A dialogue between an Artist and a Philistine

ARTIST: Integration with the university or no integration, one way or another the specialized, practical training that the VCA has offered until now has to be preserved.

PHILISTINE: No doubt it would be desirable to do so, and in a world without scarcity we would do it, but you can’t ignore the economic realities.  You need to appreciate that in the last few decades we’ve been able to overcome the role played by higher education in the reproduction of class distinctions by extending the educational franchise.  However, our new mass system of higher education is too expensive to be funded entirely by the taxpayer; it has to be made more efficient and less dependent on the public purse. Intensive, practice-based training, because of the required number of teaching hours per student, is inevitably expensive.  I’m sure you don’t mean to say that students and teachers in the fine arts, who amount to a small cultural elite, should get special treatment?

ARTIST: The insinuation you’re making with the word ‘elite’ is unfair. We want to train elite artists, it is true, but this is not, as you seem to be implying, a bad thing.  Australians hold elite sportsmen and –women in high regard; we encourage them to do the same for the people who excel in artistic fields of endeavour.  And in fact they already do this, if we go by the number of people who attend musical theatre performances, or galleries, or theatres, or who watch locally produced television drama.  The arts are big business in Victoria.  And that’s before we get to the tourist industry, and the flow-on benefit it derives from Melbourne’s wealth of cultural offerings.  I can’t accept it when you imply that we are ignoring the economic reality of the situation.  The reality is that there is an economic case for keeping the VCA as it was.

PHILISTINE: Come now, you’re an artist.  What do you care about economic arguments?  And for that matter, who are you to lecture the government about economics?  Do you think they government haven’t gotten all the cost-benefit analysis they need on the role of education in providing skilled labour inputs?  You can come clean with me: the noises you make about the economic benefits of practical training – they’re not really aimed at the governments and the MBAs you find in university management, are they?  You’re make them for the benefit of the TV audiences in the suburbs.  Admit it, you’re not offering arguments so much as fighting a war of impressions.

ARTIST:  Even if that was true, I’d say it’s a just war.  The policy advisers and masters of business administration are ignorant of what it takes to make a person into an artist.  They don’t need to take my word for it; when representatives of the arts industries speak they should listen.  If you ask them, they’ll tell you about the VCA’s reputation, and the importance of the training that it offers.

PHILISTINE: The representatives you’re talking about have lent their voices to the Save VCA campaign on a solidaristic reflex.  They’re used to arguing for more government funding, so whenever it looks like that’s what the issue is, they pipe up.  But let’s put aside our public personae and speak frankly for a moment.  The issue is not how much money we’re going to spend, its how are we going to spend the amount we’re going to spend?  And the answer is: the motions of arts education will continue to be made, only the education will be that little bit less substantial than it used to be.  There will still be course guides and degrees and a fuss made about pushing boundaries and achieving excellence.  But everyone knows that the arts industries aren’t predicated on the state paying for students to luxuriate for a few years in l’art pour l’art.  The industry is reproduced, rather, on the strength of its sheer existence and of its ability to assert its own importance through advertising.  Take John and Margaret, for instance, coming down to the city for a nice weekend.  On Saturday night they’ll go and see a show — any show, no matter how clichéd and aesthetically meaningless it be.  It’s as much a part of the whole tourist ritual as going to a restaurant, or, for people travelling in the opposite direction, a day-spa: you get to be treated like a VIP, you get entertained.  But for the effect to be achieved, the pretence of art is just as good as art itself.  In fact, so long as there are plenty of bright lights and loud sounds, the pretence is better.  It’s cheaper, and there’s almost no risk of Margaret and John’s weekend being spoiled by being made aware of the shriveled state of their own powers of imagination.