frey

Most of my artistic and musical friends – at least, the ones whose music and art I respect – are on the dole (unemployment benefit/social welfare support payments). I had a conversation with Warwick, aka Control 6580, who makes music using a Commodore 64 and a guitar and misc other equipment, about this the other day. It went a bit like this:

me: “Who are all these people?” [we'd gone to see a public sinking of a decommissioned frigate off Wellington's south coast]
Warwick: “They’re the people who pay your dole, so that you can make art, which they then ignore.”
me: “.. but what do we do in return?”
Warwick: “We make Wellington a ‘cultural’ and ‘creative’ city, and they like to live in a cultural and creative city.”

Interesting ideas here i thought.. Wellington’s main marketing point, its creativity, is floated by a body of people who are by and large ‘dole bludgers’ and thus (supposedly) a drain on our resources and damaging to the economy, or something. I decided after this conversation that if I was running New Zealand, I’d make it compulsory for everyone to go on the dole for a year. Like compulsory military training, only rather than learning how to kill people, you’d have to learn how to live on very little income outside of the work-consume-sleep wageslave lifecycle.

Sometimes it’s nice to live in a country where the Prime Minister is also the Minister for Arts and Culture. Brings a sense of legitimacy to being artistic, or something.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 15th, 2005 at 3:03 pm and is filed under ideas, music, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.