And David Seymour replies ‘The arts, for all their value, are disproportionately patronised by the middle and upper class.’
First, ‘upper class’? I didn’t know we had one. As long as you define ‘arts’ around a certain narrow type of product – opera, NZSO, Royal NZ Ballet, Auckland Theatre Company – this elitist view might seem to gain some traction but if you look at it more carefully you find its not only bollocks, it’s big, big bollocks. Last night I reviewed ‘Pigs on the Run’ at the Mangere Arts Centre and that full house was NOT upper class. Earlier I attended five and performed in one of the Shakespeare productions at the Pop-up Globe. Almost 100,000 people saw those shows and they appealed, as the plays did 400 years ago, to rank and file everyday folks. The whole point of the arts is that they’re everywhere and accessible to everyone, that they enrich, enlighten and entertain people of all ages and cultures everywhere. Seymour has shown himself to be a philistine elitist – no surprise there – and the minister Maggie Barry is a thousand times worse. But we arts peeps, we know better. We know that you people in power claim the ‘arts’ for yourselves, to set yourselves apart, and you fund it accordingly but we know that truly great art is being produced in South Auckland and other working class communities and that you, Mr Seymour and Ms Barry, would never be seen dead in any of them. ‘Upper class’ myopia, Mr Seymour? Snobbery, Ms Barry? When you hold the mirror up to nature it’s supposed to be facing the other way!
dykiegirl 