‘Selective’ identity focus may cost half of audiences: arts chief

Adelaide Festival director Brett Sheehy questions whether the arts have ‘shut out 50 per cent of humanity’ through a focus on minority identities.

Rosemary Neill

Adelaide Festival artistic director Brett Sheehy at the Adelaide Festival Centre in front of the set from Innocence. Picture Matt Turner.

3 min read

9:30PMMarch 14, 2025.

Updated 10:15PMMarch 14, 2025

One of the country’s most successful cultural leaders has accused left-of-centre artists of pursuing a “selective diversity” that could be limiting their audience reach.

In a provocative interview, outgoing Adelaide Festival director Brett Sheehy questioned whether the arts had “shut out 50 per cent of humanity” by focusing on certain minority identities and blaming factors such as Covid for sluggish ticket sales.

Sheehy said: “We have been championing … diversity but it’s been a fairly selective diversity. It’s been a diversity of identity – of gender, sexuality, ability, neuro-diversity, ableism, certainly race.’’

While he supports diverse arts programming, Sheehy asked: “Have we shut out 50 per cent of humanity in our focus on those things? Do we need to start to address diversity of religion, ideology, politics, more socio-economic diversity, because the arts do not tend to be … a cheap pursuit.’’

He added: “If audiences have fallen off (since the pandemic), we can’t blame Covid forever.’’

Sheehy, who has been artistic director of the Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney festivals, and the Melbourne Theatre Company, agreed there was a lack of diversity of political opinions within the arts, which were “by nature a left-of-centre pursuit”. He said: “I get frustrated when I hear my colleagues write off 71 million Americans as idiots because they voted for Trump. It’s not the case.’’

He said there were conservative opinions he did not agree with, but nevertheless merited debate or exposure in the arts.

The veteran arts leader was recruited at short notice to run the 2025 Adelaide Festival after his predecessor, Ruth Mackenzie, stepped down midway through her contract to take up a state government arts job.

Mackenzie’s 2024 festival recorded a $825,000 deficit. In contrast, Sheehy’s program – anchored by Innocence, a contemporary opera about a mass school shooting, an adaptation of Trent Dalton’s Love Stories and a dance program by legendary German dance company Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal – has achieved a stunning financial turnaround and will record a six-figure surplus. Sheehy, who previously directed the Adelaide Festival from 2005 until 2008, said in a statement: “After making a perhaps rash declaration to my board and my team that a deficit this year was simply not an option, I am thrilled to call it now – the 2025 festival will finish with a very healthy six-figure surplus.”

He thanked his “stellar festival team who gave their all 24/7 in unprecedented circumstances’’.

Sheehy told The Australian that if the arts were to be truly diverse, the industry needed to do more to embrace class and educational diversity, as people’s socio-economic backgrounds were the product “of happenstance at birth’’.

The festival director said Taylor Swift’s record-breaking world tour showed that post-Covid, people were still prepared to pay large sums to see live performances. Yet some arts companies were still blaming the pandemic when they struggled to sell tickets and subscriptions.

He said: “If people aren’t coming to the things I am presenting as much as I feel they should … I can’t blame the audience, ever. I can’t blame Covid anymore. It has to be me and what I am presenting.’’

Sheehy, who is heading into semi-retirement in NSW’s Blue Mountains, said he had been “wrestling” with questions relating to identity and diversity in cultural programming for a decade.

His Adelaide Festival program wraps up this weekend with performances of shows including the hit Indigenous rock musical Big Name, No Blankets, Love Stories and Tanztheater Wuppertal’s Club Amour.