The Present of the Power

B. FULL PAPERS 1

SURVIVIMG or THRIVING In the 21 st CENTURY: CULTURAL MERDEKA, STATUS QUO AND FORESEEABLE CHALLENGES By Aubrey Mellor OAM Senior Fellow, Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore I A nation is defined by its culture: its customs, values and traditions; its dress, food and its arts. Beliefs, values and behavior were always the subjects for artists; and their reflections on surroundings make up the majority of world art. Nature, of course, is a prime conditioner for everything; and the visual arts, as well as much literature, are dominated by artists‘ perceptions of myriad aspects of nature; but, in the performing arts, it is the human being that gets the main focus. The human being at its most natural, and unnatural. It is always the human condition that shapes any political agenda. For me, arts and politics always go hand-in-hand: content, whatever we call it - ‗meaning‘, ‗moral‘ or ‗theme‘ - is necessary if one wants a dialogue with an audience. And the performing arts cannot perform without an audience. Thus ideas, intentional or accidental, are found in any performance event; and for that reason the written and spoken word is considered potent and to a degree always political. The arts have two audience areas, and these often overlap – perhaps they should always overlap, but often they don‘t. For me the best work always speaks to both the galleries and the stalls. The elite has always commanded the agenda, commissioning music and paintings, creating performances - and, very like an educated critic, requesting more of some things and less of others. The elite can be from an intelligentsia, but the most powerful come from the ruling classes. Wealth continues to dictate much of an artistic agenda; prices on the world art market continue to shock us – especially in the face of continuing poverty and disease - and it is well known that opera, for example, is an accepted form of elitism encouraged as the sign of the most civilized society. China is building a series of great opera houses to rival the West, though still importing the major western opera companies to perform. Like festivals, theatre events have attracted public, private and government support for thousands of years. But performance groups, or families, have survived only on offerings, traditionally collected in a hat; and, from the Renaissance, from ticket sales. Though Richard Burbage‘s and Shakespeare‘s company was essentially a commercial company, and a contemporary new-works one at that, surviving mainly from its box-office, it did enjoy patronage - as did many artists. Through history‘s great patrons, such as Frederick II of Prussia, artists gained time to create some of mankind‘s greatest artistic achievements. Every nation has