He told FMT: “Our corporate culture is completely philistine. It has no understanding of the arts, no understanding about how to contribute towards building cultural civilisations, nothing of the sort.”
“Their contributions are confined to charitable work as a CSR (corporate social responsibility). Even when they do contribute to something, they don’t know how to sustain it.”
He said the new Pakatan Harapan government should ensure the “culture” wing did not end up taking a backseat to tourism as was done in the tourism and culture ministry of the previous government.
Khoo said he was a signatory to a recent petition calling for the revival of the culture, arts and heritage ministry. However, if run properly, a tourism and culture ministry should be more than enough to ensure art and culture were not forsaken.
The problem, he said, was that the previous administration was looking at how it could earn money directly from culture.
“I was a member of the National Transformation 2050 advisory board and some of the things that were discussed there were utter nonsense. “They were talking about how we could create an equivalent to K-Pop, how we could create an equivalent to Bollywood. It was that kind of mentality. The idea was to create cash-earners.”
Instead the creative industry should create an environment where it was possible to raise money from other sectors, including the corporate world.
Khoo’s organisation, Pusaka, is dedicated to supporting the viability of traditional Malaysian art forms.
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