Art in the Dark will not run this year.
"In Bali, everyone makes art; they find anyone who doesn't to be quite strange," said actor Jacob Rajan at a dress rehearsal once, probably between switching masks and voices, transforming himself from a small boy to an old crone in the batting of an eye.
It was a wonderful thought:
that there was a place on Earth where the artist wasn't an outsider and creative self-expression was as normal as eating, breathing and cricket.
I've kept this dream of an artistic nirvana alive in my heart for years until last week, when I woke up to its detailed topography. No, the exulted state of which I speak wasn't attained on the Indonesian island perfumed with sandalwood and resounding to the incessant plinking of gamelan. The age of enlightenment dawned at home, with the publication of Creative New Zealand's 120-page report, "New Zealanders and the arts: attitudes, attendance and participation 2014."
Very close to half of 1181 people surveyed said they simply "could not live without the arts" and last year, a gargantuan 85 per cent of us were found to have attended an arts event; close to 65 per cent of us had participated in one.
The definition of attending "the arts" was so broad it could have amounted to simply going to a Katy Perry concert. Making art might involve little more than taking a shot of a sunrise on your cellphone before uploading it to Instagram, depending on interpretation. It threw the net wide, and captured most of us within.
