Image supplied.
Five years is both a short and a long time in the arts. During my term as CEO of the Australia Council, I have worked through two federal elections, three federal arts ministers, and numerous state and territory ministers and departments.
Over the same period we funded 37,635 new works, provided grants to thousands of individual artists, and witnessed a growing appreciation of First Nations arts among Australian audiences*. Some 88.4 million people attended arts activities supported by the Australia Council across our vast country. These are figures to which I’m proud to have contributed, yet I am humbled to know my contribution is part of a much bigger picture.
During my 11 years at the Australia Council, initially as Executive Director and subsequently as CEO, what has significantly shifted is the Council’s support of a far more diverse community of artists and practice and a far greater recognition of the power and role in supporting and embedding First Nations arts and culture in our work. While we’ve made great strides in ensuring greater diversity and support of First Nations arts, we still have a long way to go, and this needs to remain a priority.
In recent years, a concept which has resonated with me is ‘cathedral thinking’. The artisans and architects who laid the first plans for those soaring medieval structures knew they were contributing to something bigger than themselves, with the results of their labours coming to fruition many generations later. This highlights the importance of a future-focused, long term vision for the arts and our cultural institutions. It is with this approach we need to support the arts, to ensure that we build strong structures which will stand the test of time.
To do this, we need to invest in supporting Australian artists and arts administrators. As CEO, one of my greatest joys has been to see the impact of the capacity building program for which I had passionately advocated. These programs have been delivered to hundreds of leaders across all genres and fields, supporting arts leaders to achieve their potential, and encouraging new leaders to emerge from increasingly diverse communities.
Having a firm architectural plan is key to realising new visions and building on existing structures. Our inaugural all-encompassing strategic plan A Culturally Ambitious Nation was the pillar upon which we expanded our strategic work, implemented a new funding model and engaged more deeply with all Australians during the last five years.
In the biggest structural reform in the Council’s history, we implemented a new funding model and moved away from an art form focused structure to a new streamlined, responsive one. We delivered this despite uncertainty around funding levels.
The model has succeeded in enabling greater access and diversity – around one in three of the nearly 15,000 applications received under the new model have been from people applying for the first time. Applications are assessed by peers from a pool of 700-plus experts representing diverse areas of practice, demographics and geographies.
Challenge and change
The greatest challenge of my term as CEO was not necessarily the 2015 changes impacting our funding. Rather, it was maintaining a commitment to fulfilling our strategic vision which we had promised to both the arts sector and to the Australian public through times of change. The Australia Council faced intense criticism during and following this period around misperceptions that we had not fought for the return of funds. Many people assumed because we weren’t publicly making noise and demanding the return of the funds, that we weren’t doing anything. On the contrary, the Board and Executive worked tirelessly, holding constructive conversations reiterating our long-term vision, advocating for both the Australia Council and the arts sector.
At the same time the arts community worked fervently to advocate for the value of the arts, recognising the importance of an arms-length body to distribute public funds. By 2017, a large portion of this funding was returned. It was the result of the powerful voice of the arts sector, in tandem with our work, which ultimately affirmed the government’s confidence in our ability and the strength of our strategic vision.
Since then, we have continued to strengthen our cathedral’s structure through research, which contributes to an ever-growing body of evidence of the value of the arts. Last year we released two major pieces of research that demonstrated both the immense value of the arts to the lives of all Australians, and the vital importance of supporting sustainable careers so that we can continue to see the benefits of artists’ work into the future.
The future presents both challenges and opportunities for the arts. Research shows creativity will be crucial in workplaces of the future and creative mindsets critical to the development and sustainability of our communities and nation. Creativity, of course, extends beyond the arts. With artificial intelligence taking over routine tasks, numerous studies (from the Harvard Business Review to the World Economic Forum, Nesta and our own research at the Australia Council) indicate that the future of work will prioritise the place of human creative capacity. In Making Art Work we show that this accelerated change will expand opportunities for artists to apply their artistic skills outside the arts, while also posing challenges in an uncertain future.
Creativity alone cannot tackle some of the major issues facing our world – climate change, mass migration, population shift and regular economic and political disruption – but surely it is key to finding some solutions. In commercial business, creativity, along with technical and social skills (areas resilient to future automation) are being viewed as economic drivers. While measuring creativity remains subjective, McKinsey concludes in a June 2018 study of top-performing companies that companies that integrated creativity and data had two times an increase of revenue than those that did not. I agree that the integration of creativity will be key.
Creativity alone cannot tackle some of the major issues facing our world – climate change, mass migration, population shift and regular economic and political disruption – but surely it is key to finding some solutions.
Over its near 50-year history, the Australia Council has, across many areas, been at the forefront of thinking on issues impacting the arts community and society more broadly. A decade ago the Australia Council began to realise the value of what the digital revolution could bring to the arts. Our first discussion paper on this area, Don’t panic: The impact of digital technology on the major performing arts industry (2008) predicted “how people may soon be reading books on electronic readers… [and] by 2025 you will be able to hold every movie of any length ever made on your mobile phone handset”. When reading it now it is almost quaint, however at the time, it was seen as quite a landmark piece. Since then, the speed of digital and technological transformation has been, quite frankly, breathtaking.
The Don’t Panic report is a good example of work that initiated a targeted strategic focus for the Council and a $3m investment delivering a comprehensive series of projects, research and programs to stimulate awareness, discussion and investment in this area. The Council commenced research into Artists’ Rights in a digital age, explored distribution models, announced a partnership with the ABC, started a Digital Culture funding program, held an early version of what is now known as a “hackathon” and created a HIVE developmental program to bring so-called “traditional artists” to a hybrid lab environment to take stage content to screens.
We know that artists’ skills and capabilities will be crucial to workplaces of the future. Innovation is not enough. Nor is data. Nor is digital. It is making meaning from the mass of information – and this is the creative part – that matters most. It is what artists and artistic communities have always understood. First Nations people implicitly understand. Culture and art are at the centre of their lives and have been for 60,000 years. Culture is not a ‘soft power’, rather it is the fibre that binds individuals and family, families to community, community to country. Culture is power.
Culture is not a ‘soft power’, rather it is the fibre that binds individuals and family, families to community, community to country.
A fine example of this is a recent National Museum of Australia exhibition that highlights the strong international interest in Australian Indigenous art and culture. Delicate and rare bark paintings headline an unprecedented exhibition of Arnhem Land artworks on a landmark tour of China. The Chinese media reported, “the exhibition would open up people’s hearts and minds to the deep truth of the long human history of Australia”. This exhibition will now start a 20-month tour across mainland China and Taiwan and shows how a single collection has the power to change the perception of Australia.
Casting our minds back in the Western canon, the Renaissance was a period founded on art and culture which informed and underpinned society, commerce and government. The balance between these forces changed during industrialisation when art and its associates became sidelined. Yet, now things are changing dramatically once again. As we shift gears from the industrial to the knowledge and digital economy, creativity is increasingly being viewed as integral to what we do, how we think, and how we relate.
As Robert Wong, Vice President of Google Creative Lab says, “creative people are the best people to invent the world… Technology is not the driver of innovation – that is completely false. It’s always been, and always will be the human heart and the human imagination”. He continues,“Creative people visualise possible futures… we distil very complex ideas into products people are attracted to. Things that they want to use, things that engineers want to make.”
As I reflect on my time at the Australia Council, I am excited most of all to look to the future knowing that many of the plans set in place will begin to take form, and the Australia Council’s vision for ‘a culturally ambitious nation’ will continue to be realised.
Leadership takes many forms in current times. I believe leadership in the arts, however, must contribute to a long-term vision. A future-focused approach furnishes the framework within which creativity can be fully explored and the stories of our nation’s cultural ambitions can continue to be shared.
* Results of the most recent National Arts Participation Survey show that in 2016, seven million Australians, or 35% of the population aged 15 years and over, attended First Nations arts – a record number of attendance and double that of 2009.
