This week I attended an arts show, I Hide in Bathrooms, as part of the Adelaide Festival. The show was an interesting one-woman performance which traversed difficult issues of death, sorrow, fear and the contradictory feelings of the loss of a loved one. I was not completely engaged, partly for personal reasons, and partly because I thought the big questions raised by the performance focused on a “love of my life” relationship politics that I do not share. But it was a great performance and a show worthy of one of Australia’s major arts festivals.

To be clear, this was not high art – rather, it was independent and experimental theatre from people and organisations that work on shoestring. And despite that, the performance and production values were high, and the content was provocative and important. So what has this got to do with political economy?

The performance I attended was an opening night – so it came with speeches! The Chair of the host organisation, Vitalstatistix, thanked and congratulated the artists and the production team, and then thanked the backers – Brink Theatre, Vitalstatistix, and Arts SA.

All very ordinary – but can we rewind on that? The show was made possible by the collaboration of the publicly-funded Brink Theatre, the publicly-funded Vitalstatistix, the state government’s arts body, Arts SA, and was part of the publicly-funded Adelaide Festival. This is typical of the funding cocktail required to produce modern arts (or other community projects), but what was absent from the acknowledgements was a thank you to the Australian and South Australian taxpayers who backed the project via 4 four different paths.

Alongside the formal acknowledgement of production partners, would it be such a big step to acknowledge that the whole show was made possible by taxpayers’ funding? To acknowledge that it is a privilege and a responsibility to be funded by the community to produce thought-provoking art (a similar privilege/acknowledgement that should sit with the millions of other people who also rely on the public purse in government employment, defence industries, community services or even the big 4 accounting firms!)?

[And yes, my wage is also indirectly funded by the public purse]

But in an arts context, would it be useful to acknowledge the support of the community of taxpayers and ask the audience to bring other people to see the show and appreciate the importance of public arts funding in raising difficult social issues?

To be fair, the speeches I heard were just fairly standard opening night routines, and the content may have been different if the speech was delivered by the CEO, the author of this great piece on the arts venue and the role of “communal luxury”.

But in reality, if we want to continue to support collective activity we need a bigger picture at all the micro-events that owe their existence to taxpayers’ funding. We need to stop treating government bodies as external funders and start acknowledging the web of links (including taxes) to the broader community.

Our taxes pay for so much more than politicians, or even public schools and hospitals. We need people to understand the social and economic poverty of a world with low taxes. We can’t afford taxation to hide in bathrooms!

This may jar with my friends in the Modern Monetary Theory community who view government expenditure as a precursor to and independent of taxes, but as I have argued before, I suspect this is partly economic pedantry. The bigger issue is to agree that a private market will never deliver the breath of human supports and experience we need. Government is essential – not simply as an economic regulator or authoritarian legislature, but as a facilitator of collective goods and services which are essential to a modern social life.