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.”

He stressed the problem was confined to a minority of boards and was being addressed, but said the more troubling pattern was among those doing the right thing. “One of the difficulties is that the organisations that are doing the right thing, which is most of them, are frightened of being public about their more broad-minded positions, and are worried that they’ll become targets,” he said.

Individual artists faced a sharper version of the same pressure. “The problems of doxing and cancelling is very real, and their ability to earn an income in Australia has been reduced significantly.”

Ivany said nothing resembling this existed for most of his career. Across 40 years, the only controls on what was shown were external ones — the censorship board for film, the broadcasting tribunal for media, state authorities for art.

“There was never a discussion in any board or any organisation I’ve been at that discussed subject matter with regard to geopolitics or ideology,” he said. “The people generally on these boards were on the boards because they wanted to make a contribution. They weren’t really political people.”

With government still providing the majority of arts funding in Australia, he said the answer lay in who gets appointed — chairs, boards, selection committees and the management who execute policy.

“One of the things that they have to have when they’re recruiting people is they have to look at their social media profiles. They have to look at what they’ve said in public statements, and if that is contrary to what they want to achieve in social cohesion, then they can’t be given jobs in the sector,” Ivany said.

“That’s not a restriction of free speech. That’s what private industry does. If you’re in a position where you’re going to disrupt or take over these things, that’s been in your past, and that’s got to be looked at as part of your job.”

Boards also had to be genuinely diverse, he said, “because the two things that happen is one, that all of a sudden the programming becomes very one-sided, and then the opinion on that programming is also one-sided. You are there to serve the broader Australian population because you’re there representing a government that’s been elected by all the people.”

Turning to the Royal Commission, Ivany said it had done an exceptional job within its brief. “They’ve really highlighted the depth and breadth of antisemitism, and how unfortunately it’s infiltrated nearly every aspect of our society,” he said, adding that Australian institutions whose primary objective was to protect people had failed.

He said the focus now had to be on implementation and on causes.

“We have to start looking closely at the causes of how we got there,” Ivany said. “Now we’ve verified what happened to a significant degree — what created it, and how do we prevent it? If there’s more work to be done on that, it should be done, because it actually means that ALL Australians are endangered.”

Ivany noted the inquiry was the first investigation of antisemitism since the Second World War, which had kept the issue before the whole community.

Asked whether he was confident about the Jewish future in Australia, he said he was, with conditions. “If Australia, in terms of values, implements the policies and continues to take this seriously, Jews will have a life in Australia,” he said. “But it will need a lot of work, and it’s not an overnight solution.”