Sugar Daddy is ruining the arts by Gunduz Kalic

Government and the arts are now well and truly shacked up.  Unfortunately, the pair have never sought to have their relationship blessed in a formal ceremony before the community as a whole.

At that point where the preacher traditionally asks, "does anyone know any reason why these two should not be joined together", we might have had a chance to answer "yes".

With only a few exceptions our intelligentsia have neglected to refreshen the public mind: the biggest arts patrons of all time were Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin.  In return, needless to say, the dictators had quite a bit of say about how they like their art.

Professor Austin Gough has called the dealings between government and the arts world in our time a Faustian bargain.

Australian governments now spend $1 billion each year (and rising) on the arts.  Exactly what logic is it that places performance and painting and poetry ahead of, for example, the shortening of hospital waiting lists or the decreasing of pupil/student ratios or the cleaning up of local rivers?

"No society can be truly great unless it has a soul and that is what the arts are all about".  So intoned the poet, actor and lawyer Matt Foley upon becoming the new Minister for the Arts in Queensland.  Presumably, it is in the job description of arts ministers to put public money to work nurturing the social soul.

As Paul Keating’s Creative Nation says:  Cultural policy is also economic policy.  Culture employs.  Culture adds value.  It attracts tourists and students.  It is essential to economic success.

But is this really so?  Do the rationales for arts funding hold up in the real world?  The case of the Queensland Theatre Company is instructive.

QTC has been in strife this year for mediocre performances and excessive losses.  In round numbers the company has spent $2 million more than it has taken at the box office - a shortfall made up by the taxpayer.

Money, wherefore art thou, money?  Spend on set construction, telephone bills, ad agency fees, and newspaper advertisements.  It is difficult to see this spending as a windfall to the larger Brisbane community.

Many other dollars obviously go to wages and salaries for the artists and arts managers who are in effect public servants.  (The arts must be fostered as an industry, Matt Foley says.)  Do we really want artists on the public payroll in this way?

Reformers in the theatrical community would argue that the problem with the QTC is not with subsidy per se but with mediocre people.  Put the right people in charge and everything will soon be sweet.  The new team can work towards getting, say, a Sydney Theatre Company standard of performance, with appropriately Queenslandish content, of course.  Taxpayers’ money will then be well spent.

But the very best - and most popular - shows are those put on by the commercial theatre.  Miss Saigon is an excellent example of the old adage if the product is worthy, it will sell.

Why does the public need to subsidise theatre at all?

Is it that, in the eyes of our arts bureaucratic elite, commercial theatre somehow isn’t quite the real thing?  That government funded art is Mickey Mouse and the other stuff is sadly inappropriate in content and disgustingly money oriented?

Do we really want Big Daddy government bankrolling our art?

Unfortunately for artistic content, the facts of life are that anything that government funds must naturally (and properly) be accountable to government.  The taxpayers’ money must be spent - or be seen to be spent - very carefully and with the utmost scrutiny.  But scrutiny by the bureaucracy itself distorts the process of artmaking.

Christopher Pearson of the Adelaide Review likens this process to the sieving of flour.  What comes out the other end has all the same size, consistency and uniform quality. Inexorably, over the life of the Australia Council, the bureaucracy has drastically increased its control over the content of Australian art.  We now have well-hyped, innocuous and bland art guaranteed not to affect or offend, guaranteed within the narrow range of politically correct thought.

He who pays the piper calls the tune.  The arts are forgetting their long tradition of independence.  Euripides, for example, was exiled from Athens for putting on a play which told his fellow citizens home truths about their conduct in the Peloponnesian war.

The great problem with government as Sugar Daddy of the arts is that although some artists may gain in status the arts are effectively bought off as a free voice.

Artists come to have a child-parent relationship with the arts bureaucracy such that even reformers like Michael O’Connor seem to be arguing that the problem is that artists are being cheated out of the rightful incomes promised by Daddy Gough and Uncle Nugget when they set up the Australia Council a generation ago.  It all turned out wrong because the political masters have ended up overpaying the arts bureaucrats and underpaying the artists.

Private patronage has always been a better solution to the business of supporting innovative, disturbing or newfangled art into the marketplace.  Or why not instead directly subsidise the buyers of tickets and works of art as Professor Gough has suggested.

Certainly governments do not want to see or hear, let alone bankroll anything really searching or critical.

Some relationships bring out the worst in each party.  So it is with government and the arts.  What about putting the matter of public funding of the arts directly to the electorate?  How would the people respond to a referendum question:  Will you entrust your government and public service with management of the "social soul".  Yes or no?  The debate would be interesting.

This article appeared in the Brisbane Courier Mail, August 29, 1995.