Hearing from musicians working in the remote deserts of Australia and creative leaders from the world’s major arts centres and institutions – across four performing arts conferences and markets, two national and two international – raised an important question: are there consistent themes across our industry, and do they align with those of our global counterparts?
In this article:
Learnings from sector gatherings
The inaugural Regional and Remote Music Summit in Darwin, and subsequently the Australian Performing Arts Exchange (APAX) provided opportunities to hear first-hand the key issues the Australian performing arts industry is facing, take the temperature of the performing arts ecology, and listen to and have conversations about the things that may place live performance more centrally in people’s lives.
These conversations were both inspiring and frustrating.
Inspiring because they highlighted a bunch of people and organisations totally committed to making a difference in the industry and our communities: creating, promoting, presenting and touring. (Seriously, making stuff happen!) And doing so with some amazing initiatives and programs that are addressing current challenges. (If in any doubt check out programs like the Live Music Office’s Live and Local and MusicNT’s All Good.)
Frustrating because across these performing arts gatherings, seeing the pipeline of work, of what could be, highlights huge potential – for artists and arts workers, for arts consumers, for society and our sanity. Whether that be in economic development, tourism, education, physical and mental health, community building or, simply, lifting us up as Australians – just some of the myriad outcomes the arts can deliver across society.
And further frustrating, as why it is that these outcomes are not adequately valued and why is the work that can deliver them not invested in appropriately?
These lost opportunities, the potential outcomes from ‘unfunded excellence’, can drive a sense of hopelessness in the sector. Not only for the creativity that may never be realised, but for the values by which parts of our society seemingly live that rationalise creative output.
In considering the various issues and points of view in a global context, it’s difficult not to respond in a variety of ways. Hopeful … sometimes. Enraged … occasionally. Despondent … often. Less so at the status quo and more so, once again, at lost potential.
The notion of ‘what could be’ is pervasive across all these events and the art forms represented in them. Ultimately, it is startlingly clear that more requires more.
The support is there
Support from all three levels of government for the performing arts in Australia is great. Our local governments continue to invest at a level not often recognised. For example, in pre-COVID times, over a third (37%) of all revenue of non-commercial venues in Australia came from Local Government. Across all levels of government, expenditure on arts and culture was $7.26 billion in the 2019–20 financial year. Federally, we’ve seen a new National Cultural Policy, a sharp and attentive Federal Minister and reform of what was the Australia Council for the Arts. Lots of pluses.
Similarly corporate and private investment is significant, facilitating some amazing development and performance work that delivers significant impact – think of the Ian Potter Foundation and its 2021 investment of $1.527 million investment in the sector, or the Minderoo Foundation’s recent $30 million contribution to the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). Collectively, private sector support for the arts in 2022 was $540 million. More specifically, The Australian Ballet’s $3.618 million revenue in 2023 from partnerships/sponsorships is alone indicative of corporate support to major organisations.
But what could be happening is game-changing stuff.
The kind of cultural shift that leads a country to say ‘yes’ not ‘no’. The kind of cultural shift that has repeatedly proven to deliver things such as increased rates of literacy, lower rates of truancy, reduction in crime, incarceration and recidivism and, more broadly, increases in tolerance and understanding, and positive effects on physical and mental well-being.
The evidence is already in and has been for years.
- Economic – The arts and entertainment sector contributes $14.7 billion per year in value added (GDP). One arts centre alone, the Adelaide Festival Centre, generated $164 million for South Australia.
- Tourism – The Western Australian Government invested $8 million to subsidise two live concerts by Coldplay, which reportedly injected “tens of millions of visitor spend” into the state’s economy.
- Education – According to a review undertaken by the Australian Council for Educational Research, it is now widely documented … that those students whose learning is embedded in the arts achieve better grades and overall test scores, are less likely to leave school early, rarely report boredom and have a more positive self-concept than those students who are deprived of arts experiences.
- Physical and mental health – the World Health Organization reports that art can help us to emotionally navigate the journey of battling an illness or injury, to process difficult emotions in times of emergency and challenging events.
- Employment – In 2016, the cultural and creative economy employed 868,098 people, accounting for 8.1% of Australia’s national workforce. In WA alone the creative industries were reported to employ approximately 53,000 people as at 2019.
- Community building – A report supported by the US’s National Endowment for the Arts recently noted that “the arts are indispensable for their power to build community with unique depth and meaning”.
In spite of these known benefits, as reported by A New Approach (ANA), Australia’s percentage of GDP spent on the arts (0.98%) ranks 23rd out of 31 OECD countries, and Australia remained below the OECD average from 2017 to 2020.[9]
All this before we even contemplate the intrinsic benefits and value of the arts, or arts for arts’ sake.
But this is not simply another article about the benefits the arts can and do provide to society (indeed to some extent this is about what we do in spite of those outcomes), this is a self-reflection, a question and a challenge to the industry, about why these benefits are not perceived by decision-makers to the extent that it effects notable change in the investment status quo.
Investing in a better society
This is not necessarily an argument for increased investment in the arts – it’s an argument for increased investment in a better society. And the extent to which the arts deliver those benefits effectively, efficiently and competitively as a consequence of the art itself, not by arts being the means to ‘another’ end.
When we use these societal benefits to drive arts investment we complicate and often compromise the very purpose of the art.
These causal links between the arts and social impact seem not to be carrying the weight we had hoped, certainly not to the extent that arts investment is adequately increasing.
The contradictory nature of this thinking is not lost on me – arguing for the social benefits of the arts, yet not wanting these benefits to be the determinant of the investment. But this is not a binary issue.
In a somewhat dated but still relevant journal article, Professor of Marketing at the Graduate School of Business, New York University, Elizabeth Hirschman wrote the following in reference to arts producers:
If one adheres to the doctrine that multiple perspectives on social issues are useful in a democratic society, even though they may be in conflict with prevailing popular sentiment and social norms, the freedom of expression exemplified by self-oriented creativity is a social asset.
In a similar tone, the inimitable Robyn Archer when questioned about who the audience is for a particular production, once replied: “whoever will come”.
What might we be getting wrong? Has arts investment been rationalised to the extent that our competitive advantage as a sector (art as a reflection and challenge of who we are as human beings) has become sidelined?
That is to say, maybe we should not bend the ‘product’ to suit the prevailing required outcomes; more so, maybe the outcomes should be identified that are delivered by the essence of the art.
As a majority of Americans recently apparently chose economics over human rights, is this a moment in time that investment should be prioritised to lift social justice into the consciousness of more Australians (via the arts)?
Look out for the second part of this article to be published later this week.
Article slightly amended on 12 December at the request of the author.
