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http://www.themercury.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5936,6049122%255E3462,00.html
NO prizes for guessing who's fired back at nationally prominent Hobart gallery owner Dick Bett's comments (The Mercury, February 22) about the State Government and local visual arts organisations' ineffectual policies and programs.
Apparently his insight into the real problems facing the contemporary art industry in Tasmania have so agitated two long-term arts bureaucrats that they took the time to tick him off for expressing his professional opinion shortly after the article appeared.
Customising the truth about difficulties faced in the visual arts industry in Tasmania certainly covers these sorts of bureaucrats' backsides but is this really what cultural spending is for?
Should departmental initiatives be permitted to compete with private enterprise? Another crude line of industrial defence totally funded with our tax dollars are claims that Bett's opinions are "divisive" or he "holds a grudge" about the State Government and publicly funded visual arts organisations actively negating commercial arts enterprise needs and standards.
Bett believes his job is to put bread on artists' tables, not turn them into grant-dependent trophies.
Although Despard Gallery owner Steven Joyce, among others, "wholeheartedly" supports Bett's views, it's apparently easier for local arts bureaucrats to discredit the gallery owners' combined years of professional expertise than listen.
But keeping independent experts quiet merely disguises policy and program failure in the face of contemporary art's decade-long boom elsewhere.
Artists and contemporary art's intellectual integrity are the ultimate casualties of Tasmania's funded bureaucrats' antithetical commitment to true freedom of expression.
Forestry Tasmania's image problems would look like a grumpy teenager's bad hair day in comparison with what might be revealed when we inquire about what happened to Arts Tasmania's Wine Trail, or why there isn't a comprehensive record of the Art for Public Building Program to represent Tasmanian artists' 20 years' work in this important field.
In all this time, Arts Tasmania hasn't kept an accurate database of artists' names or artwork titles matched with a picture archive.
Nor has a financial appraisal ever been undertaken of what these publicly funded art works installed in public malls and buildings are now worth.
Millions have been spent in two decades on public art works yet no one knows what this art is worth. Some artworks may even be lost or irretrievably damaged.
How can Arts Tasmania evaluate its own successes and failures in managing the Art for Public Building Program without this crucial formation?
A commercial gallery wouldn't survive a week in the marketplace if it operated in this manner. Yet one high-profile publicly funded art gallery director told me last week Tasmania's commercial galleries aren't holding enough seminars and forums!
This naive confusion of visual art market standards with graduate educational interests is apparently Dick Bett's fault too? No wonder local bureaucrats want to shoot our brave messenger.