The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterised?
Written by Sara TrulaThis is a great article on why digital talent doesn’t want to work for some companies.
I think the post hits upon some really interesting points, points that hold true beyond the simple issue of digital talent working for companies and reaches as far as saying something about why there’s a lack of innovation coming from publicly funded organisations in general, compared to unfunded (publicly) organisations and individuals. To summarise them:
Every element of their work will be pored over by multiple layers of bureaucracy.
Mediocre is good enough.
Trial and error is condemned.
I’m going to throw out a few possibly shocking but really quite obvious statements here:
Making things happen isn’t very hard.
Making good creative things happen isn’t very hard.
The best way to ensure great projects is to ensure that the people working on them are personally motivated to make them great.
The success of an event/project is really about how many people were fundamentally influenced, not how many people attended, tweeted about it, or how high the ticket price or profit margins were.
I’ve been writing a bit about this lately in MyOtherPlace. A real revolution in publicly funded institutions will happen only when they’re prepared to seek an attitude shift, genuinely engage in debate, and open the doors (even if in a reasonably controlled way) to trying some new things out and risking seeing them fail. Chances are those new things wont fail at all, and I’m pretty confident the art-loving public just about have the smarts to understand immensely complicated concepts like “experiment” and “beta testing” and “just trying this out” and wont permanently castigate a publicly funded organisation for actually doing these things occasionally. Hell, they might even like those organisations more just for trying.
It’s hardly an audacious proposal. And any sense of it being radical or revolutionary stems only from having an extremely conservative outlook. Last time I checked, extreme conservatism wasn’t the driving force of the arts. I’m not sure why it seems so pervasive an attitude these days.
Addendum: I can’t seem to shut up on stuff like this today. Please see here if you really want more caustic sniping about stuff I deem “so obvious, we shouldn’t even have to be talking about it at all”.
Discussion (5 Comments)
I saw a charity (not a photography one) looking for donations to go with a grant to ceate an online fundraiser / auctioner / promoter / digital person position. Didn’t make any sense to me. They wanted to raise £60.000 for a three year position (I hope! as £60k a year is quite steep!) for a position that they wanted to reach a target of raise £2.000 a year. Why didn’t they just keep the £60k to advance the objects of the charity? How weird! The world’s crazy!
Joni, the world is so crazy.
this is quite an “obvious” statement?
please ignore this comment, i used the wrong blockquote html tags for this blog. so it has made the entire post past the quote a blockquote. My appologies
you claim that this is quite an “obvious” statement
But surely this isn’t something that can be tallied? They can’t decide if a project/event is a success by finding out how many people were fundamentally influenced… surely if this was tangible then yes it would be obvious that this is how we gauge the success of a project/event. Strangely though i believe that some people can be influenced by something in the long run and not realising it until a year later when they think, wow, i remember this image….. (i myself did this with an exhibition by Bruce Davidson that i saw in London, i was amazed by the photography i saw, and it inspired me throughout my degree, but i didn’t realise how much it had influenced me till at least a year after seeing it) so even if someone was to stand at the door and say “excuse me, were you influenced in any way from this event” the results would still be inaccurate.
Surely they want to find out if it is/was a success, so they will monitor the physical variables throughout the project/event, perhaps feedback forms, profits, ticket sales etc… I agree that profit is not a value i would consider with an event/project but i would certainly look at the turnout and general vocal feedback from the attenders. I would think that if it was a good turnout and people appeared to be enjoying the event/project then i would class that as a success and it would inspire me to keep pushing on to the next event/project. But most importantly out of all of this, i would like to think that i have influenced someone in someway or another. Surely that is the obvious?
I don’t disagree or agree with the statement, i do think the obvious is that artists should be creating these events/projects to inspire and influence, even if its only one person, then yes it is a success, but unfortunately the artworld has been infiltrated by businessmen that monitor the tangible. I know theres alot of raw talent out there, but theres also alot of spreadsheets… do you not think so?