nasty business

I was half way through my fine art course at university when a new government was elected in, the arts funding was cut and quite literally over a month we lost enormous amounts of staff and resources (while still paying the same fees). We were left with not much more than our own devises to make art. And although artists are excellent at adapting, we were left unsupported and somewhat quashed.

When I heard about Orphan Works legislation that is before US Congress, it really caught my attention, and in a flash I was signing a petition to oppose it. Up till now even if everything else has been taken from our grasp, the one thing we do still have is our art.
In a nutshell, as an artist you currently own a copyright as soon as you create something. International law also supports this. But the Orphan work legislation means that you will have to register and pay fees for every work you create with a registry to keep your rights to it. It’s apparently being considered in the US and Europe.

So if you’re interested you can read more here or here, and sign the petition here.

Honestly, who comes up with this stuff?

It makes me wonder, as gallery fees and access to funding has become unreasonably expensive and difficult, more and more art has taken to the streets. Made in back alleys and on public walls, under the cover of darkness with hidden identities, street art has surged ahead. So much so that works by Banksy (for example) are now auctioned at Christies and owned by the Angelina Jollies of the world.

It shows me that you can’t kill art, art making is an essential part of humanity, but it makes me wonder what would happen if it was supported.


Meanwhile last weekend 1000 of Australia's "best and brightest brains" were invited to gather for the 2020 Summit. Basically a huge democratic workshop for the new government to listen to the ideas of “the people” for their ideal society in the year 2020. The people invited represented different streams of society.

Most of it was telecast, and I watched with bated breath as Cate Blanchett addressed the arts group during the introduction. Here are some of my favourite parts of her speech:

… not as an adjunct to, but as a fundamental aspect of society. Now we’re not wrong in claiming this fundamentality, what the human race does is create, and what makes our species unique is its ingenuity…

...They cause trouble without doing damage. They fix broken things where glue just won’t do. They spring from the very thing that binds us, and they goad us on to being so much more than we ever thought.

Now there’s this ridiculous notion out there, and has been there for a long time, that you’re either a science person or an arts person, and I hope that this summit refuses to countenance such inane and counterproductive social divisions… Science and art are siblings. Science and art are different outcomes of the same primal urge in us all to engage with, to detail, and to affect narratives and patterns.

Now a few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting President Clinton… he liked talking to artists… he said because they existed just a fraction ahead of culture… he said he always read the latest airport novels, spy thrillers, unpublished manuscripts, unpublished screenplays because writers were often right on the money where the technology and ideology, a lethal combination, were heading. He listened assiduously to music coming up from the streets, because he knew that those people knew their audience’s needs and wants.

…We’re here today to think beyond our current practices, and beyond our current needs. We’re here to imagine the best possible society in 2020, and then reverse engineer our way back from there to some broad sustainable policy recommendations that can help those visions be realized. Now I believe much can simply be done by imagining the arts where they rightly belong, at the very heart of our society... we will all believe something today, we will all want something out of today, but it’s important to remember the bigger picture, the future…

Her full speech is well worth watching (it’s only 6 mins). It’s a feel-good one.