Ivany warns of breakaway arts push

Arts figures are drawing up proposals for breakaway organisations because they no longer feel represented by existing ones, according to Jewish philanthropist Peter Ivany, who told The AJN he had already been approached with such plans.

Ivany, who gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion in late August about his four decades in the arts, said the driver was a shift in who controls a number of arts boards.

“Some of these have now been taken over by ideologues who divide the world into oppressors and oppressed,” he said. “They label you. You can’t put a label on yourself. They do it, and obviously that has been very difficult.”

Those boards had come to dominate programming, he said, producing what he described as a monoculture. “The old idea of the arts forming a bridge between society and a diverse set of opinions has gone,” Ivany said. “In many cases the attendances have dropped, and weirdly, in some cases, it’s forced the government to subsidise that lack of revenue.”

That reversed decades of effort, he said. “For a long time in the arts, we tried to make it more and more populist. We wanted to be more accessible to more people, and some of these organisations have turned that on its head.”