Posts by BenWilson
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I'm struck by the assumption that some high art can justly be funded and some can't.
It is inevitable though. We can't have all the art, so that decision is constantly being made. The differences are just about which art, and how much funding.
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1...the signal/noise ratio would put it on par with hearing the news through a flushing toilet.
2....either would do. If I then drank it and it was nice, I'd know it was all just a bad dream.
3....Adonis, but straight. Perhaps a scar.
4....it's code to his security guards to get between you - the question is to slow you down. Put your finger on the button and...
5....when it comes to actually pissing yourself, it's best to already be in the water if you don't want anyone to notice. A beach in Maui is pretty safe, anyone there is up for a laugh. -
Speaking truth to power my fat black arse.
Heh! But surely ragging on Rudman is truth to the powerless. You can't rag out your own organization publicly, that's just a plain fact of paid employment. If I want to hear Granny-ragging, the internet is where it's at.
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I actually don't think you'd really like living in a society whose memory of itself extended no further than the last five minutes.
True, but I'd also not particularly like to live in a society that prioritized the past over the future too much. In between?
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Danyl, I'll have to stand corrected now that I've heard it from the horse's ... mouth.
I actually don't think we're so poor we can't fund the arts. Indeed, on your apparent rationale it wouldn't matter how rich we were, any art that got support is less money for health, education, welfare etc. That boils down to a difference in priorities. From what I can see the only dance industry we'd have without funding would be lap, and whatever rich patrons like (I'm willing to bet that ballet would survive).
OTOH, if NZers just won't pay to keep dance afloat in the box office, maybe it should die, or piss off overseas where it's appreciated. Certainly we would be spared the agonizing decisions about which starving artists should subsist. Agonizing because art is always a judgment call, an exposure of prejudice about what is art and what is not. We could happily leave that in the hands of the wealthy elites, who would most likely continue to fund the existing classical forms, with the difference being that what survived would be entirely to their taste. They wouldn't have agonizing public debates about what middle class prejudices are exposed by their choices, they'd just go ahead and indulge their upper class prejudices.
Or we could outsource the agony of allocating our actually already extremely meager budget for the arts to little known officials, and then gripe about their choices after the fact. That's the course we have actually chosen. A very small pool of money for a bunch of people who would otherwise probably collect the dole, which is given to them on the basis of actually producing something.
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Steve, I was never connecting dance funding with music funding in my analogy. I was connecting one kind of dance funding with another kind, and funding of one genre of music with another. But certainly the one dime scenario is 'constructed for the purposes of argument'. I pretty much felt that was what Danyl was saying from the start - "If you must cut something could it be this instead of that?". I didn't actually read him to be advocating any cuts of any kind at all.
This is the point some seem to be making here: that by raising this as if it’s some sort of “question that needs to be asked” or “Devil’s advocate” question, all we really do is play into the hands of the right.
Seems so and I thoroughly disagree with it. Devil's advocates should probably expect to cop a lot of flak if they haven't made it clear what they are doing, but most of the time they drive the debate, bring out the good arguments, make the case stronger. If they make the case for the Devil stronger too, it's probably because it's a strong case, and the Devil will be sure to come up with it himself anyway - best to be prepared for it.
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I was prompted by Sacha's link, "for a local creative life probably deprived of the 'best' concertos, ballet and oil paintings." I don't want kids to be deprived of such art forms; even ballet, which I loathe.
Who does? The question is around whether that particular good outweighs others that could be delivered on the same dime. Sure it's questionable whether that's a fair trade off, whether other goods should/could come from other dimes. But that doesn't stop us asking the hypothetical question: What if it that was the only dime? How fair would it seem that the Concert program with its current programming has this special spot? And I can't see any compelling reason other which doesn't make a lot of questionable assertions about the greater value of European classical music over ... the entire rest of the world/history.
I don't want kids to be deprived of ballet either. But there is seriously bugger all funding for dance, and my little sister has struggled for a decade trying to make a living out of contemporary dance here. One thing does come at the cost of the other in the arts. Keeping the ballet alive does cost us a lot of our dancing budget. The decision has to be made constantly - is it worth it? It's not automatic, and I don't envy CNZ for having to make those kind of decisions at all. To decide what art should be funded and what shouldn't. In NZ, it seems that the older the art form, the easier it is to justify funding, and to me there is something just a little bit screwy about that. Curiously, that's mostly because the older stuff is more popular with the audiences. It's less challenging, it's considered more beautiful because the style is established, people know what a graceful ballerina looks like. It doesn't matter one whit that the 'message' (if there is one) is hundreds of years old, whereas contemporary dance is about contemporary issues, uses contemporary styles, and challenges contemporary views. The people making it are also a contemporary underclass of artists, eking out their lives on meager budgets and big dreams. This is the 'cost' of ballet.
I'd be the first to say there should be no such trade off, the two should not be connected budgetarily at all. Yet they are, every bit as much as one genre of music is to another. So the hypothetical question above does need to be asked - certainly it is asked behind closed doors all the time whether we like it or not.
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Kids should have access to culture broadly, and not be constrained by what is thought by others to be "relevant" and "accessible."
If anyone had ever said they should be, you'd have a point. At least as far as that particular person was concerned. To generalize to the entire middle class white demographic is ... overgeneralizing.
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No, the middle-class people think it a suitable creative activity for brown kids - the don't enjoy it in the sense that they would have it in their homes or neighbourhoods.
That's a quack. I'm sure I remember Otis Frizzell (the multi-talented son of famous artist Dick Frizzell) did one right in the heart of Ponsonby. He was a white boy, IIRC.
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I distinctly remember the works of the Smooth Crew being everywhere I went back in the 80s, and there were others. Mostly, they were commissioned works, although they might not have studied entirely legally. Other wall paintings did seem to last longer, but possibly because the Smooth works were often advertising for something ephemeral, like a movie.
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