High on a hill overlooking the Ecuadorian capital of Quito sits the home of the late, much-loved artist and sculptor, Oswaldo Guayasamin.
The expansive, hacienda-style house is built on one of Quito's volcanic, hard-to-come-by flat blocks of land; it is crammed with the artist's private collection of pre-Colombian and Colonial art, the works of other famous artists — Picasso, Chagall — and his own prolific and magnificent output: oils, watercolours, sculptures.
But set on a terrace just below the house is Guayasamin's masterpiece, La Capillla del Hombre (The Chapel of Man), a domed cathedral in whose centre a flame is kept burning. A collection of his imposing artworks fills the space, works that ask the unanswerable question: why is man equally capable of such cruelty, and such compassion?
It is surely a question that all good art should pose — a point that Senator Mitch Fifield, Australia's newly appointed Minister for Communications and the Arts, would do well to remember.
Art — writing, poetry, music, photography, film, dance, the visual arts — holds a mirror to society in a way no other medium can. It prompts us to look critically at what we're doing, the impact our choices will have on our communities, the vision we are creating for ourselves. At its very best, art assists in the development of a humane society.
And so it is a brave thing for governments to fund the very people who might well set out to criticise them through their work. The Ecuadorian government did this when it commissioned Guayasamin to paint a mural depicting Ecuador's history. To the mortification of many, the country's relations with the US were referenced in the image of a man wearing a Nazi hat with the letters 'CIA' emblazoned on it.
In Australia, those artists wishing to dissect and debate contemporary issues or critique those in power have found it ever harder to do so — not because they are deliberately prevented from self-expression, but because funding for their poorly-paid art forms has been deeply eroded over the years.
In this year's budget alone, the outgoing Minister for Arts, George Brandis, displayed his contempt for the field he was charged to care for by cutting more than $104 million over four years from the functionally independent Australia Council. The money was funnelled instead to an arts body established by him and to be overseen by him, thus eroding any sense of objectivity.
Now that Prime