DanCoyote

Welcome readers, firstly in the interest of full disclosure I would like to state that Larry Pixel and the New Media Consortium (NMC) have been very generous and supportive patrons of my projects for nearly three years. They are not my only patrons, but definitely the biggest and most involved. The continuance of the ZeroG SkyDancer production depends on the generosity and continued support of NMC and the good will of Larry Pixel (Dr. Larry Johnson CEO of NMC).

What follows is my response to the claim that “big art” in SL art is in “crisis”. Even if there is not a crisis, It is critically important for artist and art patron to understand each other and maintain good relationships.

Larry Pixel wrote:

I had an interesting conversation with Bettina Tizzy the other day when we met in real life for the first time. Over dinner she relayed to me her concern that there are fewer and fewer patrons willing to give artists a place to do their work in Second Life®. Knowing that the New Media Consortium (NMC) has been arguably the largest patron of the arts to the general SL arts community over the years, sponsoring show after show on Ars Simulacra, as well as NMC Campus West, the home of the Aho Museum, she asked if I had any insights.

I do, in fact. At one point the NMC dedicated 7 full sims and 9 voids regularly to art projects, generally passing full control to the artists. Over the last year, however, NMC has reduced its hosting of artists from dozens to a very small number — and none of those we currently host have control over a full sim. That is a big departure from past practice.

The reasons are largely *not* economic.

There is an odd dynamic in SL between artists and landowners. For the landowner, beyond perhaps some bragging rights of limited value, there is really almost no payoff for hosting artists. Most of them generally ignore you, and barely conceal the fact they’d be happiest if you just left them alone to do their thing.

DC Spensley wrote: Sadly there is also “almost no payoff” in being an artist either.  Actually it is the other way around.  Artists pay a very high price for dedicating their lives to work that has no easy fit in the economic system, and like patronage, this is a choice. I would define patronage as the willingness of some individuals or organizations, who may have more means than the artist, to share the commitment to making art happen regardless. Some might feel that to do so is to further the finer capacities of humanity, without which all things are equally meaningless.

Those who support art acknowledge its cultural significance and ability influence the world in profound ways.

It is a fact that land owners in Second Life enter into a contract with Linden Labs to pay a certain amount of money each month to maintain a presence on the SL grid. This is the same with the web. These same owners pay handsome fees to web designers, builders and content creators to populate their spaces on the web and in Second Life.

It is only when you call yourself an “artist” that land owners expect content to come to them for free. This is a key point that is connected to the generally non-profit nature of the cultural phenomena called “Art”. Commercial designers get paid well for their contribution and are rightfully subject to metrics and statistical evaluation of their work and effect on the owner’s space. Art generally does not provide a 1:1 return to the owners in this way since cultural capital is very hard to quantify. There is nothing new about this. Cultural capital is simply priceless.

LP continues: For artists, on the other hand, access to land and lots of it is a huge status indicator. The most successful artists — be they conceptual or “pure” artists, or designers who just love to build — are the ones who have regular access to new land that they can do art on.

DC continues: Doesn’t an artist’s status really have more to do with the perceived quality of their cultural production? It is true that artists have a much harder time producing work without a secure space to work on it, but it also is true that empty space is of no value without quality content. This leaves the owners with the choice of paying commercial designers to populate their spaces or prevailing upon the generosity and enthusiasm of artists to do so for free.

Art makes quality content cost effective for owners. SL is predicated on this idea of user created content as is wikipedia and other so called 2.0 initiatives. Google, Yahoo. Flickr, YouTube and blog accounts are free and storage space for content is free or nearly so. This model is working on the web and I think the assumption has been that it works in SL too.

LP continues: The need for new sources of land is important, for what drives the artist is the need to create. To continue to make new stuff, artists either need new land, or they have to pick up past creations, which means their work can’t be seen.

DC continues:  Almost every land owner I have approached is happy to have fascinating art placed on their land, even moreso if it is created by a noteworthy artist. Often this is a temporary arrangement, sometimes it is longer term. New sources of exhibition space are out there. It is up to individual artists to go out and talk to owners and make deals and cultivate relationships, and as Larry has suggested, every relationship needs to be a two way street. Owners need content to make their projects in SL viable just as much as artists need space. Owners already pay for the space and if they can obtain content without further expense, most will jump at the opportunity.

This is the content argument.

I would go further to say that the content varies enormously from creator to creator.  There IS a qualitative difference between creators as well as a benefit from the public press profile of some artists. For instance it is much more of a boon for an owner to have a Picasso in their care than it is to have a painting by their brother  (unless his name is Vincent of course). This is the reputation rub-off argument and is not easy to quantify, but should not be  dismissed either. How does one quantify the return on vast sums of  money spent by foundations to support artworks that might be unpopular or controversial or obscure? They don’t do the numbers on something like this. They support the arts because they want to assure that arts don’t get drowned out by better funded cultural entities that produce things like studio wrestling and soap operas.
LP continues:  There is a large class of good artists who have not sorted out how to manage getting new land, and are stuck building in borrowed spaces or sandboxes, and look to galleries to show their stuff. Galleries, of course, are businesses, so the goals are not very well aligned between the average artist and the average gallery owner. It is hard for these artists to grow, and without sponsors willing to give prims and space, much good art will simply never have the resources to be realized or seen.

DC continues: This is the same thing in the material world and always has been so. For every great artist there are 10 other artists nearly as good but not as lucky or industrious at getting the word out. Any artist who DOES hook up with a patron has worked hard for the opportunity and made a successful case for this support.

LP continues: Established artists are rare in Second Life, and to my knowledge less than a handful have sorted out how to regularly get free land for projects, which is the ultimate currency in SL for an artist.

Few of the thousands of other artists have been able to find that level of support. Indeed, after listing 3 or maybe 4 well-known artists, all of whom have regular access to land for new ideas, the list seems to fade away. Among that group, challenges are getting more common. One of the most popular has lost many of his early and most significant builds. Another ground-breaking sculpture that once occupied the full volume of a sim lives on only in video and blog posts. A major sponsor of several highly regarded artists is increasingly demanding a revenue flow from the works hosted there, and content is folded up regularly to make room for new projects. That is a very different story than just a year ago when almost anyone with a concept could get land for projects.

DC continues: This is all true. SL as a medium is ephemeral. There is no guarantee your work will stay on display no matter how good an artist you are or how wonderful the build. This is also the case in the material world but the issue is accepted as the norm. The work goes up, the work comes down. What remains hopefully is art history. But is this a crisis or the way things work?

LP continues: I agree with Bettina that big art in Second Life is in serious trouble, and the future looks less and less bright for artists who need to find that patron who will give them a place to work and create.

DC continues:  If you look carefully there is a lot of underused space and prims in SL. Sure everyone wants to display at the highest profile spaces, but these spaces became high profile because of the quality experiences they offer. Make relationships with owners, make something happen, make deals! My solution has been to create work at high altitude which solves the space problem. There is little competition for space at 3000 meters! The prim problem is more problematic.

However I would not completely agree with the idea that big art in SL is endangered. I just opened a “big art” show at the PiRats Art Network (a French sim), and there is Artropolis, the Odyssey Project, The ARENA projects out of Italy and Brooklyn is Watching that are all great places to show big art in SL and there are many, many more alternatives. I think this idea that big art is in trouble in SL is a result of not accepting the fact that ALL displays of art are ephemeral. It could all be gone tomorrow, and much of it will unless a patron sees fit to provide for work to be available in perpetuity.

LP continues: I’d love to sit down for coffee with some of the other large landowners who support the arts in SL. I bet we’d all share similar experiences, primarily that historically there has been little benefit that accrues to a sponsor from hosting an artist.

I’d bet $1000 that no one whose work is displayed in the Aho Museum, Ars Simulacra, or NMC Campus West really understands or appreciates what we do at the NMC, beyond hosting them, or for that matter, even cares. I’d venture to say even the artists we have given a home to for years would have a hard time explaining what it is we do at the NMC, or how our SL projects line up with our far more subtantial work in RL. The work we do to create a place to host the art is just not part of the story for them. I doubt that anyone who has been featured in our many full-sim exhibitions has had any sense of where they were, that they were taking part in a grand project with international reknown, or that many many other events happen there. They just know we host artists; the rest is a mystery of their own making.

That is a not an issue unique to NMC.

DC continues: Isn’t it is the artist’s job to make good art? This is no small feat and to get good at it an artist needs to bring significant personal resources to bear. A patron benefits from this free content and even more if the content has vision and cultural significance. I don’t think patrons want to know the gritty details about an artists life and challenges, so it is not really equitable to expect the artist to spend too much of their time off topic.

Artists need to make, exhibit and document art or they aren’t doing their job. This is more than a full time job if you are serious. I would also add that an artist needs to make good relationships and cultivate them carefully. I think if more patrons knew the challenges artists face to simply survive day to day, this conversation might be different. Patrons and land owners by definition are empowered people, artists rarely are. To suggest otherwise is to deny the facts, otherwise artists would not need owners to provide land for their work. It is however a little unfair to expect artists to live up to terms that are not plainly stated at the onset of a relationship.

If there IS an agreement that quantifies the relationship this is generally called sponsorship or employment, or endorsement. Patronage is a different thing.

LP continues: Generally artists in SL just don’t pay attention to these things. Certainly there is no mention at all of the hosts on a typical artists’ invitation to a show or a performance beyond a sim name. Indeed, I cannot name but one or two examples from all the artists I know that illustrate good practice in nurturing support for the arts.

How many artists list their patrons work in their picks for example? That would be a very very simple thing to do. I did a quick check of the the top artists we support, and not one mentioned our project anywhere in their picks, yet we’ve put out tens of thousands of actual real dollars in support for the arts over the last three years.

This does not mean artists have to shill.

Indeed, no one would like that. But I do think artists need to acknowledge, especially in here, that their patrons are not stupid rich people with no talent of their own. In fact, of the major patrons I know, all of them have a fantastic and massive vision for virtual worlds that is almost completely unacknowledged by the artists they support — and all of them work their tails off to make it happen.

DC continues: No artist I know (and I know many) has ever spoken about a patron in any terms but with the most sincere gratitude, even though they get no compensation for their contribution to the owner’s space. Real dollars? Do artists see real dollars from patrons? Rarely. The owners derive the benefits of free content, good press and the goodwill of being a supporter of cultural production. This is more payoff than the artist gets. RL foundations and patrons support art because they understand how critical cultural production is and how dreadfully difficult the choice to dedicate one’s life to art can be materially.

Patrons can choose to support artists but artists don’t really have a choice. Art is not a job or a vocation, it is a calling, it is a way of life and often an oath of poverty. We are compelled. I would venture that patronage is also a calling whose purpose is to support art. One can choose not to support art if it doesn’t suit you. Art is something that our culture could never do without but ironically rarely supports materially.

(Having said that I humbly applaud people Like Larry Johnson, Giulio Prisco and Evonne Henning and many others who do support art in SL. I would not want ANY disagreement on these issues to be construed as a lack of acknowledgement of the good work that NMC, MetaFuturing and AMO has done to keep art and education vital in SL. We need more patrons of the arts like this who set such a high standards and good examples.

LP continues: Our own project, for example, is the largest educational effort in Second Life by any measure — a vibrant community of more than 150 universities doing all sorts of cool stuff. The project has been completely self-supporting for 2 years, and was built with no seed money. It now supports dozens of artists, hundreds of faculty, and thousands of students, from more than 50 countries — and makes tier on nearly 100 islands every month! The average visitor spends an astonishing 98 minutes per visit — and there are about 15,000 unique visitors to the NMC Campus each month. It is such a substantial project that Linden Lab spent six months documenting it for a case study on their site.

Yet not one artist we support, and there are a great many, would likely have any mention of NMC Campus in their picks. A few note the Aho Museum as a place to find their art, but none the larger project.

Does that seem as out of balance to you as it does to me?

DC continues: Aren’t picks a personal thing? A person “picks” something because they are compelled to do so for their own reasons. It is not only individual artists who should have their patrons in their picks, but fans and viewers of art exhibits. Artists are few, viewers are many. However I do agree that artists should always make sure to properly credit their supporters in important ways. I am very vocal about my support for NMC and a strong ally of their educational mission in SL, and while I don’t have a lot of time to be part of NMC in the material sphere, I try to reflect well on NMC at every opportunity. Things happen three times as fast in SL as anywhere else. It’s hard to keep up, hard to keep relevant…

LP continues: Bettina is right. One day, we patrons are going to realize that the value equation here is way out of balance. Free land for artists is not an entitlement — no matter how good they are, it should be a partnership, centered on the love of art, but grounded in mutual self-interests. At the end of the day, they need prims to create, and prims are not free.

DC continues: Bettina is right about the value equation, but not about how it is framed. Artists are really being very generous in SL, providing content that owners would alternately be paying real dollars to create and vision and cultural/historical contributions that cannot be quantified in terms of prims at the end of the day.  Patronage is really not a partnership. Partners are equals.  Artist and owners are rarely equals in terms of resources.

This is like a home owner trying to explain the crushing load of property taxes to a homeless person.

LP continues: There is a huge need in SL for artists to acknowledge the symbiotic nature of their relationships with landowners, and they need to take the time to learn and appreciate the work patrons are doing. And they need to help those people succeed. I can’t point to a single example in SL that meets that standard.

It is more than showing up with art. If that is all it is, then this train is already grinding to a stop all across the grid. Large sponsorships are already down significantly, and I can see them drying up altogether.

DC continues: The grid is evolving and changing, but there are lots of people providing space for art. I’m not sure there is a crisis. The grid WILL change and evolve, this is just the way it is, this is not some fault of the artist or patron relationship.
LP continues: I think learning how to nurture support for the virtual arts is a self-education project that SL artists need to undertake for their own good. In doing so, they need to acknowledge the role of entrepreneurs in making their art possible, and they need to see the artistry in their patrons’ work as clearly as patrons see it in the artists.

It is an investment in the sustainability of virtual art.

DC continues: It is only natural that as this venue/medium for art matures that artists and patrons will gain better insights into how they can mutually benefit each other. New patrons are emerging every day to support art in SL from all over the world. Whereas US patrons might be at the fatigue end of the scale, European patrons are kicking in to help and benefiting from the hard work of these earlier patrons of the arts. SL is a very young phenomena and it may well be cyclic or even a fluke that this time of strong patronage emerged at all.

Patrons can be conjured by an artist who makes a good case for their work to a land owner. Some patronage will inevitably go away, but others will emerge for all the reasons I have covered above. I don’t think patrons are pulling out because of artists. Patrons are pulling out for their own reasons and I DO think it is economic in many cases. Other times they just move on and lose interest in SL. It is up to the artist to cultivate existing relationships as well as find new relationships and new venues for their work. This is a great opportunity!

LP continues: I’d hate to see patronship erode further. Bettina thinks it is in crisis. As one who has worked for years to support virtual art and artists and musicians of all genres, I have to agree.

To my way of thinking, it is just devastating to see patrons disappearing across the grid as fast as they are, even as Second Life land ownership sets new records monthly. My hope is that artists in Second Life will work together to make clear what the value in supporting virtual arts is for patrons, and help each other learn how to nurture and sustain support for the arts in Second Life, just as artists do in the real world.

DC continues: Patrons in the material art world willingly support artists for their vision and sacrifice and acknowledge the role of the artist as a producer of culture that is decidedly not motivated by capital profit or even practicality. Art simply is NOT practical, but patronage IS very practical, and in SL it is cheap by comparison. Without the generosity and hard work of thousands of artists, and wise patronage, SL would be a wasteland of failed businesses, low rez porno and strip malls. There is a reason that NMC has so much traffic. Regardless of how cool a building or sim is in SL, it is irrelevant without good content.

Coyote Love to Patrons and Artists alike!

DC Spensley whois DanCoyote in SL