It’s generally accepted that the arts – from ballet to butoh, kapa haka to community collage courses – deserve public funding. But do they? As we enter arts festival season and head off to enjoy multiple taxpayer-subsidised nights out, it’s a question worth asking.
The arguments in favour of using your money to pay for someone else’s passion are many, varied and compelling, ranging from purely commercial ROI (return on investment) calculations to inspirational waffle about enriching souls and making lives worth living.
Yes, there never will be enough money to satisfy everyone. A similar situation applies in such areas as health, education and reform of the criminal justice system, but we keep paying for oncology treatments, even though we may never get cancer.
Only the most zealous philistine is opposed to creative types getting their paint-stained hands on your money. But there is no shortage of zealous philistines whose 5-year-olds could do that, so the case must be made.
Critic, librettist, screen writer, biographer, poet, academic and commentator Roger Horrocks makes the case for funding the arts as what’s called a “merit good”.
“A government should attempt to create a rich, healthy way of life for its diverse population,” he says. “It also needs to support the arts because they contribute to [improved] mental health, social communication and wellbeing.”
And not just for ourselves but for the future. “Nature is a good example of something whose rewards everybody accepts, but which has no financial value.” Just as supporting the environment creates a natural legacy, supporting the arts ensures there will be a cultural heritage for those to come.
So much for the human spirit. Let me show you the money.
Even the bottom-line-obsessed boffins of the OECD see a value in the arts beyond the merely commercial. In its 2022 report, “The Culture Fix: Creative People, Places and Industries”, it notes that the arts “combat marginalisation and promote inclusivity in society” and improve “the wellbeing and health of cultural participants as well as consumers”, concluding public support is important so that these benefits are “effectively harnessed to steer growth and development”.
And for those who lack a soul, the purely financial case for funding is forcefully made in a US National Assembly of State Arts Agencies policy brief that would melt the heart of a Taxpayers’ Union member. Artistic activity, it says, stimulates business activity, attracts tourism revenue, retains a high-quality workforce and enhances property values. The arts have been shown to be a successful and sustainable strategy for revitalising rural areas, cities and populations struggling with poverty. Small businesses and individual entrepreneurs are critical to every state’s economy. “The arts are a dynamic contributor to the small-business sector.”
Arts sure do sound like a swell way to spend your money and time. But there are problems with deciding just how much money should be available and how it should be spent. As to the former, we know only that, as with health, education and criminal justice reform, there will never be enough to satisfy everyone.
Bureaucracy breakdown
The bucks start with crown entity Creative New Zealand (CNZ), the primary funding body with $80 million-plus a year in revenue for the past three years. Recently, the organisation has been the focus of growing dissatisfaction.
The danger signals were – and still are – there to be seen in the bureaucratic newspeak to which the organisation has been prone. It lists among its aims such gems as “virtuous circle” and “amplifying reciprocity and wellbeing”. And it offered artists support to “help you on your journey”.
Horrocks says artists have found “the application process exhausting and bureaucratic. Too many aspects feel like box-ticking and the need to bend one’s project to the current priorities of the funding body.
“The ultimate reasons for the funding body’s decisions are not transparent and not trusted. Those who administer the process tend to be career civil servants with healthy, regular salaries and they appear to have little appreciation of what it is like to be an artist making an insecure living in the gig economy.”
A writer might find herself having to say in an application, “This book will deliver to the Creative NZ strategic outcome: High-quality New Zealand art is developed.”
She might also have to fill in a “project budget template” in the form of a spreadsheet with space for “administration costs (eg, audit fees, electricity, insurance, legal services, licence fees, office supplies, photocopying, postage, rent, stationery, telephone, etc). Please provide a breakdown of the project’s administrative and overhead costs.”
There’s no way a 5-year-old could do that.
The career civil servants aren’t going anywhere, but some of Horrocks’ criticisms were addressed in November with the announcement of a new funding model for individual artists. The “For the Arts” programme introduces “eight new funding and support opportunities … tailored to three distinct groups: early career artists, artists and practitioners, and arts groups and organisations”.
This means significant changes to the existing contestable grants programme. In brief, instead of applying for money to support projects, artists can apply for money to support themselves. And, to possibly oversimplify, this means that instead of having to deliver strategic outcomes, they can experiment, practise and develop their art. Now, if you start a mural and decide halfway through to make it a sculpture instead, you can do so without having to change your strategic outcome delivery promise.
The initial reaction was positive, says CNZ chief executive Stephen Wainwright. “People liked that you don’t have an emerging artist competing with someone who’s got a great track record. And they liked having some clearer categories to work with. They also liked an approach that’s more around valuing the time and the oxygen that artists need to be artists. It’s not quite so mechanistic.”
Ruth Buchanan, kaitohu (director) of artist-led Auckland contemporary gallery Artspace, said after the announcement, “The weird thing [historically] has been that every art form should be processed, mediated and approached in the same way. Like, what’s important for the literary world is the same for visual arts.” She cited a decision-making process that drew heavily on input from bureaucrats rather than artists.
“Artists working inside organisations, if they can bear it, is something that’s really useful.”
Wainwright is not so aligned with that view. “We will continue to be guided by peers, but we’ll also bring our own perspectives to the table,” he says. “And, I think, given a huge amount of our work, and actually engaging with creative practitioners on their ideas, I don’t really buy the out-of-touch [argument].”
Cultural philistines
Adequate funding will happen only when there is an informed and educated population to appreciate it. The bureaucracy may be getting there, but artists feel there is little interest in, or understanding of, the arts among politicians (in contrast to, say, their interest in sport or treaties). In the lead-up to the election, the few people who tried to find out what the plans for the arts were found the policy cupboards of the two main parties bare.
The new National-led government has Paul Goldsmith as Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage. He was not National’s arts spokesperson before the election (although he has previously held the role).
“Preserving and cherishing the heritage of the country is one element we’re fully committed to,” Goldsmith tells the Listener. “Then, recognising the broad cultural contribution of the arts – the sheer joy performance brings, how we tell our stories to domestic and international audiences; sometimes shocking us and challenging us.
“I think there continues to be a role for what some might describe as the legacy art traditions, in terms of the orchestra and opera. But we also continue to broaden that, reflecting the changes in our modern society, recognising the important role of particularly Māori and Pacific arts. I also see it as partly an economic portfolio, recognising the very significant contribution that the creative sector makes to our economy and export economy.”
How about leaning on philanthropists? More tax incentives for supporting the arts?
“The previous National government brought some tax relief for donations to help with that. And there is significant philanthropy in the arts, but certainly always room for more. I can’t make any commitments around tax policy, but recognising the importance of private philanthropy is certainly a message that I will be giving to the state agencies. It’s not just a way for the government to save money. It’s a way to deepen the pool of resources available.”
Reduced education
“Artists are passionately concerned about the running down of arts education at all levels, from primary to tertiary,” says Horrocks. “Successive governments have shifted the emphasis to STEM subjects. You can’t do good science with amateur scientists. It’s the same in the arts.”
Buchanan says education is about attitudes as much as knowledge. She’d like to “get rid of this thing of ‘I don’t get it’ … knowing ‘nothing’ is still enough to engage with an artwork.”
Mass media aren’t really helping to educate the public. They love a good record-art-price-at-auction yarn, but that’s about the extent of visual arts reporting.
CNZ’s Wainwright points out that those complaining we no longer have an arts show on TVNZ 1, such as the beloved Kaleidoscope of yore, or weekly exhibition reviews in the newspaper may be mired in old thinking.
“We have a highly fragmented media world. And there are many more channels and opportunities for specialisation. More diverse voices can have their say.”
Money has been going to more diverse voices and artists for some time now. Even Horrocks thinks women, Māori and Pacific arts and artists are reasonably well served.
But it could be argued that Māori arts – the painting, sculpture, narrative and performing arts – were all well established and deeply embedded in the lives of the population by the time Europeans got here. They then fell victim to the mechanisms of colonisation before being revived by the likes of Āpirana Ngata and Peter Buck 100 years ago.
Toi Māori Aotearoa, supported by CNZ among other agencies, is the “independent Māori arts organisation that cares for the interests of Māori art and artists at a local, national and international level for the benefit of Māori people”. Its tumu whakarae (general manager), Tamahou Temara, declined to be interviewed for this story.
Horrocks notes that while the important issue of biculturalism is now highly visible in the arts, multiculturalism is often overlooked. Indian, Chinese and other large population groups still struggle to be seen or heard. Chinese New Zealanders, for instance, are prominent as performers and audience members in classical music and may prove crucial to its survival.
Pale, male and missing out
In the cafes of Aro Valley, you can hear middle-aged pale male creatives acknowledging that the imbalance has been addressed and of course that had to happen because it’s only right after so many people were shut out of the system for so long, but gee it’s a lot harder for them to get money these days. And then they lapse into silent wistfulness, wondering if it will ever be their turn again.
We may be entering a post-diversity age. An important cog in the funding machinery is the Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi, which draws on various sources to provide grants to artists, including its high-profile Laureate Awards.
General manager Jessica Palalagi says the foundation’s work is not about promoting diversity for its own sake, but “about awarding the most outstanding artists. There isn’t an agenda for us where we’re looking at the landscape and going, ‘There’s a gap.’ If anything, we’re looking at the landscape and going, ‘Why hasn’t a ceramicist got one for a long time?’” As proof, she points to the award made in 2013 to Megan Wraight, a landscape architect.
“I think our first queer Laureate Award, we awarded to someone who was primarily in fashion design, which is not typically an art form that people would associate with the arts. But of course, we’ve also awarded opera singers and composers and cinematographers. So, for us, it’s like recognising that creativity and artistry come in many forms.”
The Auckland Philharmonia’s new chief executive, Canadian Diana Weir, who started in October, says diverse musical styles are a priority. In fact, she was drawn to the job not just by “the commitment to work on the main stage but also all the stuff we do outside the town hall, in South Auckland and West Auckland, in partnerships with schools, and work that cultivates New Zealand artists outside of the ‘classical’ milieu. Our Matariki concerts feature artists that don’t often intersect with the orchestra. I like to think about 21st-century orchestras as libraries of sound, not a museum.”
Diversity is more of a core kaupapa for Arts Access Aotearoa, which is funded by CNZ among others. Those to whom it awards fellowships include artists with disabilities, a history of mental illness or in prisons.
Diversity butts heads with funding when it comes to deciding just who gets how much of that limited pot. Can Pasifika get along with Puccini? Somehow, the arts economy, with its precarious public funding, seems to be sustaining the old elite forms as well. No one spoken to for this story wanted to consign ballet or chamber music to the dustbin of arts practice alongside cave painting and manuscript illumination.
One reason the old forms survive is that contemporary art depends on historical art. As Horrocks says, “To put an embargo on that category would mean that we could not listen to classical music, or read many important literary classics, or see much of the history of painting. Any would-be artist who excluded ‘dead white guys’ would be sabotaging their own training, seriously narrowing their perspective.”
Wainwright puts the elite practices into perspective. “The arts ecology here after World War II was largely cut and pasted from England,” he says. “The things that got watering were entirely Eurocentric, and the initial legislation of the arts council in 1963 did not refer to Māori at all. And that reflects the dominant ideology of the time. We are a profoundly different country from what we were. As has recently happened, we have absolutely acknowledged the validity of supporting the expression of Māori culture.”
The institutions we regard as elite have had to get with it. “Fewer people want to go and see a three-hour opera than was the case 30 years ago,” says Wainwright. “Those institutions are a good example of evolving and adapting the programme. They honour the past, but are also alert to the fact that tastes and appetites change.”
Triumphant collaboration
NZ Opera showed one way forward in its collaboration with Black Grace dance group in last year’s (m)Orpheus, which triumphantly combined old and new, Europe and the Pacific.
Weir points out that an arts organisation which presented only work that could be wholly supported by ticket sales would have a very dull programme indeed. “Orchestras all across the world have been funded by governments, to varying proportions, as charities, because they’re a public asset. And if we were to be a market-based organisation, you would see less investment in cultivating a New Zealand musical and cultural identity.”
And in providing jobs. The Auckland Philharmonia is a big machine with 70 salaried musicians and 35-40 administrative staff. It also employs contractors and international guest musicians who, in turn, act as ambassadors for our arts by taking good reports back home with them.
Many of the orchestra’s issues around repertoire and revenue are also faced by a group of classical musicians at the other end of the scale. NZTrio is in its 21st year and comprises five people – the players, general manager Jessica Duirs, who is 0.75 full-time equivalent, and a a 0.4 FTE assistant. They’re a taonga, and they benefit from the CNZ Toi Uru Kahikatea programme, which gives them three years of guaranteed funding.
If traditional classical music is an increasingly smaller subset of the arts audience, then chamber music is a smaller niche within that space, contemporary chamber music smaller still, and by the time you get down to performing original contemporary New Zealand chamber music, you might wonder who will show up to listen. So, although their playing is acknowledged to be of the highest quality, they still have to labour prodigiously to survive, with a workforce which is about 4% of the Auckland Philharmonia’s.
“Groups like NZTrio work their butts off to be relevant,” says Horrocks. “They play in schools, they play in the community, they endlessly talk to people to find out what they think of concerts.”
Duirs says listening notes and cocktail partnerships can be added to this, “but it’s the baseline infrastructure funding from Creative New Zealand that gives us a place from where we can explore stuff. There’s really not many funding bodies that we don’t know about. As the manager, I’m always open to anyone’s suggestions of something to try.”
Covid booster
There is another funding source whose work helping art to happen should not be overlooked. The Ministry of Culture and Heritage “manages a handful of small, specialist funds relating to the history of Aotearoa New Zealand, commemorating Waitangi Day events and celebrating Matariki,” says Joe Fowler, pou mataaho o te hua (deputy secretary, delivery and investment). So, plenty of room to get creative there.
During Covid, it stepped up to provide extra help. “We responded to the immediate needs of the arts sector and the funding programme was unprecedented in terms of financial assistance and grants available,” says Fowler.
“Having delivered initiatives of close to half-a-billion dollars for arts, culture and heritage since 2020, we’ve achieved the purpose of the Covid-19 programme – a large part of which focused on short-term and emergency relief that other funders were not able to manage.”
It’s been suggested that this flood of emergency funding might have thrown the arts economy out of whack.
“Some of this support included individual grants to self-employed creatives who lost out because of Covid-19 restrictions, and grants to cover the organisational and individual losses associated with event cancellations.”
No one on the receiving end is saying that’s a bad thing.
Warblers over Wānaka?
Philanthropy, sponsorship and crowdfunding are all options for keeping the arts alive.
There are many means by which the arts can pay their way besides government funding and ticket (or painting or book) sales. Perhaps alternatives could be more energetically pursued?
“We’ve actually done a lot of things ourselves,” says Creative New Zealand’s Stephen Wainwright. “For example, in the 1990s, we advocated for and established the Arts Foundation. And we have a thing called the Creative Communities Scheme, which ensures that every local authority has the resources to support local creative communities.”
But Aotearoa New Zealand doesn’t have the long tradition of philanthropy that is central to US cultural life. There are some tax incentives but they manage to be both grudging and complicated at the same time.
There are many affluent immigrants living around Queenstown and Wānaka who grew up in that tradition of philanthropy. Perhaps they could be encouraged to sponsor a Lakes District Opera Festival or Warblers over Wānaka event.
So it’s still a hardscrabble life for the likes of the NZTrio, which is always on the lookout for opportunities to diversify its funding base. “Sometimes you realise that you’re performing in an area that has a gaming trust that you haven’t applied to before,” says the group’s general manager, Jessica Duirs. “We do a lot of collaborative work with visual artists and dancers. They might not be an investment client with CNZ, so they are able to apply for the costs to enable collaboration.”
The Auckland Philharmonia’s director of development, Melanie Esplin, is a fan of Supergenerous, which helps people claim tax rebates on charitable donations. “If you sign up, then they will go to all the trouble of collecting your rebate for you. But then there’s an extra step so you can have your rebate regifted to the charity. And that will continue for three years, increasing the value of that original gift.”
Artspace’s Ruth Buchanan cites Kunst am Bau, a scheme in Germany (and with versions in other countries) which mandates that a percentage of the budget of a new building must be spent on art.
The Arts Foundation oversees the boosted.org crowdfunding platform which boasts a 90% success rate, having raised nearly $13 million for projects so far. “What we’re doing is really harnessing a collective of giving, encouraging people to support the arts in whatever way they can,” says general manager Jessica Palalagi.
More innovative ways of providing financial security for the arts were suggested in “The show must go on, but it’s time to rethink how we fund the arts in New Zealand”, a 2021 article on The Conversation website by Jonathan Baker, then senior lecturer in business strategy at Auckland University of Technology. It advocates possibly painful but effective measures, such as rationalising the country’s orchestras.
For more on the impact of artists, entrepreneurs and philanthropy, see Hip, hip for Hamilton.