marcus westbury

EVERYONE is fast becoming a critic. On the internet, curating, selecting, recommending and critiquing have evolved from the most rare of skills to something we do every day. Everyone is commenting and critiquing. Meanwhile, traditional cultural criticism is in danger of being swamped by the proliferation of hybrid art forms and the whole notion of the flagship authoritative expert is under attack from an armada of alternative voices.

It might even be a good thing.

The rapid evolution of creative disciplines is tricky for artists, critics and audiences. Visual artists are working in performance, video makers are trained in theatre, theatre directors are putting on shows without actors, computer programmers are collaborating with dancers, sound artists are working in video or occasionally dabbling in astronomy.

Is it even possible to critique them all without proliferating into hundreds of constantly splintering sub-categories? Are critics somehow in need of expertise in film and visual art and performance and anything else that may arise? Should newspapers such as this one send multiple critics to every show? Or is criticism becoming less a function of the form and more about the cultures and ideas the work is created for?

It can be a festival director’s nightmare finding laneways for exhibitions, shop windows for dance projects, hairdressers for theatre performances, planetariums for music gigs or shipping containers for galleries.

It could sound very avant-garde or try-hard cool, but artists inevitably try to use the full set of tools and techniques available to them. Why wouldn’t a theatre director pick up a video camera and use it when everyone else is?

The anything-goes approach doesn’t make life easy for critics.

Traditionally, critics have tended to work within strict artform definitions and within the boundaries that many artists are wilfully or inadvertently breaking down.

Smart critics aren’t oblivious to the challenges, but that doesn’t mean they’re good at it either. A good critic can know that they’re often not the right person to comment or pass judgement on what they have in front of them. Often they have to do it anyway.

Meanwhile, the internet is encouraging a proliferation of both critical and congratulatory voices. An abundance of commentary is coming not from artform critics but from organic communities built around things that sometimes have nothing to with the form of the work. Everyone from game geeks, to hip-hop lovers, urban fashionistas, guerilla gardeners, street artists, sports fans, retro musicians, knitting housewives, craft lovers, suburban fathers, and online bookclubs are forming and sharing their cultural interests. They’re swapping notes on gigs, books, exhibitions, plays, events and interventions with little regard to the boundaries of form. Their defining interests are occasionally around artforms but can slip and wander easily to anywhere within the interests and experiences of their own communities.

I read scores of online publications that tip me off about exhibitions, books, performances, blogs, films and all manner of unclassified things. Criticism and commentary comes from everywhere.

It could be anything from the dense tech and theory-heavy cultural commentary of the nettime mailing list, to the arts and culture section of the news-ranking sites such as Digg.com, to facebook forums from my home town, and the snapshot pop-culture-meets-hipster cool of Lost at E Minor or Three Thousand. Cultural communities are forming around ethnicity, geography or hobbies far more than artforms. Shane Warne the Musical is as likely to be reviewed on a cricket forum as a theatre one and what it lacks in knowledge of theatre may be more than compensated for by the connection of reviewer to the expectations of the audience.

As the authority of the artform expert becomes just one of many ways by which we filter cultural experiences, a whole new set of issues arise: incestuous and interconnected networks have always been a problem in creative communities and become more so among cliques commenting on themselves; rigorous technical assessments are easily lost on the non-specialist; an even larger danger is that we become a series of communities talking about and to ourselves.

For all the fears and issues, there is no doubt that the rigid hierarchies of form and criticism are breaking down. For all the value of the history and traditions of a given form, new patterns of commentary and communication are emerging. It is fast becoming more important to get the joke, have lived the life experience, or intuitively understand the cultural reference points than to even try to keep up with the constantly changing and merging mediums.

Originally published in The Age.

Tags:   21st century criticism · art critics · art criticsm · blurring of artform boundaries · craft lovers · cultural criticism · game geeks · guerilla gardeners · knitting housewives · media art · online bookclubs · retro musicians · sports fans · street artists · suburban fathers · the age · theatre criticism · to hip-hop lovers · urban fashionistasNo Comments.

Zac Zavos, the publisher (along with his New York based brother Zolton) of the fantastic cultural guide Lost at E Minor and the excellent sports site The Roar is one of our tenants at The Clinic as part of Renew Newcastle.

He recently wrote a nice little post about his involvement in the process:

I moved to Newcastle late last year, though I still do a lot of work in Sydney. What a great city Newcastle is. It’s been breath of fresh air for me. For the first few months, I worked on Lost At E Minor and our online pubishing company, Conversant Media, from home. But then I heard about the Renew Newcastle project … Inspired to work with interesting and interested people, I put in an application for a shared creative space which would drag people out from their sunrooms into an inspiring environment.

On May 15, we had a party … to celebrate the launch of The Clinic.

The Clinic is a creative space in Newcastle which apart from us, currently harbours graphic designers Illumination Ink, Neon Zoo; editorial stylist and publisher Tim Neve; and film and music producer Stuart McBratney.

Renew Newcastle and The Clinic show the great power that passionate and creative people can have on shaping their work environment and the community around them. I’m loving being a small part of the process.

You can read the full post here, but has someone who has long admired LAEM i’m pleased that we’ve played a small part in their ongoing evolution.

Tags:   Illumination Ink · Lost at E Minor · Neon Zoo · Newcastle australia · Renew Newcastle · Stuart McBratney · The Clinic Newcastle · The Roar · Tim Neve · Zac Zavos · Zolton Zavos1 Comment

DIGITAL technology has created two opposing cultures. One where copyright rules are enforced by a phalanx of lawyers with no regard for artistic intent or respect for legitimate creativity, and another — in our homes, studios and offices — where ignoring copyright has become open slather. Neither serves artists or creators well.

In the professional world, many have experienced the madness of the official system. I discovered recently that the cost of clearing a three-second sample for a TV show — even with the artist’s explicit consent — can exceed the cost of flying to the other side of the world and back. Academics fear media companies that plant people in lectures to report copyright “violations” for showing film clips in educational contexts.

Yet outside the professional world, the kids are effectively ignoring copyright. The internet has become a global mix tape, an infinite jukebox and a video-on-demand service on a massive scale, and a lot of the time people aren’t paying for it. At times, it is copyright that actually prevents people from paying. “Illegal” downloads have become commonplace, not least because of the desire to get hold of TV shows, films or music that — usually for copyright reasons — aren’t even being sold in the formats or into the countries in which people wish to view them.

This is where Creative Commons comes in. Artists and academics internationally are working to reform copyright law and create a system that puts control back in the hands of the artists, not the lawyers, corporations, administrators and speculators who have created a minefield of copyright complexities.

Under a Creative Commons licence, musicians, for example, can allow others to distribute their music free of charge, or they can allow their work to be quoted in a new work or republished on any website. It allows original creators to share their work if they want to, and allows other people to spread the word. It has been welcomed by many artists but fiercely resisted by the companies making their profits from the control they hold over copyrights and distribution.

Creative Commons founder Professor Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford University, in Australia last week for a conference on copyright futures, points out that the larger crisis of copyright is not about what people consume but how they create. He told ABC radio this week that copyright law “criminalises behaviour that is creative behaviour … people remixing or making content, making new content which is just regulated under the existing law in a way that renders it illegal. And there’s no reason for the law to do that, it’s just a byproduct of it being an archaic law applied to digital technologies and we should be changing it so that we can be encouraging and teaching our kids how to use this technology legally.”

Computers aren’t cutting-edge creative tools these days; they’re the new folk art. Households are far more likely to have a computer than any other creative tool, with the possible exception of the pencil. In the 21st century, computers are a more familiar means of expression than guitars or easels.

On YouTube or MySpace or any one of a thousand other websites, young Australians — like their counterparts all around the world — are making their own videos, songs, animations and images. Often they do so using other works as their raw materials: making a new video clip to a favourite song; combining or recaptioning images; cutting together scenes from existing movies to make a new one; or recording themselves singing or dancing to music they love. None of this is the domain of pirates or profiteers. It is the natural extension of curiosity and creativity meeting digital tools. Yet it is almost always illegal.

Creative Commons is a step in the right direction but it is actually a systemic problem. Today’s sampling culture is nothing new. Artists have been quoting each other for as long as there has been storytelling. We are just the first generation to criminalise it. It’s time to make sensible legal distinctions between ripping off someone’s work and the legitimate right to quote, be inspired by and comment on the sounds and texts and images saturating our lives.

Originally published in The Age.

Tags:   Age Column · australian copyright law · copyright · Creative Commons · Creative Commons Australia · Creative coom · creative industries · Creativity and piracy · google · illegal downloads · IP · Ip law · lawrence lessig · myspace · piracy · youtubeNo Comments.

A FRIEND of mine visited Melbourne for the first time in more than a decade last week. The last time he was here was in the early ’90s, in the middle of the last great recession to hit this city. The Melbourne he remembered was the one that was broke and broken. He’d heard about the stylish, fashionable, diverse and creative city that Melbourne had become but I’m not sure he believed it until he saw it.

I know why. The Melbourne I first visited in the early ’90s was a bleak city. Large parts of it were emptying and verging on abandoned. Many of the now famous laneways were no-go zones, apart from a few hardy souls moving in and setting up homes, galleries, workspaces and hosting the occasional illegal, late-night warehouse party.

The city was reeling from the collapse in manufacturing. Flinders Lane was a failed textile district, not a funky retail strip. A thousand people each week were moving to exciting, trendy places to the north such as Sydney, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.

What a difference a decade or two can make. As we teeter on the brink of another recession, suddenly people are very interested in the transformation of Melbourne.

My friend is a journalist. We combined our catch-up with a “research tour” of Melbourne’s laneway bars. NSW has finally changed its liquor licensing laws. They’ve grasped that not everyone wants to drink in a beer barn full of plasma screens and poker machines. They’ve realised that there’s a whole other world of potential creative alternatives to grog and gambling. For better or worse, after decades of ballooning real estate prices, they too might soon have cheap spaces.

The further we progressed in our long research tour, the louder and more animated I became about Melbourne’s charm and the more convinced I became that so much of what I love about Melbourne is in many ways the upside of that last downturn. So much of Melbourne’s character from the laneway bars, the city galleries, the music scenes, the small fashion shops, the distinctive inner-city retail strips, the collection of small and strange and wonderful places, has grown out of the DIY infrastructure built in that last collapse.

We may soon be experiencing some of the same dire opportunities again. Unemployment, vacancy rates and foreclosures are on the rise. A major downturn will surely wreak a great toll in lives upended and personal tragedies. But while they slam some doors shut, recessions can also prove the resilience of artists and creative communities.

We can already see the downside. Large companies and major events are struggling to maintain their pre-recession sponsorship levels and meet their budget targets. Visual artists are dealing with fewer buyers than in the heady days of the art market bubble. Creative fields such as fashion, design and architecture are hit hard as people pay down rather than run up their debts. It’s likely to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Yet recessions create interesting opportunities for artists and people willing to take cultural initiatives. That’s because many creative enterprises begin life as a passion and not a business plan. While recessions might make expensive things more difficult, they make a lot of other things cheaper and easier. If you’re worried about how much money you’ll lose and not how much money you’ll make, falling costs, cheaper space and creative people with time on their hands make a whole range of new things possible.

Artists and creative types are also resourceful. They tend to see possibilities in places where others fear to tread. In the last recession, they colonised stinky laneways and empty warehouses. Perhaps this time they’ll see possibilities in the detritus of our shrinking finance sector.

Smart policymakers will recognise the role creative communities can play at times like this. As I incoherently attempted to explain far into our late-night study tour, the lesson to take away from Melbourne’s transformation is about the process and not the result. Sydney and other cities would be wise to get past the desire to clone Melbourne’s laneways, and to concentrate instead on unleashing the same processes.

Perhaps we’ll all be moving north again as Sydney emerges as home to a thriving scene of boardroom bars, office cubicle galleries and stockbroker studios.

Originally published in The Age.

Tags:   art and recessions · creative initiative · cultural commentary · cultural policy · culture and recessions · DIY infrastructure · flinders lane · laneway bars · Melbourne · Melbourne 3000 · Melbourne in the 1990s · Melbourne laneways · NSW liquor laws · poker machines · Small bars · the age · upside of downturns · urban renewal · Victoria manufacturing collapse2 Comments

ARTISTS and sportspeople have a lot in common… really.

I’ve never understood the idea that art and sport are somehow opposed to each other. I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, and a little time with sportspeople, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’ve got more in common with each other than just about any other walk of life or profession.

I have to confess that I’m an armchair sports nut. I’ve used any excuse to spin my cultural credentials into a chance to indulge my sporting obsessions. From auditioning a footy team to trying to compete against Olympians – I’ve taken every opportunity to segue from my arty occupations into my sporting preoccupations whenever a half-chance has presented itself.

In the lead-up to the Beijing Olympics, I spent some time up close with a range of hopeful Olympians. Away from the glamour of a couple of weeks of competition, it was a stark insight into the similarities between artists and sportspeople.

Apart from a handful of big names, Australia’s Olympic athletes and those aspiring to be aren’t exactly rolling in dough.

They’re often self-funded or on tiny scholarships plugging away at obscure sports that most of the time we couldn’t care less about. They struggle to balance work, training and international competition. They are forced to move cities and countries to follow coaches, facilities and opportunities. They live in obscurity for 99 per cent of their lives, interspersed with occasional bursts of fawning praise or unforgiving critical glare.

It was pretty much the same story I’ve heard from every artist I know.

Spending a little time with the reality of sporting life rather than the TV image was what it took for me to realise that. Because the artists I know are mostly poor and struggling and the athletes I see on TV are rich and famous, it was easy to assume that the athletes had it easier. Away from the football codes, cricket and the absolute top tier of other sports, your average struggling artist and your average struggling athlete are engaged in something strangely similar.

Because the artists I spend time with are mostly of the hard-working and practical kind, I forget that plenty of people presume that artists, like athletes, see themselves as some kind of glamorous elite. At the 2020 summit, I passed the likes of James Hird in the corridors but discovered that it was the “Creative Australia” group who were being mocked by the other delegates for having all the glamour and fame. I coined the verb “Jackmanned” to describe the process of being constantly elbowed in the head by photographers snapping celebrities on the other side of the room. Yet most of the people in that room would have spent a lot of their “careers” working multiple day jobs to support what they do.

The massive amounts of money, prestige and attention lavished on TV sports, like the popular cultural forms of cinema and music, can create a very misleading impression. The reality is that the vast majority of sportspeople or artists are working in some of the most poorly paid fields going around. The glamour and wealth at the very top obscures the reality of making a living – most artists and athletes do something else to support what they’re passionate about and driven to achieve.

The reality is that most sportspeople and artists are engaged in something fundamentally uneconomic and irrational. Something both completely noble and totally selfish. Some are undoubtedly motivated by the thought of being part of the glamour and fame at the very top of their fields, but more often than not the reasons are far more personal. They’re driven to explore or achieve something that is profoundly personal and to test their sense of what they can be or do or create.

I’ve decided that we should argue less about art versus sport and more about the value of that kind of passion over economics. It is too easy to forget how much we value that. It’s the reason why lists of national icons, “living national treasures” or most admired Australians are full of artists and sportspeople.

We do actually value things that are on one level frivolous, stupid, crazy and indulgent, and on another passionate, wonderful, inspiring and insightful. It’s about far more than economic returns or efficiency dividends.

Both the artists and sportspeople I’ve met seem to get that.

Orginally published in The Age

Tags:   2020 Summit · Art v. Sport · Australia · australian artists · australian sports people · Creative Australia · economics · hugh jackman · james hird · living national treasures · Melbourne · Olympics · the age · what art and sport have in common5 Comments

As of today, all of the writing on this web site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Practically that means that i encourage people who read the contents of this site to republish it in other non-commercial contexts, to link to it, to use excerpts of it in their own work or otherwise share the ideas around.

I’m doing it because i want the ideas noted here to be shared not secreted. I believe they are better loose in the world than stuck on this site waiting to be found. Please pass the posts here along, republish them on your blog, print them out and pass them around to your friends. I ask that you give full credit by naming me as the author and linking back to this site. Also make sure that it is clear that by publishing my work i do not necessarily endorse your site or your content — particularly if i’ve never seen it.

This only applies to non-commercial sites and publications. If you are on a site that takes advertising, makes money or would ordinarily pay a fee for content, the normal copyright rules still apply.

From this week onwards I will also be publishing most of my weekly columns for The Age on this site under the same Creative Commons license. Although i own the copyright, as a matter of fairness to The Age and Fairfax (who pay me to write them) i will leave a reasonable period of time between writing them and making them available under CC here. I have a backlog of a couple of months worth that i will catch up over the next little while. Then will publish them shortly after they come out in print — or more likely when i get around to it.

Finally, it’s slightly embarassing given that i have written about Creative Commons in several places, i have made TV programs about it, i’ve organised forums about it and i have spoken publicly in favour of it in several places. Frankly i’ve just been a little too lazy and preoccupied to do this until now. Now i am finally practicing what i preach.

Tags:   CC Australia · Creative Commons · Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike · Creative Commons Australia · Marcus Westbury · Writing3 Comments

It can be incredibly difficult to kill an arts company in this country and damn near impossible to simply let it die a natural death. Come the apocalypse, the only things likely to survive are cockroaches, email spammers and arts companies.

Yet finding a way to let things die is vitally important in the realm of creativity. We fund and support a vast portfolio of companies and programs that are probably well past their use-by date. While most artistic directors will quietly acknowledge the reality, very few will admit that their company is going stale.

The Australian National Academy of Music saga demonstrated how quickly the arts community can ward off a perceived threat. The Australia Council Theatre Board discovered the same thing late last year. It made a long-overdue reshuffle of its small and medium-sized theatre funding, and several companies fell down the list to a great outcry.

Culture is in flux all the time, yet arts funding is often paralysed and fixed. A healthy creative ecology is one that actually encourages variety and change. In an ideal world, a large number of projects would be starting, a smaller number of them going professional and receiving ongoing support and only a much smaller number would earn the right to security so strong they can’t be blasted out with dynamite.

We live with the reverse.

If any established company is bumped for funding, a small and vocal community reacts loudly. We debate the decision as though it was made in isolation. We treat the government of the day – of whatever political persuasion – as making some sort of conscious attack on the very idea of art itself. Rarely do we acknowledge the decision as one about allocating and prioritising scarce resources.

In Australia, culture is largely resourced and funded in retrospect. Systems to identify, nurture and take risks on new things are inconsistent and poorly designed. New funding is almost impossible to come by – but once funded, organisations can be practically and politically incredibly difficult to dislodge. A lot of arts organisations are far better at self-preservation than cultural production.

Most independent companies or arts organisations begin life in a burst of enthusiasm. They start out with a few talented individuals but with little in the way of administrative ability or overhead. Talent, enthusiasm, persistence and some degree of luck mean they can manage to create projects and programs that demand to be noticed. If they can survive long enough, their output is rewarded with access to infrastructure and administrative assistance.

This can be where the trouble starts. The arrival of the support can coincide with or be shortly followed by the departure of the key people driving it. Taxpayers can be left funding the administrative rump of a once-vital company. Occasionally, such companies are reinvented by new creative energy, or evolve into productive and valuable roles beyond their original creators’ intent. But often they do not. They are left over-resourced administratively and under-resourced creatively.

This wouldn’t be a problem but for arts resources being extremely scarce. Everything has an opportunity cost. Everything we put resources into means effectively making a decision not to resource something else. Rarely do we stop to ask ourselves not just whether something is worth supporting, but whether it is the best thing we could support.

Creativity and culture – perhaps more than any other area of our lives – is in a state of constant reinvention. When we act as though culture is the product of fixed organisations and structures to be preserved and defended, we miss the point. Culture isn’t just about preserving the legacies of the past. It’s also about us. It’s about realising the unique possibilities of now.

Sometimes creativity needs a little creative destruction.

First published in The Age 27/04/2009.

Tags:   ANAM · Arts · Arts Funding · Creative Destruction · Creativity · cultural commentary · cultural policy · Marcus Westbury · media · the age2 Comments

Given that The Age web site folks haven’t exactly been enthusiastic about posting my columns online, i am going to start posting them here as well after a a bit of a delay. I’ll post a new (old) column here each week starting from today. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but i’ve been on the road constantly and have been stuck dealing with more urgent things.

If you are interested in reading these as they come out, they are published each monday in The Age newspaper in Melbourne.

Tags:   canvas · fairfax columns · Marcus Westbury · Melbourne · newspaper. column · the ageNo Comments.

I recently had a chance to chat about Renew Newcastle with Richard Fidler on ABC local radio’s Conversation Hour in NSW and Queensland. I think it catches the spirit of the project really well.

Marcus Westbury is changing part of his original home town of Newcastle from a dead zone of empty shops to a vibrant precinct of artists, craftspeople, architects and jewellers.

Click here to download the audio. My interview starts about half way though.

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For what i think is the first time, my weekly column in The Age is up and on the web site.

DIGITAL technology has created two opposing cultures. One where copyright rules are enforced by a phalanx of lawyers with no regard for artistic intent or respect for legitimate creativity, and another — in our homes, studios and offices — where ignoring copyright has become open slather. Neither serves artists or creators well.

In the professional world, many have experienced the madness of the official system. I discovered recently that the cost of clearing a three-second sample for a TV show — even with the artist’s explicit consent — can exceed the cost of flying to the other side of the world and back. Academics fear media companies that plant people in lectures to report copyright “violations” for showing film clips in educational contexts.

Yet outside the professional world, the kids are effectively ignoring copyright. The internet has become a global mix tape, an infinite jukebox and a video-on-demand service on a massive scale, and a lot of the time people aren’t paying for it. At times, it is copyright that actually prevents people from paying. “Illegal” downloads have become commonplace, not least because of the desire to get hold of TV shows, films or music that — usually for copyright reasons — aren’t even being sold in the formats or into the countries in which people wish to view them.

This is where Creative Commons comes in. Artists and academics internationally are working to reform copyright law and create a system that puts control back in the hands of the artists, not the lawyers, corporations, administrators and speculators who have created a minefield of copyright complexities.

Read the rest of it at The Age web site.

Hopefully The Age will make a habit of putting these online but if they don’t you can read them in the dead tree  edition of the paper every monday.

Tags:   Arts · Creative Commons · Creative Commons Australia · Internet · lawrence lessig · Marcus Westbury · media · piracy · the ageNo Comments.