Artists should stop casting entrepreneurs as criminals

It is rare in my experience for an artist to be a truly exceptional entrepreneur. There are of course some highly successful Australian exceptions to the rule - Ken Done, Pro Hart, Reg Mombassa.

On the other hand, the art entrepreneurs, whether you like it or not, have made Australian Aboriginal painting the wealth-creating commodity that it is and without their role we would not have such a vibrant and distinctive contemporary visual culture as we do now - recognised internationally.

The relationship between the painters and entrepreneurs in this part of the art industry seems to have satisfied all parties. The exception has been a sideline debate in the media about intellectual property that has little relevance to the indigenous people or their commercial supporters but a lot to lawyers and art and academic elites. All the really active parties in this ecology have continued to get on with the game in one way or the other.

If we are to succeed in the knowledge industries of the future, to be really innovative in our communities, the arts community needs to change its attitude to industry in general, and the continual mythologising of the businessman as criminal is not to be trusted at any cost.

Perhaps Keith Webb, a Canadian ecologist in residence at the Banff Centre of the Arts, can provide us with some new insight when he talks about nature and capitalism as working very much in parallel, that is, as ecologically integrated.

Fungi form a partnership with trees. Fungi break things down into carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen, water, minerals which go back into the tree. Trees pay the fungi by contributing sugars to them because trees have access to light. In this economy, energy is the currency.

Different trees also exchange energies with each other, for example the energy of birch trees flows in Douglas firs. That’s not the way we think of our economy working or our ecology. We usually think of it in competitive terms because that's more obvious. But there is a more subtle, more pervasive and larger scale co-operative exchange of energy which is fundamental to the way a forest works. It’s also fundamental to the way an economy works.