C94 Article

The audience as producers

Could it be that art starts, not with the artist, but with the launching of the artwork onto the market? The route from original artistic impulse to consumption by the art audience has parallels with translation between languages, and much of the process is officially sanctioned and supported. Brian Hand here reveals some of the threads that hold the fabric together.

Millions of artists create; only a few thousand are discussed or accepted by the spectator and many less again are consecrated by posterity.
Marcel Duchamp

An author who teaches writers nothing, teaches no one. What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers or spectators into collaborators...
Walter Benjamin

In the first essay of this series, Public Misrecognition, I started my investigation of audiences with the Arts Plan and with what I perceived as a new language from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon as regards audiences for the arts. The choice of new vocabulary signalled to myself and others that the once fashionable set of discourses called 'community arts' was about to be translated into the new discursive formation of 'audience development'. The Council defined community arts in 1980 as art forms, which have the objective of "community participation in the arts."¹ More specifically Lars Cassidy, an influential officer of the Council executive, defined community arts in 1987 as "the process of creation in concert with one's audience as opposed to the traditional view that the work of art is an end in itself, divorced from the social context of meaning."² Cassidy's view represents a distinction that is arguably very difficult to sustain between the supposed autonomous production of art and social forces in contemporary society. The bourgeoisie, as I have tried to show in these essays, actively participate in creating the figure of the artistic genius and his or her autonomous work. What is traditionally unstated is the social formation of community arts and how they were conceived as art forms to be produced by economically and socially marginalised citizens (usually guided by artists and administrators) precisely because of the bourgeois belief in art as a leisure activity distinct from economic productivity. Another problem with community arts has been, in my opinion, around thinking about poverty in terms of numbers (communal or the 'masses') and about wealth in terms of individuals (noncommunal). Rarely do we speak of corporate bankers in terms of their community art needs despite their often uniform shared taste. However, to their credit as processes of audience engagement, community arts continue to further, in an increasingly extreme society, the politics of creativity and aesthetic production as a right not a privilege, and they correctly argue that culture is a collective experience.

In the government's White Paper Access and Opportunity (1987) the emergence of community arts contributed to a policy distinction that proposed not evangelising "already accepted cultural values to a wider community, but [in placing] new emphasis on cultural elements in the community which [were] currently neglected or undervalued."³ Recognition of the distinction is important because the bourgeoisie are after all traditionally understood as the producers of culture and capital whereas all subordinate classes are consumers and labourers. In our society the fruits of the bourgeois cultural endeavour reproduce the established values. The tastes of audiences are accorded greater and lesser worth in what Bourdieu described as the "cultural economy" and it is not surprising that the resulting hierarchy of aesthetic values mirrors the relationship between dominant and subordinate social groups. New forms of cultural production by subordinate classes could potentially be a threat to such dominant values. If art were truly separate from exchange economy then there would be no need to worry over the creative output of other classes. The ever-increasing concern for strict monitoring of value for money for cultural projects funded from the public purse is revealing in its articulation of a crisis of belief in the separate place and value of art as well as demonstrating the fears over art's potential for challenging the status quo through the exercise of 'free speech'.

From its very inception in the postwar years the publicly funded Arts Council (more accurately 'under-funded') has had to negotiate the relations between developing public interest in the arts and maintaining and generating cultural values. Another way of presenting this would be to see the Council's role as providing support to the cycle of production and consumption of the arts and yet this too would have unpalatable consequences: as Paul Wilemen argues, "the social formation that puts into place the circuit producer–product–consumer privileges the producer, defining consumers as those who do not produce at all."⁴

It is out of the welfare state's challenge to both the inequalities of the class system and the unbalanced power relations in the cycle of capitalist production that the Arts Councils in Ireland and Britain emerged. The primary concern of the new Council appeared in the ambit of the Arts Act of 1951, which went: "An Act to stimulate public interest in, and to promote the knowledge, appreciation, and practice of, the Arts."⁵ Stimulation, promotion, and appreciation before practice - the index of the success of the state-sponsored arts policy was then reception and not production but contradictorily the mechanism of support subsidised producers not audiences.

Not initially aware of the language of the Arts Act, I conceived the emphasis on the word 'audience' and the practice of audience development in the Arts Plan as a new discursive departure for the Council (in addition to a harmonisation with terms now employed in arts policy in the U.K.). In this respect I was further surprised to discover the word used in the title of a 1983 report on a survey into public participation in the arts.⁶ Audiences, Acquisitions and Amateurs was co-written by Richard Sinnot and David Kavanagh and they pointed out in their commentary that this survey and report was a first of its kind for the Council. Sinnot and Kavanagh outlined that, while the opening ambit from the Arts Act (1951, quoted above) recognises audiences as the responsibility of the Arts Council, no examination of audiences in isolation had occurred to date. Their commentary and interpretation of the survey must have made for uncomfortable reading in its conclusions about the barriers of class, location, age and gender to attendance of the arts, purchase of arts goods and involvement in amateur arts activities. The survey revealed that rates of participation at arts events had been static in the ten-year period from 1972-1981, leaving one columnist at the time to articulate the blunt conclusion that "state subsidies are totally biased in favour of the more passive traditions of the urban middle-class."⁷ Visual art, defined as attending an exhibition of work by a living artist, had particularly low attendance and the national figure was just 2% for those who purchased "painting/sculptures by living Irish artists" in the year of 1980-81.

The recommendations of Audiences, Acquisitions and Amateurs included the suggestion that the Arts Council encourage its funded organisations to increase audiences. Sadly it took some twenty years for such a suggestion to appear as a priority on the agenda of the Arts Plan. But even more disappointingly Sinnot and Kavanagh argued for similar surveys to be repeated every three to four years to monitor and refine knowledge of audiences by taking stock of demographic patterns, mapping the rise of popular culture and identifying cultural and structural obstacles in accessing the arts. That such a step was not taken makes understanding audiences a much more costly and complex practice today.

In this humble first step of analysis of the audiences for arts and popular culture, Sinnot and Kavanagh had to accept some methodological compromises that could have become part of the challenge of their proposed future arts audience research. For example, they did not devise the survey and nor were sample surveys tested on respondents. Crucially they also acknowledged the complexity of answering questions based on memory and they recognised the tendency of attitudes to conform to socially acceptable norms: interviewees are prone to translating their experience of the arts in ways which researchers will find interesting. So while Sinnot and Kavanagh were aware of the possibility that middle-class respondents may exaggerate their involvement in the arts so as not to appear like cultural philistines, in the absence of any mechanism to detect this in the survey they had to proceed with the results and take them at face value. Again a policy of regular surveys, building on the blind spots of previous methods, could have achieved significant results. On a negative side, settling for results at face value or ignoring the challenges of research methods and experimentation can lead to approximations that reduce audiences down to positivist objects. Audiences are intensely complex and nuanced and not at all straightforward to interpreters.

The chrysalis and the pyramid

What is important with respect to visual art production and reception, as revealed by the survey, is the thorny question of value. There has always been an agenda in the Arts Council and in state funding policy of putting forward the fiscal importance of the arts in a capitalist economy. Occasionally there are opposing views like the conclusion of the Indecon report on the first Arts Plan of 1995-1998 which stated that:

The Arts Sector provides economic benefits but these are not of a scale to justify the level of public expenditure, which must be defended on the basis of artistic and cultural objectives.⁸

Understanding value is particularly relevant to the visual art audiences, as Jenny Haughton has remarked:

Who are the 'customers' of a painting? Either somebody who pays for it, or somebody who is attracted by it. The need to own is important in the visual arts field. Someone's response to a painting - what kind of value does that have in itself?⁹

At a recent graduate seminar in Edinburgh College of Art the London art dealer and gallerist René Gimpel outlined what in his experienced view were the mechanics of production and consumption in the art world.¹⁰ For Gimpel art accrues value as it travels from the creator in the studio or place of production to the dealer, collector and finally the public museum. The successful studio artist avoids alienated labour, has no boss supervising him- or herself and does not labour for an hourly wage. The outputted work is finished in an unfinished sense: it is a chrysalis that may one day transform itself utterly, and it remains, as Gimpel puts it, in an arrested state of becoming. Only in consumption can the work be said to have emerged. This Gimpel feels is the destiny of art and consumption can only be recognised through the market. No art bypasses this fact for him; all creative labour is destined to be consumed by its primary and privileged audience, i.e. the wealthy private, public, corporate audience that legitimises the work as art through exchange of one commodity, money, for another, art. The exchange value of an art object is measured in money and obviously those in society with disposable incomes are to this extent the priority audience. However, money is a finite commodity (its value underpinned by the scarcity of gold, for example) and there is only a certain amount in circulation which facilitates commodity exchange. Art-buying is a mechanism like hoarding or credit, which relieves pressure on money as a commodity.¹¹

The art world, continued Gimpel, is like a pyramid with many at its wide base jostling for their chance like labourers for hire; many remain on this level unwanted by the market. This is not always because their work is poorly conceived or executed: quality does not really become an issue for the logic of the market, rather value can be measured in usefulness and potential for profit. Despite the fact that the artwork in Kant's opinion was defined by its uselessness, a bad painting which sells for a profit is useful and market values may systematically distort the meaning of a given work. Once the initial art-buying transaction is completed value may start to grow like a film over the artwork as the piece advances from group show, maybe gets reviewed and maybe illustrated, and all connected to this journey of advancement receive money - the critic, the magazine, the sponsor. Once entered into this system the work assumes the status of speculative capital - meanwhile the artist will in time produce further works and start expecting or asking for higher prices. In several European countries artists do benefit from resale royalties; significantly the U.S.A., the U.K. and the Republic do not as yet recognise such rights.¹² But never will the value of the artwork exist as simply representative of expended labour (mental or physical) or of materials used in its fabrication (nor will the artist's effort be reducible to an immediate financial return). Aesthetics are not really the dominant issue in terms of dealing and collecting; art works can be easily valued for purely financial considerations when they are treated as reserve currency, bearer bonds or tax-avoidance vehicles through donation to public museums.

Faith in fakes

If we return to Willemen's formulation we can recast Gimpel's analysis to say that what conventionally becomes important in art production is not the individual artist's energy or intention but the forces of production of value that adhere to the work. The so-called consumers or patrons of art are the real producers. As Willemen writes:

The real cultural 'producers' are the ones who determine and provide 'templates' for marketable cultural production, the rest of us, artists and intellectuals alike, merely 'play' (i.e. produce) within the virtual parameters specified for us by the cultural bureaucrats-entrepreneurs.¹³

The artist as a provider of raw material (the artwork) for the narcissistic producer/consumers might assert autonomous authorial rights as a form of resistance to the appropriation of his or her labour but there is limited effectivity to this strategy as the authorial function often becomes a commodity in its own right. Again this commodity is something that the artist can only participate in the production of; those who authorise the author are the producer/mediators who require a unified source of value to facilitate even greater exchange value. As the collective Critical Art Ensemble succinctly puts it:

The Individual's signature is still the prime collectible, and access to the body associated with the signature is a commodity that is desired more than ever - so much so, that obsession with the artist's body has made it into 'progressive' and alternative art networks. Even community art has its stars, its signatures and its bodies.¹⁴

Many artists are compliant enough to live in a star system that has shaped their success and manufactured their charisma, where investment insures their brand name and the future shelf life of their work against the vagaries of art fashions. Others have struggled within these powerful forces to find spaces that appear to be less reified (less subsumed in the 'template'), and at different periods of economic, social and political upheaval art movements have mobilised to challenge the system of aesthetic production or audiences have voted with their feet. After a turbulent century we can speculate about the successes or failures of strategies and works that attempted to, for example, dematerialise the art object, offer resistance to immediately accessible meaning through formalism or allegory, employ chance compositions to disturb the authorial function, make the personal political, foreground class, race and gender in the means of production, form collaborative groups, overproduce, utilise humour, expose the power constructions of corporations as patrons, unite with anti-imperialist forces or counter global capitalist forces in the public sphere, or challenge the construction of subjectivity through consumption, etc.

Now, at a point of near exhaustion of new forms of resistance through art there is perhaps a greater need to look at the dominant discursive formations which give rise to the communities of interpretation and the intended, the imaginary, the actual, the posthumous and the excluded audiences and their productive capacities - remembering that in such theoretical analysis, to quote John Hartley, "in no case is the audience 'real', or external to its discursive construction."¹⁵ The discursive analysis of audiences is not an activity removed from practice; rather it is a possible solution to some of the failings of other analytical approaches to audiences like sociology, psychology and British cultural studies. It is significant in this context to acknowledge that marketing executives now define their practice as an art and not a science.¹⁶

Sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish radical initiatives from opportunist attention seeking in the production of new types and hybrid forms of oppositional intellectual output and reception. To reiterate my argument from Public Misrecognition, in the discourses of art and audiences (while there is no 'gold standard' in the community of interpretation) capitalism itself can exert a valuable demystifying power with its pitiless exposure of the class, gender and racial distinctions of market-oriented profiteering in its laundering of cultural values like taste, accessibility and appreciation.¹⁷

The contradictory value of art in the bourgeois public sphere is precisely its ability to represent both material wealth or exchange values and the antithetical values of desires to challenge or escape from capitalist commodity exchange and its inflationary debasement of values. The social formation of producers and consumers playing out this polarity remains crucial for audience analysis. The type of work which attempts to avoid the competitive fashion of oppositional art or radical chic might be, as Benjamin argues in The Author as Producer, where:

[The work of] the author who has reflected deeply on the conditions of present day production will never be merely work on products but always at the same time, on the means of production.¹⁸

At a time of record economic growth and of inflation, the Republic is coming to terms with a deluge of revelations about greed and cash in positions of high office in the state, from blood to offshore banks and briefcases of money. Civic republican values have taken quite a knock and there may even be a growing anxiety in the arts establishment that they may get drawn into the mire. Michael Smurfit's evidence to the Moriarty Tribunal in July this year offered an insightful example of bourgeois art values. This was in his description of how upon sudden impulse he decided in 1990, on the occasion of making other fine-art donations to the state, to give the then Taoiseach Charles Haughey a Jack B. Yeats painting of labour, The Forge, valued at IR£55,000. Smurfit did not see anything inappropriate in making such a generous personal gift and added, "I did put in the caveat that I didn't expect it to be sold the next day. I said I expected him to hold on to it for a long time." To this reply the tribunal lawyer probed a little further:

Mr. Healy SC: So when you were handing it over and indicating that you didn't expect it to be sold the next day, does that mean that you were not handing over an article that could be converted into cash the following day? You thought it would be held in remembrance of the occasion?'

Dr. Smurfit: Yes, I had it in the back of my mind that it would look very bad if you gave a painting like that to somebody and they cashed it in the next day. It would look like a cash gift. I wasn't into that situation and I requested that he hold it for a considerable period of time. I hoped it would become what is known as a family heirloom.¹⁹

The speed of the decision to make a donation is nicely balanced with the desire for a long-maturing object of value and Smurfit's carefully chosen words under oath display a patrician and pseudo-aristocratic air with his definition of a an heirloom. The genteel image is somewhat clouded by Haughey, who was after all an allegedly insatiable consumer, as the revelations of the inquiries reveal, requiring well maintained secret expense accounts. It is ironic that under these circumstances a work of art with the non-market-translatable caveat could have almost been a subversive, frustrating gift.

Old lamps for new?

In the 1980cet of Arts Council policy in addition to community arts that directly sought to intervene in the artist-audience relationship. This was their support for interlingual translation initiatives. Translation has a particularly central place in Irish cultural practices, due to the discursive formations of the two official languages on the island in the contexts of trade, conquest, national identity, modernity and modernism. Mangan was discussed as an example in my third essay, Looking for Attention, but numerous examples of work by writers/artists could be enclosed under this aesthetic umbrella where rewriting or refashioning texts or events foregrounds the mediated nature of all language systems.²⁰ Despite such a central place, translators and translations have until recently (not unlike audiences) drawn very little attention to themselves and their practices. Like with audiences, or the capitalist market, focusing on translation can de-center the original work and the original producer. Through translation studies, as it has emerged in the last two decades, it is possible to see a direct relationship between concepts of translation, economic production and audience development. Translation is a flexible bridging practice that incorporates a state of change and a re-presentation of a text in the target language of a new or particular audience. The activity of translation has always to self-consciously incorporate the prioritised audience's interests; hence translation is often a valuable indicator of audiences in a historical dimension. As Michael Cronin argues in his discursive history of translation in Ireland, Translating Ireland (1996),

people who read translations do so because they do not speak the source language and therefore the questions of reception and target-language acceptability are central to the translator's practice.²¹

In 1981 the Arts Council commenced the funding of translations into English of living Irish-language writers as part of a new policy to encourage bilingualism and the creation of new English-speaking Irish and non-Irish audiences for writing (principally poetry) in Irish. (A decade later this would extend to funding translations of both Irish and English into languages other than English.) With the commercial success of this venture the Council proceeded with a second phase of its translation policy. This was to promote translations of foreign language texts into English for home audiences. The policy has endured and is represented by one of the four policy objectives on audiences in the current Arts Plan.²²

The logic of the Council's policy on translation is both cultural and economic; publishing is a business in search of audiences and English is a dominant global language. The logic of European integration into the E.U. stimulated support for inward translation of contemporary foreign writing and the outward translation of 'indigenous' writing in both languages. The inward translation policy has not been as successful as the outward. There are a number of complex factors in this, and they are very illuminating about the discursive formation of reception and audiences. Lars Cassidy, in an interview with Michael Cronin, accounted for the lack of success by alluding to the absence of 'gateway persons' in the host culture to present foreign writers to the native audience.²³ As Cronin writes:

"An important aspect of the reception of literature in general is the process of mediation by which the work is introduced to potential readers. In the case of translation the need for knowledgeable and interested intermediaries is all the greater where the writer is often totally unknown to the target-language public."²⁴

The Arts Council, translators and publishers themselves might be considered in the mediation roles of 'gateway persons' as it is their initial belief in a market, the worthiness of a text, or in anticipating an interest for a foreign text in the native audience that motivates their endeavours to expand audiences. As Denis McQuail writes, "gatekeepers can serve either side of the producer-consumer relationship and often both at the same time."²⁵ Translations are an interesting model of production because they displace (but never dispel) questions of authorial intention, ego and sanctity. Funding translations is subtly different from funding work that has never been produced. With translations there is the existence of the source text and therefore a certain level of insurance cover. Translation functions as an economic form of renewal (old lamps for new); it refashions works for new consumers. Still, the Arts Council, translator and publisher, while they can support translations of select texts of high quality which have high readership numbers in their source language (or, in Willemen's words, which possess the "'templates' for marketable cultural production,"), do not necessarily succeed in terms of winning an audience.

A significant reason highlighted by Cronin for the lacklustre response to foreign translations is the insularity of English (a hybrid translation-formed language in itself) to foreign idioms in contemporary global capitalism. There is at present a significant imbalance between works in English being translated into numerous other languages and traffic coming the other way.²⁶ Partly this can be explained by the monopolistic nature of market logic that seeks to remove the risk of differences. Interlingual translation, by asserting difference, can produce negative reactions of estrangement in cultures dominated by one language. Reliance on translation can make the reader feel that what they are reading is not exactly what they are supposed to be reading, that the translation is an inauthentic imitation. Paradoxically translations that are smooth, seamless and fluent and which provide the reader with "the narcissistic experience of recognising his or her culture in a cultural other, enacting an imperialism that extends over the dominion of transparency" can just as easily undermine this process: they masquerade as a fraudulent substitution of the original foreign text, leaving the gullible reader feeling conned.²⁷

Translation, despite having an universalist philosophy of crossing boundaries, can present an awkward cultural difference in the target language through the specificity of the foreign language. The translator can defamiliarise the target language by exercising too close attention to the source text and the process of translation itself. This self-reflexive strategy can also seriously challenge comprehension, often leading to the disruption of conventional syntax in the difficult play of intertextuality.

In contemporary capitalist culture, human translation shows itself as an obstacle to the fantasy of totalisation. As Cronin perceptively points out:

The profound engagement with language and culture that is implied by in depth language learning and attentive translation represents a substantial commitment of time.²⁸

Human beings, despite 747s and satellites, are no faster at learning a new language when compared with times past, yet the movement of capital proclaims itself to be "fluent in every language," to quote a Visa credit-card billboard slogan in São Paolo.²⁹ In the mythic, accelerated, technologically driven market place, exchange values do not appreciate sticking points. The rationalisation of zero-resistant smooth capitalism views "human translation as an impediment: it slows down the circulation of goods, services, people." Needless to say, accelerated production also creates congestion (the 'inevitable' traffic jam).³⁰ Yet translation is contradictorily a fluid mechanism for creating sameness through difference, although this trajectory will of course potentially lead to the end of human translation. Translation functions, as Georg Simmel once observed, a little like money; in accelerated commerce it is prone to disappear and be replaced by the swipe of the plastic card or the blip on a stock-exchange computer monitor.³¹

Translation theory as it has emerged in the last ten years in Ireland offers a valuable conceptual resource for a discursive understanding of art audiences. As a behind-the-scenes practice that has often sought the conventional sanctuary of an invisible presence, translation has been, according to Cronin, overlooked in Ireland, and its depth of complexity largely undervalued. Equally translation, in being represented as a ubiquitous visible presence by such statements as, "All legitimate intellectual enquiry is translation of one kind or another,"³² is prone to trivialisation, for if all interpretation is translation, translation has then no specificity, everything equals nothing.

Such equivocal meaning also encircles notions of audiences and may partly explain why they too have received so little isolated attention. For many, audiences are ignored because they see the primacy of meaning and pleasure in the artwork as residing in a supposed unmediated understanding of the specific work or in the artist's intention.³³ For institutions and administrators there is often the fear of fluid concepts like audiences. There is a desire for pragmatic certainties that will control the situational logic of reception once and for all. The subject for others is dull and distracting because audiences are perceived as a passive body (punters as sheep) that are always going to be around in some form.

The relevance of translation scholarship like Michael Cronin's is that it helps us to better understand how, like with translations, "the conditions and boundaries of audiencehood are [so] inherently unstable" and yet discursively do not lack coherence.³⁴ In Translating Ireland he writes, "the relative lack of self-reflexivity in translation for many years related in part to the absence of an institutional focus for translation studies in Ireland."³⁵ The translation paradigm encourages a sophisticated discursive analysis of the values and mechanics of art, economics and audiences. Arts-audience studies in Ireland (such as they are) could benefit similarly with institutional sponsorship, and a starting point on the new curriculum might be a comparative analysis with translation studies. I hope that my essays have contributed in a small way towards such an outcome.

Brian Hand is an artist based in Dublin.

¹Quoted in Brian P. Kennedy, Dreams and Responsibilities, The State and the Arts in Independent Ireland, (Dublin, 1990), p. 197.

²Ibid., p. 197.

³Access and Opportunity: A White Paper on Cultural Policy, (Dublin, 1987), p. 13. In this sense the White Paper clearly distinguishes bourgeois cultural 'values', e.g. the (supposedly) autonomous closed artwork produced by the singular creator, as identified by Cassidy, from the undervalued cultural 'elements' that appear in working class, rural and disenfranchised spheres, e.g. tattoos, or collaborative practices like jiving or ballad singing.

⁴Paul Willemen, Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory, (London, 1994), p. 74.

⁵Brian P. Kennedy, op.cit., p. 94. It is clear to see in the Arts Act the influence of the Keynesian social contract.

⁶The survey was carried out by Lansdowne Market Research in 1981, sampling 1,400 adults at 50 random sampling points throughout Ireland.

⁷Chris Sparks, Art for Whose Sake?, The Phoenix, April 1, 1983, quoted in Kennedy, op. cit., p. 211.

⁸Quoted from The Arts Plan 1999-2001, (Dublin) 1999, p. 54.

⁹Quoted in E. Hill et al.,Creative Arts Marketing, (Butterworth- Heinemann, UK), 1995, p. 103.

¹⁰The seminar Components of the Discourse was organised by Mel Gooding and took place on May 19, 2000. My account of René Gimpel's paper is from my own notes . Gimpel's critique was aimed at what he felt was the misperceived public and media pride in the new Tate Modern, in his view, a state-funded museum to feudal patronage, and at the Blairite protection of the wealth and privilege of art-dealing élites through New Labour's robust defence against the proposed E.U. directive on artist resale rights (1996) under the harmonisation of national laws in the E.U. and their vigorous protection of the practice of off-shore banking (the 'saving option' of choice for certain politicians, criminals and captains of industry, as we have learned to our cost in Ireland).

¹¹This understanding of money comes from David Harvey, The Limits to Capital, (Verso, London), 1999, p. 12.

¹²Of note here is the distinction drawn between visual artists' production and that of authors, composers and merchants of popular culture.

¹³Paul Willemen, Of Mice and Men, twoninetwo (Edinburgh), 2000, p. 19. Willemen provides the example of the Joan Collins' trial a few years ago in the U.S.: "Her publisher sued her for having delivered an unpublishable manuscript. She won the lawsuit because the judge confirmed that writers were supposed to provide a specified quantity of words relating to an agreed menu of themes. To shape this quantity of words into a publishable commodity was the responsibility of the publisher not the writer." (p. 18)

¹⁴Quoted in Gregory G. Shollete, Counting on your collective silence: notes on activist art as collaborative practice, Afterimage, Vol. 27, No. 3, Nov/Dec. 1999, p. 18.

¹⁵Quoted in Shaun Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption, (Sage, London), 1983, p. 2.

¹⁶See for example Mark Mortell, Marketing the 21^st Century, The Sunday Business Post, January 2, 2000, p. 23.

¹⁷Take for example the current U.S. investigations into price fixing at Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses; see Donnacha O'Maille, Auction houses to pay out for collusion, The Sunday Business Post, October 1, 2000, p. 12.

¹⁸Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, in F. Frascina and C. Harrison (eds.),Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, (Paul Chapman, London), 1988, p. 216.

¹⁹Extract quoted from Marie O'Halloran, Smurfit gave Yeats work to Haughey on impulse, The Irish Times, July 26, 2000. It is not stated in the article if Haughey later sold the painting. Significantly there is no mention of Yeats' painting in the survey of the gallery of Abbeyville in Mary Rose Doorly's Abbeyville: The family home of Charles J. Haughey, (Town House, Dublin) 1996.

²⁰Outside of exceptional interlingual translations like Brian Coffey's Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (1965), the concept of translation can be broadened to include such works as, for example, James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake (1939), a text that combines many languages in a type of Babel-speak but which has also been translated into national languages such as Japanese, German, and French. In the Irish visual arts, translation is also, I believe, a valuable model for looking at such works as Anne Tallentire's The Gap of Two Birds (1988), James Coleman's La Tache Aveugle (1978-90), Valerie Connor's All Very French (1990), Willie Doherty's Same Difference (1991), and Noel Sheridan's Not Waiting (1998).

²¹Michael Cronin, Translating Ireland: Translation Languages Cultures, (Cork University Press, Cork), 1996, p. 2.

²²See p. 20 of the Arts Plan for details on the objective to "develop international audience for Irish arts and bring international arts to Irish audiences."

²³Ibid, p. 171. The term 'gateway persons' is presumably linked to Denis McQuail concept of 'gatekeepers'; see Dennis McQuail, Audience Analysis, (Sage, London), 1997, p. 112.

²⁴ibid, p. 172.

²⁵McQuail, op. cit., p. 112.

²⁶This is particularly the case in the British publishing market.

²⁷Lawrence Venuti quoted in Cronin (1996), op. cit., p. 177. See also the introduction to Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, (Routledge, London), 1992, pp.1-17.

²⁸Michael Cronin, Across the Lines: Travel, Language, Translation, (Cork University Press, Cork), 2000, p. 116.

²⁹The example comes from ibid, p. 111. Cronin also cites the example of Robert Guillain's comments in Le Monde: "After spending a week in China you write a book, after three weeks, an article and after a year, nothing."

³⁰Ibid, p.114. So-called artificial-intelligence software is continually being developed to overcome problems of reliance on language learning or interpreter/translators. Interpersonal communication itself would seem at present to be highly resistant to the such limited technology.

³¹See ibid., pp. 111-112 and 138-139 for analysis of Georg Simmel's essay On the Psychology of Money.

³²Robert Welch, quoted in Cronin (1996), op. cit., p. 168.

³³For a recent anti -audience perspective see, Nick Zangwill, Art and Audience, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 57:3, Summer, 1999, pp. 315-332.

³⁴Quoted in Shaun Moores, op. cit., p. 2.