Re: RAT One worm turning(4)

[nick <nick@nickspix.com>]

At 03:15 PM 5/5/99 -0400, Ben Cameron wrote:

Nick, thanks so much for your email.  Yes, feel free to share any or all of
my responses to you at any time.   
I am provoked by the question of "are you a participating member of the
community you exploit?"  I guess I ask myself a related question--- am I a
participating member of the community I serve?    It is a loaded question
for me.  I think I dis-serve my work if I forget that I am NOT an artist,
that artists deal with daily struggles and dilemmas that I don't experience
in the same way, that this increases the mandate to listen to artists
rather than to rely on my own personal experience.  When I was a funder, I
felt like a lot of my colleagues started doing bad work when they forgot
that they were not the field; when they started believing that they and the
field were synonynous, the work became distorted for a lot of reason.  And
so if I say I am not part of the community, I say that precisly out of
respect for artists, out of an internal mandate that I must always push
myself to listen and to seek out information aggressively, out of a desire
to serve rather than exploit.  But enough for now.
Which city are you located in?  Any chance of a face to face at some point?
 Best.