[-empyre-] Art, Funding and Politics

[NeMe]

Many thanks to Timothy Murray and Renate Ferro who invited us to
moderate the November discussion on Art, Funding and Politics. It has
been a very interesting participation for us.

We also thank our guest discussants, Denise Robinson, Iannis Zannos
and Bill Balaskas who despite their hectic work schedules, found time
for substantial contributions and to all of you who contributed to
this dialogue generating some very pertinent considerations and
concerns.

Inviting ideas, comments, and thoughts on a topic such as this,
generates both objective and subjective responses, so we should be
prepared for views that differ and challenge for it is this very
process  that establishes connections to each other in ways that
generate a coming into alignment with others.

One positive feature of an online discussion is its immense potential
to reach a large number of people and not just network friends and
colleagues. Unfortunately, we feel that this thread has not succeeded,
to the extent we had hoped for, in engaging a satisfying
representation of these voices despite the very significant
contributions.  We also feel that, as moderators, we failed in
engaging voices belonging to academics and cultural workers from non
western institutions who do not have English as their first language.
We did invite several academics from non-western universities who
enthusiastically agreed to post but then retracted due to their
unfamiliarity with overtly academic precis style posts. We were aware
of this criterion when writing our posts however it does appear,
sadly, that there is still a lot of work to be done towards the
breaking of the dominant boundaries and notions of intellectual
authority established by western cultural and academic hegemony,
especially online.

In the words of cultural theorist, Nancy Adajania, "its time to
re-stage the world" and perhaps this is an appropriate conclusion to
this discussion on art/funding/politics as it is indeed time " to
re-stage the world " of arts and scholarship into more engaging and
participatory voices for and from many.

Thank you for reading,

Yiannis Colakides and Helene Black
http://www.neme.org
http://neme-imca.org