Arts Funding - Your money is my money so shut up and hand it over
Ah. The arts funding industrial complex. For whom access to other people’s money is not just an obligation on us but a human right for them. Where customers and tax payers just need to cough up their money and shut the hell up.
In an appropriately titled opinion piece in last week’s AFR, Louise Adler wrote:
Adler refers to the case list year where as she put it:
there is no evidence to support the proposition that three young actors in keffiyeh at a Sydney Theatre Company opening night or a Palestinian writer at Adelaide Writers’ Week provoked divisiveness in the community or contributed to the rise of antisemitism.
Perhaps so. But should those people who paid their good money be forced to consume what they did not ask for or pay for?
Why do the narcistic view of these “three young actors” take primacy over patrons, the management of the Sydney Theatre Company, or their colleagues?
Where is the ACCC? Is there a consumer law issue here where patrons paid for entertainment and instead got posturing.
If these artists wanted to make a political statement, it is their right to do so. But not on the shoulders and expense of others. They should just put on their sandwich boards and march up and down George Street.
But then Adler neatly pivoted from voluntary arts contributions to compulsory arts contributions by way of government funding. Adler fails to recognise that government funding is not sourced from donations by tax collections at the point of a gun.
Citizens, perhaps not happily, accept this compact on the agreement that their funds aren’t used for divisive or sectarian purposes. Adds Adler:
The most recent embarrassing example – the announcement and cancellation of Khaled Sabsabi as our representative to the Venice Biennale – is a particularly egregious case study.
Embarrassing? Really? Embarrassing for who?
Egregious? Really? Why pray tell?
Novice opposition arts spokesperson, Senator Claire Chandler, lacking visual arts expertise, launched herself with an ill-informed obvious question: “Why is the Albanese government allowing the person who highlighted a terrorist leader in his artwork to represent Australia on the international stage?”
Ah. Before one can criticise the appropriateness in the use of public funds, one must be an expert. With visual arts expertise in this case.
It would stretch credulity to breaking point to imagine the hapless senator had any knowledge of the video installation made some 20 years earlier or was aware that the artist withdrew from the Sydney Festival some years ago over its tone-deaf acceptance of $20,000 from the Israeli government.
You see. Adler and her ilk are apparently experts, visual arts experts, and they must be obeyed. The people from whom money is taken by force, and their representatives get no say.
Adler continued:
Opinions should be welcomed and attended to with due seriousness. But there is an important difference between a well-meaning donor with an amateur’s love of the arts and the expertise of the artist or the arts manager.
Ah. But Ms Adler. There is also a different between a donor and a tax payer. Voluntary versus compulsory.
Much like the difference where I to come to you Ms Adler, inviting you to buy a banana stapled to a board and you declined versus my showing up with a bunch of people with guns and demanding you buy the banana.
Voluntary versus compulsory. See the difference.
Adler concludes:
We all support organisations whose values align with our own. When those values don’t, we are perfectly entitled to take our support elsewhere.
Correct. Absolutely correct. And this is what happened with Sabsabi. Taxpayers took their support elsewhere.
Said also Adler:
In the increasingly troubled relationship between donors and artists, it is becoming difficult to figure out which hand is feeding and which is being bitten.
No it’s not difficult. It is donors and taxpayers who are feeding. It has always been thus and will always be thus.