You and your day

A grant application that took three weeks to prepare does not get up. A long-running collaborator pulls out of a project for reasons that take a while to understand. A First Nations artist on a curatorial team mentions her contributions are not being credited fairly. An AI tool produces in twenty seconds something that would have taken a designer or illustrator a day, and the question of what work is left for human artists feels closer than it did a year ago. An older artist mentions, half-joking, that she is not sure she can afford to keep making work.

The British art critic and writer John Berger argued that ways of seeing are never neutral. Who looks at what, who is looked at, who decides what counts as art and what counts as decoration, are all political questions before they are aesthetic ones. The Australian arts sit inside that argument continuously. The politics of which artists get funded, which voices get amplified, which work gets shown in major institutions and which is kept at the margins, is shaped by political conditions that reach into the studio before any individual artist gets there.

Reading the politics is part of doing the work. It shapes what is made, what is funded, who is paid, and what survives.

Your community and clients

The arts sits inside multiple communities at once. The professional community of other artists is one. The communities of audiences is another. The communities the work is about, or for, are others again. The politics travels across all of these.

Different communities have different arts politics. A high-end commercial gallery audience has different expectations than a community arts audience. A First Nations arts community is in a different political position than a mainstream one. A queer arts community has its own political mood. A multicultural arts community has its own. Disability-led arts has its own. Each carries political weight that reaches the work.

When a First Nations artist mentions her contributions are not being credited fairly, the politics of cultural sovereignty is at the studio. When an older artist worries about her ability to keep making work, the politics of cost of living, of arts funding, and of the long disappearance of middle-tier arts careers is at the studio. The work is always already political.

Your Council and neighbourhood

Local Councils shape the arts through arts funding, through community arts programs, through the local environment that artists move through, and through the politics of which neighbourhoods welcome creative practice. Some Councils are politically active in supporting the arts. Others are not. The political composition of a Council shapes the difference.

Council planning shapes whether artist studios, performance venues, and arts-friendly precincts can survive housing intensification. The politics of whether an arts neighbourhood becomes an arts-themed luxury one is itself a political conversation. Artists and arts workers, often on irregular incomes, are typically poorly represented in Council politics. Property owners and established residents are heard more often.

Your state

State politics carries the dominant funding layer for the arts in Australia. State arts agencies allocate significant funding and significant political mood. State performing arts companies, state museums, state galleries, and state festivals are all shaped by state political composition. The political position of a state government on cultural sovereignty, on diversity, on accessibility, and on the politics of representation shapes what is funded and what is not.

State politics also shapes intellectual property, defamation, and the contractual environment in which freelance artists work. Anti-discrimination protection, family violence protection, and disability inclusion all sit at state level and shape who can sustain a career in the arts.

The nation

National politics on cultural funding, on intellectual property, on AI, on screen content quotas, on First Nations cultural rights, and on the long-running debate about Australian cultural production all reach the arts continuously. The federal political conversation about AI and copyright, about cultural sovereignty, and about who is funded on what basis, is one of the most active in the sector.

The Australian arts have been working through intersecting political conditions slowly. Progress on women in senior creative leadership, on First Nations creative leadership, on culturally diverse representation, and on disability inclusion has been uneven. The arts sector also carries one of the highest rates of mental health pressure of any sector, partly because of the precarity of the work and partly because of the political conditions of being an artist in a country where arts careers are not economically supported.

The region

The arts across the Asia-Pacific is shaped by very different political settlements on cultural funding, intellectual property, and freedom of creative expression. Aotearoa New Zealand has been politically more active than Australia on Maori cultural production. Pacific Island arts and Indigenous arts across the region are doing political work that the wider region’s institutions are slowly catching up with. Diaspora artists working across multiple jurisdictions navigate political conditions in several countries simultaneously.

The world

Globally, the arts is in the middle of significant political and technological transition. AI is reshaping the economic and cultural conditions of creative work. Platform power is reshaping how art is distributed. The politics of intellectual property is being renegotiated. Cultural sovereignty politics is moving across most countries simultaneously. The political backlash against First Nations, queer, racial-justice, and feminist art is also moving in many countries.

Australian arts sits inside all of these currents. The next decade of global cultural politics will reshape what the arts in Australia can be.