WORK/PLAY

The following description was extracted from the Introduction in focas Vol. 3 by Editor Lucy Davis.

The forum had grown out of two recent developments in the arts community. The first was a search for a language of practice. For some time now, various members of the arts community have felt that arts practice is increasingly overlooked for the sake of arts production. These attitudes, in turn, have lead to a tendency by some practitioners to essentialise their practice in a defensive response to allegedly product-focused arts funders and arts commentators. The second development that inspired the Work/Play forum was the oft-heard refrain, "Making Art isn't Fun Anymore", and the pressure on cultural production and practice to become more and more like other rationalised industries. This rationalisation of the arts finds expression in the ever-increasing application of productivity measures, including such quantitative "performance indicators" as the number of productions per company or per artist, per year, and audience per funded dollar.

The forum transcription was published in focas Vol. 3.