marcus westbury

A Kookaburra (image by Eva Hejda)
COURT decisions, particularly those involving heinous crimes, are typical talkback and tabloid fodder. But how often does the heinous crime that has the public up in arms revolve around the obscurity of copyright law?
Last week, the Federal Court found that Men at Work had infringed the copyright of Larrikin music [...]

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 [...]

Perhaps it’s because my brain is still on holidays and I’m more inclined to laze around, wander up the street, and generally while away my days unproductively than to take art, culture and its consequences – or anything else for that matter – too seriously.
Art is often discussed in reverent tones , we invest in [...]

Success is overrated. Take risks, be experimental, try failing creatively.
ONE of the things I’m hoping for more of in the arts this decade is failure.
No, I’m not wishing that the nation’s artists and arts companies spend the coming years slipping into decline, bankruptcy and despair.
I’m just hoping that they will find ways to take the [...]

[Note: I am catching up with posting bits and pieces of writing that have not yet been posted here. This was actually published in The Age last November - preempting the recent events at The Tote and The Arthouse. Umm, told you so?]
MELBOURNE does the small scale better than any other Australian city – or [...]

National Museum of Australia
WHAT HAPPENS when the Federal Government puts a call out to the public to make suggestions about a cultural policy? After a few hours of reviewing some of the submissions, it would be fair to say that the quality and usefulness of the submissions so far have been decidedly mixed.
Despite its rather [...]

THE dominant cultural form of the 20th century is starting to unravel.
What was the dominant cultural form of the 20th century? There are plenty of candidates and no lack of ones that are allegedly under threat. Cinema? Rock music? The album? Radio? The four-minute single? Magazines? Newspapers? Television?
Actually, it was none and all of the [...]

How can we make reasonable judgments about what is acceptable when censorship laws can’t keep up?
Australia’s censorship and classification regime has a major problem. It is breaking, if not broken. It is in need of a serious national debate and not the simplistic solutions or opportunistic point-scoring that tends to characterise debates around censorship. The [...]

THE Australia Council and the ABC provide two radically different examples of how cultural agencies can deal or fail to deal with technological change. Where the ABC has spent the last decade experimenting, making and learning from mistakes and innovating with digital technology, the Australia Council has retreated further and further away from engagement in [...]

I SPENT a day last month searching for a mirage in the desert. Oil-rich Abu Dhabi plans to get into culture in a big way. It is building a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim and Jean Nouvel-designed Louvre as a pair of brand-name museums the likes of which the world has never seen.
It is part of a [...]