As a local artist living through our COVID nightmare, I understand first hand - like many others I know - the current strain on our creative industries and the rumours of its imminent demise.
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But I grew even more concerned to read Professor Bridget Aitchison's proposed solution in The Courier ('Ballarat ACE Precinct about more than arty-farty stuff').
I drew a breath reading of Professor Aitchison's recycling of the urban planning myth that government-driven arts precincts revitalise cities.
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Ballarat's self-belief as an arts loving city is long-standing.
But this also leaves the city as we have seen again and again vulnerable to bad policy.
The fundamental problem facing local and state government is their aim to match this self-belief with reality, by pressing disparate, public-funded arts organisations together into a single arts equivalent of a sporting precinct.
This approach may suit the bureaucrats of Spring Street and some local councillors, but will do little of benefit for the local community.
If there is one sure law of urban planning, it is the law of unintended consequences.
Putting to one side cost and planning hurdles, the naive proposition that event planners, musicians, orchestras, theatre groups, and ballet and opera companies would have much to gain by becoming partners in a centralised multi-discipline complex overseen by government would not stand up.
Bureaucracy would stifle any prospect of creativity.
Worse still, such complexes can result in something more akin to an arts ghetto, shut off from the broader community.
For me, Professor Aitchison's idea has arisen from a fundamentally negative view of the modern world as crowded, chaotic and hostile.
And where an arts precinct offers patrons a distant sanctuary.
In my humble opinion, cultural cities really should evolve.
Culture is, after all it is said, not a destination.
It should not be confined to planned precincts, but rather be given the space to be expressed in a multitude of ways, at multitude locations - to be promulgated ultimately by and through the imagination of all residents and not dictated by government, however well intended.
Andrew McIlroy is an artist and arts writer, living and working in Daylesford
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