Gilded Cage

"Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the following propositions are encouraged to join Gilded Cage."

The corporate regimentation of arts, science and education in Australia has been proceeding apace for more than two decades. In higher education, the process was initiated in the 1980’s with the ALP’s Dawkins reforms, which saw mass amalgamations of universities and vocational colleges and the introduction of HECS. Under Howard’s Liberals universities, arts organisations and scientific agencies were increasingly compelled to seek funding from private sources as Federal patronage entered a prolonged period of decline – with predictable results for all areas of intellectual and aesthetic life unsuited to operating in a mass market or unable to gear operations to the development of new products and technologies. The story continues under the present Labor government. Its latest instalment is the underwhelming response by governments to calls on behalf of the VCA as it struggles to avoid annexation by a rapidly corporatising Melbourne University.

Gilded Cage is a loose association of university students and staff, writers, artists, scientists and activists who see corporate culture, bureaucratic regimentation and top-down managerial practices as threats to institutions of many kinds. The group aims to raise awareness of the noxious effects of current institutional practices on Australian cultural life and combat them.

Gilded Cage calls for:
1. university students, university staff and the wider arts and science community to support suspension of the application of the “Melbourne Model” to the VCA;
2. immediate revision of the Federal funding arrangements that led to the VCA-Melbourne University merger;
3. university music students and staff to oppose the merger of VCA Music and the Conservatorium;
4. university students and staff to resist corporate regimentation by:
(a) disposing thoughtfully of university advertising material or undertaking spontaneous creative improvements to it
(b) publicising cost-cutting and re-structuring measures being undertaken by university faculties that are likely to affect teaching, learning or research;
(c) circulating flagrant examples of managerial language deployed in pursuit of inappropriate business models for academic life;
(d) discussing the impact of cost-cutting, re-structuring and managerial foul language with sympathetic parties beyond the university system;
5. artists, art teachers, arts workers and the members of arts funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of consciousness-raising and resistance involving: (a) culture-jamming, (b) whistle-blowing, (c) circulation of examples of toxic managerial newspeak, (d) public discussion;
6. scientists (social and natural), science teachers, government researchers and members of scientific funding bodies to undertake a similar campaign of (a) to (d); and
7. all interested parties to join Gilded Cage in a show of support – with the aim of bringing together and informing all those with direct experience of systemic problems in the arts, science and higher education.

Gilded Cage believes that:
1. looking to the arts, sciences and education system exclusively as the source of export revenue has seriously impaired Australian public culture;
2. the introduction of inappropriate models of market competition has led to wasteful expenditure on advertising and consultancy and an institutional culture whose relation to students and to the general public is blinkered and manipulative;
3. new forms of managerial control demoralise all who seek to sustain and benefit from arts, science and higher education
4. university life is increasingly anonymous and educational experiences increasingly impoverished; and
5. current modes of operating arts organisations and scientific agencies have led to similarly impoverished aesthetic experiences for artists and their audiences and to the socially questionable dissemination and use of science.

Neither the arts, the sciences nor the education system at large should be forced to run as businesses or managed as mere adjuncts to economic life. In the absence of philanthropic patronage, governments should sustain a level of funding for the arts, sciences and higher education systems which acknowledges their non-economic importance to the nation. The arts, sciences and higher education belong together as touchstones of an informed self-critical intellectually and aesthetically dynamic community of citizens. All those who support these and the above propositions are encouraged to join via:

the gilded cage facebook enclosure

The art of having something to say: Part 5 - Nestroy

For followers of the ongoing debate about the VCA taking place on this page – can anyone hear echoes of Sharman Pretty in the little interchange between A and B I’ve got down as my first quote from Nestroy? It seems the Melbourne University breadth agenda was invented in mid-nineteenth century Austria. If only the Dean of VCAM could be as clear in her fatuousness as this. Charming!

For those of you not in on the joke, Nestroy (1801 – 1862) was an actor-cum-satirist, who’s never caught on in English because half his characters speak a picturesque essentially untranslatable Austrian German. Everyone who’s studied German knows the tremendous verb “durchwursteln” which denotes the Austrian national trait of “muddling through” (literally “sausage-ing through”, or, if you like, “getting by in the shape of a sausage”. You know how when things go wrong in English they go “pear shaped”, well, in the glory-days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when they went right they went sausage-shaped.) Well, there are a whole lot of silly sausages sausage-ing through and coming out with some fairly porky untranslatable pronouncements in Nestroy.

Nestroy’s favourite two kinds of play are Possen (farces) and Travestien (travesties). Most come with songs – think Keating The Musical, but with more dialogue and the full range of comic plot devices that would probably be considered artificial and lame nowadays – servants insinuating themselves into balls by putting on disguise moustaches, Biblical heroes being seduced by men dressed up as women, clothes-baskets with stolen babies in them being mistaken for clothes-baskets with washing in them, etc etc.

For more of an idea, you need only have a look down a list of titles:

“Banishment from the Realm of Magic, or: 30 Years in the Life of a Lump”
“Freedom in a Cultural Backwater”
“There’s No Cure for Stupidity”
“The Girl from the Suburbs, or: Honesty Keeps You Keeping On”
“The Confused Magician, or: The Faithful and The Fickle”
“The Magic Journey into the Age of Chivalry, or: Embarrassing High-Spirits”
“Theatrical Tales of Love, Intrigue, Money and Stupidity”
“Big Chief Evening-breeze, or: The Gruesome Banquet”
“The Miller, The Collier and The Furniture Removalist, or: The Dream of the Shell and the Kernel”

Anyone who wants to try Nestroy out in English should look up “A Man Full of Nothing”, “The Talisman” and “Love Affairs and Wedding Bells”, translated – and “fondly tampered with” – by Max Knight and Joseph Fabry for Ungar in the 1960’s.

***

A: I’m a product of the school life. My education is tenuous but extremely widespread: a smattering of geography, a fraction of mathematics, a molecule of physics, just an idea of philosophy, a germ of medicine, and a pinch of the law.
B: How charming! You have learned much but not lost yourself in details. The mark of the true genius!
A: Ah, this explains why there are so many geniuses in the world!

Is there a better opportunity to make someone you hate unhappy than to marry him?

Man is a being who occupies the highest stage of creation, who even claims to have been made in the image of God – but God is probably not very flattered. Man is an insect, because he stings, bites, bugs you, gives you the creeps and is often for the birds. He’s also a fish, because he gets into deep water and does horrible things in cold blood. No less is man a reptile, for he’s a snake in the grass. He’s a bird, too, because he lives in the clouds, often makes a living out of thin air, and gets upset when he cannot fill the bill. And, finally, man is also a mammal, because he’s a sucker.

This is the moment I’ve anticipated and dreaded at the same time. I face it, if I may say so, with knee-shaking bravado and bold trembling.

It’d be great to be Fate. You could sit round picking your nose doing nothing all day and still get the credit for everything.

In a castle in the air even the janitor in the basement has a view of heaven.

It’s probably a will-o’-the-wisp, but I find it entertaining all the same.

It’s really a matter of the heart but all the heart does is flutter and dump problems into the lap of the head even if the head is up to its neck in trouble. I’m done in.

If you’re a man with seventeen diplomas on your wall, a science at the tip of each finger, five languages at the tip of your tongue, and an extra helping of ambition between your ears, you can expect fate to present you with a fat slice of the good life on a silver platter – that’s commonplace. But if your only diploma is from reform school, you have nothing at the tips of your fingers but your prints, no language but what you were born with, and your only ambition is to be unemployed – and you still haven’t given up the idea of getting rich . . . there’s something grandiose in that. To face Lady Luck like a cross between a pan-handler and a freedom fighter, to hold out your hand when you haven’t a leg to stand on, that is noble gall, an enviable itch. I appreciate myself – and why not?