Is public money really cleaner than corporate money? Some reflections on the Sydney Biennale protests

The recent furore that has erupted around Sydney Bienniale artists rejecting corporate sponsorship brings to bear some important assumptions around the role of the artist in society, and how their activities are bankrolled.

In a nutshell, the Bienniale severed ties with sponsor Transfield Holdings as a protest against the corporation’s involvement in offshore detention centres. This has inspired a number of responses by government ministers. Most notably Arts Minister George Brandis threatened to pull funding from the event all together.

Interestingly, it seems that there is no currently existing legal or policy grounds for the minister to follow through on his threat, as reflected by his request to the Australia Council to formulate a policy to penalise organisations that refuse corporate sponsorship on “unreasonable grounds.” This should come as no surprise; the expectation that recipients of arts and cultural funding seek corporate sponsorship and improve revenue through growing audiences has been enshrined in cultural policy from Keating’s Creative Nation initiative 20 years ago.

More pertinent I think is Treasurer Joe Hockey’s seemingly innocuous observation that such a move is logically inconsistent, given that the Biennale relies on government for the lion share of its money and said government is also involved in offshore detention centres.

This raises the question: why do artists consider corporate dollars dirtier than public funding? Clearly the government consistently sees fit to invest in innumerable atrocities, including wars, prisons and detention centres, so why is its money deemed to be okay?

The answer, I think, lies in the misapprehension that Australia’s “arms length” system of funding allows artists to operate in an ideologically neutral zone, and create thought provoking and culturally pertinent art for the good of the public. It is an assumption that rests on the notion that art challenges political power, that it is practiced for the good of the public, and that it reflects the will of the public. 

Through my own research of SBS Independent as a publicly funded cultural institution, what was made abundantly clear was that no matter how well intentioned artists are, how much they aim to be a conduit of public debate, or to subvert State power from within its institutions, when artists receive money from government they ultimately become entangled within its bureaucracy and extend its reach and power within civic life. In order to qualify for “public” money, certain compromises need to be made and performance measures met. Ultimately, government’s only see fit to fund agendas that are consistent with their own, and which win public favour thereby securing their power into the future.

This means two things:
  • Government investments are not a direct reflection of the will of the public.
  • The content of art and creative labour practices is subtly transformed over time by this political, institutional and financial context. 
State financed art and culture is not, in other words an ideologically neutral zone located somewhere between public authority and private consumption. It is deeply embedded in both.

For alternative views on this topic see:

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/australia-culture-blog/2014/mar/14/australian-artists-respond-brandis-intervention-biennale-transfield?CMP=twt_fd

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/george-brandis-threatens-sydney-biennale-transfield-blackballing

http://www.hotheadlines.com.au/redirect.php?h=If_the_Sydney_Biennale_doesnt_need_Transfields_money_why_should_they_be_artsHub_Australia_subscription_&artid=3048638

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Only whites can be racist": debunking a very dangerous lie

Image
Yesterday, by way of anecdote, I proposed that academia is at least in part, responsible for the mainstream media acceptance and rationalisation of violent anti-white racism . See here if you missed it. Admittedly the points made were largely anecdotal and provided little in the way of evidence. What I offer today is more substantial in terms of evidence, and is provided in the form of a critique of what is a largely unchallenged field of study within the humanities, known as critical race and whiteness theory (CRW). My knowledge of CRW stems from my PhD research where I leaned the claims of the theory to discuss the representation of national identity in Australian film and television. If you are interested my dissertation is linked here . I am no longer a proponent of CRW theory and here’s why…  Critical race and whiteness (CRW) really began to coalesce as a theory within the humanities from the late 1990s. The interdisciplinary field CRW has deep roots within pos...
Read more

The Lack of Ethics in Cultural Policy Studies

Image
Cultural Policy Studies emerged as a distinct subfield within Cultural Studies in the early 1990s, and is distinguished from its parent field by its focus on activism through policy. Adherents of cultural studies have traditionally aimed to illuminate how power is maintained by an elite few in the West through its examination of cultural practices and meanings. Cultural policy studies goes one step further and involves itself within the institutions that actively regulate the cultural industries such that the inequalities exposed through cultural studies scholarship might be eliminated. The huge problem with this approach is that it is a blatant program of social engineering, and one which lacks any foundation of ethical principles to guide its practitioners.  Insofar as the field is founded upon the philosophies of the French postmodern thinkers of the 1960s and 70s such as Michel Foucault, who deny the possibility of objective truth, cultural value (criteria of artistic ...
Read more

What's so bad about Nazism?

Image
What is it about Nazism that people find so abhorrent? What are those elements of Nazism that we recognize in the words and actions of the politically empowered that make us rise up and say “no more”? Is it the harsh lesson of how quickly the forked tongue of a charismatic leader can whip up support to condemn a whole race of people to extermination? Is it the uncanny ability to identify the next despot, paving his or her road to political victory by spinning tales of unearned wealth and privilege accruing to an elite minority? Both sides of the contemporary political spectrum increasingly invoke Hitler to raise the alarm about the imminent danger of the next fascistic regime. It is however, towards the left that I pitch this question, because the Hitler-Nazi-Fascist triad has largely been invoked by the left to foreground the re-emergent politicization of race, and valorization of racism. And while I certainly do not condone racism I believe that this focus is detriment...
Read more