OPINION: Arts funding cuts are a perennial headache of the artist, arts organisation, and general, fun-loving citizen. Every election cycle, both local and general, the funding of our beloved arts infrastructure is marched to the gallows, where its worth or worthlessness, depending on your proclivity, is debated at length.
And it can get pretty woolly, pretty fast. In 2022, the Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival was denied its bid for $30,000 funding from Creative NZ to pay for an executive assistant and succession planning. What followed was a outsized public uproar over the alleged cancellation of Shakespeare – an uproar that made it to international headlines – even though the festival was never at risk of being cancelled. The funding decision became a tinder box wherein disparate cultural values and disinformation within our society played out in public. The Sheila Winn debacle got so out of hand that other successful funding applications were ridiculed by those on the right who had deemed Creative NZ had been overtaken by the “woke left” and even saw staff at Creative NZ become the targets of racist abuse.
Earlier this year, the coalition government has been castigating local councils for their supposed open wallets when it comes to “non-core activities” (i.e. the arts). A day after this public admonishment, however, it was revealed that the government had just approved $750,000 in funding for the World Crew Dance Championship, and they were promptly called out for their hypocrisy.
Look, I’ve got nothing against dance competitions. It’s certainly worthy of public funding. But the funding of it reveals the centrist priorities of political parties whenever they deign to engage in the arts: that it better put New Zealand on the world map, it better be within the realms of good ol’ fashioned capitalist competition, and it better be easy to understand and enjoy (none of that conceptualist crap please).
Most recently, the Act Party has reignited its protracted and bafflingly bitter campaign against poet Tusiata Avia. Either through prejudiced ignorance or, more likely, deliberate disinformation, the Act Party has repeatedly accused Creative NZ of directly funding a poem by Avia that is “racist” to white people. Just two weeks ago, after the poet received the Senior Pacific Artist Award at the 2024 Arts Pasifika Awards, Act protested the poem’s funding yet again – despite this funding having been administered back in 2020.
How can we stop the predictable cycle of arts funding cuts, if it’s even possible in the first place? How do we better articulate its worthiness? Each time a beloved art gallery, celebrated poet, or after school theatre sports programme is put on the chopping block, our defences invariably include one or more of the following arguments:
1. The arts are good for our wellbeing.
Arguments in favour of arts funding usually extoll the benefits to an individual and collective sense of wellbeing. The arts and culture sector is said to make a significant contribution to our “social wellbeing”, “cultural wellbeing” and “community wellbeing” by virtue of its placemaking, community-empowering, and resilience-inducing activities. But what does this actually mean?
Sweeping statements like these are part of a wider trend in public policy to attempt to factor in wellbeing to all sorts of major decisions where the health and quality of life of citizens had rarely been considered previously, but which would be irrevocably affected by such decisions. Think, for example, of the decision to offload grey water into our seas, which is good for the council’s bottom dollar, but bad for our health.
This trend can be traced back to a 1968 speech by Robert F Kennedy, who criticised the GDP as the only indicator of a nation’s prosperity, arguing that “it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.” This conviction endures today: in 2019, the Labour Government released the first ‘Wellbeing Budget’ (rather than its usual title of ‘Budget’) which sought to design the government’s budget around wellbeing indicators, rather than solely economic ones.
More broadly, the past decade has been named by some as a ‘wellness era’ with the prevalence of woo-woo brands like Goop, ‘clean girl’ beauty trends, therapy-speak and work-place meditation rooms. However, this decade is decidedly over, and these trends are rightly criticised for the pathological pursuit of self-optimisation and the paradoxical pressure to achieve mental enlightenment.
Therefore, these arguments of wellbeing have a dulling effect on my ears. The terms wellbeing and wellness have been so distorted, overused and rarely clarified, that they obfuscate rather than illuminate when it comes to articulating the impact the arts have on our lives.
But it is true, that when you have had a long work week and a depressingly dwindling bank account to show for it, or when your landlord has increased your rent by 7% (for inflation, they say) but a head of broccoli at the supermarket now costs $6, it can be such sweet relief to be pulled out of the boredom of a quotidian existence by an unexpected art installation on your usually-dodgy walk under the overpass near your house. And it can feel so good to laugh with a crowd to the latest improv comedy show at the Basement Theatre (who knew New Zealand comedians could be so good at improv? Who knew one can enjoy improv?).
Not to sound too macabre, but the ability to experience arts and cultural events at an affordable price can sometimes be the thin line between keeping our heads above water or just throwing in the towel. Or “wellbeing,” in other words.
2. Artists contribute to the economy.
This one is true, but it just feels icky. The fact that the arts contribute to 4% of the nation’s economy is often thrown around, and there is a current swell of arguments that “art is work.” This argument is often made to try and demonstrate the skill, industriousness, and business savvy that artists cultivate and use to make meaningful contributions to the economy. They are, therefore, working just as hard as the rest of us and are by no means luxuriating at home with their feet up.
This argument feels “icky” because it buys into the idea that people must work in order to be of any real value to society at all. I don’t need to know how hard artists worked in order to enjoy their art. I don’t need to know how many months, long nights, tears, and sweat it took Enya to write and record her Watermark album. I just like Enya! I also don’t need to know how many gruelling meetings, rewrites, rehearsals, and arguments it took for Basmati Bitch to be staged, or how many people were employed in its orbit to be able to laugh at the jokes, to feel the stakes. I appreciate the effort of course, but the art speaks for itself.
Arts practitioners represent a spectrum of political proclivities, from those who sit squarely in the middle of the art market, selling their wares to wealthy collectors, or those who pace at the periphery of the flow of money in and out of the arts, maintaining a Marxist ideology while also trying to cover their rent through their arts practice. There will be varying degrees of comfort artists have in relation to capital. But the arts can be understood much like universities – they are meant to exist outside the incentives of the market economy, where there’s no bottom line to uphold, but instead, where the freedom is given to pursue knowledge, beauty, or the unknown. The ‘economy’ complicates this pursuit.
3. The arts are essential for achieving social cohesion.
Defences of art that use this argument tend to note how the expression of different cultures through creative and artistic mediums ensure we are exposed to difference, and that difference is embraced and celebrated, therefore enabling greater social cohesion. Social cohesion can be understood as the aspiration to live well together in a diverse democracy in which we peacefully navigate disagreement towards the common good.
The arts are one of the most important tools in the toolbox to combat alienation, hate and disinformation. Influential artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Keith Haring and Derek Jarman subverted fear and misconceptions around people living with HIV, acting as key forces in a movement to demand greater investment into public health measures and treatment research. More recently, artist and photographer Nan Goldin staged protests of the Sackler family’s responsibility in the opioid epidemic, at the very gallery they had philanthropically backed.
Defences of arts funding need to learn from the above artists and lay out the stakes to their fullest extent. We are now living in a time where the far-right is creeping further into the mainstream in major global players such as France and the UK, places that can have alarming influence on New Zealand. What happens abroad can quickly catch fire in New Zealand – there is no protective bubble around us, we might be far away from the far-right riots across the UK following the Southport murders, but that fear and hate can ignite within our society at an alarming pace. Just as the Canadian anti-vax truckers’ protest influenced the anti-mandate (and inevitably racist and conspiratorial) occupation of Parliament grounds in Wellington, 2022. Yes, we want to achieve social cohesion, but using these words do not effectively strike at the real risks associated with underfunding efforts to bring people closer together.
The arts should be understood as a preventative measure – the more you are exposed to difference (especially through enjoyable means such as the arts) you are less likely to feel threatened by it.
*
The above defences of art are accurate and justified, but they still somehow continue to fall flat. They may have been able to ward off a particularly brutal proposal to slash Auckland Council’s arts and culture funding, but it hasn’t done enough to ward off the prying eyes of our current government, so it is very possible those original proposed cuts might come back on to the council’s table.
Those who seek to cut arts funding often claim they aren’t against the arts, but that they believe it more appropriate that the arts seek investment elsewhere, such as private sector funding and philanthropy. The tastes of philanthropists are varied at best. But more importantly, if we only allow art to be commissioned and produced at the nexus of capital and power, art will cease to be anything other than a luxury good.
Recently, at the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park, there was a retrospective exhibition of American feminist artist Judy Chicago, most known for her sculptural installation titled The Dinner Party, a large-scale staging of vulva-shaped dinnerware, honouring overlooked women from history. The exhibition, spanning the artist’s career to date, showcased Chicago’s efforts to offer women (although mostly white women from the Western world) a ‘seat at the table.’
In the exhibition at the Serpentine, a small television screen played the real-life backlash to these efforts, in the form of footage of the U.S Congress’s debate over the funding of The Dinner Party (the University of the District of Columbia was to commission the work, and their budget was signed off by Congress). Congressmen (all men) decried the allocation of public funds on what they deemed “pornography,” referring to the abstracted vulvic shapes on her 39 dinner plates, honouring women such as Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe.
The political discourse surrounding the public funding of the arts is ubiquitous and inevitable. In fact, the public debate that predictably arises at every local election, general election, cabinet reshuffle, funding round, long term plan public consultation, and local board plan consultation, proves the inherent value of the arts. That which moves one to take notice, listen in, and inquire as to how public funds are spent locally (something not known for its sexiness) is worth something.
Art is used by conservative politicians as a smokescreen, to waggle a finger at something subjective and taste-based that will reliably pull people’s attention away from more pressing matters. So why do we (those who wish to defend the arts) buy into this game? And why do we do so with such woolly and outdated notions of value?
By enfolding that footage of US Congress fear-mongering and arguing over the funding of her art, Chicago was embracing the discourse, rather than being in conflict with it. By doing so, all apparent well-intentioned concern over objectionable material dissolved away, and the cynical political manoeuvrings of the Congressmen were laid out in plain sight.
I do not have an answer to the provocation of this essay’s title, but that is because I’m no artist myself – and perhaps they are who we should be looking to for the best defence.
A case in point: Tusiata Avia recently quoted the work of fellow poet Oscar Wilde in her response to Act’s incessant scapegoating. “If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all.”
Avia refers to Wilde’s 1891 essay The Soul of a Man Under Socialism which continues: “The moment he seeks to exercise authority he becomes the avowed enemy of Art and of himself. Art does not mind. It is he who suffers.”
