Art Matters: Quantifying beauty leaves bean-counters cold

Art in the Dark will not run this year.

"In Bali, everyone makes art; they find anyone who doesn't to be quite strange," said actor Jacob Rajan at a dress rehearsal once, probably between switching masks and voices, transforming himself from a small boy to an old crone in the batting of an eye.

It was a wonderful thought: that there was a place on Earth where the artist wasn't an outsider and creative self-expression was as normal as eating, breathing and cricket.

I've kept this dream of an artistic nirvana alive in my heart for years until last week, when I woke up to its detailed topography. No, the exulted state of which I speak wasn't attained on the Indonesian island perfumed with sandalwood and resounding to the incessant plinking of gamelan. The age of enlightenment dawned at home, with the publication of Creative New Zealand's 120-page report, "New Zealanders and the arts: attitudes, attendance and participation 2014."

Very close to half of 1181 people surveyed said they simply "could not live without the arts" and last year, a gargantuan 85 per cent of us were found to have attended an arts event; close to 65 per cent of us had participated in one.

The definition of attending "the arts" was so broad it could have amounted to simply going to a Katy Perry concert. Making art might involve little more than taking a shot of a sunrise on your cellphone before uploading it to Instagram, depending on interpretation. It threw the net wide, and captured most of us within.

But a few days after the report was published, something rotten at the centre of our artistic utopia came in the form of a headline. The organisers of Art in the Dark, an event that was rapidly becoming a staple of the Auckland calendar, announced it would not be running this year because of lack of funding. Even after attracting 150,000 patrons to Western Park since 2009, there wasn't enough sponsorship and grant money around to put it on until next year.

The example backs up two things about the research. First, it shows New Zealanders love the arts - especially when entry is free - and second, it underlines why a government agency as part of its remit is asking us questions as prosaic as whether we like music, or films, or nice-looking objects. (For the record, 88 per cent of us think they're fantastic.)

The data, which has now been collected for 10 years, is a bold and occasionally quite baffling attempt to quantify the value of bestowing beauty on the world so it may be explained to bean-counters. Despite the most recent survey showing participation rates in the sector as the highest on record, the message has left them unmoved.

Creative New Zealand's revenue is expected to be down by about $4.3 million this year. It will still fund projects at the same level but will dig into cash reserves to do so. Although the Government's contribution via the Ministry of Culture and Heritage has remained static, the income the funding body gets from the Lottery Grants Board is likely to be lower, because fewer people are buying Lotto tickets.

Bottom line: the health of something so important to the fabric of the country - something so many of us believe to be essential to life's very enjoyment - is quite reliant on how many of us play Big Wednesday.

Bali anyone?