> Do you have enough time?

time is quite relative. each human being has a different perception of time.
in general I feel like I have enough time. but not enough time for 
certain things. I don't always find enough time to work on my 
projects. or I can't assign the right time-slot to those demanding 
projects since the common duties (working for money, looking after a 
child etc.) have to come first and use up a lot of the energy, even 
though they don't really stress me.


> How do you use free time?

time is free anyway, or is it not? there might as well be no such 
thing as free time, there may only be time of activity and time of 
recovery. free time is part activity time and part recovery time. i 
guess i make a diverse use of my free time. i use my free time to 
work on different projects, some free time to contemplate and come up 
with new ideas, i use some free time to relax, some free time to have 
fun and some free time to plainly vegetate.


> How does your free time (should you have it) affect your (artistic) work?

if i don't get any "free" time, there will be no artistic work.


> Marcel Duchamp, perhaps the greatest avant-garde artist of the last 
> century stoppend working as an artist in 1912. This fact had an 
> enormous influence on modern art. On 11 November 1964 Joseph Beuys 
> actually dedicated a complete art-action called "The silence of 
> Marcel Duchamp is overrated" to this refuse to work.
> How do you explain this enormous effect DuchampZs Znot-workZ had? And 
> what do you think about it?

did duchamp really stop working? after all, he did produce many more 
works in the coming years like the large glass, the bicycle wheel 
etc. mostly by "finding" them and making them as readymades public to 
the public - and after a long time of assumed silence he produced in 
the 1960ies his final master piece "Given: 1 The Waterfall, 2 
Illuminating Gas", which reflects all his former works in an 
installation in the Philedelphia Art Museum.

what he really did, was discarding the brushes and exploring the mind 
more than the hands. this, I suppose, could be interpreted as 
stopping working. in any way this concept had been a radical change 
for arts at the time it was proposed. ever since then artists working 
by means of mind rather than by hands have been accepted by the 
public as artists.


> In a recent essay Lev Manovich states that since the end of 1960s, 
> modern art has far more become a conceptual activity and less a 
> question of "medium" or "techniques" (thus, for example he assigns 
> software-art to craft).
> That means art could easily be considered as part of the "vita 
> contemplativa" - the contemplative life - and could be referred to as 
> (perhaps last) counterdraft to the "active" spectacle of the global 
> capitalism. What do you think about that?

I see the point Manovich tries to make but I fail to see the 
conclusion. conceptual activity indeed is very important for modern 
art since the 1960s, and it is a big part of today's netart and other 
contemporary art. but medium and techniques still play an amazingly 
important role. many digital works of art show an intricate 
reflection of medium and techniques although they certainly don't 
lack conceptual activity. art isn't just contemplation, it is at 
least a rendered contemplation for further use.


> There is a coincidence between art and free software. As a rule, 
> except appreciation both do not gain much money and are commercially 
> exploited.
> For free software this is allowed and desired but not for art. What 
> do you think: Will the free-software-model increasingly become valid 
> for art too (that means we will have complete cross-subsidizing and 
> self-exploiting).

Free art is already here. Netart and digital experiments are in many 
ways the free software of the art world. Cross-subsidization and 
self-exploitation are  side-effects. there are others like potential 
worldwide publicity for any work of art, new channels for 
publication, marketing, distribution, discussion and review and new 
means of cooperation and communication which outweight the negative 
side-effects by far. Already the commercially "exploited" art world 
cannot be without the "free art" world anymore. It finds it a very 
resourceful and innovative world which is ready to be exploited as 
free software is to commercial software enterprises.


> Only a few artists make a good living - despite supposed highest 
> appreciation. Doesn't society owe them at least paid leave?

supposing I say yes, I also have to take in respect, that half the 
population would claim to be artists. a nice idea but society might 
not yet be able to afford paid leave for half the population. and 
again taking duchamp in consideration we all might righteously call 
us artists and righteously claim paid leave. a great idea: we all 
could do our own arts. well, maybe not all of us should really 
produce art since there is enough kitsch und junk around already to 
fill half of earth's museums. then again we might want to produce so 
much junk-art that our whole race finds vibrating fulfillment in an 
eternal recreativity-process which seems a much better concept than 
the global warmonger-capitalism we face presently.