Re: [Futurework] Sonny Bush ~ Pro Bono?

Ray Evans Harrell Mon, 20 Jan 2003 10:11:39 -0800

That is all very well and good but a factory worker gets PAID for his work whether it sucks or not, as does management. Do you get a salary Brad, Keith? Keith has your music business made a profit? As you well know the living Artist does not and the mastery involved is as expensive as a doctor's training and the reviews follow them to the grave. My friend Sam talked about big artist fees but he refused to see the limitation of private market that he worshipped. That the pie was only so big given that economic model and that it advocated the Enron approach to stars in the system. You may think that Enron is an aberration but six years ago on this list I said that the Arts were the future for American Capitalism. Enron is an artistic business structure in a private economy. Keith even sent me a rip-off article in the Guardian by a "Journalist" who simply took my post and made an article out of it. The subject was the parallel between movie companies and the Agile Virtual structure advocated by business and it drew the same conclusions, of course since they were mine anyway. How long would consultants be able to work individually if they weren't able to Trademark the processes they developed? You dudes just don't get the difference between work that demands Masterful Creativity every day and work that is the same lesson over and over again for a lifetime. This is sort of like talking to school teachers about holistic, individual education which can only be done privately.

They teach the same course and grade for years with the same material endlessly. One could say that most teach either the one year, one course or four years for the rest of their lives. While we teachers in the private sector have to vary it with every single new student and continually create with what is happening in the marketplace. It is stupid for the private sector to try to compete with the public sector for classroom education but the public sector could never afford to work as intensely on one student until they succeed as we do on a daily basis. We don't get salaries and we often don't get paid for our best and most cutting edge work. IBM said it years ago when they first tried selling computers to the public. They drew a crescendo mark and said that the point was the "need," the lower line was the "consumer" and the upper line was the "new product." How to get the two together (the consumer's learning and the products complexity) took years and the best paid minds on the planet working 24 hours a day. What chance does a poor individual artist have without that kind of money to back him up, advertise his creation and publish endless books for "Dummies" on how to understand what he did?

Pay artists a salary no matter how we are feeling for the day and we will make up new works for ever. The only problem with that is that you will insist on telling us what we make up since you are paying the taxes that pay our salaries and then we have the banal Soviet Union again. Your ideas for creativity are - sadly to say and I mean that - bankrupt and only "Argentinize" the Artist World. You are to Artists as the IMF is to Argentina and was to Yugoslavia. We were Argentina before the World Bank was ever brought into existence. Before that, even the American Indians called America's artists the "Indians" of the White Man's World (Lame Deer Seeker of Visions) because of the way they were and are still treated in America.

Most of the Artists of America have elected to keep the Art in their heads instead of giving it away and elect to do something else. I teach them late in life. Such bitter souls, it eats my heart and gives me high blood pressure. Or you could be that like Cherokee composer who knew very well who his music belonged to. Stokowski called him America's finest composer but the prejudice of the time meant that he wasn't heard much. Except for a couple of events he still isn't and he burned all of his 1,600 works on his death because we believe that private property is inviolate. If he didn't sell it or give it away then it was to go with him into the next world and that is where it is.

The pity here is that there could be a compromise answer. The Internet makes it possible for there to be schedules and processes by which information is used. Information that is not used brings nothing back to the inventor while on the other hand information that is stolen also serves as no incentive to creativity by the Master workers in the professions. People have to eat and deserve to as the Hutton article - that no one talks about - made the point. No harm is done for someone like Keith to "mine" the great works of the past and make them available to the present. That is easy. Also the public dialogue is not helped if we cannot publish on a list the works of someone like Krugman. If you publish it without his name that is a rip off of his ideas. If you publish it with his name you owe the NYTimes. That double bind has to be addressed and it is NOT being addressed by advocating doing away with ownership of writings and other artworks. That is "throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater."

There is also a place where the common feeds the Artist. But such an idea deserves more the treatment as given it in the anthropological examination of time titled the Dance of Life by Edward T. Hall than the cheap shot that Keith gave it in his post. That is a serious issue and deserves more. I would say that the Artist feeds the common as well and that is the Artist's job. Starve one and you don't get the product. The problem is to feed both the Artist and the Common. The question is whether the pie is too small in Capitalism for that to happen.

I know, I'm whining but I'll be happy to keep this up as long as you continue to refuse to see the contradiction between your ideas of private property necessary for Capitalism to exist and the current fad that you are advocating. It doesn't compute. You could come up with a third way which is what I have been asking for, for at least a year on this list.

Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director

The American Masters Arts Festival Biennial

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