With apologies to those to whom this is of absolutely no interest:

>Perhaps as you suggest there is an over-emphasis on marketing just now, but
>they've only been at it for a couple of years. I would hardly think that
>this constitues over-doing it. Perhaps the Australian wine industry is a
>useful parallel. Applying great marketing strategies AND also resourcing the
>development of great product is a winning combination.

As I said in my initial post, I am not against marketing per se. The
problem is the abstraction of something called a "market" and the
mystification of people called "consultants", with the consequent
applications of huge amounts of money beyond the greediest dreams of most
artists: and this allegedly in the "service" of art! Marketing
consultants talk about very simple tasks and ideas as if they were
esoteric arts, rather than practical solutions to practical problems: it
takes no great insight to arrange publicity, or to create mailing lists,
or to administer a media campaign. One is always grateful for an
efficient administrator who knows what he/she is doing, or a pr person
ditto. That is not the question. The amount of money wasted on
consultants - as in the recent IT out-sourcing scandal - outweighs entire
national arts budgets, but nary a ripple of discomfort this causes; let
one artist hang out in Paris to paint a picture and the shit hits the
fan. The ideological hostility is towards _art_, which as we all know,
is just a bunch of wankers loafing around at government expense.

There may be an element of truth in that, as there is in all caricatures;
but I will say that the artists in various disciplines whom I know work
extremely hard under conditions which would scandalise most consultants,
and every survey that has been done shows that the "arts industry", as
they so love to call it, is about the most efficient sector there is.

By virtue of its abstraction, marketing is also an ideas-free zone: the
units involved might be air conditioners or books, it makes no
difference. It is just product. The wine industry is the Great Ozco
Model, as if art is merely a leisure activity to be consumed by the
well-heeled - there are other views of what it might be.

When art is expected, as policy, to be led by the market, and evaluated
by market-driven concepts, I think we're in deep trouble. I'm completely
with you on the literacy programs; I might add as areas of concern the
disembowelment of the liberal arts which has been ongoing in the tertiary
sector for the past decade, and the current highly political
dismemberment of the ABC - which, btw, supplements the income of a fair
number of Australian artists. The focus on marketing would not upset me
if I didn't suspect that these "marketing strategies", which are
announced on very glossy paper and backed up with figures from Saatchi
and Saatchi, are going hand in hand with tightening budgets for the arts,
and are designed in fact to obscure dwindling government support. Ie,
what is wrong with this picture?

Now, whether this dwindling funding matters or not is a matter of
opinion. It depends whether you think a culture has value apart from
that generated by its financial turnover/employment figures/value to
tourism. It's quite clear, I think, where my prejudices are. If you
want to produce a play, which requires the payment of a large number of
people even in its smaller incarnations, and (if it is to be made
properly and with a proper respect for its audience) their full-time
investment, then less funding means you will see fewer productions and
consequently less diversity (as in fact has happened in the past decade).
 You might argue with some justice that Mayakovsky managed to put on his
crazy plays without government money, just a whole lot of enthusiastic
students. There are always nutcases who will do their work for nothing.
I know people who have done this. One can only do it for so long. But I
have the weird idea that the only possible justification for government
funding of the arts is to make possible work that, in a market-oriented
economy, otherwise would most likely not happen. That is, the
innovative, the unpopular, the "difficult", which by its nature attracts
only a small proportion of the population, but which might "matter" in
different ways.

I don't believe Beckett ever did complain when "audiences didn't flock to
his door". What _I_ am complaining about is the devaluing of
relationships and human intimacies which occurs in this Brave New
Corporate World we are all supposed to inhabit, and the insistent pushing
of a mass market as the only desirable one. I passionately believe that
art depends on relationships of a certain intimacy, that audiences, as
Ron Silliman said a few months ago of new poetry, are built "one by one".
 If "importance" and "success" are measured only by audience reach, by
numbers, and not by other less tangible possibilities which culture might
in fact represent, then let's just settle for Jeffrey Archer, who's much
better than any of us at selling his books. And just stop pretending,
get rid of arts funding altogether, and admit that's where we are.

Whew, that feels better.

>I wonder whether, to some extent, the
>freedom to give the books away rests in part on the sense that they are not
>'yours' in the sense of personal property.

That's possible - actually, I don't know.

Best

Alison