October 2022 The Nation Reviewed Funding to artists shouldn't require bureaucratic acquittals and demonstrated outcomes I often ask myself what it takes to be a visual artist in Australia. This is not because I am one (although I did study painting at art school) but because I so often write about what it is they do – the work that they make and how they carve out an existence amid what is, by any objective measure, an openly indifferent environment. For, beyond a vanishingly small audience, who among us really knows what is happening at the leading edge of Australian art practice? We might take in a blockbuster or two at a large public gallery such as the NGV or the NGA, and even visit one of the smaller exhibitions that those institutions invariably produce on the sidelines, but how representative is that, really, of what our best artists are doing at any given moment? Most Australians would surely give little thought to such oversight.

https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2022/october/quentin-sprague/no-purse-strings-attached

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