Very nice, dear, but is it art?

Curiously, there are a number of creative people in New Zealand who vociferously oppose arts funding until it comes to raising cash for their own pet TV shows, book and film projects. Surely such critics should either get their hands out of the trough or quit being so hypocritical.

The matter of who gets the money if the government is going to hand it out to artists is just as contentious. What is art? Must it have mass appeal and be commercial for it to deserve funding? I can’t help thinking that a rotating public panel — made up of a cross-section of pro-funding punters — should get to decide which artists and works of art are funded, instead of so-called experts.

We’ve all heard the controversy about Merilyn Tweedie et al, famous for a work consisting of a dunny that brayed like a donkey, a piece commissioned for the Venice Biennale and the $500,000 in public money allocated to fund its creation. Well, in Europe, cultural concerns are of a more authentic flavour and odour. This is a translation of an email just in, from a female friend in Hamburg, Germany:

“Yesterday I joined an association, not usually my kind of thing. It’s called — wait for it — ‘the Registered Association of the Little Citizen’s House, Eppendorf’. Its aim is to rescue a pissoir in the Eppendorfer Park Martinistrasse, opposite the main entrance of the University Clinic. This citizens’ initiative doesn’t want this 1902 mini-palace to become a café (“a pleasant commerce-free island”) but rather for it to be renovated for use in cultural events such as vernissages, outdoor classes, readings and so on. It only had a measly 32 members, so I decided to become the 33rd and put my energy into it. The team behind the initiative consists of the treasurer (who works for the Hamburg Transport Network); an architect; a company chairman who operates a café in the port city centre (“Fleetschlösschen” [“small castle on the canal”], also a former urinal), which I intend to visit soon; an unemployed former company board member; the minister of the St Martinus Church; the director of the Wolfgang Borchert School; and the director of the district office north. Somehow this little house moves me; it connects memories of my schooldays at the Curschmannstrasse School with the neighbouring park where we met boys. Who knows, in order to raise money, perhaps we could open a café bar and sell drinks at cost-price to stressed-out hospital personnel, or organise jazz sessions...”

When it comes to getting things done — whether it’s saving a urinal or getting the trains and buses running on time — you can depend on the Germans to get serious and rally round some high-profile citizens. In Auckland, you’d struggle to find 32 people to protest the development of one of the city’s hideous, toilet-style totalitarian apartment blocks, let alone convert a disused toilet into something culturally useful and surprising.