Gillian wrote:
>Accordingly, I am very
>glad for the new emphasis at OZco on Audience Development. Some of their
>initiatives have been quite good, others seem to be naive.
I don't know how much you have to do with the end of things where people
are attempting to inform others about their work, Gillian. There seems
to be this expectation among some in the Oz Council that "marketing" will
solve everything, and that as soon as the populace at large knows how
fabulous, exciting etc etc some work is, they'll rush out with their
dollars in hand and buy it. There is apparently some great unplumbed
pool of audience out there.
That sadly is a complete mirage. There are some art forms here which are
only ever going to attract small audiences, no matter how brilliantly
they are executed. What bothers me is that this small audience, no
matter how committed it might be, is by virtue of its smallness
considered worthless. This is where the insane economic model of
"growth" begins to be very damaging. Large audiences are not in
themselves a virtue; there are experiences available between a small
audience which might have value in themselves. At this point that
mindset begins to seem very like censorship. The audience-oriented model
of art takes no account of the staying power of great works, many of
which sold very badly in their time - Paradise Lost, for instance, is
still selling centuries later, despite going nowhere near the bestseller
lists when Milton wrote it - nor of the fact that _none_ of us know which
works which will stay, and which won't. Eliot was quite serious when he
wrote, after a lifetime of writing poems, that he had no idea whether
he'd been wasting his life or not.
Of course, by saying they were "flat earthers", I meant Samuel Beckett et
al took no notice whatsoever of any "potential market".
>I've just submitted a tender to OZco for a $140,000 research project to
>measure the effectiveness of the program in the first year. I asked about
>Key Performance Indicators and long term effectiveness measures. But none of
>that has been articulated yet. The $5mill program is a poorly formulated
>knee-jerk reaction. And so is the evaluation of it. Still, I figure that,
>given that the funds are allocated, I could do some good with the $140,000 -
>plus it would put food on the table for a while. My pact with the devil.
It's difficult not to point out that (so I will) $140,000 is way way more
than any of the annual grants available to writers, which top at about (I
think) $40,000. It's a sum which would run a small theatre company for a
year. And this $5 million which is being spent on this "poorly
formulated" program is $5 million which does not go to publishers,
writers, and so on, to actually _make_ art.
I know the arguments for marketing, and am not against it per se. But in
bureaucratic/corporate cirles it has a kind of magical aura, and is a
dominant orthodoxy, I think at the expense of what is actually supposed
to be being "marketed", especially as far as art is concerned. The
underlying ideology of that bothers me deeply.
Best
Alison
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