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| ANU Kambri Precinct. Photo Florian Groehn |
Before anyone removes anything, they need to understand why it was there in the first place.
This principle is called Chesterton’s Fence. Every university, media outlet, and government should be required to apply this fundamental process before making any cuts.
What began as quiet “restructuring” has become an avalanche of destruction. Arts and humanities faculties are being dismantled at universities like the Australian National University, Macquarie University, and the University of Tasmania. Departments once devoted to philosophy, art history, literature, and music are replaced with fragmented, casualised courses. The message is clear: the arts no longer matter as a body of knowledge, but only when they can be monetised.
This erosion is not trimming fat; it is dismantling the skeleton and chopping off the head of our cultural life. Arts education doesn’t just produce musicians or writers. It teaches us to think critically and see the world from multiple perspectives. It is the foundation of a healthy, democratic society.
When universities withdraw from the arts, the damage spreads. Local artists lose teaching roles and the intellectual systems that nourish their practice. Aspiring students are told that their abilities and dreams are worthless. Communities lose artists and networks. And society as a whole loses a source that not only brings people together, but one that provides a voice and substance for what the community represents.
This decline is mirrored in the media. Once, newspapers devoted space to cultural criticism, they engaged reviews and essays that treated art as a public conversation. Arts reviews got people talking outside the headlines. Today, most have slashed arts sections, replacing them with lifestyle content, celebrity news and advertising. Critics have been laid off or replaced by freelancers not trained in the arts, and in many outlets, reviews are short or gone entirely.
Criticism is not simply opinion. It is how art lives in the public sphere. It is how it is contextualised, challenged, and kept vibrant. Without it, art and social ideas risk becoming mute, reduced to disposable entertainment. A society that abandons cultural criticism is one that abandons its own capacity to reflect, question, imagine and inspire.
The effects ripple outward. Local arts communities and artists, once supported by universities and media, now operate in increasingly precarious gig economies. Without teaching posts, residencies, and reviews, their work becomes invisible. Emerging artists suffer most; without mentors, platforms, or critical ecosystems, many give up or divert their talents into private-sector roles far from the arts.
Audiences suffer too. Fewer exhibitions, fewer performances, and less diversity in creative voices. Arts festivals shrink. Theatres and music venues close. A community without visible, supported art is a community that will be lost to just another commercial system.
This is not an argument for nostalgia. The arts should not be preserved out of sentiment. They should be recognised and funded as essential infrastructure, as vital as health, science, or roads. Governments must treat cultural investment seriously, funding not just production but also reception, criticism, coverage, and education. Media outlets should reclaim their role as cultural voices rather than retreating to click-driven superficiality. After all, many people bought newspapers just for the arts section alone.
Part of what is at stake is the $65 billion Australian arts industry. But the greater loss is immeasurable: the imagination, reflection, and humanity that the arts bring into public life.
The erosion of the arts is not inevitable. It is a choice. Universities can lead in culture again. Media can invest in real criticism. Communities and governments can affirm that the arts are not luxuries but the very things that make a society a place that people want to be part of.
Let’s not wait until the arts vanish entirely, because when we realise what we have lost, it will be too late to go back.