roachboy

* How are artists in your nation/state/province/community faring?

i don't know anyone who is able to make a living doing art of any kind.
i know folk who have periods that enable them to focus on their creative work--large grants or residencies---but everyone else splits their time up, doing one or another type of day gig to get over. what that means is a direct function of how much time they're willing to give away on maintenance. alot of my friends drift about in adjunct world because while the pay's shit and isolation can be a real problem, if you can rig things up you can steal time.
without any medical insurance of course.
caveat emptor i suppose.

one of the more depressing realizations i had, particularly in chicago where i started meeting a bunch of fairly well-known artists, writers and musicians, is that even in the more famous sectors of work lumped together as "experimental" or "underground" very few people can make a living doing what they love doing.

the exceptions have trust funds.

Do you support government funding of the arts? (Why or why not?)

yes. of course. both direct to artists and indirect to organizations that enable or foster creative work. the more the better.
one effect of the past 30 years of conservative hegemony in the states has been a destruction of what were diverse, decentralized art and music scenes--alot of new ones have grown up in the wastelands left behind--some last, some don't.

consistent funding enables folk to devote their time to creative work, which is every bit as socially important as other types of production.

to adopt the crass american capitalist way of talking for a minute--a vibrant creative economy (if you like) provides a host of benefits to straighter economic activities.--from real estate to design to sound work to architecture. on and on. you live in a designed world. someone had to design it.

i think it is an enormous waste of creative potential, this system that's in place in the states.

i also think it should be possible to start new radically interdisciplinary schools on the order of the bauhaus or black mountain. think of the impact these schools have had. what enabled them is (a) a cross-disciplinary cirriculum (b) a highly skilled and devoted faculty (c) a rigourous course of study.
straight schools operate with pretty strict divisions between disciplines.
even "interdisciplinary" programs function to affirm where one comes from.
specialization is limitation---trans-disciplinary education enables the generation of quite specialized work, but more importantly, it facilitates recursion and/or reflexive modes of thinking and working.
the era of single-minded devotion to a single task in isolation from everything else is well behind us all.
in the states, the educational system from top to bottom hasn't even started to catch up with this.

o yeah:
art funding underwrites process not outcomes.
it is of no consequence whether people like the outputs or not--the funding is not about you as a consumer. you can opt for what's available--if you don't like x go do something else.
so personally, i couldn't care less if people were offended by serrano's piss christ for example.
one thing's sure about them: they hadn't seen the prints.
the prints are awesome.
to argue that it's not art without having seen it is just stupid.
a particularly american kind of stupid.

Is your government doing enough to foster a vibrant and accessible arts scene?

hell no.

* Do the arts matter to you? (Why or why not?)

some are ways of life, others i enjoy, others i don't care about: all is important. if not to me then to others.
there should be lots of possibilities.
the more the better.

* If you are an artist, what would you like to see changed?

more sources of funding.
more coherent funding for individual artists across media.
more funding available for fashioning new intermediaries that enable a sense of ordering to new media projects (for example) that are already out there but that no-one knows about because there aren't enough intermediaries.
more funding for new media. more funding for print. more outlets, more writing.
more sound projects. more film. more everything.

look at it this way: more creative work done by more people in more places gives the straight world more options to steal. plus it generates a better social environment for everyone. plus it keeps artists from forming gangs and terrorizing suburbanites.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite