No arts industry. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)

SIR: Professor Donald Horne broached a very relevant issue when he declared, in a speech delivered at a seminar on arts management in Sydney in March, that the arts are not an industry. But, surprisingly, there has been scarcely any discussion of this statement.

I wonder why. Are people stunned by Horne's audacity? Certainly the statement seems to have come out of the blue, although he traced the "economisation of culture" in Australia back to Keating's "Creative Nation" of the 1990s. In the ensuing ten years or so, have we become so inured to thinking in economic irrationalist terms generally that we are unable to consider any alternative for the arts?

Perhaps Horne's thesis has been read as the romantic ramblings of an academic who is past his best. I hope not, because his view is that of a large number of arts practitioners who have hitherto felt powerless to assert it themselves. If Horne's statement is allowed to disappear into oblivion, we will miss the opportunity to right a long-standing, grievous wrong.

That the arts are not an industry is a matter of cold, unromantic logic, not just Horne's personal opinion (however authoritative that may be). It is a fact that deserves the serious consideration--and adoption--of all our arts writers, academics and administrators as the tyranny of economic irrationalism is increasingly shown to be the false religion it always was.

When we consider what an industry is and does we come up with the irrefutable conclusion that industries exist solely for "the bottom line"--profit to shareholders. These days at least, industries are only established after considerable research into whether their products will sell at a price high enough to pay expenses and yield that profit to shareholders. Usually these products are clones or variants of products that are already on the market in some form.

Nothing could be less like how the arts operate. Artists (those who are worth their salt as artists) create things for which there is, by implied definition, no pre-existing market ...