Dialogue: Rallying to flag in name of art

By JOHN GARDNER

When Helen Clark, in her role as Commissar for Culture, started arranging the programme of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra it was impossible to resist the thought of the Emperor Joseph II rebuking Mozart for using "too many notes."

The NZSO, ruled Helen Clark, should tackle only large-scale works such as Mahler symphonies "once in a blue moon" because they used too many players. One can hardly argue with the right of the Arts Minister to lay down the law for, like her Hapsburg predecessor, she pays the piper and can call the tune.

The state has stepped in as patron of the arts and has the right to demand fiscal responsibility. And the arts have undeniably become big business. A report this week from Absolutely, Positively, Totally Wellington, or whatever it's called, gloatingly recorded that the Arts Festival was worth $39.7 million to the city.

The Heart of the Nation arts project, torpedoed so cruelly and so typically of arts politics, went on about "sustainable cultural industries and a contribution to economic growth."

But it would seem Philistine to be too crassly commercial about the arts and in an exposition of her arts policy in May, Helen Clark also proclaimed a vision "through which a strong and confident cultural identity can emerge."

I was standing up to salute and break into a rousing chorus of God Defend New Zealand before I realised I hadn't the vaguest idea what this really means.

I read further. "What is unique about us are our arts, our culture and our heritage." I'm not sure this helped.

For instance, it was generally thought to be a feather in the cap of the Royal New Zealand Ballet that its latest production Dracula gathered good reviews and audiences in Melbourne. It's probably true and I loved it but I haven't worked out specifically why a production of an English ballet written by an Irishman about a Hungarian reflects well on New Zealand.

When Gareth Farr takes to the gamelan I'm not sure how we are hearing "more of our country in our music" as Helen Clark would have it. When Ralph Hotere unveiled the basic structure of Skylight IV this week, did our thoughts instantly turn to the Dunedin landscape?

Even if a piece of music or writing is explicitly grounded in New Zealand, does that automatically make it somehow better for us than another work which does not draw on such a heritage?

The heritage and cultural defence of the arts can be interpreted as nothing but camouflage. The American critic Dave Hickey put it bluntly: "Why don't all of us art types summon up the moral courage to admit that what we do has no intrinsic value or virtue ... the presumption of art's essential goodness is nothing more than political fiction that we employ to solicit taxpayers' money for public art education and for the public housing of works of art that we love so well."

This view is often rendered in class terms - that high art is nothing more than the leisure interests of the middle classes. The regular tenant of this essay slot has robustly argued along the lines that if the toffs want opera let them pay for it themselves without bleeding the poor.

There is an element of reverse snobbery in this argument's presumption that working people don't like, for instance, symphonic music. Try telling that to a Russian or the Liverpool audiences of my childhood who used to fill the Philharmonic Hall for "industrial concerts."

Even if this were true, are we saying the force of the anti-elitist argument means taxpayer cash can go only to mass audience performances (or, of course, that most holy of all sacred cows, ethnic culture)? Surely this is to disenfranchise a considerable proportion of the population whose tastes are different?

Perhaps the middle classes could mount a case for television programmes more to their taste than Friends by arguing they are an underprivileged minority.

Television producers, of course, argue that their medium is the real reflection of contemporary national culture

But does Shortland Street, good as it may be, really reflect New Zealand's national honour as it plays to bewildered audiences in Birmingham in the bleak off-peak hours?

Perhaps cultural heritage is like pornography - hard to define but we know it when we see it.

Paradoxically, though, I do believe it is an indication of a country's standing when it produces a range of artists free to express themselves, not as citizens or national representatives, but as respected participants in the mainstreams of world culture. Kiri Te Kanawa won acclaim for her performances of the great repertoire in a way that would have been impossible had she stuck to New Zealand music.

A country which has a climate in which artists can thrive is almost by definition a country worthy of respect. Money spent on artists is money well spent. It is a pity it has to be defended by grandiose nationalistic humbug.