Kia ora koutou On 16/07/2009, at 12:07 PM, Julian Oliver wrote: > Disconnections are dumb, as are fines. That said it's not the big bad > state that is entirely to blame here, nor media moguls.
> Fighting the tide is dumb. Pretending there isn't one is dumber. > So, rather than seeing vast sums of public and private money absorb > into fighting these abstract battles, artists would do well to learn > to re-position themselves within the realities of the economic, > technical and cultural context within which they expect to compete > and/or thrive. This is a reform that needs to happen at a peer level: It's here that I think the government should be putting their energy. I agree with you entirely, and think the government should play a role in helping artists to restrategise their economic model in a way where you don't fight the Internet but go with it. It is a case of adapt to how the Internet works or die really. Sadly it looks like Birchville died .. although if the album that appeared on bittorrent sites had been seeded by the artists, with text on where people can go to purchase some cover art (always lacking from digital), gig guide, even donate anonymously, maybe it wouldn't be such a sorry story. Radical, scary, all of the above, but it's reality and there's nothing artists can do to stop it. Adapt or die people. Government should be doing more to help us work out ways to adapt. It should do this rather than scamper around with cutting internet blab which is a transparently ugly non-solution. A small island nation in the far corner of the map really should be looking to turning these technologies to their advantage rather than fighting them. It's kind of ridiculous that here we're faced with the best, easiest and cheapest medium available to create exposure to New Zealand art, and the government is trying to work out how best to stop this from happening. If they truly care about artists then they should be coming up with strategies for guiding us to adapt to this digital world. A government that leads should really be coming up with creative ways to leverage that inherent wonderfulness of the Internet to share/trade/expose in a way that our artists can thrive. Teach us how John Key! I will be your willing tutor! It should probably also just acknowledge that you can't ultimately stop this from taking place, but you need to work in with it instead, help artists work out how to monetise this, and prepare for some artists to die as a consequence of not being able to/willing to find a path of adaptation. This is pretty important. Luke _______________________________________________ Ada_list mailing list [email protected] http://aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz/
