Dialogue: May as well pay the money and let them paint

By KATE BELGRAVE

There's absolutely no point in complaining about the extra funding Helen Clark has served up for the arts. I've tried to oppose the concept - what about giving money to the poor? - but even I am beginning to see the point of it.

I discovered this again at the weekend, when a series of chance rendezvous and happy flukes saw me mincing up the path of the tidy Ponsonby pile that houses one Judith Tizard. (La Tizard, you are of course aware, is Associate Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage, or something like that).

Also present were a couple of media people, and a couple of other people, one of whom was apparently a kinetic artist.

("What the hell is a kinetic artist?" yelled one of the media people in alarm. Poor sod was clearly worried about being left alone with one. I, meanwhile, was getting very worried about being surrounded by pinkos. I do enjoy the company of socialists, but that is mainly because they can all play the guitar. When they start talking (flowery) ideology, they make me nervous).

I was always going to emerge as the afternoon's most humourless punter, and this proved the case when she suggested that extra arts funding was a waste of time and money which this nation did not have on talent mostly living in England.

Tizard seemed to understand that there was an element of pouring good money after bad in handing out the extra arts dosh. She was rather witty about it, though. In the end, that's half the battle for any Labour politician (look at Lange).

"One of the complaints [the great unwashed made about the extra funding] was 'Oh God - more films. More films about more little bastards in some back valley in the Taranaki wearing balaclavas'."

It's true that Tizard also delivered buckets of the usual fertiliser - "I think that we have an exotic and unique different culture, reinterpreted in our clear Pacific light...blah blah blah." But what the hell, it probably would have been rude to turn the hose on her. You'll be pleased to know that I stayed my hand.

Next up was the kinetic artist. The kinetic artist had "pretty much given art up" because he found it a bit hard to make a living that way. Still, he was pleased to think there was money around to help others.

So was a woman at the table. "I think it's great."

Her feeling was that New Zealand was old enough now to take the arts and culture seriously. She also felt that the extent to which a nation was prepared to spend on arts and culture spoke in some ways of that nation's maturity, its sophistication.

And hell, why not? Well - "because everything [New Zealand artists] do is crap," as another, somewhat disgruntled, local punter hissed at me last week. I wonder about this line of argument, though.

Perhaps it is time we learned to accept that most artwork is rubbish, and fund it nonetheless. Perhaps the ability to do that is a sign of maturity. It is in every other country in the world.

In every other country in the world, it is widely understood that the greater percentage arts funding is spent on producing work so awful that you wouldn't mount it at a dog-fight.

America's National Endowment for the Arts is considered (particularly by Republicans) a hideous waste of money - a fund used by pimps, paedophiles and pornographers and/or their victims to create works to which nobody except the original funder ought to be exposed. (Salon magazine's Sarah Vowell has an excellent piece listing the endless S-bends around which NEA funds disappear).

There has also been no end of argument about the funding of British neo-conceptualists like Damien Hurst and Chris whathisface - the winner who paints with (after somehow locating) elephant flop. The point is not results. The point is that arts funding allows people to express themselves. It's a freedom of speech gig.

It's all making money available for as many people as possible to express themselves - even if the rest of us can't understand what they're trying to say.