Science and the Arts   

In the second of an occasional series Harry Robinson comments on what art can teach science with regard to public and political relations

Degas said it a hundred years ago: "We must discourage the arts." He wanted to suppress painterly competition but he might have been talking to scientists of today. They need to suppress competition for public money. The Arts, or The Yarts as Sir Les Paterson used to say, now have  more money than sense while the hard discipline of science is on short rations. 

One lobby group for the arts industry--industry, mark you--claimed 150,000 art workers in Australia. It’s an unlikely figure if they mean fine art, but the industry isn’t all that fine. It includes pick-up pub bands, weekend daubers, shonky producers and idlers who imagine that "doing art" beats work.  And there seems no way to stop them. Not long ago, John Crawford on ABC Classic FM told us we have 500 composers of New Music in Australia. Five hundred playing with pip, squeak and parp noises. Oh my aching arpeggios!

Watch the arts advocates come out during the election campaign to try to screw more money out of anxious politicians. To some extent, they are bound to succeed because politicians find it relatively easy to toss a million or two to the arts. Not because of any arts-drought. There is no drought. We are actually in an arts-glut. Rather because people who “do” art are articulate and sociable and they can be had for peanuts. They don’t need millions to finance long-term work in expensive laboratories. No. Toss $50 thousand at a regional theatre and a hundred tongues will sing political praises through district after district. Toss $50-thousand at an astro-physics outfit and silence will be the result.

The purpose of arts grants is not to get more art. It is to win more votes.

Arts champions will protest: "Look what our screen producers do for medical science!” And they will rattle off a list from Dr Kildare and Ben Casey to ER, Chicago Hope and All Saints in which haloed nurses and dedicated doctors save patient after patient by applying the latest in medical science. These and dozens of similar shows are actually human interest follies. People fear trauma, here are medical "scientists" foiling disease and death, ergo, science is good, science is plentiful, pay your Medicare levy and science is wealthy.

Totally spurious. Absent are the strenuous processes of advancing the hard core sciences--physics, maths, molecular biology. The list of hard, strict disciplines that can’t be romanced is long.

Is the voting public aware of this sleight of  political hand? Nobody knows because it hardly matters. Taxpayers at large don’t feel frauded because they always get something for the arts dollar. Something they can see or hear. It might be a work of genius like a Graeme Murphy dance but it is much more likely to be a dog of a play, a botch of oil paintings, yet one more pretentious novel, a loud and empty session of monkey music.

Schlock will overwhelm art.

Even those taxpayers who are awake to the sham don’t seem to mind. They seem willing to assume that schlock is the essential compost for growing fine art. Yarts nourish art, as you might say.

Let’s stop beating the arts industry around the head and ask a question--why does the science industry not win that kind of sympathy and tolerance? What would happen if a group of scientists went to a political party during this campaign and said, "We believe we are on the track of nuclear fusion, we believe that if we can investigate this or that property of the nucleus, we may find the key to much cleaner energy. No, we cannot say how long our search will take. No we don’t know if we will ever get the magic answer. No we can’t give an estimate of cost five or ten years from now. Yes, our search might lead us to a dead end. Yes, we might spend billions before we get a glimmer of an answer.  All we can promise you is that we have disciplined and curious minds and we will put our hearts and souls into the effort."

Chilly silence would be the pol-response. And with public endorsement-- "That’s our tax dollars you are trying to pocket. What kind of dimwits do you think we are?"

This is the central difficulty for the science industry. Science cannot offer laughter, escape, entertaining stories on screen, pretty pictures, loud music. It has none of the warm and fuzzy. To the uninitiated, science is cold.

The arts can play the wanton courtesan.

Science in the sense of hard core endeavour in the fields of physics, maths, chemistry and such has no such luck. This science has all the charm of an austere, vinegary spinster, and dry spinsters make no money on the streets.

Must it always be this way? No, the blue-lipped old maid is not immortal. First, it’s necessary to discard Degas’s advice. We must not discourage the arts if only because that’s negative and destructive.

Science could learn, though, from the yarts and their success at scrounging money from the public purse.  The suggestion will horrify many men and women who have devoted their lives to the stringent discipline of the scientific method. It is hard for them to accept but fact and truth are not enough to win the public arena. Scientists would do well to look at the illusions, smoke and mirrors, motley gear, sound and light shows and seductive dances of the arts lobbies and see not Jezebel but a chorus line to funds.

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The first in the series (2/10/01) --  Science and the Media

Harry Robinson
who for 25 years worked in television journalism in Oz and the US and who was for several years air media critic for the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald.