It’s a new year. A time of hope. Of high expectations. Fresh energy. Even optimism. There’s no real reason why we should feel this way. But we do. The legacy of the “festive season” defies our lived experience of the past year. Or five. So what can the arts and artists hope for in 2005?
What about a maximum of 12 weeks’ turnaround time from the deadline date for applications for funding to the first transfer of funds into the accounts of successful applicants for any public funding agency, including the lottery, the National Film and Video Foundation and provincial arts and culture councils?
If any agency fails to comply, the applicants will automatically receive 50% of the grant they applied for within seven days of the end of the three-month period. Furthermore, where agencies fail to meet the deadline, in future, officials employed by these agencies and board members will not be paid — like many of the artists whose livelihood they prejudice with their tardiness — until all applications that arrived by the deadline are dealt with. That should help to improve bureaucratic efficiency.
Then what about theatres that pay half salaries (or any rate lower than the agreed weekly rate) to actors during rehearsals (when they work the longest hours in the course of a production)? This bizarre practice should be stopped by withholding public funding to all theatres that do this.
Alternatively, managers and administrators of such theatres should be paid only 50% of their salaries during the rehearsal period of any production (since they made the choice to do the production), and only get paid full salaries once it is running and generating box-office income.
Since we’re on the subject of remuneration of artists, perhaps creative professionals who make their living within the arts sector, should at last be brought in line with domestic workers and have minimum wages set in law so that the rampant exploitation can be stopped.
Then maybe the Department of Arts and Culture can do something for artists while they are still alive — rather than pay for their pauper funerals — by setting up a scheme to provide medical aid, a pension and even a subsidy for a little Reconstruction and Development Programme matchbox? Perhaps they can also get optional free golf lessons to provide them with the means to meet department officials from time to time.
We pay R78-million to employ arts and culture department staff at the moment. For the same amount, at an average of R78 000 an artist a year, we could have 1 000 artists go to work as full-time members of 15 theatre companies, three orchestras, nine jazz ensembles, 18 contemporary, classical and traditional dance companies and three opera companies. Wouldn’t that be better use of resources for the arts and add greater value to the arts landscape? Is it too much to hope for sustainable performing arts companies?
Perhaps we should hope for the mining magnate, controversy magnet Brett Kebble, to take responsibility for funding the whole arts sector. Or maybe just its core business. Currently museums and theatres receive funding to paint their buildings, buy loo paper, ensure they have staff to switch on the lights and managers to make sure that they do so, but there is no funding for exhibitions or productions. So what about a Kebble Fund to Save our Cultural Institutions from Becoming White Elephants? (Or in the spirit of transformation, we could change the name to Black Elephants to magnet a few BEE magnates to the arts?)
Then, in 2005, let’s hope that people who govern the sector will be familiar with the King reports on governance, with the laws they are required to abide by and with the people they are supposed to serve. Knowing a little bit about, and having some experience in the sector also would really be nice.
And is it too much to expect that in the new year, freedom of expression will be respected, that representative structures of artists will be viewed as expressions of democracy rather than as threats, and for consultation and transparency to be resurrected from their early graves?
At least I’ve kept to my new year resolution. I’ve just written a column without mentioning the dreaded three-letter word — NAC! Or have I just blown it?