here’s the pdf: https://creativenz.govt.nz/-/media/Project/Creative-NZ/CreativeNZ/PageDocuments/Future-of-arts-development/20230508_Future_For_Arts_Development_Report.pdf

says CNZ: “We agree with many artists and arts organisations that where we are now doesn’t serve our communities and will not improve without an intentional and significant shift.”

says CNZ: “It’s important to us to co-design the ‘future island’ with those who will be living on it.”

this may raise some eyebrows, says CNZ, while acknowledging that since Covid-19 Creative New Zealand hasn’t always delivered for all artists and arts organisations in the way they’ve needed. It says eyebrows about sharing some of the quotes it heard from people on their experiences and beliefs of how the arts is funded in New Zealand …

before the eyebrow-raising quotes, the organisation cites 5 challenges it needs to address:

1. CONNECT TO ARTISTS AND ARTS ORGANISATIONS (note, not institutions) based on trust, respect and longevity (yep, that’s what it says) (note, this is challenge No. 1)
2. FACILITATE ACCESS to work with the organisation in both “process and interactions” (whatever that means)
3. GIVE COMMUNITIES A GREATER SAY IN WHO GETS $$$ AND IN [something called] ARTS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITIES, “so that specific and nuanced arts development needs are met more effectively” (if you say so) (although meeting arts development needs more effectively sounds more than ever like meeting the development needs of children more effectively) (and this is not to speak of an implied similarity)
4. MEET A STATED REQUEST TO USE THE ORGANISATION’S STATUS AS A CROWN ENTITY “to broker relationships between artists, arts organisations, territorial authorities, local governments and businesses to build better communities” (now to whomever made this request, be careful what you wish for) (and–the status of CNZ under statute is that of a crown entity thanks to the patronage of His Majesty King Charles III of Great Britain: decolonise that!)
5. this challenge is headed as ADVOCACY. Good. However the description goes like this, “a challenge to use our existing government relationships more effectively so the lives of artists and the value of the arts are better respected and understood.” hmmm… Is that advocacy?

Co-design – is a buzz word that gets a lot of airtime in this document. A way forward is being co-designed. Co-design goes further than in consultation with … I’ve seen co-design in action. It’s not pretty. No… It is pretty. Like post-it notes in different colours are pretty.

The only technical word in co-design is the word design. What it is is a participatory design process. It’s pretty, like sunlight, says the commercial site for the Sunlight Foundation. This organisation presumably has co-designed global access to sunlight for all the nations of the world.

This May, in its last week, the organisation previously known as the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council (and never to be known as the King Charles III Arts Council) will take the next step to “co-design a way forward, with small groups of big picture thinkers from both the arts space and Creative New Zealand working on the high-level architecture” … &blahblah. One of its longterm goals is for communities to be the “accountable decision makers for their arts development needs.” (As above, read special needs.) It always intrigues me how it is that while painting the picture the organisation is not seen to be, and is not in the picture. Here it’s addressing its delegation of the work it does to those it is supposed to serve. I suppose this is really like a commissioned artist and the communities are like those commissioning the portrait that will paint them and their special arts development needs.

Note that this longterm goal of shifting decision making, no. That’s not right. Shifting accountability for decision making, decision making that the organisation is still being paid to do, a number of fulltime arts-organisational fulltime wages’ worth of being paid. This longterm goal is complex. It will take more time than co-designing whatever that first bit was.

By the end of 2023 expect to see some changes, warns the organisation. The cap on the number of applications for the April 2023 funding round lifts from 250 to 450. For the August and October rounds there is no cap on the number. The organisation is going to be speaking clearly and plainly and will clearly and specifically name people within it to have a conversation. That’s nice.

I’ve just gone through and to facilitate legibility have increased the size of the font in this post. This is probably the sort of thing you can expect from the organisation. Also know that you can always talk to me. Please use the contact form.

The organisation is embarking on this change journey for you and with you. However, it already concedes here, before the journey has begun, that leadership and advocacy changes (see 4. & 5. above) involve areas in which it has less direct control. That’s OK though. It’s going to get back to you before the end of the year with a plan, a seachart.

Ouuuuugggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrghtweoirukgdfbkvuh

agrrrrrrrrssssssssssssssssssssssssssszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzshshshshhsh:

just sneaked a peak at the quotes.

not really, is all a bit lilylivered and yallerygreeenery and not enough uzis

on (dis)connection: “CNZ needs to be humanised. It is operating like a huge corporation and is totally out of touch with the art world in NZ.”

short-term thinking:

“Project focus is admin heavy and doesn’t allow for creative and long-term thinking.”

“We need art funding that isn’t project based–research fellowships, residencies, development time without outcomes.”

“You say you want to support us having ‘sustainable careers’? Let us think beyond projects so we can actually have career sustainability.”

“Please, I beg you: GRANT GENERAL OPERATING FUNDS!!! It is simply poor funding practice not to support general operating funds. All CNZ grants that organisations are eligible to apply for should be able to fund general operations. Not allowing that forces organisations into oppressive and reactive ways of working.”

interesting: this concern, which seems to have elicited the strongest response, has not really been taken up by the organisation

“Aotearoa New Zealand’s performing arts sector is served by enterprising organisations that may be regarded as ‘essential services’ within the overall infrastructure. Unless they meet rigorous criteria that may allow them to apply for multiyear funding, they are obliged to apply for shortterm Project Grants, competing with one-off creative projects, when they are neither one-off nor creative. What would it take for on-going funding to be available to such enterprises on the basis that the services they offer are seen as essential, valued, and well delivered?”

I like this one too:

“We need to be allowed to fail, if only to glimpse what possibilities lie in the experimentation without needing the weight of garnering critical acclaim.”

of course critical acclaim means numbers not the work of critics

And this:

“CNZ actively distrusts artists. Failure should be possible.”

And:

“Projects that can generate bums on seats aren’t necessarily innovative–judge work on its artistic merits, not popularity then help those artists learn how to build an audience.”

(in)accessibility:

“We are artists, not grant writers.”

“We need a sense of community not a sense of competition.”

“CNZ’s competitive tendering model is far from best practise; and is inherently, manifestly and demonstrably unfair. It’s prejudicial. It’s also open to inconsistent, incompetent and sometimes corrupt implementation via the assessments system.”

in fact the organisation’s five challenges oddly misrepresent the concerns in the quotes. Have a look. See what you think.

It’s all here, from Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s Cultural Policy in New Zealand (page last updated 8 October 2021):

An early concentration on supporting the “high arts” was supplemented in the 1970s by structures and policies to support a wider range of cultural activities in New Zealand’s local and ethnic communities. Policies came to be concerned with encouraging community participation as well as supporting cultural practitioners. This shift in policy reflected the concept of cultural development promoted internationally by UNESCO.

what was ok in the 70s is not ok now. Note also the shift is to cultural development. It comes endorsed by UNESCO. However as a replacement for support of professional artists and arts institutions, cultural development may be readily conflated with the policies of development economics such as were rolled out in developing countries in the early phases of the New International Economic Order that replaced the Bretton Woods system.

1 = “high arts” [it’s outrageous that an official government website page in 2023 uses this phrase, high arts, as if to signal both the elitism of certain cultural activities and that ‘we’ know which ones they are (cf. here)] – support for professional artists and arts institutions –  “the best possible art by professional artists for the most diverse possible audience” (Nicholas Hytner, from here)

2 = supporting a wider range of cultural activities encouraging community participation

and 3 = (specific to Nz Aa? or generalisable to sectors of the population lacking privilege for reasons due to gender, class and race in any country) honouring obligations of equal access and opportunity to Māori, specifically under the Treaty, and to Pacific peoples

the three areas are different and irreducible one to the other, any such reduction being a levelling down of state-funding and support, an excuse to cut costs while claiming a social-moral good based on an unspoken consensus as to what constitutes such a good

Here are the social-moral do-gooders’ smiling faces and their social-moral do-gooding purposes and principles, and no mention of the cultural elitism implied by high arts or ulterior motives, like the sustaining of CNZ as the only fully funded arts organisation in New Zealand Aotearoa:

[CNZ’s] purpose

[CNZ’s] purpose is to encourage, promote and support the arts in New Zealand for the benefit of all New Zealanders.

[CNZ’s] Guiding principles

The principles [it] follow[s] include recognising and upholding:

• the cultural diversity of the people of New Zealand
• the role in the arts of Māori as tangata whenua
• the arts of the Pacific Island peoples of New Zealand
• participation, access, excellence, innovation, professionalism and advocacy.

note the avoidance of the word and the notion institution. For the Ministry for Culture this is covered by the term “high arts” and that 70s thing. From CNZ we can expect the word organisation, which is not the same thing.

I wrote an earlier post here about the autumn edition of Metro Magazine‘s special report on what it called the curious case of the collapsing culture. Editor Henry Oliver called it a crisis.

I answered my critical response to Metro‘s coverage here.

The reason for the current post follows, Nicholas Hytner’s response to the cultural crisis the UK is undergoing. He is much more creative than I am and points to the improbability that one funding agency can deliver on two remits, both supporting the professional arts and arts institutions and at the same time providing the means for community participation at all levels in culture and in the arts. (see below)

It’s like the old distinction between Theatre in Education and Drama in Schools. TIE was about professional practitioners coming to schools and performing for students and being paid to do so. Drama in Schools is about the students themselves performing, perhaps under the guidance of a professional but this is not guaranteed. The students of course benefit from both as we might were both supported.

…

Nicholas Hytner writes in the Guardian: that for the UK,

Maybe the way forward is for the arts to use sport as a model. There are two distinct funding bodies for sport. UK Sport has, in its own words, “a very clear remit at the ‘top end’ of Britain’s sporting pathway, with no direct involvement in community or school sport”. And it wins us medals. The other, Sport England (which has equivalents in the other home nations) invests in sport and physical activity to make it a normal part of life for everyone and gets us out on the track at the weekend. Both functions are vital.

[Nicholas Hytner’s] proposal, then, for a Labour government [in the UK], is to fund, in addition to the Arts Council, a new body as expert in its field as Sport England. In doing so, recognise the importance of participation in the arts with its own funding stream, to which new community-based initiatives as well as established education and outreach programmes can apply. And re-establish the arts in schools.

Meanwhile, focus the Arts Council’s existing grant on making the best possible art by professional artists for the most diverse possible audience.

…

You really pour yourself into something when there’s no money to make things.

— Róisín Murphy

 You’re not free to say a lot of things. You notice it in every single crisis that pops up

— Laurie Anderson

 there’s such silence about the pandemic in art. After 9/11, we built two towers of white light to represent the people who died. We shine them again every year. With Covid, nothing. Why are people so silent?

— Laurie Anderson

 Art should have a mood, I think, before it has anything. That can unlock personal revelations for people.

— Róisín Murphy

 Creating a kind of dreamlike situation which works in sound and image, that conspires to take the listener into another less judgmental place…

— Laurie Anderson

“Oh, this is why I’m doing this. Love: that’s why.”

— Laurie Anderson on the death of Hal Willner from COVID

try to tell the truth. But the real thing I have to say is just try to really like and love yourself, because if you don’t, it will be so much harder. Realise that you already are perfect and you don’t have to worry about anything. Take that as a starting point. That kind of sounds idiotic, but advice is idiotic!

— Laurie Anderson

the way creatives are going at the moment, they don’t need my advice. They see all this straight away. “I’ll do it myself, I’ll make a movie one day, I’ll do whatever I want to do.”

— Róisín Murphy

there it is, the answer to the anodyne pap being served out as cultural commentary

here

and the answer is …

POP

no but really, really consider this critical moment. Yes, it’s always a critical moment. The present is a problem time.

Read this if you want to know about problems.

so how it works is the present critical moment throws into question all the preceding stories-we-tell-ourselves-to-put-ourselves-to-sleep-at-night and so that we can.

pomo, postmodernism celebrated the end of the master narratives. No more authoritative version. No absolute truth. Just egos puffed up and wanting to dominate, dominate the narrative.

The present critical moment throws into question, celebrates throwing into question ALL THE MINOR NARRATIVES.

the minor narratives are the ones we whisper to ourselves, like it’s going to be all right

like lullabies, the infantile babbling … of what used to be called the inner child now in this critical present moment DOMINANT,

fattened on narcissistic narratives of identity the inner child …

is now THE political representative. Is OUR political representative.

so how it works is the present critical moment puts the problem

and putting the problem opens what is called a solution space

putting the problem sets the terms to articulate the problem

what is the problem?

it’s not absence of creative opportunity

it’s absence of opportune creativity.

return to top, reader. Read how it’s done …

The name has a further meaning, you see. It’s not about the narrator being haunted. It’s not about that Schumann piece, written at the dictation of angels, a yutbe clip appears below. It’s about an altogether other dictation, no less angelic but, in this case, the angels have to be generated to do the dictation.

Chinchilla, play, Robert David MacDonald, brilliant. Brilliant because it’s about art as much as it is art. In other words, it’s about artistic creation and that of an ensemble, the Ballets Russes. Chinchilla is Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev. The play’s special power comes from its special ontological position, as translation.

Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist” starts fittingly at the piano. In it we find that every work of art worthy of being so called is really a work of translation. Damian Lanigan’s novel translates from one art form to another to make great art.

From pianist to the novelist, from the narrator who is a concert pianist, to the writer who is also a playwright, says his blurb, Lanigan translates to the typewriter that is now a keyboard from the piano that is for Declan Byrnie a machine of torture. See,

A piano performance consists of a body that can never get quite comfortable, possessing an insufficient number of hands and a sucking vortex mind. The poor frightened beast must assert his control over this bizarre Heath Robinson mechanism: strings and hammers and wood and steel and felt and glue stretched in and around a misshapen coffin that weighs about nine tons, has the temperament of a prima ballerina and the capacity of a nuclear power station.

— op. cit., 117

At a certain point it enters the landscape, because it’s always been a part of the landscape of writing. See,

The sunlight breaking on the hillside across the valley, the peaks drifting in and out of view, the way the colour of the water changes, it’s constantly shifting, this permanence, and the mountains are a billion years old, and the clouds are three minutes old, and so you get this collision of massiveness and insubstantialness, the now and the ancient, and the constant shifts between green, grey, white, blue, brown and silver, zero visibility and infinity.

— ibid., 242

Published by Weatherglass Books very well in 2022 you just have to read it really.

While I was writing the book [The Physics of Sorrow] and wondered where this sadness was draining from, it had flooded all over Europe and, in a sense, all over the world. As a writer, I know that the long accumulated sorrow, the concealed sorrow is a dangerous thing ready to explode. That is why it should be freed, narrated, tamed through the story. It should be danced out, if you like. And this is one of literature’s capabilities.

Yes, people dancing out sorrow in literature, can you imagine it in NZ Aa [Aotearoa]?

I can in Aus[tralia], not here. And yet without it, the sorrow concealed accumulates and is concealed. It explodes.

How does it explode? Are there people crying on the streets or just onto the screens of their cellphones?

O, no, of course if not danced out in literature the explosion of the accumulated sorrow, which is mountainous today, can only be violent. It digs a hole for itself as deep as the mountains are high and throws children down into the pit.

We used to say it went all the way to China but that’s a two-way street.

The immigrants who come here, they take the happiness that would have been ours in a fairer world.

Now I would like to say a few words about what literature is still capable of in a world like ours today.

It is capable of doing simple things. Like saving a life for example. You tell the stories and thus you postpone the end. We know this best by Scheherazade–stories in exchange for life (simple deal). When the victim tells a story she inhabits another, protected zone.

If my last post had been a how-to book this is what it would’ve said about cinema. It seems to have everything to do with rushing forward but in fact it is How To Hesitate.

Perhaps this will be the title if I give that long post called “a note on cinematic time” another life. This is just something I’m playing with, an idea.

This is the special guarantee of literature. This is the strength of the weak one who narrates.

I must have known this instinctively as a child because I always chose to read books narrated in the first person. I knew the simple rule that the hero wouldn’t die as long as he or she keeps telling the story. I tell a story, therefore I am. Narro, ergo sum.

What else can literature do? … these quoted bits are from here.

It seems to me we slowly begin to understand that the world cannot be explained only through the first pages of the newspapers, the political statements or markets, banks, etc. Because we are not made of economics and politics. We are made also of sorrow and hesitation, of such fragile and inexplicable, sometimes irrational things.

…

It is as I was saying:

A critical mass of hate and insecurity has accumulated worldwide, a madness, if you wish, that is easily multiplied and intensified by the new fast media. We are getting harshly radicalized in our opinions and words. This internal jihadism hidden in each of us is one of the most dangerous conditions today. Now the great battle goes on not just over geographic territories but over the territory of the human. There are limits of human nature that shouldn’t be overstepped. Because historically, the human kind comes before ideologies, before states. And the migrants today are part of a great migration of sorrows. And this migration of sorrow is something we should think over and try to narrate.

Thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for sharing a few minutes together in one of the sentences of this world.

Thank you for the feeling.

Published June 12, 2107
© 2016 Fondation Jan Michalski

   a protein that doesn't seek the                         features
limelight. Yet is content to work
perfectly in tandem with them,
snuggled right up close in fact,
embracing the heat, and trans-
forming into a velvety cascade
of yum. Because no matter how
delicious they are, and what great
sources of protein they provide,
they would be nothing without

. he published two collections of short stories - Cinnamon Shops and The Sanatorium 
Under the Sign of the Hourglass - during his lifetime Schulz was shot and killed by a 
German Gestapo officer in 1942, whilst walking home with a loaf of bread. Much of his 
writing, including his final, unfinished novel The Messiah, was lost in the Holocaust.

-- source: https://www.amazon.com/Nocturnal-Apparitions-Essential-Bruno-Schulz/dp/1782277897/

...now this makes more sense. Amazon's editorial review for Schulz's The Cinnamon Shops & Other 
Stories reads, "Schulz would be murdered in the town in which he was born by a Nazi officer who 
then reportedly went to a colleague to say, 'You shot my Jew, so I have shot yours.'" 

Bruno Schulz was initially spared by an officer of the Gestapo who admired his artwork and wanted 
him to paint a mural on a child's wall. 
{courtesy of BJA Samuel's twttr acc. as is the picture of Schulz's mural below}

…so what is it? Here’s some bits I liked:

Just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the global economy was dominated by natural-resource extraction, today the world’s largest companies have grown as large as they have entirely on the promise of providing to their clients the attention, however fleeting, of their billions of users.

— Justin E.H. Smith The Internet … , (Princeton University Press, 2022), 14

… which suggests a temporal economy and probably a better world were mental-resource extraction to replace that of natural resources…

And these users are, at the same time, being used. One vivid and disconcerting term that has been circulating in social media to describe anyone who spends time online is “data-cow.” The role that users of “free” online platforms occupy might sometimes feel creative, or as if it has something in common with traditional work or leisure. But this role sometimes appears closer to that of a domesticated animal that is valuable to the extent that it has its very self to give. We do not usually provide our bodily fluids, and are not usually asked to do so, though sites such as Ancestry.com do ask for saliva as part of their data-collecting efforts, and health bracelets and other such devices owned by Apple and Amazon are increasingly discovering ways to monitor a number of our vital fluid levels. But even if we are not giving our fluids, we are giving something that has proven more valuable to the new economy than milk ever was in the system of industrial agriculture: information about who we are, what we do, what we think, what we fear. Some of us continue to have old-fashioned careers in the twenty-first century–we are doctors, professors, lawyers, and truck drivers. Yet the main economy is now driven not by what we do, but by the information extracted from us, not by our labor in any established sense, but by our data. This is a revolution at least as massive as the agricultural and industrial revolutions that preceded it. Whatever else happens, it is safe to say that for the rest of our lifetimes, we will only be living out the initial turbulence of this entry into a new historical epoch.

— Ibid. 15

so begins chapter 1. Sounds like its going to chart the impact of what Shoshanna Zuboff in her 2015 book called Data Capitalism called data capitalism. I like the clear statement of what’s at stake. Revolution.

After naming four features of the revolution we will spend our whole lifetimes coming to terms with the book sets about telling us that the revolution is not anything new. It has been going on since at least the Revolution. In fact he dates the whole thing, the whole thing being the Internet, back to Leibniz.

That’s fine by me in terms of fundamental understanding, ideas and concepts, but not in terms of data extraction. And not in terms of the fundamental changes Smith’s four features of the revolution describe. Not then in the terms the book sets for itself.

These are:

1. “a new sort of exploitation, in which human beings are not only exploited in the use of their labor for extraction of natural resources; rather, their lives are themselves the resource, and they are exploited in its extraction.” (15)
2. a new problem: “the way in which the emerging extractive economy threatens our ability to use our mental faculty of attention in a way that is conducive to human thriving.” (17)
3. feature 3 is so new it constitutes, says Smith, a “genuine break with the past: the condensation of so much of our lives into a single device, the passage of nearly all that we do through a single technological portal.” “Whatever your habits and duties, your public responsibilities and secret desires, they are all concentrated as never before into a single device, a filter, and a portal for the conduct of nearly every kind of human life today.” (18)
4. … “in the rise of an economy focused on extracting information from human beings, these human beings are increasingly perceived and understood as sets of data points; and eventually it is inevitable that this perception cycles back and becomes the self-perception of human subjects, so that those individuals will thrive most, or believe themselves to thrive most, in this new system who are able to convincingly present themselves not as subjects at all, but as attention-grabbing sets of data points. (20) “For many, the only available adaptation to this new landscape is to transform our human identity into a sort of imitation of the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet, to trade a personality for an algorithmically plottable profile, in effect, to imitate a bot.” (21)

After this setup I’d like to find out what happens, particularly to number 4, but it wasn’t until much later I realised I was not going to. It was around when Smith was telling me that Deleuze (writing with Guattari) doesn’t have a theoretical monopoly and can’t claim copyright over the idea presented in A Thousand Plateaus of the network being a rhizome or the rhizome a network. And this was followed closely by citing Kant as an authority, so it kind of made sense. I mean, Deleuze with or without Guattari is not going to fit into a Kantian framework.

The problem I have with this book is that although it appears to want to engage philosophy, and this is in the subtitle, A History, A Philosophy, A Warning, it doesn’t do so in a philosophically informed way. The history part is halfway amusing but I would have expected, given that the book really starts with the warning, again a more philosophically informed approach, say an archeological or genealogical one. The trouble is that Smith maintains that it is, that he is doing a “reverse Foucauldianism”. (12) What this tells me is that the book is written the wrong way around.

— Tullio Pericoli

Spong chose to make these works using the process of investment casting, whereby the cast object retains a more intimate material presence. Rather than pouring the molten bronze into a wax mould of the apple, it floods the apple itself within a ceramic shell, immediately eviscerating it, swallowing it, flesh, skin, and stem, into hardening metal. The organic matter of the apple itself is no longer, though nor is it destroyed. Via such a sacrifice it has also been enshrined within the bronze–if not in microscopic traces of its ash, then surely in spirit.

— as above and from here

on the subjects of evisceration and investment, this time of art itself, riseart website offers examples of the works it has for sale as they might look in your own home, on the wall above your bureau, by the lamp, against a dark background or a light one and so on. Here are some featuring the work of Noah Borger. Born in 1970, the site calls Borger one of the hottest street artists of the moment, just so you know you’re making an investment in something with cred.

— Noah Borger, Reticular, Denticular

… here is the template for room 5. Imagine the above right there.

— Noah Borger, Gentleman Face One

… and here’s room 3.

— Noah Borger, devil from Ukraine … or imagine this one, room 3 or 5, your choice.

that Anne Carson wrote for her brother, the epitaph, ... I was trying to find a name. 

a name for new project, a photographic project. I have never, in fact I have avoided photoing
people | as much as I have avoided proper names, in places. Places... as Carson writes, Places in

         the world where we saw things.                               In places I've not a-

voided it at all and that is because in those places the people have died. , so reading on
I made the following notes                                              in case something
   
jumped out.                        It hasn't happened yet.

Anne Carson: I didn’t know the for ld print black on the film did you? /and: it is for God to fix the time who knows no time /and: the sheets of memory blow on the line /: a room, where one gropes for the light switch. /in the face if [sic] what has just been said/: the word, discandied, melted, … /:haec adversaria sunt menstrua illae aeternae these adversities are monthly, those eternal. /:As in some cave may lie a lightless pool./: omne supervacuum pleno de pectore manat the whole pointless night seeps out of the heart. /: ave … (on sepulchral monuments) now it is night. /: …[something] [something] the stairwell [where he was when his mother with her hands crying What now oh what now?]