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A Different Perspective
Hugo Twopeny
How the arts sector is being forced to confront its identity
Cultural institutions can no longer rely on an inherited agreement about their public value, independence or role.
For a long time, being a museum, festival or university carried a certain authority. There was broad agreement that these institutions contributed public value, and many of the assumptions underpinning that role could remain largely implicit.
That inherited authority is increasingly being tested.
As society changes, institutions are being asked to articulate positions they once had the luxury of leaving undefined: what they exist for, who they serve and what they are prepared to protect.
If those questions remain unanswered, controversy becomes the moment they are forced into the open.
Art has long played a significant role in Australian public life. At its best, it represents something of an ideal for a democratic society: it challenges our perspectives, creates space for freedom of expression, asks us to think and rethink our collective history and gives us access to different ways of understanding the world.
But governments, funders, artists, audiences, communities and staff increasingly hold different expectations of what cultural institutions are for and what role they should play.
When controversy arrives, those competing expectations surface quickly. What can appear to be a sudden crisis often reveals a disagreement that has been developing for much longer.
The past 18 months provide several vivid examples.
In August 2025, the Bendigo Writers Festival issued participants with a code of conduct just two days before the event opened, asking speakers to avoid language or subjects considered inflammatory, divisive or disrespectful. More than 50 writers and hosts withdrew and around a third of the program was cancelled.
Earlier this year, the Adelaide Festival board removed Palestinian-Australian author Randa Abdel-Fattah from its 2026 Writers’ Week program. More than 180 participants subsequently withdrew, director Louise Adler resigned, most remaining board members stepped down and the event was cancelled.
The response from the institutions governing the sector matters as well.
In February 2025, Creative Australia rescinded the selection of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino for the 2026 Venice Biennale less than a week after announcing their appointment, following questions in Parliament about Sabsabi’s earlier work.
The agency said a prolonged and divisive debate posed an unacceptable risk to public support for the artistic community and later told Senate Estimates that maintaining social cohesion was a national priority.
Yet the Creative Australia Act also requires the agency to uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts.
Sabsabi and Dagostino were reinstated five months later following an external review of Creative Australia’s governance and decision-making.
The episode exposed a deeper question.
When public support, social cohesion and artistic freedom were brought into conflict, which part of the institution’s purpose was it there to protect?
In each of these cases, the arguments about who was right matter. But focusing only on the immediate decisions can obscure what sits underneath them.
It’s tempting to treat moments like these as failures of governance or risk management and to conclude that organisations need better scenario planning or a clearer understanding of public sentiment.
That diagnosis, however, misses a broader strategic issue.
Organisations can’t govern effectively under pressure if they haven’t spent time defining, redefining and continually stress-testing what they’re there for, who they are and what they stand for.
Boards and leadership teams often focus strategy on questions of growth, reputation, funding, audiences and influence. That work matters. But it can carry an implicit assumption that the world surrounding the organisation is the same as it was five, 10 or 15 years ago.
It isn’t.
And as the environment changes, assumptions about an organisation’s role, responsibilities and sources of legitimacy need to be reconsidered with it.
There’s a wider historical context to this.
Periods of rising populism often place institutions across the arts, media and education under greater pressure and scrutiny. Over the past decade, trust in institutions has eroded.
Institutional authority no longer carries the same automatic weight.
For cultural organisations, this means identity can no longer be treated as something inherited through history, prestige or public mandate. It has to be actively understood and repeatedly tested against the society in which the organisation now operates.
This requires leadership to reconcile an organisation’s principles with the competing responsibilities it carries to artists, audiences, communities, governments, funders, staff and the broader public.
In times like these, boards and leadership teams need to interrogate the moral, philosophical and ethical positions their organisations may previously have been able to leave implicit.
This practice itself isn’t new.
Inquiry has always begun by questioning what appears obvious, rather than waiting for events to demonstrate that the underlying assumptions no longer hold.
Before the controversy arrives, a board and its senior leadership team should be able to answer one simple question without reaching for the organisation’s values statement:
When our responsibilities and principles come into conflict, what are we here to protect?
