Better late than never
The Department of Arts and Culture, that frustrating behemoth of bureaucracy, is upping its game, it appears. If nothing else, they’ve put some thought into who they put on stage to represent the department. Monica Newton, the rep they chose to speak at the ACT/UJ Arts & Culture Conference was engaging, succinct, and seemingly honest.
Newton first provided some figures from the department’s first creative economy mapping study benchmarked against similar such studies in the UK and US. What the DAC believes, through mapping 2500 respondents (and they only received a 1-in-10 response rate – take heed arts practitioners) was that the creative sector contributed R90.5bn directly and indirectly to the national GDP in the 2013/2014 financial year. That’s 2.9% of GDP, about equal to agriculture. It also sustains 562 726 direct and indirect jobs and the sector is 50% black owned and 30% owned by young people. In short, the creative economy is young and black, and should be proud.
Thus the DAC’s figures show that this sector needs to be taken seriously and the Mzanzi Golden Economy programme aims to stimulate demand for the arts, build audiences, develop human capital and engage in a continual process of research, monitoring and evaluation.This with a budget of R300 million per annum which, Newton stated, was quite a large chunk of their total R3bn budget given how much they have to fork out all around (including civil servant salaries I’m sure).
One thing she says they’re finally getting off the ground is an art bank. This idea, which has been around since the 1996 White Paper on the arts, involves government buying art to be displayed in public buildings, with the bank of art housed and managed by national museums. A pilot programme is promised to be running by the end of this month. It’s taken about 18 years but hey, it’s still a good idea.
In terms of developing audience to create greater sustainability in the arts, the DAC are busy developing an online arts portal and have awarded a tender to an academic institution – announcement imminent – to find ways of identifying and tracking loyal arts audiences, and figuring out ways to reward them. In other words, the DAC are finally getting their digital act together to generate greater interest in arts events, festivals and programmes, many of which they fund, so this is in their interest after all.
Tapping into the theme of collaboration prevalent in presentations at the Arts & Culture Conference, Newton said the DAC is liaising with public works to upgrade long neglected and mismanaged cultural precincts as they’ve finall realised these performing arts precincts are cultural anchors.
She ran through a bunch of numbers as to festivals the DAC support (22 national and regional arts festivals), the projects supported through the 2014 Open Call (113), the fact that the UK and China seasons are underway, that eight public arts projects approved in 2012 are now happening three years down the line, and 240 artists in schools have been approved, among other facts and figures most likely available on their website.
More exciting was her announcement of an upcoming Africa Month platform, for which the DAC are in the “advanced planning” stage. Africa Month will be a “celebration of Africa in South Africa,” says Newton, an initiative which, if one has noticed the dearth of art from the rest of Africa we’re exposed to, is long overdue. She’s talking “linkages, markets, opportunities for collaboration” and its long past time we started collaborating with the rest of the continent instead of bemoaning the eurocentricity of the global arts market.
She’s talking about the DAC being more innovative in order to better represent an innovative sector, such as “dipping their toe” into crowdfunding to make funding more accessible for township and rural areas, are “keen to think about digitisation” and to “support you as artists to digitise”. They’re improving the Mzanzi Golden Economy open call processes and want to turnaround requests for R100 000 within 14 days. Wouldn’t that be nice.
“We are trying to be more responsive. We are frustrating, we are annoying, we are intransigent sometimes. But we are here, we are with you. We are trying to transform and speak to your needs but it can’t be to everybody’s needs. We’re trying to think where best government money should go.
However, she admits that, “as government, we’re elephants”. While her honesty is welcome, being government is not excuse. They have to become a lot more nimble or run the risk of their ideas being outdated by the time they’re ever put into practice, which would just be a waste of taxpayers’ money.