Volunteers and Great Art
From The Star And Shadow Cinema Wiki
Here is a question being posed by the Arts Council, for a conference on @4th March. Christo has been invited to be on a panel, but would like to come with the mixture of feelings that naturally represent the Star and Shadow's volunteers.
Amateurs and volunteers – Does someone have to get paid for great art to be worthy of public support?
Please consider writing a few thoughts down on this page or email me:
dearchristo at gmail dot com.
1. Independence from cash transactions (which imply a 'service rendered for a fee'), leaves the artist or social group free to explore their own ideas in whatever fashion they like. The terms 'amateur' or 'voluntary' are not quite sufficient to define this type of self-motivated human agency.
Really this independence means taking no handouts from the government or private invesotrs unless it is completely 'no strings attached' (and then there are questions about the ethics of the donors too) which is perhaps impossible.
If artists are to be paid for their work, then there has to be some system of value judgement going on (as in 'use/exchange'value:social, cultural, philosophical and economic), which is relative and subjective. Adding labor into the equation renders a problem, because for some reason in the UK, being an artist is still perceived as somehow getting a free ride or copping out. Products of labor which serve to critique or reflect on the world, unless they have other uses (like decoration for personal happiness and/or increasing social status), have very little market value as we understand it in the capitalist world. The state steps in here: I would say it considers artists' products of labor to be of value roughly according to the terms Mat's rant has set out. The state is however a business and has profit fantasies as well, so it wants to strike just the right balance between its subjective understanding of social value and economic value.
Naturally, when a volunteer organisation pops its head up, looking for very little money to run some awesome stuff, it represents excellent value on all levels. Personally, I am confused about this. I think it is a very good idea like mat does for governments to give money for space and resources to be used by the public, and I think the Star and Shadow represents an excellent organisational model for doing all that stuff. In fact, we are nearly self-sufficient. We are working according to a different system than the capitalist one even though we are absolutely enmeshed within it. We are creating something alternative ourselves, which relies on mutual co-operation, rather than 'volunteering' as it is more commonly understood. The S&S use of 'volunteer-run' is perhaps lazy, and we should use a different word. Volunteering suggests philanthropic donation of your time and labor for the good of something else. There is a bit of that in the S&S, I agree. But the main terms of the S&S are 'if we help one another to run a building, we can do whatever we want in it, and show what ever we want and party however we want in it' (allbeit within the laws of the land, boo hoo). We frequently try to express this to people interested in getting involved or putting something on in the S&S: S&S doesnt exist to 'serve' your vision in a philanthropic way, it exists for you to help run a space so that you can use it in whatever way you want.
It is a shame if our existence, or other 'voluntary' organisations existence as many artist run initiatives are, suggests an unfair competetive edge for funding. That is not what we are interested in. Ideally, money destined for the trident submarines, coal and nuclear power stations, military initiatives and bailing out irresponsible greedy piggy banks should be redirected towards culture (among other things!). But as it stands, funding is highly competetive, and this does not diminsh the labor value of what is being produced within the art world.
The competetive art world is a lethal place with a bad labor rights record, even though the recent £180 per day or whatever has been stipulated. As Pip and Galia Kollectiv suggest in their article 'Should Artists Struggle', money slithers through mailing lists and databases offering various public funds for those prepared to engage in worthy community issues. If one is lucky, the privilege of selling beer or becoming a bizarrely under-qualified social worker beckons, with the temptation of proper income from artistic enterprise, almost. For the unlucky, fierce competition over lowly pseudo art jobs ranging from the secretarial to the janitorial awaits. The old £180 per day deal frequently gets abused, and there is unwritten expectations in some contracts for you to do a lot more work than a single day, and other times where as an artist you feel like you are exploiting tax payers by getting £180 for 3 hours work. Very tricky, and again, subjective and relative.
Currently the state's understanding of use value is, as far as I can see, liberal, politically correct, nervous of risk, pro-community development (in fairly airy fairy terms), multicultural, and often heavily predicated towards inwards economic investment (festivals which can be advertised in Easy Jet's flight magazine and on the London-Edinurgh train. It is aimed at the middle class consumer/leisure seeker, with a very badly thought out ideal of 'accessibility' for those further down the (cultural?) poverty scale (according to the state) which tends to be deeply patronising and frequently renders the object or event pointless for everyone according to the very ideal upon which it was built. It is also hugely bureaucratic (a good thing maybe because it proves accountability, but a bad thing because it puts loads of pressure on free thinking, spontaneity and un-compromised expression). Perhaps many of the artists and organisations that are nurtured under this system acquiesce to this understanding of value, for very legitimate reasons - their need to sell their labor for some cash to survive. If you consider art as a leisure time activity, and that your need to sell your labor is reduced by your reduced desire for the products and services of the capitalist system, then a) your leisure time and ability to make/show art is increased, and b) you do not have to worry about art being your main labor-selling activity. This argument may also subliminally be inflected by the Romantic ideal of the artists suffering in the margins, up in their garrett. There is suffering but there is also freedom in that scenario.
Hell this is an extremely complex set of social, cultural and economic relations we are talking about.
What is my opinion as to whether 'Someone has to get paid for great art to be worthy of public support' - no someone doesnt have to get paid. Someone is only the half of it, considering most of the money (aka public support) moves through the 'client' into the myriad of goods and services they use. If the subtext, as Steve points out, is 'do we have to pay out to artists in order to fulfil our social, cultural and economic goals, or is there another way', then I am highly sceptical of the motive there. Paying people to make art is a very progressive thing to do. It is a shame that there is so little 'great art' though, and perhaps that is because the people who should be paid for it are flaky, risky characters, who may actually fulfil the romantic stereotype of the suffering artist.
2.
Mat's opinion on the matter - or Art if I ruled the world.
Depends on your definition of 'great art'. If you're talking about fantastic things by inspired individuals that impress you and make you wish you could be so clever then i would say that yes: great art is produced by people who are paid, who have time to devote to thinking and doing. In fact the more you pay them for less product the better the art becomes: i.e. as well as giving disproportionate sums to the artist you should give as much as you possibly can to marketing their art and as much as you can to the organisation/s representing it and to the venue hosting it. Everyone and everything around the art should look smart and the richer it looks the more intelligent and appealing the audience will think it is (even this one)
If your definition of great art is something that is a bit flawed, what people do when their imagination is allowed to run free, what artists try when they cant afford what they want, what people do when they are drunk, presented with a piece of kit they don't know (or cant afford) to use properly, what communities do together when no one professional is providing the entertainment. how people decorate unfilled space and use things that aren't useful, how people protest obliquely, what nourishes AND empowers the mind then you should not give any artists any money at all or very very little. You should spend your money to make unoccupied buildings available to people who have time and energy to use them. lawyers should be on hand to protect the sanctity of the activity. There should be open workshops of equipment for people run democratically (you should pay the technicians if you can) there should be stores with PA's projectors, tables, chairs, marquees catering equipment etc which are available to all. etc. etc. modest grants should be easily available for materials.
From a Government point of view the first strategy is useful for propagandist purposes, nurturing retention of an elite, increasing international status, and employing some people who might not be suited to much else, and as a support for philosophical exploration. The second is useful for nurturing innovation and talent, helping social well being and promoting democracy. I think the ACE rightly have a remit that includes both. However they should be honest in the way they distribute resources. The upper bit should be elitist and closed - unless you advance into it and should be accountable internally, and the bottom bit should be politicised and fun with a very small administration. There should not be any pressure to behave like your own business and ticky box stuff no pretence at usefulness or wholesomeness (though it is). It should be accepted that some of this art will be bad and badly organised and people will fall out and fall into cliques etc. (but I suspect there would be more examples of brilliantness that would out weight that bad stuff).
So when people volunteer they should be volunteering for themselves and their friends not for the Art.
Choosing to make work in leisure time implies that it is yours and the public have no right to it. It doesn't have to be worthy or profit making or popular. It's still valuable but money doesn't increase it's value (just the opposite). I like doing things for and with friends and peers but there is definitely mega-exploitation in the festival volunteer style which is sadly endemic at Festivals and Galleries from AV to Art Works. If it's worth stewarding for free the organiser should want to do it for free. It'd be interesting to find out how many of these organisations would continue if there wasn't any money in it. It would be even more interesting to say "here's the budget of AV but you can only have it if no one gets paid" Then we'd really get something wild. But actually those festivals fall into the first view of great art and there shouldn't be any place for volunteering - it's just exploitation.
There you go: meaningless opinion. I should be a blogger. I think you summed up the conclusion in 2 sentences above!! [addition a week later] the above reminds me of the old adage that if you want a rich person to work harder you should pay them more and if you want a poor person to work harder you should pay them less.
Steve's contribution:
1. If no-one gets paid, what's the incentive to make anything apart from great art? So that art should be worthy of public support, because it has already proved itself by getting made. Yay, paradox!
2. When the financial metanarrative hits a buffer, it's a mark of resilience for a society to be able to keep going, and that includes a vibrant art-scene. In fact, it'll probably be the artists who have built up that resilience, by exploring and investing in alternative metanarratives before the big crash, just to find out if they work.
3. But this panel heading seems to be juggling a whole bunch of loaded terms (as Mat points out). Not only what Great Art is, but how it is to be judged worthy, who the public are, what form of support they/we can give, whether that support can be in the form of the payment the artist receives, or is directed elsewhere (to the curators, government, the public itself in the form of society's sense of self esteem (our nation produced Shakespeare, don't you know?!)). So a big question around the categorisation evident here (not just about the volunteer/paid; amateur/professional divide).
4. Finally, pragmatically, what are the motives for asking the question? Can it be paraphrased thus: 'Are the public unable to recognise Great Art unless they know someone has been paid to produce it?' - Which might be a funding body's way of asking either 'How do we stand in relation to the public?' or 'Can we get out of paying quite as much and fostering volunteer and amateur schemes instead?'
