Posts by DCBCauchi
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Bart's line about the point of governments is extremely funny. And this is a very interesting and generally excellent article. More please!
No response from 3 yet? How long have they had?
Wouldn't think you need to take much time to be upfront and honest. Manufacturing a dishonest response though is a different story. Innit?
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
The other problem with appreciative patrons is that they have an idea of art that revolves around the patron.
One of many reasons you bite the hand that feeds.
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Why is it grating? What is wrong with appreciative patrons?
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to Sacha,
Oh totally, that was but one example. More vibrant art forms the better. Totes.
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
The Minister is a rich man who likes to go to listen to the orchestra.
Ok, the Frizzell low blow was funny and apt, but this one isn’t.
There is a common argument put forward about Lotto funding of such things as ballet, opera, and orchestral music. It’s an outrage that poor people’s pokie money be used for highbrow events for the rich elite, the argument goes.
On the face of it, looked at purely in class terms, that’s true. It is outrageous.
Ok then. Let’s say we make the ballet companies, opera companies, and orchestras (ha ha, I’m using plural forms!) fund themselves through sponsorship and box office takings. What happens?
Only a few years later, all the poor kids with musical or dance abilities who want to make something of those abilities are pretty much screwed. Where do they train? Once trained, what do they do? Start a company from scratch?
Oh, but ballet and opera and orchestral music are dead relics of the past, you might say. Why drive a horse and cart when you can drive a car? To which I would answer, they aren’t dead relics now but would be if you had your way.
Imagine a young kid with a deep abiding love of opera. They see possibilities in the form. This is the thing with artistic media. The kid can see a way to say things with opera they can’t say in any other medium. Things the kid thinks no opera has done before.
But all the funding to opera companies has been cut. All the theatres to hold them in have closed down or turned into multiplex cinemas. The people who knew how to put on an opera have all got new jobs and new responsibilities trying to get the shiny new car to work like it was meant to. Half of them have forgotten what they knew, and the other half are very rusty. The sole opera singer the kid can find to train them how to sing properly is unaffordable.
All the institutional knowledge on how to put on an opera is gone. Destroyed. The kid gets a job at McDonalds instead. Spends their nights and weekends planning their dream opera. When they die, someone throws out all those scraps of paper with unintelligible scribbles on them.
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Re: Baby boomers’ supposedly free education.
I can rant for a long time about the changes to the education system from the mid-80s onwards. But this myth of a golden age before those changes should not be swallowed whole.
An anecdote (I hope she won’t mind): When my mother announced she was going to go to university, her father refused to pay for it. ‘What do you want to go to university for? Get a job as a secretary until you get married.’
Mum did go to university, at the same time as several well-known politicians of the same generation. Because she couldn’t pay for it herself (this ‘free’ education), she had to bond herself to someone who could.
When she finished her degree and her department asked her to become an assistant lecturer, she could not take them up on the offer, despite how much she’d’ve liked to, because she had to go work for the people who’d paid for her to go in the first place.
But then, she was still pretty lucky: her mother had a scholarship to go to secondary school – secondary school! – but couldn’t take it up because she had to work instead. So Mum actually being able to get an education at all was quite a big deal. Something she had to fight tooth and nail for. And boy does she regret what might have been!
Yeah, they had it so easy. (And I'm not so sure this is the right place for this.)
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Two open questions:
1 What is the purpose of publicly funding the arts? That is, what specific goal is funding the arts meant to achieve?
2 What is the best way to achieve that goal?
By way of a preliminary answer to 1:
Public funding of the arts is meant to have a return in terms of enabling those art works (in whatever medium) that could not exist without that funding to exist.
That is, society, through taxes, pays for art to be produced that would not be produced otherwise, for society’s benefit.
(My head’s a bit messy at the moment, so this is very clumsily put. Let’s try again.)
Art is funded through public money because it is not economic in its own right. And also because being economic is not the only value there is.
Whaddyareckon? Anyone game to have a stab at 2? Or dispute my answer to 1?
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I think it is probably fair to say that arts policies are not the most heatedly debated policies in the world, and I would be very surprised if most members or MPs could tell you what was in the arts policy. It is a backwater, and so very easily captured.
It's not play money. There are large amounts of dollars involved, and how they are spent directly affects the culture as a whole and the work that gets made.
The country's arts infrastructure is all connected, through public funding. The priorities of that funding directly affect the approach that art schools, artist-run spaces, public galleries, and museums take. What gets taught, what gets shown, what gets collected influences what gets made. Obviously.
It actually matters. I think quite a lot.
I reckon the best work in this country is shown in a handful of dealer galleries (but then I'm clearly biased, and yet where did this bias come from?). And it is a real struggle making it. None of my friends have it easy. We're up against it.
The funding priorities are wrong. They encourage careerists, and discourage good artists.
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Muse: Indecision 2011: Writing Policy on…, in reply to merc,
I’m reading ya loud and clear DCB. It’s an area (arts funding) I’d love to dive into…but it’s a case of, I could say, but I wont.
As Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston shouted together at the end of one of their songs:
'Long live the independents!'
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I’m really surprised. Where are the robust defences of policies people passionately believe in?
Or do their promoters not passionately believe in them? Are they just a hodgepodge of vague phrases designed to appeal to particular interest groups? Which is it? Style or substance?
Where is the defence of public gallery programmes and funding models? Come on people! Or does no-one give a fuck?
I’m a little worried I’ve killed this conversation dead. If so, sorry. Oops. (Oh ok, not just me then. On ya, Kyle!)