The bigger picture

The political question of who is permitted to make culture is among the oldest political questions in any society. The political conditions of patronage, of the political relationship between culture and state, of the political contest about whose creative work counts, have been continuously contested across the modern era.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno documented in detail how the political conditions of mass cultural production in the twentieth century reshaped what art was understood to be. The political project of what he called the culture industry produced art at industrial scale, with political consequences for what was made, who profited, and what was politically possible to imagine. The Australian arts sector inherits the analysis through its participation in global cultural production, regardless of whether the politics is named.

The Martinican poet and political writer Édouard Glissant developed in his work a political theory of cultural production grounded in the experience of colonised peoples. The political argument was that cultural production from colonised places operated as a distinct political project of relation, of the meeting of traditions, and of the refusal of cultural hierarchies established by colonisation, rather than as a derivative of European culture. The analysis reaches Australian arts through First Nations creative practice, multicultural arts, and the political conversation about cultural sovereignty.

The colonial transfer

The arts in colonial Australia inherited British and European political settlements about cultural production. The patronage tradition, the gallery and museum tradition, the conservatorium and art school tradition, and the political assumption that high culture was a settler-European inheritance to be preserved and transmitted in the colonies, were all transmitted into Australia from the nineteenth century onward.

What that political vision excluded is part of the history. First Nations creative practice, developed over millennia, was not recognised as art by the colonial cultural establishment for most of the twentieth century. Multicultural creative practice, brought into Australia by successive waves of migration, was politically marginal in mainstream cultural institutions for decades. The political achievement of creating space for First Nations and multicultural creative practice in mainstream Australian cultural institutions was won through decades of advocacy, contest, and slow institutional change.

The political legacy of the colonial cultural settlement continues to do political work in contemporary arts. The hierarchies of which creative work counts as serious, which is decorative, and which is craft, are inherited political distinctions, not natural facts.

The post-war state arts settlement

The post-war Australian political settlement included a significant role for the state in arts and creative production. The Australia Council for the Arts, established in different forms from the 1960s onward, was a political artefact of the political idea that culture was a public matter requiring public investment. State arts agencies followed similar patterns. Public film funding, subsidised opera and ballet, and the state-broadcasting arts commitments of the ABC were all elements of this political settlement.

The post-war arts settlement was a political achievement, contested at the time and contested again now. The political idea that the state had a role in supporting cultural production was held more strongly by some political traditions than others, and the political contest over arts funding has been a recurring feature of Australian federal politics for decades.

The post-war settlement also reshaped who counted as a creative worker. The political project of professionalising creative practice, of establishing arts unions, and of building the institutional infrastructure for sustained creative careers was a significant achievement of the second half of the twentieth century.

The neoliberal turn

From the 1980s, a different political settlement began to assert itself. Arts funding came under sustained political pressure across multiple political cycles. The political conversation about arts as economic versus arts as public good intensified. The political conditions of artists as workers were reshaped by award restructuring, by the rise of casualisation, and by the slow withdrawal of state investment from significant parts of the arts ecology.

The political legacy is significant. Australian artists, writers, and arts workers operate in political conditions where freelance precarity, unpaid pitching, and limited industrial protection are widespread. The political question of how creative careers are sustained in a country where cultural production is not economically supported is unresolved.

The cultural sovereignty moment

The political conversation about cultural sovereignty has intensified across the past decade. The political question of who can make which work, who is credited fairly, and how cultural traditions are respected, has reshaped what arts operators do and what they can claim.

The cultural sovereignty contest is not new. The political contest about cultural appropriation, about First Nations cultural production, and about the political conditions of multicultural arts has been continuously active. What has shifted is the intensity of the contest and the political pressure on arts institutions to engage seriously rather than procedurally.

The present moment

Generative AI, cultural sovereignty politics, and creative labour conditions are reshaping the arts now.

Generative AI reaches artists through training questions, market displacement, and the political contest about what creative labour is. The political settlement is unresolved and is being negotiated in courts, regulators, and unions globally with significant Australian implications.

Cultural sovereignty politics, accelerating since the 2010s, continues to reshape practice. The political pressure for First Nations leadership, for genuine partnership rather than appropriation, and for sustained institutional change is sustained.

The political contest about creative labour conditions arrives through union organising, freelancer collectives, and political advocacy. Casualisation, freelance precarity, and the political invisibility of arts work as labour are being challenged in ways that reshape what operators can ask of workers and what workers can ask in return.