I have lived in Stepney for a decade. Despite the official name of our local council, I don’t think of myself as someone who lives in a city but rather someone who lives near one. It’s noteworthy that many of the posts on this site explicitly refer to the Parade and/or Norwood in discussing ideas about the city. Can we infer from them that a city is a place in which residents are within a 10-minute walk of a cafe? Where does that leave the other NPSP precincts?

I walk a lot; over the years this has allowed me to see a variety of public art in our area. A particular highlight was a burial shrine for a dead crow that I saw created on the corner of a nature strip in St Peters. I watched the work evolve over a number of days around the corpse: flowers, stones, twigs tied into crosses, and leaves were gradually added. It was quite the installation and much more evocative than many of the official, council-funded public artworks that I have seen.

As well as pieces created with a deliberate intent, there is a lot of incidental art to discover; wonderful juxtapositions of materials and forms, often seen in people’s gardens or our parks. I think it was the American writer Alice Walker who wrote about women expressing their artistic impulses through their gardens, I think this is true of all gardeners – even those who limit themselves to iceberg roses and English box hedges!

If you want to celebrate the local community and our art-making, encourage people to walk around their neighbourhoods, it’s there for the seeing.

I agree, creative practitioners have a significant intrinsic value from a cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, psychological and creative perspective; I feel this is the heart of what makes us human. I also think that it is this very capacity and perspective that makes the work of creative practitioners so valuable in a commercial context. For me the creative and business worlds do not place mutely exclusive value on activities – they actually value the same things, but both usually don’t seem to realise. Therefore for creative practitioners to have value to business they need to remain creative in their own terms. A true, deep economic value can only be derived from allowing creative practitioners to fulfil the intrinsic motivation that has always been their rationale.

With regard to support, I don’t see merely distributing/communicating works in galleries as the high point of creative endeavour; the research and creative processes, embedded as a part of society, is where the most significant value occurs. This too is where the most valuable economic impact can happen, but this requires both the artworld and business world to think differently about the value of creative practice. I think creative practitioners should lead, change and drive business process – I am asking for change and leadership, not capitulation to what already exists. Creative practitioners need to maintain what they do, but understand that people see different value in what they create. This doesn’t mean they should panda to what a commercial world seems to value, but be able to express the deep value of their work to others. This may require partnering with people who can achieve this, but creative practitioners will always remain a poorly paid if they are unable to bridge these worlds.

I also believe business creates real value for society (the economy is important) and while there is varying degree of significance in that value, the benefits we derive from new thought is mainly distributed to citizens via commercial processes. This role that the commercial plays in society means that a refusal to engage in it cuts the arts off from one of the most significant avenues of influence, while at the same time letting the commercial world of the hook with regard to greater cultural and social relevance and responsibility. With this in mind I didn’t feel I had to be provocative in the forum because I got the impression that the artists present wanted to move beyond (while being a part of) the artworld, to a more significant impact on society and understood that they could influence, shape and benefit from the commercial world and to ask for help in attaining the opportunities that will afford creative practitioners a more significant place in society while still being shown on gallery walls or being performed on the stage.

With particular reference to artists I have been thinking about this question lately – Why should artists pursue the artworld so doggedly when they can have the whole world?

Gavin Artz

check out my post http://thinkingthroughthecity.com/2011/10/01/on-being-provoked-or-on-not-neglecting-the-business-whilst-also-not-making-it-the-bottom-line/#more-1047