Budgeting for arts and culture

The battle for the diversification of our arts and culture has not been won although there was verbal recognition by the Minister of Finance in his Budget speech that the arts add value, generate income and employment and aid national development.

Planned funding for the arts seems to indicate a new focus on community development principally for young people through cultural camps held in new community centres, coupled with a renewed plan to save and upgrade some of our important buildings.

Full marks for paying attention to the National Museum and Art Gallery, which is an embarrassing representation of the state of TT art and culture. This institution is, finally, to be brought into the 21st century.

I am unaware of the proportion of State spending allocated to arts and culture, but we might presume that the remedial and new building works and Carnival will reduce that sum significantly. Buildings are necessary but what you do and put in them are what art and culture are about. How much money will remain for that? With inadequate State funds to implement fully the programmes alluded to in the Budget and to develop other unmentioned areas of the arts there should be some encouragement for the planned increase in public-private business sector collaboration to extend to all areas of the arts.

The recently concluded 2016 Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival demonstrates the reward for investment in arts and culture. Two feature films that received sizeable State funding under a special funding scheme run by the Trinidad and Tobago Film Company, now part of Creative TT, broke new ground in TT film making.

The breakthrough films, as relates to subject matter and high production standards, won prizes for the best local films by juries and cineastes and have the potential to do well abroad, having already attracted private funding, local and international, to allow them to be completed.

That special feature-film public funding came after many years of sustained State support for the industry, firstly to grow a generation of new filmmakers by offering grants and expert advice that helped produce films that then went on to be shown internationally and at the TT Film Festival — a private initiative and handsomely funded by the private sector with secondary State support. The film festival is now an important hub for Caribbean filmmakers whose TT projects benefit from tax breaks.

Alas, theatre, dance, visual arts and literature have been less fortunate! Since 2010 the literary arts have produced tangible gains in developing writers and readers across a wide strata, with a push at growing the publishing industry.

This mirrors the intense work several of us put into the film sector, but despite ministerial appreciation, the Government’s lack of a holistic approach to cultural diversification is frustrating the literary sector’s development.

Private and State-owned companies quickly realised the potential of investing in our writers, resulting in an emerging second golden age of Caribbean literature which is being recognised internationally as offering the very best in the English language, yet simultaneously we are the only country in the Americas applying full VAT on books — discouraging readers and stifling growth — and, uniquely, penalising the inviting of writers to TT by levying a 15 percent withholding tax, per writer, on the country’s annual literary festival (an NGO), devouring limited sponsorship funds.

Rethinking those inefficient taxes, which yield comparatively little revenue but damage the embryonic sector, and encouraging private philanthropy through tax incent i v e s w o u l d e n abl e the literary arts to develop and r e a l i s e its full po t ential.