By Mikayla Yap, AYO Youth Council member
In light of AYO’s inaugural Changemaker’s Summit, the AYO Youth Council reflected on the future of the arts and classical music industry in Australia. Although our discussions ranged from the commodification of the arts to the future of Artificial Intelligence in creative spaces, we found that many of our topics circled back to a central theme: the importance of engaging our communities.
Through rigorous discussion with our guest speakers, we came to recognise how our communities should not be seen as external audiences, but as active participants in the future of the arts industry and an integral part of our artistic identity.
The Artist in Modern Australia
The first session of the summit began with the question: ‘What does it mean to be an artist in Australia?’
To define the ‘artist’ alone is no small challenge. Through a classical music lens, what defines an artist can be quite narrow. Young musicians are often encouraged to desire prestige – national stages, competitions, and overseas recognition can be framed as determining artistic worth.
Furthermore, younger musicians tend to be labelled as ‘emerging’ artists. However, AYO CEO Kimbali Harding reframed this: “Emerging artists are not ‘emerging’. Where is the line between an ‘emerging’ artist and an artist? … The moment someone creates art; they are an artist.”
Whether it be to five audience members who came to a recital or thousands on a national stage, every artist can express, impact, and communicate something meaningful through art.
As guest speaker Hamish AJ Trait articulated, the artist is someone who “…make[s] art for the sake of art”. Artistic worth should not be defined by qualifications or visibility, but a person’s willingness to create and communicate through artistic creation.
Now, to place the artist in Australia.
Australia’s arts scene does not always receive the same public visibility or institutional attention as our European counterparts. Hence, the expectation that communities will have a wide interest in classical music and the arts is no longer one artist can fall back on. In fact, the way the community consumes art has changed drastically in modern Australia. Classical music has been commodified as something to hold commercial value, be marketed, and sold.
Breaking down this internal culture of prestige and visibility as measures of success would encourage the collaboration and entrepreneurial thinking needed of future musicians in a commercial society. However, this raises a further question: what should we value when we call an artist successful?
The ‘Successful’ Artist
When classical musicians think of a ‘successful’ career, often the image that comes to mind is professional achievement and recognition. It is to achieve a permanent position in an orchestra, to gain international recognition, to become as visible as possible. However, this industry mindset neglects another crucial aspect of the definition of a successful artist; our community engagement.
Community engagement can often be seen as a ‘lesser’ career path than virtuosic performance, with young musicians not really being guided towards the endeavour. Yet, our roots as an arts sector lie in community.
It is from our communities we developed, it is our communities who receive our art, and it is our communities who provide us with opportunities to pursue our art.
An artist who is engaged with their community will be empowered by their community to succeed, creating a symbiotic, sustainable relationship in which artistic expression and community impact reinforce one another. Their marketability will be able to communicate their artistic value without replacing it.
That is its own form of success, one more artists and the wider industry must learn to recognise.
Engaging with our community creates a two-way street of communication and understanding. Communities do not merely receive art; they also shape what art becomes through participation, support, interpretation and collaboration. Artists, in turn, contribute expertise, creativity, performance, teaching and cultural expression. Through this exchange, communities can better understand the significance of our artform, while artists can better understand how their work can meaningfully contribute to the lives of those around them.
Furthermore, amid the commodification of arts, we must realise that arts cannot be run on a business model alone. Artistic value is not equivalent to commercial value, and communities should not be treated merely as markets, consumers or audience statistics. The arts cannot afford to understand community as external to the sector, because artistic activity depends on relationships with the people who participate in, support, organise and give meaning to it.
Thus, artists must become aware of the broadening definition of artistic success in our ever-evolving society. As an industry, we risk becoming more estranged from the communities who have shaped us, so future artists must learn to integrate the community into their practice, while creating opportunities for music to become part of everyday community life.
Fuelling the Community
Some common solutions proposed for the challenges the arts sector faces include increasing government funding or urging the community to understand that the arts are important to us, and important to society. However, we cannot sit idle in our own artistic circles and expect the groups around us to bridge the gap. In the future of Australian arts, it is time we bridged the gaps between groups like classical musicians and the wider community. While our expertise lies in the arts, we have the skills, knowledge, and autonomy to begin the chain of change. As Hamish encouraged us at the end of the summit’s first session: “Get angry, and stay angry”. Not simply with the challenges facing the arts, but with our own complacency towards them
This is not to say that artists should simply push their agenda onto policymakers or community leaders. Rather, it means having conversations about engagement, collaborating with community members and, as AYO Youth Council’s Co-Chair QiQi said, “meeting people where they are”.
To help ensure the future of the classical music industry, we must begin at the grassroots level, where every artist began.
Investing in quality music education and community performances, while encouraging appreciation for music at a young age, can strengthen musical knowledge and appreciation within the community. Dismissing these community music spaces as ‘lesser’ is not only unfair, but it may further weaken the future of the professional sector itself.
We should also broaden the ways in which we engage with the community. The guest speakers at the Summit gave a variety of already active examples, such as the Lullaby Project by Connecting the Dots in Music, founded by guest speaker Emily Gann. Not everyone ‘speaks’ music – not everyone will be engaged with the idea of music alone. Sometimes, music needs another point of connection through which people can encounter it. Artists must become comfortable with the fluidity of our music as identity, we must be comfortable with the fluidity of the definition of a musical career, and we as future artists should foster a welcoming community about this.
Ultimately, artists must collaborate with their communities and maintain relationships that remain open to discussion. Future artists have a responsibility to their art, their communities and themselves to forge a sustainable artistic culture for the future of the industry.
The first step is not forgetting where we came from when we get to where we want to be.
