Thoughts From Inside Your Arts Bureaucracy
I just got home from a day helping to select successful applicants to the Write in your Face (WIYF) round of grants offered by Australia Council (OzCo) and administered by Express Media (EM). Those links will tell you more about this whole shebang, but I’ll copy/paste the juicy bit for all our Canadian readers:
WIYF grants are offered to young and emerging writers who use language in innovative ways. This may involve writing in the digital space, blogs, graphic novels, comics, multimedia, multi-artform or cross-media works.
Basically it’s a really exciting grant, because all sorts of weird shit gets thrown at it in applications. It’s especially exciting for me at the moment because this is my first opportunity to sit on a selection panel and be directly involved in delivering necessary funding to literary-arts projects that otherwise might never see the light of your computer screens.
I made some notes today, but it’s too late to type them up and I have to work in the morning.
I want to write here soon about: how WIYF has been (de)devolved from EM to one of OzCo’s more general digital funds (that ‘evolved’ is now bearing the suffix ‘ded’ makes my squidgy little progressive heart want to curl up and vomit out my arse); how something Lefa (EM’s Program Manager) said reminded me of the importance of thinking of the literary-arts as contributing in ‘not immeasurable economic value’ to society; and how reacquainting with the dreadful process of ‘scraping the barrel’ made me consider the importance of not awarding grant money, following on from feelings I’ve had for sometime about not awarding prizes to literature that you otherwise wouldn’t publish, just because you said you’d award a prize.
These are all subjects near and dear to my heart, and ones that have been bouncing around for a while, but some other things came up that I’d like to explore some more if I get the time: how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without telling stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.
To cap this off in the spirit of Three Degrees of Uncoordination, I’m going to quote from the editorial of Chalk, one of the magazines I had the fortune to read as part of the WIYF process:
…
edition1
a co-composition _ _ a communicating collaboration _ _ these are a series of conversations and interconnecting threads _ _ alive in the informal economy of the culture industry
What a great time you’ve had! Devolved funding is a great idea: it make sure that scarce public funds for the arts can get to artists via those organisations whose specialisation and expertise is those very artists. Express Media can find artists and support artists far more effectively than a government body, and everything learnt via the artist development process can be reinvested right back into Express Media’s literary youth arts expertise. So that even more artists get the benefits FTW, not just those funded by Write In Your Face.
Reinvesting that expertise, thanks to the devolved funding, can afford independent arts orgs like Express the time and resources to think through that challenge you’ve put so beautifully:
“…how to set up systems to allow people to tell stories without *telling* stories to them; and how to avoid writing to markets by creating markets for your own writing instead, and how to use digital technology to do this.”
Only artists and makers who are already immersed in planning unintended consequences for other artists can approach this challenge in a meaningful and effective way.
I think this is a good idea – and as you’ve state it is happening already in some places – as long as independent makers are still supported through direct grants.
It is a good way for context-specific works to be commissioned. It is more likely that Express Media will have knowledge of innovation happening in the field than the Arts Council. But it is also important to protect the independence of individual artists against the philosophies/nepotism/political agendas that can be a part of small organisations.
this article might interest you: http://artspolicies.org/2011/06/17/modelling-the-economic-impacts-of-cultural-policies/#more-1236
Christopher Madden writes in a very dry, economics way so you have to read a few of his articles to get a broader view. But it is interesting to get different points of view that aren’t from artists/writers.