The Arts - Just Entertainment, or a Testament to Our Civilisation?

Since the ancient Egyptians the state has always been inclined to build monuments and so leave a trace of its material splendour. This remains a generally accepted philosophy of governments today.

But what of more ephemeral things like the performing arts?

In the past, the governments of northern Europe treated the performing arts quite generously. Today, musicians, actors, singers, and dancers still have a decent salary, often paid for 13 months of the year, and governments don’t mind giving money to the arts because they are seen by the populace as positive and valuable.But even there, since the decline of communism and the "victory" of capitalism and economic rationalism, the performing arts have had to battle a lot more than they did 20 years ago.

Even left-wing governments, previously acknowledged for their support of the arts (especially in Europe), follow a different path today. The famous "middle road" of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair has spread to many other nations. It looks, in many cases, just like a right-wing policy explained with a different philosophy: "Companies, and people, have to be helped to achieve but not by pouring money into them"; "The private sector must take more of its share of the burden"; and so on.

A world which is governed by economic rationalism is not healthy for the arts because its benefits to the community, like those of the environment, are not easy to quantify.

Our federal Minister for the Arts has recently released the results of an inquiry into the state of the major performing arts companies in Australia. There is a much-publicised concern about the fact that the combined loss of these companies over the past 5 years has amounted to $12 million.

Placed in an international perspective, this figure is not particularly large - the entire annual budget for the arts allocated by the Commonwealth government (around AUD$94 million) is similar to the budget of one opera house in the city of Hamburg (AUD$85 million). Australia has a population of 18 million; Hamburg has 1.8 million citizens.

However, I don’t believe that the issue in Australia is so much financial as political and social.

When one analyses the flow of money given to a performing arts company, a good part of it comes back to the city or state very quickly and many services profit from it directly. In addition to the obvious services provided by restaurants, taxis, and hairdressers, many local industries profit from the performing arts through the supply of materials, machinery, and technical equipment. And this is before considering the money spent in the area and contributed through taxes by people directly employed by the industry.

I’m sure too that economists in Australia are only too aware of the financial loss in taxes and to the general economy by the continued exodus of performers, educated in this country, who can only find permanent employment overseas. Many stay away for more than 20 years, easily the equivalent of a loss to the Australian economy of $1 million per artist.

Yet government support for the arts remains limited, and I feel the reason is that Australian governments do not view the arts as important. In our democratic society, this means that the population in general does not consider them very important, or sees them as ‘elitist’.

The ‘elitist’ tag is the core of the problem.

The performing arts are traditionally ‘of the people’ in many countries, responding to the needs of a people at a particular moment in history. For example it is quite understandable that a writer such as Bertolt Brecht would emerge from post-war Germany, a period of great self-analysis, uncertainty and introspection. On the other hand, Australia, a country of light and open space, which has seen little conflict on its own soil, would be very unlikely to produce an author with these inclinations. In other words, art and its audience develop naturally from their environment.

The imposition of artificial political or intellectual agendas on this natural development does not do the arts a service. In fact it further increases their elitist reputation. Works become too far removed from audience needs, and a disappointed public is driven further towards the popular commercial entertainments which are predictable, unchallenging, and involve little or no risk.

So what can we in the performing arts industry do to remove this elitist stigma? How do we survive without becoming completely commercial?

First, as long as we have enough support from government and sponsors to permit our existence, I see only one way to go - expand our audience and so convince more people of the value of the performing arts. A performing arts sector with strong public support has a much greater chance of survival.

Second, bearing in mind that it is impossible to please everybody, it is nevertheless possible to offer programs with enough layers of meaning and intention to appeal to a large number of people and to offer variety.

Finally I believe that personal feeling and convictions do play a part. The experience of some of the extraordinary moments of human truth and beauty is what makes the arts so precious. People who are given this experience will be more likely to support the arts.

In a world driven by economic rationalism and technology, I want to believe that our emotions are more than a flux of proteins going to the brain - they are precious; they are our humanity and that is what music, dance and theatre are all about.

As artists we have to defend those values and we can only do so by offering a quality product that many others can share. I often hear that we have to educate our audiences. I think it is more about communicating our passion. The rest will follow.