Its funny seeing yourself portrayed in the media. Today The Australian arts section is running several features on artist income with one headline proclaiming “Artists don’t do it for the money“. Well there isn’t much news there, but the stats from two new reports back this up, showing that “16 per cent earn less than $10,000 and 5 per cent more than $100,000″ with women having “a median income of $5000, compared with $10,300 for men”. To accompany this there is a profile of, well, uhm, me. And the tag-line for this is “FLEXIBLE, optimistic, but doing it tough“. Actually I’m not disputing the summation, its pretty accurate although I think I’m luckier than most. Almost all artists are “doing it tough”, especially up the mountains.
I find Amanda Palmer pretty inspiring and artists like her which direct their work through the net via blogs, twitter etc might be leading the way to a new kind of semi-sustainable practice. (Maybe this is where the optimism comes in, ha?). While AFP had a record deal which got her started, and undoubtedly helped to give her a web profile large enough to sell concert tickets and digital music downloads, its questionable whether she could have maintained it without a genuine love of the medium and for her fan base.
On Sat morning I was watching AFP’s #LOFNOTC (loser on friday night at the computer [- hey I'm in Australia so everything on a Friday night is Saturday here]) webcast as she introduced Tristan and a bunch of teenagers she met randomly outside Berklee College of Music. They jammed and it was AMAZING!!! In her blog this morning she posted the video and wrote about how she met everyone. Very Cool. And an example of how exciting online practice can be, especially in the hands of a bat-shit crazy superwoman.
I’ve been thinking about the role of the internet in an artistic career a lot this week with the impending Australian federal election. The Australian Labour Party want to build a National Broadband Network- a largely fibre optic internet backbone covering all of Australia, including regional areas. It will initially offer speeds of 100mbps but the technology can be upgraded to be many times faster, as need dictates. The Liberal/National Coalition want to scrap the NBN and replace it with a wireless broadband network based around mobile technologies that will service mostly the cities. The minimum guaranteed speed of wireless is 12Mbps which is slower than my current ADSL connection. It won’t be upgradable. I also don’t get mobile coverage at my house, despite being listed as living in a coverage area. So in terms of what system I would prefer it’s a no-brainer. This is an important debate as an artist. Large amounts of the art cultures I engage with are online. Given that I live in regional Australia, my potential audience is largely online too. This election has been devoid of discussion on the arts, but the NBN is an issue for artists, and could affect our ability for practice in the future.
Over+out.e.
If you enjoyed this article, please consider sharing it!
