State aid to the arts in New Zealand

Abstract

This essay is a study in public administration. Its subject is a relatively new kind of government agency:- the arts council. In the following pages, I shall attempt to trace the historical development of an arts council in New Zealand, to describe its characteristics and to evaluate its performance within a New Zealand framework. This study is not a comparative one. A comparative look at arts councils would undoubtedly prove constructive, and I suspect that the arts councils which have emerged among New Zealand and her allies show many similarities. But certainly New Zealand has her own distinctive needs in an arts council. Being a small and isolated country, she has problems which her larger sisters do not face. But by the same token the New Zealand arts council may also enjoy a certain potential which arts councils in other countries lack. Few people have been very enthusiastic about arts councils - at least in Anglo-Saxon countries. Many have disliked the idea of subsidizing the "immoral" works of "bohemian" artists. On the other side of the question, the intellectuals, while all for relieving the artist's lot, have nevertheless doubted the appropriateness of a public agency established to stimulate national culture.