Should we be concerned about the state of visual arts education and opportunity in Australia? In any number of recent articles, the Australian art writer Christopher Allan has railed [if that is the right word] about the deficiencies of high school art teaching in Australia where an inspirational message or an elevated social agenda such as saving the planet is promoted as subject matter. Perhaps this is just teachers responding to the naïve concerns of teenagers discovering that the world they live in has its deficiencies. In art history I can think of only two instances where this approach to subject matter produced something of note – the German expressionists who came out of WW1 and the politically motivated anti- war messages surrounding the Vietnam war. In both cases the art was a direct response to a lived experience. Teenage attempts to save the planet, while motivated by good intentions, are hardly in the same category.

There has also been a steady decline in the numbers of students taking visual art courses in high school in South Australia. Partly it is due to the huge number of subject choices available diluting the potential pool but it may also be where school choose to place Art in the scheme of things. If it wasn’t for a compulsory component in year 8, a taster, the situation would be even worse. There is nothing new about this. At the end of the 80s many high schools in South Australia simply shut down art departments and moved on redundant art teachers to what was called the ‘roundabout’ an ignominious state of temporary fill-ins. Many stopped teaching art altogether. Devaluing art teachers, devaluing art teaching and a profound lack of understanding of why art is taught in the first place are probably the subject of another article

A second concern comes from a statement from the head of a high school art department in Adelaide who bemoaned the fact that the final product – the ART- was of little importance according to the curriculum writers. What they valued was the journal, the ideas, the analysis, the soul-bearing. The artists statement has become the be all and end all of the finished work. It took me back to something Picasso said about why he didn’t write down his ideas- if he could explain them in words there’d be no point in painting. In essence, for me, the act of painting is an exploration in itself.

Perhaps both of these ideas about the derivation of Art, thoroughly articulated ideas and a dependence on issues, account in some part for the completion rate of bachelor degrees in visual art in South Australia of 59% [survey 2018]. It could well be that the 40% who did not finish were simply not prepared for the independence required at that level or that limited understanding of the nature of art left them floundering helplessly. From my own observations, the students in school art classes fell into two categories – those had that taken external lessons in technique who were left to ‘get on’ in the corner, and those who followed the teacher’s example. The former group, albeit small, developed impressive technical prowess but not ideas and the latter simply copied what was expected. Of course, Pinterest supplied endless ideas of finished products to be emulated.

For those that do make it through art school there is little on offer. The curated show/biennale based around one person’s idea of the direction of art is one avenue with all of its inbuilt political agenda, and the other is the commercial gallery system. Of the three commercial galleries left in Adelaide [independent of local councils] one has a backlog of artists seeking space and another deals only with artists who have won major competitions or represented Australia. The number of artist-run spaces is evidence of the need for self-promotion.  The proliferation of online galleries is in one sense welcome even though they are taking commission of up to 40%, but even then, the site managers of online sites determine the ‘artist of the week’ and the market is geared to the lowest common denominator of public taste.

Of further concern are the university-based Art school courses themselves. In the light of a major drop off in the intake of fee paying international students [covid is being blamed] universities across Australia have axed visual art courses. Studio-based learning is a clear target with the Australian National University cutting 10% of jobs in 2020-  250 voluntary redundancies on top of the 215 positions already axed] ANU’s School of Arts and Design have  cancelled furniture, glass, jewellery, ceramics and object workshops while other universities have dropped similar courses and cut back on experienced staff. Griffith University plans to stop offering jewellery and printmaking while the University of Tasmania is also cutting Art degrees [Times Higher Education].  ‘

Under the current Morrison government arts funding is at an all-time low with the relevant minister citing arts course as ‘lifestyle’ choices. Dr Cecilia Crnielewski, Research Officer at the Institute for culture and Research at Western Sydney Uni suggests that Covid has ‘in a way, given many universities the excuse to downsize dramatically’ given that student-to-staff rations are necessarily low and space requirements to run art courses, high. According to Crnielewski all of this is compounded due to a lack of an Arts Policy in Australia which promotes the message that the arts simply aren’t valued.

To quote Don Dunstan, former Premier of South Australia 1967-1989 [ in two stints]and the man responsible for giving the state an Arts festival, A Fringe Festival, a state theatre company and a contemporary dance company among many other achievements and ultimately beyond his death, attracting some millions of patrons and performers to arts events in 2018/19 based on the infrastructure he created.

‘We have faltered in our quest to provide better lives for all our citizens, rather than just for the talented, lucky groups. To regain our confidence in our power to shape the society in which we live, and to replace fear and just coping with shared joy, optimism and mutual respect, needs new imagining and thinking and learning from what succeeds elsewhere.’

When he wrote this in the early 1960s the Arts in South Australia had been ignored as irrelevant for decades. It took a man of vision to alter that state of affairs and to understand the value of the arts. It is not a luxury or an economic inconvenience or a lifestyle choice but an integral part of who we are as a society. While the arts-entertainment end of the market is working well, visual artists are increasingly left to fend for themselves

The short-sighted view of art as social issue, of artists as no more than an extension of the corporate need for wall decorations and of university course planners willing to cull arts courses in difficult economic times says much about how the arts is valued. Artists left to survive on their own, art students with nowhere to go and policy makers ignoring the need for a concerted nation-wide policy in the arts, all point to a return to a time when Australian artists had no choice but to head overseas.