Crowdsourcing a cultural policy? –Meee culpa

There is quite a lot of federal money going around in the funded visual arts sector but a lot of of it ,about 10 to 1, gos to the costs of the worrying costs of the complexity of Organisations in the field. To give one example;The Myer report resulted in the allocation of a fair bit of funding through the VACS program . But typically ,of its roughly $15 million total per/annum ,$13 million is paid to Organisations. Some organisations do a good job but the organisation sector has over the past decade bred to about the limit of avaliable resources and in the process has damaged the carrying capacity of the land. There are an awful lot of organisations out there .

I think this has happened because the Question :
What exactly is public art funding for— what is its purpose? Has for decades, been a very conflicted question.
Without clarity as to purpose, good design is impossible- it inevitably will go round in circles attempting the instrumental implementation of purposes that are fatally contradictory and thus impossible to make real .

The history of Art is in many ways the history of the audiences.

I think the conflicting positions as to the purpose of public arts funding policy are something like this
Is:
The purpose of funding is to create new art/artforms by creating a demand; a audience that otherwise would not exist , an sort of modern day aristocratic patron?
Or
Is it’s purpose to improve and instruct the publics taste,– is it aimed at producing education so as to create new audiences that currently don’t exist .. ‘audience development’?
Or
is its purpose one of a follower of both art and audiences- helper/augmentor and not a leader at all?

I would put the basic conflict about purpose as something like this;
Is the purpose of arts funding that of leadership :setting directions and standards?
or
Is its role to be one of follower of art & audiences, a role of helping/ augmenting the development of artforms that to some degree already have audiences that are really independent of the funded field?

This conflict gos right back to the 80s and the beginnings of ‘art industry’ policy. It got very hot in the 90s and has gone on ever since.
It obviously has a ideological base, the mainstream of Australian poltical culture is freemarket .
On the otherhand many in the funded field see their role as one of supplying leadership setting standards and educating the public about advanced art.
This conflict as to primary purpose has been going around in circles for decades and has resulted in it doing neither purpose well.

However, my larger argument — which is that administratively heavy heritage arts are disproportionately favoured over the new, the low cost and the innovative — is actually even more obvious when the you start to include the major collecting instituions.

Last time i looked, the NGV recieved funding levels that were greater than pretty much ALL of the initiatives for living artists in Victoria COMBINED — regardless of artform.

My point is not to specfically criticise Orchestras and Opera, but rather to argue that funding patterns have become self reinforcing — creating bad fedback loops. Beauracracies that are large enough to be funded are learge enough to lobby for more funding and have been very successful at doing so. The atomised world where people actually make stuff has simply drifted off the radar and is rarely funded or even invited to participate in the policy process.

If you want to see the argument articulated in more detail, check out the Meanjin essay linked to above.

Thanks for sharing this shocking abuse of tax-payers’ involuntary contributions to closeted culture.