The politesse of current arts funding muffles artists’ voices

Any rewards received by a pioneering buyer, reflecting an artists’ early career prices, need to be balanced against the gamble taken on his vision. And against the contribution that an artist like Hirst has and will make to British contemporary art’s commercial expansion.

When he graduated from Goldsmith’s, Hirst worked in the back room of an established Cork Street gallery, learning how the art business works from the inside. Strategic application of Hirst’s market insight was of tremendous assistance to his London gallery, the newly opened White Cube. Hirst is credited for leading the pace of owner Jay Jopling’s formative market strategies. He now owns the building White Cube operates out of in East London.

The Report missed these important influences on how the natural evolution of the contemporary art works by miles, perhaps due to its heavy dependence on the public sector as the authority vested with providing stimulus and industrial analysis of financial growth for the Australian visual arts economies.

Also failing to gain sufficient attention in the Report is the value of artists’ work supported by Federal and State Arts Grants, when it sells in the commercial marketplace.

An emerging artist’s work is often far harder to sell in the earlier years of his or her exhibiting career, until reputations are established and commercial demand is achieved. This raises an important commercial and arts spending policy question.

What happens to the public revenue advanced , spent on building a work of art by an emerging artist, when it does eventually sell? Funding assistance helps make work for sales in the commercial market, without repayment to the public purse and effectively selling art works for twice their value. This equation is rarely analysed in assessments of how the Australian commercial art market works. If an artist’s commercial exhibiting career goes well, value is constantly being added to his or her earlier publicly assisted work. Critically, artists’ first exhibited work is often stronger and less compromised than when his or her sales markets become established, and are therefore more desirable for public galleries’ collections. It is an historical irony of the visual arts, that the more comfortable an artist becomes economically and culturally about the acceptance of his or her ideas, the less dangerous his/her work seems, at least on the surface.

But this is as much a factor of the processes of cultural acceptance of innovative new ideas, as it is grounds for perceptions of compromised artistic integrity, due to market demands. It is also a reality too infrequently examined by Australian visual arts-policy experts, furthering the perceived hostilities between the public and commercial sectors in the industry.

Such gross anomalies will continue to flourish in visual arts public spending strategies, until we’re prepared to accept that contemporary art is an inherently elitist business. One that is unaffordable for all but a few select individuals, and running totally against the grain of current pluralistic social agendas.

Public collections are, of course, one of our society’s finest antidotes to the art market’s socially exclusive zone of support for the nation’s riskiest creative output. Indeed, early publicly assisted art works are often those same examples that frequently end up in public collections. Although contradictorily, purchased at a far higher price than when first released unsuccessfully into the art marketplace. Is it time the visual arts sector did its sums on the long term value of subsidizing emerging artists’ work?

Like all luxury products, contemporary art’s price increases due to shortages in production caused by increased market demands, as well as heightened critical appraisal and active public exposure. Consequently, that early publicly subsidized work is highly likely to have substantially increased in value, before it actually sells in the market place. These are market realities that no amount of strategic policy in the visual arts can withstand or divert into political objectives.

The Report recommends royalties be paid from the resale of works of art in the secondary market - in line with US and European droit de suit initiatives. This is so fair, it’s not funny. Artists have been shaping our visual perceptions of contemporary culture for eons, without getting a lick of revenue for the historical consequences of their efforts.

For instance, American pop artist Jasper Johns’ quintessential 1956 "Green Target" painting sold in the late 1950s for as little as $4,000 US. It was the same year that Marlon Brando gave his brilliantly studied performance in "On the Waterfront".