The National Endowment Agency (NEA) is the US’s national arts funding agency, the country’s equivalent of our Creative Australia (formerly Australia Council for the Arts). Since the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the NEA has been up against it, struggling to retain currency in an increasingly conservative political climate.
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In 1989 and 1990, it endured multiple attempts to kill it off in the wake of protests about funding provocative artists such as Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, Karen Finley and Holly Hughes. The NEA was almost abolished after the 1994 midterm elections in moves led by US House Speaker, Republican Newt Gingrich. Ultimately saved, its budget was massively reduced and grants to individual artists were terminated with some caveats around fellowships. There followed a roller coaster funding narrative for around 20 years until in 2017 and 2018, former President Donald Trump presented budget outlines to Congress for the elimination of the NEA altogether, which were rejected by Congress.
This year, President Joe Biden allocated US$210 million to the NEA for 2025, consistent with solid increases in funding under his administration. The outcome of this week’s US Presidential elections will have significant bearing on the future of the arts in the US. This piece in art net outlines how a small sample of those in the arts feel about the prospect of a Trump victory.
Australian independence?
For all our diversity and claims to independence, Australian cultural production, policy and governance is largely determined by the Anglosphere, led by our cultural and colonial masters, the US and England, the enormous influence of which shapes our default settings. What happens there affects what happens here and some of what the NEA has endured was replicated at the Australia Council for the Arts in the 2010s under the Coalition Government.
This reflects an Americanisation of Australia’s cultural infrastructure that ramped up during John Howard’s prime ministership in the 2000s with a gradual withdrawal of public funding against population growth, which now stands below the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) average. Howard was a member of the elite, neoliberal Mont Pelerin Society and applied the practices of privatisation and outsourcing of government services in line with its principles. To offset reduced funding, government attempted to hard-wire philanthropy into Australia’s cultural infrastructure, but it failed to take in the way that it did in the US; it was never an Australian inclination. I have a memory of an American, a director of an Australian festival, being totally bemused by the chequebooks remaining steadfastly in the back pocket of the wealthy at a fundraiser.
The illusion that philanthropy will fill the funding gap persists today, but it is a fraught and contested space for artists demonstrated by the clash of politics, particularly around the fossil fuels industry and Gaza, which has created real-world problems for artists (and arts organisations).
The curse of US-style philanthropy is the erosion of the ideal of art as a public good. This erosion affects cultural policy and its implementation, and ultimately social cohesion because it creates real resentment in the community. Citizens are hit twice for arts funding – once through the taxation system and then through the scores of fundraising campaigns that target them whenever them buy a ticket, sign up to a newsletter or express an iota of interest in the arts. The worst hit is the most vulnerable: artists. Unsurprisingly Australian and American artists share the real-life experience of financial precarity – their median income is around half of other workers in their nation’s workforce.
Disintegration acceleration
When, in the early 2010s, state and federal government policy grafted the English model of creative industries onto this shifting cultural infrastructure and policy, the slow disintegration of the Australian arts scene accelerated. Both ideas are in lockstep with neoliberal values that drive the economic and political cultures of the US and England. The long-standing decrease in real-terms funding to the arts and artists is ideological; arts funding does not fit the paradigm of the neoliberal left or right.
The decline of funding to individual artists in the US and Australia roughly aligns with the decline of democracy in both countries. From 2010 to 2020, the health of the US’s democracy dropped by 11 points according to this report by Freedom House. In the 15-year period from 2008, Australians who felt very satisfied by democracy fell from 23% to 14%. This is part of a global trend. I’m not suggesting here that withdrawing direct funding to artists is the sole cause of the decline, but I do propose it is a factor and a symptom. If you want to know what Australia will look like in 20 years’ time, look no further than the US, a country with a growing underclass and working poor propped up by city-state economies on the brink of sustained national civil unrest and unravelling.
Let’s assume we don’t want to go down that path.
The arts play a key role in the health of a democracy – countless studies attest to this. Artists create the performing arts, visual arts and the literary arts. Without them, there are no other jobs in the arts, because there are no arts (other than heritage arts). So, in the arts sector, artists are essential workers. How do we protect the essential workers in the arts that are fundamental to the health of democracy?
Funding well running dry
Our current system cannot do it. It’s not just broken; it’s dissolving in front of our eyes. A scan of grant opportunities offered to artists by Creative Victoria – which is responsible for the 28% of Australia’s artist-population that live in Victoria – shows not a single open funding opportunity. The last time a round was offered for ‘creative projects’ was nine months ago and for direct funding, the Creators Fund, almost two years ago. Having engaged with Arts Victoria (now Creative Victoria) for almost 30 years in various capacities, this is the first time in my experience that no funding is available to directly support artists and their work. Counterparts in other states report comparable stories of vanishing support.
The cost of living crisis is a major factor for American voters as it will be for Australian voters when we vote within six months. It’s a crisis that is not going away; it is a consequence of neoliberalism, which, though widely considered past its use-by-date as an economic strategy, still has significant political collateral as we can observe in its most extreme state in the US. Something needs to give; better that it is the economy rather than society. We need a complete shift in the approach to income equality and financial justice. During the 2020 US election, the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) gained significant traction, accelerated by the grim reality of the COVID19 epidemic and the successful roll-out in many countries of government safety nets. Much of what we are dealing with now in 2024 is consequential.
In September, former artist and now Victorian Greens MP, Gabrielle de Vietri published a petition on her website seeking support for a sustainable living wage for artists, a key policy from the Greens’ 2022 election platform. It is yet to accrue 1000 signatures, which suggests a lack of support. I think it is a consequence of hyper-wedge politics: Australians do not like seeing any Australian deemed exceptional or receiving preferential treatment, no matter how dire their financial situation. In a recent analysis of the Queensland election, Julianne Schultz calls this “the oldest One Nation trope: the assertion that someone else was getting more“. It’s become a powerful disincentive in consensus building and extending compassion.
Viable solution
OK. Let’s take care of everyone.
In the 2024 ‘Artists as Workers: A summary and response by Creative Australia’ report, the mean income an artist received from their core creative practice was $23,000. To make ends meet, let alone feed a family, the cost of living has been a challenge for artists for more years than most. My argument for supporting a sustainable living wage for artists in Australia is not predicated on the notion that artists are special, unique or essential (other than in the arts) workers. It is an argument for addressing a vulnerable worker population in serious decline. It is a worker population exhibiting clear long-term trends of unsustainability. If one were to identify an ideal sector of the labour force to test the efficacy of a basic income scheme, then the artist population of Australia would be top of the list: a means to an end, not the end itself.
So rather than advocating a sustainable living wage for artists alone, why don’t we consider it a pilot for an expanded model. Ireland is partway through a three-year pilot program called a Basic Income for the Arts and recently released its second impact analysis. Key findings reported a massive uptick in autonomy, relevance, well-being, and productivity. It’s a compelling argument and one that can be made at multiple points of entry – social, cultural, artistic, and economic – and with the potential to be rolled out across society. The program was extended last month.
Read: Setting in motion: what Ireland’s basic income pilot could mean for Australia
As the effects of climate change and global instability wreak havoc into the future, the arguments for a UBI (universal basic income) will become more compelling. More of us will need to be taken care of by a whole-of-government approach. A UBI will not be possible without a pilot scheme to test its merits, its efficacy, its potential. Australia’s artist population is the perfect candidate; Ireland’s scheme is a compelling template, and all the worker populations of this country need to be given hope that we are not teetering on our version of the US catastrophe.
