How can the arts thrive?

Our Academy President Stephen Garton’s 2025 Academy Lecture is entitled, “When Universities Mattered“. The lecture is both a reflection on the grand vision and policies that formed universities, and their role in the future, in a time of social, political and cultural fracturing.

The arts version (‘When the Arts Mattered?’) could have been the title for my remarks, but it’s been a long time since we could actually demonstrate that the arts mattered (outside our own circles)! I also tried: ‘Will the Arts ever Thrive?’ But then I settled on the slightly more optimistic: How Can the Arts Thrive?

The arts are a way of reflecting on who we are, and how we operate individually and collectively. They allow us to think less literally about the world, and they encourage us to envisage other possibilities. This is why authoritarian regimes have feared them.

The arts have never been ‘comfortable.’ When they offer us a smooth, feel-good experience that confirms our assumptions, they’re not doing their job. They’re supposed to make us think, disturb and unsettle, provoke and resist, and to want something different. Arts programs in universities are equally awkward: they’re all corners, not quite fitting into categories crafted to suit STEM. Within our Academy, the section known as The Arts also illustrates this unwieldy-ness. The Arts section covers Music, Theatre, Dance, Visual and Fine Arts, Design, and Architecture: with both academics and representatives from the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums).

The Arts section includes both practice-based artists who produce non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) such as research-driven creative works, and those, like me, who approach their disciplines from contextual, historical and/or theoretical perspectives. Yet, for all their awkwardness, the creativity that Arts programs foster, build and interrogate is a skill that industry demands in prospective employees. Of course, creativity is also generated in other disciplines, but for the arts it is foundational.

I will make a few proposals but I’m beginning from a low base: the recent history of ‘the Arts’ in universities has been very bleak. I’m going to reprise briefly some of the gloomy present before offering a few provocations for the future of the arts in the university sector.

Most of you will have read Graeme Turner’s book, Broken: Universities, Policy and the Public Good, and will know the larger context of this dismal scene. Broken certainly applies to the Arts sector… and then some!

Across the country we have seen an acceleration of the destabilisation of university arts programs through: reducing numbers of staff and/or hours; failing to replace staff; removing or failing to maintain facilities; suddenly charging disciplines for the use of university facilities; seemingly endless restructures; deleting components of degrees… all the way to wholesale shutdowns of numerous arts disciplines, without regard to the importance of those artforms to a university’s community commitments. The arts simply don’t fit into a box where education is all about price, cost and profit.

Arts, students & universities

The future for the arts is made more unstable by the persistent Job-Ready Graduates Package. Think about Open Day discussions for Arts programs these days with anxious or low socio-economic parents who cannot countenance their children paying yet more for a degree in an already precarious arts discipline that they believe won’t get their child a job.

Looking at overall employment over the medium-term, 92.3% of undergraduates from the category of ‘humanities, culture, social sciences degrees’ are employed—which is slightly ahead of graduates from the sciences and mathematics. If we ever needed it, this is further evidence against the efficacy of JRG. We know that arts graduates do find gainful, rewarding employment, whether in or out of an arts practice, but concerned parents don’t.

Meanwhile, programs in regional locations suffer even more profoundly. Nationally, undergraduate applications to performing arts university programs across Australia have declined by 1/3 from 2010 to 2020, from a stable base in 2010 of upwards of 28-30,000 students, to below 20,000 since 2020. Like the elimination of the study of a language, the removal of an artform is not only devastating but can be virtually impossible to revive later.

An ironic backdrop for this devaluation of the arts in universities is the importance of Arts practice during the pandemic. We know how essential the arts were to people as their worlds contracted literally and metaphorically. Some of us naively assumed that with the heightened value of the arts then, we would see much more focus on and funding of the arts post-pandemic… especially when a new government promoted its new arts policy, Revive, in 2023.

We still wait.

In the wider context of arts practice beyond the university, we know Australia excels internationally. Two quick examples: Archie Moore’s kith and kin was exhibited at the Australian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. It is now on show at the Queensland Art Gallery/Gallery of Modern Art. And second, Emily Kam Kngwarray’s exhibition that premiered last year at the National Gallery featured at London’s Tate Modern for six months until the end of January 2026.

The global influence is clear. I know I said earlier that the arts haven’t mattered but there is an economic impact: in 2023-24, the arts contributed $67.4 billion to Australia, 2.5% of the Australian GDP. And Oscar winning actress Cate Blanchett continues to be a UN goodwill ambassador, pointing to the potential for deploying the soft power of the arts. The arts can give visibility.

A New Approach

In a move designed to strengthen Australia’s national and international arts position, A New Approach (ANA), the culture thinktank whose board is chaired by Rupert Myer, FAHA, released its arts policy in November 2025. ANA was incubated in the Australian Academy of the Humanities. ANA sets out what must be implemented now to achieve a vibrant cultural landscape for all Australians by 2035.

The two goals are: first, to develop a “10-year National Arts and Culture Strategy, modelled on the National Sport Strategy, and second, […] to establish a formal Ministerial Council focused on cultural access and creative industries.” Kate Fielding, CEO of ANA, explains that: “This [plan] would unleash the full potential of the money invested in arts and culture, and provide certainty and clarity to the creative industries, along with their sponsors and donors.”

The ANA has released this provocation as the government begins to prepare its successor to Revive, due to be launched in 2028.

While ANA is advocating a nationwide expansion and strengthening of the cultural landscape, it is well past time for universities to think differently about the teaching, research, and promotion of the Arts. I offer five provocations for university Arts programs to survive and, dare I say it, thrive. Art forms (like all other types of research) have always evolved, but we seldom address the fact that politicians and the public don’t know that. Further, while the ways we make and consume art have shifted radically thanks to technological advances, and then COVID, and now AI, our explanations of the place and role of the Arts in the university sector haven’t been as agile, clear, engaging and urgent as they need to be. It’s timely to raise provocations now given the Academy’s launch of the new Strategic Plan with its bolder articulation of the need for urgent action across the Humanities and Creative Arts. We can’t wait for more funding: it’s not coming. And I recognise that it’s easy for me to make provocations at the end of my career—it’s harder for those starting out to fit even one more thing in an impossibly long must-do list.

One: Being strategic

We, being arts researchers and practitioners, must be strategic in how we think about our work—and even more urgently and importantly—how we describe it. Relying on ‘art for art’s sake’ as a self-evident value has not helped us. The strategic value of our work needs to be articulated beyond an aesthetic or theoretical outcome and to be intelligible to non-experts who vote, donate, and sit on grant committees or in parliaments.

I worked at the Australian Research Council as Executive Director for Humanities and Creative Arts from 2017-2020. I was there at a time when government ministers thought nothing of refusing to approve Humanities applications that they felt were a waste of money. I was struck then (and now in a different capacity), how poorly many arts-based academics described their research in terms that would be unintelligible to anyone beyond their very specific art form or approach. At the ARC, I also found that even in panels, many Humanities College of Experts members began their deliberations without understanding the grounds on which to evaluate research-based creative arts applications. Many in this room who have sat on panels can corroborate this. While humanities academics were able to be “educated”, numerous grant schemes are assessed by panels with a much broader membership.

Some Humanities applicants explained themselves very well: Felicity Wilcox, who gave the keynote at the 2025 Annual Academy Symposium, is a perfect example. She argued cogently and intelligibly how the opera she proposed writing as a DECRA output would revise the historic operatic approach to women and gender minorities.

Two: Engaging communities

We must engage communities much more. Our science colleagues have benefited enormously from their engagement with Citizen Science. Can we think deeper about how the general public (at least some of them) might better understand, approach, or even use, our work?

We needn’t abandon aesthetics, but we do need a public and at least some politicians who understand more deeply and concretely the value of what we do. That won’t happen if we don’t articulate it. At our symposium in November 2024, Mathew Trinca FAHA argued how important galleries and museums are as locations that attract families, and thus how galleries and museums tailor events accordingly.

With community engagement opportunities in mind, we need to encourage our colleagues and train our students to better describe their work, clarify its impact, and demonstrate how it can make a difference with and for communities, not just sharpening the cutting edge of the discipline.

Two examples among our Fellows: Naomi Stead is the architecture critic for The Saturday Paper, while Distinguished Professor Peter McNeil, the convenor of the 2025 Symposium, has written scholarly work on fashion that is readily understandable and read by general audiences and by academics.

After all, research is nothing without dissemination, and communication is a key part of dissemination. We can’t afford not to make the case for the importance of the arts across all our engagement.

Three: Arts infrastructure

The Arts need infrastructural support as much as STEM does, even if we don’t need as much storage as genomics or astrophysics.

Infrastructure enables us to, among other options, chart the national history of Australian performance from 1788 forward and then to cross reference it with New Zealand/Aotearoa through the AusStage research resource.

Luckily, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has provided the basis for co-investment infrastructure in several Humanities areas. Most recently, a new ARDC resource, the Australian Creative Histories and Futures (ACHF) has been launched: it includes AusStage, the Design and Art Australia Online database (the DAAO), Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), and Creative Australia. Full disclosure: I’m a founding member of the 20+ year old AusStage and I am Chair of ACHF’s Research Advisory Group. I know it’s not easy to develop and maintain research-based infrastructure, but the data now available are astonishing. The capacity to promote interactions between different datasets and disciplines in the cultural sector can revolutionise our research potential—and that capacity is within our grasp. Such infrastructure and research offer real opportunities for exploring new ways of creating knowledge.

Four: Embracing interdisciplinarity

Embracing interdisciplinarity can lead to both greater innovations and stronger explications of what we do and why we do it. Arts practice has rarely observed generic boundaries, but we tend to retain them in universities.

A greater interdisciplinarity of forms needs to be acknowledged and supported. Myf Turpin FAHA, like Linda Barwick FAHA before her, takes interdisciplinarity in one direction, working on the relationship between language and music in multiple Central Australian Indigenous groups.

An excellent example of a company that achieves this is Marrugeku co-founders Dalisa Pigram FAHA and Rachael Swain FAHA who present Indigenous dance that is also about climate change, environmental degradation, incarceration, and migration.

There is also room for the Arts to collaborate well beyond HASS disciplines as well: designers and engineers on prosthetics; dancers and medics on dancers’ rehabilitation post-injury. The arts, like research, are so often about asking questions: in Oedipus, who killed the king? In Beckett’s play, when will Godot arrive? Plot sparks wider questions.

Five: Exploring different kinds of research

My final provocation is that we need to explore different kinds of research even within our disciplines.

In the Humanities we have had the privilege of researching topics of our own interest and devising. I’m proposing that we must also be thinking of the larger research picture in our disciplines and identifying the gaps that need to be addressed.

To take just one example – economics and policy – Julian Meyrick’s research into the economics of theatre and cultural policy more broadly has been crucial for the field. Various international theatre organisations have economic and policy research working groups (among others) to examine issues that affect the precarious place of the discipline. These are not new, and they do happen elsewhere, but greater interconnections are essential. Disciplines and programs must work together more, whether through disciplinary associations, deans’ groups, and/or across universities. We must resist remaining in competition or in silos. Yes, it’s hard, but it’s more productive than losing yet more disciplines.

Like the humanities, the arts will not thrive just because they should or because we want them to. We need to take more concerted action to better position them. No one wants to imagine a world without culture. By stripping it out of universities as quickly and thoughtlessly as we have seen in recent years, we aren’t quite turning off the lights but we are fading to black and thereby seriously distorting our visions of the past, present and future.

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