jabronibaloney reblogged
jabronibaloney reblogged
sometimes I’ll listen to talks and interviews by people who were working artists in the eighties and early nineties when it was possible to scrape and put by on a part time working class job while developing and distributing their own skills and I’ll think about the mass sacrificial zone of art and culture that formed while multiple generations of artists were robbed of the time and energy and means to create, the artists who couldn’t rent cheap flophouses and gogo dance in bars or dishwash or bounce or escort or walk dogs part time and still support themselves, the unnecessary forced desperation of survival eating more and more away at the limited number of hours in a day available to make art.
I think all the time about henry rollins talking about living in his best friend’s mom’s living room and working at haagen dazs and all of the shows he went to and the relationships he cultivated to get into the rock scene and how impossible all of that is to recreate thirty or forty years later with the end result being the total flattening and deadening of art and culture we see around us now.
“Despite all its rhetoric of novelty and innovation, neoliberal capitalism has gradually but systematically deprived artists of the resources necessary to produce the new. In the UK, the postwar welfare state and higher education maintenance grants constituted an indirect source of funding for most of the experiments in popular culture between the 1960s and the 80s.
The subsequent ideological and practical attack on public services meant that one of the spaces where artists could be sheltered from the pressures to produce something that was immediately successful was severely circumscribed.
As public service broadcasting became ‘marketized’, there was an increased tendency to turn out cultural productions that resembled what was already successful. The result of all of this is that the social time available for withdrawing from work and immersing oneself in cultural production drastically declined.
Perhaps it was only with the arrival of digital communicative capitalism that this reached terminal crisis point. Naturally, the besieging of attention described by Berardi applies to producers as much as consumers.
Producing the new depends upon certain kinds of withdrawal — from, for instance, sociality as much as from pre-existing cultural forms — but the currently dominant form of socially networked cyberspace, with its endless opportunities for micro-contact and its deluge of YouTube links, has made withdrawal more difficult than ever before… in recent years, everyday life has sped up, but culture has slowed down.”
- Mark Fisher, The Slow Cancellation of the Future
lesbianchai
This also specifically denies poor artists. So anyone able to pop up is either extreeeemly lucky or. just rich.
