Bread & Circuses Part 2

So There Was A Protest Yesterday...

Make of this what you will.

Dancers were out in force in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday as part of Australia-wide protests against more than $100m in cuts to the country's top arts funding body, the Australia Council. Around 100 artists and members of the arts industry turned up to perform the so-called 'dance action'. Arts minister George Brandis attracted criticism for his decision to cut funding in the May budget.

I learnt of this protest action late last night at a dinner, marking the launch of Vivid Sydney 2015, which is ironic because Vivid Sydney - as far as anybody can tell - is a kind of state-sponsored arts festival and if people got money from the Australia Council to do artistic things, that too is a State-spomsored art, as much as any arts body person who receives the money from George Brandis' office directly. It's all a kind of propaganda more than proper art, and by proper, I mean art that finds both creation and audience from the artist's own practice and application. Without a doubt it goes to what I wrote about in my recent entry, about bread and circuses.

As somebody whose arts repertoire is rock music and film and writing, it's really quite hard to relate to the artists who need government monies to continue their craft. If you are a ballet dancer or a fine Shakespearean actor, chances are you need to work with some kind of body that gets this state-sponsorship. Those people are working in an area of the arts where the market is no guarantee to sustain you, and in turn, there are heavy cultural reasons to sustain these arts. This is why we have the  theatre companies and dance companies we have - good or not-so-good as they may be. I myself am not a great fan of these big old arts companies but it is clear that we need an active pool of practitioners to sustain the entire arts in general.

That being said, if you play rock music like I do, you fund yourself, and your entire adventures are risks you bear by yourself. Nobody I know ever got an arts grant from the Australia Council to record their rock album; and that's probably the way it should be. As a film maker in Australia, the majority of my production experience has been outside the funding structure. Any time I have approached bodies it has been painful, humiliating, insulting and irrelevant so I can't say I'm a big fan of the government sponsorship model of cinema any more. As for writing, well, here you are reading what I do in my spare hours and there's no government money involved here. I was working on a novel for a while but it's not like I was getting government sponsorship money at any time while I did so. I know writers who do, but it's just different when you take the government's money.

You get the picture. I'm a pretty committed arts practitioner but I have the strong (but odd) 'luxury' of not having to answer to a government body. The exchange for this luxury is that my life is nothing like my friends who are not in the arts. My friends who are in the arts are similarly afflicted with very non-standard living arrangements and family arrangements. It's not a light exchange - it's heavy, man. You do arts in Australia and you can count out the normal arrangements for family unless you're born rich.

Here's an article in the SMH that describes things bit better.

Arts leaders have stepped up their campaign against the federal government's cuts to the Australia Council in a national day of protest that included a "mass dance action" to demonstrate their displeasure. 

About 300 people turned out in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday despite wet conditions and performed the "hoofer dance" from a clip by Melbourne band Fondue Set. 

Speakers echoed Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's comments that the transfer of $105 million from the Australia Council to the new National Program for Excellence in the Arts, controlled by the arts ministry, was a politicised power grab by Arts Minister George Brandis.

Hmmm. 300 people. Like Spartans of Art at the Thermopylae for government funding, dancing in protest.

I was lambasted at the dinner table for not being there at the protest, by an artist who did go to the protest. I told him, for a start I didn't even know it was happening, and secondly I was at work at that time. I got further lambasted for my self-interest but really, who is an artist angry about how government funds the arts to judge somebody who actually has to work for a living in the arts industry, and doesn't have the liberty to go protesting at the drop of a hat?

As I wrote a few days ago, it's not like I'm not sympathetic, but we're talking about entire programs of funding the arts from the government. Colour me somewhat unimpressed. I do understand the problem for people who do rely on the government and may be somewhat institutionalised in their need for the government to dispense its funding in the way it has established for over 45years. George Brandis is cutting off the teat from which they suckle. That would be rough.

The complaint is that George Brandis has taken 104 million dollars out of Australia Council and is going to give it to his favourite artists directly on the basis of ideological alignment. Yes, it totally sucks and is perfectly in line with what the Nazi government did in the 1930s and I say that without any equivocation or exaggeration. It is highly suspect, if not downright rotten. With that part of it, I certainly agree. George Brandis is essentially behaving like Dr. Goebbels but without the Jew-Killing program. I get it.

"So why weren't you there at the protest?" I was asked. "Self-interest kept you away!" the artist thundered.

Partly because that $104 million will still go to some person(s) in the arts. Just not the regular Australia Council roster recipients. It's not like it got completely taken away from the arts and given to constructing a football stadium or something of the ilk. It's still, presumably going to some other parts of the arts industry who are presumably not so stridently pro-ALP and anti-Coalition. It sucks that it's going to some reactionary, but it's still going to the arts - just not to the classic trendy Left crowd. Is this really as big a protest-worthy-thing as say, asylum seekers on boats being sent to Manus Island?

I still had to explain my Jean-Paul Sartre reasoning from 'Age of Reason' as to why the main character Mathieu does not go fight in Spain during the Spanish civil war. That he would only fight if the war was at his doorstep. Which earned me the charge of "a kind of xenophobia for other forms of arts". But it's unfortunately true. If you're me, it's really hard to sit there and try to relate to the plight of, oh I don't know, something like the Bangarra Dance company when I work for an arts company that worked its way up from the ground up without any direct or indirect government fund injection; or the plight of an artist who needs government funding to pay for materials when I've bought all my gear to do my recordings; or to some writer who needs funding to go buy time to write stuff when all you really need is pen, paper and the commitment to write.

These 300 artists protesting, as self-important as they may be, are so distant to my own experience of being an arts practitioner that they may as well be from ancient Greece. In the broadest strokes, if you were getting money for your work before from the state, and now you are not, the general term for that condition is, you got fired. The reason you get fired at most workplaces is if your work is not good enough. You can protest your layoff all you like and you do get my sympathy as a fellow practitioner, but it does make me wonder if your work is any good at all.

As you can imagine that conversation didn't go down well with the artist at all.