Art is not elite – it’s business

Last weekend I attended the gala night for a performing arts centre opening. Decked in gladrags and sipping champagne, we might have seemed elitist to onlookers. It was far from it. If you’d seen the directors and crew vacuuming and polishing while the actors crushed into a green room, you’d know.

Lately there’s been talk of the arts being elitist, kick-started by RNZ trying to bump Concert Radio off the FM frequency, sack the staff and turn it into a jukebox.

Frankly I’m tired of the elitist argument. The arts is a business, though no-one seems to have noticed. It struggles for support and rarely gets a mention in the same reverential tones as startups, tech disruptors or sport.

A Skills Active Workforce report last week showed that the performing arts sector alone contributed $2.3 billion in gross domestic product to the economy and is growing. New Zealand has 10,000 performing arts businesses, but they’re tiny, with an average of three employees.

You know why? Because performing arts here is glued together by volunteers and goodwill. Yet it feels to me it’s an industry bursting to grow.

The RNZ debacle is just the latest in a litany of examples showing New Zealanders don’t understand the potential value of arts.

Think of the well-known story of Flight of the Conchords being turned down by TVNZ but picked up first by the BBC and then becoming a massive hit in the United States.

Have you heard of tenor Simon O’Neill? He’s probably one of New Zealand’s most successful classical musicians of recent times, in Europe. But he gets no media coverage. Or Te Vaka, a group that New Zealand just ‘‘didn’t get’’ when they started original contemporary Pacific music 20 years ago, so they went overseas and became hugely successful.

Well-known Sole Mio was first picked up by EMI in London and got famous in San Francisco before we recognised their talent here.

I was at the gala to celebrate the magnificent new arts facility on the Ka¯ piti Coast, Te Raukura ki Ka¯ piti. Over the years, as one of the many volunteers who spent endless hours raising the $12 million needed, we heard every conceivable reason why the centre shouldn’t be supported.

And we were constantly frustrated that, because the Ministry of Education had paid for the classrooms attached to the centre, at Ka¯ piti College, other funding sources refused us – even though we built the venue in response to requests from the community.

Any fundraiser will tell you it’s one crushing knockback after another. There is always something more important: a natural disaster overseas, an animal shelter, someone who’s sick.

All of these causes are important, but so many times we had to pull back because we couldn’t compete with what New Zealanders valued more. Thank goodness for the Lottery Grants Board, the Coastlands Shopping Centre, the New Zealand Community Trust and the community supporters who helped us.

But I am saddened by the many, many stories I continue to hear of artists who live in near poverty as they try to make it in the arts world.

It’s time to start thinking of the arts as a valued business and a potential big employer; New Zealanders are good at it. Yes, I’m a little one-eyed. But I know that, if it wasn’t for volunteers and those in the community who ‘‘get it’’, we’d be living in a world without arts, and that’s not a world I want to be in.

So, if you’re planning to support the business of the New Zealand Festival of the Arts this month, enjoy. And if you’re not, have a rethink – there are some talented Kiwis out there just waiting for your applause.