The New South Wales Government has recently announced changes to its Arts and Cultural Funding Program including the creation of specific art form boards to conduct assessment of applications. Writing in The Guardian, National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA) Executive Director Esther Anatolitis has expressed concern about the impact of these changes, saying, “When a minister chooses 10 ‘art form’ boards, selects the chair of each one and works with that chair to appoint members, it’s difficult for taxpayers to have confidence in the integrity of their decisions. Especially with arts projects and capital infrastructure requests now explicitly in the one funding pool, so there’s no longer any need for the minister to hide non-artistic grants.”
Further details on the new program are available at: https://www.create.nsw.gov.au/funding-and-support/arts-and-cultural-funding-program, while Esther’s analysis can be read in The Guardian at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jul/04/who-has-the-right-to-decide-what-art-is-made-in-australia-apparently-not-artists