Kevin Rudd wasn’t the only Crikey reader who got in touch with their thoughts yesterday! Here’s a few of the most interesting responses to our pieces, including but not limited to: criticisms of a full-blown socialist revolt, and reflections (in favour and opposition) on the neoliberalist world of Australian art.

 

Re: Ben Eltham’s “Why the Australian arts sector could be in for a major reckoning”

Barry Welch writes: Given some 200 individuals control capitalism in this country it would be worth identifying the rotten apples based on boards on which they sit having been involved in corruption and noting the other boards on which they sit which are likely to be turned bad by said rotten apples.

J. Mendellsohn writes: It’s a bit more complicated than presented here. For many years the board of the Art Gallery of New South Wales was dominated by artists — whose faction fighting made NSW parliamentary politicians look like rank amateurs. In addition there always were trustees associated with the big end of town — including Charles Lloyd Jones, Lady Fairfax and Harry M Miller. With the Art Gallery of New South Wales Act of 1980 more business people came on board, along with some political appointees. Unfortunately the first person who filled both these requirements was one Edward Obied.

In recent years the trustees have included many philanthropists familiar with governance procedures, and only two artists. The presence of the great medieval tapestry, The Lady and the Unicorn, would not have been possible without the support of Ashley Damer-Dawson, who was able to both support the exhibit with her own funds and enable further support from other sources.

Arts organizations will always need the expertise of those with both an understanding of governance and an ability to network with politicians and others who can provide funding. The problem, which won’t go away, is that as well as those who believe in giving back to the community, there will always be those who use the arts as the ultimate networking opportunity for their own ends. Eliminating those involved in the finance industry from boards of arts organisations won’t solve anything.

Paddy writes: It would be wonderful to imagine that the royal commission might cause things to change in the power structures governing “Big Art”. But I remain deeply pessimistic. So much “face” is involved, it’s hard to see how the privileged and powerful few will be able to let go of all those opportunities to smooch with the glam crowd.

Zane writes: For 30 or so years successive state and federal governments have insisted that arts organisations of all kinds, big and small, across all art forms have business representatives on their boards. This has been promoted as encouraging “good governance” and “businesslike oversight”.

What it has in fact done is shift Australian contemporary art further towards conservative values and normalised a form of neo-liberal art making — marketing driven, mono-cultural, risk averse, boring and desperately (embarrassingly) middle-class. It has stifled innovation and creativity, and allowed the graft ridden cronyism of Australian business to progress a twisted far-right-wing agenda at the very heart of the cultural industries. This situation has been glaringly obvious and as usual, hardly anyone has ever questioned or even noted it. Thanks Ben, for bothering…

 

Re. Guy Rundle’s “Next stop: socialising Google and Facebook”

David Edmunds writes: I was surprised to read that Guy Rundle believes that somehow the shortcomings of capitalism resulted in WWII. I had always thought that it was caused by the overweening ambitions of a couple of fascist powers, a communist power and a militarist power, whose ambitions were not addressed quickly enough by the capitalist democracies, who desperately wanted to avoid war.

While I am appalled by the failure of western democracies to effectively regulate capitalist enterprise, I am old enough to remember the quality of service from our state-owned banks and Telecom. Remember when it took at least six weeks to get a telephone connected?

Capitalism has been responsible for environmental degradation, but nothing on the scale of what happened under the socialist economies of Eastern Europe or of China, and it is one area where regulation has been able to affect change. Environmental regulation in capitalist democracies has come due to political pressure, the same sort of pressure that has forced the banks to at least admit to their wrongdoing. I am not aware of royal commissions or their counterpart being any part of socialist economies…

The idea that the nationalisation of an enterprise such as Facebook is any sort of a panacea for the very nebulous harm that Facebook has actually caused is a drawing a very long bow.  Billions of people use Facebook because they like it, and are apparently prepared to pay a cost they don’t actually feel. It is worth noting that Facebook is the sort of employer that we might all wish to have.

Guy suggests that there may be an obvious solution to the ills of capitalism, and perhaps that human nature may be different under a different economic system. There seems little evidence from history that this may be the case, even when the workers revolt.

 

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