Fantastic stock image off the internet
As I wrote to the brilliant Selina Thompson a few days ago, and partially in relation to a conversation I had with Aaron Wright of Fierce Festival on Facebook, I am in the process of seeing the extent to which I am a hypocrite in lots of ways. This particularly pertains to my professional life. Here are a few combos, many of which are related to one another:
Everyone can make art
Vs
The only art worth my attention is made by people who know what they’re doing in my terms
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All culture is important, including vernacular, DIY and outsider forms
Vs
I want to be an arbiter of what is important and not important along with people who think like me
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I want how the arts are organised to completely change because the systems are unjust
Vs
I just want to have more power in the systems because I am right and know best
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There are endless ways to appreciate and value art
Vs
My values and measures are the right values and measures
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We need a plurality of articulation around artmaking and artgoing which includes non-professional doers and thinkers
Vs
I have had education about this so I know better for sure how to articulate everything about my field
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It is great to have people cut across disciplines e.g. architects in choreography, especially when it suits me
Vs
You can only be in or supported by a field if you know its full canon and, crucially, have suffered at the hands of its crap system i.e. ‘paid your dues’
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An artist is a worker and should use worker-organising methods to improve their conditions (e.g. unions)
Vs
The category ‘professional artist’ should be dismantled so everyone can make stuff without it being a profession, with all the difficulty, exploitation, exclusion and creative stifling that that brings
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I have thought in the past that the best way to deal with these doublethinks is to hold them within myself, managing myself as best I can, sort of ignoring bits and shrugging them off. Coronavirus is awful and watching an already-rotten government completely mould into a foul stink with no real hope for an alternative whilst actual human beings suffer the great, grave consequences has been terrible. Of course. Of course I would not have had life go like this. But what it has afforded me is a bit of time not to be scrabbling straight into the next thing, a bit of spaciousness in my life in the broadest way, and that has made me see not only the hypocrises in which I am engaging but also the weight of their psychical burden. I can’t go on like this. It is too disintegrating, too heavy. To overcome my hypocrisy might mean giving up a lot, probably a lot of what I am holding onto as some sort of essential value I have in myself. I have much more work to do. I’ll write more about some of this soon.