[This essay was originally written for Griffith REVIEW back in 2008. In many respects it is the forerunner of the Renew Newcastle project which did not exist (and i had no intention of creating) at the time that I wrote it. I realised recently that i had never actually published it on this blog so to celebrate the recent launch of Renew Australia I thought it might be time to post it here and release it under creative commons]

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?

The cultures of cities are far less predictable than their hard infrastructure. You can quantify good transport links, and you can commission public buildings or even the quasi‐scientific art of designing successful communities, yet there are few roadmaps to apply to the hard task of fostering a dynamic successful culture. It is much more than placement of monuments, buildings or transport links.

Cultures aren’t fixed or fixable. They are barely measurable. While you can identify the preconditions that led to Renaissance Italy, early twentieth century Paris, the San Francisco techno‐hippie culture, Hong Kong cinema, the Seattle grunge explosion, Melbourne laneways, the music scenes of Manchester and now Glasgow, or the anarchic wonder of early ‘noughties’ Berlin, it will never be possible to replicate them.

They are a product of living things and become living things themselves. They’re fluids, not solids. Cultures flow. Cultures surge. Cultures stagnate, inundate and flood. Cultures pool and freeze, and in doing so they create another landscape in cities, countries and continents as tangible as the legacy water leaves on smooth plains and jagged mountains on the ever‐changing earth. The very act of quantifying these preconditions risks undermining the vitality that produced them.

They aren’t transferable. Culture is the process by which we communicate with each other, exchange ideas, explore possibilities, and collect and curate our personal and collective histories. They are the means by which we learn something of each other’s lives and experiences, and reflect, respond to and reject inner and outer worlds.

For cities, though, culture takes on another role. Culture is an aspiration. It is a driver of status, and status is bound to wealth and prestige. Global cities increasingly aspire to cultural prestige for its intangible aura and because they believe it will drive economic growth. Wealthy cities race each other to build grander museums and hoard ever more of the world’s treasures; poorer cities look to cultural renewal for salvation and rejuvenation.

There is no easy way to buy or build a culture. Culture has properties that defy planning. The more you grab at it, freeze it and attempt to set it in its place, the weaker it becomes. Grand buildings, landmarks or monuments are often the legacies and artefacts of profoundly resonant cultures that echo to this day. But they are not catalysts. Today they are far more likely to be signs of aspiration than achievement, and are no more likely to produce culture than tyre tracks would be to produce a car.

Cultural evolution has more in common with divination than design. A city can’t build a culture any more than it can build an idea, a thought process or a polar bear. Cultures emerge from the spontaneous, temporary nature of human motivations, passions, interactions and enthusiasms. They often form in rebellion and opposition rather than by deliberation and design. They are unique and idiosyncratic. They result from adaptation and evolution, and they have a tendency to be strongest in the places where no one is looking or particularly wants them to be.

All is not lost. Once you let go of the idea that cultures are constructed, new possibilities emerge. Cultures can be nurtured. Cities can seed and feed culture. They can give it somewhere to live, to move, to breed, to grow. And when it fails (as it often does), they can provide fertile ground to go to seed in. Cultures are living things – they die as often from ill‐thought‐out initiatives to preserve, protect or resuscitate them as they do from starvation. They live in a complex ecosystem of regulation, regeneration, tax laws, economic decline and resurgence, subsidy, anarchy, inspiration, history, technology and – most importantly of all – the unpredictable, unquantifiable and subjective fertiliser of human creativity.

Great cultural cities are those which allow their cultures to flow rather than freeze.

*

I grew up in a city engaged in a long, slow debate about what its culture was or should be. Newcastle, Australia is hardly a world‐renowned cultural centre. But it is a place fortunate enough to be blessed with a strong sense of its unique identity. Economics, some distinctive geographical impediments and some unique challenges conspire to make the city anything but complacent about its place in the world.

Blessed only with the advantage of not being Sydney, Newcastle is Australia’s second‐oldest and seventh‐largest city. For decades, Newcastle has been engaged in a long and ultimately losing fight for the title of Australia’s largest non‐capital city – now the Gold Coast. While both cities are blessed with great beaches, they are cities with very different histories and mythologies. One is an iconic, international, fast‐growing by‐word for a leisure lifestyle; the other contents itself with a gritty local pride that occasionally manifests itself in shouting down or knocking the teeth out of anyone who’d dare suggest the place is anything less than paradise on earth.

Newcastle is gradually emerging from a prolonged period of economic decline and recession. Once home to Australia’s largest steelworks, a now non‐existent shipbuilding industry and a hub for manufacturing and medium industry of the kind that Australia doesn’t do anymore, Newcastle has been forced to confront its own economic mortality. By my late teenage years, in the early ‘90s, the unemployment rate was well into double figures and youth unemployment peaked above 40 per cent. Even a booming port and coal industry have been unable to bring life back to Newcastle’s long and broken CBD. At last count there were still over a hundred empty shops on the two main streets. Hundreds more empty offices and vacant floors sit above them. Newcastle’s entire mid‐twentieth century CBD lies fractured by an earthquake and a rapidly changing world.

Growing up, no one would have suggested that Newcastle really had much of a culture. Culture was something that happened somewhere else. Culture was something that other people did. It was mostly something that had already happened. Great dead men and young Americans invented culture. Culture was imported. It was filtered by experts and occasionally brought to the Civic Theatre by the likes of the Sydney Theatre Company, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and big‐name artists from far‐flung places in Australia and overseas. The closest Newcastle really came to producing culture of any kind was when the Bell Shakespeare Company (led by local boy made good John Bell) would preview work in Newcastle before it got a run in Sydney. Whether this was practicality, nostalgia or because Novocastrians were discerning critics of Shakespeare (or not) was never entirely clear. But school kids got cheap enough tickets that I could afford to go.

As Newcastle sought its post‐industrial roadmap, the idea of culture began to figure prominently in it. Cultural tourism, smarter jobs, innovation and the idea of a creative renaissance started to take hold. The Civic Theatre was immaculately and beautifully restored, cutting‐edge architects were invited to redevelop the art gallery, massive old rail sheds were repaired and restored with the intent of turning them to cultural purposes, plans boldly proclaimed a large swathe of the CBD a ‘cultural precinct’, the city’s marketing material started to talk about Newcastle as a cultural centre and international consultants were brought in to talk about the rejuvenation of places like Dublin, Liverpool and Manchester.

Millions of dollars were spent. Many millions more were fantasised about or sought for projects that will never see the light of day. Yet the idea that Newcastle actually produced original culture was an afterthought. I did alright personally: some festivals I started brought artists and considerable audiences (fulfilling the tourism side of the equation), but the local creative community as a whole gained little.

In hindsight, cavernous heritage‐listed buildings where trains were once built were ill‐suited to the needs of artists. Their heritage status required infinite layers of planning permits and exemptions for every nail or partition, for every heavy object you might wish to drag across the floor. Government control meant activities were regulated to death and the entire place was schizophrenically required to convert to a function centre whenever a higher bidder demanded it.

A redeveloped art gallery, while desirable, was a long way down the list of potential creative catalysts. Though more impressive and less ugly than its predecessor, it wasn’t much better for local artists than the current one. In any event, to date it has never happened.

Even the Civic Theatre’s grand makeover was something of a mixed blessing. While the space was immaculately restored to accommodate major touring companies, its sheer scale meant that it was out of the reach of the innovative and adventurous, the local and low budget. The unglamorous and barely functional smaller theatre alongside it was not part of the renovation. It was quietly closed. It had not been kept up to date with ever‐tightening Occupational Health and Safety requirements – a situation that remained until comparatively recently.

Drawings dotted with precincts marked ‘cultural use’ remained plans. Practical attempts to kick‐start or bootstrap cultural innovation were thwarted by increasingly complex regulations and requirements, tax breaks that created incentives for buildings to remain empty and an attitude that thwarted initiative and deterred all but the most belligerently persistent.

A decade later, Newcastle remains a net exporter of artists and a net importer of culture.

*

Newcastle is actually pursuing a pragmatic approach to cultural development. Cities awash with petro‐dollars, status anxiety or a novelty‐driven approach to economic development have turned to museums in the same way an earlier generation turned to theme parks. Abu Dhabi alone is spending billions to build both a Guggenheim and a Louvre. Cities the world over are allocating public funds to grand art museums to boost their economies by raising cultural status. Designed by brand‐name celebrity architects, the world’s major museums are slowly creating Disney‐meets‐Prada lifestyle brands.

By doing this, cities keen to project dynamism and confidence instead flout their insecurity. Cultural cringe is alive and well in the cities of the Middle East and East Asia. They look longingly to European palaces, monuments and art collections for cultural signs to clone. It is one of the ironies of the age that authoritarian states collect and celebrate the artefacts of Western rebellion, decadence, liberalism, tolerance, religiosity, conquest and conflict with almost no comment on the irony of it.

The brand‐name museum competition is driven less by authentic local culture or the needs and aspirations of a city’s artists or citizens, and more by the commercial instinct that drives a bid for a grand prix, Olympic Games or the world’s tallest building. No one suggests that a grand prix boosts the local automotive industry or a mega skyscraper is about office space. Sporting events are sold as tourism; only a fraction of the recurrent expenditure is passed off as investment in grass‐roots sport.

For cities not awash in ludicrous sums of money, another template has emerged. Growth centres like Brisbane, Singapore and my adopted home of Melbourne chose from a common cultural menu: an ‘iconic’ (if not brand name) gallery, museum or performance centre, a ‘flagship’ art or film festival (ideally both), bringing great work from around the world, a ‘world‐class’ theatre and/or dance company and/or orchestra that can present the greatest hits of Western culture. The relative size of these offerings is mistaken for the vibrancy or otherwise of a city’s cultural life.

I have no objection to any of these. I’ve directed arts festivals, attended film festivals, and am partial to live performance. I love ambitious architecture, and regularly visit galleries at home and away. But I reject what they implicitly suggest about the cities that build and promote these limited set‐piece choices. More often than not, they represent the same assumptions I grew up with in Newcastle: culture happens somewhere else; it is something a professional elite does for you; it is something that has already been created and a world city must archive it, present it and freeze it. Culture, as defined by a narrow model, is in need of constant investment, authorisation, attention and the intervention of a small army of bureaucrats, curators, professionals and middle managers who protect and sustain it.

Our arts agencies and governments spend much more money on this archival culture than on living culture. A single gallery can receive hundreds of millions of dollars of capital investment, over $40 million a year in government subsidies (with half spent on wages and a third on promotion), while artists in most Australian states compete for a collective pie of less than a million dollars to develop and present original work.

*

I’m a daydreamer. I love the idea of designing cities.

As a child, I drew maps of places that never existed. My shelves are full of books of architecture and urbanism. I’ve sketched ill‐thought‐out ideas and made sandbox cities to resemble the ones that I live in. I love the intricacies of how cities grow, evolve and change. I am part frustrated architect, part an under‐capitalised property developer, part a great town planner of fictional utopias, and part the most petty of petty dictators.

I’ve played hours of Sim City – a computer game where the player assumes the role of all‐powerful mayor and urban planner. I’ve patiently and gently tweaked land zonings and densities to make imaginary metropolises or boutique utopias and when that hasn’t quite created the cities of my dreams, I’ve gone to the internet for cheat codes, downloaded the architecture and plonked a whopping big Guggenheim Bilbao right in that awkward spot that wasn’t doing it for me.

In the real world, cultural institutions are the last place left where politicians and bureaucrats can play the central planning game. The last remnants of the grand ‘nation‐building’ exercises of the black and white era. A throwback to a time when

you might determine a public good, marshal massive state investments, and damn the years of recurrent funding and freeze a vision, an aspiration, and hold it out to the world.

Even conservatives of the kind who elevate competition and small government into a self‐evident truth are often to be found among the most passionate advocates for this particular kind of cultural nation‐building, subsidy and protectionism. Their passion for large, centralised, hierarchical cultural forms and approaches somehow overrides their ideological objection to large, centralised, bureaucratic hierarchies. They get outraged not by the day‐to‐day protectionism, but by when the walls are breached and someone actually creeps into the palace or on to the program with something that initially found its relevance in the competitive world outside.

My imaginary cities have people in them, but mostly they are there to stare at the awesome buildings and admire the ingenious planning. In reality, the ambitious scale dwarfs the idea that people might make culture in them. It draws to mind images of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer standing over the massive model for their new world capital. Welthauptstadt Germania – with its grandiose edifices, sweeping boulevards and utter disregard of the human‐scale consequences – was to be the fixed and immutable capital of the thousand‐year reich. It is a vision of culture almost without people in it at all. It’s a great irony that one of Hitler’s last legacies is found in the city it was designed to replace. The anarchic, vibrant, culturally rich, robust and chaotic allure of post‐reunification Berlin is alive to fluid possibility. It is the antithesis of his imagined city. Welthauptstadt Germania would have been fixed, grand, ambitious and barren.

I suspect the appeal of the grand institutions is as much to the desire in all of us to leave a legacy as it is to a rational and grounded response to the needs of culture. As the Sydney Opera House shows us, soaring ambitions create great narratives and compelling legacies for those who envisage, design and plan such an institution.. They leave fabulous legacies for those who open it and have their name on the plaque. They create jobs for those employed to run it and validate it and publicise it, do its paperwork and write reassuring reports that it has met its performance targets. They freeze culture long enough to quantify it.

Yet they ultimately mislead us into believing that culture is permanent and fixed, that culture stands steadfast against time and history. They lead us to believe that culture actually lives in buildings designed to stand for the ages. Yet, to all intents and purposes it dies there. The great arts are laid to rest and are archived there. So much energy and money are spent attempting to fossilise cultures that we have entirely forgotten to farm them.

Great cities are places where cultures are born, not their graveyards. A city is a unique set of possibilities. A city is a unique collision of ideas, catalysts for cultures to breed for people meet and interact, where possibilities are nurtured and integrated.

The truly great culture‐producing cities may not have grand institutions. The art and cultural innovation they foster are more likely to emerge from the edges, not the centre.

*

Cultural planners may be best not to play too much Sim City. To really model the culture of cities, you would probably need a very different game where the city is not viewed as zones and grids, but as a series of tasks to be completed at street level – tasks such as finding somewhere to play, somewhere to rehearse, somewhere to exhibit, hang out and discuss with relatively limited capital. Finding somewhere to make mess and make noise. Somewhere to sell your work or somewhere that has enough flexibility that you can afford not to. Finding somewhere affordable and available at short notice, not bureaucratised and regulated to the point where your limited resources disappear before you have a chance to make the work or stage the production. Finding somewhere cheap enough to socialise and embrace or argue about ideas, even if you can’t afford to pay for lunch and don’t want to play the poker machines. Finding somewhere just far enough off the map to allow for experimentation, but close enough to others so you can get enough feedback to ensure that mistakes aren’t perpetually repeated.

Cities look very different from street level than they do from the models of politicians, planners, dictators and computer game players. Culture looks very different from the point of view of the people making it than from the places where it is collected. Very few of the makers would prioritise grand palaces to their work, and even fewer will actually get into them. Artists in my experience generally want the reverse – they want to be able to take risks in places that are appropriate to take them in.

Artists need infrastructure that is fluid. They need places that are adaptable, accessible, breakable, spontaneous, flexible and capable of evolving quickly with their needs. They need spaces that are cheap, and more often they are willing to take all that goes with that and pay their own price in lack of facilities, endless working bees and leaky windows to compensate for it. Creative cities can build all the monuments they like, but accessibility rather than grandiosity is the key to living cultures.

Most cultural innovators and entrepreneurs don’t need thousand‐seat theatres. They don’t need massive financial subsidies. They may fantasise about them, but their immediate concerns are generally much more basic. They need economic models that capitalise on their strengths and limit their weaknesses. While government grants and subsidies are vital and rarely refused, they’re actually a second‐ or third‐order issue in many cases – for anyone outside the world of recurrent funding grants, they are a way of solving practical problems rather than a source of income. Much more mundane questions like whether you can afford insurance, the availability of appropriate venues, whether you can have a bar and who gets to make money out of it are as profoundly important cultural questions as any philosophical aspirations.

In my experience, most artistic endeavours, from bands to exhibitions to theatre companies, short films, websites, festivals, conferences and installations, begin life as the results of pooled funds, sweat equity and very little cash. The ratio of things that creators can provide in kind (primarily labour, skill, sweat and enthusiasm) to the fixed costs that they cannot avoid is probably the major question that propels or thwarts cultural initiative.

The tangled minefield that stretches from public liability insurance to risk assessments, to liquor licensing, legal costs, copyright compliance, noise regulations, place of public entertainment licensing, is a formidable barrier to creative initiative. Collectively, these issues have been known to consume the resources of even a professional arts company and kill a not yet professional one much more quickly than a bad show. Obligatory consultants, large fees and the threat of heavy fines have clipped a lot of cultural activity before it ever started. Without a personal willingness to act responsibly but not necessarily thoroughly (or legally) in the face of these questions, I would never have got started. Culture is not so much what you plan but what you get away with.

The single largest area of expenditure for most small‐scale cultural activities constitutes fees, insurance, infrastructure and reporting requirements that are either paid directly to government or as a result of a government requirement. For companies that are funded enough to cover those, the highest costs are most likely the administrative wages – with much of the bill spent on the additional cost of servicing government funding and meeting reporting requirements. Resourcing culture becomes little more than resourcing regulation. It is the norm in Australia for arts organisations to turn over hundreds of thousands of dollars and yet leave the artists themselves unpaid or barely paid. Very few companies in Australia would be in a position where the costs of artists, their tools and materials and the direct costs of putting on their work exceed their compliance and administration costs.

If cultures are fluid, each of these impediments is a dam wall that stops a fluid, living culture in its tracks.

*

Cities wishing to step ahead of the pack need to think beyond simply copying the ‘world’s best practice’ cultural template. Cultural planning needs to think less in terms of hard infrastructure and subsidised companies and much more in terms of fluid communities and constantly changing opportunities. Beyond iconic buildings, flagship events and world‐class companies lies an entire creative ecosystem largely ignored and an opportunity to foster a culture of creativity and not simply layers of bureaucracy.

The two models aren’t mutually exclusive, but the reality is that the most efficient allocation of resources is to be found by brokering artists and creative communities with opportunities. Cities should find ways for artists and creative communities to invest their sweat equity in making and remaking their cultural infrastructure – be it temporary, commercial or publicly owned. It’s cheaper, easier and allows for the kind of evolving and redefining that keeps cultures fluid as needs change.

In international cities, this is achieved through tax incentives for artists to use vacant or transitional buildings. In Australia, it is stifled by the tax deductibility of loss‐making buildings and the fear of liability. More than anything, it is stifled by lack of prioritisation, direction and imagination.

Cities should embrace transition and transience, and let go of the idea that cultures are fixed. I come from an entire city in transition, but even the most prosperous Australian cities are full of empty blocks, vacant buildings and under‐utilised government sites that have reached the end of their economic life. Their very transience provides unique opportunities that would never be possible in a glossy arts centre.

In virtually every suburb in Australia, there is a building that has been boarded up for years, while its permanent use is debated or deferred or a consultant is brought in to determine just how much it would cost to fix. Each passing day is a lost opportunity for a temporary art gallery, for a business to incubate, for a community to form, for a performance space, for a meeting point for social or cultural experimentation.

But cities also need permanent infrastructure of the practical kind. Cities need continuing places to play, to exhibit, to sell, to perform in, and around which to develop lasting and ongoing communities and audiences. Traditionally, government has only taken responsibility for these by owning them – either top‐end institutions or community centres. In between, they have left all the other layers of informal infrastructure to the market – and the market in many places has failed. The reality is that we build our cities driven largely by commercial formulas and we subsidise our culture. In between, we have no mechanism or strategy to stimulate niche uses that may be profitable but not obscenely profitable. In New South Wales, with its obscene convergence of poker machines, political donations, property developers and a culture of conservative risk management, this has meant there are few remaining pubs used as live performance spaces. A flagrant disregard for community and cultural consequences has led to buildings, cities, suburbs and communities that are ludicrously profitable and culturally barren. A city requires the niche and the experimental, the commercial and profitable, the grand and the worthy, and as wide as possible a variety of the things in between.

To reach them, planning for culture needs to break out of the old paradigms of infrastructure, capital and subsidy, and to begin to look at the subtleties of cultural opportunities that the community itself might provide if the opportunities were encouraged.

*

Newcastle isn’t where it used to be. Even since my own childhood the geographical isolation has changed. That Newcastle felt as far from the cultured world as was possible to be in an English‐speaking country. But no city – even Newcastle – is truly and entirely on the edge anymore. Whereas once most media and most transportation came via Sydney, today Newcastle plugs into a hundred channels and cheap daily flights to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The people of Newcastle are plugged into hundreds of thousands of global conversations – on blogs, websites, forums, mailing lists and bulletin boards. Newcastle exports a little culture now, and speaks directly with culture makers. Novocastrians post their photos, share bands they have seen, the events they have attended across networks of parallel global communities.

Newcastle’s cultural connections are no longer scholarships, study tours, sabbaticals, reciprocal exhibitions or the passive receipt of culture broadcast from the great cultural centres of the world. Newcastle connects via the spontaneous, organic interactions that take place weekly, daily and hourly. Local artists and musicians have global communities with like minded people around the world.

Newcastle is part of the fluid forces of global cultural exchange – not as the top of a global pyramid but as part of a network of point‐to‐point cultural connections. Its cultural significance is measured less against whether it impresses Sydney, Melbourne, London or New York than who it connects directly to. Whether it prospers culturally will not be measured by purely by international art and style magazines, but by whether it is a hub or just a spoke, a consumer or a producer, an innovator or an afterthought in the global cultural milieu. That is a far more vital cultural measure than whether you have a landmark museum and a collection of Old Masters.

In a world made up of thousands of diverse subcultures or niche cultures, it is madness for a city to aspire to be just like other cities. Cities need places to celebrate the nature of culture that we have now. They need places where people uploading videos to YouTube can meet each other, and venues small enough to cater for the new diversity of contemporary music scenes. They need bars, galleries and performance spaces designed to capture the new paradox of communication: local work of international significance and international work of local significance.

Cities must trade in cultural cringe for a growing sense of confidence in our distinctiveness. They must try to be somewhere, not anywhere in the extended global sprawl of electronic suburbia. Cities must wilfully believe that the unique combination of events that may fuse here is just as compelling as those that may fuse somewhere else. Cities need to involve their people in making and remaking their own mythology, and create something that is truly unique.

Cities the world over need to contemplate the impossible long enough to see the possibilities emerge.

On the off chance there are any Canadians reading this blog or following my twitter feed, just a quick heads up that i will be in Toronto between the 12th and 17th of June. My main reason is to be a keynote speaker on the 14th at Canada’s 3rd Transforming and Revitalizing Downtowns Summit. Obviously i will be talking about Renew Newcastle and the hush hush forthcoming Renew Australia initiative.

If you can get along to the conference i’d love to see you there. Otherwise let me know if there’s anything i should do, anyone i should talk to or anything to check out while i’m there – happy to talk to any relevant classes, interested parties or community groups while there.

While i was waylaid in Melbourne with a newborn Renew Newcastle and our first major property partner GPT took out the Australian Business Arts Foundation Toyota Community Partnership Award for the best partnership “between businesses and arts and cultural organisations that enhance the life of communities” in New South Wales at a glittering do at the MCA in Sydney. We are also national finalists in the same category – hopefully I’ll make it along to the national awards in Sydney next month.

This is a good acknowledgment. GPT’s development in Newcastle is no longer going ahead but they should be given some considerable credit for not letting the city die while they were processing their plans. So many developers in Newcastle have let buildings sit empty for years while pursuing bigger ambitions and the net effect is entire blocks in some cases that have been left to rot. Indeed some have used it as a negotiating tactic. Whatever else happens with GPT and Newcastle it is important to acknowledge the genuine efforts they have made to keep the city alive and the support they have given to more than 50 arts projects and enterprises that have opened in Newcastle in their spaces.

Personally it’s particularly great to see David Sleet and Amanda Pieriboni from GPT getting some acknowledgement for the punt they took on this. Both have been great supporters. It is an untold part of the Renew story that it David – in particular – took it upon himself to convince some of his more sceptical collleagues that lending many millions of dollars worth of vacant real estate in Newcastle to untried art project was a good idea. He succeeded in that but shortly thereafter found himself out of a job for a while when the GFC shelved the projects he was working on. I’m sure it wasn’t the easiest of times for him – but during that whole period he stayed in touch with Renew Newcastle via email and the occasional phone call. I can’t thank him personally enough for his efforts and his interest. So I’m very pleased to see him back at GPT and delegated all the important task of collecting the awards the company is now picking up for his foresight.

Twitter, the 140-character messaging system, is being embraced by many of Australia’s major arts companies, from Opera Australia to the Sydney Opera House to most major arts festivals.

Some have begun to encourage “tweeting” before, at interval and in some rare cases even during some of their shows. Some theatres are experimenting with reserved zones or sections where punters are encouraged to tweet live during the performances.

Depending on who you ask, it’s radical democratisation unleashing raw enthusiasm, genuine criticism and passion or the barbarians at the gate.

For many traditionalists, the concept is outrageous. The idea that such behaviour could pollute the hallowed halls of our cultural institutions is poisonously problematic. The notion of having less than 100 per cent of your audience’s attention is rude, offensive and disrespectful. The experience of a show is under threat from the glare of iPhone screens and tapping fingers.

Then there are those who argue that Twitter is a natural adjunct to watching a show. Live performance has always been to some extent about dialogue, conversation and social interaction.

In the age of “continuous partial attention”, extending that online is as natural as texting – or perhaps whispering to the person seated next to you.

The arts have much to gain from loosening up, getting with the 21st century and following the lead of many music festivals, conferences, gigs and events where live tweeting has become the norm. Changing times and ageing audiences necessitate some concessions to changing expectations.

I have some sympathies for both sides of the argument. Like most things, it’s probably not really an either/or question  it’s as much about etiquette as absolutes.

Reaching for the mobile in a one-person show in an intimate venue is genuinely rude. It is much less of an issue in the back row of a 2000-seat theatre.

Equally, some robust, engaging, rambunctious performances positively demand to be shouted about both digitally and physically, but an intimate reflection on grief and loss demands attention and reflection.

There is a lot to be gained from experimenting with audiences tweeting in real time. For many younger audiences, it pierces the barriers of intimidation that accompany many art forms. It brings a night at the theatre or the opera in line with a gig at a pub or a moment at a festival where firing off a quick “This is Greatest. Thing. Ever. You Must. See. This.” to 400 followers is as authentic an expression of praise as there can be. What better review could a company hope for?

Being able to tweet a bad experience can have a value for the audience if not the artist. Am I the only person who has has been trapped in shows that are so tediously awful that the opportunity to vent, interact or complain a little would be welcome relief?

At truly awful performances I have resorted to occupying myself with a mental game called “what sort of seizure would I need to fake to get out of here now?” That would have been more fun on twitter.

Beyond the marketing and technological fad, there is a powerful potential here. It is not simply about how connected audiences will respond to existing performances but how they might change the dynamics of performance itself.

Twitter provides a genuine opportunity for companies to discover what an audience is thinking right there in real time. I have spoken at quite a few lectures and conferences that were tweeted by the audience, and I found it uniquely challenging and validating to see people quoting, challenging, and critiquing my comments as I make them. As a director of festivals and events, I’ve found Twitter and Facebook comments written in the moment much more powerful than any review.

In an age of fragmented attention spans and continuous multi-tasking, perhaps the question is not: “How can performers demand the full attention of their audiences?” but: “How can performers adapt to the reality that they will no longer be able to expect it”?

Later this week, various venues around Fitzroy will host an “anti-gentrification festival” hosted by the “radical craft group” Craft Cartel. Their aim, as they describe it, is to celebrate their presence in the city before they are driven out by what they describe as “crazy living costs”. They’ve even got hold of the stinky, sticky carpet from the much-loved, mourned, dead and soon-to-be resurrected Tote and are making exhibitions, fashion parades and souvenirs from it to raise money for local charities.

It’s easy to criticise this kind of approach. It seems a little naive. It’s certainly neither the first nor the last time that artists in Melbourne and other major Australian cities have complained of being forced out of their stomping grounds by yuppies, developers, nimby regulations, and rising property prices.

It’s certainly difficult to imagine just how this keep-Fitzroy-feisty fest will turn back such an overwhelming tide.

On one level, these kinds of reactions to the changing dynamic over our inner cities are little more than youthful nostalgia. Zoom out a decade or two and the places where artists and creative communities live and meet are always evolving not just because of demographic and economic forces, but from the changing tastes and expectations of artists and audiences themselves.

As much as I’d personally love to see the significant and seminal places of my own formative years preserved, declaring my own once-sacred sites probably won’t help. At its worst, it just invites us to swap a living city for a theme park and dynamic venues for atrophied museums.

But for all the easy pot-shots there is a genuine question here. It’s not merely about how we save any particular place, but how we preserve the ability to make creative places for the next generation. Against the backdrop of much larger forces — the rising speculative value of property prices, the growing (and sensible) policy pressures to move more people into the inner-city suburbs and the encroachment of ever-greater regulation of space — how do we ensure that creative communities still get a look-in?

These are real, live issues and not just for radical crafters. Many artists are constantly fleeing further and further out. Their very presence seems to invite rising property prices. Property investment seminars tell investors to follow the creatives. They seek out cheap space, make it dynamic and interesting and in doing so, they attract the interest of punters, speculators and developers, who, in turn, begin to price them out to the next suburb.

Look over the past few decades as the dynamics have moved from Carlton to Fitzroy to Collingwood, Brunswick, Northcote and beyond.

Against these forces, the way we plan for and support the arts are often inadequate. The way that governments have traditionally made space for the artists — through commissioning buildings and creating cultural infrastructure — has only ever been a fraction of a much greater sum of cultural activity. Then there are all the studios, rehearsal spaces, formal and informal arts infrastructure that artists create and recreate. It’s getting more difficult to find, make and shape these spaces by artists, community groups or others who don’t have much money and don’t expect to earn very much. So much of what we now take for granted in our cultural and community lives was planted and nurtured in cheap space.

The real question is not how do we save a particular place or “nostalgise” a particular suburb at a particular time but how do we ensure that the dynamic continues? How do we keep making and creating new places and spaces for artists to live and work?

There’s no single solution. Inevitably, the near future involves artists moving further afield in search of the underutilised spaces. It must also involve governments setting rules and regulations and offering incentives that encourage creative seeds to be planted and spaces to be used creatively.

Of course, if history, the rest of the world and gravity are anything to go by, this long boom of property prices won’t last forever either. In a dynamic city at some point, inevitably, the booms bust and the cycles begin again.

I BOUGHT a guy a beer last week. No, I’m not so cheap that that is remarkable. What is remarkable, though, is that the guy I bought a beer for is a writer and theatre-maker who lives in Chicago and I’ve never met him. The little transaction demonstrated one of the many ways that artists are finding to make a living from their work.

The beer was for a blogger who had written a smart, thought-provoking post about the parallels between the current challenges facing the music industry and the decline and rebirth of theatre as major cultural force in his home town. At the bottom was a button that suggested if I liked the piece I should “buy me a beer” using PayPal. It seemed like a fair transaction to me and he now has a few dollars that were once mine.

How to make an income and be an artist or creative person is one of the great mysteries of the universe. You can work more broadly in the arts, I guess. Plenty of artists have drifted into arts administration, sitting galleries, working front of house, becoming an art teacher, doing lighting and video for concerts or lugging around and installing exhibitions and PA systems. There are plenty of paid jobs in the arts industry even if there is bugger all money for actual artists.

Or you can go corporate, where there is also a demand for creative skills. A quick survey of my friends reveals novelists turned to corporate PR writers, ghost writers who’ve penned “autobiographies” for celebrities who never read them, illustrators for hire, and video makers whose skills have been effectively applied to “tasteful soft porn”. In a world where plenty of artists are often being commissioned by the commercial sector only an ardent purist can tell you where art stops and design begins. The artist as shoe designer, interior decorator, or even cool consultant is strangely in demand.

Or you can go it alone and make your own work. More recently though, there has been an explosion of self-starting creative micro- industries halfway between day job and pocket money. The blogger in Chicago is just one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people — some professional artists and some not — who are deriving an income from putting their ideas and their creative skills out there.

Musicians are taking a lot of the lead in this regard. Traditional sources of revenue and investment are drying up as record companies rush to protect their bottom line. It’s forcing the middle out of the music industry: the mega acts still make a fortune, and those in the mediocre middle are being squeezed out, but a whole stack of people with small but passionate fan bases have discovered there’s a useful amount of money to be made from $2 downloads. It is a crisis for the music industry, but it’s a whole new series of opportunities for a lot of musicians. They’ve found they can even get their fans to invest in the creation of a new record before they make it and a much greater capacity to self-promote live tours.

Those who make beautiful images can now put them on things. Micro-manufacturing and niche distribution mean that some artists are now in the business of making everything from iPhone cases to tea towels and can sell them to a global audience. New companies — entire industries — have been set up around the idea of mass-customisation. Want to design a T-shirt, get it manufactured, and quickly reap the profits? Easy. What about designing, printing and distributing your own book? Nothing to stop you. Making short films, online soaps or special-interest film or video? There are audiences and a bit of income for that, too.

The norm for artists — or at least the stereotypes — used to be much more bureaucratic. Get a job, get the occasional grant, hope to get a good agent or major company gig and hope to turn your practice into your steady job one day. That’s not how the art world works these days — probably because it’s not how the world works any more.

Taking the initiative to create your own work, build your own audiences, and make opportunities is a more common path to success. For better or for worse, the larger trend is that creative life is becoming more entrepreneurial.

HOW often does it have to happen? How many times has government – in order to solve one problem such as late-night violence and antisocial behaviour in notorious nightclub zones – implemented a crackdown that inadvertently sideswipes a whole range of people who had nothing to do with the problem in the first place?

Call it the law of unintended consequences. The liquor licensing crackdown that has caused the closure of the Tote is just the latest in a long line of botched decisions, bureaucratic entropy and poorly-thought-through policy impacting hard on artists and creative communities. It has got to stop at some point, surely?

Surely we could start to think about this stuff before we pass stupid legislation? The sad thing about unintended consequences is that they are rarely unpredictable. It was obvious from the moment that the new licensing regime was mooted that it would hit cultural venues far more harshly than mega-nightclubs. The Tote fiasco has unfolded more or less as I predicted in these pages back in November.

Remember the crisis of public liability insurance a few years back? A litigious culture, buck-shifting down the government chain and ludicrous over-regulation caused a wave of festivals, venues and events to close as liability premiums skyrocketed. The reasons behind this had little or nothing to do with artists or arts festivals – in more than 15 years, there hasn’t been a single claim against any event that I’ve been involved in or attended. Yet I can think of plenty of events and organisations that would have spent more on insurance than on paying artists in that time. It killed the ambitions of a lot of young artists dead. How many more potential drawcards or community events never made it into being for the overinflated cost of an insurance policy?

Even established events are constantly being upended by changing rules. It’s almost an annual ritual that the Melbourne Fringe Festival suffers a new round of zealotry that kills off street parties, forces venue and licensing crackdowns or reshuffles shows. Yet how often is violent, unsafe or antisocial behaviour seriously associated with Fringe events?

I’ve had so many insane interactions with bureaucracy that I’m pounding the keyboard as I think about them. Safety rules sensibly designed for industrial workplaces enthusiastically and cripplingly misapplied to small art galleries. “Best practice” building codes lumping performance venues with six-figure bills to move a perfectly functioning door barely an inch. Crippling compliance rules gradually destroying the live music and performance scene while comparatively lax and lucrative incentives encouraged pubs to put in poker machines.

There’s a real reason why cultural venues and events are hit hard by institutionalised stupidity: most people running them aren’t really out to make money. Mostly they are trying not to lose money. They are trying to maximise the cultural value of what they do and not maximise the return on their financial investment and as a result, they don’t have money to burn.

A good thing it is. If there weren’t people trying to make the world interesting, every shopfront would have become a chain store and every pub would have become an apartment block years ago. Consequently though, cultural activity is often economically marginal and cultural venues will disappear long before strip clubs, meat markets and booze barns when a major new cost like increased security is applied indiscriminately. They will always struggle when tone-deaf governments fail to recognise that regulation should be proportionate to risk and impact.

Unfortunately, artists fail to lead in this area. Generally, they take regulatory issues for granted while second-division issues such as funding programs and capital works grab the lion’s share of the attention. It’s back to front. In any truly vibrant culture, the main game is how easy it is to put on show, play a gig, or start a venue. If the culture is healthy at that level, then it will be vibrant and dynamic. If it’s not, then all the architect-designed arts centres, funding programs, application procedures and guidelines in the world won’t save it.

If governments can’t twig to the policies, maybe they’ll twig to the politics of what communities value. If the government can’t spot the difference between the Tote and a King Street nightclub, perhaps people will let them know at the polls.

Some tips on how to start a Renew Newcastle type project in vacant buildings in your own cities and towns from my ABC Arts blog.

LYNDON Terracini has been outspoken and surprisingly frank about the limitations of Australia’s major performing arts companies in recent weeks. The incoming Opera Australia artistic director has slammed Australia’s orchestras and opera companies as “conservative and predictable,” admitted that Melbourne has been poorly served by Opera Australia from Sydney and, most notably, has drawn attention to the narrowness of Opera Australia’s audience base.

It’s all reasonable and reasonably obvious. Yet the discussion he has generated implied that what he is saying is somehow insightful or unexpected. If anything Terracini’s admissions actually fall well short of the mark and remind us that Australia is long overdue for a serious discussion about cultural priorities. While his snapshot of the situation is accurate, he too quickly explains the problem away as one of the potential audiences’ ignorance and not of the companies’ growing irrelevance.

Undoubtedly Terracini, like all passionate people, believes in what he is doing. He argues that while people have a “prejudice about coming to opera” he is confident that “once they come, you can bet they will adore it.” This may be true in some cases but the convenient illusion that there is a great army of potential opera fans simply awaiting conversion is unrealistic. It is yet another in a long line of arguments that it is the failure of education, knowledge, marketing or some other external factor is behind the ageing demographics and the relative decline in interest in the major performing arts.

The reality is that Australia is changing and our cultural needs and priorities are changing with it. As Terracini points out, the ethnic diversity in the major performing arts audiences lags well behind that in smaller companies and across most other artforms. He points out that Opera Australia has failed to reach such places as Western Sydney and indigenous people are underrepresented as audiences or performers.

Yet looking at this as failure of audience outreach misses the point. It ignores the growing cultural diversity of Australia in the broadest sense — of practitioners, of artforms, of audiences, of influences, of traditions and opportunities for cultural expression. Despite the oft-repeated stereotype that arts funding favours the marginal and multicultural, the Australia Council’s entire Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts board has less than a quarter of Opera Australia’s funding. Yet indigenous artists in music, literature and the visual arts have achieved much more in provoking, nurturing and promoting a distinctive Australian culture at home and around the world than a dozen Opera Australia’s ever will.

Criticising opera companies for catering to audiences that are overwhelmingly white, affluent and drawn from the corporate social set is like criticising athletes for their athleticism. It has long been opera’s unique strength that it is the subculture of the elite and influential. Opera Australia is the single-best-funded company in Australia by a long margin. It receives levels of government support well out of proportion to its audience numbers, its cultural relevance or its creative influence. In 2007-08, Opera Australia and the associated Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra received $17.5 million of Australia Council funding. By comparison, the Australia Council’s highly competitive funds for literature, music, theatre and visual arts between them had a combined budget of $21.8 million spread over 916 separate projects, organisations and individuals.

Opera Australia receives the equivalent of half the total allocation for competitive funding for all Australia Council artform boards.

It is admirable and urgent that Terracini reaches out to every last potential convert.

It is impossible to imagine a future in which Opera Australia survives without diversifying its audience — but in a serious sense it is the wrong question. Rather than ask how to make the Australian community more interested in opera, we should perhaps ask the unaskable about the cultural traditions Australians actually value and how we might best support and resource them.

For too long Australia’s major performing arts companies have treated the lack of a diverse audience for their work as an audience development problem and not a cultural shift. By framing it as a failure of marketing, they’ve even successfully leveraged even more resources and greater subsidies as a means of rectifying it. This can’t continue.

Terracini’s will ultimately be measured against his ambitions — i fear we will be saying the exact same thing at the end of his tenure. But the need for diversification is desperate otherwise the consequences for Opera Australia are unimaginable:  not that opera will die but that it will find itself back in the competitive, scrappy, under resourced funding process that other Australian artists and artforms take for granted.