ASK & DISCUSS INDEX

7 years, 7 months ago - Paddy Robinson-Griffin

Great idea - although the ROI is generally lower for arts than vice. I guess vice being by largely black market and hence untaxed helps improve profitability too.
And lack of employment laws! Perhaps the answer is to make the arts illegal, then the black market will step in ;-)

7 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

In the words of the poet; "Don't follow leaders, watch your parking meters"

Contributions to the understanding of arcane realities by anyone, whether academically qualified or not, about a subject in which their own experience is objectively nonexistent and merely hypothetical, ought to be taken with a large pinch of salt.

It immediately becomes apparent when authorities and quasi authorities begin discussions about the hugely diverse subject of the differing objectives of hedonism and mind numbing compared with those seeking to open the doors of perception as if they are related. Such base ignorance usually becomes apparent by reference to the word 'drugs' in this context.

7 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

For the record.

The word 'drugs' covers such a huge and diverse range of entities, as do the cultures and sub cultures associated with them. The term 'illegal drugs' is unlearnedly pejorative in its blunt presumption. Society is split between those who believe in the integrity of our legislators, to the extent that anything they declare must be taken as Gospel and we should trust our souls into their keeping and those others who rely on their own integrity when the legislators are wrong. Throughout the World we can observe how differing are attitudes, which ought to raise questions amongst the unquestioning; especially where quite contradictory policies produce much better outcomes. But I particularly referred to the unlearned and blunt policies consequential to crude and unempirical analysis whereby too many of us lump so many differing circumstances into the wrong pigeon holes.

I spent the second fifteen years (1970 - 1985) of my working life in the music industry, at every level from the street to the mega super stars, lots of them, to the extent that I might be unique amongst SP's 40,000 members in this with regard to the depth and range of my experience with musicians and their environments. I've continued a close association with this on and off up until the present. The social-cultural-political-economics of this sector ought not be defined by the unnuanced blanket use of the term 'drugs'. To say that I'm parroting government in what I'm suggesting is preposterous since I'm clearly contradicting their policies on just about every issue I've ever contributed to anywhere.

It's ironic if I'm coming over as an accademic because I left school at 16 without even an o'level, spent the next four years in salt water activities before landing up in a squatting community associated with the original and culturally seminal Round House venue in Chalk Farm, where I learned much about music, theater and business before discovering the magic of film and TV. I became a production skills teacher with our hugely successful short courses, much of it retraining students coming out of three year degree courses. I could not make up the fact that I have lost count of the number of times students told me that they had "learned more here in two days than in those three years". I've never spent a day in formal academic education or at any establishment purporting to teach any of the skills used in writing, production skills or producorial business. I have however learned everything from experience and the excellence of those I've been privaliged to worked with.

It's wise to be aware of the negatives but even wiser to encourage the positives. It's grace and joy that attracts grace and joy :-))

7 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

The context is slipping. I was responding to the specific points you raised Vasco. I understood that you saying that I was using 'government lingo' inferred that in some way I represented the government, even if only in spirit? You then went on to express your 'worry' that I sounded like an extract from an academic journal, with the apparent inference that you thought I might be plagerising from one? Originality is a relative concept but my ability to uniquely articulate my own thoughts in to words is sufficient enough for me to be intellectually independent. Because you made some strident observations about musicians and 'artists' with which I differ, it was not unreasonable for me to qualify my exceptionally deep and wide experience, which is not a boast but a relavent fact. Full and lengthy details can be provided if required. Mid Wales is not the limit of my event horizon by a global long chalk, even though I know it quite well. It's just where I'm based. Most of the people I've worked with during the more than three decades I've been here have had little to with our local creatives. My contacts with the institutions in Wales have not been very fruitful, including with the gravitational bubble around Aberystwyth and its university, consequently I have few expectations that they ever will. Hope however never dies.

I'm intregued by your reference to "underground organisations" in the context of governmental systems. The notion of a democratically changeable government is a good idea. Hopefully we may one day get one. Proportional representation would be a good start, which might even lead to a more balanced and just society. Nothing currently on offer at the ballot box comes anywhere near to that yet.

But we digress, although not as much as might be assumed, from the central point of your original post about conspiring to create an arts business. It's a bit of a rhetorical idea because such "conspiracies" are endemic in our sector, it's how most of us operate. The coming together of ideas, creativity and resources has always been the modus operendi. The best of which are the collaborations of high functioning successfulness rather than the collaborations of the disfunctional.
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7 years, 7 months ago - John Lubran

Thanks for clarifying that Vasco. This has nevertheless provided for some phylosophical process. I take your point about the challenges we face in making an honest living from the sweat of our own brows, without having to resort to crime or beg for favours from worthy institutions. We live increasingly in a dog eat dog and the devil take the hindmost society. Well at least those who vote for that sort of society have got us all what they asked for, at the minute. So it's all market forces and supply and demand within a rigged market economy. Sell it cheap and stack it high? Keep 'em fearful and addicted to the reality we want to sell. What is legal is not a reliable measure of what is moral or right even if we are obliged to subscribe.

Fortunately the above model is not entrenched in an unassailable reality even though it often seems to be entrenched in a concrete mind set. Ironically it's the interactions of disruptive behaviours and iconoclasims that shatter glass ceilings and open new pathways. The alternative business models that are emerging from an Internet still in its infantsy, is such an appropriate and synchronistic thing. The opportunity for fully front loaded budgets and free distribution on a scale that few commercial distribution entities has been able to match is the key to what you're looking for. Many of us may still be young enough to enjoy its fruits.