💥✍ So who's applying for the 𝘯𝘰𝘸 amended & less competitive COVID-19 Crisis Response Award? I've always shamefully wished for a silver rabbit-eared art market in Ireland, where artists could break more rules under the support of some eccentric patron with more money & irrational desire for art (of all creeds) than sense. "Art raises its head where creeds relax." (Nietzsche) Alas we don't have such a private alternative, we have the Arts Council, a publicly funded institution that funds artists based on *good* & quantifiable reasons. These good reasons + reputational muscle are totted up in boxes with dots & crosses & ticks, where the reactionary forces & unstable desires of the moneyed market are nowhere to be seen. Two months ago I would have welcomed such a reactionary award, which, like the lovesick art collector, puts up money without due diligence or conceptual rigor, just drive & urgency, which I find perversely exciting. But not now. This award suits artists who are conditioned to curate content on-the-hop in what Claire Bishop calls our project-based economy in 𝘈𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘪𝘢𝘭 𝘏𝘦𝘭𝘭𝘴 - now complicated by our network-based economy. This award is for artists like me! (I was even contemplating applying - however my proposal was communitarian, including 10 other artists, €3,000 evenly spread, ending up an empty token for an empty gesture.) In a time of separation & isolation such a highly competitive award with artists separated from their places of work & from peers who help them think & sustain what is a lonely & thankless task, this award will only engender further feelings of isolation & segregation at a time when *kinship* is needed. Come the day when every artist, with their own relative agency, contributes their time & energy & limited power outside of their own concentrated circle to other circles & other circles & other circles until the sky is teeming with *white noise* & the liquid field is flat & unified by recessed centres—lots and lots & lots of centres of influence & the tide of artists is the thing that comes to shore & inevitably razes what has gone before & what is to come. A reproductive community. Lambs lambing. Unity🖤

APRIL 10, 2020 (ORIGINALLY POSTED ON INSTAGRAM @a_flash_in_the_small_night