My comments here about the proposed billion dollar redevelopment of the Sydney Opera House have attracted more than the usual amount of attention as has Ben Eltham’s post about the same subject over at Larvatus Prodeo.
Comments on both sites have come from people who are working or have worked at the Opera House or at companies similar to those that are resident there. Their comments include legitimate criticism of the current state of the building and at times make a strong argument that the Opera House needs work. But they also confirm my growing frustration that there are effectively two separate art worlds with radically diverging expectations and realities.
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Tags: larvatus prodeo · octapod · opera house · sydney · this is not art10 Comments
After reading through comments both here and at LP I feel compelled to clarify my experience of life outside the cultural institutions in Australia. I hope it goes some way to explaining why the routine subsidies and additional demands of major organisations is so confronting to the majority of the Australian creative community.
This isn’t about the Sydney Opera House or even about NSW particularly. I no longer live in NSW but as a case study The Opera House versus the rest of cultural policy serves to perfectly illustrate the disparity and I have spent almost all of my life in that state.
I have worked on several major cultural projects in Newcastle down the years. Newcastle is the second largest city in NSW, Australia’s seventh largest city and a large enough place that it would be the largest city in Tasmania or either of the territories.
I’ve been involved in three major and countless minor cultural projects there. I founded the This Is Not Art festival — which remains the largest annual tourism event in the city and one of the largest media arts festivals in the world — and ran it for five years. I was also a founder and manager of the arts and media organisation Octapod that hosts the TINA festival and various other local arts projects.
I am actively working in Newcastle at the moment on a project called Renew Newcastle which has already had great success in converting some of the 150 empty buildings in the main streets of Newcastle into spaces for cultural projects and arts initiatives. To date we’ve put 14 projects into 8 buildings and I expect that number will double over the next few months.
I’ve never been paid for any of this.
None of the cultural projects I’ve done in Newcastle down the years have ever paid me. This is not simply that we’ve had to deal with substandard, even dangerous facilities, less than optimal conditions, or visions that were never fully realised. Most of us have simply never even got back what it has cost us to do what we do. In my experience this is so normal and unremarkable that I’ve never bothered to explicitly point it out in print until now.
I’ve done better than most because i have often crossed the threshold into paid work with some of the funded parts of the cultural realm. Almost all the people who attend the This Is Not Art festival or taking up shopfronts in Renew Newcastle are not getting paid. Most of the artists in the two Next Wave Festivals i have directed (as a paid day job) were in the same position. Almost all the artists and most of the catalysts for interesting projects in the country are unpaid and subsidising what they do. Outside the cultural institutions even most funded projects — those where the logos of our state and federal funding agencies are prominent — don’t pay many of the people involved for what they do.
It never occurs to most of these people to lobby for more money or better conditions. In most cases, they are simply too busy or they simply accept — as i have sometimes done — that it is a reasonable and natural state of affairs.
I’m not a whinger and i’ve not let it stop me. I’ve spent the last 15 years getting on with doing it and simply dealing with the reality. There is not and never has been enough money to do this stuff properly and pay me. I’ve spent many tens of thousands of dollars of my own money. I have worked multiple day jobs to cross subsidise it all. I’ve spent the last year funding the rejuvenation of Newcastle on my credit card.
Most of us never complain about it.
However, there are times — such as when the highest funded cultural organisations in the country ask for another billion dollars — that i am reminded there is something deeply and fundamentally unjust about all of this and i feel a little compelled to ask for a reality check.