Don’t Apply For This Job!

ADMINISTRATOR WANTED AT KINGS ARI

Ok, here goes- my annual “first world problems”, futile, pointless rant about the arts industry:

I know that there is virtually no funding for positions like this, but still, asking someone to take on that level of responsibility for an org’s finances, in a job that will undoubtedly take more than 6 hours a week, for such low pay, and no job security, is a big ask. It needs to be said: all artists, ARIs and arts workers need to demand better pay and conditions. What we do is real work- it deserves real, comensurate pay, and should be funded properly. No-one expects Melbourne Museum to employ administrators under these conditions, why should Kings ARI, a gallery which has consistently helped to prop up Melbourne’s reputation for artistic and cultural diversity, promoted so eagerly by our Mayor’s and councils in glossy pamphlets, for many years at no profit, be expected to?

No disrespect or ill will to King’s intended, but I find it really distressing to see ads like these over and over again, and to see hopeful young people flocking to apply for them, not realising how far short they are selling themselves and their skills. We all need to push back – a cut in funding means a cut in service- how can the government or the public expect to continue getting so much value for such small expenditure???

A prickly truth is that, like too many female dominated industries (social work, nursing, publishing) a low bar has been set. For a long time, women had very little agency in the workplace, and those that did have careers considered themselves lucky to have the opportunity to work at all. Often, they were middle class, educated, and the onus was not on them to be the breadwinner- wages could be low, because no-one was relying on them to clothe and feed them. But a career in the arts now, and the work done there, should not be considered simply a folly of the well-heeled- a mere diversion for rich ladies. It’s appalling, exploitative and wrong that so much work in the arts industry is performed for no money, let alone the crappy wages offered in the ad above.

The worst part is how replaceable we all are- there is always someone younger, greener, more eager, and possibly financially supported, right behind you ready to take up whatever gruelling, underpaid, and highly coveted arts job you have decided to give up once and for all.

Critical Failure: Visual Arts, The Wheeler Centre, Thursday 9 September

The Critical Failure nights that occurred over four nights last week were an excellent idea – a night each dedicated to a panel discussion of, variously, criticism of Film, Books, Theatre and Art. I would’ve gone to all of them if I wasn’t out-of-town from Monday – Wednesday, luckily I was able to make it to the Thursday session, which was about Visual Arts.

Patrick McCaughy, Phip Murray, Naomi Cass (as opposed to Nadia Tass – as the moderator accidentally called her at the end of the event) and some guy from SMH, who is apparently their pre-eminent art reviewer.

It was an excellent panel in many ways. The breadth and depth of their collective experience and knowledge is something you can’t deny, and on one level, just enjoyable to be witness to. However, is it too much to expect that a discussion of visual art in this country might start in medias res?

Ethics & Art

One of Bill Henson's non-pedo (and thus un-famous) photos.

When I was working as a research administrator at Melbourne Uni, I had the dubious pleasure of encountering for the first time, the world of research ethics. Each research proposal submitted  had to pass a labrinthine, rigorous ethics test before it could be endorsed by the school. Often this delayed the start of research by many months as proposals which had been approved for funding were caught in endless ethics review loops, requiring navigation through some bewildering ethics algorithm, before getting the green light. It goes without saying that ethics boards are the bane of a modern research academic’s life, impeding their basic ability to get on with it, as they do. Part of the reason for their disdain is the overly bureaucratic form of the process, and the implication that it is simply an attempt by the university, at future-proofing against litigation.

Reflections on Experimental Art

Dream of Samarra (2007) Usama Alshaibi, Chicago, 1 minute*

There was an interesting review in the Food Issue of the New Yorker in November last year (2009)- Peter Schjeddahl reflecting on his experience of the downtown New York art scene via a large survey of 60s and 70s contemporary art at P.S. 1. called “1969”.

Speaking of the new culture where “artist was becoming a job description, at once secure and drained of meaning”, he asks:

“Who could be expected to care about such stuff? People who were vocationally obliged to care. You knew them by their tendency to speak of the art world as a “community”, adrift from society. Geared up art schools, contemporary-art museums, and programs of public funding for the arts tugged artists away from the commercial market and popular audiences and into an archipelago of insular scenes.”

Sound familiar?