The Australian Research Council funding model condemns art schools to a bleak future

The lack of research income is therefore having a serious and debilitating effect on the core activities of art schools: to produce visual artists steeped in a self-critical contemporary art. It is forcing many to mutate into faculties of creative industries that produce graduates who are mute as visual artists in the free market of global capitalism. Some are being coerced into offering fee-paying courses that produce, paradoxically, graduates who merely service the corporate design and economic needs of globalisation.

If universities house, as George Steiner claims in his elegant memoir Errata (1997), “diverse, often rival parishes”, where do art schools situate themselves in this more competitive pedagogic ethos? Are art schools better off being independent of the university system? Is this scenario even possible today in light of what is happening in our universities in terms of their structures and commercialised research? It is interesting to note the recent comments by associate professor Su Baker of the Victorian College of the Arts, the only Australian art school not amalgamated with a university.

The VCA is arguably Australia's most successful art school, having produced the 2003 and 2005 Australian representatives to the Venice Biennale (sculptors Patricia Piccinini and Ricky Swallow), which is regarded as the most respected exhibition of contemporary international art. At the Biennale of Sydney this year, Baker argued that students at art schools should be encouraged to go beyond the (post)modernist canon of the visual arts, to follow their own creative instincts so that they produce new forms of art.

Art schools at the best of times are sites of experimentation, innovation, learning and the development of professional networks. All of this is invaluable creative and social capital that universities and society could tap into if they were more open to new cross-disciplinary research and pedagogic approaches.

It is no surprise, then, that in the February 2004 issue of the Harvard Business Review, an article about the creativity index, which uses measures of technology, talent and tolerance combined as an indicator of a country's ability to achieve growth, rated Australia outside the top 15 countries.

In the same issue, the author of A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink, argues that the master of fine arts is the new MBA, with big business looking for fine artists. Arts graduates can give companies advantage because “the only way to differentiate their goods and services in an overstocked, materially abundant marketplace is to make their offerings transcendent - physically beautiful and emotionally compelling”, he writes.

These are all signs of a changing world in which creative work and artists play a vital and complex role, and where that role is acknowledged in universities in terms of funded research. If we accept poet and writer Ezra Pound's idea that artists are the antennas of the human race, we cannot afford to ignore the important role that artists play in the creative, economic and social life of our post-industrial society.

Until the universities and the ARC change their ill-informed views about the funding of creative work and allow artists to come out from the shadows, Australia will remain a significantly lesser society.