Recently, The Daily Telegraph published a front-page article criticising public funding for the arts during a pandemic. One of five female artists named and ridiculed as self-indulgent in the article was Claire Bridge who received a $10,000 grant for a collaborative multi-channel video work with Chelle Destefano. Their project, What I wish I’d told you brings together Deaf voices and centres Deaf perspectives, language, culture and agency. This year, distancing and isolation has created a number of barriers to connection, especially for people living with disabilities who depend on face-to-face interaction and for whom community is vital. The artists were thrilled to receive financial support for this project and to promote it this week as part of Reaffirming Deaf People’s Human Rights, the theme of this year’s National Week of Deaf People and International Week of the Deaf. The disheartening comments made in the newspaper reiterate the value of this type of artwork.
Attacks on the arts sector from the media repeatedly target what authors deem invaluable and unnecessary recipients of Australian taxpayer dollars. Artworks produced by public funding recipients (and notably in this case only women artists) are often highlighted as ‘objectionable’ due to controversial content — whether it be a critique of coal mining’s contribution to climate change, or an exploration of feminist and LGBTQIA+ issues — to incite public debate over social values.
A major flaw in The Daily Telegraph article is that it is laden with sensationalised untruths about what the arts grants are being used for, taking words from the artists’ bios or statements from their other works out of context. By simplifying and altering artists’ intentions, the article opened them up to public ridicule, as evidenced by the readers’ comments. The funds allocated to many of the named artists were in fact COVID-19 emergency-relief grants in the context of financial hardship, largely due the loss of billions of dollars in expected self-generated income across the industry. The situation for the sector is all the more alarming now, given a great deal of the arts sector were not eligible for the various government subsidies. One of the grants brought to question provided funding of $2,000, which is equal to 3 weeks on JobKeeper, a program that roughly 6.6 million Australians have benefited from since April 2020.
A common argument from conservatives is that publicly-funded artists take unnecessarily from the ‘average Australian’. In the current international crisis, this argument