Retrain the Horse

Surely the most frustrating thing as a taxpayer, is corporate welfare. Seeing companies that can't generate enough value in the marketplace to turn their own profits needing subsidies to survive.
To me while their are merits to protectionism and subsidies for starting a new industry, there is none in finishing it, save to disguise unemployment and deny a source of labour to entrepreneurial ventures.

I am a firm believer in product for the market, not market for the product.

As Peter Drucker said in one of his many pearls of wisdom:

'If their was a ministry of Transport in 1900 we would still be riding in handsom cabs with an expensive program to "retrain the horse"'

So too with the arts it seems. I have to hand it to the ABC it has started its long overdue move from a reinforcer of Australia's British cultural identity to become more multicultural and multi-generational. Its probably still my strongest criticism of the station but to me it is still moving in the right direction.

An organisation I had never heard of called the Australian Council however is making no progress at all.



This was on a post Bryce had plugged by Marcus Westbury. Marcus appears to be much more informed than I am of the issues of arts funding and engaged in a number of active debates.

I would just say that when I saw this I was staggered by how skewed the funding is. If you asked me for another how much I would estimate the takings of various orchestras to be, I would assume that there would be markets for it in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and would have optimistically estimated their net income to be around $12 million combined.

I don't know, every time I've seen a symphony orchestra it has been free, but I assume there are some elderly people that would pay $600 for a season pass. Furthermore I would have predicted that these exorbitant prices would result in break even economics given the massive overheads. Same deal with Opera which at least in mainstream press has been regurly attacked as a shamozzle.

So the figure of 63 million sounds like propping up pretty much the entire Australian Orchestral music scene. Which is to say, it seems sadly that all this money is used to make music that cannot attract audiences of sufficient quality and quantity to pay what it costs for the music to be brought to them.

It frankly makes me angry, as someone who draws comics that nobody reads I understand the importance of being able to perform/create art regardless of its popularity or market viability. The difference being that I take responsibility that as yet, nobody is willing to pay me for what I'm currently doing.

If you want to play the tuba or violin and even have a passion for it, or become a conductor, yes it may take a lot of work, expensive tuition and upkeep of instruments and costumes.

But just because you have a passion for something, and strive for excellence in it, doesn't mean the world owes you a living from it. If you can, good for you, if not you should suck it up.

Furthermore councils and funding bodies need to put their dollars between the strong performers, not the weak performers. Keeping symphonies and other orchestras afloat comes at the expense of all those other listed art forms. Who is to argue that any of those people are any less passionate or dedicated, or that their artforms are any more or less culturally relevant.

The point being that even if you adopt the rational that say, theatre is still relatively popular than orchestral music, and literature certainly is quite the viable business. But that just means that a dollar invested in the stage or a book will go much further and stronger than a dollar sunk in some regional center's orchestra.

Furthermore you run the risk of creating a nest egg mentality, where the culture of management behind these arts becomes reliant on hand feeding and no longer feels accountable to its audience.

I'm no fan of Andre Reiu but I would note, that he managed to bring an orchestra out, play terrible music and come home with $100 million or more AU dollars without any government funding. In many cases it was funded by nana's (like mine) that would never bother to go see the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

So you have all this money dissappearing down a black hole, and all you preserve is the worst of classical music, the dogmatists that believe music should be regimented like the army and find the use of electricity sinful. The pretentious wankers at any party. I can't abide pretention, but at least if I meet a pretentious playwright, I can feel like he actually makes his own money and attracts his own audience.