How to Make the Arts Sector Sustainable. Public Forum and launch of Platform Papers No 15: A Sustainable Arts Sector: What will it take? by Cathy Hunt and Phyllida Shaw. Presented by Currency House at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, Saturday February 9 2008.
Chaired by the well-known commentator David Marr, some 100 people from arts policy and arts management took part in a lively and informative forum on Saturday February 9 titled How to Make the Arts Sector Sustainable. The key speakers, at Belvoir Street Theatre, Sydney, were the authors of Currency House Platform Papers No 15: A Sustainable Arts Sector: What will it take?, Cathy Hunt and Phyllida Shaw, followed by John Baylis, chair of the Australia Council Theatre Board.
Hunt and Shaw have spoken at forums in Brisbane and Cairns, and will go on to Melbourne and Perth, raising issues of arts policy and funding mechanisms in Australia in the light of the developments in Britain in recent years.
Shaw, associate lecturer in Arts and Cultural Management at University of Sussex and research associate at the Cities Institute, London Metropolitan University, described the evocatively-titled British sustainability programs Advancement, Stabilisation and Thrive!. The word “sustainability”, she said, should be used in the same sense as environmental sustainability.
Hunt, a founding director of the Brisbane strategic arts consultancy Positive Solutions and a consultant for the post-Thatcher Arts Council of England’s first Stabilisation Program in the early 1990s, was concerned that some politicians take sustainability to mean “viability”. In other words, government support for the arts might not mean ensuring the healthy survival of the species, but feeding just enough until it can be left to hopefully survive on its own.
The use of language became an important issue in the discussion phase of the forum. David Marr in his introduction had talked of politicians “putting their hands into the pockets of the nation” but then giving too little, wrongly spent. Quoting playwright Nick Enright, he complained that arts people spend all their time talking about money in the “ dog-eat-dog world of light opera.”
John Baylis seemed to agree that communication has long been a problem within the Australia Council, that “we gather information, but we do not know how to feed back information to the arts sector”, and explaining that applications from individual organisations are expertly assessed with a high degree of integrity, but “we are not good at seeing how to make connections”. In later discussion, various speakers saw the problem as arts people talking arts-talk, without being willing to learn politician-talk, while few politicians understand arts-talk.
This gave rise to argument. If politicians see everything, including the arts, only in economic terms, should arts advocates submit? Katharine Brisbane, co-founder of the Currency Press, dedicated to publishing Australian performing arts, said artists have allowed themselves to become submissive because of the structure of the funding, while another speaker said her research showed that artists are afraid to be honestly self-critical for fear of losing funding.
The conclusion was that artists should stand up confidently and say that sustainability of the arts is, as Hunt said, “about much more than money”. Shaw’s words were that the arts “make people’s lives richer”. Marr said “art gives people the opportunity to transform their lives”. Others said we should not be negative and depressed about the state of the arts because quality and diversity has in fact improved dramatically since the 1970s in Australia. The arts have an essential social value in their own right, and should therefore be supported by government.
Hunt and Shaw had raised practical issues in their speeches. In Britain the arts is given a small percentage of funds from the National Lottery, but this came about by chance and could not be done in Australia, according to some speakers, when the dependence of governments on gambling revenue is under severe criticism (and even the Sydney Opera House cannot get new lottery money for its refurbishment). In Britain, even small to medium organisations can find funding sources of many kinds including from continental Europe. One group in Brighton had 18 grants and sponsorships, for example. Such a range of sources is not available in Australia, and small to medium organisations especially, and individual artists, are struggling.
The big ticket solution suggested by Shaw is for the Federal government to establish a Future Fund for the Arts as an endowment. This would be a permanent source of arts funding, at arms length from day-to-day political pressure. A good model to begin is the British 2007 McMaster Review: Assessing Excellence in the Arts by Sir Brian McMaster, former Director of the Edinburgh International Festival. The approach should be to invest in innovation for its social and cultural value in its own right, across the range of individual artists, small, medium and large organisations, while profitable work could be expected to return some income to the Future Fund for the Arts.
The forum ended with the announcement, to a standing ovation, of a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Sydney Critics’ Circle to Katharine Brisbane for 40 years’ contribution to the performing arts.
Further information: arts management www.positive-solutions.com.au ; Platform Papers info@currencyhouse.org.au ; McMaster Review http://www.culture.gov.uk/what_we_do/Arts/mcmaster_review.htm
©Frank McKone, Canberra
No comments:
Post a Comment