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My name is Alastair Pearce,I am the president of LASALLE College of Arts Singapore.
LASALLE is the college which specializes in the visual art, design art, and performing arts. So we do degree and diploma courses in a very wide range of subjects, from film to dance from music to fine art.
What we think here in LASALLE, one of the most exciting places for new art to be created, is on the boundaries between other disciplines
Therefore one of the greatest advantage we have here is - under one roof - we have film makers, dancers, musicians, fine artists, art theraphists and designers.
So it's at the borders between those, the inter-relationship between those that we think it is an exciting place for a new art creative art.
I think that all artists in any of those disciplines should be talking to and working with artists of different disciplines because it's there where new creativity can emerge.
The employment rates from LASALLE is very high, 80-90%. One of the strong elements about that is the increasing proportion of self-employed people setting up their own small business.
Whether the government, the Ministry of Education, have yet caught up with that fact - I think - is debatable because sometimes those statistics aren't counted as employment.
Yes, you're quite right. It is the case that a comparatively small number of artists will get full-time employed jobs which they'll stay in for the next 10 years
Michelangelo, wasn't like that and he was quite successfull.
Leonardo Da Vinci, Beethoven, they never work for an employer. J.S. Bach did actually, he worked for a series of employers throughout his life.
Most artists don't work for an employer and get full time salary.
They put together their careers in a portfolio with a lot of different things, abit of teaching, abit of working, abit of selling some stuff
abit of whatever, and that's the way artist's life has always been. So therefore I'm not concerned about employability.
All I'm concerned about is sometimes we are judged using methods of counting which work very well if you are a lawyer or a surgeon, but perhaps don't work as well if you are an artist.
Yes, we are developing a number of incubators here. We've got one guy doing Phunk Studio, a design studio which works with our students
and we are now starting another one, possibly with a young theatre company of graduates from LASALLE.
One of things we do here is every student who applies to come here, we'll do an interview or do audition because you can't judge the quality of an artist by how many 'O' levels they got.
Some colleges have some particular styles as a house style, which you can see coming through the work of many of their graduates, till it wears of many years later.
I don't think LASALLE has a house style. There are works coming from students here covering lots of different styles.
The danger, if it is a danger, is that you become a cover, a mini version of the master, because you don't get exposure.
Remember that art changes the world.
It's not so much of making them believe, it's stopping them disbelieving in that