By SIMON COLLINS
In three years Auckland fashion designer Trelise Cooper has built a business which is earning $6 million a year, half of that from overseas.
In her Parnell workroom, New Zealand art hangs on the walls. Music plays on the stereo - sometimes classical, sometimes the latest techno funk.
"I think it's creative energy that surrounds you," she says. "It's like going to the symphony and hearing a beautiful piece of music. It's uplifting - I think it's good for the soul.
"That's how my business runs. I have gone from nothing to a $6 million turnover in three years, and I really believe it is because I am from that [arts] place."
Cooper's is the kind of business Prime Minister Helen Clark had in mind when she justified her $86 million arts package last year on the basis that "a nation which encourages its creative people will reap the economic and intrinsic benefits in countless ways."
In the past those intrinsic benefits - what Helen Clark called "a necessity of civilisation" - were all that artists could rely on in seeking a share of the taxpayers' earnings.
But the new economy has given a new twist to the argument. Throughout the developed world, making physical things such as butter or machinery now employs fewer and fewer people.
Instead, the growth is in things that require creativity: software, biotechnology, computer games and entertainment of all kinds.
As Marianne Doczi, of the Ministry of Economic Development, put it in a recent paper: "Creativity is the lifeblood of a knowledge economy - an economy built on human capital, on people's ability to generate ideas and be innovative.
"It may be timely," she says, "to consider promoting artists and creative workers as role models for economic success, to consider how they might be used to help workers and managers across industries expand their ability and skills to generate ideas and use their imaginations."
But arts spending will always be controversial. Website designer Martyn Bowis - exactly the kind of creative person we supposedly want to inspire through the arts - says artists' funding should be much more geared to the market.
"They should be encouraged to use their creativity to create market demand for their work," he says.
"I have just done a website for an artist, for her to put her art out there on the internet. She was not looking for a handout. She was looking to go and promote herself."
Bowis, in his own words, is "creative, dynamic and innovative." But he is inspired by "whatever you come across.
"I don't go specifically looking for New Zealand art.
"Surely the Government would do better funding industry that employs creative New Zealanders and exposes their art to the world - then I will come across it and be inspired.
"Companies like mine take the artwork of our designers to the world in practical ways, at the same time paying people to develop and use their talents. Why not provide companies that employ artists and musicians with subsidies to create more jobs for creative people?"
The argument matters because the arts take a growing share of our incomes. In 1998-99, central Government, NZ On Air and the Lottery Board spent a total of $272 million on "culture" (including broadcasting, Te Papa and the National Library, but excluding education) and local councils spent a further $286 million (about half of that on libraries).
That's a grand total of $558 million, or $146 on average from every man, woman and child.
In addition, private consumer spending on "cultural" items such as CDs, books, movie tickets and museum admissions was $2.2 billion, or $577 a head. In effect, we spend 20 per cent of our culture budget collectively and 80 per cent privately.
We also earn export income from culture. In 1999 we earned $33 million from books, art and other cultural goods. Last year we earned a further $455 million in foreign exchange from films, including Lord of the Rings and Vertical Limit. And last year's Heart of the Nation report estimated that foreign tourists spend between $240 million and $400 million a year on going to movies, concerts, museums and other cultural experiences.
In a paper on Arts Funding in New Zealand (Auckland University, Nov 2000), economist Professor Tim Hazledine lists five main justifications for continued subsidies to this cultural industry. He argues:
The arts are like swimming - people don't know how warm the water is until they have been in for some time, because it takes practice to learn to appreciate "the higher arts."
We may be willing to take more risks collectively than we take individually. For instance, we may each be prepared to chip in a few tax cents towards subsidising a new book of poetry, but none of us would be prepared to risk paying the full cost ourselves.
We may need to use public money to break private monopolies - for example, by subsidising local films to compete against Hollywood blockbusters whose costs can be spread across the whole world.
The arts may have a wider spinoff effect of contributing to shared values which make people more trustworthy and creative.
We may like having the arts around for other people, and for future generations, even if we don't have time for them ourselves.
But Hazledine says that all these arguments - except perhaps the last one - imply that the arts are only worth subsidising if they are actually seen by audiences, therefore subsidies should be paid as a percentage top-up to what audiences already pay, rather than being doled out to artists regardless of how many people see their work.
He would, for example, apply the same percentage top-up to the Wellington-based NZ Symphony Orchestra as to the Auckland Philharmonia. Considering that taxpayers now pay the Philharmonia only $1.3 million and the NZSO $11.4 million, he suggests that the NZSO should be reduced to a temporary group, coming together for a month or two a year.
Instead, most of the present arts budget is, in effect, bulk-funded to artists and performing groups who are then left to do their own thing.
Just before Christmas, Associate Arts Minister Judith Tizard suggested going further down the same track by paying allowances to selected younger artists and performers, and fellowships to more established people.
"It seems to me there are a lot of people doing work as playwrights, composers, choreographers," she says.
"Take [choreographer] Mary-Jane O'Reilly. Her Commonwealth Games opening and closing ceremonies [Auckland, 1990] were among the defining cultural moments of this nation. "But we are very happy for Mary-Jane to have to limp from Arts Council application to Arts Council application and quite often be told, 'This year we are funding developing artists or Pacific artists; you are an established artist so we are not going to fund you.'
"As she said: 'Who on earth do they think I do my dances for? They are for young artists who are developing."'
Long-term fellowships for established artists exist elsewhere. Ireland, for example, pays £8700 ($23,600) a year for five-year terms to members of an honorary body of outstanding artists and writers who are limited to no more than five new members a year, with a maximum of 200 members at any time.
Judith Tizard says it is too soon to say whether a similar system might be adopted here or whether some new model might be found.
"We haven't worked it through," she says. "It's an idea."
Tizard is also working with Employment Minister Steve Maharey on a planned Artswork programme for young unemployed people. She says this would be largely "a reallocation of the existing [welfare] budget."
She has asked the Culture and Heritage Ministry for a discussion document on funding performing bodies such as orchestras, in the light of a 1999 Australian report which classified institutions as national, state and local.
A former director of Lower Hutt's Dowse Art Museum, Jim Barr, supports the move towards funding more individual artists rather than big institutions such as orchestras.
"With some of those institutions it would be better if they did fall over, then we could build something more useful," he says.
"The thing that needs to happen is much more concentration given to funding individuals, giving them opportunities to work overseas, and for people overseas to come here and see their work - to pick out our best people and give them the opportunity to extend themselves like we do to top athletes."
Many creative people agree. Fashion designer Karen Walker like Cooper, is inspired by other art.
"I can't say that it's going to have an immediate effect on my work, but anything that can be done to get our creative level, and our creative place in the world, better and more mature is a good thing," Walker says.
Industrial designer Michael Smythe says that industry is shifting from undifferentiated commodities such as butter to branded niche products which depend on creative design.
"Tom Peters uses terms like 'distinct or extinct'," Smythe says. "To do that, you have to start thinking for yourself. We have to be original and not just do the me-too business."
Mark Pennington, who leads at Wellington's Formway Furniture what he believes is the biggest furniture-design team in the southern hemisphere, says that art on the studio walls helped the team design the award-winning desks which are now achieving huge sales in the United States.
"We have Hoteres and sculptures and Polynesian artists and a lot of imagery and graphics," Pennington says.
"It's almost subliminal. It's not that you are derivative of it, it's just part of the way you feel, the way you think."
Spinoffs from the arts may extend well beyond this.
In a 1999 paper, former Arts Council director Michael Volkerling cited American "evidence that an individual's acquisition of the hard skills of mathematics and reading during their primary education is enhanced substantially by prior involvement in music and the visual arts."
Doczi says that a lively arts scene may also help to attract and keep the highly skilled people we need to succeed in the new economy:
"There is anecdotal evidence that in considering whether to come to New Zealand, some of these 'gold-plated' employees factor into their considerations the existence of cultural institutions such as orchestras and theatres and events such as the International Festival of the Arts."
All this evidence, however, remains scanty and largely conjectural so far. For every designer like Cooper who has been inspired by the arts, there is another - such as Bowis - who sees no reason to subsidise formal arts more than the myriad other things around us which excite creative people.
If children do become more confident with maths and reading after being involved in music and art, this may have more to do with an active learning style than with music or art as such. They may get the same spinoff from scientific experiments, sport, cooking or carpentry.
As for Hazledine, there seems little reason to believe that people know less about "the high arts" than they do about any untried product on the supermarket shelves, or that they are any less willing to risk investing in a book of poetry than they are in, say, a computer program. Yet no one suggests that we should subsidise new grocery lines or software.
If you listen instead to educationists, then the whole argument about subsidising artists seems beside the point. Laurence Zwimpfer, who founded the 20/20 Trust to increase the popularity of information technology in schools, says that the best way to foster a creative, innovative society is to get people online to access the world's best arts and ideas.
"Our philosophy is about getting people involved in using and participating in the digital society. They will not participate if they have never had a hands-on experience."
As a trustee of the National Library, Zwimpfer is promoting a scheme for every school to maintain an internet record as part of its local heritage.
He believes other cultural institutions, such as Te Papa, should also make their resources available nationally and internationally through the internet.
"We can electronically take those museums out to schools and the people, rather than having them come to the buildings," Zwimpfer says.
That would be in complete contrast to either funding artists purely for their own sake, or topping up the private spending of those like Hazledine, who can afford to pay for real rather than virtual arts experiences.
Shifting the emphasis to making the arts available to everyone, regardless of income, might inspire more New Zealanders to follow both Cooper and Bowis into establishing the kind of innovative businesses we need.
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