The process inevitably privileges the voices of the influential and powerful (particular, in these Howard years, the business lobby). To the extent that local government had input, it would have reflected Vision 20/25 where art and culture are ranked as low priority.
No news so far.
Artists are, always have been and always will be, a very small percentage of the population, in spite of which their presence and products are taken as defining elements of cultural identity and pride, be that at a local or national level.
Consider than a paradigm shift; a recognition that provision of cultural services is not only a basic service, but also one of central significance to the community. It has taken yet another drought to begin to shift ecology to the centre of economic planning – what will it take to change the paradigm in social planning to position art and culture at the centre, as the touchstone for other planning strategies.
If we don’t have water the economy shrivels. If we don’t have art, the mind and soul are dry and stunted. You cannot live without water – but life unenriched by art and culture is only partly lived. Or as Socrates said, a life unexamined is not worth living.
The Road Ahead
The first is identified with Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) who argues, largely from an economic perspective, that when Regional Cities provide the necessary cultural resources (art, music, youth culture, theatre and performance, libraries, museums and multicultural life) and environmental circumstances (clean and green recreation spaces) to attract the Creative Class, they benefit from increased economic development beyond that delivered by tax incentives, subsidised real-estate, and the other usual business “incentives”. Members of the “creative class” are those whom Andrew West (Lifestyles of the Rich and Tasteful) would categorise as young “Culturists” in the Australian context.
The second comes from the creative industries and art-for-well-being lobby. ‘Creative Industries” (creative nation, creative hubs, creative…., etc.) takes an industry approach with all the standard language that assumes integration and meshing with business, law and government agencies. It is an approach taken by NAVA (with great benefit to art workers) and, with irony one must say, by the Howard government whose promised increased funding to Ozco is intended to advance the relationship between artists and the commercial sector and also to move funding responsibility from government to corporate players through art/business partnerships at the big end of art town.
What has been outlined so far, albeit in simplified terms, is the instrumental view of culture as opposed to a view that regards art and culture as having intrinsic value. The instrumental conception is one that appeals to the managerial types, bureaucrats and politicians, who can use economic rationale to justify expenditure on the arts, which is helpful, or to justify little or no expenditure on the grounds that the economic benefits claimed cannot be statistically demonstrated. Art commentators like Andrew Brighton and John Carey (What Good are the Arts) support this critique of the instrumental value of art and culture.
Both these writers contest the instrumental “social well being” justification for improved support for the arts, such as that made recently by Regional Arts NSW in its submission to the Draft NSW State Plan, Plan Ahead. Their submission is a good one and should be endorsed.
One can understand why art and culture advocates employ the language of community development, i.e. enhancement of tourism, local identity and education, building of self esteem in youth, indigenous, disadvantaged and multicultural groups, and creating social well-being (what ever that means). This is the language that allows elected representatives and their minions to articulate the benefits they have delivered to the people. (Such as a music fest, a garden fest, a poetry fest, a writer’s fest, a coast fest, an art fest – I am reminded of that imaginary island where everyone made a living by taking in each others washing.)
Perhaps we should get serious about spending on infrastructure for the rest of the year. Investing in sustainable primary cultural production.
Town centre - hotel, council chambers, court house, police station, funeral parlour and School of Arts.This term comes from a debate in the US a few years ago about how, why and to what effect, art and culture function in community and national affairs. Similar processes of re-evaluation have been taking place in a number of countries. The discussion paper for the National Review of Visual Education in Australia www.visualeducationreview.edu.au collates some of these ideas, and they are examined by a number of writers in Double Dialogue’s Culture Wars: Art and Industry. www.doubledialogues.com/issue_three/contents_three.html
as well as in papers given at the Speculation and Innovation (SPIN) conference hosted by the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology. www.speculation2005.net/
In the US, the Center for Arts and Culture produced a useful paper: Creativity Culture and the Workforce www.culturalpolicy.org/pdf/education.pdf and the Rand Corporation produced the rigorous and encompassing Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the benefits of the Arts. www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG218/
We live in an increasingly global (art) culture, and these debates, conferences and papers provide the background for decisions that need to made about the future of contemporary art and culture on the Central Coast, and as such are vital to Regional Strategic Planning.
Ann Daly, in Beyond Richard Florida: A Cultural Sector of Our Own, www.anndaly.com/articles/beyondflorida.html points to important shifts in the way artists’ organizations are structuring themselves, and an emerging trend away from the arts-in-the-service-of …., philosophy, towards a practice where art is regarded as an unfolding of understanding, insight and vision, centred on the artists themselves. Grant Kester (check brown’s Cows website for references), more than ten years ago, was talking about the link in the US between the rise of socially engaged art and a shifting of government and corporate funding away from the National Endowment for the Arts and toward social welfare programs. Perhaps the lure of lucre was illusory and artists are returning to a wish to control their own creative agendas.
Perhaps this return could be seen as a reclaiming of the intrinsic values of art and culture as detailed in the Gift of the Muse report; a celebration of the individual, poetic, dissident and imaginative dimensions, and a recognition of the limitations of the economic rationalist model as applied to the humanities.
This position understands art as one of the last domains of freedom, and therefore one that must set its own objectives if it is to remain so.
In fact it is that freedom that most defines art in a world increasingly in thrall to spin and the corporate control of media. It is the power not to speak in the language of conventional paradigms, to posit sometimes bizarre, confronting and absurd alternatives, that give art its power to enlighten, inspire or critique.
There are lessons to be learned from many societies facing the future in similar ways to us. From Finland, Marketta Seppälä writes in New Value for Creativity. “Right now, when there is an urgent need for investment in creativity and culture, the preconditions for the creation of anything new – experimental thought and action that transcend boundaries – should be especially safeguarded. There should be resources to support things that do not yet exist. The making of art also has to be allowed to be unsystematic and unprofitable in order to be able to punch holes in the doctrines that surround us, and to investigate divergent paths of thought in order to see where they lead. The importance of creativity ultimately reveals itself specifically in the important questions that art asks about the foundations of the ideology and the collective moral foundations of our age.” Full text at: www.framework.fi/2_2004/edit_colo/editorial.html
“Resources to support things that do not yet exist.”
The challenge then is to plan for the unknown; to plan with vision and faith in what the arts and culture bring to human experience.
Early Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art Space
B&W picture references: Old Gosford and District in Pictures, Gwen Dundon.
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