Traditionalists will hate me but I am less and less convinced that artforms are a particularly useful way to slice up the way that cultures are talked about or resourced in the world.

The qualities that interest me are far more about the resonance of cultures, how they circulate and are shared and transmitted, and the potential audiences that they might appeal to. In the festivals and programs I’ve been involved with I’ve observed something that is rarely commented upon. The content, themes and concerns of a work rather than its form is the strongest indicator of who it is that is most likely to appreciate it.

Without thinking we treat artforms as though they are the significant factor by which cultures and their potential audiences can be categorised. We fund, build infrastructure and appoint critics to artforms. We create career structures around them that depend up them for their validity. Our structures for Theatre or Dance or Music or Film or Television or Literature or Visual Arts rarely cross. Review pages of our newspapers and publications for the “the Arts” are almost always sliced by the form and not the content of the work.

Almost without exception, it is reviewers and commentators who are artform specialists (or obliged to act like them) that interpret, select, review and comment upon our culture for us. Given their beat is often based on a form it comes as no surprise that their expectations are set against the canonical works of that tradition and not the expectations of the full diversity of potential audiences.

It creates strange distortions. We tend to treat acts of cross pollination as exceptions and as innovative rather than inevitable and obvious. We create novelty where there is none. At times the most obvious connections: a hip-hop opera, a book derived from a blog, a hybrid media performances are discussed often as oddities. Whether they are good or terrible, nuanced or merely novelties, nothing about these cross pollinations is particularly exceptional in the world which we actually live in. It is quite natural that cultural communities will experiment with different forms.

It should be obvious from the examples around us. How many millions have been made by employing the simple marketing trick of cross pollinating old forms in ways that appeal to new audiences? Simon fucking Cowell and whoever the evil genius behind Human Nature knows it. They’ve gotten away with inflicting light classics (think “Il Divo” and the like) on audiences who would never be seen dead at the Opera and managed to revive countiless dead pop trends on people who would never touch the originals.

Much of this can easily be dismissed as shonky sex appeal and heavy marketing, It is. But it points to an underlying shift that takes place when you change the axis upon which discuss and attempt to propagate culture and connect it with cultural communities based on characteristics other than form. It deserves to be though about more seriously than as a marketing trick. In almost all artforms how often are the artists who reinvent and combine forms in ways that appeal to those outside the form tradition the successful one?

Such a way of thinking makes sense only when you think outside the form and connect with the potential of different cultural communities. Confidence in your cultural context is becoming a far better marker of cultural success, potential resonance and likely significance than simple technical expertise in a form. Yet it profoundly counter intuitive to artists schooled to appeal to those at the centre of the form. The temptation is always to point new work towards your artform peers, experts and whoever the relevant gatekeepers in the form you have trained in are.

All the evidence i see around me seems to points towards the cultural communities becoming increasingly fragmented. Artform is less and less a relevant distinction except for those whose career depends upon it. A far more important distinction is cultural experience – of which experiences of artform traditions is only a small subset. The audience for a Peter Allen musical would inevitably be very different to a The Nick Cave musical or The Cold Chisel musical or - and I would pay just to see the audience reaction - The Nasenbluten musical. None on those potential audiences need identify as a musical audience any more than the teenage boys who go see Spamalot do or as fans of “Australian music” any more than a someone in Turkey who might happened to own a Savage Garden album does.

The prevalence of celebrity collaborations in Arts Festivals is probably a sign that a few leading companies and festival programmers have twigged to this at least at a superficial level. But I’m still not convinved however that the ramifications of this – beyond the babling marketing bollocks about “branding,” “leverage” and “marketing” – has fully begun to sink in.

Something fundamental changes about everyone’s role. It changes the role of the critic. It changes how we might think in a larger sense about culture and whatever we choose to call “the arts”. The critic as expert in an artform or even in “the arts” is only one of the potential roles a critic might play. It is not an invalid one but it is an overemphasised one. A far more vital and relevant one is as an envoy for a cultural community or as translator to a variety of cultural communities.

Similarly as we resource and support the arts, is the most appropriate framework to resource it via artform or by audience? Without meaning to, the artform based approach tends to reinforce the sense that the audience for “the arts” is an elite subset of the wider community and not reflection of the wider community. That it is inward looking and self referential.

Away from the heavily marketed collaborations I struggle more fundamentaly with why we constrain new work, new theatre, new dance or new visual arts by almost exclusively measuring them against the traditions of their forms. We lose the potential audiences whose interests are in the content of the world(s) that they draw upon. The arbitrary classification by form does nothing to tell a wider audience what if anything they would appreciate of it. The danger is that we have made it confusing and contradictory for the people trying to navigate our culture according to their own reference points and by default, much of the potential audience for a work by its content are alienated by its form before they arrive.

I have a problem with the word “Art.”

I duck the question of what is and isn’t Art. I’ve resorted to all the flippant throw away clichés: that like pornography “I know it when I see it”; that “I don’t know what it is but I know what like”; or that it is “whatever you can get away with.” They’re mostly dishonest answers but at least they are brief.

The honest answer is that I find it a difficult and uncomfortable question.

It’s uncomfortable not because Art itself is so difficult to define (although it is and all of the above clichés are as good a stab at it as any) but because I can’t escape the sense that the debate is almost always a proxy and a trap. Art functions far better as a Rorschach test than as a definition. It is an almost useless word but a wonderful window into the values of people that seek to define it.

Defining art is never a simple matter of defining what the word means. It is almost always a contest of values. Defining art is an act of validation and invalidation. In wielding a definition of art you are explicitly or implicitly saying comparing qualities that you enjoy, respect and validate with those of others and with rare exceptions it becomes a process not of definition but of deifning relative values.

Debates about the nature and meaning of “Art” can be a question of profound philosophy. The underlying process is no doubt worthy of great philosophical discussion, but it rarely play out like that. It is more often just a game and a petty competition. Like many games it reveals much more about the players than any higher truths about the world.

To the extent that I have one, my definition of what Art is is a fluid, inclusive but ultimately unimportant one. It encompasses the beautiful and the ugly, the ancient and the immediate, the naively utopian and the wantonly destructive, the mercenary and the altruistic, the introspective and the revolutionary. It allows for all those things simultaneously and remains open to the possibility that it is occasionally none of them.

But my definition of art is ultimately unimportant. Not because the things it seeks to define are unimportant but because I value the precise meaning of what i say. In the case of “Art” there is almost always a better word, a more precise word, or a word less loaded with layers of contradictory meaning and expectations for almost any circumstance in which I might be tempted to use it.

I plan to dig up, and minimally clean up some fragments, pieces and notes that I wrote earlier this year for a book that may or not eventually appear. All going to plan (i.e. if i can make the software work) I will set them on a timer so that they are published here about twice a week over the next few months. Even if the ideas are crap at least I won’t feel so guilty about not updating this thing more regularly.

These posts have a history. Earlier this year the good folks at Melbourne University Press asked me whether I was interested in writing a book for them. I was keen but hesitant given that a book can be quite an undertaking. While I am pretty good with team based projects, I am notoriously unable to finish massive tasks that rely on being self motivated and not distracted (see the above about a life peppered with distractions) so I decided – before finalising any kind of contract – to take some time to compose some notes about to myself about the areas that i was interested in writing about.

In March I took a couple of weeks away from my daily life and went up to Halls Gap in country Victoria. I indulged myself in a rather massive and poorly thought through brain dump. The result was about twenty thousand odd words of what you could loosely describe as not quite book.

By that i mean that it is not quite a book yet in the practical sense and not simply in the “how many times can he overextend the same bloody Not Quite / This Is Not / Ok maybe it is series of titles” sense. It lacks vital ingredients for a book like structure, word count, editing, consistency of motivation, intelligence and a sense of it being a project that might eventually edge towards completion.

The pieces that are being posted here are plucked straight from those notes in that draft I made for myself.

They need a cleaning up. They aren’t finished, or finalised or nuanced enough to capture the intent of what i was trying to get at. Some of them are in desperate need of qualification or explanation and some will ultimately be abandoned or at least vehemently denied. They have barely been spell checked, let alone edited but are posted here in the hope that they will lead to opportunities to discuss them, clean them up, or argue them over late night beers somewhere.

If anyone is interested in publishing them or works based on them in places other than a book then drop me a line. I’d be more than happy to elaborate, clean them up, rewrite them to your needs or whatever else may lead to finding another audience or context for these ramblings.  MUP have first dibs on that eventual book but all other platforms where they might find a life are actively sought.