Glen Milne says the arts community should back Howard. Why? The money.
In the 12 years since the last Keating budget in 1995, commonwealth support for the arts has risen in nominal terms from $410 million to $680 million, an increase of 65.8 per cent, more than twice the rate of inflation. Funding for the Australia Council increased by more than 110 per cent.
More important than the very good reasons Milne has listed for the arts community (children overboard, the Iraq war, indigenous intervention, climate change) to hate this Government and the nutty idea that you must vote for a Government because it throws money at you, are the little things that make the arts community believe the Government won’t friend them on Facebook.
For a start would it be easier for the arts community to consider supporting the government if only they didn’t see themselves under constant attack from the usual right wing rabble who support the government?
Of course the mistrust goes back a long way, from Liberal MP’s comments about the Parliament House art collection and it’s “victory over this little clique of correct, highbrow, holier-than-thou, you-must-like-this-shit brigade.�?, to the racist and ideological treatment of Dawn Casey, former head of the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and now the CDEP fallout that is about to hit Aboriginal artists.
Anyway, I leave it for our artsy readers to discuss further.
Like the attempted destruction of drama on the ABC, the virtual destruction of SBS, the History Wars instigated by the Right, the paranoid fear they have about the arts community, their lack of support for the Australian filmn industry - etc, etc. And I haven’t even looked at theatre, dance, painting, sculpture etc. etc. Anybody in the arts community who trusts the libs to espouse artistic freedom, especially freedom to criticise them has to be puffin muffins as the girl says in the ad.
If it came down to “throwing money” at voters, then all of the below would owe the Federal Govt gratitude: pensioners, nursing home residents, disabled, parents of school kids, university students, farmers on special drought allowances, road users, public transport users, all employees, all unemployed on allowances, rural broadband users, ummmm did I leave out a few million folk? So by that reckoning the Government should win about 98% of the primary vote and 99% of the 2PP vote.
??? How can thew Polls be so wrong???
How can some Journalists be such twerps?
A stirring chant from Days of Old:
The Twerpers, united, Can never be Defeated!
The Twerpers, united, Should never be Repeated!
VOTE 1: Glenn, First Australian into Outer Space, War Hero of Milne Say; Soothsayer Extraordinaire; No Quitter He; Interpreter of Tea Leaves Takes Leave of His Sentences
You only have to look at what this Government has done to funding for foreign aid to know what a con it all is.
Increases in the aid budget but when you look into it, it includes things like running a jail for asylum seekers on Nauru, paying the salaries of AWB execs in Iraq to selling Australian wheat (with sweeteners), etc.
Talk to people who work in NGOs and they will tell you how this government has turned everyone into a compliant contractor, and does not brook any alternate views. Advocacy is now the dirtiest word in the business ( which is why you will not hear much from the NGOs about Burma, unless Lord Downer is to approve it).
The arts community knows that there is largess for those who do what they are told, and don’t critise the Government.
Milne might as well argue that every academic who has received ARC funding should be obliged to support the Government.
It’s a silly argument. People vote the way they do for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with money, including values and tribal loyalties.
The captains of the finance industry did extraordinarily well under Hawke and Keating. They set them up, first, by removing decades-old regulations on banking (this set up the investment banking industry) and them by introducing compulsory superannuation (this set up the funds management industry).
How many Labor voters are there in the senior and not-so-senior echelons of Macquarie Bank?
Even if it’s just about the money, it’s not about what the government (any government) has done in ythe past that counts. It’s what will happen in the future.
Ode on a Greasy Earn
For ‘PD’
Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunt about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Give it a shake, mate, there might be some dough in it.
I think Phil has proved Milne’s point. Lots of waffle about things which are NOT art.
Children overboard, CDEP, Iraq War, Climate Change, Indigenous Intervention — this stuff is ART?….?…..?
Art is lots of things, but it is NOT politics. Which was Milne’s point.
Media whores apparently believe other folks’ affections are as marketable as their own.
You philistines. Milne, ever erudite, was simply trying to broaden his readers’ cultural horizons by introducing them to Dadaist poetry, of which his column is a fine example.
STAP. Yes, it is art. Artists comment on issues of the day through their work. It’s been going on for a while though I suppose you might not have noticed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernica_%28painting%29
It’s not all about portraits and pastoral scenes you know.
Milne’s figures on arts funding under the Coalition must come as a terrible shock to those people who voted for them in the 1998 election on the strength of their warning that a Labor government would “spend more of your tax dollars on elite arts”.
Milne’s and SATP’s views on what is and isn’t “proper art” would have to rule out Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the democratic political protest poem by Schiller which it set to music, amongst a lot of other things.
Indeed, Phil. STAP,try some of the following:
Aeschylus, The Persians (though he is a bit of a boring conservative); Aristophones, Lysistrata - so out of date that anti-Iraq war protestors were using his ideas in street theatre a couple of weeks ago; Seutonius- wrote dreadful things about the Roman emperors; Procopius - wrote even worse things about the Byzantine emperors, -
Artists just can’t help puncturing politicians and the powerful and long may it go on, however much the likes of JWH try to bribe them to shut up or out and out repress them.
If artists have to be relied on to swing the polls back to the right, then things are really looking bad. They’ll be calling for the Communists to get on board next. To each according to their needs…
Paul Burns
Not as venerable or revered as your examples, but here’s 2 cents for the fray: Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, Mark Twain’s “War Prayer”, some Russian guy: “The Government Inspector” (Aussie production in fulkl swing contemporaneously); Voltaire’s “Candide”, and more recently, “Don’s Party”, “The Odd Angry Shot”, “The Department”; nasty caricatures of Whitlam-era poltroons in Barry Humphrey’s stage shows from 1975 onwards; Les Patterson… that’s one of the troubles with arts funding and The Yartz: ya can’t whack ‘em all inter one big lefty tent, eh? Worse ‘n tryin’ ta herd flies, mate!
Some pretty outrageous claims being made here about the classics. It’s silly to align Beethoven’s glorious ninth symphony with a simplistic political ideology. And while a lot of modern left-wingers have tried to appropriate Aristophanes sublimely funny ‘Lysistrata’ as a kind of proto-feminist anti-war polemic, the interpretation just doesn’t stick.
Art can comment on politics, but doesn’t have to. Many of the silliest artworks of all time have been closely aligned with certain political ideologies, as anyone who’s familiar with the history of communism or Nazi Germany (bang goes Godwin’s law!) will attest.
I think Milne’s comments are fair enough. I’ve encountered the unqualified claim that the arts are underfunded by the Howard Government several times: this observation refutes that.
Milne’s column is sourced from a speech by Senator George Brandis, which is worth listening to in full - Brandis expands on arguments already encountered in this thread in some detail.
The thing that’s struck me about these Howard years is that, as far as the government acknowledges, artists don’t exist here.
Has Howard ever been photographed with a painter? Shared a stage with a composer? Banged on about how enobling of the Australian spirit are the sculptures of such and such? There was a time 7 or 8 years ago when Les Murray was paraded about but once the republic was buried he was no longer required.
Public life is closed to artists and anyone who might come up later on and bite the government in the bum. Instead its Ian Thorpe, the boys serving in Afghanistan, perhaps a scientist or two, lots of rugby players….
After all, how could you sustain arguments that ignore the greenhouse gas debt owed by developed countries if pesky artists keep reminding you of the importance of memory? Ditto for the history wars of a few years ago.
Howard’s never wavered from promoting a phobia of elites. By now, he’s been so successful he can just ignore them.
Artists have no reason whatsoever to want to extend a period that will go down in history as a cultural desert - money or no money.
“I’ve encountered the unqualified claim that the arts are underfunded by the Howard Government several times: this observation refutes that.”
This totally ignores the fact that the “arts funding” that has increased has gone to the major arts institutions - ballet, opera, symphony, portrait gallery - and totally gutted out from the you know, ‘ler-class’, contemporary arts. Milne’s point is a dishonest furphy, classic as they come. And the Brandis speech from which its cropped (and yes I’ve gone through the entire thing) is uncontrolled, unfiltered bullshit. Paying a few million for a quiet portrait gallery to have a nice backdrop for party functions is not the same as supporting an arts culture which could be bringing in squillions and enriching public life. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody gives a toss about portraiture and the Sydney Symphony orchestra. Are we serious about taking the snobbery out of culture or is it all lip-service?
Milne’s masturbatory fantasy reaches a disquieting climax when he asserts that artists just had the government for other reasons: “And here’s where he gets to the point. Much of the arts community’s anti-Coalition political positioning is simply a cypher for other things: children overboard, the Iraq war, indigenous intervention, climate change.” Stephen, are you even aware of how hilarious you are? I can’t decide if Brandis’ use of Oscar Wilde’s point about the politics of art is more ill-concieved or more ill-executed. Is his speech writer a left-wing Dadaist genius or what? Oscar “Venus and Tannhauser pinned to the floor of the House of Lords” Wilde used to detach art and the social - now this is proof positive of why we need to shore up arts education - even our leaders are stumbling on the basics. You heard it from the horses’ mouth; make art for its own sake, but not for social causes or for political enquiry. Looking forward to lots of - oh look - portraiture and ballet! Quelle surprise!
Classic, old school, class warfare bullshit dressed up as populism. Upper class snobbery at its most naked and farcical. Stephen Milne, your failure as a commentator is complete and epochal; and Brandis, take a moment away from your red wine and canapes to reflect on the fact that everybody knows you’re a class-A political junkie who hasn’t even installed conservative arts policy with any aplomb. It is just a bit different when the Emperor is a stripper, mate.
And the Brandis speech from which its cropped (and yes I’ve gone through the entire thing) is uncontrolled, unfiltered bullshit.
So have I, and no it isn’t.
Some v. interesting commentary on this thread, but I sort of have to take some mild exception to this:
“Wilde used to detach art and the social…”
Well that’s what he *said* he was doing, and it was his mouthpiece, so to speak, but what he actually *did* in his art is far more complex and involved than that, and involves the social in a vital way. Just not a nattering non-brilliant way, which is what I think a lot of contemporary artists need to learn.
But I take your broader point.
TimT, I reckon I’ve pretty comprehensively explained why Brandis’s speech is bullshit - so do you have reason why its not? Unless you’re referring to the raw figures, which are of course correct. They however reflect a total gutting of arts funding and its reappropriation to the classic arts, which as you know, appeal to the smallest possible group of elite arts patrons. The whole Liberal fantasy that the arts elite is something they can ridicule for political gain while holding party functions in gallery foyers is pretty much done with. People figured it out a while ago. Snobs are everywhere; its just that artists tend to have a -gasp- interest in social life.
Brandis proudly farts that he’s overseen an increase in Arts funding but he has fooled exactly no one - I say again - funding the national institutions of classic art is not the same as a real arts policy. In fact, it was said a decade ago as it is now, that we grasp on a very fundamental level that this has been largely a sluice of politically motivated policy - done precisely to guard against claims of cultural barbarism. “No we’re not! We paid for Tosca! And remember - the art elites on the left hate you!”
Is that good enough for you, TimT? Is that the arts culture you think people really want funded? I reckon its not. I reckon people want publically-accessible (no, a national portrait gallery doesn’t qualify) publically-revelant art they can bring their kids to. And hey, turns out, despite all the bleating and harrumphing from the lords and ladies of the national wine cellar brigade, that contemporary art is bloody popular, and is sometimes so because it adds a bit of vim to social and political debates. Even Thatcher understood this pretty basic principle. Need we dredge up the Greater London Council’s art directives? The conservatives knew that by really funding the arts, they could get people actually on side across the political gulf, and they were applauded for it. Brandis’ grasp of the political history of his job is as astonishingly poor as his grasp of English literature.
We can go though every bracket and comma of the Brandis speech - or in fact any speech he’s ever made. We can go through every bracket and comma of Milne’s piece.
But I suspect, black skivvy and horned-rimmed glasses in tow, that you’ll want to avoid scratching the surface.
j_p_z - sorry, my parsing wasn’t correct - I agree completely. I meant ‘used’ as in ‘made to’.
A good deal of your comment was directed at Milne’s article, Christine, not Brandis’ speech.
I redouble my critcism for Brandis. I’ve seen the man speak twice. I consider him indefensibly partisan and more to the point, bad at this job.
He’s a snob and doesn’t seem to have the ability to connect with people that politicians should have, but the speech is a fairly comprehensive working through of a cohesive artistic philosophy.
Christian, I would suggest that art that has a transparently highly political motivation is exactly what about 1/2 of the population don’t want to take their kids to.
Also, I can’t speak for the rest of the capital cities, but the Brisbane galleries (including the spanking new modern art one) seem to be going out of there way to be kid friendly in the last couple of years. I walked past the Powerhouse this weekend and saw that it is running a kids program this school holiday. Even if the Commonwealth has little or nothing to do with funding these institutions, my point is that I don’t get the impression that under current arrangements there is some dire crisis in terms of art events that parents can or want to take their kids to.
Christian, what you say is true about the feds funding dollars. And the ALP states have tried to varying (unsuccessful) degrees to spend the very limited arts $ in more democratically and culturally diverse ways. But even if fed and state govts spent loads more $ in a fairer way, is this enough? Just what are we talking about here? Surely, “publically-accessible” and “publically-relevant art”, however you define it, in no ways suffices for producing a richer or better public cultural life. It begs the questions of what difference such value-free criteria would mean for democracy? How would they assist the growth of a more humane, sane, tolerant and co-operative society?
The arts don’t exist in a political and economic vacuum. Associating support for refugees or indigenous Australians or signing the Kyoto Protocal with artists, as the GG constantly does, along with the implication that the former issues are radically Left, is a sign of just how retrograde and intolerant public culture has become in Australia.
It’s not an increasingly industrialised arts culture that’s desirable, where the tourist and family dollar, bums on seats, branding and self-promotion, all of which are so much part of the arts landscape today, continue to reign supreme. There is a lot more at stake here than that and it is a mistake to view the state of the arts separate from all the other socio-economic policies that hold dominant sway today and no doubt will under a Rudd ALP govt.
Two points from me - one fact, one opinion;
Brandis was graciously invited by the Qld Govt to the recent opening of GOMA - one of those stand-up drinks and canapes things. Funny to observe the space that always seemed to be around him in the very crowded room - sort of like a noxoius bacterial colony on a petrie dish.
And Milne? He is just taking out some insurance in case his meal-ticket Costello loses his seat. Milne would then need to find a new cloaca to inhabit - think hermit crab changing into a new shell - and Brandis will be the proxy Costello for the Libs in opposition.
BTW, don’t be fooled by Brandis’ facade of ‘reasonableness’ - one doesn’t achieve plum pre-selections in the Qld Liberal cesspitt without being utterly ruthless.
Christian.
TimT is an always valuable contributor here at LP and I know for a fact he does not deserve that caricature.
Secondly, the last time I looked, the kids are well taken care of, however your point on the perspective that funding the big institutions does not an arts policy make is correct….it does make it elitist.
Thirdly, the problem may not be Brandis himself but the PM and the many appointed cultural warriors and philistines who now populate our cultural institutions.
Phil - I was talking about *my* skivvy and glasses! I wouldn’t caricature someone else like that.
I may have also been misunderstood on the issue of kids and accessibility - its not a good arts policy by any means but I was illustrating that Brandis is out of touch, even with that vain sentiment. I think contemporary art galleries are doing a stand-up job of making art accessible but that is not the same as jinmaro’s idea of a “humane, sane, tolerant and co-operative society”.
TimT, I think you’re right in that Brandis is speaking through a philosophy, but I would classify it as deeply anti-artisitic. He rejects - wholesale - social action as leftism (and also did so with Arts educators in his speech to CHASS in July, which was nice.) despite there being now a good body of historical evidence that when art speaks about broad social issues, it reach across the divide and bind political philosophies around action. What Brandis is interested in is anti-leftism, first and foremost. That makes him a poor governor of the Arts. What you may see as ‘comprehensive’ I would characterise as extremely elitist Grammar school frippery articulated at a sub-literate level. At least Hewson got his fingers in the mud, and Peacock knew how to throw this issue around rather intelligently, as I recall.
Apologies for the misinterpretation Christian. My bad.
It’s all very well for Brandis to go on about supporting young emerging artists - what about us middle-aged dilettantes then?
It’s them but it’s also Brandis himself. There was a feature article a while back somewhere or other where the journo noted that it took Brandis’ staffers four days to point to the Liberal Party’s arts policy, which ended up being a press release. Garrett, by contrast, has produced a 22 page discussion paper - in July last year. Of course, it’s had near zero coverage in the meejah.
http://www.alp.org.au/download/federal_labor_arts_policy_discussion_paper.pdf
Christian, btw, it’s Glenn Milne.
I support a special OOK! Prize for cartoonists above the age of 35, Gummo, yes, my tax dollars will be put to good use. Maybe like the Council you could get an overseas studio posting with that, three months and a room with the guy who does Dilbert.
Amazing! A discussion about our nation’s arts and cultural policy!
Milne’s sycophantic article was nothing special but after following cultural policy closely for some time now, I think some of the LP commentariat (not to mention the arts community) are being a little unfair about Brandis. The true story is both more complex and deeply ironic.
Brandis has actually been the most vocal and engaged of all the Howard Government arts ministers so far. And he and Milne are right to point out that, overall, arts funding under Howard has risen.
Can anyone here remember the previous Howard Government arts minster? Hmm, it’s a toughie isn’t it (for the record, it was Julian McGuaran - nuff said).
The problem is, as Christian McRea observes, that the increases in funding have all been motivated by a policy process that is at best ad hoc and at worst, an example of the worst kind of insider lobbying.
The ANU’s Jennifer Craik has written an excellent recent monograph on Australian cultural policy and traces the current debate back to the Keating administration. Does anyone remember John Hewson’s 1993 arts policy? For its day, it was a very interesting document that proposed some big-picture reforms of the Australia Council as well as many of the Blairite reforms centred around “creative industries” that the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport rolled out in the 90’s.
Craik argues that Hewson’s policy, far from threatening arts funding models, was in reality a threat to the existing arts establishment, which is why it was so savagely resisted:
Craik continues:
The massive support thrown behind Keating after the 1994 Creative Nation policy - particularly at the ALP launch in 1996 that Milne quite accurately refers to as a media relations disaster for Labor - set a different tone for Howard’s arts policy. When Howard came to power, the Coalition lacked a coherent arts policy and instead the federal government’s arts policy began to evolve over the administration into what Craik describes as an “an aggressive gamble on elite cultural organisations.”
Brandis’ speech is interesting in this historical context because it is the first explicit reference to - and defence of - this policy to date. Brandis also made reference to the international debate about “instrumentalism” in arts policy, arguing that the left’s belief in the effectiveness of art in delivering social policy is misplaced. In this, he is actually supported by much of the international research literature.
Of course, none of this matters because of the validity of Keating’s other point: that the milieu for arts and creativity in Australia has suffered dramatically in Australia under Howard.
Ironically, the actual Howard years policy settings of “elite nurturing” have occurred at precisely the same time that Howard, the MSM and many of the right-wing Howard barrackers have decried the very “elite” cultural artforms and artefacts they have been most supportive of.
Brandis is susceptible to ‘culture war’ imbeciity with the best of them. This is a guy who likened Australia’s Greens to the Nazi party. I don’t know why anybody would take him seriously.
As far as I can tell, Brandis has only made one sensible comment in his entire political career, and I believe that had something to do with rodents, in repose.
“Brandis also made reference to the international debate about “instrumentalismâ€? in arts policy, arguing that the left’s belief in the effectiveness of art in delivering social policy is misplaced. In this, he is actually supported by much of the international research literature.”
I bet he’s also supported in this by the quality of the social-policy-directed art. (And by the nature of the policies so desired, while we’re at it.)
This is a very interesting discussion, with lots of good points all around. Kudos to all the contributors thus far. I’d like to leap in at some point and contribute some thoughts (about basic principles, not about the Australian scene), but I’ll have to wait until later, as I’m, um, somewhat pre-occupied at the moment. But good conversations about arts policy are always worth following. Cool.
Oops, tea break’s over, back on me head.
And on what basis would you make that wager? Is yet another tired performance of a canonical play more worthy or more valuable? And what about when that tired performance itself attempts to be “social-policy directed”? (Which incidentally I think is a silly notion…)
The only thing I would add is that the research literature on the effectiveness of social art - to my limited knowledge - was written by government policy wonks in the 80s in Britain (in response to the social art of the time) and Bush the Elder era government policy wonks in the 90s (in response to the social art of the time). Generally art history looks pretty favourably on intelligent social art, as I recall - I’m think of the Brian Barnes murals in London decrying nuclear war, which are still used as rallying points twenty years later. (Probably because the same power structures are pushing for nuclear power then as now.) This does not include the type of art history that Mr. Brandis would gleefully quote, no doubt Robert Hughes or some such, as proof positive of the silliness of contemporary political art.
Apologies to Glenn Milne for incorrect spelling. Hi, Glenn!
Ugh, now I’m bit, had to come back. It’s friggin’ catnip, this stuff.
Mark, your concerns are quite valid, but I think you may be framing them in the wrong way. (I’ll try to explain why later.)
For now I just wanted to make a more general comment… People who think that the arts should primarily be used to “change society” should tread kind of carefully, because they are in danger of making two very basic errors.
The first is, that art is generally powerless to “change society.” Great art changes the individuals who can perceive and understand it; and if there are enough of those people and they take their augmented sense of the world and of the humane back out into society, then that may indeed ‘change society’ for the better. But the idea that the art/society relationship is mass-mechanical, and not organic-cellular, is I think much mistaken. For the purposes of art, there is no “society,” there is only the viewer, and the one sitting next to her, and the one standing next to him, and so on.
The other problem is the old one of, Beware of what you wish for. Art that has the quality of being very powerful but yet not truly great often is either counterfeit, or else there’s a worm in that apple somewhere. Do you really want the vote of someone who believes a thing because they saw it in a painting or in a movie, or because they were told so in ‘appreciation’ class? Let’s look at Brecht for example. Personally, I’d much rather have the vote and the involvement and decisions of the kid who was baffled and hypnotized and genuinely confused by “Jungle of Cities” or “Baal,” over the kid who parrots back the overt messages of “Mother Courage and Her Children” without examination. Frankly, the second kid scares the hell out of me, and that kid should scare you, too, regardless of your political views; not because of what’s in that mind, but because of its operational qualities.
There’s also that other thing that’s really true: Ars longa, vita brevis. You don’t know how things will be received past your own time. Orozco and the other Mexican muralists (and T.H. Benton, too, for that matter) who helped teach Pollock were interesting artists in their own right, but they were also in some ways grubby propagandists, and a lot of what they put forward back then is horseshit now.* But “Autumn Rhythm” and “One” are still there, mysterious and nourishing as ever, and anyone who spends time with them comes away looking and learning, not just feeling angry about what they were told to get angry about.
[* - or else, it’s sort of paralyzing, because it can’t get you past a certain stage; which is as good as being horseshit, though it’s more refined.]
There’s a point at which what I’m saying bangs up against some of the quite valid arguments about elitism and institutionalism, it’s true; but that’s a matter for later on. It’s important to see this stuff from not just two sides, but from many. Anyway, that’s too much out of me here, already. Carry on! Sorry to blather so long!
That is so funny.
Brandis has repeatedly brayed to arts administrators that it is irrelevant what the arts lobby thinks because, as he said, they all vote ALP or Green. In other words, f”ck them, he says.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of federal funding to the arts have gone to business groups that fund….yeah, “the arts”. The usual rort.
How unoriginal, jpz, to channel that appalling neo-liberal sheila, Margaret Thatcher.
The research around social-policy-directed art typically centres, as usual, around the economic impact of the arts.
Especially in the US, for instance, there have been huge efforts made to try and quantify the economic benefits of arts funding, both in economic value-add and in so-called “multiplier” effects to the local economy
The problem is, as spruikers of large sporting events are also finding, it’s hard to argue that the discretionary dollars spent on arts, sport and entertainment wouldn’t be spent anyway by consumers on other things - whether that be other entertainment goods or their rent, bills and other living expenses. Either way the effect to the overall economy is marginal …. especially across a whole country.
So your local arts centre may be good at generating urban renewal in a depressed suburb, but it’s not generating wealth across the broader community.
The one area where there has been some positive effects of the arts shown has been in arts education, where kids taught music do better in maths, for instance.
This is why people like John Holden at Demos argue we need to return to basic first principles of arts funding. Spending on culture in all its forms has consistently been shown in public opinion research to be an extremely popular form of government spending. His answer to the question “why should governments fund the arts?” is a simple one: because voters want them to.
I disagree with some of the implications of the following from Christian McCrea:
Yes, a portrait gallery is a very safe project for government. Most of the portraits painted in Australia were executed after the invention elsewhere, notably in Britain of the National Portrait Gallery, of a repository of images of VIPs. Whereas the British National Portrait Gallery is host to a depth of culture which precedes the invention of public celebrity. Thus, Australian portraits of the great and the good are often lazy, flatulent art.
I am a lover of opera. Opera is one of the most voracious clients of government largesse. I would prefer it to be otherwise, but the fact is that without government subsidy major opera would case to exist in this country. Opera serves as a seedbed for a wide range of musicianship and stage-craft. But that in itself does not justify the existence of government subsidy. More persuasive for me is the argument that opera can serve as an avenue to the huge richness of western culture. Opera therefore serves to make possible conversation with a larger world.
This acculturative role of opera, I suppose, could be seen as snobbery. It still costs me less to see an opera than it did to take in the recent Dylan concert. A wide range of people spent a considerable sum to attend Dylan. There are no direct government subsidies for Dylan, which was for me equally acculturative as Handel’s Julius Caesar.
I played a tiny and non-artistic role in my youth in the Melbourne theatre renaissance in the late 60s and early 70s surrounding the Pram Factory and La Mama in the days before major government subsidisation. That renaissance was profoundly acculturative and deeply political in ways that are absent today from most current Australian theatre. I don’t believe that this is because of subsidisation. Rather, I believe that subsidisation became necessary because the Australian theatre ceased to matter in the lives of all but a few people. All the money in the world won’t make anything matter. Instead, it will pay the salaries of arts administrators and make it cheaper perhaps for audiences to attend performances that don’t matter.
I remember one of the members of Jefferson Airplane (it may have been Paul Kantner) in a doco recalling the arrival of the LA record company suits in San Francisco in 1967 bent on signing up SF acts. Kantner said that these execs had no idea about how to market this new phenomenon because it fell so far outside their usual sphere of operations. Kantner suggested to them that the music should be offered the same way a drug dealer trafficked to his clients.
Is it too much to ask that at least some art may be seen as dangerous and alluring as that? Maybe. But one thing’s certain: if you wish to remove the danger from art, then the best way is for the government to subsidise it.
Well said, Katz, esp. the stuff about opera. The reasons you give for subsidizing opera are important. The stuff should be funded and performed, even if there were not a soul* in the audience, simply to keep it alive so that in 20 or 100 years time, if and when people are ready for it again, it’s there.
btw, I have to ask…
“the Melbourne theatre renaissance in the late 60s and early 70s surrounding the Pram Factory and La Mama in the days before…”
So, was there a Melbourne La Mama? Or did you get to have dealings with Ellen Stewart?
Oh, and speaking of “Autumn Rhythm,” I believe you mugs are still holding “Blue Poles” hostage in Canberra. Hope you’re enjoying it…
* - “not a soul…” A great old friend once sent me a postcard from abroad: “Greetings from S______, a delightful little city of some 30,000 souls — and 420,000 people.”
Yes (seconding j_p_z), great comment, Katz. I’m still not sure about subsidizing opera in these days of CDs and DVDs. Once the only way to experience opera was to go to the opera, but that’s not the case now. And I’ve seen (subsidized) performances at the Sydney Opera House by Opera Australia that were beyond dire. Why should the taxpayer fork out for that? But I recognise the opposite arguments as well.
Speaking of portraits. Howard is the only Prime Minister in history whose official portrait includes his wife:
http://www.portrait.gov.au/static/coll_549John+Howard+and+Janette+Howard.php
Apparently the Howards were not all that impressed by the way the portraits of all Prime Ministers back to Federation were hung in a row on the gallery walls in Parliament House. As part of the historical sequence, John and Janette would end up hanging beside Paul Keating. Horrors.
So they decided to commission a brand new monumental building devoted to the subject of John and Janette, sorry, to house the Prime Ministerial portraits along with portraits of other famous australians. That way they could be viewed and admired by a wider audience. And so it came to pass.
Janette, being such a busy girl, is patron of three institutions, the National Breast Cancer Foundation, the Hockeyroos, and the brand new National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Her baby, carefully nurtured.
And long after Janette is forced to vacate Kirribilli Castle, her portrait will still be hanging at the National Portrait Gallery.
Janette’s gift to the nation, and proof that the Howards love art.
The best opera productions anyone could ever see are on film: Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute, Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni, numerous German productions of Wagner’s the Ring Cycle, John Schlesinger’s film of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, the perfect Russian film of Prokofiev’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. All the greats in fact.
There is no need for the equivalent of the Mosman Musical Society to keep on producing inferior productions that soak up a massive part of the federal arts budget in short-run productions aimed and enjoyed exclusively by an ageing, sentimental, culturally unadventurous, cash-flushed, mono-cultural, tiny minority of the Australian population.
Well, jinmaro, much as I like Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni, I’ve seen more exciting performances live, notably one in Zagreb (subsidized? Probably). A good live performance does have a frisson that’s absent from even the best recorded or filmed versions.
This probably refers to readers of Dickens as well, but I’m likewise not abashed to be one of them.
And “mono-cultural” is a tad harsh, isn’t it? I listen to Janacek (Czech), Dvorak (ditto), Wagner (German), Mozart (mainly Italian), Britten (English), Puccini (Italian). Gosh, I even like Chinese opera — sometimes.
Heh, it’s been ages since we’ve had some elephants in a production of Aida. Call the Australia Council!
Well, not so many have such opportunities, Rob, which was my point. In Australia you can rent for a couple of $, rather than pay one to two hundred plus for a crammed seat in a theatre that has shit acoustics, that’s filled with over-perfumed hacking asthmatics and intrusive poseurs, a film like Joesph Losey’s, which is brilliantly seductive and sensual, features sublime sets, to-die-for cinematography and singers of the calibre of Kiri te Kanawa. No contest I reckon with the, as you say, often dire productions of Opera Australia.
Culture doesn’t have to be enjoyed en masse, and in fact is mostly not.
As for Dickens, you can buy his novels for a dollar, or borrow for free, through the public library system.
Yeah, but Rob, jinmaro, you’re missing half of Katz’s point. It’s not all about the present audience. This stuff has to be performed and worked through so that your young musicians, singers, directors, conductors, designers, all get a chance to converse at length with the master-spirits of the civilization, and benefit from that contact. That’s how the future audience will benefit. This is about cultural policy, not about individual cultural actions. You can’t have a future if you’re not always constructing the present. Look at the pervasive influence of just a few guys like Peter Sellars and Robert Wilson; and the major effects they’ve had on the careers of folks like John Adams, Dawn Upshaw, Philip Glass, Sanford Sylvan, and too many others to mention. Doing this stuff is how you keep it alive.
And hey, if you’re really that jaded with the state of Australian opera, well, let me run the Sydney Opera House for a season and I promise to make your head spin like a top. Scout’s honor.
Mozart’s The Magic Flute is perhaps one of the most subversive, revolutionary pieces of performance art ever constructed.
So what if prosperous people splash too much scent upon themselves before viewing it? They’re helping to pay for a production that stands at close to the pinnacle of radical art, whether they know it or not.
If present-day radicals don’t understand their connections with Mozart and the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden, then they deserve to be powerless and marginalised.
The electrifying effect of such art performed live cannot be replicated on a DVD and a plasma screen.
jinmaro, the problem with Losey’s film, lovely and all as it is, is that it’s not live. It’s mimed, all fixed in post-production. It’s not singers interacting with the orchestra, or the whole thing interacting with the audience. I agree with Katz there — the live experience is not exchangeable for the facsimile. It’s like looking at Turner’s paintings in a book: it in no way replicates the experience of seeing them in the flesh.
You also have to reckon that most people have shit sound systems that cannot come anywhere close to even approximating the full volume and weight of sound experienced in the opera house.
I’m not necessarily opposed to subsidies for opera (though I don’t think all arts and cultural policy should be skewed to “high culture”) but I can’t see how this rationale differs in principle from subsidising other performers or performances which may have cultural value but don’t appeal to mass audiences. I don’t think you can escape by saying “it’s stood the test of time” because that begs the question of what might in the future.
j_p_z, I would really like to agree with you, but I’ve seen too many crap operas and stupid, self-indulgent productions of Shakespeare to truly believe that “artists” carry the flame of deathless culture for future generations. Personally, if I never saw an “avant garde” German production of either Purcell or Wagner again it would be way too soon. A lot of this stuff is just about ego — the producer’s ego.
Right now I’m listening to Solti’s sublime recording of The Marriage of Figaro and remembering the absolute shambles that Opera Australia made of it a couple of years back. Which (somewhat reluctantly) reinforces jinmaro’s point.
My broader point is that I agree with Ben that we need to go back and rethink arts/cultural policy from first principles. The question “what is it for?” should be answered rather than people squabbling over which bits of the pie go to the art forms or institutions that they happen to favour.
Rob: “I’ve seen too many crap operas… to truly believe that “artistsâ€? carry the flame of deathless culture for future generations.”
From a policy point of view, the individual “artists” don’t have to carry any flames at all. What’s important is that their teams are continually working through this stuff, living with it as a group, making mistakes, etc. etc. Treating it like it’s alive, which it is. Doesn’t have to be avant-garde at all, though once in a while a useful new idea comes up. The big point is, you can’t win it if you ain’t in it.
Mark: “we need to go back and rethink arts/cultural policy from first principles. The question “what is it for?â€? should be answered…”
Totally agree. Part of my real argument (which I haven’t even made yet) is that the question “what is it for?” should get answered not by an individual or a committee (we hope), but by as many people as possible who are reasonably capable to judge. So some of the things you want to emphasize in your spending, I’d say, are creating basic artistic literacy (I mean the real kind, not the forced kind), conceptual competence, things like that. In my experience, very few people learn to love Mozart by being shouted at, “Mozart is great! You’re stupid if you don’t agree!” But some people DO learn to love Mozart once you explain to them about the music’s architecture, the ideas behind sonata form, tonality, a sort of: why it is the way it is. Before they know things like that, they usually don’t “see” what they’re looking at, so how could they love it. It’s just another totem, another thing they have to wearily agree to.
Same is (at least partly) true for other art forms, and again, Mark, I agree with your previous comment, I don’t think everything should be put in one place, or one philosophy. There should be more money for arts in general because if done properly, it increases the health of society. And I think you have to be broad-minded about what you’re calling “art” and at the same time not silly or insulting about what you’re willing to pay for (looking at you, Karen Finley). People who don’t understand art completely will be more willing to pay for it if you don’t kick them in the balls every time you take their fifty quid.
I’m not sure who Karen Finlay is, j_p_z.
A lot of these tensions in cultural policy go back to the French Gaullist programme after Andre Malraux became Culture Minister in 1958. Is the aim culturalising democracy (what you refer to as “creating basic artistic literacy”) or democratising culture? There are obvious tensions that I’m not sure have been satisfactorily resolved.
In addition, there’s the nationalist aspect of cultural policy which does play a real role in Australia, among other nations (and the way it can be used to “rebrand” - think Blair and “Cool Brittania” and the whole “creative industries/cities” project).
In the spirit of two artistic faves, the Dadaists and Bill Burroughs, I offer a random collection of highly debatable thoughts, points and quotes on this topic.
“In one often-told story, Picasso is said to have been visited in his studio by a German officer who spotted a photograph of Guernica and wanted to know if Picasso had done it. “No,” Picasso reportedly replied, “you did.”"
Australia’s most commercially sucessfully and critically acclaimed artists are, in no particular order, ACDC, Nick Cave, INXS, Kylie, Savage Garden, Crowded House and Joe Dolce - none of whom received a jot of government funding.
“It’s a good thing that acid and MTV came along in different decades.â€?
I miss the VSO. Its 1988 production of Offenbach’s La belle Hélène was one of the wittiest, energetic and sexyist live performances of anything I have seen.
“People will run across a battlefield to spray a DJ’s name on a tank.”
Mario Bava is possibly the only artist in recorded history who went under budget by nearly 800% and returned the surplus.
So many of Australia’s most memorable (and entertaining) films were created under the old 10BA tax regime. Film making is one of the few creative industries that actually draws productive energy from hustlers and chancers. Ask David Lean about Sam Spiegal.
The chief barrier to entry for certain artforms like writing and film used to be the cost of the means of production and distribution. Not any more in this web 2.0 world.
“It’s aggregation, attention, centralized portals and massed eyeballs against the wide canvas of the entire Internet.”
“The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Fame is a by-product of doing something else. You dont’y go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.” - Banksy (a celeb brand name artist)
“There’s nothing worse than a sharp picture of a fuzzy concept”.
- Ansel Adams
Irregular verb time!
I provoke thought
You shock the bourgeoisie
They pointlessly stir up shit.
Think what a horrible, parched life that must be: unable to enjoy art unless you approve of its creators’ politics.
Nina Simone’s piano solo in “My Baby Just Cares For Me” is 80 seconds that almost makes up for several thousand years of civilisation at its worst.
Great art is always subsidised in one way or another by the society from whence it sprang. It’s just that when it comes to keeping accounts, great artists will bamboozle the bean counters every time.
All that extra money for the arts, and still a culture of volunteerism. It’s not just my opinion, Rupert Myer wrote a whole report.
The money (state and federal) goes to builders, pollies like an opening, and marketing. A while ago policy types decided that it was more efficient to give money to people who might grow the audience rather than the people who make the product. The actual artists don’t see much of the cash, they’re still writing their dole diaries, which Costello found highly entertaining last week, working as casuals in hospitality, and trying not to think about the weight of their HECS debt. The administrators of art and it’s institutions generally don’t get paid much either, when we do it’s on a short term contract. Furthermore, while governments are generally thrilled to throw billions at a building project, they have no interest in paying to keep the lights on when it’s finished.
So Brandis can bite me if he thinks I’d vote his mob.
I yam what I ram?
Also
So where’s the fucking 65.8% increase in quality art then?
The story goes that a hardbitten Hollywood comedy writer pestered by a producer to make the script “100% funnier” snapped back:
“Look, I can only make it 30% funnier today, come back in a couple of days.”
“That makes 90%. What about the other 10%?”
Or by humming the actual tunes?
Perhaps less irresolvable at the margins than it appears.
Most cultural productions over time have been either undemocratic or perhaps consciously anti-democratic. Democracy as a respectable ambition is only 200 years or so old. there was a hell of a lot of culture around long before democracy stopped being a swear word.
Does that mean a democrat should try to ignore, wish away or falsify undemocratic and/or antidemocratic art? I think not. At the very least, respect for such art pays tribute to the task of overthrowing the cultures that educed it. This is part of the task of “culturising democracy”.
What should be done about contemporaries who insist on making undemocratic and/or antidemocratic art? My answer is to embrace the challenge of disputing its means and its ends. Such challenges, if met, can only make democracy stronger. That is why I am averse to official and subsidised art. No one likes a prig, and art paid for by people who don’t necessarily subscribe to its ambitions has a powerful tendency to look and sound self-righteous and preachy. Preachiness is no way of making friends or of challenging bad ideas.
A million tut-tuts about APEC wre as nothing beside the cheeky stunt of the Chasers. This was art in the great tradition of Swift and Fielding and Gilray.
I miss the VSO too. It was a brilliant ensemble.
I like Kate’s comments. As the Myer report and David Throsby’s work on the incomes of actual artists show, artists have low inccomes and poor job security.
On the other hand, how many amateur plumbers and electricians do you know? The arts is eternally flooded with new entrants to its workforce, which is why it is so prone to what US economist Sherwin Rosen called “superstar economics.”
The opera debate is one of the most common tropes of the “high art/low art” argument that has gripped western criticism since modernism began. Opera in itself is not necessarily a waste of public funding. Nor is it quite dead. Queensland is home to a very good composer who writes opera right now: Richard Mills. It’s just that you won’t see Mills’ work in the normal repertoire of Opera Queensland or Opera Australia. They’re busy