Re: [-empyre-] nice and naughty

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

For the benefit of those offshore, I think it's worth noting that New
Zealand had a tertiary education boom from the mid-90s through to a couple
of years ago, resulting in a sharp rise in academic employment for artists
as the "creative industries" became a sexy career option, and the economics
of government funding encouraged Universities and Polytechnics/Colleges to
run degree programmes over other courses. I think NZ's art and design
schools, taken as a whole must have the youngest faculty in the world. There
are a whole lot of useful ways that networks that were associated with
artist-run spaces in the 1990s have shifted into academia, but probably at
the cost of access by some sectors of the community. On the other hand, the
people who've made that transition have also opened up academic spaces and
resources quite radically compared to a decade ago. Anyway, the move isn't
purely toward the academy, people also move out of it (I'm collecting my
last tenured pay packet this week :7), and the question of who pays one's
bills is perhaps less interesting than how this new situation is
transforming the production of artists.


On 1/22/05 12:13 AM, "ian clothier" <hybridia1@yahoo.com> wrote:

> As such artists and academics in the art world stand
> alongside eachother. I spent all of my 20's and 30's
> being an artist and now in my fourties I'm an
> academic. Well it was fun being an artist and living
> on wits and whatever else, but the whole boom-bust
> economic scenario got boring, real bad after 20 years.
> Life has its ins and outs. In either scenario - as
> artist or paid academic, there are things to do that
> can only be dreamed of.

--
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