I attended this Government IT conference called GOVIS last week and at it there was a woman talking about this New Zealand arts portal called NZLive.com.
She talked about the site and its attempt to engage the arts community to get them posting their events and exhibitions and concerts, etc. The site is quite well done, and they're a committed bunch, and I wish them all the best.
But... it's all part of an established movement to coddle the culture 'industry' (which term is borrowed from this new paradigm) - sort of jolly it along with funding grants and portals and seminars and whatever else. That's all very nice in a right-on, middle-aged, work-at-the-National-Library kind of way, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with a thriving culture. To me, culture is what happens when a society just goes about its business. Sure, that's how the Feelers happen, but this despite this obvious downside, I think the Feelers have more of a right to exist than "et al".
The current ethos behind NZ On Air, or Ministry of Culture and Heritage, and the WCC's various pandering programmes is that through policy, we can make the arts thrive, in the way that a gardener might slop on liberal amounts of fertiliser and water to encourage plants to grow. And yes, you'll get results, but it's a bit like trying to grow jungle plants in the desert - unnatural. Maybe just letting the cacti grow would be more sensible?
This metaphor doesn't capture the fact that by fertilising the ground you can in fact change the whole landscape. As a country New Zealand is traditionally profoundly indifferent to any non-pragmatic endeavour. Here's a good example: my old Dad was a big fan of Bob Jones for his 'put it up them!' mentality, but even he went off Jones when the prominent property investor started publishing novels. The reason: the sense that Jones had gotten too up himself, and had gone all pretentious.
It's fair to say that much of what arts scene New Zealand has had since World War II probably wouldn't have existed without government funding, and the need to create a more dynamic and richer society should be axiomatic for all but the most entrenched Act voter. Though I would argue that arts funding is more of an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. If we were really interested in improving public support of the arts, we should make art and music compulsory up to fourth form (uh... what's that... year 10). Improving children's appreciation of art would make them more likely to actively support it in adulthood.
I guess arts funding generally should still be encouraged. But to get around the hideous bureaucracy of the current system, based as it is on applicants meeting discrete criteria, rather than overall merit, I suggest a kind of Arts version of Dragon's Den, where punters have to front up to a committee of made of barking eccentrics and arts-sceptics. Oh I know you would say 'where's the accountability in that?', but people can tell whether an idea is a good one in front of them, and can tell a shyster a mile off (take note, et al!). So I don't doubt that it would be a more honest system, and have better outcomes. At any rate, it can't have any worse an outcome than giving Fat Freddy's Drop money to 'develop an audience in Europe', as CreativeNZ did one year.
[26 May 2007: It should be noted that I've revised this post considerably from when it was first posted. The first edition simply stated that the Government shouldn't fund the arts scene at all. But then I thought about it a bit and decided that the instinct to encourage interest in the arts was valid enough, it's just the mechanism for doling out money I disagreed with.]
Posted by stuart at May 17, 2007 7:19 PM