Peter Garrett Online Forum

Naomi

I'm sorry to have implied that this was a new thing - I meant to assert that it was a wrong thing. I am a fierce opponent of Government funding for the arts. It is not their business. If the Government wants to commission a particular work of art, then it has every right to do so, but it should not be allowed any greater role than this.

The villains in this piece are not merely the present Government, but they run in a long and unnterrupted line from Menzies onward (and possibly from even before that).

If the Government wants to support the arts then they, as individuals, can buy our books, attend our shows, listen to our music and purchase our paintings.

Using art as an adjunct to its own self-promotion - which is all that arts funding is - is offensive.  

Private patronage is okay - he who pays the piper calls the tune - but public patronage does not have my support. That is why I am an independent theatre artist, not a member of the mainstream.

A sad consequence of Government funding is that individual citizens feel that they do not need to support us themselves, as that is now the Government's job. Before the Elizabethan Trust (or whatever the damn silly thing was called) this was a culturally more vibrant and interesting country than it has ever been since. That is because culture is made by real and ordinary people on the real and ordinary ground, not by a set of isolated and self-affirming 'cultural producers' safely protected from the real world by free money.

I do not want a National Arts Policy and I will reject and defy it wherever I see fit. This is an issue that puts me in a fighting mood. 

Government is incidental to our lives, not central. It need to accept this and to get on with its job.

Noël Christian

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