Flipping the bird at answers

Hooooonk!

I saw the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra play last night – my girlfriend got free tickets and looooooves classical music. I was going to post something silly on Facebook about it before I went: something about how I hoped my fellow grundy fulture-cunding anti-elite didn’t catch me sleeping with the enemy, because I understand that some of the alternative, independent, underground artists and writers I tend to spend a lot of time with get pissy when they find out cultural institutions such as Opera Australia receive millions of dollars more in government funding than any other Australian creative sector.

Instinctively, this upsets me too, because I’ve spent a lot of my otherwise misspent youth pouring my intellectual and creative energies into editing and promoting emerging literature, within a sector that receives relatively bugger all in government funding. But it’s obviously not as cut and dry as that, so it’s a good thing I didn’t post anything stupid – I had the good sense to wait for Lara to get home before I did, and she filled me in that ASO is one of the most poorly funded orchestras in Australia.

I’m still not sure how I feel about that – or about the whole idea that the subsidisation of traditional art forms continues to be prioritised over emerging art forms and, in particular, youth literature.

Then when I dragged myself out of bed this morning, to pour a little more of my unpaid self into making up for that regulation failure, Marcus Westbury had posted a link to this article from the Australian, which seems to conclude that the ASO should stop whingeing about their meagre $75 000 salaries because tickets are already subsidised by 75%. I don’t trust the reporting of those figures, because the Australian generally doesn’t support liberal approaches to cultural funding, but if they’re accurate then I would tend to agree. But then, I don’t play the oboe.

I wasn’t sure of the point Marcus was making, but one commenter got me riled by saying, ‘I think we can all agree classical/orchestral music should have it’s pension cut’. This sort of narrow-minded antagonism tars the rest of us around here who prefer to be respectfully irreverent and critical of traditional culture and how the government funds it. So I got my long winded on and, because I wouldn’t want to waste that on Facebook’s torrential updates feed, here is what I wrote:

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I went to the ASO last night and there were two young couples to my left and, on the right, the little old Italian woman who ran the takeaway pizza restaurant next to the video store I worked at as a teenager. The ‘ratcheted up’ industrial action’ was a fifteen minute delay, a sign on the door and red tuxedos replaced by t-shirts reading ‘Great Cities Make Great Orchestras’ (I’m pretty sure that’s what they said – my eyes are beginning to fail).

I’m a ‘young creative’, but I’m also a sentimental bugger, and I was inspired by the performance. I often enjoy watching (or reading, for that matter) the work of the ‘aesthetic traditionalists’, as it helps me see where my creative production fits in our culture. I wouldn’t like to see their ‘pension’ cut, but I’d be happy to see some of that $12.4 million diverted into the literary sector, where there is a similar dearth in resources for promotion and publicity.

What do you reckon? A lot more discussion evolved after I put my bobs in – it’s interesting, if you’re interested in this sort of thing …

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