Haves and Have-Nots

# 603

Minister Graham explores new creative ecosystems

Doom and despair descended on the Art Gallery of NSW this week, when it was revealed that “dozens” of staff are to be retrenched. It’s the latest blow in NSW Arts Minister John Graham’s war on the arts, a campaign that is proceeding with implacable brutality, a complete lack of accountability, but plenty of enthusiastic press releases. Vladimir Putin could hardly do it any better.

Barely a month ago we learned of the NSW government’s plans to slash the budget of the state’s arts agency, Create NSW, requiring the retrenchment of almost one quarter of its staff. At the same time, the Australian Design Centre had $300,000 in annual funding withdrawn, complementing the Federal government’s efforts in removing a $200,000 allocation. Next it was the turn of eighteen regional galleries to lose their four-year funding, creating an instant crisis among institutions that to all appearances, had been doing everything right.

Now the cuts and general miserliness have finally come knocking at the door of the AGNSW, which shedding is dozens of jobs, chasing annual savings of $7.2 million. I’d heard on the grapevine that 51 jobs would be going, which sounded like an exaggeration, but Michael Bailey, in the Australian Financial Review, says the NSW Treasury has suggested the gallery’s 385 employees should be reduced to a more “reasonable” number of 315. By my math that sounds like 70 - meaning more than one fifth of staff are in line to be made redundant. Presumably it won’t come to that, but it makes 51 sound more believable.

It doesn’t help that the AGNSW’s government allocation of $72.4 million in 2024-25, will fall to $66.6 million in 2025-26, meaning the gallery is being asked to do more with far fewer staff and significantly less money. Bailey writes: “The gallery has agreed to raise $36 million from its two gift shops, restaurants, private functions and box office, and to this end has been promoting membership packages.”

Cue: audible sigh. We’ve heard these threadbare promises before. In March last year, when the first twelve months of Sydney Modern AKA Naala Badu, came up with a $16 million shortfall, then-director, Michael Brand, made all the same undertakings. There was going to be increased revenue of $40 million raised from the gallery shops, from attendances, from venue hire and memberships. It’s the same old song and it’s pathetic to hear it reeled out again and again.

You may recall the government gave Brand a $12 million bail-out and told him the gallery would have to find a further $4 million. He said he would probably have to reduce staff numbers by 30, which never came to pass. Instead, the AGNSW mostly declined to fill vacant positions. Now we find the actual number of jobs lost was allegedly no more than four. In the last months of the Brand regime staff numbers began creeping back up. What were they thinking? It’s easy to hire but difficult to fire, when those who are losing their jobs may have families and mortgages to support, or even just themselves in this economic climate.

By the time the Brand era came to a hasty, unceremonious end, the gallery was in financial hot water again. New director, Maud Page, received a hospital pass, inheriting an institution with a government stipend set to plummet, and staffing levels back to the brim. This means that virtually her first task at the helm is to preside over a round of savage staff cuts – not exactly the best way to endear yourself to employees or generate the positive morale that’s necessary to drag the AGNSW out of the hole into which it has been sinking.

Some thoughts on this dire situation:

It has been a long time in the making. The roots of the problem date back to that fateful day in 2013, when Michael Brand and then-chair of trustees, Steven Lowy, announced the “Sydney Modern” project without a single cent being pledged towards its construction. The NSW government was alerted that the gallery would be building an extension costed at $450 million, and the taxpayer would be largely responsible for the bill. By contrast, when Tony Ellwood announced a new contemporary extension for the NGV, transport tycoon, Lindsay Fox, immediately stumped up $100 million.

As the project limped along, fund-raising became a painful, overwhelming preoccupation. Exhibitions and other gallery business suffered as the administration scrimped and saved. The only areas of extravagance seemed to be the director’s personal spending, including numerous overseas trips at vast expense for little apparent value. After the Japanese architects, SANAA, had been given the task of designing the new building, there were those excursions to Japan for the director and the trustees, to check on the progress of the work. Eventually, a large part of the plan had to be scrapped, bringing the budget down to $344 million. The losses included the walkway that would have connected the old and new buildings, creating a tangible separation that discourages visitors from making the effort to see both sites.

The building itself is wrong. Whatever SANAA’s merits as architects, the design for Sydney Modern/Naala Badu is patently inappropriate. Those huge glass windows, vast empty spaces, dysfunctional meeting areas exposed to sun and rain, and the novelty dungeon, ‘The Tank’, which is not suitable for most forms of art, are expensive follies. The building has not captured people’s imaginations and has never enjoyed the attendances it requires.

Nevertheless, we are stuck with the damn thing and need to make the most of it. The one glaring imperative was for the venue to host as many shows and events as possible within the first year, to try and capitalise on new viewers coming along to take a peek. Instead, the AGNSW did not hold a single exhibition in Sydney Modern for the first twelve months, being content to rearrange parts of the permanent collection. Considering the main rationale for building this extravagant pile was a supposed need for more exhibition space, the inertia was unforgivable.

Under Michael Brand, exhibition programming fell into the doldrums. At a time when it was more necessary than ever to host a range of temporary exhibitions, the AGNSW chose to save cash and effort by taking pre-packaged shows, economising on catalogues and openings, and generally allowing things to drift. It was an utterly counterproductive approach. Aiming to minimise expenditure, it destroyed the gallery’s opportunities for bringing in income and discouraged repeat visitation. Why keep coming back if you’ve found that exhibitions and displays never seemed to change?

Meanwhile, Brand’s high-handed takeover of the support group, the Art Gallery Society, caused immense anger and grief. The dumping of volunteers in favour of a group of young, salaried assistants, added expense and reduced the friendliness with which visitors had been greeted. Long-term sponsors were neglected while a team of fund-raisers went chasing new money – money that often proved ephemeral.

In the absence of an active, well-rounded exhibition program, the gallery delved ever deeper into the feel-good realm of identity politics, becoming increasingly obsessed with all things Indigenous, Queer, etc. It may have made everyone feel virtuous, but such fixations – in the absence of anything to balance them out – are a sure-fire turn-off for the public. While the administration congratulated itself on its concern for social justice, it could only lament the benighted attitudes of those viewers who chose to stay away. This did nothing for the bottom line, although it exposed the hypocrisy of the politicians who may have been gung-ho for the PC agenda but didn’t wish to recognise its consequences and compensate the gallery for the inevitable loss of revenue.

I dare say this agenda has also been responsible for most of the hirings in recent years, while old-style, experienced curators have struggled to get their exhibition proposals accepted. When staff cuts need to be made, it’s more likely the older staff will be pressured to leave, rather than the new bloods. I’m told, for instance, that Natalie Wilson has been cut from the Australian art department, which would be a travesty of justice. Natalie is an experienced, hard-working curator with a background in art history, who did an outstanding job on the Archibald prize centenary exhibition, receiving little kudos in the process. If she is an example of the kind of staff member the gallery thinks it can shed, I dread to think who might be considered indispensable.

The Situation today. Under the policies favoured by Michael Brand the AGNSW seemed to do everything possible to discourage visitation, yet it is only through increased attendances that the present malaise can be turned around. The new director, Maud Page, has a gargantuan task in fixing the problem, and she would be well advised to abandon any ideologically driven ideas about what the gallery should be showing and collecting, and think about large-scale shows that will bring in audiences. There will be opportunities for pet projects when the books have been balanced. The AGNSW’s role is to entertain, educate and inspire us, not teach us to be better people. The art needs to be visually exciting, not morally edifying. Curators need to make judgements based on quality – old-fashioned connoisseurship, if you prefer – rather than identity. The public will respond to work of high quality but show little patience with mediocre product that ticks the right boxes.

Whatever Maud and her team choose to do, they cannot hope to do it alone. The State government has to come to the party and provide adequate funding. And this is where the biggest problem lies, both today and into the future.

The NSW government does not understand the first thing about museums or a public culture. Everything we’ve seen recently from NSW Arts Minister, John Graham, is almost diametrically opposed to best practice and mere commonsense. Mr. Graham has undermined the best-run, most effective arts bodies in NSW, and thrown money at projects which have little prospect of success but a high probability of failure. He has treated the major galleries and museums with contempt and poured tens of millions into a Powerhouse Museum “revitalisation” that is shaping up to be one of the biggest cultural disasters of all time – and not just in Australia. Is there another country that will have lavished the best part of $2 billion on an utterly fanciful project that has taken a major museum and turned it into three worthless venues that will continue to put a strain on government coffers for as long as they are allowed to continue? Already bets are being laid as to how long the Parramatta branch will be identified as a ‘museum’ or as part of the Powerhouse. Whatever the future of this costly albatross, it’s never going to be an effective exhibition venue.

It's a basic fact that galleries and museums are expensive to run, and Australia – despite countless efforts to attract the private sector – does not possess a culture of philanthropy. This problem will not change overnight and will never be changed by depriving the institutions of government funds. The only way wealthy individuals and corporations ever want to be associated with galleries and museums is when those institutions are already conspicuously successful – viz. the National Gallery of Victoria.

It seems that his other role as Minister of the Night-time Economy (which sounds like something out of The Magic Flute) has scrambled John Graham’s circuits to the point where he believes Powerhouse Ultimo should be repurposed as a venue for rave parties instead of a museum. Indeed, the entire mentality that prevails in the Arts Department – and here his Arts Advisor, Clara Klemski, is exhibit A - seems to be one of short-term distraction rather than the long-term building of firm cultural foundations. Pulling money from the ADC, from the regional galleries and the AGNSW will do immeasurable harm. I can hardly bear to mention the poor bloody Museum of Contemporary Art, which is living on bread and water.

When all that government money is going, holus-bolus, into something as wasteful and ridiculous as the Powerhouse ‘revitalisation’, it’s a scandal and a tragedy. Only this week I was talking to a former employee of Lisa Havilah’s regime who said getting out of the PHM felt like escaping from a dictator’s prison. Is anybody looking at working conditions and staff practices at the PHM? As everyone else is laying off staff, the PHM is hiring people with no museum experience, and handing large sums of taxpayers’ money to mates, who are called “Powerhouse associates”. The $1.52 million spent on “artists’ fees” for 2022-23 alone would have run the ADC for three years, and some regional galleries for a decade!

To demonstrate the idiocy of Mr. Graham’s spending plans we need look no further than a report by that ace reporter, Linda Morris, in the Sydney Morning Herald, on 29 July, in which we learn: “NSW Labor has promised to redress a funding divide stretching between the harbour and the Blue Mountains that splits the city between the arts’ haves and have-nots – spending $5 million to fund a new home-grown festival for western Sydney and other new projects.”

Mr Graham’s own words are worth quoting: “…the vision is to create a thriving and inclusive creative ecosystem in western Sydney that celebrates its diverse communities, drives cultural innovation and delivers social and economic value for everyone… To get there the key priorities are unlocking investment, putting First Nations’ culture at the centre, growing creative careers, strengthening creative ecosystems, better showcasing off [sic] western Sydney artists, and unlocking more cultural spaces.”

Doesn’t it sound wonderful? All these “creative ecosystems”? A glorious cultural renaissance is on the way for the poor but humble western suburbs. Take that, you Liberal-voting silvertails in Waverley-Woollahra! What’s even better is that the full cost of a colourful new festival for the western suburbs will be paid for by money snatched from Create NSW, when it was forced to sack a quarter of its staff. Under this visionary scheme, funds clawed back from rock-solid arts institutions across the state, will be gifted to as-yet-unidentified “partners” in western Sydney to help nurture new shoots of creativity. Naturally, this includes “five grants of up to $100,000 to First Nations artists and organisations from western Sydney, and $350,000 will help Western Sydney Arts Alliance deliver micro grants.”

Anybody who is really concerned with the vitality of so-called First Nations arts should pay a visit to Darwin during the Telstra Awards and compare what’s on offer with the fare available in Western Sydney. The Northern Territory is where one sees genuinely impressive Indigenous art. In western Sydney, to be in line for government largesse it may be sufficient to simply be of Indigenous extraction. It’s tedious to dwell on the foolishness of the “First Nations First” mantra, which often means valuing second-rate First Nations art over the first-rate art of other persuasions. Why is it so hard to accept that artists, whether they be black or white or brindle, all make good and bad art?

Reading this story, which Morris presents with the neutrality of a press release, anyone would imagine it was a heroic blow on behalf of class struggle in Sydney. We’re supposed to believe those bludgers in the well-heeled Eastern Suburbs (“the haves”) are absorbing all the riches that should be going to the underprivileged artistes in the Western suburbs (“the have-nots”). Despair not, because the Minns government is here to right these historic wrongs, with John Graham starring as Robin Hood.

Until Mr. Graham’s stunning intervention we find the discredited and gutted Create NSW was allocating just 7 percent of its arts budget to western Sydney, “with 74 percent going to Eastern Sydney, the rest to regional NSW.” What the article doesn’t tell us is where the line is being drawn between western and eastern Sydney. Presumably the CBD counts as the east. Neither should these figures be surprising when the state’s flagship cultural institutions all (logically) reside in central Sydney. Perhaps the Minister or Linda would like to compare the attendances of the AGNSW and the Australian Museum with those of the galleries in Campbelltown and Casula?

Statistics can be made to work miracles of propaganda given a pliant media that prints whatever scraps it gets and doesn’t bother to analyse anything. The real story should be the marvels achieved by regional arts organisations that received only 19 percent of the total funding. Mr. Graham has rewarded them for their efforts by cancelling their grants.

This phoney war between east and west - the haves and the have-nots – falls right in line with Lisa Havilah’s rhetoric about the poor but deserving western suburbs being oppressed by the greedy easterners. She has used such claims to bolster her own rapacious money-grab for the PHM. It’s empire-building on a grand scale, funded by the NSW taxpayer. It’s the language of division, shored up by a duplicitous indulgence in identity politics. This redirection of funds is not a boon for the western suburbs, it’s a goldmine for a few groups and individuals at the expense of the biggest, best-attended cultural institutions in the state. Ultimately, it’s a windfall for a few, and a catastrophe for the majority of NSW citizens. It’s a strategy based on spurious, transparently self-serving arguments and it is causing untold damage.

The wholesale cutting of staff at the AGNSW is a direct result of the direction arts policies have taken under the Minns government, and we have not seen the worst effects yet. If the arts crowd are ready and willing to turn out for Gaza in such huge numbers, are they prepared to march on Parliament House in the name of fundamental self-preservation? It’s clear by now that all the government’s destructive, senseless policies are being pursued through a mixture of spin and secrecy. Misleading announcements are trumpeted to the press, while questions remain unanswered and important details kept secret. As this week’s massacre at the AGNSW makes clear, those who are cowed into silence are likely to be next in line for the axe.

The art column has been in Darwin for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), and satellite shows. In contrast to the doom narrative of the arts in NSW, Indigenous art in the Territory is thriving. The second week of August is one of the major dates on the Australian art calendar for anyone who wants to know what’s happening in the Indigenous art world – who the leading artists are, and who’s emerging. It’s a truly uplifting experience to see people from so many diverse communities all gathered in one place, determined to have a good time. If only the NT government understood the story about the goose and the golden eggs…

This week’s film review looks at The Life of Chuck, which has been getting rave reviews but failed to touch my cinematically hardened heart. A fantasy about the extraordinary life of one ordinary man, and the end of the world (!), I found it cloying where it was supposed to be touching and enchanting. I suppose it’s not all that different from my reactions to John Graham’s proposed arts festival for the western suburbs. There’s nothing appealing about being expected to show admiration on demand.