On Friday, August 29, the city council launched its draft Dunedin Arts and Culture Strategy.
This can be seen on its website and the council is inviting people to comment on it so that may be taken into account before it reaches its final form.
The time for making submissions ends on October 3. I'm aware many people have neither the time nor the inclination to do any such thing but I recommend it nonetheless.
Such documents can seem rather vague and wordy and some of the words can be off-putting - spare me ''holistic'' and ''leveraging'' used to mean ''using'' - and some of the aspirations are naive.
There is also a rather relentlessly upbeat tone to the whole document where a more realistic recognition of difficulties and limitations would be welcome.
Even so, if you read the whole thing it does explain fairly specifically how goals are to be worked towards and it openly asks if these are even the right goals. We have not had such a comprehensive strategy before and it would be worth taking the trouble to try to make this one as useful as possible.
It has been a long time in the making. It was initiated in 2010 by the city and was taken up by an arts collective Transforming Dunedin and proceeded with seminars and a lot of work by a lot of people.
There is an overview at page 16 which in diagrammatic form shows six themes each with subheadings. Some appear very vague such as ''A-C Infusion'' in theme 1 which is ''Infuse public and private sector organisations with arts, culture and creative thinking''.
How is this to be done? With an arts and culture and creative tea bag? But if you turn to page 19, it is spelled out more specifically.
''Dunedin's public and private sectors, community groups and agencies need to be supported to integrate creative thinking, arts culture and design, into the way they do business''. If you're wondering if this means yet another handout from the city, turn to page 46 and you will see no, not necessarily.
While the city will achieve some results by providing funds, it will also act simply as an advocate, by setting an example, and by providing space in property it already owns, among other means.
Theme 2 is called ''Identity Pride''. Linking the arts to identity, especially in connection with funding, always makes me uneasy. Yes, culture can be a great identifier. There is nothing quite like pre-European Maori decorative work anywhere in the world. Put a koru motif on an Air New Zealand tail fin and it runs up a distinctive New Zealand flag.
Helen Clark's government took this firmly by the horns and made it a reason to put public money into the arts. But that raises the danger of making the funding prescriptive, channelling it towards certain things only.
If identity is left out of the equation, artists will sometimes produce things which eventually seem specifically characteristic of this country. But local and central government funding shouldn't be tied to some committee's attempt to prescribe this.
The document is saturated with the view that art is all about innovation and risk-taking and that some of the best may be seen by some as unpalatable and offensive.
That the authors are unaware of how things were in the past is evident on page 17, in the expansion of Theme 3, where they include Michaelangelo with Picasso as an artist who experienced this. You don't get that impression reading Vasari, Michaelangelo's contemporary biographer.
The idea that strong negative public reaction to a work is a sign of its merit can be and has been damaging. The discussion of Theme 6 at page 24 has a heading ''Ensure public art, culture and creativity is highly visible and valued''.
Below, it says ''Public art is by its very nature high profile and often generates passionate debate''. I am not among those who disparage Rogan Gantry's Harbour Mouth Molars but I am under no illusions the public generally was pleased with the money spent on it.
Haka Peepshow in the Octagon produced an even greater negative reaction and the result was the funding for art in public places was suspended. People will accept experimentation more readily in the publicly funded art gallery than they will in other public places.
On the same page, we are told that the public spaces of Rome, Venice and Paris are romantic and exciting for modern travellers ''and have become icons of vibrant city life''.
So they are. But they weren't created in working democracies and if their designers had set out to unsettle their patrons, they probably wouldn't exist.
But never mind my concerns. Look at the draft and make a submission.
Peter Entwisle is a Dunedin curator, historian and writer.
