marcus westbury

I was asked by the good folks at Griffith REVIEW to write a major essay for their current edition Cities On The Edge. It’s my first crack at the “writing a major essay” caper so i’d be very interested to get people’s thoughts. The essay Fluid Cities Create picks up on several of the themes in Not Quite Art and several of my own pet themes that i haven’t been given much of a chance to explore elsewhere.

In it:

What makes a city culturally dynamic? What makes a city the sort of place that people want to visit, move to and explore? What makes a city the sort of place that spits out or draws in artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers? What makes a city culturally desirable and talked about, or a hub of music, literature, media and the arts?

You can download the essay in full as PDF on the Griffith REVIEW web site or you can actually buy the current issue from good book stores everywhere if you aren’t a total tightarse.

I was invited to talk about about some of the themes raised in it on Radio National’s By Design this morning. You can read about the interview and download the audio from their web site.

Comments on the essay, the interview, the ideas or the issues most welcome.

Tags:   city planning · cultural policy · Griffith REVIEW · Newcastle · Not Quite Art · wrting2 Comments

How rude is this woman? Megan Harding and I were casually posing for the Paparazzi and this limelight hogging bitch leapt out in front of us. Image from The Sydney Morning Herald.

Full Logie report is here.

Tags:   Jennifer Hawkins · Logies · red carpet3 Comments

With the intention of writing a piece for Crikey this morning, i kept detailed notes of the minute by minute events at the Logies last night. Unfortunately, I slept through and missed most of this morning, so it didn’t quite make Crikey. But at least you can read them here!

12:45 Very senior ABC figure texts me with wise advice: “imagine you’ve taken half a tab of LSD and are at a very bad performance art installation.”

4:15 I am interrupted attempting to explain my planned schmoozing with Australian TV celebrities technique to my better half. She says that i sound like i am in an episode of Extras.

4:20 Arrive at ABC pre-logies party.

4:45 Sideways into conversation between The Chaser’s Chris Taylor and Johnathan Holmes of Media Watch. Chris: “Yeah, we probably deserved it” (or something to that effect), Holmes: “I wish everyone was this easy going.” Where is the bloody conflict???

4:47 Resist urge to ask Johnathan Holmes if he doesn’t call himself John Holmes for the obvious reasons.

6:25 Limos arrive.

6:30 In limo en route. Elaborate discussion about pranking David Leckie as he awakes from his finger induced coma by pretending it is 3 years into the future.

6:40 Red carpet arrival. A spotter peers in limo window to see who of any interest is in the limo. “No one!” they call back to red carpet show director crew.

6:44 300 metres of red carpet and I’m stuck awkwardly between screamers and the screamees. I try waving enthusiastically and pretending to be famous in the hope that someone will think they recognise me. I’m spotted by ABC MD Mark Scott while doing this - he observes that my approach isn’t very “ABC arts.” I wonder whether that’s a bad thing. (See photo here)

6:51 Make my way up the magic escalator and discover I’m sitting at table 66. Yes they are ranked more or less in order of importance. [Read more →]

Tags:   Logies · Name dropping · TV Week9 Comments

I’ve held off on writing this because to be perfectly honest I’m really not sure what the hell happened at the 2020 summit in Canberra last weekend. Several days of attempting to process it and decompress later the only thing that is clear is that the whole 2020 summit process was never clearly defined and i never really knew what to expect. I’m not exactly sure what we were trying to get to and what we might have achieved so i am very unsure of whether we did it or not!

So what follows is less of a report and more of a brain dump. More details and something better written will follow at some point. [Read more →]

Tags:   2020 Summit11 Comments

I’m off to Canberra this morning.

I had the best of intentions of replying in detail to a lot of the ideas and comments that have been raised over the last few days. But the sheer rate and volume of contributions have made that impossible. I’ve read everything i can get my hands on and am trying to process it all.

Unless i shout everyone else down (the thought has crossed my mind but some of those actors are actually trained to project their voices so i don’t want to get in a shouting competition with them) there’s no way i’ll get a chance to raise many of the issues that has been raised over the last week at the summit.

What i will do is try and represent the perspectives and issues raised as much as i can in the various bits and pieces that i get to make some sort of contribution to. We’ll see whether that works at all i guess.

In the meantime, in the interests of a reality check, i thought i’d share this contribution from the Director of The Brunswick Institute:

Dear Marcus,

I’ve just read your 200 words worth in Crikey and your website rationale for participating.

No mention of writing, books, publishing.

Happy wanking.

My big fear is that he might just be onto something.

Tags:   2020 Summit6 Comments

If anyone is interested, we will be talking 2020 summit and the future directions of Australian art and cultural policy type stuff on Radio National’s Australia Talks tonight at 6pm (EST). I’ll apparently be joined by fellow summiteers Robyn Archer, and Trevor Green from the MSO. If people want to be part of the discussion, the talkback number for listener input into the conversation is 1300 22 55 76.

Tags: 1 Comment

Jason Hill from Fairfax’s Screenplay Blog has started a bit of discussion prompted by my comments in relation to the Games industry and the 2020 summit.

Quite a few interesting comments piling up there.

Tags:   2020 Summit · Computer GamesNo Comments.

What is the difference between a 1920s and a 2020 summit?

It’s not a joke. It’s the question that I have been mulling over since my last minute call up to the “Towards a creative Australia” stream of the 2020 summit next weekend. The seeming disparity between the stated goals and the mix of people that are being asked to discuss them inspired it.

Culturally, the difference between the 1920s and now are stark. The sheer diversity of cultural platforms and networks and the scale, speed and scope with which cultural activities take place has changed dramatically. Australian culture comes less from a small number of large institutions and more from a massive number of large and small scale companies, individuals, production houses, collectives, web sites, networks and initiators both here and around the world.

It is a cultural landscape made up less of fixed structures and more of fluid and dynamic forces. The key question is how to channel those forces so they flourish?

The answer to that question is easily sidetracked by the unrelated (but often legitimate) issues and ambitions of our professional companies and major cultural institutions. Half a century on from the Whitlam era few Australians would be convinced that a 2020 cultural vision focusing on innovation and initiative will be found in shovelling bigger buckets of money at conservative major institutions. Expecting it to trickle down through the layers of management to actual risk taking artists is naive at best.

Many of the comments posted here over the last few days either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge this. While many argue directly for a more diverse, competitive and dynamic funding environment the aim is less for grand, centralised and expensive top down public programs than for attention to the impediments and practical barriers that make it hard for creators to create, to find audiences, to take risks and to innovate.

Attention to those details is a key missing ingredient from our cultural policy mix. While tackling them is ambitious in scope and imagination it need not be costly in anything other than political will. The will necessary to identify the elements that hinder people from creating things and put in place the local, state and federal government strategies that facilitate them.

[Read more →]

Tags:   · 2020 Summit · Arts Funding · Microeconomic reform11 Comments

[Yes, somewhere inside me is a frustrated headline writer just busting to get out.]

I have to thank Ben Eltham and the comments over at Larvatus Prodeo and Christian McCrea for drawing this to my attention. Despite the fact that one of the agenda items for next weekend’s 2020 Summit is explicitly “How to encourage participation in emerging global industries such as game design, the internet 2.0, graphics-rich applications and animation” there is NO ONE on the list who really has much actual involvement with the computer games industry in Australia.

My own involvement in the world of computer games is pretty f**king minimal to say the least but i have at least had a long term interest and engagement in the area. Unless someone else who really knows this stuff received a late call up from reserve grade like me it may be left to me and a couple of games-friendly academics to carry this particular torch at the summit (there is obviously some sort of TORCH/ GAMES extended tortured China/Tibet metaphor there but i’ll be damned if i can be bothered working it in just now).

So i thought I’d throw it open here for any good ideas to take to the summit from the Games world. Can’t promise that it will be massively useful but I am trying.

Tags:   2020 Summit · Computer Games9 Comments

One of those strange days.

Until early this afternoon I was not one of the people attending next weekend’s 2020 summit in Canberra. I took a 3 week writing sabbatical back in early March and dropped mostly out of communication with the world. When i came back to civilisation i discovered that the nomination process for the summit had mostly been and gone. I returned with a couple of days to spare, took a quick look at the nomination form - which i remember (perhaps unfairly) as being heavy in its emphasis on qualifications and light on experience or ideas - and decided to pass on the grounds that I probably wasn’t the sort of person that they would be looking for.

I guess I also wasn’t sure that I was particularly comfortable with putting myself forward for a gig like that. I already have a few platforms to get my views out there and that it would probably be (or have been) a better process if people with less of a chance got a look in.

Anyhow… Fast forward a few weeks and a strange chain of events has led to me being given a last minute call up.

To cut a long story short, it turns out there are a few last minute wild cards being given out and I’ve been offered me one.

It was all a bit frantic on the phone today but I assume I’ve been invited me because I’ve got a fairly different perspective from some of those on the original list. There are a lot of great people on the original list but my initial reaction was one of being disappointed with the diversity of it.

It probably doesn’t help when people like me and most everyone i know aren’t really the types to nominate ourselves. Most of the participants are overwhelmingly attached to institutions large and small. While i am sure that most of them will be able to see beyond that the reality is that most of the arts and cultural sector isn’t like that any more and hasn’t been for a long time.

Anyhow, i thought i would throw it open to people to put forward ideas on this site over the next week. I’d be very interested to hear from cultural practioners, punters, artists, media makers, and trouble makers that are working at the coal face if you have any ideas for making a more Creative Australia. I don’t care what form you work in (if any) but I am particularly curious about the practical problems people encounter when working with budgets of 50, 500, or 5000 dollars rather than dealing with turnovers of 5 million.

I would hope that would be something that i could take with me to the summit.

Suggestions please! I will try and take any particularly good ones to the summit with me and some of the less good ones will feed into other things i do. Oh, and try not to dwell on needing more money - it goes without saying.

Tags:   2020 Summit65 Comments