There were a lot of things said in Parliament recently, mostly, of course, having specifically to do with the White Paper. But there were also other arts-related stuff.

The S$19 million dished out for the Community Engagement Masterplan, for one, during which Arts NMP Janice Koh asked whether the cultural officers at the CC level are getting adequate training when it comes to dealing with and exposure to arts.

Koh also posed another question regarding literature in education, which you can find on her Facebook page. A then-and-now query about the number of students taking Lit for their O levels.

The data that Education Minister Heng Swee Keat revealed was pretty sad. It’s a huge drop that Koh summed up: 17k took full Lit (48% of the total cohort) in 1992. Today it’s 3k plus (9%) (and another 3k taking it as an elective in Combined Humanities).

“Now I finally see why fewer and fewer people understand satire,” she posted.

Hopefully, they can still understand humour. If only it wasn’t so tragic. Says the former Lit major.

But there was one final bit of news that actually made me do a double take.

Yesterday, in response to Koh’s query about the reasons for the drop of visitors to the Singapore Art Museum (from 743k in 2009 to 636k in 2011 according to the Singapore Cultural Statistics 2012 report), Acting Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Lawrence Wong said it was probably because of the museum’s current strong focus on local artists and content.

So… visitors aren’t going to SAM because SAM is concentrating on local art.

For the culture (acting) minister to say that sounded, to me, rather… off. Hence my double take.

But then, he adds that it’s the “right focus” for SAM. Which is essentially a thumbs up for what they’re doing. Cue: triple take.

So basically, take those two statements and what he seems to be saying is: We’re cool with what SAM does, we’re cool with the whole viva local artists and local content—even if it’s proving to be not quite successful in bringing lots of people to the museum.

To which, according to the exchange between the two, the acting minster added that it’s precisely this go-local direction that they hope will eventually bring the audiences.

Why was all these a surprise to me? Well, for a system that privileges hard data, concrete figures, that goes for numbers as an indicator of success, it would seem that Acting Minister Wong has implied quite the opposite. And categorically puts his faith on the local art strategy to build audiences. In Parliament.

Of course, there was also another reason given—that there have been fewer exhibitions as museums (Natmo was also mentioned) do supplementary programming and have longer runs to add to the experience (which is also quite cool). But by foregrounding the local art content excuse as the first reason, no matter how initially “off” it sounded, it seems like a vote of confidence on record.

But of course, there’s still the big question mark surrounding SAM, given the recent announcement about the future of MCCY’s so-called “visual art cluster” (along with TNAGS and STPI) and the supposed joining of forces among the three (which still sounds vague and no word yet on what that actually means).

So yeah, we’ve yet to see the whole picture. But hey, you have to admit what Acting Minister Wong said was quite interesting right?

And on that note, gong xi fa cai!