The politesse of current arts funding muffles artists’ voices

The Report on the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Inquiry, is a detailed analysis of the health of Australia’s strongest artistic sector’s contribution to the nation’s cultural economies. The report was released on Friday September 9^th 2002, and chaired by Rupert Myer.

Due to its recommendation of up to $15 million in increased Federal and State funding, the Report is already enjoying widespread endorsement across the arts sector’s managerial classes.

Its advocacy for tax relief for cultural gifts of up to 125%, and strategies for broadening understanding and acceptance of contemporary art’s presence in our society, are also warmly welcomed in the visual arts industry. However, there are a number of anomalies in the Report’s approach to visual arts commerce that place this year-long analysis, at odds with today’s free market economic realities.

On paper, between primary commercial gallery sales of new and established artists’ work, as well as ticketed and door counts for attendance’s to major visual arts exhibitions, the visual arts industry’s status as a value added growth opportunity highlights its potential to become a substantial contributor to the nation’s internal and export cultural economies.

Yet the Report reflects mistrust of the dynamics of the commercial marketplace. Recommendations that artists should be "protected" against "fly-by-night" galleries using sales percentages as operating capital, highlight the suspicious stand off between commercial and publicly employed visual arts experts. Yet, it does so without sufficiently clarifying the artist’s engagement with the commercial marketplace, which will always need to be cool-headed if not totally mercenary.

In spite of years of publicly assisted legal and financial advocacy, guiding Australian artists in how to deal with the art market promoted by the Australia Council and NAVA, many artists still fail to take simple commercial precautions, such as collecting consignment notes when delivering their work to galleries.

Does this tell us that publicly funded advocacy campaigns aren’t working? Or, is it carelessness born out of the blinding emotional relief that often occurs when a gallery welcomes an artist’s difficult ideas with open arms? Do public sector driven interpretations of how the visual art market should work, take this into account?

Others complain about galleries slow reimbursements for sales billed for sixty days, but at least some of those same galleries are generous in advances against unsold work as well as offering payment plans to collectors.

Australian commercial art galleries take as much as 10% less in commission fees than their international peers. But, they are expected to do the same amount of work on behalf of the artists they represent, to promote sales and widen critical exposure in today’s competitive world.

In this country, galleries serve the additionally important function of introducing the concept of buying contemporary art into our society, so must continually cultivate new collectors to buy their artists’ work.

In other words, galleries are paramount in building the visual arts market place in Australia. That’s a lot of cultural socializing, a lot of dressing up and being friendly – on behalf of financial stakes in the risky business of bold and dangerous new visual ideas!

As a curator for a private collection in the UK in the 1990s, the first time I bought a piece by British bad boy artist Damien Hirst it cost as little as 2,000 pounds. While it is worth many times that now, the point is Hirst had absolutely no guaranteed commercial standing at the time.

Any rewards received by a pioneering buyer, reflecting an artists’ early career prices, need to be balanced against the gamble taken on his vision. And against the contribution that an artist like Hirst has and will make to British contemporary art’s commercial expansion.

When he graduated from Goldsmith’s, Hirst worked in the back room of an established Cork Street gallery, learning how the art business works from the inside. Strategic application of Hirst’s market insight was of tremendous assistance to his London gallery, the newly opened White Cube. Hirst is credited for leading the pace of owner Jay Jopling’s formative market strategies. He now owns the building White Cube operates out of in East London.

The Report missed these important influences on how the natural evolution of the contemporary art works by miles, perhaps due to its heavy dependence on the public sector as the authority vested with providing stimulus and industrial analysis of financial growth for the Australian visual arts economies.

Also failing to gain sufficient attention in the Report is the value of artists’ work supported by Federal and State Arts Grants, when it sells in the commercial marketplace.

An emerging artist’s work is often far harder to sell in the earlier years of his or her exhibiting career, until reputations are established and commercial demand is achieved. This raises an important commercial and arts spending policy question.

What happens to the public revenue advanced , spent on building a work of art by an emerging artist, when it does eventually sell? Funding assistance helps make work for sales in the commercial market, without repayment to the public purse and effectively selling art works for twice their value. This equation is rarely analysed in assessments of how the Australian commercial art market works. If an artist’s commercial exhibiting career goes well, value is constantly being added to his or her earlier publicly assisted work. Critically, artists’ first exhibited work is often stronger and less compromised than when his or her sales markets become established, and are therefore more desirable for public galleries’ collections. It is an historical irony of the visual arts, that the more comfortable an artist becomes economically and culturally about the acceptance of his or her ideas, the less dangerous his/her work seems, at least on the surface.

But this is as much a factor of the processes of cultural acceptance of innovative new ideas, as it is grounds for perceptions of compromised artistic integrity, due to market demands. It is also a reality too infrequently examined by Australian visual arts-policy experts, furthering the perceived hostilities between the public and commercial sectors in the industry.

Such gross anomalies will continue to flourish in visual arts public spending strategies, until we’re prepared to accept that contemporary art is an inherently elitist business. One that is unaffordable for all but a few select individuals, and running totally against the grain of current pluralistic social agendas.

Public collections are, of course, one of our society’s finest antidotes to the art market’s socially exclusive zone of support for the nation’s riskiest creative output. Indeed, early publicly assisted art works are often those same examples that frequently end up in public collections. Although contradictorily, purchased at a far higher price than when first released unsuccessfully into the art marketplace. Is it time the visual arts sector did its sums on the long term value of subsidizing emerging artists’ work?

Like all luxury products, contemporary art’s price increases due to shortages in production caused by increased market demands, as well as heightened critical appraisal and active public exposure. Consequently, that early publicly subsidized work is highly likely to have substantially increased in value, before it actually sells in the market place. These are market realities that no amount of strategic policy in the visual arts can withstand or divert into political objectives.

The Report recommends royalties be paid from the resale of works of art in the secondary market - in line with US and European droit de suit initiatives. This is so fair, it’s not funny. Artists have been shaping our visual perceptions of contemporary culture for eons, without getting a lick of revenue for the historical consequences of their efforts.

For instance, American pop artist Jasper Johns’ quintessential 1956 "Green Target" painting sold in the late 1950s for as little as $4,000 US. It was the same year that Marlon Brando gave his brilliantly studied performance in "On the Waterfront".

The painting, like Brando’s characterizations, is widely recognized for ushering important new movements into the American contemporary cultural experience. In the visual arts, "Green Target" signaled the end of the abstract expressionist movement by opening the doors to pop art’s objective study of American commercial culture.

The difference is that Brando’s breakthrough performance still pays the actor royalties, whereas "Green Target’s" resale for several million dollars in the early 1990s did not. But whether the Report’s important advocacy in the area of royalties, is based on the principle of great art’s importance in the visual evolution of Australian life, or a rather uneasy bureaucratic suspicion that elitist secondary art markets are getting away with murder, is anyone’s guess.

Certainly, today’s contradictory economic drivers build on the expectation of public funding. The cultural and economic impact of long term individual and institutional grant dependencies are important questions the Report leaves relatively unattended.

The impact of our increasingly privatized health system on artists’ well being is also seriously neglected, as are other important areas of financial advocacy in the industry in favor of slightly hysterical statistics highlighting artists’ low incomes. Can artists afford to make superannuation contributions?

It is time Australian visual arts bureaucrats faced the fact that although they are professionally dependent on artists for their raison d etre, the guy in the paint-splattered suit may never enjoy quite as high a standard of living as an arts management desk jockey. Ideally, artists are here to promote these and other truths, but the politesse of the Australian arts funding system often muffles these dangerous voices in our society.

The Report advocates a $15 million federally matched lifeline to the Australian contemporary art scene. The only cloud on the horizon - other than persuading the Howard Government to embrace the Report’s perspective on industrial realities - is that the states are being asked to match the funding increases.

Approximately $7.5 million will be needed to make these generous strategic recommendations stick. This puts the onus back on Australia’s Labor state governments. Will they swallow Rupert Myer’s generous demands on behalf of the visual arts industry in this country?

I’ll be watching the Report’s reception closely for debate focussed on Australia’s visual arts industry's chronic financial problems. Can it buck decades of international economic growth trends in this potentially immensely lucrative sector?

I’ll also be looking for signs of increased commitment to a more worldly approach to the incredible opportunities Australia's vast geographic span should be providing for artists and the public. That is, with or without increased public support. It might mean the end of our tolerance of mediocre regional arts bureaucrats, but there's always contemporary art history for reviving culture's premature fatalities.