WHY ARE THE ARTS IMPORTANT?

19 October 2026

The October edition of The Monthly contains two articles on the perilous state of the arts in Australia: https://www.themonthly.com.au/  They are worth reading in full but I thought I’d capture some of the ideas they contain in this post and the next. In Art for Art’s Sake, Sean Kelly compares countries like Ireland and South Korea, where governments have actively invested in artists and the arts to both deliver better economic outcomes and to enhance their culture, to other countries where “governments – drowning in debt and afraid of citizens they imagine thinking only about their bills – want nothing to do with funding something so obviously superfluous as higher meaning” i.e. the arts. And if governments are prepared to support the arts, then “[a]lgorithmic capitalism has slashed the number of people willing to pay or, or [be] able to find, new and interesting works of art.” And that same “algorithmic capitalism” in the form of AI is stealing the work that artists have managed to make.

So why are the arts important in this precarious time? Kelly reminds us that “Good Art” is about asking questions rather than providing slick answers. “One of the reasons we sometimes say a work of art has stayed with us is because the questions it raises keep knocking around in our heads.” When I did my last piece of audience research for Melbourne Theatre Company back in 2011, the answer to why people went to the theatre was summarised as “exercising their emotions”. We need to keep doing that to understand our world and to make it a better place.

Kelly goes on to say that one way of understanding what’s happened to our communities in the last few years is that we’ve stopped asking the right questions and now have misguided beliefs about the best way to run our society. “The things that might give us a sense of meaning have gradually been demoted in the hierarchies of our culture and in the priorities of our politicians: time spent at home with family and friends, care for others, love, learning, community, craftsmanship, duty (such an old-fashioned word), integrity and artistic achievement.”

Obviously, doubling investment in the arts won’t change things overnight but it might enable more people to help us understand our world better, to be more empathic neighbours, to be more creative ourselves – as well as simply having moments in time when we are entertained, moved, inspired and thrilled. And that's been true for thousands of years.

Rainbow Serpent, Mount Borradaile, NT