This is a great interview.
Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration:
Over the course of 45 years in the film business, Francis Ford Coppola has refined a singular code of ethics that govern his filmmaking. There are three rules: 1) Write and direct original screenplays, 2) make them with the most modern technology available, and 3) self-finance them.
“Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.”
This is why universities, colleges, the Arts Council and NIScreen are important to me.
They enable art.
Because they are patrons?
I’m not going to be original here. But I don’t think 3rd level education should be about patronage.
I disagree.
Third level education is about pursuing your interests while ‘cloistered’ within the confines of an institution which encourages such pursuits. Whether your interest is the mating habits of non-biting midges or the effects of social isolation on internet addicted geeks or the creation of art.
Unless of course you think that the University (as a charity organisation) actually costs what you pay in fees? You get a lot of patronage for your fees.
University has been ‘perverted’ into the accumulation of vocational skills. Which is utterly wrong.
Art being purely a subjective notion, there doesn’t seem much point spending time seeking to create a border around what it may or may not be.
I am an advocate of paying for a service while at uni. I don’t like the idea of being taxed for the livelihoods of other non-learners/teachers while I’m there any more than I do as a citizen of the state.
That said I think we may have descended into semantics – there is always a place for research, these days with an increasingly commercial backing, so long as there is defined benefit either for those learning or for the wealth of the institution concerned.
With more uni grads out of work than ever before, and there being more uni grads than ever before, there are undoubtedly cross-currents at play here. Something may well have to give.
The ‘give’ is here. Fees are going up AND universities have to make considerable cuts to services. This is going to impact anything which doesn’t have a business case. And I think that’s a shame. We didn’t get progress through business cases.