Dear Santa, We received your encrypted fax asking for payment in exchange for gifts of our choice as the arts sector. We’ve referred the matter to the National Arts Council, and they’ve promised to process the payment as soon as they have verified your existence. In the meantime, an NAC board member would like you to know that he owns a delivery company that could help with the distribution of Christmas presents. A discount is negotiable depending on whether you’d also like to use his chimney-sweep company.
Now about those gifts of choice. Please, when you bring new culture ministers after next year’s elections, can you scrape a bit higher up the barrel? We know that they use the best people in finance, education and water affairs, and then culture and health have to make do with the quota selections. But it would be really nice to have arts ministers who know the difference between ballet and ballroom, and who don’t have to be accommodated because they are serial party hoppers or would fail to make it in business or who need to earn a decent pension after their role in the struggle in the 1960s.
Then, Santa, please could you bring us some new debates. The old Afro-centric versus Eurocentric art debate is completely threadbare, and it is only of interest to the Rip van Winkles who’ve woken up to find themselves somehow thrust into senior management positions in the arts, with 10 years having passed them by. There would be no point in having debates though, unless you also brought us the culture of debate, a gift that we seem to have lost in the midst of our dependence on public funding that has tied our tongues, compromised our minds and made us look the other way.
A little more space in the media for the arts would also be a great gift. At the moment, we struggle for attention even in the media ghettoes into which we’ve been frogmarched by the drive for profit. At least one major daily has hidden the arts news in the classified section along with the death column, services of prostitutes, employment offers and second-hand car deals, all of which may somehow be related to the arts, but don’t do much to inform or educate the public.
What would also make a good gift is a little bit of outrage. So that every time some whistleblower is silenced, some minister breaks the law, some petty official brings the arts into disrepute and the system of patronage favours a small elite yet again, there would be public outrage, media outrage, political outrage and outrage within the arts sector. At the moment, it seems that it would take 10 Kamp Staaldraads to get beyond the apathy and public disinterest that afflict the sector. All of which means that the trinity of thugs, fascists and the ignorant continue freely to empower themselves.
Santa, could you bring us another international funder or two? Not because we don’t have funding inside the country. In fact, there’s never been so much money for the arts from internal sources such as the NAC, the lottery, CREATE SA and the like. The problem is that by the time artists access funds from these efficiency-challenged bodies, they have generally forgotten why they applied for the funds in the first place. International donors have helped to keep the arts alive with substantial grants, quick decision-making and minimal bureaucracy.
Then, perhaps a few little things for the stockings like minimum wages for artists to bring the sector into line with domestic workers? Maybe a pension scheme so that artists can retire at some stage and what about legal support to ensure that their contracts comply with the labour laws and Constitution? A dictionary on transparency, consultation, participatory democracy and good corporate governance would really help us all to read from the same page.
And Santa, if that’s what it takes, could you bring a few golden handshakes to have some of the current culture bosses ride off into the sunset with their rugby counterparts?