Cringeworthy arts grants

Australia's first national arts giving day

This week an arts administrator won a grant to improve arts administration.

Yes, the latest, and one of the richest of grants in the not-for-profit sector, the $100,000 Betty Amsden Fellowship, this week went to young Melbourne-based arts administrator, Dr Ciaran Frame. His task? Investigate ways of improving arts administration.

Artists will be less than pleased to discover that he will be asking chatbots – the evil eyes of the data centres that constantly raid artists’ endeavours – to help find efficiency, marketing nous, and engagement with audiences for the arts.

With possibly unfortunate timing the grant was announced just before AusArts Day – today, Thursday October 23 – when Australians are asked to dig deep to fund arts in Australia. It is the first time the nation has staged an arts giving day.

So it’s a good time to reflect on the remuneration of arts administrators.

In my innocent youth the administration of the arts was a task undertaken by enthusiastic arts supporters. For free.

I remember being astonished when Rob Brookman, and up-and-coming actor, writer and creative spirit (and fellow student and member of our Adelaide University Dramatic Society) announced he had won a trainee arts administrator’s position at the newly opened Adelaide Festival Centre Trust.

I didn’t know there was such a thing as an arts administrator, let alone a career.

It was a time when increased public funding of the arts had arrived in South Australia to enable an array of professional companies and organisations and a demand for capable administrators in the arts.

For some reason, I always thought they would be paid on the same scale as artists.

As a rule, artists don’t earn much money, and even less from practising their actual art.

This seemed the only fair outcome for those who helped organise them.

To have an impact on the world, artists need to be hugely talented, motivated and have some good luck, along with sufficient income to make it possible.

I presumed that the same rules would hold. Arts administrators would be outstanding talents who would dedicate their lives, despite the obvious lack of anything but a derisory income, to putting their preferred arts companies to the fore.

It turned out that arts administrators didn’t think like that. They would be paid according to public service and private company pay scales, like smart administrators in transport, department stores or sewage. I don’t begrudge these administrators their pay. There is a lot of self-satisfaction and social cachet to be had in the arts admin business.

Way back in those university days Rob Brookman and Verity Laughton and friends had shown their arts and entrepreneurial spirit when they acquired a horse and cart, decorated it as a gypsy wagon, and headed off to perform as they travelled the Barossa Valley.

Other students and friends, like Tim Coldwell and Sue Broadway, mainly from Flinders University’s drama course, trained in circus and set off in some clapped-out trucks painted yellow and red, to perform as New Circus at spots along the south coast all the way to Victoria.

Circus Oz was the result, and Tim Coldwell was to become the leading light of animal-free circus in Australia. His ringmaster, Michael Harbison, left the arts, but deployed his showbiz talents in business and as Lord Mayor of Adelaide.

The 1970s saw a lot of this kind of spirit in the arts: very smart people who cut their teeth in creative endeavours before branching out into their particular careers.

Some stuck with their university discoveries of arts and performance. I first saw Robyn Archer – then Smith – wow audiences with her lascivious version of That Old Soft Shoe at a Flootlights Revue. Was that 1969? Later I reviewed Shaun Micallef – as quick a wit as I have encountered – in University of Adelaide Law School reviews.

Among all the 1970s creative activity there was a great desire to make things happen. To make things happen you needed new theatre companies, new music ensembles and bands, new dance, new writing and new artforms. These had the effrontery to want to be professional.

Until then SA’s thriving amateur performing arts scene of troupes, bands, orchestras, ballets and eisteddfods had been managed by committed boards and officers, who kept accounts as unpaid treasurers and secretaries. An honorarium might be paid for work above and beyond the call of duty, but Adelaide’s considerable arts output of the 1960s had few professionals of the yet to be named arts administrator class.

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, its administration entwined in the bureaucracies of our national broadcaster, the ABC, was typical of those cases where professional administration was evident.

Arts companies were often tied to education establishments.

I well remember that the Union Hall, the centre of theatrical work at the University of Adelaide and the Adelaide Festivals of the 1960s, was run by two professionals, Jack and Reg, who patiently explained to 18-year-olds how to run a theatre without killing those on stage with badly made sets or electrocuting themselves while setting up booms of lights.

I once played God, suspended on a tiny platform and descending from the flies to appear before Job and crack my stock whip. I needed those professionals. Another one of those great future talents, playwright Steve J Spears, was on piano.

Elsewhere, commercial operations accounted for arts activity. The professional performing arts were still within the JC Williamson mould of commercial theatre management, running Her Majesty’s until 1973. Commercial art galleries exhibited for profit, and publishers gambled on the success of their writers.

The need for arts administrators came with the large public investments in the arts in the 1970s. In Adelaide figures like Len Amadio and James Murdoch stepped into the roles, establishing the idea that professional public servants on proper salaries were the obvious choice for arts administrators.

Perhaps it was just assumed that well-paid arts administrators were necessary to look after the innocents from the ranks classified as artists. Perhaps no one asked why arts administrators were sufficiently-paid while artists were not.

If you fast forward to the 2020s world populated by Ciaran Frame and his AI synthesis of how to run the arts, take a look at the back pages of theatre programs where the professionals who produce the event are listed. It has grown like topsy by the decade.

Professional performing arts needs professional administration and haven’t they made sure of it. Regulations have grown around employment so companies need to be properly managed. As finances became a matter of making deals, securing public funding, finding sponsorships or patrons, the tasks have been given to professionals. As marketing and advertising and public relations became essential engines in the search of audiences, the tasks have been taken on by professionals. As education programs, access programs and social equity programs have become a raison d’etre for public funding, arts companies have engaged professionals.

I have no issue with that. But I still don’t see why they are paid more than the artists.

The arts can’t be allowed to become a self-feeding complex, ossified by its own administrative costs as it sheds audiences and opportunities for local creatives.

Some artists do become stars. They earn a lot of money. I suppose some arts administrators become recognised for their brilliance and make a case for being well-paid.

They should move on.

Tim McFarlane was among the best of Adelaide Festival Centre CEOs and has since had a distinguished career managing the Cameron Mackintosh musicals of the Really Useful Group. Ian Scobie was outstanding as general manager of the Adelaide Festival and went on to establish APA, Arts Projects Australia, with the jewel in his crown the management of Womadelaide, one of Australia’s most successful and long-lasting music festivals. Rachel Healy went from managing Carclew to managing Sydney City’s arts office followed by years as Adelaide Festival co-director.

My proposition?

Let’s transform our professional performing arts companies to ensembles. Let’s get rid of pre-conceived ideas of who gets paid what in the arts.

While we are waiting, observe AusArts Day: hand over a bit of cash to your favourite arts company, and ask for it to go to an actual artist.