon technologies, and I'm not going to pretend that that can easily be changed.
Corporations may be easier, as there is some degree of interlock between an institutional emphasis on innovation and novelty and an institutional desire to finance artistic experimentation; in Wednesday's post I pointed out that many corporations are indeed currently financing the investigations of a sizable number of cultural producers. I have no idea, however, how to compel them to do more of this kind of work.
There's an entire set of caveats that circulate around any kind of artist-patron relationship, of course. I would stop short of saying that all artist-patron relationships are inevitably compromised, but in our attempts to increase the amount of funding that "we" receive from "them" we need to remember that safeguarding artistic integrity is equally important. We do not want to find ourselves in a situation similar to that which reportedly is currently afflicting the "hard" sciences, a situation where work with obvious commerical application receives funding while "pure" research tends to languish.
How could we strengthen our position in the social fabric of our country?
I am not certain that this is either possible or desirable. The problem with the "strong positions in the social fabric" is that those positions bring with them substantial secondary rewards (power, celebrity, wealth) and thus attract people to them who desire the secondary rewards over the rewards of inherent in doing the work. (This is, I would argue, why so many young people want to be doctors or lawyers.) I write or make sounds primarily because I enjoy the process of doing so, and I feel like this is the way it should be. People who make art primarily because they want to be famous or rich generally make bad art (which does not necessarily prevent them from getting famous and rich). There is enough of this happening already: strengthening our position in the social fabric is likely to exacerbate this problem.
Who do we need to speak to or wake up?
I agree with DB when he writes about the elitist assumptions inherent in the phrase "wake up," so I'll be focusing more on to other half, the question of "who do we need to speak to?" And my primary answer is that we need to speak to one another. I believe that increased communication between artists is good for art.
Artists are commonly chided by insiders and outsiders alike for being insular, or courting "inaccessibility"—for writing poetry that mostly appeals to other poets, or music that mostly appeals to other musicians, etc. But I don't think that this is a bad thing. The main audience for a specialized field should be other practicioners in that field. This appears to be the case in most other specialized fields: we do not, for instance, think it would be particularly virtuous for most scientists that they write their scientific articles in a language that will be accessible to the layman—I think most scientists would view this as a colossal waste of time and energy. (This is not to say that there aren't scientists who do occasionally write for a lay audience: there are, and I'm grateful that their books exist, I just think that culturally, we understand that whatever value we might get from all scientists striving to do this all the time would not match the value that we get from scientists speaking to one another in their own specialized language.)
We need to interact more, support one another's events more, buy one another's work more. And I think the kind of dialogue that takes place on and between poetry blogs is a very healthy sign. Labels: personal |
