Readers may wish to access the theory on which the article is based, which is expressed in my new book - What Art Is - and Isn't - which is published in New York, but available from Barnes and Noble and
Amazon on line.
Or contact me through my website, <donaldart.com.au>

Yes, well. 'The Arts' in Australia certainly is an 'industry' -- and a mature one at that. It's obvious: just consider the size of the bureaucracy. For each branch of 'art' you have something like ten civil servants, each earning $120,000/yr, whose job is to distribute $500,000 in grants once annually. They solicit complex 20-page applications from thousands of hungry 'artists' nationwide, then gift between $10,000 and $50,000 to each of 30-odd lucky recipients, taking due care to ensure all states and territories receive a share, all ethnicities and cultures are represented, and as many neophyte try-hards are rewarded as established long-term practitioners. This process is overseen by teams of senior arts administrators, each supported by a seven-figure budget, whose job is to generate good publicity amongst Parliamentarians and the commentariat, and to prevent public funds from falling into the hands of 'artists' whose work could be classified as demotic (i.e. popular) as opposed to properly proletarian (i.e. ideologically trendy). This is high-minded support of Australia's proud culture, and not in the least mercenary; hence, it would be out of bounds to notice if the book was ever published, the play performed, or the the painting sold. It's very gratifying to get a grant -- I've scored a couple over the years. Recipients of government largesse receive respect and admiration (if sometimes grudging) for their achievement. What they don't get, of course, is a salary. It's an honour, but all up, I'd rather be the paper-pusher with a six-figure income, thank you very much.

Thanks, Donkeygod, for not getting my point - and for MAKING MY POINT!!
donaldart

Donkey, I'm sure you had fun spending it, but didn't it make you feel just a little dirty, receiving funds from such a disgusting system?

Yes, Hasbeen. Just a little. But I got over it. The thought of somebody else walking off with $25K and wasting it on some dreadful, politically correct contemporary novel of urban angst was just too ... y'know? So I wrote a book of ... poetry. Heh, heh, heh ...

Good on you Donkey, well done.

Donald You mention employment in higher education as a way of supporting 'some' artists but what you do not mention is that education is the source of the problem. .
Subsidizing an economically un-viable artist, by paying him/her to produce/educate additional hundreds of economically un-viable 'artists', is insane. Yet this is exactly what was implemented in the 70s and 80s and it has continued to this day.

Donald Richardson wrote 20 October 2011:

>... is the government looking for a culture policy or an arts policy? ...

The Government is looking for an arts policy which fosters economic activity. I got that impression listening to the Arts Minister's speech and talking to him over coffee at Senator Lundy's Digital Culture Public Sphere a few weeks ago: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/10/revitalizing-regional-australia-with.html

> ... arts market ... commercial galleries, box offices, literary and theatre agents, movie producers, and publishers ...

Yes. Artists should receive basic training in how the market works, so they can derive an income from it, or at least not be exploited by it.

>... true artists operate more like priests and philosophers than business people ...

Priests are paid for spiritual services. Philosophers sell books and teach courses. In his talk on the Paris avant-garde movements last week, Professor McKenzie Wark, pointed out that they were funded by art sales: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/10/revolution-in-over-developed-world.html

>... And the policy should consider allowing artists to participate in a work-for-the-dole type scheme. ...

Yes, but artist's training should give them the skills needed to earn an income, ideally in the arts industry.

As an example, the Australian National Unviersity and the Canberra Institute of Technology have joined to prove training in both the industry and artistic sides of music: http://studyat.anu.edu.au/programs/2150XADMUS;overview.html

Arts will be important in the merged digital economy. As an example of this I bumped into a documentary maker in the the foyer of the National Library of Australia last week. They were lamenting the fact that the Apple iTunes store limited video formats. So I suggested they produce an enhanced e-Book. This allows more flexibility in the formats allowed. It might also allow their work to be seen in a different light.

For those wondering, an "enhanced" e-Book is one which has audio, or video, or some other format in it, apart from text and still images. This is not that hard to do as an "e-book" is essentially just a canned web site, as was discussed at the NLA a few weeks ago: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/09/australias-first-enhanced-ebook.html

tomw
MR Crean is one in a long line of ministers trying to change arts policy into something is in a economic sense, sane.
However the bedrock the system was built upon, 1972-75, was explicit in its anti-market and anti-commercial intentions :

"Until recently the attitude to the encouragement of artists has been that the market itself has operated as the most satisfactory supporter of the artist of ability, and that while it continued to function adequately in this way it was undesirable to interfere with the mechanism by introducing other forms of assistance for artists.
However, it now appears that while this may be true with regard to painters it may not have the same validity when applied to certain other branches of the visual arts such as sculpture, and possibly to the truly ‘avant-garde’ artists of any generation whose work rarely has much initial appeal except perhaps for a limited public."

good luck Mr Cream, good luck.

tomw makes some good points. It’s one thing for government to support arts and culture. Meddling with the ‘market’ is an altogether different proposition. One could almost assert that, if there’s actually a ‘market’, it’s popular culture, not ‘art’.

Commercial galleries aren’t there for people with $50 to spend on brightening up their living room; you go to the local Asian Import Warehouse for that. It’s high-end ‘culture’ for the rich. Until the ‘market’ evolves to the point where COPIES of art can be reproduced under licence, painting & sculpture will remain beyond the reach of all but doctors, lawyers, CEO’s and arts administrators.

There’s a market for theatre: it’s called TV, or The Movies. Live performance works for rock stars; the rest of us can only afford to watch Branagh’s Shakespeare on DVD. Australia simply isn’t a cost-competitive place to produce anything ‘popular’. Actors know to move to Hollywood, Thespians to London; they don’t need Canberra to pay their tickets.

Publishing is different, especially given the advent of e-books. For the next year or three, major publishing houses can still afford to build and sustain a few ‘big names’. There’s a major shift, though, towards smaller, more nimble publishers specialising in genre. They’re the ones in touch with who’s hot and who’s not ... and the fans (aka readers). They don’t pay 40% to distributors, and most use mail order to avoid the 40% discount for retailers. They don’t pulp 30% of each print run. They pay authors 2 to 10 times what the big players offer for royalties, but not as an advance to be earned out. Government has nil interest in ‘em -- they support ‘literary’ projects and ‘literary’ prizes, for which the market is essentially nil anyhow.

Government wants ‘art’ in a museum, not in the hands of the hoi polloi. They support what they think we ought to admire, not what we want. Donald mentioned Bauhaus -- a great model, but in Australia it stopped with dot painting in the NT. Probably a mercy: just imagine KRudd/Gillard’s ‘Building the Arts Revolution’!

Donkeygod

Agree, except for one wee point: it is not what the government wants , remember the 'arts' is a 'hands off' statutory authority .

Pedestrian - certainly education is one of the key issues ('education' at all levels, including popular culture, and not just at the tertiary level). But an understanding of a clearly-expressed theory of both the arts and education has to underpin teaching at all levels. I wrote my submission and my book What Art Is - And Isn't - as attempts to generate intelligent discussion of the theory (NOT 'Theory', which contributed nothing to the discussion!).
Please note that I recommend artists being employed in tertiary education as only one possibility of employment and the proviso I place on it (with which I am sure you agree).

Donald the problem with subsidising education as a way of subsidising the production of uneconomic art, is that by doing this what we really subsidise is the 'mass' production of more and more uneconomic artists whose main (sole really) hope of earning a passing living in the 'arts' is by becoming teachers producing more and more 'artists' and so on I.e a theoretically infinite, positive feed back chain reaction over supply, bad public policy .

The total 'budget' demand for visual art is much smaller than the budget demand for music yet we have significantly more publicly funded tertiary art schools than we have publicly funded tertiary Music schools.

I was not thinking much about art theory -- paying audiences don't buy theory , the fans come to see the act, not a theoretical representation of the act.

Pedestrian - you can't ignore theory. Every action we take, every opinion we hold subsumes a theoretical position. If you think artists are a bunch of slaggards your policy will reflect that. If you think Asians, or gays, or women..... There is a theoretical position lurking under all of our positions, opinions and actions.
Sure, audiences don't buy theory, but they buy performances and each and every one subsumes a theoretical position on heaps of things. Shakespeare, Shostakovich, Picasso - the lot.
Yes, our systems produce more of everything than we really can consume - including food. But this allows great wines, buildings, plays, operas and pictures to emerge from the mass. Unfortunately there is a lot of wastage. But, hopefully, these people will become intelligent consumers rather than producers. Many find great jobs in services or hospitality. Nothing is wasted.

The problem of artists' incomes is a very important one and one hopes that it will be dealt with by the inquiry. Sure, there is a lot of pressure on artists to get a real job or to market their wares. But artists don't have the time to market their stuff. It's a full-time job and best left to those who are good at it - the marketers. Arts marketing is just as specialised as arts education. Just as producing art is. If the government and ABAF want artists to earn their livings they should realise that they are not qualified to do that. It's not a matter of laziness - just of horses for courses.
True artists (of all media) are happy to live on subsistence finance for a time so long as they can do their thing and survive. And they need a non-exploitative regime for this. It can work and only takes a little thought - of the right kind.

The intertwining of action and the set of instructions that is a representation of the 'action' is an Gödelian eternal golden braid and thus I can equally say that no 'action' equals no 'theory'.

Young artists need money to buy the gear and time to make the art. People who do not get paid have to do something else ; somebody asked Henry More 'how did you become the UKs greatest sculptor ' he answered "all the rest gave up".

Which is fine there is no moral right to be an artist.

Enticing people into expensive and de-skilled, academic training for a area were they haven't a snow flakes chance ( when you are up there its all about performance, not theory) simply so as to maintain the lifestyle of the people running the school, is a cruel trick.

DonkeyGod You stated ", painting & sculpture will remain beyond the reach of all but doctors, lawyers, CEO’s and ......arts administrators."

'Arts administrators' do not pay for art, most have no interest in art and rarely turn up, even if its free.

Quite so, pedestrian; I stand corrected in re the financial proclivities of 'arts administrators'. Though they might argue that a BMW and a $2000 golf putter are both objets d'art.

donaldart, I think we agree for the most part. The notion of government getting all proactive about raising artists' income, though, is ... scary. Most 'art' is either hobby or avocation. Lots of people write fiction, a very small number actually publish some commercially, and maybe the top 0.01% make a modest living out of it. One muso in a million will do an album. The regime which 'exploits' this does a pretty good job of sifting what's worthwhile from what's worthless: think iTunes, think Amazon. If we had similar mechanisms for flogging painting, sculpture, photography ... who knows where it might lead? It might be worthwhile attempting to create a modern version of Verrocchio's workshop, but only if the enabling legislation proscribed any sort of public financial support, required that it be built and operated at least 75 km from the nearest University, and ensured no one with a degree in 'Art' be allowed within cooee of the place.

DonkeyGod
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