Unfortunately I do not have the time to go into debate about most of
the presumptions and insinuations in Julian Oliver's text. Let me
just say it seems written from prejudice rather than knowledge.
Prejudice about how funding bodies work, for example. To simply call
them 'the state' or 'the government' is utterly simplistic. There are
two statements in this article I want to take out in particular.
There is NO basis for these at all.
The Netherlands, Britain and most of Scandinavia especially are
countries with a strong history of state support for the arts;
development of a
work of new media in these countries in particular often comes with an
expectation of state support.
This is nonsense. Surely you will find artists working this way, but
for every single one of them you will find at least three or four
that don't.
In June 2011 Zijlstra, the Dutch minister for culture, announced a
200 million
Euro cut to infrastructural funding in the arts sector. It may be
the death
knell for a great many organizations and initiatives throughout the
Netherlands, some of which are considered to be canonical to the
international
media-arts scene (V2_, Sonic Acts, Mediamatic, NIMK, STEIM, to name
a few).
Many organizations under the axe where born directly out of arts
funding and
have benefited from persistent support from the Dutch state since
their
inception.
V2 was born from a squatters/artists initiative, and worked as such
for many years before it got regular funding. Similar stories for
Mediamatic and NIMk. I am less familiar with the histories of Steim
and Sonic Acts, but I am pretty sure these were also started from
artists enthusiastically setting up something that became important,
interesting and influential enough to get funding at some point.
Meanwhile the tax-payer's conscious or unconscious
investment in these fields (resulting in projects and vast,
specialist bodies
of knowledge) will likely go unarchived, even lost altogether; a
shell of
documentation on websites alone.
???
It is good to talk about new economic models, but to talk about them
while kicking colleagues is not a good idea.
J
*
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