Art for Art’s Sake
6th Chief Minister’s Governance Lecture
22 June 2022
Prof Jen Webb, University of Canberra
What I am discussing tonight is the importance of art to community and to personal and economic wellbeing. I arrived in Canberra fresh from almost a decade of working in the arts sector in Australia, primarily in Central Queensland and in Brisbane; and during that decade, I also completed a PhD on the arts community and their connections to society, government and the economy, along the western line, from Yeppoon to Winton. This meant I arrived here already deeply involved in art practice, arts management, the creative community, art policy and art funding. This made it all the more interesting to leaf through papers in the archives; and, in addition, most of those applying are people I have come to know. In some cases, I have since worked with them, and in each case, I have followed their careers and admired their work.
Something I found impressive, in the documents from 1999 and 2000, was to find in the applicants’ proposals and plans, the seeds of what we see blooming all about us now. In their own ways, these artists and members of arts organisations were concerned with expanding acceptance of diversity, contributing to human and animal rights, and demonstrating concerns about the future of the planet, the state of the economy, and better access to educational experiences.
The archives are a vital part of the collective memory of any community. The word ‘archive’ contains, in its etymological genealogy, the verb arkhō, which incorporates the idea of beginnings or origins. So, we can conceive of archives as combining the authority of government with the ability to collect and preserve evidence of what was going on, and with the idea of origins. Access to archives and all their riches provides what all researchers need – including people like me, who research contemporary practice, because what is contemporary is to a significant extent built on what came before.
Understanding the ‘what came before’ is not a straightforward matter. How we make sense of the past, how we put it to work, and what use it can be is open to contention. The debate about the value of history is well known and can perhaps be best understood in terms of Santayana’s dictum, on the one hand, and Hegel’s on the other. Santayana is famed for his statement, “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it”.i And is countered Hegel, who argues that what we learn from history is that we cannot learn from history.ii Both have validity: the past matters, of course, but we can never really understand, because as JP Hartley points out in his novel The Go-Between, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”.iii We do not speak its language; but we can attempt to translate it into our present discourse, and doing this allows us to identify general principles of human behaviour as well as the ways in which governments seek to solve problems and exploit opportunities; and use these principles to build productive ways of dealing with contemporary issues.
In the case of the documents I saw in the ACT Archives, what I translated was the enduring importance of art. But art is, of course, a broad term, and as difficult to define simply as is ‘the past’. Art is many things and has meant many things across history. I tend to perceive art as operating as a network of veins that run right through human society, taking many modes, emerging in many types of practice, and having many different orientations. It is both a social expression, and an individual action.iv Its outputs are equally observable in toddlers’ drawings and in Sappho’s poems, in the quilts made by my grandmother and in the remarkable textiles produced by the artists of Gee’s Bend in Alabamav. Creativity, after all, is not the preserve of artists; it is a property of all humans;vi and it was not until the eighteenth century that art began to assume its special status of originality, and of something separate from everyday life. Up to that point, art really just meant ‘doing things well’, and creative practice – what we now call ‘art’ – was just what people did, often for pay.vii
Art and value
The ‘special’ status we now accord art is a bit of a double-edged sword for artists, because it means that art operates outside the flow of capital. This is evident on considering how art is made and distributed, compared with the functions in the production of everyday commodities. In business, what typically happens is that the market is assessed, and a marketable commodity or service produced for the existing demand; but in (special status – autonomous) arts practice, the making of the object typically precedes the investigation of its market potential. For example, when I am compiling a collection of poetry, I simply work on it, and hope that some publisher might like it enough to publish it. When I am preparing an academic book, I don’t start the writing until I have a contract from a publisher – until, that is, I have a pre-determined market. The first approach is driven almost exclusively by my enthusiasm for practice, and the work involved, though very time- and energy-consuming, feels worthwhile in and of itself. For the second, despite my equal enthusiasm, I operate under a form of pragmatism; that is, I will not write an 80,000 word on ‘spec’ when I can disseminate those ideas more economically in the form of, say, a series of journal articles or conference presentations.
What this ‘special status’, and the typical operations of artists means, is that pretty well no one can make a living from their art, because what we are making are, effectively, non-commodities – objects that may circulate as commodities, but are much likely to have been made as personal expressions of creativity. The products of an artist’s work are quite literally ‘priceless’: they may be incredibly and uniquely valuable, but they are just as likely to be economically worthless.viii As an apocryphal statement goes: you can’t make a living from the arts, but you might make a fortune.
Very few artists make a fortune, yet we continue to make art.
This sounds impractical, and there is a body of research into why intelligent and highly trained people would make what appear to be impractical career choices, opting for low and erratic income as an artist, rather than achieving a good living wage as, say, an arts manager or accountant. The philosopher Bruno Gulli suggests that artists are faced with a choice between what he calls productive labour (viz: working to earn a living) and living labour (viz: working to achieve a creative life).ix I have been interviewing artists – especially the visual and literary arts – since 1995, and have talked to several hundred people across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, South Africa, the UK, Canada and the US. What I have observed in all those conversations, is that people who are established artists are utterly committed to living labour: art for art’s sake. Yes of course they’d like reliable earnings, but not enough to turn their often very high skills to the sorts of commercial activities where they might achieve wealth. They attribute non-financial value to art itself.
And so does the community; they see benefits in there being art in their environment. The national census collects data on social attitudes to art and the consumption of art, and routinely reports the high participation rate. This is more often in the commercial end of the art spectrum – mainstream movies, popular music – but also visits to art museums, libraries and theatres. Art is also used extensively in what the census calls ‘informal learning’.x parents reading stories to their children, drawing and painting with them, taking them to cultural events and places. Particularly within the Indigenous communities, the practice of art as informal learning, and incorporating cultural traditions, remains very high.
Art offers a sort of social glue, or connective tissue. It provides a shared experience of trying things out, of finding a mouth to speak with, and ways of seeing the world, that are not framed by public or mass media discourse.
Art and health
Art therapy has been a health practice for close to a century now, but art practice per se is also, and increasingly, demonstrating the capacity to help people living with traumatic injury to manage its impacts; helping people with degenerative diseases to maintain some mobility, interest and autonomy for as long as possible; and helping everyone involved to find and sustain grounds for connectedness.xi Artists rather than therapists are at the forefront of this, offering non-therapeutic workshops in creative making and creative play. It doesn’t replace the importance of therapy, but it offers a rich and generative, future-minded opportunity, and builds the capacity for creative thinking. It’s of benefit to artists too, partly because in many cases they are paid for this work, and partly because in many cases they have a deep sense of responsibility to fill the gaps in society, and to try to improve the lives of others. We have seen this at the University of Canberra in our work with returned service personnel, emergency service workers, and communities that have been ravaged by environmental disaster.xii It is affordable to deliver, accessible to its participants, and shows the capacity to rebuild broken lives and broken communities.
Art and economic wellbeing
The affordances of art for individual and community wellbeing are clearly evident in the research literature and in lived experience, but when it comes to the economy, the answers are less straightforward. I noted earlier that art is largely outside the economy, but for some decades now, there has been a strongly held belief that art, expressed in terms of ‘the creative industries’, is an economic rainmaker.xiii Economists and finance ministers point to the genuinely huge contributions made to GDP by the creative industries especially in developed economies; but these income flows are rarely attributable to what is more conventionally identified as art practice. The term ‘creative industries’ includes professions like architecture; fashion; advertising and marketing; film and tv production; live streaming; software design; media platforms. All these rely on creative capacity, but unlike the arts – painting and poetry and theatre – their role is to deliver on contracts, and to meet expectations that polished products will be provided according to the terms of the contract. Artists forego income-earning capacity in exchange for the freedom from predetermined outcomes for clients. This allows them to experiment, take the risk of failing, and thus extend their thinking and making. This in turn means that, for society and for government, art is a social laboratory that is both very affordable, and effective. But what it means for artists, as Professor David Throsby warns, is: ‘don’t give up your day job’.xiv
Art delivers very little income as such, but it can mitigate social costs; and most governments recognise its value in providing a space for a wide range of sociocultural delivery. This is evident in the suite of legislation, policy and other instruments found around the world. In fact, right across such documents are statements that demonstrate governments value art because it represents the nation to itself and to others, and can be used in building international relationships, brokering community activation, and easing the burden on, for example, the health and education sector.xv
While art does not fit neatly within the logic of the creative industries it fits very well within with the logic of the foundational economy: “that part of the economy that creates and distributes goods and services consumed by all (regardless of income and status) because they support everyday life”.xvi The foundational economy includes mundane things like roads and water and health and education and food and fuel; and art, of course. All these are elements humans have always made and consumed, across all the historical records and all cultures. Art supports the worth of everyday life, not only for artists but also for the community as a whole; as has been seen most recently during the COVID-19 lockdowns.xvii
The applications
I saw applications from just nine people or organisations – several of whom submitted more than one request (in different funding categories). Three of those were from visual artists; three from literary artists; and three from organisations. Each of the individual artists was highly trained and very experienced, with substantial portfolios of exhibitions, publications and prizes. In broad terms, the visual artists asked for equipment; the writers asked for time; and both asked for support to make their work public. All six artists delivered on one or more of the six key result areas listed in the Arts Capital plan, particularly in terms of formal and artistic innovation. In several cases they also delivered outcomes of value beyond the arts; such as diversity, human rights, and environmental protection.
The three literary artists submitted four applications for funding. One, a widely published and highly awarded writer, needed time out from his job to work on a new manuscript. Despite his literary profile and the quality of his writing, this poet was never going to make enough money to have an economically self-sustaining art career. The few weeks this grant bought him away from the office helped him to resolve problems with the manuscript that couldn’t have been managed in the bite-sized amounts of time we have when we are employed fulltime on other things.
He and the other two writers also applied for funding to support publication costs. Unless a commercial publisher contracts a writer to produce a manuscript – which is very rare for poetry, and not much better for short fiction – it is typically the case that authors need to support the costs of production through a subvention payment; and this is what all three requested. The amounts were very modest, and all three applications were funded. That government investment delivered a new collection of short stories about men’s experiences, and two collections of poems, written in the ACT by Canberra writers. Three new books were produced and circulated, adding to the authors’ profile, supporting Canberra’s identity as a good place for literary production; and funnelling money into local small industry – in this case, two local small presses, who received the subvention payments, and produced and distributed the volumes.
The visual artists were equally frugal, and equally productive. The first, who works in timber, submitted an application for $3000 to purchase equipment that would limit the amount of dust in the air. The acquittal shows that this support helped him not only have a healthier environment – with, one can surmise, a saving in health costs in the future, which benefits his wellbeing and limits pressures on the health system; but also facilitated his production of a body of work for an exhibition that drew attention to the natural environment, and supported his efforts to produce environmentally sustainable work by using timber from old derelict cottages.
The second visual artist, a sculptor working in clay, needed less than $1500 for the costs of mounting an exhibition. What she produced was a body of work that represents women’s experiences and stories, works that were brilliantly realised and very funny critiques of gender politics.
The third visual artist requested $5000 to buy a computer so that she could transition her photographic work into what was then still considered ‘new’ media. Her project aimed to illuminate what she calls ‘daily endless maternal repetitive tasks … [and] the domestic fabric of family life”. Adding digital technology to the process allowed her to exploit the affordances of the digital revolution and enrich her art practice and her expertise.
All are very modest requests; the third artist’s request for $5000 translates, in 2022 rates, to less than $9000; which is not a lot of money to deliver, in this case:
- sustainable art practice;
- innovation in practice;
- participation and audiences; and
- online art creation.
innovation in practice;
That $5000 therefore delivered on four of the six key results for grant funding. The only key results not directly addressed were visibility of ACT arts (which supports cultural tourism); and demonstrating that the ACT is a place where art can develop (which supports seedbeds for new artists).
Each of the three organisations similarly addressed both the key result areas and other useful social outcomes. Where the individual artists were committed to art for art’s sake, the organisations were committed to art for the community’s sake, art as economy, and art as a pathway for better use of the new electronic environment.
The first is an organisation committed to what we now call arts/health practice: the use of art across a wide range of forms – visual, performance, literary – to support the wellbeing of people with a wide range of disadvantages; in this case, physical, psychological and neurological health. They asked for a miniscule grant to cover registration fees for attendance at a conference where their staff member could expand understandings of how to deliver quality creative support to people in need. They also asked for over $80,000 for running costs of the organisation, which again is very modest – that $80,000 ($134,000 at 2022 rates) would cover the salary for an arts worker, and some running costs. In exchange the ACT would receive advocacy, promotion, training, presentation, et al., for a sequence of programs that improve the lives of many Canberrans – not just those living with various disabilities, but also their friends and families, and the general public who, better informed about the potential of people in this situation, are both more likely to be more empathic, and more likely to understand the value of, maybe, employing them.
The second application was from an arts marketing organisation, and this was for the cost of attending a conference. This, like the previous one, was positioned as an opportunity to build knowledge and networks that would be likely to promote ACT arts, thereby contributing to training and profile-building for the ACT community. This also delivers on the aim of achieving sustainability in arts practice, and points to the concerns to pursue lifelong learning, and keep up with contemporary knowledge.
The third was an application submitted by artsACT itself for a national program design to expand the use of online arts and technology. The very large folder for this project contains documents that show an awareness, at the level of government, of the affordances of art to drive major social and technological changes. This is an example of a government-led initiative, aimed at enhancing aspects not only of the arts, but also business, government strategy, and capacity building. In addition, this sort of project cannot be delivered without wide consultation, so it provided the framework for arts community building, and the possibility of enhancing business, government strategy, and capacity building.
All the applications are all very pragmatic, and carefully costed. What they rather beautifully illuminate is the variety within what we might call the field of arts production. It is not a homogeneous industry; it is a collection of individuals, organisations and activities with almost as many motivations as there are agents involved in the domain. But all of them are committed to improving both the production of creative works, and the distribution of these works to their audiences; and all are committed to varying degrees to making life better.
The provision of modest amounts of arts funding supported artists’ practices, offered fresh ways of reflecting on gendered labour; and also supported experiments with form and material that have the potential to generate innovation. It also facilitated the work of arts organisations in delivering the sort of healthy, vibrant opportunities that enrich the community, raise audience participation, and highlight the quality of art in the ACT. In addition, the money that the government put into these grants has a multiplier effect. Beyond the artists’ careers, it supports the small to medium enterprises whose business it is to deliver the goods and services required by artists, including exhibition spaces and publishers, putting real money into circulation in the local economy; and it also delivers the aspiration to expand social good, community connectedness and wellbeing, and the reputation and attractiveness of the ACT community. Government investment in the arts and art practice is precisely that: an investment. Arts grants are small compared with what is required by most other sectors, and they deliver across a range of domains; often in ways that could not have been imagined by industry or policy. And, of equal importance, they contribute to the sort of creative, innovative context that provides the bedrock on which actual creative industries can grow, and thrive.
Which brings us to COVID-19
As we know, the world exploded with creative activity during lockdown. Artists made work for online displays, writers held zoom readings and launches, performers performed in simultaneous transmissions and in individual online posts; musicians in Italy stood on their balconies to serenade their neighbours; and families produced delightful musicals, home theatre and impromptus to entertain friends and relations online. This was a calming and cheering thing to do. It kept the makers involved in creative play and was good for their mental health and wellbeing, and it made lockdown bearable for so many.
In a capitalist economy, though, everyone needs money to survive; and while those of us employed at acceptable rates in acceptable economic sectors were paid a generous survival rate emolument, other were not. Given how many artists survive on a combination of casual and part time work, miniscule sales, and occasional arts grants – the gig economy, in short – they were not eligible for JobKeeper. To add to the problem, while it costs very little for writers to make their work, visual and performing artists need to buy equipment and facilities, which meant it was terribly difficult to keep making.
Deloitte Access Economics produced a report in late April 2020 where they estimated the cumulative impact of COVID-19 on Australian wages and profits would be in the order of $6 billion, with arts and recreation one of the worst hit, second only to the hit on accommodation and food services.xviii While by December 2021 they had revised the national economy, artists were still out in the cold, as Deloitte notes: “The economic crisis wrought by the pandemic has served to exacerbate the already precarious nature of employment for many artists and cultural workers.” A report recently published by Paul Crosby & Jordi McKenzie, focused on Australian musicians, shows that this group of artists barely survived on savings and their partners’ income during COVID, and that they now report pessimism about being able to continue with any form of creative employment.xix
An Australian Parliamentary Report is similarly bleak: it shows that the arts took the biggest financial hit measured by weekly payroll figures, and is still at the very bottom of all the industries for pay.xx The Report notes this about the sector’s contribution to the community during lockdown: “Ironically, the need for creative experiences and the joy brought by participating in art was critical to peoples’ ability to endure the economic and social disruption and damage caused by the pandemic.”
Artists not only carried much of the mental health and wellbeing of the population during COVID; they also suffered one of the highest proportions of job and income losses, and the sector is still struggling to recover. I remain hopeful insofar as artists are on the whole quite resilient; they are after all accustomed to living quite difficult lives in what is termed ‘the cruel economy’ of the arts.xxi I note here, with real gratitude, the efforts the ACT government is going to, to support artists post-COVID, and in particular the Creative Recovery and Resilience Program, which is having some excellent outcomes.
But this sort of issue needs broad social support too, and I urge members of the public to buy books and art and theatre tickets; and urge federal as well as local governments to look closely at how they can ameliorate the always precarious, now pretty much impossible, circumstances of artists’ lives in terms of factors like social housing, like a social wage; and I do remind myself and us all that support for the arts is actually pretty cheap, and produces very real value for money when we take into account what is often not noticed in the accounts: social wellbeing, some economic advantages, support for health, richer experiences of education; community activation; and all round joie de vivre.
References
i. Santayana, George 1905 The Life of Reason Volume 1: Reason in Common Sense (trans B Watson), New York: Scribner, 284
ii. Hegel, Georg (2019), Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Volume 1: Manuscripts of the Introduction and the Lectures of 1822–1823 (trans Peter Crafts Hodsgon and Robert F Brown), Oxford UP (actually reads: “History and experience teach that peoples generally have not learned from history” (138)).
iii. Hartley, LP 1953 The Go-Between, London: Hamish Hamilton, p.1
iv. Vygotsky LS 1971 The Psychology of Art, Cambridge MA: MIT Press
v. Arnett, Paul, Joanne Cubbs & EW Metcalf (eds) 2006 Gee’s Bend: The Architecture of the Quilt, Atlanta: Tinwood Books
vi. Winnicott, DW 2005 [1971] Playing and Reality, Abingdon: Routledge
vii. Staniszewski, Mary Anne 1995 Believing is Seeing: Creating the culture of art, Harmondsworth: Penguin
viii. Kopytoff, Igor 1986 ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as process’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed) The Social Life of Things: commodities in cultural perspective, Cambridge UP
ix. Gulli, Bruno 2005 Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press
x. ABS 2014 Arts and Culture in Australia: A statistical overview, 4172.0, https://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/4172.0~2014~Main%20Features~Attendance%20and%20Participation~19
xi. See, e.gClift, S & P Camic (eds) 2016 Creative Arts, Health and Wellbeing: International Perspectives, Oxford UP; Webb, Jen, J Williams & A Eaton 2021 ‘Creative interventions: Art against trauma’, in M Celinscak and C Hutt (eds), Artistic Representations of Suffering, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield
xii. Bullock, Owen, Jordan Williams et al. 2019 ‘Creative Arts by Artist Educators: An Intensive Creative Program for Injured and Ill Military Personnel in Australia’, ANZ Journal of Art Therapy 14.1: 110–19
xiii. Santos-Duisenberg, E., SR Basu, SL Cheng et al. 2010 Creative Economy Report 2010: Creative economy – A feasible development option, UNCTAD, United Nations, https://unctad.org/webflyer/creative-economy-report-2010; Trembath, JL and K Fielding 2020 Australia’s cultural and creative economy: A 21st century guide, https://www.humanities.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ANA-InsightReportFour-FullReport.pdf
xiv. Throsby, David and Virginia Hollister 2003 Don’t Give Up Your Day Job: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, Sydney: Australia Council for the Arts
xv. Turner, Caroline and Jen Webb 2016 Art and Human Rights: Contemporary Asian Contexts, Manchester UP
xvi. Justin Bentham, Andrew Bowman, Marta de la Cuesta, Ewald Engelen, Ismail Ertürk, Peter Folkman, Julie Froud, Sukhdev Johal, John Law, Adam Leaver, Michael Moran, Karel Williams 2013, Manifesto for the Foundational Economy (November), Manchester: CRESC
xvii. Kapoor, H and JC Kaufman 2020 ‘Meaning-making through creativity during COVID-19’, Frontiers in Psychology 11
xviii. Richardson C 2020 ‘COVID-19: Australia’s $60bn income pain’, Deloitte Media, https:// www2.deloitte.com/au/en/pages/media-releases/articles/covid-19-australias-60bn-income-pain-290420 (accessed 11 June 2020).
xix. Paul Crosby & Jordi McKenzie 2022 Survey evidence on the impact of COVID-19 on Australian musicians and implications for policy, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 28.2: 166–86
xx. The Impact of COVID-19 on the Arts, https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Communications/Arts/Report/section?id=committees%2Freportrep%2F024535%2F78295
xxi. Abbing, Hans 2002 Why are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Amsterdam UP