Secret Sharers

Arts bounty, strictly behind closed doors

Until Creative Australia did a triple backflip with nosedive, and reinstated Khaled Sabsabi as our representative at the next Venice Biennale, the biggest story of the week concerned the savage cuts the NSW government has inflicted on regional galleries.

The Sabsabi saga requires attention, but it can wait for a while as the sharpest minds in the media decide whether the CA board has made a brave and necessary decision, or if the committee members need to be executed to expiate their sins. Few of the newspaper sages seem to have entertained the possibility that Sabsabi was the wrong choice all along.

The orgy of fatuous commentary on the Venice Biennale debacle has tended to overshadow a far more troubling topic. We may spend a lot of money sending a single artist to an international hoopla, but it’s an ephemeral issue in comparison to the NSW government’s systematic undermining of regional arts.

The latter story got its best airing in a piece by Kelly Burke in The Guardian, which began with a blunt statement of fact: “Three out of four regional public art galleries in New South Wales are facing a funding crisis after the state government pulled its financial support as a result of a massive restructure of its cultural funding arm, Create NSW.”

The galleries that have had their applications for four-year funding knocked back include Armidale, Broken Hill, Maitland, Orange, Tamworth, Bathurst and Wagga Wagga, along with suburban venues such as Mosman and Penrith. Coming on top of the defunding of the Australian Design Centre, which has lost $300,000 from the NSW government, and $200,000 from its federal counterpart, we are looking at a bloodbath of historic proportions.

What exactly have these well-established galleries done to be punished in this way? I’ve written up enterprising shows in Broken Hill and Orange over the past six months, and have appreciated the go-ahead efforts made in Maitland, the fastest-growing municipality in the state. It appears, as with the trashing of the ADC, Arts Minister, John Graham is intent on penalising venues that do everything right, while lavishing millions on… you guessed it, the Powerhouse – a project so wasteful, fanciful, dysfunctional and secretive that no respectable economic rationalist (if that’s not a contradiction-in-terms), would give it a pass mark.

The thinking seems to be that well-run galleries can do without funds that may instead be passed on to a range of pet projects or diverted to government expenses deemed more important. This assumes the galleries can simply go to their respective councils to make up the shortfall or tap wealthy patrons who live in the district. Nothing could be more idiotic. Every regional gallery director will tell you it’s a perpetual battle to extract a dollar from councils. With even the most sympathetic local administration the smallest political shift can mean instant famine for the arts.

Local patrons, especially in places such as the Tweed and Orange, are more than generous, but there are limits to private largesse when donors also need to allow for their families, and for the ups and downs of wealth and income.

As for the benefits of regional galleries, they are not merely tourist attractions that bring in much needed revenue to a local economy, they are centres of social cohesion in which residents, old and young, can gather for public events, art and crafts classes, lectures, film screenings, and a range of other activities. They are places where people begin to appreciate their own cultural achievements and heritage. For young people a regional gallery is usually the first place they get to view art on the wall, as it was for me with Newcastle Art Gallery, which I visited regularly during my school days.

By withdrawing funds from leading galleries, the government has created a climate of instability that makes everyone less willing to try new projects, acquire works, host residencies and workshops, or a hundred other things that constitute the regular business of these institutions. The galleries may not be forced to close but they will be reduced to simply putting a bunch of works on display and leaving them there for an extended period. The energy and initiative of an active cultural hub will give way to the inertia of a trophy cabinet.

Having stated the problem, we need to ask:

Why did the government do this?

Where did the money go?

Who made these decisions?

What are they trying to hide?

The simple answer to the first question is: cost-cutting. Every major construction project in NSW seems to run massively over budget. The bill for the Sydney Metro, for instance, surged from 16.8 billion to $21 billion. When the government needs to find the necessary cash they look first to ‘soft’ areas such as the Arts, which most politicians consider to be expendable, barely more than a luxury.

Matters get more complicated when we seek to identify those entities that did receive funding. We might have to accept the view of Brett Adlington, the CEO of Museums & Galleries of NSW (MGNSW), who suspects the normal business of galleries wasn’t “sexy” enough for the shadowy mandarins who decided where the money should be spent. Adlington pointed out to Arts Hub that the success rate for regional galleries applying for four-year funding was 18%, well below the overall rate of 52%. He estimates that 20 galleries would have applied for this funding, with only six of them – three based in Sydney – being successful.

The big winner - surprise, surprise - was First Nations Arts and Culture, which received $1,394,699.65 in funding. To put this into context, Visual Arts received $816,872, Classical Music, Opera, Choral secured $295,121; while Museums & History got $103,922, far less than Digital & Experimental, Immersive & Light Art, which received $764,859.07.

When we try to discover more details about where the money went, we quickly hit a brick wall. Those organisations that received four-year funding are listed, but it’s interesting to see that three separate grants have gone to the City of Parramatta, totalling $1.23 million. Would this have anything to do with propping up that monumental folly-in-a-floodplain, Powerhouse Parramatta?

When we come to the other grants, with ‘Creative Nations’ a total of $982,477 has been earmarked for Indigenous projects. But 10 out of 20 recipients are listed as “individual - de-identified for privacy reasons.”

With the ‘Cultural Access Priority Area’ program, $2,636,850 was handed out, with 23 of 59 recipients being listed as “private”.

With the ‘Next Steps’ program, for “individual artists, arts and cultural workers”, 41 applicants received a total of $333,042. All of them have been kept “private”.

Ditto with the Creative Steps programs, for “new work by individual artists and cultural workers”, which awarded $2,982,769 to 73 lucky recipients. All names are kept “private”

A note explains: “By keeping recipients’ personally identifying information private, we meet legal requirements set out in the New South Wales Privacy and Personal Information Protection Act 1998. This is because published information could be used in combination with other details to identify an individual. For example, in a location with a small population, a single recipient may be able to be identified based on their name, their location and the amount of funding received.”

How very considerate! By redacting the names of individual recipients and giving the vaguest information about the projects – a “gallery program” received $73,325, but we don’t know the gallery, or what the program entailed – the Ministry remains unaccountable for its choices. Whatever the benefits of “privacy” for individuals, it's hard to see how they outweigh the need for transparency in the way the government dispenses large sums of taxpayers’ money.

Where there is secrecy and lack of accountability, one can only be suspicious. Given that the NSW Ministry for the Arts likes to present its cuts to Create NSW, as a “reform”, the signs are ominous. Among Orwellian perversions of the language, “reform” almost always means someone is getting screwed, and it seems “privacy” means that vital information is being deliberately withheld from public disclosure.

Why shouldn’t an individual be identified as a grant recipient? If the community is small enough everyone will soon know about it anyway.

What the Create NSW website is not telling us is that a disproportionate number of grants may have gone to projects that many members of the public, let alone small communities, would consider a complete waste of time. Unsuccessful applicants may be pissed off to learn who got the money ahead of them, but they have a right to know, because this will assist with any future grant applications.

My uncharitable suspicion is that a lot of money has been channelled into projects that would end up on page one of The Australian were they disclosed. Rather than wear this kind of heat, John Graham and his department have simply decided to keep everything “private”.

My second uncharitable suspicion is that this cloak of secrecy represents yet another way of steering funds into Powerhouse-related projects, at the expense of everyone else. The convention is that state cultural institutions are not eligible for grant money, but when so many projects remain unidentified, can it be guaranteed that a number of them won’t end up in some Powerhouse-related event? It's a grey area, and this government has shown a distinct taste for shades of grey where cultural spending is concerned.

The person with whom I’d like to discuss these grants, isn’t John Graham, the smiling assassin of culture in NSW, but his arts advisor, one Clara Klemski. I’m told Clara is a cheerful person, a lawyer, a bit of a writer, who wrote a play on a burlesque theme. It all sounds like great credentials for telling the Minister where he should be spending his money. Or rather, our money. If you’re reading this, Clara, what exactly was the rationale behind defunding the Australian Design Centre? What were the Orange or Maitland galleries doing wrong? Can you reassure us that the money handed to anonymous individuals won’t end up funding a Powerhouse project, albeit indirectly?

While I wait to hear back, there’s a bitter time ahead for those regional galleries that have to regather their resources and apply all over again for two-year recurrent funding. As usual, the old out-of-sight, out-of-mind adage applies, as the bulk of funding has gone to Sydney and a few favoured suburbs, which just happen to be politically volatile ‘swing’ seats. Cynics might argue there’s no point in pouring money into regional areas that will most likely vote for the Nationals, or handing it over to those snooty Liberal voters in Mosman. But surely this reform-minded, privacy-conscious Labor government wouldn’t stoop to such blatant political pork-barrelling!

I know there are plenty of people who believe the taxpayer shouldn’t be paying for arts and culture at all, but in Australia it’s completely unrealistic to expect the private sector to suddenly pick up all the bills. For reasons that require a volume of historical and social analysis, we are wildly out-of-step with countries such as the United States and Japan.

Quite by coincidence this week I attended a lecture by Kathryn Hunyor at the Art Gallery of NSW, on the theme: ‘Art in urban life: The Transformation of Tokyo’. It was full of astounding information, although considering the ongoing ruination of regional galleries in NSW, “heart-breaking” might be a more appropriate adjective.

There are 80 private museums in Tokyo, funded by wealthy individuals and corporations that see culture as an essential part of life. It has been like this for most of a century, as successful businessmen started foundations, put their collections on public display, hosted educational programs, and so on. Even during those dark days of the 1990s, following the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy, when corporations saw their profits evaporating, they maintained their commitment to the arts.

The story that really brings tears to the eyes is Mitsubishi reconstructing a block of Victorian-era buildings it had demolished in 1968 in the name of modernisation. Forty years later, the company decided that heritage was more important than the pitiful illusion of progress, and rebuilt the earlier buildings, detail-perfect, albeit with all mod cons. There was no urgent reason for this major building project, and the cost must have been astronomical.

Ask yourself, “Would any Australian corporation knock down a functional modern building and reconstruct one from the Victorian or Federation period?” If a CEO of a big local firm were to propose such an idea it wouldn’t get beyond the board room, although it might get him or her sacked. If by some miracle the plan was actioned, it would have to negotiate the fury of the shareholders.

The fact is, the Japanese have a deeply ingrained sense of the importance of culture, whereas we in Australia have little interest or understanding when it comes to such matters. To explain why would require something like a book rather than a quick posting.

The paradox of John Graham’s funding priorities – if we leave aside the mystical logic of rewarding failure and punishing success - is that the NSW government does not favour a hard-line model whereby art institutions must raise the bulk of their funds from private sector. OK, they’d be delighted if it came to pass, but that’s not what they’re working towards. A commonsense approach would see the established galleries given their bedrock funding, leaving the remainder to be divided up among the best of the smaller projects. Instead, NSW appears to have adopted a radical welfare model for arts funding. Or is it a Robin Hood model? Can it be that the Minister is robbing the supposedly rich galleries to give money to marginal, identity-based projects that have little hope of attracting private funding, or an audience? Could he be undermining established arts organisations and throwing moolah at untried, untested individuals? Is he motivated by ideology or Christian charity? How would we know? It’s all under wraps. When you provide so little information everybody suspects the worst but nothing can be proved.

The result is that the same amount of money gets spent, but rather than giving it to professional organisations that are working to grow audiences and sponsors, the cash is disappearing into a mass of private pockets which promise little by way of return. It’s like rejecting a fertile paddock and sowing seed in the desert. It won’t make the desert bloom, but it will retard the growth of the fertile areas. If there’s a master plan here, it's far too subtle for my imaginings.

I’m off to London this week, so these posts may continue to appear sporadically, as I find time to write. In the meantime, in a week when no movie seemed worth reviewing, I’m posting two art columns, both on Indigenous themes. Yolngu Power: The Art of Yirrkala at the Art Gallery of NSW is a triumph, featuring an incredible array of work by the most dynamic Aboriginal arts community in Australia, while 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, at Melbourne University, is a more problematic, politically charged affair that mixes some excellent art with a lot of angry proselytising. I’d argue that the best thing Indigenous artists can do right now is to adopt the positive approach of the Yolngu who have understood that audiences respond more readily to great art rather than grim rhetoric.