Gordon Kerry

PATRONISING BASTARDS AND OTHER ANGELS

You must remember this: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ It’s a great line - part of Harry Lime’s justification for his murderous criminal activities in Graham Greene’s screenplay for The Third Man. Lime’s history is a bit approximate, and clearly he had never tried getting money out of a Swiss bank, but there is a grain of truth in his hyperbole. In Culture of Complaint, Robert Hughes develops the theme. He notes that Renaissance strongman Sigismondo da Malatesta (alias Il Lupo – the wolf) was a man of great taste who engaged the services of the architect Alberti and painter Paolo della Francesca to build his wife’s memorial temple. All the same, for having brutally sodomised the Bishop of Fano in the main square of Rimini, Sigismondo was ‘so execrated after his death that the Catholic Church made him (for a time) the only man apart from Judas Iscariot officially listed as being in Hell’.

But you have to admit: much of the hardware of Western Culture – the statues, the paintings, the books, the music – is the result of acts of patronage by individuals. Sure, often the commission of a particular artist stemmed from vanity or some even less noble sentiment. Supporting the arts has always been a way of buying respectability for some, and even the great philanthropic gestures of some nineteenth century American tycoons came after messages from government along the lines of ‘do something charitable or we’ll tax you so heavily you’ll have to mortgage your fillings’. It is fair to say, though, that often such patronage arises from a genuine enthusiasm for (if not always understanding of) the art by the patron. There is a story, for instance, of Peggy Guggenheim’s conversion to the cause of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings: she showed one to that master of formal serenity, Piet Mondrian, expecting him to agree with her own low estimation. Mondrian’s unexpected admiration for the Pollock caused the scales to fall miraculously from Guggenheim’s eyes. To her credit, she maintained that enthusiasm – one of many that have significantly enriched western art.

Some mystification on the part of the patron is possibly desirable, or at least the willingness of a patron to accept that the artist is the expert at making the stuff. Architects wince whenever a client trots out the ‘I’ve got some great ideas, I just need you to draw them up’ line. While you wouldn’t want your family room extension to turn into, say, a beach volleyball court at the whim of your architect, one needs to trust in his or her professional competence. It’s the same with artists. If you commission a painting for a particular space, the work needs to fit the dimensions; if you commission a piece of music, there is usually some notion of duration to which the composer needs to be sensitive. But the content of the work is what the artist is uniquely placed to create, and one would hope that any patron would welcome the element of surprise when the work is complete. Sigismondo did, and in giving Alberti free reign profoundly influenced the direction of architecture in the Renaissance. What Harry Lime didn’t mention, though, was that when the college of cardinals had retrieved its collective jaw from the floor of the Sistine Chapel – having seen Michelangelo’s vision of sacred history for the first time - it was scandalised and demanded changes. And that way lies the road of censorship.

Government (and therefore the taxpayer) is the single most important patron of the arts in this country. At the federal level the Department of Communications and the Arts disburses its budget through various organisations including the Australia Council. That body funds performing arts companies, visual arts facilities, literary activity and earmarks a certain amount of money for the commissioning of new works. On a per capita basis, we spend much less on the arts than do French or German taxpayers, but a whole lot more than those in the USA. There have been one or two egregiously ham-fisted cases of censorship in living memory, and arts funding by specialist committees (the Australia Council’s practice) will never be entirely free of factional politics (though Les Murray’s famous call to replace them with ‘a couple of clerks and a computer’ is possibly going too far). But the real problem with arts funding in this country is that the money available doesn’t go far enough.

As the result of a recent survey conducted by Saatchi and Saatchi for the Australia Council, there has been some discussion on Australians’ attitudes to the arts recently. While unfortunately muddied by some misguided wrangling over a supposed difference between ‘elite’ and ‘elitism’, the basic news is, it seems, good. Paul Costantoura, author of the report, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald recently that according to his findings

‘89 per cent of all Australians agreed with the statement: "I feel proud when I see the creative talent of Australians being recognised locally and internationally." Three-quarters agreed that "the arts help us define and express our national identity"; seven out of 10 agreed that "plenty of Australians are famous in the arts"…In summary: Australians enjoy, encourage and feel pride at the elite performance of Australian artists.’

How this reflects our attitudes to the financial support of the arts is another question, though the Coalition’s scare campaign against ‘elite arts funding’ (in all states except Victoria) before the last federal election may be an indicator. The facts, however, are these: arts funding at present levels is not diverting crucial funds from more important programs, and most artists earn what can only be described as modest returns from their craft. The latter point can be seen in the response to the recently debated move to have artists who also drive cabs or wait on tables lumped in with Collins Street farmers as ‘hobbyists’ for tax purposes. Under the Ralph recommendations, making art for most artists would simply not have been worth while.

Merely increasing public funds is not, perhaps, the answer. Among the 89 percent who feel proud of our creative talent there are people who are in a position to personally support the arts in various ways, and one would hope that this could be encouraged. One doesn’t have to have the morals of Sigismondo da Malatesta or the wealth of Peggy Guggenheim to patronise the arts; patronage can as usefully take the form of buying a painting from a struggling young artist or getting someone to write a song for your firstborn’s wedding as endowing a metropolitan concert hall.

In my field, classical music, there are many individuals who donate as generously as they are able to performing arts companies, and, the commissioning of new work is gradually becoming seen as an appropriate way to contribute. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s commissioning program has been generously supported by a number of bequests where individuals have contributed to the repertoire while making a gesture to a Significant Other. The artistic directorate of the orchestra rightly decides which composers will be commissioned after discussion with the patron, and the results have included Andrew Kaldor’s support of Ross Edwards’s Second Symphony (as a present to Kaldor’s wife, Renate), and donations from Christine Gailey and Eva Griffith for works in memory of friends or loved ones.

In 1999, Melbourne QC Julian Burnside made available the money for Musica Viva Australia to commission two new works for its 2000 season: one from me and one from my former teacher Barry Conyngham. Media-watchers will remember Burnside’s remarks to the ‘cash for comment’ inquiry when he warned that ‘whose bread I eat, his song I sing’, so it should noted that the nature, scale and price of the work was entirely left up to us composers – all Burnside asked for was a signed copy of the final score. Unconditional donations to performing arts companies are, of course, tax deductible, (unlike, sadly, specifically targeted ones) but the management of any orchestra or ensemble would, I feel sure, happily discuss the ways in which they might use such a donation. A ten to twelve minute string quartet might cost about the same as a wide-screen TV, but it will almost certainly last longer – and it will sound a hell of a lot better than a cuckoo clock.

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Gordon Kerry is a composer based in Sydney. His ‘Vigil’ for two pianos, commissioned by Julian Burnside QC, will be performed by the Australian Virtuosi on a national tour for Musica Viva Australia in Sydney (21 August), Perth (23 August), Adelaide (24 August) and Melbourne (28 August).