Let audiences dispense the subsidies  by Gunduz Kalic

To grit or not to grit?  That is the existential question with which the new Minister for the Arts, Senator Richard Alston, has been flirting.  Alston is fond of quoting Graham Greene:  "Artists should be the grit in the system, not the oil".

Or, in the language of the arts policy the Coalition brought before the public at the election, "Creativity will only flourish in an environment free of government and institutional intervention".

The arts world was much in the news last year, with Australia Council chair Hilary McPhee’s chastisement of Australia’s artists as backstabbing and vindictive rating front-page headlines.  In Keatingesque fashion, McPhee was deemed to be attempting a pre-emptive strike against government dependent (and would-be dependent) artists in preparation for an imminent reorganisation of arts grant and other arts-world arrangements in line with the latest government policies.

Reformers in the arts community fought back in guerrilla fashion, making use of the media spotlight to attack the Federal Government and the arts bureaucracy for the unfair and increasingly politicised way in which the arts grant pie was carved up.

Meanwhile, almost unnoticed by the main combatants, Professor Austin Gough launched a potent attack in the pages of the national press upon the very concept of governmental bankrolling of the arts.  In Gough’s words, government sponsorship of the arts is a Faustian bargain.  The bottom line, he argues, is that under the present system there is more incentive for artists to please the Australia Council and the Government than any kind of genuine public.

Senator Alston and the Coalition, aware of former Prime Minister Paul Keating’s manipulation of the arts, picked up on the theme of governments keeping off the arts turf.

"It’s quite healthy in a democratic society for artists to be actually anarchic", is another oft quoted statement of Alston’s.  Yet the minister’s view from the bridge, his expressed sensitivity to the conditions necessary for a more authentic artistic independence, is at odds with the structures and practices of mainstream arts production in Australia.

The Coalition points to the unpopular Labor practice of making large individual grants - the Keatings - to favoured established artists and promises that those days are now behind us.  Thank goodness.  However, the larger reality is that nearly all art-making of any public consequence has been sifted and resifted, in Christopher Pearson’s phrase, by governmental and arts institutional intervention.

Government involvement in anything means rule by committees, Professor Gough reminds us.  Whatever the Government funds must be accountable.  Yet the process itself skews art-making.

With much pride, the newly ascendant conservatives point out that most of Australia’s arts institutions were in fact founded by the Coalition.  With its return to power in Canberra, there will likely be moves afoot to reclaim and reshape those institutions as conservative icons - no doubt, for all of us.  But carrying on the nation’s art business more or less as usual would be short- sighted.

Greene’s image of artists as social grit, which has so taken Senator Alston, could inspire the new government to look anew at the arts institutions its political forebears created.

Current financial arrangements whereby subsidies go direct to established institutions dominant in their market entrap artistic expression - a double bind.  Since it is not audiences but government that effectively keeps a roof over the head and bread on the table, the nation’s art workers naturally tend towards public service modes of thinking and operating.

In the Third World, artists in State theatre companies, for example, make no bones about the fact that they are public servants.  They understand perfectly well that they are toiling at the State’s behest on cultural projects.  But in the West, a residual expectation - or, more aptly, a pretence - persists that artists can be on the state payroll and remain independent and freely critical.

The unfortunate reality is that even important appointments, such as the artistic directorships of theatre companies, are made with one eye on arts funding.

To even begin to change the myopic dynamics dominating the arts is a big ask.  The arts industry has come to be a powerful interest group.  The small minority of the population - not higher than 1.5 to 2 per cent - that actually takes state subsidised art seriously also no doubt like the current way of serving up culture.

Yet, what of that enormous Aussie audience, the public as a whole?  Senator Richard Alston can begin to grit the arts by shifting the arts infrastructure towards the public and away from the institutions.  As Professor Gough has proposed, let subsidies start to go directly to audiences attending performing arts events.  In much the same way, the poet Les Murray has suggested tying writing subsidies - in modest amounts - to the reading public’s purchases of books.

Perhaps an arts debate of substance has started.

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, April 19, 1996.