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.

This article was written for the latest edition of the Dutch architecture/ design journal Volume…

Let me put a scenario to you. Say you live in an aging, fading industrial town. One that has been on receiving end of repeated shocks from earthquakes and natural disasters to the closure of its largest industries and mass unemployment. A city where an old urban core – a legacy of an era of trams and public transport long gone – has hollowed out and emptied. Retail has moved to the suburbs and a growing suburban sprawl. A city with dozens, if not hundreds of empty buildings in the old downtown. A place where the feedback loop has become so desperately negative that many of the shops and offices that remain are forced to leave by the growing vacancies around them.

How do you turn such a place around? How to bring life and people back to it? How to bring interest, curiosity and commerce? How to make it – or at least some of it – liveable and desirable again and to bring its decaying urban character back into flower?

Almost always, the answers to those questions are about physical things. They involve long planning process, research, workshops and facilitation followed by attempts to attract large amounts of capital to invest in new buildings, public amenities or to kickstart new industries.

But what if you can’t do that?

Suppose you have access to none of the above. Suppose that to varying degrees of quality and effectiveness all of the above has been tried and failed or at least stalled – lost in posturing and process.

Imagine that you have no money. That you cannot buy or build anything – that you are stuck with the building stock and the hard infrastructure. Imagine you are not the government and have little or no capacity to persuade them to make major investments or decisive changes.

If all that doesn’t make things difficult enough, let’s say the budget you have to work with is tiny – amounts you can put on a credit card. All you have is the city – beautiful, fading but endowed with many interesting small scales spaces, a talented enthusiastic creative community and a generous broader community willing to donate their skills and time and resources in kind.

What could you do?

Actually, this is not a thought experiment. It’s a real place. It’s my home town of Newcastle, Australia. As recently as 2008 the situation in Newcastle was pretty much as described above. Yet as of a few months ago more than sixty new creative projects, initiatives, galleries, studios, and creative businesses – all experiments of various kinds – had started up in the old downtown. The city – far from being a failed post industrial basket case – was being hailed by the world’s biggest travel publishers Lonely Planet as one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit in 2011 on account, in large part, of a vibrant creative resurgence that had taken place in the long dead downtown.

So how did we get here from there? Two years is too short and the budget was too limited to address any of the city’s real hardware problems. Instead, Newcastle took a different tack. To do so we engaged the immediacy of enthusiasm and activity and stepped back from the contentious and divisive debates about what should and shouldn’t happen in the long term. To do that you need to start by rewriting – or hacking – the software to change not what the city is but how it behaves.

[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/2011/01/21/tiny-revolutions-meanjin-essay/ http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2011/01/21/tiny-revolutions-meanjin-essay/#comments Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:30:01 +0000 marcus http://www.marcuswestbury.net/?p=1257

Tiny Revolutions

At more than 200 years since European settlement, Newcastle is an old city in Australian terms. It’s a fading but to my eyes beautiful seaside city of a bit under half a million people. Like many industrial cities in the developed world it has been battered by the loss of once formidable heavy industry. In a global economy that demands specialisation and scale, its steelworks—once the defining symbol of the town—has been a casualty. The BHP operation once dwarfed much of the city around it. A decade after its closure, the site is little more than a hole in the skyline, some rusting ruins and unfulfilled promises of new industries and opportunities. Where blast furnaces once stood nature slowly reasserts itself. Here the mighty works of the industrial era and its toxic legacies lie idle.

When the BHP Steelworks towered over the economy and geography of Newcastle—as it did when I was growing up there few would have suspected it would ever be too small to survive. Now there are newer, larger cities of steel thousands of kilometres to the north. They’re fuelled by global not national demand, by billions not millions of people, by cheap labour and economies of scale once impossible to imagine.

Today Newcastle digs up its exports. It is the largest coal port in the world. Coal is both a boom and a portent: a precious, finite and poisonous resource. Each ship sets sail on an ever-rising sea. Though the community is fiercely divided about whether the end should come by caution, consumption or calamity, few in Newcastle would argue that coal can last forever.

The riches being mined nearby are not reflected in the cityscape. Newcastle is no shining resource-rich boom town. The old city declines and decays. Well over a hundred empty buildings line the two main streets and the once vital commercial heart of the city has become an anachronism of forgotten trams and consumption patterns long past: designed for a local economy before the rise of suburban shopping centres, global brands and car culture made such things obsolete.

There are at least six billion perspectives on globalisation. There are stories of great opportunity (development, economic liberation and transformation) and of great destruction—social, environmental and personal—in every community, in every culture. Both sides of the globalisation story are reduced to simplifications, yet really they are stories of complexity and contradiction.

For this story of Newcastle it is necessary to reduce this complexity to a problem of scale. It is a story is about accepting contradiction and the opportunities offered by cultural globalisation to repair some of the damage wrought by economic change. It is tale of looking for the small solutions to giant problems: of rebirth and renewal through a series of tiny revolutions.

Read the rest at the Meanjin web site.

If you want to find out what happened next check the Renew Newcastle web site or see what the good folks at Lonely Planet have been saying.

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.

The Room Project, a Renew Newcastle installation

I was recently asked to give a talk to the Victorian Association of Performing Arts Centres annual conference talking about how social media is changing the arts and i was specifically asked to use Renew Newcastle as an example. What follows is my notes from that talk – as with all times when i post speech notes it’s probably a little scrappy and only particually thought through in part. Sorry about that.

Thanks to VAPAC for having me. I appreciate the opportunity. I also appreciate that I’ve been encouraged by Jenny from VAPAC be a little provocative which is an opportunity that I always relish and hopefully not something that either of us will regret by the end.

As the directors and managers of fixed performing arts centres, you’re probably not really my target audience for a lot of the issues that I talk about but I hope we can learn something from each other. As per the session title I’m going to talk a little bit about Renew Newcastle – particular it’s use of social media – but it in order to get there I thought it might be best to start with something more recent.

Last week – last Friday to be precise – I started a new project, Renew Australia. Essentially, it’s a scheme aiming to take the model that we have developed in Newcastle and try and seed and roll it out nationally.

I will come back to that model later in the talk but essentially in Newcastle we’ve invented a system – a legal mechanism, a philosophy, some template agreements, some negotiating tactics and a bunch of other tools that allow us to take otherwise empty buildings and make them available to artists and community groups on an ongoing but temporary basis.

We’ve taken over about 40 once empty buildings in Newcastle in the last 18 months or so and used them to launch about 60 arts projects, creative enterprises and community groups of different kinds. It’s worked well in Newcastle and will hopefully work well in other places – hence the interest in taking national.

Last week, in response to the potential for a little more funding and a flood of incoming requests I formally announced that I was planning to try and set up a “Renew Australia” project that will attempt to work with local groups to seed and replicate the project nationally. At this point Renew Australia has no budget to speak of.

I have been promised but not yet received a small seeding grant of $10,000 from a group called Social Traders who are running a great social enterprise incubation initiative called The Crunch. That money is essentially for a feasibility study and business plan that will allow us in turn to bid for funding early next year. But formally, legally Renew Australia does not yet exist. We have also been shortlisted for funding by The Australian Centre for Social Innovation and I have every intention of aggressively shaking the tin around next year.

To date though Renew Australia hasn’t actually received a cent.

I launched Renew Australia last week not with a press release, or a media announcement but with a blog post on my personal web site and on the Renew Newcastle site and a link from me on twitter and Facebook. I asked my friends and supporters of likeminded organisations to register their support by becoming “Fans” of Renew Australia on Facebook.

Now, it’s less than five days later as of this morning the non-existent, as yet unfunded Renew Australia has about two and a half thousand fans on Facebook. To put that in context – after only 5 days – Renew Australia has more Facebook fans than all but a handful of the nation’s largest arts organisations.

It took less than 20 hours to overtake Opera Australia. It took a few days to overtake the Melbourne and Sydney Symphony Orchestras and the main stage theatre companies are very much in our sights.

Is there anyone here from The Victorian Arts Centre? You’ll be pleased to know that you’re still ahead of us. Last I looked Renew Australia was about 5 fans behind The Arts Centre. However, at the rate our fans are growing I’d be reasonably confident that we’ll pull ahead if not by the end of this presentation, certainly by the time I get back to the centre of Australia’s newest national cultural institution – located in the salubrious confines of my front bedroom/ baby room/ storage area in Brunswick – some time this evening. [Renew Australia had actually overtaken the arts centre by the end of the talk].

I am using this as an example for two reasons.

The first and most obvious reason is that although I don’t like boast, I’m just boasting. I think it’s always important to preface any gratuitous boasting with “I don’t like to boast” even when it’s obviously disingenuous. In this case the opportunity presented to do so is irresistible.

The second reason is far more substantial reason actually relates to why I’m here. The Renew Australia example demonstrates far more effectively than any long elaborate argument just to what extent Social media is proving a great leveller between established infrastructures and institutions and what I will for lack of a better term and because it sounds sexy call insurgent initiatives and ideas.

The point here is not simply that we’ve had a good run on Facebook thus far but just how quickly the dynamics are changing around where cultural audiences are coming from and how those audiences and communities create and recreate themselves.

Renew Australia’s five day unfunded, mostly spontaneous marketing campaign has basically fitted into the spare time between my various overlapping day jobs. I’ve juggled it with my sudden and slightly overwhelming responsibility as a first time dad to a six week old. It shows how effectively those with a good network (or access to one) and a good idea can quickly access and activate large-scale national and even international networks of support.

Somewhat counter-intuitively, i would actually argue that these kinds of projects and initiatives have access to audiences and supporters in ways that even the most well funded of the nation’s formal arts infrastructure will struggle to compete with. I can’t know for sure but I realistically predict that by the time it actually legally exists some time next year Renew Australia will be – in Facebook but certainly not funding terms – could well be one of the largest arts and cultural initiatives in the country.

How Facebook saved Renew Newcastle

Renew Australia is not an entirely new scheme. It is based on a model I have been working on in Newcastle since 2008. But Renew Newcastle too is very much a social media project and has its origins in the social media landscape.

Renew Newcastle is a project set up in response to the decay that was evident in Newcastle CBD. To cut a long story short there are about 150 empty buildings, I believed there were a lot of artists and creative types who would and could use them, so we set up a not for profit company to effectively borrow them while they are empty and make them available to artists creative types who use them to incubate their own initiatives.

Before today how many of you had ever heard of the Renew Newcastle project?

If you answered yes to that question [and the vast majority of the audience did] it may surprise you to learn that Renew Newcastle has never taken out an ad. I have only once in the entire history of the project sent out a media release – which was way, way, way back in early 2009 when we launched our first projects into empty shops. Pretty much the only way you could know about is directly and indirectly is via social media.

If you follow my blog, you may have read about it there, but you wouldn’t have read more than oblique reference to it in my column in The Age for example. I write for a Melbourne based newspapers and they generally like me to write about goings on in Melbourne not my Newcastle based pet projects so while I’ve made the odd reference to projects I’ve been doing with empty buildings my editor has so far not let me indulge my urge to write about renew.

Indeed as I put my email address and twitter contacts on the end of my articles I do get the odd angry email from someone who points out that while I’m very opinionated about what others are doing I should “put up or shut up and try doing something myself for a change.”

As we generally don’t do traditional media releases and haven’t taken out any ads, if you’ve heard about Renew Newcastle – even via TV or on the radio, you have almost certainly heard about it from someone who heard about it via social media. From people who joined our Facebook group or heard about it from people who did. From someone who follows me on twitter or from people who wrote about it after hearing about it from someone who follows me on twitter. In some cases its come via someone I’ve emailed directly but much of our media coverage has come as the extension of the social media conversation into the traditional media space than because we hired a publicist.

Social media is – and this example demonstrates – a giant conversation. Or another way of looking at it is as hyper accelerated word of mouth.

Out of sheer necessity Renew Newcastle began life as a social media project. If it hadn’t it wouldn’t have happened. Social media made this project. Back in mid 2008 when they idea was slightly more than a well developed thought bubble I started a Facebook group to float the idea.

I did this for a couple of reasons. One is that I simply have an annoying habit of starting Facebook groups for my pet ideas – many of which i hasten to add turn out to be total duds. Another more practical reason was that while Newcastle is my hometown I now live in Melbourne and found it difficult to gauge from afar whether and to what extent anyone in Newcastle might be interested in such a scheme.

At a time when I start the Facebook group I was not yet fully committed to the project. If anything it was almost at the point where i was retreating from it.

Every funding body from the Australia Council down to the local council was telling me that they weren’t interested because the project didn’t fit the boxes and/or that they were already doing it and/or that i should come back later as now was really bad time and/or that would gladly support it provided I made a few changes and turned it into something completely different.

Indeed it’s amazing just how unsuccessful everything other than social media was at incubating this project.

Initially the idea was that the project would be a TV doco and/or series following my entertaining but quite likely futile attempts to get artists into the empty buildings of Newcastle. The ABC had decided that they weren’t particularly interested in that either and my producer decided to simply disappear off the face of the planet at exactly the crucial moment when we shopping it around to a couple of film funding sources. My pet idea for extending my short lived career as a TV presenter on Not Quite Art in turn turned out to be a project so entirely out of control that it actually killed it. Juggling Renew and everything else effectively killed of any hopes of having any time to make any more tellie any time soon.

As you could imagine, having been rejected by absolutely everyone, the prospect of spending an awful lot of my own money on the project – making what has turned out to be about 40 or more return trips to Newcastle – mostly at my own expense, and generally throwing myself into something that seemed to be all downside and of no interest to anyone who might actually have the power to help was becoming a less and less appealing prospect with every passing day.

Then something incredible happened. Facebook saved the project.

Having started the group at one of the more optimistic moments and invited my friends who either lived in Newcastle or I thought might have a bent for this kind of DIY project and approach, a snowball started to form. Within a day or so there were a hundred people, then there were 300 then 800 then 1000 then 1500 then 2000. Every day i woke up it seemed someone new, in most cases someone I’d never met was joining the group. Many were emailing me directly to tell me that they believed in the project and they wanted me to do it.

While the powers that be could see little interest or value in it, the people of Newcastle certainly could. How can you say no to that?

Like word of mouth – or gossip – social media like Facebook in this case can become a self-perpetuating brushfire. When several of your friends join a Facebook group, Facebook points it out to you and suggests that you might want to do so too. It was that effect more than anything that for me that quickly established that the group had genuine deep roots in and interest from the Newcastle community.

At first I feared it was simply all my Melbourne arty friends and their friends who were supporting the project yet one of the other neat things that Facebook does is tell you which groups have the highest correlation of members with yours. The number one group associated with Renew Newcastle wasn’t some inner city Melbourne wanky arty thing, it wasn’t the one i started for my own Tv show, it wasn’t even one I was personally was a member of – it was a group called Bugger Off, It’s Called “Gardo” – a group set up by a bunch of pissed of Novocastrians who weren’t impressed with the new rebranding of “Gardo” (or the shopping centre formerly known as Garden City) as Westfield Kotara.

Renew Newcastle now has abut 3500 Facebook group members but that correlation is as good sign as any that it has deep local roots.

The unfair advantage of having nothing

Over this last weekend I was privately gloating. After my recent Festival of Dangerous Ideas talk (which you can read here or watch here) I couldn’t resist noting the milestones of which major national arts organisations Renew Australia was knocking off as it was rapidly accumulating facebook fans. At one point I emailed colleague to point out just who we’d knocked off and how quickly we’d done so.

Her response was that I was being a little unfair. She pointed out that it was a little unfair to compare Renew Australia to the likes of the MSO, the SSO, Opera Australia or any of the others we were shooting past in Facebook fans, after all, Renew Australia she said has such huge advantages.

She’s right…  But let’s just take a second to parse that comment.

Renew Australia — a project that does not yet exist, has not yet received a cent in funding, has no employees, has no marketing department, no buildings, no fixed infrastructure has huge advantages over the nation’s largest arts companies when it come to using social media to market and promote itself.

Welcome to the crazy world of 21st century cultural dynamics. It’s true but if you’re a traditionalist it’s almost impossibly weird to contemplate.

So what exactly are our huge advantages?

The first is simply that it is a bloody good idea. Renew Australia is in my not-so-humble-opinion simply a kick arse concept of the first order. But looking more deeply in many respects much easier to sell than a theatre show or a subscription season or the some nebulous idea that you might become a fan of a company or a building. Which is not to say that they are bad things but the idea of becoming a fan of an idea is perhaps an easier thing to sell than the complex dynamics of a company with history, politics. Even ardent fans approach things that they love with some detachment any issue from the recent changes to the seats, not liking what they’ve done with the place or the general sense that it was better back in the day.

The second huge advantage is that Renew Australia is participatory and plural. It is a project that has moved well beyond the elite artist/ passive audience dynamic that has dominated much of the last few centuries. It asks people not merely register their support but also to register their involvement. It is based on the notion of providing opportunities and not of cultivating audiences. In becoming “Fans” people aren’t simply registering their support but they also register their desire to actually engage in doing or creating something.

On Facebook Renew Australia, like Renew Newcastle before it is engaged in the notion of providing opportunities and not of cultivating audiences. But then again, so are a lot of funding programs and agencies that have failed to attract anything like the same level of support online. Last time I looked Renew Newcastle for example has more Facebook fans than the Australia Council.

The other obvious advantage is me. This time i’m not really boasting – just pointing out that I’m a real person not a marketing department. It helps that I’m a geek. That I spend a fair chunk of my life online, that I have a lot of followers on twitter and quite a few facebook friends. I have spent a decade or more working with artists in a variety of contexts, places, festivals and events and I remain in touch with them via social media. Unlike a building or a company all my projects are networks and they endure as networks long after the show is over and the lights are turned off.

I – and any of you in the age of social media – unlike all the buildings, marketing departments, advertising campaigns and whatever else people traditionally associate with marketing am actually a totally mobile piece of infrastructure. Wherever I go, that social network goes with me. Plenty of them think I’m talking shit a lot of the time but at the very least there’s a high correlation between something I find interesting enough to do and something that people who connect with me on social media find interesting too.

Also, I, unlike a lot of you, am not bogged down by process. Renew Australia has the extraordinary advantage of not actually existing yet.  I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. I speak as myself and in my own voice. I didn’t have to call a committee meeting or ask my supervisor to promote what I’m up to. I can and do stay stupid things, I tweet when I’m drunk, I trip up and cross the line occasionally, do things that might actually embarrass my employer (if I had one) but I can also act opportunistically, outside of work ours, as say slightly tongue in cheek things at the expense of myself and the project if it helps gets attention and shows that as a real person i am actually thinking about its limitations.

The final point is demographics. I assume is the one that people would have assumed to be the main one but it’s not really that big a deal. It may surprise you to learn that the average age of a Facebook user is actually 38 and that 61% of Facebook users are actually older than that. The median age of the Australian population is actually only 36.9. Yes to some extent we have a demographic advantage over the major performing arts companies and centres that i was comparing us to online but that’s not because we are disproportionately young. Renew and Facebook skew middle while most major performing arts companies skew very old.

Our demographic advantage is not age but understanding. We know we are working with a generation or generations that have their own culture already. We connect with, channel and challenge that and they in turn carry on our ideas for us. This isn’t about marketing it’s about building communities around projects and ideas – if you can’t do that then don’t bother trying.

For all the dollars that have been ploughed into marketing, audience development, youth initiatives and education programs in much of the traditional arts sector there is only so much you can do. There’s only so much you can do to market to younger online audiences not because they are vacuous blank slates that are impossibly thick to get through to but because, well, they’re busy doing other the stuff. A lot of what they are doing is actually richer, more diverse and sophisticated than what people are trying to sell them. The key question is whether you can or want to be part of that not how to use some fancy new technology to sell them stuff.

What this means for Performing Arts Centres

What does this have to do with running a performing arts centre — particularly a regional one? Well, everything and nothing. Fortunately the nothing informs the everything side of the equation.

Really we aren’t talking about marketing here. One of my great and recurring criticisms of the whole arts funding and policy system is that it starts from the wrong assumptions most of the time. In this case, the assumption is that the culture or the “programming” is fixed and that what we are talking about with social media and the Internet is that the marketing needs to change.

The idea that we are still talking about “marketing” where the preeminent issue is that we somehow need to funky up the same old stuff that we’ve always been doing and put it onto the internet and the kids will come is frankly both confusing and infuriating to me. It’s also just a little insulting to the community out there.

Nothing could be more wrong. The point of social media is that the culture itself is changing. It’s a participatory culture out there. They aren’t consuming they are making it – from crafts to photography. They make it every day, in every word they write, every thought or image that they share. They create ad hoc reviews and short-lived publications. They make their own films. They select their own playlists, and make their own radio stations. They make crafts and bags, and jewellery and comics and they share skills with, swap them and sell them to folks around the word.

Engaging via social media is not about selling those people something its about joining that dynamic. It’s about supporting and nurturing that culture. Of course, Renew Newcastle and now Renew Australia are designed from the ground up with that in mind. Renew Newcastle is an experiment fast becoming a case study in applying that ethos to both a new arts framework but also a new regional development approach. If you’re running an arts centre it may not be what your designers and forebears intended but it ha to be something that more formal arts centres and infrastructures can think about and work towards.

You need to think of yourself less as a venue and more as a part of an evolving creative dynamic – as a hub of participation, of creation, conversation and not merely as a place of consumption.

How can you become that place in a community? In your community? In my experience that has been very difficult – as director of Festvials like Next Wave in Melbourne and This Is Not Art in Newcastle I found that the costs and complexities of using much of the city’s formal performing arts infrastructures significantly outweighed the advantages. This is particularly the case where the project is part of a transferable network – be it a festival or a community that has its own online communities and marketing capacities. In that context venues with grand resources but large cost burdens, administrative requirements and that are expensive to access and difficult to use become a liability not an asset.

Can you make your space behave like that audience and those communities need it to?

The whole point of Renew Newcastle was about making space behave like artists do. Much of the model we have embraced with Renew Newcastle has been one of building nothing and spending very little but redesigning the rules and processes that govern space so it can behave cheaply and so it can respond quickly to the needs of a fluid dynamic creative community that is constantly experimenting and reinventing itself. In practice we create a physical space where evolving virtual communities converge and can put down roots.

Conceptually, it’s a different space and a different role to that of the performing arts centre and yet I think it’s something they will need to grow into. Certainly it’s one i’m seeing the museum and gallery sector embrace – as they have begun to host everything from zine fairs to designers markets to nightclub nights but whether and how a performing arts centre can become that is a difficult challenge.

The question is not whether you can market via social media but whether you too can be responsive to a community of initiative?

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.