Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Your pokie machine dollars at work

The latest round of Creative NZ grants has been announced. This time $1.8 million has been allocated, a nine percent reduction on the same round last year. The result is an average grant of $21,565 compared to last year's average of $24,478.

How did the visual arts make out? Well, thanks to Creative NZ becoming increasingly opaque since the departure of Alastair Carruthers, it takes a bit effort to work it all out. The charts that used to show percentage allocations have gone and so too has the ability to sort grants to the visual arts from the rest. This is the second year that some (but for some reason not all) Maori and Pacific grants have been included, it's a good idea but conveniently complicates efforts to make historical comparisons at the same time. The addition of Maori and Polynesian grants takes the visual arts component to a healthy sounding 26 percent of the total round. If you take them out the visual arts come in at around the usual 17 percent of the total allocation. Pacific Island grants were on average $15,626, Maori grants $25,000 and the rest of the visual arts grants averaged out at $18,449.

Here’s how the visual arts funding was divvied up with the Maori and Pacific Island grants included:

Publishing: $23,750 or 5.6 percent of the total

To NZ Institutions: $136,544 (32.15 percent)

Direct to named artist: $121,970 (28.7 percent)

Study overseas: $30,777 (7.25 percent)

Participation in overseas exhibitions and events: $111,702 (26.3 percent)

If you add in a couple of the named artists who have been funded to make exhibitions overseas, the total funding for off-shore projects is 39 percent.

And so it goes.