The whole Art Start idea, I find really insulting. To a certain level I think you need to have some kind of struggle with your practice, and just giving people money willy nilly is a silly idea, it gives people too much confidence to go on, there’s so many artists out there and their ideas aren’t really that great, Art Start just waters everything down and gives people an altered sense of reality about how their career is going to be.
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I find that the peer assessment model of the Australia Council to be one of the reasons that the critical discourse in the arts isn’t that good in Australia because every three years the peers are rotating, you never know who your peers are going to be… I think because of the peer situation, people aren’t going to go and criticise things the way that they should because they don’t want to publicly put something down when they know that these artists could be assessing their work at a future date. I think Australia needs to get more critical. I don’t want everyone to be negative but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of critical discourse in the arts.
