Australia Needs Effective Arts and Culture Ministers to Represent Australian Artists and Art

By Ruth Skilbeck

One thing which has emerged from the heated and passionate dialogue on social media and amongst Biennale artists about the sponsorship of the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), was the absence of political debate on this issue, and the absolute lack of a political voice in power. The Greens Party spoke out in support of artists, but there was no arts and culture minister debating the wider and local issues in detail. 

This is an extraordinary gap in Australian diplomacy and international relations. Arts and Culture is the field on which internationally the most significant representations of a country are made, and forged.
Yet in Australia, Culture is still politically equated with sport, and by sport is meant the kicking of balls, or hitting them with an implement, not the sport of rhetoric, which politicians have taken as their own, and chosen not to have a significant representation of arts culture.

What we need in Australia is good Arts and Culture ministers, who can provide leadership. Where are they?

The events surrounding and leading to the severing of ties between the Biennale of Sydney and now ex-sponsor Transfield due to controversial political allegiances and contracts to run detention camps which are in breach of human rights shocked and outraged visiting Biennale artists who withdrew in protest.

When international governments started to question the links between the Biennale and the detention camps profit connections to its controversial sponsor, the Biennale rapidly severed the ties with the sponsor, yesterday (as reported on this blog).

This shows that art and politics are inextricably linked, artists need political representation at high levels in Australia, beyond the arts administration which is not in this arena. 

For example, we urgently need sponsorship for the arts which is not connected to dubious business ties and political allegiance.
 It may seem like a contradiction to then call for political representation of artists but I believe that we do need strong leadership to connect Australian art to the wider world, and to champion the rights and needs of artists eg to cheap housing, transport, and to give artists liveable incomes. This has happened in Berlin, it can happen here.

Strong representation of art and artists, by those who are artists themselves, in politics, and a far more serious committment to the arts and culture in Australia, can only help to further the presence of art from Australian artists on the international stage, and strengthen cultural ties between arts bodies and artists in Australia and internationally.

Such a representation could forewarn, for instance, of the kinds of sponsorship that is likely to be considered controversial and unacceptable internationally and nationally by those who have a moral conscience, and act on it, which would save the kind of international embarrassment which this Biennale debacle has caused for the Australian government, and the Biennale itself.

Above all, the Australian government should not be pursuing policies of mandatory detention and cruelty which have made this such a controversial issue, which artists have had the courage and ethical sense to resist.


Ruth Skilbeck, 8.3.2014