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The Australian Ballet presents The Dream, a triple bill of works by master choreographer Frederick Ashton, during a dress rehearsal at the Opera House in Sydney on April 28, 2015. The performance will be running from April 29, to May 16. AFP PHOTO / Saeed KHANSAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty Images
‘Yet even as he panders to those who’d like to see the council entirely abolished, Brandis must also satisfy a different constituency, the Liberal traditionalists.’ Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images
‘Yet even as he panders to those who’d like to see the council entirely abolished, Brandis must also satisfy a different constituency, the Liberal traditionalists.’ Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP/Getty Images

Captain's calls and culture war: the future of Australian arts

This article is more than 8 years old
Jeff Sparrow

George Brandis’s new funding regime is a double dose for artists: interventions on behalf of the Liberal party’s base, and precarious employment

“Viciously ungrateful.”

That was Malcolm Turnbull’s description of the artists boycotting last year’s Biennale festival, an episode that seems to have spurred George Brandis’ new arts funding policy.

At first glance, the transfer of $104m from the Australia Council to a National Programme for Excellence in the Arts (NPEA) seems merely incoherent, particularly for an administration pledging to end waste and cut red tape.

By definition, the new body must duplicate the current procedures by which the Australia Council processes the thousands of funding applications it receives. The peer system enables the council to call, as needed, on specialist skillsets for its selection process.

What will the NPEA do instead? Given it’s been created as an alternative to peer assessment, the adjudication of “excellence in the arts” will presumably depend upon a fresh legion of bureaucrats. One imagines they will expect rather more by way of recompense than the small honorariums that Australia Council assessors traditionally receive.

But the peculiarities of the program begin to make sense when we consider the competing interests that Liberal policy must balance.

In an era of declining party memberships, the Liberal party uses American-style culture war to recruit and retain its activists, a cadre whipped into a permanent frenzy by climate denial blogs, shock jocks and tabloid columnists. These rightwing populists regard the arts with a mixture of incredulity and fury. As far back as 2006, culture war generalissimo Andrew Bolt was denouncing artists for “living in ghettoes of hate” and demanding they be “assimilated” into the mainstream.

The Biennale boycott – a gesture by artists (bad!) on behalf of refugees (worse!) – infuriated the party base, so much so that Brandis insisted that the Australia Council henceforth deny funding to anyone who refused any private sector backing offered to them.

Yet even as he panders to those who’d like to see the council entirely abolished, Brandis must also satisfy a different constituency, the Liberal traditionalists who embrace the Anglophile values of the party founded by Robert Menzies. Evenings at the opera, season tickets to the ballet, champagne in ritzy theatres: such things matter to the old money patricians and corporate sophisticates who exercise considerable influence in the Liberal party and for whom Bolt’s readers are mouth-breathing oiks.

A policy that disrupted their art would be disastrous for Brandis. Hence he has steered a careful path between the two competing interest groups.

Since the budget, the 28 major performing arts companies have been reassured that their funding will be left untouched. The glitzy opening nights can, in other words, proceed as scheduled. At the same time, the Australia Council has been given a mighty kicking, much to the delight of the Liberal base. The money snatched from it will instead be available for dispensation by bureaucrats reporting directly to the minister, facilitating what might be dubbed arts funding via captain’s call.

Expect, then, more interventions along the lines of Brandis’ notorious decision to bypass usual processes as to grant a huge sum to the boutique classical label Melba Music, an outfit that’s received extraordinary patronage over a long period of time. Grants have already been announced for the Australian ballet and Bell Shakespeare. Expect also prolonged culture war, with the small to medium arts organisations chastised or rewarded according to their willingness to shut up and sing (or paint or dance or write).

The Turnbull rhetoric about artistic ingratitude becomes thus particularly important, since it papers over the (at least potential) contradiction between the two constituencies Brandis wants to service.

The neoliberals of the IPA might urge the complete abolition of the Australia Council but that’s never been a serious option. For were the free market simply unleashed, high art would be among the first casualties, with traditional forms like opera (hugely expensive and with a very niche audience) pretty much disappearing.

Brandis must, then, defend state support to the arts, even while attacking many of those who currently receive it. The insistence of “gratitude” reinforces the old-fashioned relationship between the patron and those artists he or she favours. If you’re putting on shows that rich people like to see – and you give a fulsome acknowledgement to your sponsor – you’re all right. If, however, you bite the hand that feeds you (by, say, caring about the fate of refugees), you’re an ingrate and, by God, you’ll get what’s coming to you.

All of that’s entirely obvious. But there’s another, perhaps more interesting, way to discuss arts policy, one that turns the discussion away from aesthetics and toward industrial relations.

It involves thinking about those affected by Australia Council funding not simply as the creators of art but as workers, individuals trying to make a living in an industry that receives only a relatively tiny government subsidy. In a 2013 piece, Alison Croggon noted that, in the previous year, “Australian industry as a whole – including agriculture, food manufacturing and service industries – was given an estimated $17.3bn in combined assistance (a mixture of direct subsidies, tax breaks, tariffs and regulatory assistance).”

When discussing arts funding, she said, the relevant figure was “$500m annually, out of a total tax revenue in 2011–12 of $390bn – that is, about 0.1% of total government expenditure”. Back then, the relevant figure for the Australia Council was slightly over $200m.

What do we know about the working lives of Australian artists? The most recent study of artists and their financial circumstances was conducted back in 2010. It found that more than half of the nation’s professional artists earn less than $10,000 per year from their artistic work. Obviously, that’s not a living income, particularly given that it’s generally expected that artists pay for their own training and to keep their skills up to date. How, then, do they survive?

Basically, Australian artists eke out a living by putting together a variety of income sources, some arts-related and some not. They take short-term contracts. They freelance. They teach. When they get a full-time arts job, they usually do so conscious that it will not last, and they’ll soon be looking for another gig.

“Nowadays,” explain researchers David Throsby and Anita Zednik, “few artists follow the traditional linear trajectory beginning with training, passing through an emerging phase, arriving at establishment, and continuing with a life devoted exclusively to a core creative practice.

“Rather the concept of ‘portfolio careers’ has emerged, characterised by a variety of work arrangements, some involving original creative work, some applying skills more widely, some requiring team participation, some taking time out from creative work for further study, travel, research, and so on.”

What’s intriguing is that the experience they describe sounds very much like an extreme example of the model of employment increasingly imposed on the workforce as a whole throughout the developed world. The British academic Guy Standing writes, for instance, about the emergence of what he calls the “precariat” – “a multitude of insecure people, living bits-and-pieces lives, in and out of short-term jobs, without a narrative of occupational development … the precariat’s relations of production are defined by partial involvement in labour combined with extensive ‘work-for-labour’, a growing array of unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings.”

As Clay Lucas noted back in 2012, about 40% of the workforce in Australia are now in non-permanent jobs, “making making us something of a world leader in developing a casualised workforce”. In the US, Sarah Grey identifies a similar phenomenon. She argues that approximately 23 million Americans – more than a third of the total workforce – “have engaged in supplemental, temporary, or project- or contract-based work in the past 12 months”.

For Standing, the precariat is a new phenomena, the result of globalisation and the attendant imposition of casualisation and workplace flexibility, particularly in the wake of the global financial crisis. Others, however, have suggested that, in fact, the long economic boom after the second world war created an anomalous pattern of secure employment and what we’re now seeing is a return to the normal experience of capitalism.

In an interesting interview for Jacobin, Charlie Post rejects Standing’s terminology on the basis that the precariousness he describes was once entirely commonplace: “If you look at the condition of workers before the first world war, say in the 1890s, the vast majority of working people lived an incredibly precarious existence.”

On the Flinders Street extension in Melbourne, you can still find the remnants of what was known as the Wailing Wall: the site where wharf labourers used to congregate looking for work on the docks. In the early years of the 20th century, jobs on the waterfront were allocated according to the notorious “Bull System”, which meant that the foreman arbitrarily selected or rejected the employees he wanted each day. As the unionist Tom Hill explained in Wendy Loewenstein’s oral history Under the Hook, “[the foreman] would point – say, “You! You! You!’. [The men] used to wear all sorts of fancy hats, put their arms up, to attract the foreman’s attention”.

Ironically, wharfies and other blue-collar occupations today enjoy relative job security, the legacy of bitter union struggles fought during the second half of the century. It’s often in newer white-collar industries without strong union traditions that precariousness reigns supreme. Think, for instance, of higher education, where the modern universities employ an army of casuals, part time lecturers who do not know from semester to semester whether their contracts will be renewed.

As Thomas Frank says about the “lumpen-profs” of the American university system, “teaching college students steadily becomes an occupation for people with no tenure, no benefits, and no job security”. It’s not quite the Bull System – but anyone working in higher education will identify with Hill’s description of the desperate need to stay in the good graces of an employer who can simply refuse to re-employ you on pretty much any basis whatsoever.

What does this have to do with art?

The populist contrast between feckless artists and the taxpayers on whom they’re said to be leaching usually rests on an invocation of the ordinary Australian as a stolid fellow in fulltime employment, feeding his family via a steady nine to five job in which he stays throughout his life. Actually, in the 21st century, that supposed norm is becoming more and more anomalous, even as the precariousness of the artist becomes increasingly common. No matter what your profession, it’s up to you to be job-ready, to travel to where the work is, to do whatever’s necessary to get your share of the crumbs.

But aren’t artists different simply because they get to make art? An actor might earn less than the minimum wage. She might have to hustle for teaching work and schmooze directors for a few hours here and a few dollars there, in between holding down a cleaning job to pay her bills. But she’s doing what she loves – and isn’t that the main thing?

In a 2010 piece on the Throsby and Zednik study, Rebecca Baillie from the ABC’s 7.30 program interviewed Kirstie McCracken and Byron Perry, highly-regarded dancers whose working life is fairly typical for artists. It’s worth quoting the transcript at length:

KIRSTIE MCCRACKEN: Byron did a job once between gigs to earn a little bit of money that was packing boxes.

BYRON PERRY, DANCER: And I earned more packing boxes per hour than you did as a dancer.

KIRSTIE MCCRACKEN: And we did think for a minute - even though we love this, we thought, you know, that’s bad! You don’t need an education or any sort of skill to pack boxes.

BYRON PERRY: Any training - or as long as you got two hands. You don’t even need legs to pack boxes.

KIRSTIE MCCRACKEN: So that was a slightly depressing moment, wasn’t it?

BYRON PERRY: So ...

KIRSTIE MCCRACKEN: But anyway.

VINCE CROWLEY, DANCER: I reckon you always have days where you go, “What the hell have I done with my life?”’

Nonetheless, the report ended on an optimistic note, with Perry explaining, “Although we’re not rich, we’re very happy”.

It’s a sentiment with which many artists would agree. Of course, you don’t have to be a dancer to take pride in what you do, to think that your occupation’s worthwhile and that your job’s worth doing. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, paramedics – all kinds of people experience a definite pleasure in the exercise of their skills.

Indeed, it’s another way in which the working experiences of artists are being generalised: namely, people in all manner of fields are expected to trade off decent wages and conditions in the name of job satisfaction.

Miya Tokumitsu draws attention to the popularity of Steve Jobs’ injunction to “do what you love,” a phrase attributed to a graduation address that the Apple CEO gave in 2005. “You’ve got to find what you love,” he said. “And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

It’s not a coincidence that the slogan originated in the IT industry, a field in which the shift to precarity has been underway for some time. As IT skills became more common and corporations began to outsource, the managers of tech companies urged the staff members they were downsizing to think of themselves not as programmers but as creatives.

An IT worker might want job security and benefits and penalty rates; an artist, on the other hand, would merely be thankful for any opportunity to do creative work. You might no longer have a guaranteed position. You might be freelancing or taking short term contracts as they were offered. But you were doing what you loved – and that should be recompense enough.

As Tokumitsu puts it, “according to this way of thinking, labor is not something one does for compensation, but an act of self-love” – which is pretty much the traditional view of artistic labour.

It’s not hard to understand why the labour practices of the artist fit so perfectly with the needs of 21st century capitalism. The art world is still dominated by a romantic notion of creativity, one that emphasises individual genius. While many artists have liberal politics, they’re also often committed to building their own profile through competitive achievement. Artists are not unionised – indeed, many are deeply suspicious of collectivity. The desperation of many creative people to succeed means they’re often willing to underquote, to put in extra hours, to accept unpaid internships and even to work for free.

For employers, these are all desirable attributes, and ones that they’d dearly like to see emulated in other professions.

There is, however, a problem, one that brings us back to Brandis’ Australia Council reforms. The romantic idea of creativity might be reactionary in all manner of ways but it’s a concept tightly connected to ideas of freedom and self-expression, which are much less welcome in the 21st century workplace.

From the CEO’s perspective, it’s terrific if the freelance web designer thinks of herself as an artist – so long as by that she means that she’ll work overtime because she loves what she does so much. It’s much less terrific if her artistic sensibility emboldens her to speak to a newspaper about the sexist images the company wants the page to feature.

In that sense, the ideological policing that the Brandis policy will facilitate needs to be seen in a broader context. The rhetoric about ungrateful artists harks back to the lifters versus leaners guff from the previous budget and Joe Hockey’s insistence that the age of entitlement had come to an end.

But the desire to punish those who speak out of turn isn’t merely directed at artists. Yes, the Brandis scheme will enable the Liberals to punish anyone joining any future artistic boycotts. But it also represents a warning to workers in other industries.

Think, for instance, of the recent shenanigans at SBS, with the sackings of Scott McIntyre and Marion Ives over social media postings. Ives, of course, was a casual employee, whose dismissal in the middle of the shift – allegedly on the basis of a Facebook update – exemplifies the awful insecurity of “flexible” employment.

The generalisation of precarious work in and of itself necessitates a clampdown on employees’ free speech, lest they start to complain about the conditions to which they’re being subjected. Traditionally, the art world provided a certain degree of protection for dissenters, something that the old funding system recognised. But that kind of thing can be contagious, which is why it’s being snuffed out.

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