The Will for 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 its patrons: people who have been educated to appreciate the necessity of the arts and can afford to invest in them. In many cases governments, local or national, have been the patrons, and in some countries today – eg Australia and Singapore – it is the government‘s funding systems that keep the arts surviving, though, interestingly, not thriving. We know that occasional masterpieces were created under the most appalling conditions, and some people still think it is appropriate for all artists to ‗starve in a garret‘; but I believe emphatically that without commerce art does not thrive. At least not in ways that impact a nation and its people. II The performing arts are ephemeral, thus making them difficult to capture in other media, and are fragile for many reasons, thus lacking the robustness to be mobile and have outreach. Government support as well as private and corporate sponsorship are today‘s necessities; and will hopefully remain strong in the future – provided the arts can continually re- articulate their necessity to the health of a nation and its quality of life. But without a commercial edge in several aspects, all arts companies will occasional flounder and often disappear forever – especially those relying solely on the hegemony of a particular artist or patron. In many ways it is silly to talk of ‗the arts‘ in general, as in general they appear to have always had their place, and there seemed always a market for the great works that we have inherited. We know of the great collectors who purchased, often to aid artists, and to then offer access for the public: where would America be without the Guggenheims, J. Paul Getty etc? – but they were only following examples of the Medici, Kings, Rajahs and indeed Sultans. Rulers defined their kingdoms by the quality of their art, regardless of the quality of the ruler Hitler aimed to collect more than anyone in history and stole prodigiously. Any collection is the result of some quality arbitration, not all Patrons having personal taste. Contemporary purchases on behalf of a nation are entrusted to position-holders but are also subject to boards and committees; these will forever attempt to define ‗taste‘ and ‗quality‘, on behalf of the people. The subjective areas of quality and taste are continually under debate, and debate remains crucial to ensure that arts education is essential to those in power. But if difficulties confront the patrons of material arts, how much more difficult to deal with the very different problems of the ephemeral arts? Private, corporate or government funding not only keeps the artists creating, it contributes to possible international recognition. A nation‘s art ensures a degree of respect and definition in the world today; and also lifts the value of the artist and their art. I believe governments are now mature enough to accept that artists feel obliged to express counter-views and sometimes bite the hand that feeds them. Yet international recognition can also bring a degree of immunity to an artist, regardless of a nation‘s view of them. International recognition of Solzhenitsyn for example, kept his life preserved from Stalin; similarly the imprisoned playwright, later President, Vaclav Havel, was kept alive by the massive international support through Amnesty International; and though Ai Wei Wei remains under house arrest, his fame allows this work to continue. Fame allows them boundless liberty. Because of international prominence, playwrights Kuo Pau Kun in Singapore and W.S. Rendra here in Indonesia both survived their nations‘ maturing processes to ultimately become national treasures. Of course international recognition is sometimes an embarrassment to a government, yet it is international