IN POLITE company in arts circles these days, you do not mention the “e” word. No, not e-books or e-commerce or the other electronic innovations running a wrecking ball through Australia’s much loved big-box retailers. The uncomfortable e-word in the arts is “elite”.

The arts are in a bind when it comes to elitism. Once central to the very idea of the arts, elitism now seems best not talked about. On one level, that notion of being elite, of being separate and better, is unashamedly (or not ashamedly enough) a reason why many gravitate to the arts. There are plenty of people who genuinely believe that “the arts”, and some art forms more than others, make for a better class of person.

I’m not a better class of person. I tend to see culture with a more inclusive bent. The notion of the arts as disproportionately for an elite sits very uncomfortably. That particular kind of elitism is exhibit A in why much thinking around the arts is dysfunctional and alienated from many Australians.

It’s easy to get stuck between two different meanings of the word elite. The first and relatively unproblematic definition is the idea of elite as the “best” of something. While it opens up plenty of practical debates about exactly who gets to determine it, the idea that the arts should aspire to producing stuff that is somewhere between pretty good and downright awesome is not particularly contentious.

On the reverse side is another idea of “elite”  the idea that reserves certain status for the privileged few. Historically, this has been a major part of what “the arts” have been about. It’s probably why every single ticket to the nation’s symphony orchestras is subsidised to the tune of $137, while many excellent musicians couldn’t get $100 to produce an album.

Arts lovers are quick to point out that Australians are mostly comfortable with the idea of “elite” sportspeople. Yet the comparisons between how arts and sport approach the term can be misleading if not disingenuous.

Australia takes a pretty broad view as to which sports are elite  inclusive of any with television coverage or medal tallies involved. Every Australian need not follow aerial skiing for there to be a consensus that we like having Australians who are good at it. We don’t generally suggest that particular sports are more elite as a matter of policy.

The arts have tended to approach it from the opposite end  beginning with the assumption that certain art forms are more elite than others and working back.

It’s simpler in sport, where the competition itself shows who is the best and funding has, to some extent, rewarded medals, participation, interest and success. In the arts, any simple measure of “Are we any good at it?” and “Does it need a subsidy?” is complicated by who gets to decide.

There is a legitimate role for nurturing the elite in the arts, but there are dangers. One danger is detachment from the living cultures around us. Cultures are plural, so striving to be great needs to be less about elevating select elite cultures and more about supporting a range.

There’s a bigger danger, and it, too, has a parallel in sport. Tennis star turned Liberal federal MP John Alexander last year convincingly argued why Australia is producing fewer great tennis players. The problem was not underinvestment in the elite or our choice of Davis Cup captains. The problem was Australia has been losing its tennis courts. Alexander estimated that Sydney alone had lost more than 2000 courts in the past 15 years.

The same thing has occurred in the arts. Places to rehearse, to play, to exhibit, to try  and fail  are disappearing, swallowed up in a property bubble or regulated out of existence. If you had been focusing exclusively on the elite, you might not have noticed. But greatness will always need somewhere to practice.

TECHNOLOGY is creating a strange paradox when it comes to art and culture. It’s expanding our options but narrowing our choices. It’s a phenomenon that has consequences far and away from the online world and one that is even threatening the business models and viability of some companies and art forms.

Recently, the National Endowment for the Arts in the US released a report that attributed much of the decline in the audiences for large-scale traditional arts to what it called the “decline of the omnivore“. For the NEA, “omnivores” — culturally speaking — are people who involve themselves in a broad range of cultural activities. They have long made up a large proportion of the audience for what is traditionally regarded as “the arts”, but the trend over the past few years is that there are fewer of them and they are seeing fewer things.

A decade ago, American author Ted Gup wrote about what he called the “end of serendipity” — the idea that in a world of information it is becoming harder, not easier, to learn about things that we weren’t already looking for.

As the internet, social and niche media take over from mass media as the way that people find and share things, it is becoming harder to be an omnivore. The more we get recommendations from those we select for ourselves, the less we find out about things we don’t already know about.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the internet and social media. You’ll easily find me on Twitter and Facebook. I’m neither a techno utopian nor a curmudgeonly sceptic, but social media are changing the way we create and consume culture in ways both good and bad.

On the upside, I’m enamoured of the proliferation of small-scale cultural production; I love that creation is outgrowing consumption as the way people engage with art and culture; and I’m enriched by the constant conversation and connectivity. But the downside goes beyond simply the changing demographics and behaviour of arts audiences.

Away from the arts, consider a highly polarising issue such as global warming and the carbon tax. The mass media — at their (occasional) best — provide a range of viewpoints. They allow you to hear conflicting arguments and compare different points of view. Online, it is all too easy to follow links, read arguments, and only hear from people who validate and reinforce your own point of view. It is easy to live in a self-reinforcing bubble — regardless of which side you are on — and there are real dangers in a world that is so siloed.

In the arts, compare reading this article in the pages of the newspaper to online. They are very different experiences and processes. In the paper you could well be reading this almost unintentionally: because it’s your lunch break, because you were reading the piece next to it or because you happened to open to this page. If you are reading this online, chances are that someone sent you here or that you were searching for it. Online, you are less likely to view the articles around it and you are more likely to read what is most similar to this next.

I’m not too worried for arts marketing. Smart arts organisations are finding new ways of building communities around the content and not the form of the work. While audiences may be less inclined to sample from a range of cultural organisations, they are more capable than ever of following an interest — in design, a musician, computer games or history — into a gallery or performing arts centre. As a result, arts programming and marketing that leads with content and not form is growing massively.

But I can’t help but fear for the loss of serendipity. So many of my significant cultural turning points were mistakes or accidents — the product of discovering something by mistake, of reluctantly being dragged along to a thing I had no intention of seeing, of having my interest captured by something out of left field. Of discovering and enjoying the unexpected — sometimes in spite of myself. It would be a terrible thing to lose that.

JUST before Easter, Arts Minister Simon Crean announced that advertising guru and philanthropist Harold Mitchell (pictured) would undertake a major review of private sector support for the arts in Australia. The review will look at the range of existing government programs and incentives for philanthropic support for the arts in Australia and abroad, such as the Australia Business Arts Foundation and the Australia Council’s Art Support Australia, and make recommendations for tweaks and reforms.

At first look it is a promising and appropriate announcement. There are valuable arts programs in Australia to foster private philanthropy, but there is also perceived duplication, confusion between different programs, areas where badly designed incentives discourage private support.

Yet the timing raises fears Crean may be the latest arts minister so sidetracked by the trees that he misses the forest. Mitchell’s review is a new step towards the Rudd/Gillard governments’ long-delayed attempts to develop a national cultural policy. The decision to look at philanthropy in isolation and before finishing that process puts the cart before the horse. The role of private philanthropy is surely a function of the unanswered question of what exactly needs to be fostered.

Harold Mitchell himself will, we hope, bring with him the talent for innovative and forward-looking strategy developed through his business career as the nation’s savviest media buyer and not merely the Rolodex he would have filled as chairman, president and benefactor of the likes of the National Gallery of Australia, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne International Festival of Arts. While those roles demonstrate a rare depth of commitment they are also extremely atypical organisations at the periphery and not the centre of the 21st-century Australian arts experience.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at last count about 3.5 million Australians  or 22 per cent of the adult population  were engaged in some professional work in arts and cultural activities. Most artists never work for, in, or with major arts companies, festivals and organisations, yet the philanthropy deck is stacked heavily in their favour.

Government funding of major companies has grown consistently at the expense of individual artists and yet it is among small-scale practitioners that participation and economic activity is surging. From 2004 to 2007 (the last period for which detailed data is available) there was a 117 per cent rise in people working professionally in photography, 93 per cent in drawing, 93 per cent in computer-based art, 76 per cent in painting, 96 per cent in textiles and 113 per cent in other craft and an astonishing 204 per cent in jewellery.

Yet in funding, philanthropy and policy terms, most of those 3 million-plus people are the forgotten constituency and seem likely to remain so.

The Mitchell review must recognise that the momentum and the most interesting work is taking place away from the major arts companies. The best initiatives in philanthropy are responding to this. Initiatives such as AbaF’s Australia Cultural Fund (allowing donors to give to individual artists rather than large, tax-deductible companies), the proposal by Julianne Shultz and others to establish a Foundation for the Artist to redress the growing imbalance between artists and institutions, and my own experiences through Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia in cajoling property owners to offer up empty buildings to incubate small-scale arts projects, are all motivated in part by responding to a changing reality that the government itself is yet to acknowledge.

We hope Mitchell brings the skills that steered his business through a dynamic media landscape to furthering those efforts.

[I've been incredibly slack at updating the blog of late, i put it down to travel, parenthood, and general need-to-make-a-livingness. However, that does leave me with a bit of a backlog of old scribblings to post here over the coming weeks. The piece below was originally in The Age on the 31st of January and no, as far as i can tell not a lot has happened since...]

SIGH. The Australia Council for the Arts did something incredibly impressive last week. It released one of the more interesting, more insightful, more nuanced and more genuinely interesting pieces of research it has put out in a long time. Why the sigh? Well, so far, it doesn’t exactly seem very enthusiastic about it.

The report, Arts and Creative Industries, is based on detailed interviews with creative practitioners, micro-business operators, curators, managers, directors, lecturers and consultants, and dispels the simple dichotomy that has art on one side and commerce on the other.

For those of us who have long held that the line between the two is not so much a division as a continuum, the report provides a lot of on-the-ground evidence to back that up. The authors  led by Professor Justin O’Connor from the centre for creative industries at Queensland University of Technology  point out, “they might work for one or the other across the course of a day or week, but equally their [commercial] work, though never receiving public subsidy, might be described as ‘artistic’. Indeed, those working in commercial culture not only value ‘the arts’ but also see their own commercial activity as involving high levels of artistic or cultural purpose.”

The report argues against the simplistic neo-liberal line that art can only be validated by some secondary purpose, be it innovation or export earnings. It argues for art “as an idea, as a set of practices, as a set of experiences” and yet  somewhat complicating things  makes it abundantly clear that any contemporary understanding of that “cannot be restricted to what is now known as ‘the arts’ . . . that old opposition of art and popular culture  with its associated binaries of ideal/commerce, public/market, high/low  has always been contested and is now mostly threadbare”.

It’s good stuff. It is entirely consistent with the cultural experiences of anyone born after the latter half of the 20th century. It’s certainly the closest the Australia Council has come in a long time to provoking some serious self-reflection on its own role in a changing landscape. As Australia Council chief executive Kathy Keele acknowledges in the foreword, it “challenge[s] many of our current conceptions, definitions, and even policies”.

And therein lies the rub. The Australia Council, to its credit, has commissioned the research and provided the foreword to the report, the real challenge is to start providing the leadership. While the simple dichotomy has long passed its use-by date in the real world, the whole current arts funding and policy system is pretty much premised on it. Take away the idea that “the arts” is a bunch of stuff that came to prominence around the 18th century  enshrined in the Australia Council’s Whitlam-era act  and that everything else is industry and commerce, and there is a major problem.

Despite its increasing disconnection from either real-world experience or an articulated and coherent rationale, there remains a lot of vested interests, reputations, rent seekers and hangers-on  and yes, even some really great artists  for whom a simplistic dichotomy works really well.

In the best-case scenario, the Arts and Creative Industries report moves the Australia Council away from a reactionary and defensive position of recent times and towards showing genuine leadership. It provides a clear rationale and authority to move beyond simply providing subsidies to a relatively small number of artists and companies to engaging with the whole creative ecosystem. It even suggests some engaging ways of doing that, including opportunities that would significantly expand the role of art  in the broadest sense  and embed it in areas that have traditionally been left to markets  to integrate it more into media and design. But will it do that?

How it handles this report will be a test of the Australian government’s arts funding and advisory body’s seriousness. While the Australia Council isn’t backward in promoting research, reports and good news stories that validate the status quo, there is not much precedent for it challenging it. There is little indication that the kind of media blitz, national forums, and general oxygen that have been given to other reports are about to follow. Still, the moment hasn’t passed.

Now would be an excellent time to lead.

]]> http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2011/05/21/arts-creative-industries-dichotomies-and-bureaucracies/feed/ 2 http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2010/12/10/in-praise-of-initiative-or-why-bob-carr-made-me-move-to-melbourne/ http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2010/12/10/in-praise-of-initiative-or-why-bob-carr-made-me-move-to-melbourne/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 23:30:11 +0000 marcus http://www.marcuswestbury.net/?p=1243
Why i moved to Melbourne

I HAVE described myself on more than a few occasions as a cultural refugee from New South Wales. Many young artists and creative types – some very talented and some obviously less so – left the state during the Carr years. Some went overseas, some went north and played a part in the reinvention of Brisbane, but most drifted south to Melbourne.

Bob Carr for all his erudition was almost certainly the worst arts minister in recent Australian history, with no understanding of the dynamics of a living culture. If you had to write a prescription for a policy mix that would send keen, talented and enthusiastic young people into exile, it was Bob Carr’s NSW.

I recently met an adviser to a senior NSW politician. He asked me why I had moved to Melbourne a decade ago.

I had wanted to move to Melbourne as I think many of my friends and peers had from the very first moment we visited. Was it the galleries? The theatres? The festivals? The nightlife? The laneway bars?

Yes, and no. All of those were part of the picture but at a deeper level there was something far more fundamental. Melbourne, I explained, wanted my initiative and that of those around me. Try being young, not rich, but desperately keen to put on a show in Sydney in the late nineties or early noughties and see how far it got you. It’s was bloody difficult.  For many years it was damn near impossible or effectively illegal  amid insane rents, the physical obliteration of small-scale space near the city, the poker machines and the absurd place of public entertainment licensing. Sydney was a city where buckets of cash were needed to get anything done.

Melbourne seemed totally different.  For reasons both accidental and planned  worked at the scale that many young creative types and I worked at. It was bouncing back from a recession, it had small, cheap spaces, it had a culture of community and great community radio stations that promoted and talked about interesting things. It was possible to do things here. It was a city that seemed to like the idea that people wanted to do things in it. It’s hard to explain how vital that is until you have lived in one that doesn’t.

Many of those things are intangible when we talk about the cultural life of cities and yet they are incredibly significant.

Yes, Melbourne has great galleries. But so does Canberra. When was the last time anyone said they were moving to Canberra because they wanted to be part of the cultural life there?

Melbourne has great festivals, strong flagship companies and a great arts centre, but so does Adelaide. Yet Adelaide has a large net exodus of young people who move east, chasing initiative and opportunity.

Yes, Melbourne is big, has scale, great arts centres and blockbuster shows. Sydney has all of the above but it makes little difference if you are trying to do something there.

At a forum I once hosted when i directed the Next Wave festival in Melbourne, about three-quarters of the young, keen, enthusiastic and talented artists in the program were not native-born Victorians. Most were originally from NSW, some from Tasmania, many had fled the Festival State and a few were from Queensland. All had somehow wound up in Melbourne pursuing initiative and opportunities.

When you are young and mobile you want to be part of making a culture, not simply a consumer of it. You want to pick up the guitar, grab the camera, the turntables and the paintbrushes and apply them to sorting out and ratcheting up whatever happens to be coursing through your veins. It may not always be pretty but it’s vital in every sense of the word. The idea that you can do it and that the place you live in wants you to do it is as good a reason as any for being there.

Melbourne is still a place where the young “initiativists” come but with each year it seems to geta little less so. It has become more expensive and opportunities are crowded out by the influx, NSW to their credit have fixed up the PoPE laws and the liquor licensing and some of the worse legislative bits of the Carr era, and Brisbane on the surface at least seems to be dynamic and welcoming of the young and keen.

Now that NSW politicians and their advisers are thinking about this stuff it will be interesting to see whether the next generation makes the same move south that many of mine did.

Australia’s arts and culture scene is in the grip of a bike helmet problem.

ARTS? Culture? Bike helmets? Let me backtrack a bit. Apparently the take-up rate for Melbourne’s casual bicycle sharing scheme has been uniquely woeful in the world. Bad. Dismal failure bad. The reason, according to most, is that Australia is the only country in the world that mandates that cyclists wear bike helmets. In Melbourne the bike-borrowing concept has been thwarted because casual users need to have planned ahead and brought a bike helmet with them when they left home that morning.

According to Mikael Colville Anderson, a Danish cycling advocate who was on Radio National last week, the main reason Europe doesn’t have compulsory helmets is . . . Australia. Every time it comes up in any European city or country the response according to Anderson is: “Let’s not do what they did in Australia, they killed off the urban cycling culture.”

What you gain is not worth what you lose.

Killing a culture through well-meaning rules and regulations? Where have I heard that one before? Australia’s cycling culture isn’t the only one we’ve smothered with rules and regulations. We live in one of the most micro-regulated societies in the world and for decades we’ve simply never bothered to ask what the cultural consequences might be. As result, Australian artists and small-scale creative initiatives drown in rules and regulations that make simple things unnecessarily complex.

It was a bike helmet problem that closed the Tote and created such a furore from the live music community. A well-intentioned response to problems at some large licensed venues led to the state government introducing very expensive security requirements for all live music venues. At no point in the process did anyone bother to ask either whether a folk duo playing to 20 people on a Tuesday was dangerous enough to require a couple of security guards. Or  more to the point  whether the risk warranted killing Victoria’s barely-break-even live music scene.

Similarly, take reusing empty buildings. I’ve been spending a lot of time recently persuading owners to lend old and otherwise empty buildings to artists. Keen owner + free building + poor artists seems like a no-brainer. It is until you start to navigate the regulations. Beyond the real and pressing issues of ensuring the electricals are safe or there isn’t dangerous asbestos lying around, the administrivia verges on the absurd.

A building that may have operated safely for 50 years may suddenly need tens of thousands of dollars worth of replaced doors, new banisters or fittings to keep up with minor  but ludicrously expensive  changes in building codes. Renting a park, putting on a gig, running any kind of show will incur the same problems.

I’m not a free-for-all libertarian, but I am a believer in proportionality. The issue is not that we shouldn’t have sensible rules but that they can’t be made in isolation and they should never be made in such a way as to deny people without resources the right to participation.

Doing nothing is a risk too; risks can’t be measured in isolation. There is a risk associated with getting on a bike without a helmet, but there is a risk too in always adding more cars. There is a risk in not having two security guards at every gig, but there are also risks in not having them at every school, on every street corner, in every park. There is a risk in not having live music. There is a risk of activating an empty building without making a perfectly functional door 10 centimetres taller, but there are cultural risks in not having spaces for artists and practical risks in simply letting buildings sit unoccupied until they rot and fall over.

There is a perverse effect in a lot of this regulation. We have effectively professionalised participation in Australia. You need access to capital, legal advice and expertise to take part in culture and community. A healthy society is one where everyone can take part  casually, spontaneously and without needing a bank loan, a lawyer or an army of experts. Australia needs to recognise that the simplicity of participation is a virtue, doing things spontaneously and cheaply is invaluable and that not everyone needs to carry a bike helmet.

Hand made Nick Cave, by Lucy of Newcastle.

MEMO to anyone tempted to frame a cultural debate as a choice between “high art” and “popular culture”: don’t bother; you are missing the point.

It’s not just that the terms are frustratingly polarising or that they frame the world as a simple hierarchy of quality based on archaic definitions of form. They’re just incredibly misleading. A lot of “high art” is decidedly low in ambitions, pumped out for a mass audience and downright average in its execution. Equally — and what has always interested me — a lot of popular culture is decidedly and deliberately unpopular.

I’ve long been a passionate advocate for the idea of “unpopular culture”. As a festival director, I used it as a Next Wave festival theme and — demonstrating my considerable breadth of imagination and originality — I used it again as an episode title for the “Not Quite Art” series I made on the ABC. Until recently I had never actually looked up what it’s supposed to mean. When I googled it last week there seemed to be no consensus definition, but given that at least a few of the references were mine, I figure I’m as entitled as anyone to simply make one up.

So what do I mean by unpopular culture? To me, it’s the stuff that doesn’t quite fit. It’s somewhere between the often self-conscious and self-referential world of high art and the lowest-common-denominator shite that gets served up by the mass market.

Unpopular culture uses all the available forms, mediums, tools and technologies for reasons that have nothing to do with making a profit or reaching a mass audience. It’s often the experimental, personal, art-for-arts-sake take on cultures that are active and alive in our world. It can be very contemporary and very high tech — or not — but evokes the same motivations and reasons that have always been there down centuries of great art. What defines it is probably more of a “why?” than a “what?”

It’s a thread that connects the independent or alternative, experimental ends of popular genres with a lineage of artists that have always sought to reflect and respond to the real world. It’s in indie films, alternative music, small press, and DIY comics. It’s there in a lot of independent theatre or new music. It’s an engine of creativity, experimentation and innovation that is constantly creating and recreating itself. It’s abundant, vibrant, enthusiastic and perpetually underresourced.

It’s the stuff we make from the ideas and tools and influences we have around us. It evolves without plan or design, if not spontaneously, then at least with little control or management. It results not from a commercial imperative but from the creative imperative that is in each of us — from our desire or need to create or share our experiences.

You can find it in fringe and film festivals but also in zines and blogs, Flickr and YouTube, animation, computer games and virtually any other areas of culture where people feel compelled to create.

It can confuse some traditionalists because it uses “new” technologies. But it does so not because it’s high-tech and avant-garde or self-consciously cutting-edge but for precisely the opposite reason — because digital culture is a people’s culture. Video cameras, computers, printers, photocopiers, and telecommunications are cheap and accessible. They provide far more abundant opportunities than cellos.

It is a dynamic not a form. At its best, it’s a creative ecology — and only occasionally an economy — that promotes and rewards experimentation, evolution and innovation. It’s the opposite of popular culture in many respects. It’s the antithesis of the bottom line culture that spits out product and market-tested corporate entertainment to defined demographics. It can have little in common with popular entertainment apart from the confusing similarities of form. Indeed, it often grows right out of contempt for, opposition to and critique of the corporate entertainment culture that it can be inadvertently mistaken for.

Unpopular culture isn’t an island. It gets easily swallowed up. It’s often their unpaid R&D system for the both art and commercial worlds. It actually drives a lot of the innovation.

My complaint about reducing discussions to high art v popular culture may seem flippant but there is a serious misunderstanding here. Many cultures — many of our best cultures — don’t fit the paradigm. They’re not precious enough for the art world or profitable enough for the commercial world yet they are vital and necessary and can be critical to both. The better we understand and support them for what they are and not what we’re preoccupied with the better off we’ll be.

The Powerhouse museum’s Sydney Design iPhone App

ARE OUR museums and art galleries our cathedrals, or our town squares? That was the question posed in The Wall Street Journal last week. American arts writer Judith Dobrzynski described what she refers to as “a big rupture” in the world of American art museums. She describes a tectonic shift in the way museums see themselves, their role and their audiences and one that is causing considerable division.

According to Dobrzynski: “Not so long ago, directors were proud to say museums were ‘cathedrals of culture’, collecting, displaying and preserving the best art. Today, that’s regarded by some as elitism, and it’s not enough. Reacting to demographic and social trends, they are bending the art-museum concept to reach new audiences and remain relevant.” In contrast, some museum directors have come to see museums as what she describes as “modern-day ‘town squares’, social places where members of the community may gather, drawn by art, perhaps, for conversation or music or whatever”. She cites the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis, which has taken to lending radios, blankets, playing cards and even iPads to people. It’s even inviting the audience to help curate a show from its collection.

Many Australian museums and galleries are at the forefront of the town-square approach. Here in Melbourne, ACMI has been hosting a “weird, wonderful and whimsical program” of “Burton club” — live music and performance events in conjunction with the Tim Burton exhibition. In Sydney, the Powerhouse Museum — long an Australian and world leader in reimagining what a museum can be – has been hosting everything from “Writer Overnighter” events where authors, children and parents stay overnight in museum and sleep among the collection to markets for Sydney’s best young designers. In Brisbane, GoMA has been organising “Up Late” for its Valentino, Retrospective: Past/Present/Future — complete with bar and music performances by leading local, national and international DJs.

It’s a fascinating evolution and not without much debate. There are both great potential rewards and dangers to elite institutions that go down this path. The promise of new audiences is immense, but so is the risk of undermining the authority and legitimacy built up by decades — or centuries — of conservative programming.

Despite the risks, the case for the more inclusive approach is overwhelming. It doesn’t come from within the museums but from the changing world outside. The cultural needs and expectations and choices of the community are multiplying and diversifying and museums and galleries are simply responding to it. The idea of uncontested authority is evaporating, as is that sense of reverence that was central to the museum as cathedral.

Culture has become more participatory and many have come to expect more from what museums do. DIY curation has become one of the most popular hobbies in the world. The nature of social media interaction is based in part on millions of contesting curators who are constantly selecting, critiquing and competing for attention. The real world is creating patterns and dynamics of enthusiasm and interest that museums and galleries need to respond to. They can be connected to but not contained by what goes on in a gallery collection — let alone the small fraction that is on its walls.

Our cultures are splintering, diversifying and evolving and telling us we need more town squares. Perhaps the real question is whether museums and galleries are the right places to become them. Should we really expect the cathedral to become the town square? Is it within their institutional DNA to become meccas of participatory projects? Or is it best that we build our town squares elsewhere?

Museums and galleries, like all cultural institutions, have to resolve how to balance the history, values and intent of many who love and value them against the rapidly evolving cultural landscape. New forms of practice, new demands on infrastructure and new audiences create new battles for legitimacy and attention. Museums unwilling to evolve risk being left behind and having to defend their legitimacy.

Yet museums and galleries have one huge advantage over the major performing arts companies that are also trying to grapple with the same challenges. They can be plural. They can try many things at once. They have the flexibility to innovate through experimentation. Indeed they can be both conservative and experimental, large and small, avant-garde and conservative simultaneously. Regardless of which approach proves successful, that may prove be the key to continued relevance in changing times.

THIS weekend I’ll be heading to Launceston with about a thousand artists and arts types for the biennial Regional Arts Australia conference. Against some of my best unreasonable prejudices, it’s a nice opportunity to remind myself that some of Australia’s more interesting creative dynamics are a long way from Southbank.

I might be lynched down south for admitting it, but the term “regional arts” for me still conjures up images of doilies and fetes, watercolour landscapes, and a general sense of quaint, trapped-in-time rural nostalgia. Of course, it’s not particularly accurate. It is one of those areas where perception and reality have long been on diverging paths. My recent experiences of dealing with artists living and working outside the major cities is not only that there’s a lot of good stuff out there but even a sense that it might be where a lot of the action is or soon will be.

Inner-city arty cultural types in Australia still have a strange relationship to the regions. We pride ourselves on looking to our internationalised cities for cultural cues. Yet we still mythologise and romanticise the bush. We are one of the most urbanised nations on earth and yet we are steeped in rural mythology. We think Australia’s cultural success and place on the international stage is a product of our internationalism and big-city sophistication. Yet many of our most successful and enduring recent cultural exports particularly our indigenous visual and performing arts — come from far away from all that.

Plenty still cringe at the thought of regional arts. Yet the very mention of places such as Woodford, Meredith, Wangaratta, Castlemaine or Byron Bay conjures up enthusiastic associations with the festivals and cultural events held there. And, of course, many love to flee the major cities in search of the fine wine, food and produce that have become prized cultural trappings.

There have always been talented regional artists, but structural changes are pushing more city-based artists to the regions and pushing more regional artists to the world.

One obvious reason is property prices. Our prolonged property boom has left many artists economically squeezed. The very types who make interesting things happen are being priced out of what were once their cheap, accessible inner-city haunts. Many are skipping over the suburbs and heading further out in search of a better life. Our inner cities seem to have fled to places such as Daylesford, Castlemaine, Natimuk and even Geelong in search of relatively low prices and those vital commodities that many artists desperately need: space and time.

A second great factor is telecommunications. Our regions connect direct to the world. Artists I know living in small towns can now find audiences around the world — often bypassing Sydney and Melbourne entirely.

It’s not just transplanted city folk either. I once stood on the shore at Elcho Island off Arnhem Land with the late Frank Garawirrtja. He’d put a performance by his son’s group The Chooky Dancers on to YouTube — sparking a global phenomenon seen by millions. Frank was born in an era when Elcho had no same-day communication with the outside world and was now enjoying a constant flood of international tour offers complicated by the ever-present challenge of spam. There are few better examples for regional artists and communities that there are real community and economic opportunities in local creativity. Done well, culture and creativity can provide a valuable lifeblood to economically challenged communities.

Success stories are hard to replicate and yet one thing stands out. While luck, geography and natural appeal all play a part, the regions that become creatively and culturally successful all have a common trait: they are confident in their local culture, they support their local artists to experiment and grow. They’re confident enough to celebrate what makes them unique and not feel insecure about what makes them different. They’re not simply trying to import their culture fully formed from the big cities or win a race for the most McDonald’s with the next town over.

In a world of global communication, defined by what connects us instantaneously it’s actually what makes a place and a culture different, unique and worth seeking out that attracts a premium.

Australia’s regional centres and artists are uniquely ready to capitalise on that.

Ride, Vapour Trail. I once spent 6 hours on a train to buy this album.

THE music industry has seen massive changes recently — both for better and for worse, as musicians have adapted to changing times, technologies and audiences. In many ways they might be the canaries in the mine for many other art forms.

I had an old-man moment not long ago. I was explaining to someone in their 20s that when I was in my late teens I would regularly make a six-hour round trip from Newcastle to Sydney to load up on imported and specialist niche books, records and CDs of the kind you couldn’t get in a large regional city. I learnt very quickly that the idea today that CDs and books might be something so scarce and hard to come by that you needed to travel vast distances to get them is not only old-fashioned — it’s inconceivable.

Those intervening years have totally upended the old music industry. CD sales have plummeted. Record stores — entire chains of record stores — have collapsed. Record companies and some musicians have suffered as falling revenues from a surge in downloads — both legal and illegal — have undermined old business models. For many it has been disastrous — a long slow decline that has overturned pretty much all the certainties that many careers were based on.

But it’s not all bad. For teenage kids there has never been a better time for finding and loving music. Despite what you might hear and fear for a lot of musicians, it has been a golden age.

For those many musicians — like the obscure indie ones I used to travel to collect — who were never of great interest to record companies in the first place, the technological changes have been liberating. Artists who could never get played on the radio no longer need to worry about it. The same digital downloads that so scare the major labels allow them to find audiences everywhere.

Bedroom musicians who could barely afford to press vinyl or manufacture CDs no longer need to worry so much about it. Where they would have once fought a losing battle for valuable space on record shop shelves, and struggled with expensive distribution, they now find their music available for sale almost everywhere.

There’s a record store in many people’s pockets now. Some smaller acts can actually make more money from recorded music than ever before and many have found ways to build audiences for their tours, live shows and merchandise who would never have found them otherwise.

What it really means is that music niches are global nowadays. Your audience can be virtually anywhere. Many bands with a dedicated and appreciative audience of a hundred or 200 people in Melbourne can probably find a similar-sized audience in most major cities around the world. A couple of years ago I was walking with my brother in Bangkok when he heard his flatmate’s band blaring out of an inner-city apartment building. Though they had a global audience and they lived with my brother, I’d never heard of them.

Why is this relevant to other artists? The balance of power is changing. What’s been happening to music is already happening to other media-based forms. Film, video and books are all in different stages of similar transition. Design and digitisable visual arts such as photography have also become international in many ways already. Even some of the more traditional performing arts are open to the same possibilities. Small-scale, high-concept works and ensembles that can readily and easily tour have new audiences and opportunities opening up around the world.

It does raise some interesting questions. The need for more smaller venues is growing. A world where hundreds — if not thousands — of bands and performers are travelling the world to play to hundreds of people requires a very different infrastructure than one where dozens are playing to thousands.

For Australia the technology creates a paradox. This generation simply hasn’t felt the tyranny of distance. Yet in a world of global touring circuits, the costs of getting on those circuits from here leaves us at a small but significant disadvantage. Australian acts may not quite have the same capacity as their European and American counterparts to get to the other side of the world to build their audiences.

Against all this change I’m reminded of a larger point. The cultures that can thrive are changing. The places where young artists and audiences look for inspiration and opportunity are changing. The challenge for all of us is to keep changing with it — even old men like me.