Funny that, I'd always hoped my decision to become a practicing artist would afford me a modicum of freedom from having to "interact with the fucking community".
I"ve rarely ever applied for grants or public project funding of any kind ... unless, of course, someone, 'in-the-know', had kindly given me the 'high-sign'. I have always preferred to invest my energy - energy I'd otherwise expend grant/proposal writing - on studio pursuits.
Earlier in my so-called career I did execute a couple of ambitious public projects (one in LA and one for the City of San Francisco) but in both cases I was fortunate to have willing & qualified intercessors who didn't seem to mind interfacing with all of the many punctilious doorkeepers, inevitably attached to such matters.
The % for the arts program in the USA (wherein new building construction which had received any sort of federal or state funding were required to establish a set-aside budget for the purchase or art) had, arguably, the single most destructive impact on the arts, I have seen in my lifetime.
Artists - ever accommodating when it comes to cold cash - soon twigged to the reality that 'site-specific', region specific, community specific, proposals were most appealing to deciding regional ("fucking community") committees. So, the loathsome term 'research' began to attach its self - like a linguistic leech - to project proposals wherein aspiring % for the artists began to look at local events, 'sites', putative communities (historical or otherwise) local sensibilities & mores to dress up their proposals & ass-powder deciders.
Institutional spaces, artist's spaces, and granting bodies of every possible affiliation and ideology, soon, thereafter, joined the site-specific, community relevance/interaction dance. And artists - once again, as accommodating, as always, when it comes to money or exhibition 'exposure' - shaped their work and themselves to whatever Procrustean bed they were asked to lie down in.
To my mind, these serial lie-downs had unfortunate, domesticating, impacts on both art and artists. Former wide-ranging & relatively fascinating wolves-of-the-steppes (who could, now and again, be lured near the campfire, with promises of meat) soon grew accustomed to sleeping with and being warmed by their domesticator's well appointed hearths.
Packs of artists became homogenous breeds with predictable appearances and habits. In time, these domesticated artists became indistinguishable from loyal dogs and, worse yet, began to resemble their 'owners' in both sensibility & petite bourgeois predictability.
Art of the type I allude to here - and the sotto voce requirements for its funding and fabrication - became ever more standardized and international in distribution and influence. The single good thing about it, though, is its distinguishable 'smell' ... which allows for its scrupulous avoidance, if we are fortunate enough to be approaching it from downwind.
