KEY POINTS:
For some reason any suggestion that Wellington has too great an influence on the national culture almost immediately deteriorates into a parochial slanging match. It should not. New Zealand is now a country mature and diverse enough to ask and answer questions like that.
It is also a question far too complicated to answer by adding up who is on what board and where do they come from, or by adding up columns of grants and where did they go. Any reasonable person will or should know the power of a bureaucracy to shape what it serves in its own image.
New Zealand culture is maintained and to a large degree defined by a bureaucracy firmly fixed in Wellington. Almost every cultural button and lever has a Wellington hand or finger on it.
Of course Wellington is the country's capital. But is it, as it claims, also the country's "Cultural Capital" and if it is how did it become that? Is it by virtue of having almost all of the country's cultural institutions within its boundaries? Or is it by some other kind of cultural alchemy? If it is the former, then there is a natural resentment to have our institutions - and they are ours and we pay for them - so much a part of a city brand rather than a part of our culture.
Of course there would be less resentment if the presence of those institutions had a tangible impact on the rest of the country. When, for example, was there a major Te Papa exhibition seen in Auckland or any other city for that matter? If you want to borrow an art work for an exhibition anywhere else you are expected to pay for it - and not just for cost recovery either. But even that is less the issue.
Other countries in a similar position to our own - where the capital is not a major population centre - do not position all their cultural eggs in a single basket. In fact the arts are not really defined by any particular mechanism at all. That is what make the endless parroting of some "search for a national identity" so irritating. We are what we have become. And there are more of us that have become that outside the boundaries of Wellington City - in both islands.
It is a self-serving argument, for example, that there are more professional theatres in Wellington than in Auckland through some strange deficiency in the Auckland population. There are more professional theatres in Wellington because more receive subsidy. Christchurch is larger than Wellington and Wellington is the size of one of Auckland's suburbs. It would be an odd state of affairs if the audience for theatre had miraculously coagulated in Wellington. And the same could be said for music or any other of the arts. Is the music audience of Wellington so refined that it needs two orchestras - both subsidised by all of us - to serve it?
The argument is not some inter-city stoush. Cultures are driven and shaped more by demography than they are by geography. We have matured enough - more than enough - to begin to wonder if it is not time for some degree of cultural devolution, even if for no better reason than to divert the cosy bad habits of the country's cultural bureaucracy. But a more urgent reason is to reflect New Zealand's very real cultural diversity. Of course it could be argued that if that is the case what is the problem. The problem is as much one of perception. The view of our culture and its genuine needs is naturally restricted when it comes solely from Lambton Quay or a dinner party in Karori. But I hasten to say that those views are not to be denied for they are a part of the view - it is the general view that needs now to become larger.
There are opportunities. Te Papa is a very immediate one. It has been outgrown by the national collections. As an earnest of cultural devolution it could open an Auckland branch. Other countries' national museums have done it. A genuine iconic building, paid for with our taxes, right where one is pencilled in for the Tank Farm. Then one-third of the country's population would have access to the nation's collections - and not only the art collections either. Build the right building and we can have the whale skeletons and the Lord of the Rings show too.
* Hamish Keith is the Auckland-based author of The Big Picture, a history of New Zealand art, and has served on cultural institutions, including as gallery keeper of the Auckland Art Gallery and a former chairman of the QEII Arts Council.
