‘There isn’t a single arts organisation in Australia who shouldn’t be paying attention to the issues of censorship, artistic freedom of expression, financial sustainability and broader arts sector survival right now.’
As the Adelaide Writers Week crisis worsens, I was interviewed by Jo Pickup for ArtsHub about why arts boards aren’t taking note of others’ past actions.
‘It’s been more than two years since these issues started making mainstream news headlines. Organisations should have been spending that time getting ready for dealing with their own version of this [Adelaide Writers Week] crisis. If they haven’t, they have been negligent.’
For Larsen, at the heart of the current situation is the problem that many arts boards appear unable to face the hard reality that the management strategies they may have applied to similar crises in the past, are not applicable to present and future business operating environments.
‘We cannot take a business-as-usual approach to governing our organisations within the [global] poly-crisis that we are in,’ she explains.
‘We must also acknowledge that many of these current situations are really just new manifestations of old issues that we have actually known about for some time,’ she adds.
As evidence of this, Larsen describes the long-time decline in numbers of people who are willing to sit on low or unpaid arts and cultural boards in Australia.
‘Those numbers were decreasing even before the pandemic [in 2020],’ she says, ‘and this is only getting worse.’
She explains that due to the drop-offs in numbers, the sector now has a situation where, in the context of the global poly-crisis, ‘we are relying on fewer and more burnt-out arts board members to make ever more complex decisions at speed whilst being actively lobbied in ways they’ve never been lobbied before.
‘Essentially, it means we’ve got unprepared and burnt out people making bad decisions – and that is just one part of what’s wrong with the current picture,’ she adds.
While Larsen’s insights into these current governance-related predicaments are many (too many for one article), she says that the Adelaide Writers Week events have reminded her of three key things: that we need to get better at risk and crisis management; that organisations need to invest in repair, not just reversals; and the need for big-picture structural changes to the way arts boards function in this country should be a more urgent industry priority.
‘It’s also important to acknowledge that we don’t currently have an alternative board or governance model that will necessarily work better,’ she says.
‘All board models have their issues… But it’s clear the Adelaide Writers Week crisis is another example of the approaches we are currently missing.’
Read more on the ArtsHub website.
Further reading: Palestine as a governance issue
Check out all of the articles and resources in my series on Palestine as a governance issue.
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