Presented in collaboration with Sabrina Sokalik
Critical Animals, This is Not Art Festival
4 October 2013, The Lock Up: Exercise Yard
#whokilledtheavantgarde
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@artsHub respond to the talk Sabrina Sokalik & I gave at this year’s @CriticalAnimals http://t.co/90uTfqS1fn #whokilledtheavantgarde #ca13
— Lucy Randall (@lucyerandall) October 15, 2013
The arts and money
When it comes to selling contemporary art, suddenly, “the money in the arts” that generally is lacking seems to appear.
It’s true that to make money you have to spend money. There are no foundations for a great arts festival or similar event without some sparkle and some incentives for your patrons. Free drinks, free passes for the media, well designed collateral, well designed websites, hours invested in social media – things are starting to look pretty tight. You may need some intern support. Some free labour. Some cut corners.
Take Sydney Contemporary Art Fair. Armed with exquisitely crafted promotions, Sydney Contemporary exceeded expectations, according to Sydney’s Financial Review, the festival’s principal media partner. Over four days, the Fair was attended by 28,800 people who were packed into Carriageworks, an increasingly popular venue for site-based artworks. This was double the number that the Fair’s founder, British art mogul Tim Etchells, had anticipated.
Tim Etchell is described as “a veteran of art fair management” and has been establishing arts fairs across Europe and Asia, in addition to running an events management company here in Australia.
According to the fair’s own marketing, Sydney Contemporary’s focus for its first year was “emerging and established artists from leading Australian and international galleries.” This year’s Fair was designed with “modest beginnings” by Etchell. The Fair’s director Barry Keldoulis assembled content from more than 80 art dealers across 12 countries and the Fair drew industry crowds from New Zealand, Europe, South Africa and most significantly Asia, the top priced artwork was a $900,000 piece by Damien Hirst.
Should we be grateful for such well-endowed international dealers for bridging the gap between mixed local successes and the broader arts environment?
Months ago, the inaugural art fair was in strife following accusations that its Guest Manager, Iain Dawson, had stolen from six participating artists. Artists have been coming forward in increasing numbers to make complaints about Iain Dawson and claiming he owes them debts from $5000 up to $10,000. Tim Etchells had said in response to this very gentle uproar: “We are aware one of our employees, Iain Dawson, has outstanding debts with artists that he incurred prior to joining the team at Sydney Contemporary.”
While the Sydney Morning Herald reported this, Artshub, the online careers portal for the creative industries in Australia, did not. As a partner of Sydney Contemporary, it was not in their best interests.
Sydney Contemporary’s website alone is tens of thousands of dollars of marketing and communications work. The fair has dozens of partners and receives substantial support from the Financial Review. All the while, the Fair still relies on labour contribution from volunteers seeking experience in the industry.
Sydney Contemporary was well-advertised but its promotions were extremely targeted. Its saturation spoke to Sydney widely as a cultural event but as an industry happening. The smaller scale collective event Art Month Sydney continues to expand with each year and has an immersive cultural effect, spanning over the period of just under a month. This festival also has a strong collector focus, targeting personal buyers rather than art dealers.
In Sydney, we seem to feel a continuing cringe around our cultural inadequacies. Etchell’s intentions for Sydney Contemporary were to represent “the first time this city has hosted a serious, high-end art fair. We expect it to play a significant role in helping to focus attention on the art scene in the same way that Art HK focused attention on Asian art.”
Seemingly starved for large-scale, European style site-based arts events, Sydney this year has embraced arts exhibitions that look and feel more like glamourous events. 13 Rooms, backed by Kaldor Art Projects, attracted enormous crowds in April this year.
Boasting the Commonwealth Bank as its principle partner along with 52 others, it’s unsurprising that 13 Rooms drew such enormous crowds. What is surprising though is that if this particular exhibition had been run by an artist run initiative by lesser known artists, would these artworks have made even a remotely similar impact?
Of course not. Lesser known artists don’t draw crowds. But was 13 Rooms really an arts-savvy audience, familiar with the works of the exhibiting artists beyond maybe Damien Hirst?
My partner and I when seeing 13 Rooms felt confronted by the intensely social nature of the artworks. As we made our way through several rooms, I began to feel cynical: were these participating performance artists – as in the people who were the living sculptures themselves – being paid? How long were they working for each day? How far are they into their career? Was standing naked in a room tens of thousands of people pass through under contract by Marina Abromovich this young woman’s dream career progression?
As we made our way to John Baldessari’s room, the artwork Thirteen Colorful Inside Jobs, my partner stuck his head in and said to the performance artist, “can I ask you a question?” She agreed and he asked: “are you getting paid for this?” The artist replied no, paused, looked offended and said “but that’s okay.”
My cynicism in this particular instance made it hard to appreciate the works of the artists and the participating performers. With complex social gravities, I know that these artworks were intended as confronting. However, I felt that seeing a naked woman stand before me, tested by her own physicality for who knows how many hours – I was angry with the artists. These well known, presumably well-paid, international artists.
Partnerships
Are partnerships a good thing?
As a festival organiser, I often debate internally on whether or not partnerships are good for arts business. Do I want to protect my artists and avoid censorship, or do I want to arm them with greater exposure and eventually pay them with funds I don’t currently have?
Over time, I’ve loosened in practice the values I used to live by quite strictly. I run a film festival exhibiting films made by women, and I’ve aimed in the five years that I’ve run this very small festival that I would promote to my best abilities the industry gender divide and the films and their filmmakers at the same time. It was important to me that I would take no artist fees and not charge audience members. This goal of creating a culture of openness, while ambitious, only ended up closing the festival and the filmmakers off to greater opportunities. There’s only so much in-kind sponsorships or media partnerships can do for you with absolutely no money.
The way things are looking, it appears that bigger funds given by corporate bodies inevitably create better opportunities for Australian artists. What are we compromising in this process?
Embedded, an exhibit by Craig Walsh currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, studies the impacts of mining on Indigenous communities. The exhibit’s major partner was Rio Tinto, and it was their funding that allowed Walsh to spend time in the Pilbara, where iron ore is mined.
Where do we draw the line for compromise? I think we can agree unanimously here that we want to support Indigenous contemporary artists and that we want the big institutions to do the same. But do we want to do so at the expense of a mining giant? Is this really the right way to do this?
Corporate funding vs. government funding
Recently Artshub published an article entitled “OzCo chief pushes private funding”, highlighting MONA as an example of philanthropic success. The article reads, with reference to MONA in Hobart, Tarrawarra Gallery in the Yarra Valley, White Rabbit in Sydney and others, that “These risky and daring initiatives have changed the way we think about art museums, programs, education, curatorship, outreach and taste. In each case, a private ambition has cascaded into a deep community of public pride.” The author goes on to mention John Kaldor as a prime example of their thesis.
Rupert Myer, who gave this as a speech to Wollogong art students, closes with the statement, “We need commercial arts entrepreneurs and we need graduates from schools such as Wollongong’s Creative Arts Faculty to be players in our national culture.”
As Myer argues, MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, could not have been envisioned by government. The largest private funded gallery in Australia, MONA is an unusual instance of philanthropy and progressive art combined, does Myer really make a solid case here?
In likeness with Sydney Contemporary Art Fair and 13 Rooms, the enormous financial backing allows for the presence of massively controversial art that may not be supported by government. As we all know, government and controversy in the arts do not mix – take Bill Henson – but are corporate sponsors exceptional in this case?
Crowdfunding
The current culture of crowd funding leads artists to what the New York Times described as “forced entrepreneurship”. Not every artist is interested in constantly self-promoting – and rightly so. This is time taken out of your creative time, which is probably the time you have outside of your day job.
Crowd funding does not create easy money for many, with incentives being a major, if not essential, means of rewarding your donators. While crowd funding appears initially as a more democratic approach to art making, artists are still responsible to their donors.
For those with money to give, are the arts their priority? As we face the future of a Liberal government in Australia, where will the public’s interests and confidence fall? Will this still be with the arts, and why? Will artists continue to have the same potency as small-scale political campaigns?
The digital space is not without its restrictions. There are many voices to compete with, and to be effective in the arts digital market, a good sense of marketing is essential. There is plenty of room however to be supportive of your fellow artists with little to nothing to be compromised and creating the platforms by which to establish communities and positive group mentality.
Arguably, digital opportunities have done wonders for programming, with festivals such as TINA and Critical Animals are no exceptions, with opportunities to find artists and be found has expanded.
I once heard a colleague of mine use the term “double-careering”. I’d never heard the term before and I’m not sure that I’ve heard it since – but what she meant was cultivating skills for her day job at the same time as increasing her opportunities for her creative business by night. Maeve, who is the Artistic Director for the cabaret group Lady Sings it Better, worked at the time as an online content editor, constantly looking to raise the bar in her day work but equally so as cabaret director and singer.
In this sense, Maeve and I felt we had something in common. We cared about our day job, and we as women worked hard to create opportunities for ourselves, but we also lived what could be described as double lives, working from after five on long-term side projects.
For many artists, this is their reality – doing both at once is for many the best way to preserve your creative opportunities.
Protection for artists
Can I ask you to raise your hand if you have volunteered for an arts event or institution? Can I ask you to raise your hand if you have interned for one? Finally, can I ask you to raise your hand if you have participated as an artist in an arts event or institution out of your own pocket?
Internships
Has anyone here done an internship? Can I ask you about your experiences? How long was your internship for? What do you feel like you gained from your internship?
According to the Guardian, people from wealthier backgrounds are three times more likely to have completed internships, due to the affordability of working for free. Not only do internships create a culture of exploitation, they also present greater career challenges for those who simply cannot afford to work for free and their social mobility. Again, according to the Guardian, the British National Union of Students found that 20% of young people in the UK have undertaken at least one internship.
Interning culture in Australia underwent a boom recently but not without backlash, with talks of outlawing what are currently accepted conventions of interning.
As emerging artists, we are expected to live with compromise. We work for free and in service industries on the side, we live with our educational debts and we accept that finally making it in the industry will mean lower salaries than our corporate colleagues.
What role do you think we have to play in protecting our rights as workers? How do we protect ourselves from exploitation?
A recent article in Artshub suggested that in Australia artists lack skill in asking, and that the visual arts space in general lacks “a culture of asking.” This was the same piece suggesting that we as artists should look more to private funding rather than public. So, has interning made us all afraid to ask? What do you think of this idea?
Where is the protection for artists and what actions take place in a time of crisis?
To improve intern culture, the government needs to intervene – we cannot rely on businesses to treat their interns in a fairer capacity. Poorly resourced arts organisations are not going to be the bodies to step forward and make a change, unless their resources do.
For paid artists, The Media, Arts and Entertainment Alliance are a strong voice in the union space, but mainly in the protection of journalists on the frontline. After all, as artists, we’re not saving lives here.
The National Association for Visual Arts are an Australian advocacy group but themselves are under financial strain. I’ve heard anecdotally that their Christmas parties involve a box of wine in the corridor of their building.
The arts and education
Recognised more widely in Europe than a degree with Honours, and generally more tailored for professional practice, a Master’s degree is becoming an increasingly common choice for people making a career in the arts. This is not the cheap option though, and a massive investment in time. Is it best to start working on your career earlier rather than later, or to invest in more study?
There are few guides or mentors who can really give you the answers here. Once again, those who are in a position of wealth are granted greater social mobility.
Who do you look to for support?