For a week I’ve manned an exhibition of my work at Port Adelaide and had only a handful of people call in. If I had to categorise them the majority were local artists intent on sharing their practice via pictures on their mobile phone. I’ve seen water colours, pastels, paintings of boats and listened to an ageing Bosnian tell me about wood inlay. Certainly, for all the discussion, sales have been limited to one small wood sculpture. I think the question I have to ask myself concerns the worth of this way of selling work. Someone said to me that the only time anything gets sold is the first night opening when friends and family are guilted into purchasing something but even that as a methodology is flawed. Just how much can friends and family hang on their limited wall space?

This is the seventh exhibition of work I have mounted over the last eighteen months from traditional white wall galleries, to a winery, to an open studio, to a hospital corridor and have yet to see any real success. The same is true of the expensive website and all of the social media exposure. I am certainly not despondent but have yet to find either a market or an outlet. A gallery visitor this morning told me that she sells ‘heaps’ on Facebook without qualifying what she was selling but the experience of Facebook as a selling medium has yet to persuade me of its value beyond lots of ‘likes’, which mean nothing.

I doubt that the lot of the artist has ever been any different. There are those that strike a chord, those that receive promotion from critical or commercial gallery sources and those that attract grants. Other than that you are on your own.

I recently read the Arts policy of the Current Liberal Government in South Australia and there is no doubt money is put into the major festivals such as the Adelaide Festival, the Fringe, the State Theatre and the Australian Dance Theatre amongst others and within that structure the Fringe promotes the visual arts through its program. SALA is also popular. [South Australian Living Artists festival each August]

‘South Australia has long been acknowledged as a leader in the arts and cultural industries. In particular, SA has led the way in arts programs that have striven to create social change and progress, and to making art accessible to every person.’  We are all grateful to have a policy at all and to see money put into cultural institutions but I think that the problem lies elsewhere.

For thirty years I created original dance works and toured them to regional areas when possible. Ten of them debuted as part of the Adelaide Fringe in competition with the other fifteen hundred acts. Audiences were inevitably small – friends and family. As with visual art people seemed to be looking for ease and comfort – challenge hardly came into it all. There was little or no questioning or discussion to say nothing of the audience basically expecting to have a production delivered to their living room as an extension of Netflix entertainment. The idea of going to a venue that involved any more than a five minute drive in the car seemed to be anathema. Perhaps though, the extent of the audience problem can be seen more in terms of a lack of a critical perspective. It is one thing to provide facilities and access to festivals but when the best anyone can offer is ‘wasn’t that good’ or ‘I didn’t like that’, the failure lies in the culture and what embeds it. Again, to quote from the Arts Policy ‘A vibrant city cannot be created by decree. This vision can only be realised through a critical mass of creative people.’ I would go further than that. The Vison can only succeed when the people have enough education, language and confidence to talk about the arts in the same way they do, for example, football.

So just how does the creative state evolve beyond a vague hope? Where is that education taking place? TV, radio, public forums, schools? I simply cannot see it. A TV half hour program on where to get the best lobster dinner hardly qualifies and in spite of the efforts of Radio Adelaide and their arts program, who is actually even aware, let alone listening. As for schools, if you don’t take an arts subject, you hear and see nothing. And I can relate from personal experience to just how difficult it is to get critical coverage of any description from the media in Adelaide. Is this the role of the government? It would seem to be a starting point. Without an active policy of public education, artists will continue to shout in the dark and rail against the price of creativity in our community. Having said that I have to acknowledge the efforts of the various artist spaces around Adelaide. Praxis, Floating Goose and Collective Haunt provide not just space but an avenue of communication between artists. Samstag and ACE Arts also provide platforms, but the general public would know little about them and the work might well challenge understanding and a vocabulary to talk about it. There is nothing like a contemporary art exhibition or an opera or contemporary dance production to strike a note of fear into people. It is one thing for the government to want to ‘exercise our freedom of expression and be fearless, take risks,’ but quite another when you are afraid both of the dark and the light.