Oscar Wilde famously quipped “Art is useless”. Like all quotes, it’s been taken out of context. Later in the same letter he explains his point more fully, “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.” 

If you want to make money, make money. If you want to make art, make art. This idea is widely held and yet the rage that underpins the lack of reward for art making marches in lockstep. Is an art practice and an expectation of security –  as a direct result of this practice –  at divisive odds with itself?

Anyone who has been with someone they love for the long term, can attest that not being able to tolerate any change in your partner, is a recipe for diminishing returns on your investment. It will lead to a market crash, and charges of controlling and restrictive behaviour. You can love your craft and choose to continue to stick with how you love it… while the world around you and, possibly, inside you, has changed. You lean in harder with unchanged love and your resentments build. Your vocation may start loving you back in different ways than when you first flirted, then courted, and ultimately committed. In other words…”Your partner” may be doing something wonderful that an unchanged “you” needs changed eyes to recognize.

If the spiritual belief holds that we are all one, then how is it even conceivable that we are not permeable or impermanent in our selfhood?  How is it permissible to believe that while art is filled with chaos, revolution and joy, that institutions that support it are not spaces that must contend with chaos, revolution and joy in their practices?

So let’s do it. Let’s invite in some chaos, revolution and joy.

Let’s begin with the sacred fence that exists between being a Professional and NOT. “That’s not Art, it’s just Entertainment”. “Their work is so Commercial”. “She is a REAL Artist”. We say these things and hear them being said, but what do we really mean by them? It feels like a hierarchy between something desirable or NOT, and some calcified ideas about what makes an artist an artist. The first commandment is that the real artist must be free of any corrupting forces.  The second commandment is that artists must be paid. The third is that artists must be protected.The fourth is that artists must be revolutionary. The fifth commandment is that artists must be poor. The sixth is that artists must be bad with money. The seventh is that artists must look a certain way. The eighth is that artists must be values driven. Ninth is that artists are non-violent. What is your 10th?

After a very successful theatrical investigation, a good friend of ours quickly states: “I feel bad about the artists not being paid”. And we say: “but you paid them, you fed them, and everyone had a great time.” They say: “I know, but I feel bad”. And we say: “is it because you are not paying equity rates?” And even if they didn’t cop to it… which occasionally they will, we will always believe it is that. It is not that the artists are not being paid, it is that they are not being paid by the rules set up inside the fencing for “professional”.

And those lucky few who do make the “professional” rates? After the dues, the agents, the precarity and the childcare – they are still ultimately donating “to the cause”. At this point someone will proclaim that equity minimums were hard fought for! We don’t refute the blood, sweat and tears that were spilled in the quest to make the professional artist’s life a viable one. It was a noble pursuit, and yet, here we are. Very very very few can survive on just their art, and for the rest, it is not their fault.

It’s not our fault. 

We need to understand what we gain by building fences. 

What is the purpose of a fence? It is to keep some things out and some things in. It is to demarcate who is “us” and who is “them”. Who is a real artist and who is a community member? We need categories, of course. The human psyche can’t cope without them – probably.

Some fences we are interested in thinking about: 

• Commercial vs Nonprofit
• High-Art vs Community Art
• Amateur vs Professional
• Process vs Product
• Rentals vs Programming 
• Art vs Entertainment 
• Artist vs Community 
• Labour vs Practice
• Teacher vs Artist

What are these fences serving right now? What are they keeping out and what are they keeping in? 

The fences of “professional” and “commercial” are keeping something locked away, otherwise why would we need them? Some of that is a scarcity of resources – for sure, but some of it is status, identity, change. Instead of fixating on how we protect “us” from diminishing portions of pie, what might a fixation on growing the pie yield? The “art is labour” rhetoric threatens to withhold some value from the public in exchange for greater wages and security. But when the public is not asking for more of what we are providing, when our problem is apathy not exploitation, who do we demand more from and in exchange for what? 

Is it possible that  – by untethering professional and commercial fences from the joys of experiencing art –  abundance lies on the other side? If we are to take our unchanged love and change it… what hidden beauty and possibilities might begin to emerge? What if, by focusing our dwindling energy and power on sharing our love further and wider, we actually find more love in return? If our demands are not being heard, maybe an invitation will. 

The removal of fences is not easy. The first stage that follows is chaos, because we collapsed the categories and nothing makes sense anymore. This is painful and scary, we need to be compassionate to ourselves about how painful and scary it is. But it’s likely that some elements of chaos are required to offer new paradigms, new possibilities. There will be a cost associated with this changed love.  It may be as minimal as discomfort, it may be as high as loss. But we are already at a loss. 

We believe in beauty, joy, wonder, spiritual uplift and all those good things. And we are not opposed to the market, the sale, the transaction and an exchange of value. Many in the arts are opposed to the coarseness of money, the evils it can bring, and yet believe in the second and third commandments (see above). It’s thorny.

Don Druick, a Canadian Playwright, wrote a play called Tulip. It is about the great “Tulip Mania” in the Dutch Republic in the 17th century, documenting the speculative bubble and crash in the price of tulips that has since become a metaphor for any major deviation in prices from intrinsic value. The tulip itself didn’t change, but the world around it did. The price of something is not its value, and conversely the value of something cannot (and should not) be determined solely by its financial utility.  

You can pay a gardener to garden, but you can’t pay a flower to bloom. Maybe our insistence that the flower blooms on command and is sold and consumed in a free market for maximizing returns to the gardener doesn’t make the flowers smell any better. 
“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless”.