NAVA Blogs

National cultural policy and arts research are the flavour of this month. If the policy geeks are that way inclined, there are lots of affirmative statistics for shaping arts election platforms to be found in the newly released Australia Council’s research report More than bums on seats: Australian participation in the arts.

It seems that there is no end to community fascination with the debate about the ethics and legality of representations of children in art. This has once more been ignited by two concurrent events. One is a move being mooted by the NSW Government to remove the ‘artistic defence’ from the NSW Crimes Act.

At the time of writing, the arts community is awaiting the Commonwealth Government’s new cultural policy vision to 2020 to be delivered by Arts Minister Peter Garrett in a forthcoming address at the National Press Club on October 27. It is perhaps the right moment to reflect on what has been delivered thus far by the Rudd Government that is pertinent to the visual arts.  

Is the regulation of art an oxymoron? Listening recently to the opining of art critic John McDonald seemed to me as though he wanted the artworld to stay the way it was in the good old days of C19th Europe.  

For art addicts the sight of people speeding through an exhibition snapping each art work on a mobile can be very disconcerting. What is it about? Is it just a trophy gathering exercise – been there done that? Or in the intimacy of their own homes do they reprise the experiences of the day because they are more comfortable and familiar with the virtual than the real thing?

Artists continue to be put in the position of having to make the hard decision about whether it is worth gaining exposure rather than exerting their right to be paid. Imagine the response of an electrician to being offered the option of profile on a company website instead of a fee for rewiring a company’s office?

In a major speech at Melbourne University in Jan 2007, Kevin Rudd then Opposition Leader cast education as an economic policy. He made the case that Australia's future wealth lies in training a more productive workforce, and that the economy could be boosted if more people stayed in education or training for longer.