Paying for the Privilege
Artists Talk: Issues Facing Australian Artists, eds Richard Holt & Brett Jones
Westspace

Postmodernity, as an acknowledged cultural shift, results in fragmentary languages and fields for the aesthetic and symbolic; it is also the case that postmodernity is realised and effected through the political economy. Accordingly, David Harvey asserts that "the rhetoric of postmodernism is dangerous for it avoids confronting the realities of political economy and the circumstances of global power."1 In a small way this essay seeks to confront some of those 'realities', exemplified as discursive strategies or techniques, without positing them as universal or totalising despite the tendency of those who wield them to assert or assume their dominance.

In this epoch, generally regarded as one of crisis for late capitalism, the economics of art and culture are emerging as a predominant and indeed prevailing discourse, engendering a new language of business and corporatism within the arts. Presently, the arts straddle a number of parallel and intersecting discursive projects and imperatives. Tensions exist between those domains to identify and establish 'authentic' territories, flows and hierarchies of culture and economics in which art happens. Structurally, it straddles the realms of both culture and industry. It is both the sign of civic or public culture and the product of corporate or commerical enterprise. Harvey further asserts that:

entrepreneuralism now characterises not only business action, but realms of life as diverse as urban governance, the growth of informal sector production, labour market organisation, research and development and it has even reached into the nether corners of academic, literary and artistic life.2

In this viral attack by discourse, 'entrepreneurialism' has undermined 'creativity' as the underlying impetus or value of cultural work and productivity. Entrepreneurialism measures production and acquisition over expenditure. To a certain extent, both practices have as their central value, individualism. The individualism of entrepreneurialism is apparently more competitive and more commensurable than the individualism of creativity. For my purposes, this issue of context is not the question but a given which raises several nascent questions, readings and issues for visual artists. And for this reason, this essay may appear to embrace economic determinism, a kind of evidence that these discourses are coercive and difficult to escape, despite attempts to resist them. Nevertheless, writing through various critical positions also results in their reversal, displacement and redundancy. Here, I am concerned with where visual artists are situated in this environment and how that frames or contextualises the exchange and expenditure of artistic and cultural production and consumption in the competing terms of creativity and entrepreneuralism. My concerns are simple: how do those streams of postmodern discourse which flow through culture and economics enter into a 'language game' to not only eradicate the other but also to perform or inscribe the artist? How does the artist not only negotiate the territories of entrepreneur and creator, but establish value through and for her or his productions?

In the last quarter of this century, most levels of government in Australia have pursued agendas of economic and structural reform to remodel and reduce the public sector as well as deregulation of the private sector. In considering these last three decades, it is important to accommodate both a generational shift3 and a paradigmatic shift4 in the values and structures which have [in]formed cultural and civic life. In so doing, I seek to acknowledge how those adjustments and reforms have impacted on "the bureaucratic and public policy making institutions that alone stand between individual citizens and market structures."5 Economic rationalism is regarded as the process and the ideology by which these changes have been pursued, driving both government policy as well as public and private agendas. By way of definition, John McDonald describes economic rationalism as

while not offering a coherent ideology or political program, its central elements include faith in the supremacy of the market, and deregulation and minimisation of government intervention, incorporating programs of rationalisation, privatisation and service contracting. Managerialist and corporationist organisational paradigms service these imperatives.6

In general, a significant proportion of activity in the arts is maintained by some form of institutional or governmental support. It is also in the last 30 years that public funding or patronage has become entrenched as part of federal government program provision and policy-making.7 Of course, the greatest gains for the arts as part of and necessary to a civil society were made during the period of Gough Whitlam's Labor government, 1972 - 1975. However, according to Pusey, since the late 1970s, successive conservative governments (Labor and Coalition alike) "have aimed at moving some of the co-ordination functions of nation-societies away from states and bureaucracies to economies and markets."8 In this respect, government operates a paradox whereby social goals and economic goals might be equally justified and measured against each other, realisable through the processes of a free market. In the 1970s, the arts were a matter of civilisation, having a 'civilising' effect on the constituency. In the 1990s, they are a matter for markets, having value as commodity. In discourse, the language of government shifted from reform predicated on notions of the public and civic to rationalisation predicated on productivity and efficiency. As Pusey argues,

the triumph of economic rationalism points to a weakness of culture and civil society which it etched into the images of contemporary Australia that inform much or most of what is done in Canberra. We find that this state apparatus is caught within projections of reality that give primacy to 'the economy', second place to the political order, and third place to the social order. Indeed, perhaps the most central finding is that, since the 1970s, reality has been turned upside down and society has been recast as the object of politics (rather than, at least in the norms of earlier discourses, as the subject of politics).9

Clearly, concerns for the social and cultural carry little weight with those who instigate programs of micro-economic reform of the sort that Pusey describes. He points out that processes of rationalisation are discursively formed. The economy emerges as the single most important indicator of national prosperity and cohesion, replacing and displacing other representations and narratives of civic or national life. Herein lies the crux of the language game where "those who drive this process of rationalisation believe in it and deploy it very powerfully as an evaluative framework that throws a difficult onus of justification on anyone who seeks to oppose them with defences premised on social needs or on [other] values."10

In this laissez-faire economic vision, conceived as ideologically distinct from any prevailing or residual democratic liberalism, the orientation of the reforming state apparatus is that it must "adapt civil society, culture and identity to the functional requirements of the economy".11 Subsequently, artistic products or artworks exist in the realm of 'commodity', within markets which are considered to be the most appropriate mechanism for distributing or allocating goods and services. To appropriate some terminology from Karl Marx (via George Bataille and Walter Benjamin): use-value and exchange-value (I will return to these concepts imminently). How the individual is cast seems to provide some indicators of how and where the artist is located (as producer, consumer, user, client, consultant, etc). McDonald argues that "individualism becomes a creed; society is disaggregated into units of production and consumption."12

In the successive and parallel disaggregations of society, all that is irreducible, as Foucault claims, is the body. For McDonald free market economics are premised on a number of key assumptions about these bodies as individuals:

1. The individual is cast as a rational economic actor. People are assumed to operate in a rational, calculating way to seek to maximise their utility.
2. The individual is essentially egoistic, paying little heed to either other economic actor or the implications for society at large.
3. Notions of freedom are constructed in a negative sense. Freedom equates with lack of coercion. Restrictions on freedom from government rather than freedom through government.
4. The actions of individuals pursuing their own ends results in economic growth and well being for society.13

Subsequently, notions of community and social contract are spurned and government provision is seen as a compromise to the individual and self-reliance, especially in social services. The key to such services, where and when they are provided, is to force clients into some sort of self-sufficiency, either through cuts to services, conditions on service use or though ancillary programs which promote such shifts or have those as their outcome. In the case of the arts such moves at a bureaucratic level have been witnessed not only through structural rationalisation but also through policy, discourse and programs such as audience development, promotion and publicity, sponsorship, partnerships, self-funding administrative structures, ceilings placed on funding levels, limits to the frequency of grant applications, accountability, changes in selection criteria, emphasis on professionalism, career-paths and entrepreneurialism. That an attendant administration has been maintained at local, state and federal levels is evidence that the arts has been able to argue and reconcile itself to economic criteria.

Similar shifts are also occurring in tertiary education, resulting in contraction of tertiary programs, restriction of student intakes and prioritisation of streams such as graphic and communication design, film and video or teacher education over fine arts. Hal Foster argues that there is a "fundamental stake in art and the academy: the preservation, in an administered, affirmative culture, of spaces for critical debate and alternative vision."14 Once a refuge and a focus for artists and critics (to varying degrees of effect and relevance), the academic world provides fleeting comfort in this time of deregulation. That context provides a different focus for ideas and intellectuals embattled by culture wars. Foster questions the the role of ideas (criticism) "in a visual culture that is evermore administered - from an art world dominated by promotional players with scant need for criticism, to a media world of communication - and - entertainment corporations with no interest whatsoever?"15 As visual culture, notions of entrepreneurialism and creativity co-exist and indeed infiltrate the 'industry' (or sector) through effect and implication, ultimately impacting on the way an individual artist manages and negotiates her/his 'career'.

In this respect, it appears that the public or administrative realm of the arts (including funding bodies, government departments, education and statutory authorities) has adopted the languages and styles of the private to not only appeal to the market context but to encourage its growth, efficiency and flexibility. In writing about markets, Esther Dyson claims:

Markets are not a form of evolution, commonly considered survival of the fittest. Markets have rules and enforcement mechanisms agreed on (more or less) by all players ... [W]hat does this survival rule apply to: Is it people? Is it firms? Is it the products or concepts the firms sell or operate on? And is it really the fittest? Or the best nurtured?16

The effects of this market-orientation have had a disturbing outcome at a localised level and questions emerge about the 'survival rule' and 'nurturing' in the context of the arts. Obviously, the arts flourish when they are adequately funded and when creative and critical are valued. However, in the current user-pays environment, the artist who is both entrepreneur and creator is increasingly defined as the 'user' of goods and services. Where services and spaces were once provided for free or attracted a fee for the artist (generally through public funding) as a means of encouraging creativity, they have now attracted charges for which the artist is solely responsible. These include such things as user-pays exhibition spaces; membership, service and industry organisations fees and charges; non-payment of artist fees; charges for award and competition entry; employment services charges; and education. And now withe a Goods and Services Tax, we can anticipate an increase in these costs. These and other considerations result in art-making being a very expensive exercise, increasingly expensive to the artist. In order to support what has 'traditionally' been the objective of artistic practice - studio-based object-making and gallery-based exhibition - artists need to diversify their skills and practices to compete in the marketplace as part of a fragmented industry.

In a pragmatic industry sense, the objective of the artist's enterprise is to maintain expertise or specialisation but to exercise such expertise flexibly, across diverse fields as well as across the positions of client, user, producer and provider. According to the language of the marketplace, this increases the individual's marketability and potential profit-margin, viability and success within the industry. An artist does not just make art, but also must address a series of commercial, critical and political interests which are extraneous to the art itself. Adrian Searle describes the artist's world as

an international network of private and public institutions, commercial galleries, collectors, critics, curators and consultants; it is a world of cultural and financial investment on which the artist's reputation rests ... [T]here are many different artworlds, and many different kinds of artists. It is not simply a matter of high-brow and low-brow. We have, presently, a bewildering, multiform heterodoxy in the visual arts in the way of styles, movements and positions.17

Having now considered those questions of context, it is now appropriate to return to the notions of use-value and exchange-value, as previously mentioned as a means of addressing the economy of the art object or product. In terms of art, we are concerned primarily with the notion of use-value.18 George Bataille claims "there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man [sic],"19 arguing that measures of usefulness are generally grounded in notions of 'material utility' whose goal is theoretically pleasure. Art's material utility is considered to be pleasure and therefore a concession, "a diversion whose role is subsidiary".20 When the use-value of art is construed as neglible, then it follows that the effort invested in its making might be construed as misplaced. Bataille attempts to account for the principle of unproductive expenditure which is excluded by the rights of rational acquisition, conservation and consumption, claiming that it is part of consumption: "it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of the unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production."21 In so saying, such expenditure operates as a loss, as unconditional expenditure.22 It is expenditure that is not (or rarely) compensated for by acquisition (and therefore sits uncomfortably in the regime of economic rationalism and is subsequently an expenditure borne by individuals). Denis Hollier further explains that "use-value cannot outlast use; it vanishes at the moment it is realised. It is thus a value that the thing can only lose."23

By contrast, exchange-value is somewhat more straightforward as the end of production.

[It] is not an intrinsic, exclusive property of any of the objects it allows us to exchange: by definition, it must be common to at least two of them. But above all, it is on account of a delaying of consumptions that an object is endowed with an exchange-value and that this exchange-value is detached from the object it quantified. It is use-value deferred. The commodity is the object whose consumption has been postponed, an object laid aside, an object taken out of circulation, in order to be put on the market and exchanged.24

In an expanded, disaggregated and flexible market, the productions of the artist cross the categories of use-value and exchange-value. Artists remain among the least employed, most educated and lowest income earning professional group of the workforce. In managing their practice, they must seek and compete for opportunities for paid employment, networking, commissions, selling art, criticism and publication, consulting, commercial representation, events and festivals, teaching and lecturing, administration, curating, writing, self-promotion, funding and sponsorship so as to be in a position to make art - some thing which is then understood as 'unproductive expenditure' in economic terms. Somewhere in this exposition, the expenditure of the artist is at odds with the myths surrounding the artist.

Despite these complexities, art-making remains the site of growth and expansion, and indeed artists have successfully straddled the economic and creative: there is clearly a market for the symbolic. According to Hal Foster, contemporary art and criticism have seen an expansion in the social dimension of art which has involved art and theory in sites and audiences long removed from them.25 Such expansion is a strategy for asserting relevance in various localised contexts in ways which engage the social. In other words, there has been signficantly increased expenditure as part of an increase in consumption and production on the part of individuals (both consumers and producers) resulting in a greater emphasis on the point of consumption and the reflexivity of the viewer. Despite the successive waves of economic reform, cultural discourse, however marginalised, has been maintained and art-making has hybridised and adapted, establishing distinct and dislocated economic (entrepreneurial) and cultural (creative) spaces of self-maintenance.

NOTES
1 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, Blackwell Publishers, London, 1990, p 117
2 ibid., p 171.
3 In so saying, I am evoking Mark Davies' Gangland. Davies is skeptical about the 'post' or 'endist' discourses arguing that they serve secular and generational interests which marginalise young people (post-Baby Boom) and so devalue their cultural and economic engagement. Mark Davies, Gangland: Culture elites and the New Generationalism, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1997
4 In The Condition of Postmodernity, David Harvey outlines this shift as from modern to postmodern, industrial to post industrial, fordist to flexible accumulation, economies of scale to economies of scope. The transition may not necessarily be understand as lineal.
5 Michael Pusey, Economic Rationalism in Canberra: A Nation Building State Changes it Mind, Cambridge University Press, New York, 1991, p 2
6 John McDonald, 'Economic Rationalism: The Dismantling and Appropriation of Community', ... Centre for Contemporary Cultural Enquiry, Ballarat, 1996, p 52
7 However, there are significant precedents predating the Australia Council which commenced operations in the late 1960s as the Australian Council for the Arts.
8 Pusey, op.cit., p 3
9 ibid., p 10
10 ibid. p 154
11 ibid., p 225
12 Mcdonald, op.cit., p 52
13 ibid., p 55
14 Hal Foster, Return of the Real: The Avant Garde at the End of the Century, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996. p xvii
15 ibid., p xv
16 Esther Dyson, Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age, Viking Press, London, 1997, p 15
17 Adrian Searle (ed), 'Introduction', Talking Art, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1993 p 11
18 According to Marx, "the usefulness of a thing makes of this thing use-value" as cited in Denis Hollier, 'The Use-Value of the Impossible', Carolyn Baily Gill (ed), Bataille: Writing the Sacred, Routledge, London, 1995, p 136
19 George Bataille, 'The Notion of Expenditure', Visions of Excess Selected Writing 1927-1939 (ed. Allan Stoekl), (trans. Allan Stoekl, Carls R Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr), University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 1985, p 116
20 ibid., p 116
21 ibid., p 117
22 Economic rationalism marginalises and devalues such expenditure which manifests at a macro-level as social programs, education, cultural organisations.
23 Denis Hollier, 'The Use-Value of the Impossible', Carolyn Baily Gill (ed), Bataille: Writing the Sacred, Routledge, London, 1995, p 136
24 ibid
25 Foster, op.cit., p xi