Comments on: Opera’s opportunity costs? (or sing fat lady! Sing!)

By: What’s so special about Opera? [My Festival of Dangerous Ideas Speech] | marcus westbury

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 03:31:59 +0000

[...] our arts funding down the years and the immediate precursor to today’s talk was a piece that i wrote in my column in The Age in response to comments from the incoming director of Opera Australi… late last [...]

By: john walker

john walker — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:00:29 +0000

Marcus

Opera audiences are skewed towards people in the top tax bracket – Why shouldn’t they subsidise whatever they like? after all its their taxes that are being used.

A voucher type system dos have one big advantage , it greatly reduces the very large management costs that a top down distribution system has.

By: Marcus Westbury « Stumbling on melons

Marcus Westbury « Stumbling on melons — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 04:27:15 +0000

[...] and he’s trotted it out a few times since (I hope for a fresh fee) – for example, at the end of last year when Lyndon Terracini got the top artistic job at Opera Australia, and [...]

By: john

john — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 23:01:36 +0000

marcus I agree with you on much….but…. Popular is the defining character of modern art, the 19C academy was a pier review system. ‘modern’ began when artists (Courbet was the first) left the pier review system and opened up shop in the vulgar public marketplace.
“Populism” is a blinker that makes clear thinking impossible. Raymond Chandler was in his day dismissed as Populism, these days hes Fne lit 1. Every thing new comes from outside the little huddle that is culture.

By: john

john — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:50:34 +0000

Is lumping so many very different things all together under the banner ‘arts’ possibly part of the problem? From the very outset (1973) lots have questioned the wisdom of the amalgamation that created the Australia Council. Are there actually discrete things : ‘arts’ ‘culture’ &’audiences’ that have common needs?

By: Ian Milliss

Ian Milliss — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:19:53 +0000

Marcus have you come across an analysis of funding per attendee for different performing arts? I’m sure there will be one out there somewhere. It would be interesting to see if anyone receives a higher rate per head than OA. And it would also be interesting to see that turned on its head into a sort of voucher system (so beloved of right wing economists in other areas) so that a standardised rate (based on the OA rate?) was applied to all performing arts funding ie funding would be a multiple of the rate by the number of people who attend. Or perhaps the rate could be determined by dividing the available funding by the number of attendees of all funded events in the previous year. Crank up the spreadsheets and see how much OA would then receive. I assume that Ozco must do this sort of modelling somewhere deep in the bowels of its policy units, would they make the figures available?

By: marcus

marcus — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:20:09 +0000

Sorry Peter but where did you get that ‘what matters to actual audiences’ quote from me from? I’m not sure where i said it and it wasn’t my intent.

My argument against Opera is not that it shouldn’t be funded only that is should be subjected to the same funding dynamics that every other artist, company and group that i know in Australia is subjected to.

As for my own remarks, pluralism: definately! Populism: i wouldn’t think so.

Peter to explain my context, I’ve spent the last 12 months opening 40 new creative projects in Newcastle and i’ve had to pay for it. I’ve been in the arts for 15 years and i’ve had two paid jobs in that whole time. I’ve managed 10 or 15 festivals, which included hundreds of distinct projects and events and thousands of performances – i’ve literally NEVER worked on a project that had enough money to pay the artists.

At some point that pushes you towards questioning the inherent equity within and logic benind the system.

By: Peter

Peter — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:06:18 +0000

Actually Marcus you are not posing the right question to this issue. The test question in thinking about culture is not ‘what matters to actual audiences?’ but ‘what culture is most revelatory, most profound, most meaningful?’, a question which, sadly for cultural administrators ultimately concerned with numbers, cannot be properly answered by ‘whatever people in general think is most reveletory, most profound etc…” This is not at all an argument in support of stodgily produced expensive canonical opera of course, but it is an argument against the reductive populism and pluralism that (if I am right) seem to organize some of your own remarks.

By: Paul

Paul — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:33:34 +0000

Fantastic, Marcus. You seem to be the only person in the country talking any sense about this issue (on the internet at least). Good luck getting this one reprinted in Meanjin, they are a bit busy throwing links to The Australian at the moment. Great work again.