If anyone is interested, we will be talking 2020 summit and the future directions of Australian art and cultural policy type stuff on Radio National’s Australia Talks tonight at 6pm (EST). I’ll apparently be joined by fellow summiteers Robyn Archer, and Trevor Green from the MSO. If people want to be part of the discussion, the talkback number for listener input into the conversation is 1300 22 55 76.
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Jason Hill from Fairfax’s Screenplay Blog has started a bit of discussion prompted by my comments in relation to the Games industry and the 2020 summit.
What is the difference between a 1920s and a 2020 summit?
It’s not a joke. It’s the question that I have been mulling over since my last minute call up to the “Towards a creative Australia” stream of the 2020 summit next weekend. The seeming disparity between the stated goals and the mix of people that are being asked to discuss them inspired it.
Culturally, the difference between the 1920s and now are stark. The sheer diversity of cultural platforms and networks and the scale, speed and scope with which cultural activities take place has changed dramatically. Australian culture comes less from a small number of large institutions and more from a massive number of large and small scale companies, individuals, production houses, collectives, web sites, networks and initiators both here and around the world.
It is a cultural landscape made up less of fixed structures and more of fluid and dynamic forces. The key question is how to channel those forces so they flourish?
The answer to that question is easily sidetracked by the unrelated (but often legitimate) issues and ambitions of our professional companies and major cultural institutions. Half a century on from the Whitlam era few Australians would be convinced that a 2020 cultural vision focusing on innovation and initiative will be found in shovelling bigger buckets of money at conservative major institutions. Expecting it to trickle down through the layers of management to actual risk taking artists is naive at best.
Many of the comments posted here over the last few days either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge this. While many argue directly for a more diverse, competitive and dynamic funding environment the aim is less for grand, centralised and expensive top down public programs than for attention to the impediments and practical barriers that make it hard for creators to create, to find audiences, to take risks and to innovate.
Attention to those details is a key missing ingredient from our cultural policy mix. While tackling them is ambitious in scope and imagination it need not be costly in anything other than political will. The will necessary to identify the elements that hinder people from creating things and put in place the local, state and federal government strategies that facilitate them.
Tags: · 2020 Summit · Arts Funding · Microeconomic reform11 Comments
[Yes, somewhere inside me is a frustrated headline writer just busting to get out.]
I have to thank Ben Eltham and the comments over at Larvatus Prodeo and Christian McCrea for drawing this to my attention. Despite the fact that one of the agenda items for next weekend’s 2020 Summit is explicitly “How to encourage participation in emerging global industries such as game design, the internet 2.0, graphics-rich applications and animation” there is NO ONE on the list who really has much actual involvement with the computer games industry in Australia.
My own involvement in the world of computer games is pretty f**king minimal to say the least but i have at least had a long term interest and engagement in the area. Unless someone else who really knows this stuff received a late call up from reserve grade like me it may be left to me and a couple of games-friendly academics to carry this particular torch at the summit (there is obviously some sort of TORCH/ GAMES extended tortured China/Tibet metaphor there but i’ll be damned if i can be bothered working it in just now).
So i thought I’d throw it open here for any good ideas to take to the summit from the Games world. Can’t promise that it will be massively useful but I am trying.
Tags: 2020 Summit · Computer Games9 Comments
One of those strange days.
Until early this afternoon I was not one of the people attending next weekend’s 2020 summit in Canberra. I took a 3 week writing sabbatical back in early March and dropped mostly out of communication with the world. When i came back to civilisation i discovered that the nomination process for the summit had mostly been and gone. I returned with a couple of days to spare, took a quick look at the nomination form - which i remember (perhaps unfairly) as being heavy in its emphasis on qualifications and light on experience or ideas - and decided to pass on the grounds that I probably wasn’t the sort of person that they would be looking for.
I guess I also wasn’t sure that I was particularly comfortable with putting myself forward for a gig like that. I already have a few platforms to get my views out there and that it would probably be (or have been) a better process if people with less of a chance got a look in.
Anyhow… Fast forward a few weeks and a strange chain of events has led to me being given a last minute call up.
To cut a long story short, it turns out there are a few last minute wild cards being given out and I’ve been offered me one.
It was all a bit frantic on the phone today but I assume I’ve been invited me because I’ve got a fairly different perspective from some of those on the original list. There are a lot of great people on the original list but my initial reaction was one of being disappointed with the diversity of it.
It probably doesn’t help when people like me and most everyone i know aren’t really the types to nominate ourselves. Most of the participants are overwhelmingly attached to institutions large and small. While i am sure that most of them will be able to see beyond that the reality is that most of the arts and cultural sector isn’t like that any more and hasn’t been for a long time.
Anyhow, i thought i would throw it open to people to put forward ideas on this site over the next week. I’d be very interested to hear from cultural practioners, punters, artists, media makers, and trouble makers that are working at the coal face if you have any ideas for making a more Creative Australia. I don’t care what form you work in (if any) but I am particularly curious about the practical problems people encounter when working with budgets of 50, 500, or 5000 dollars rather than dealing with turnovers of 5 million.
I would hope that would be something that i could take with me to the summit.
Suggestions please! I will try and take any particularly good ones to the summit with me and some of the less good ones will feed into other things i do. Oh, and try not to dwell on needing more money - it goes without saying.
Tags: 2020 Summit65 Comments
Radio National have asked me to join a discussion on Australia Talks Thursday next week (the 17th) about the cultural priorities for the 2020 summit. It’s part of a series of discussions they are having leading up to the summit. In part they asked me to join in as a result of an op-ed piece i wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald last year about culture and covers bands.
I’ve re-posted the original article below as most people outside Sydney would have missed it.
No, i didn’t write the headline.
Mozart cover bands rake in the Moolah
Marcus WestburyIn the music scene there has always been a pretty strong division between those who play original music and those who are derisively, and sometimes unfairly, dismissed as covers bands. What’s the point of being in a band if you’re not playing your own songs? When was the last time that duo with a keyboard and a drum machine from your local RSL club had a breakthrough hit?
It’s not that covers bands aren’t talented, don’t make good music, don’t entertain or even have a good time. Hell, put enough drinks in me and I’ll hit the dance floor to an ’80s pop classic or wave a lighter with half a tear in my eye to, say, Flame Trees.
But no one seriously goes out of their way to suggest that covers bands are the most vital or important part of the music scene. Why then are covers bands - of the high-culture variety - receiving the bulk of arts funding?
Tags: 2020 Summit · Arts FundingNo Comments.
Just how big would the solar system be if you mapped it to scale on the surface of the earth?
Click on the thumbtacks for planet names and sizes.
The map above was put together after a few too many drinks last new year’s eve. One discussion led to another and before we knew it several of us were half arsedly planning one of the largest guerrilla art projects ever conceived.
Well that’s more or less how i remember it but the memory is a little fuzzy.
The plan was to pile a bunch of us into a van for a long road trip and secretly build a scale model of the solar system across the vast expanse of central Australia. The road that stretches across the Nullarbor plain that connects the east and west coasts of Australia is almost certainly one the few places on earth you could even begin truly see the vastness of the solar system at scale.
The idea at the time was that several of us might do it anonymously but we were thwarted by the logistics of sobering up and realising we would need to build a 240m sun. Somehow.
I’m posting it on the off chance that someone out there might work out how to solve the logistical problems for us. How?
Tags: Crazy ideas · Public Art7 Comments
I’ve just found out that I’ve failed to secure a Logie nomination for Not Quite Art.
The good folks at ABC TV had apparently put my name forward for the Graham Kennedy award for the “Most Outstanding New Talent.” It is a sign of just how delusional you (ok I!) can quickly become that i’ve managed the full arc of responses from initially thinking “That’s the most ridiculous thing i have ever heard” through to a few variations of “how could i not win? Really?” and even thinking up a few pearler lines for the victory speech. All in the course of about three weeks.
Tags: Disapointment · Failure · Logies · Richard Wilkins1 Comment
Following on from previous frustrations, I returned to Newcastle on the weekend.
Returning to Newcastle after any length of time away, the startling thing is just how badly shattered the CBD has actually become. When you live in Newcastle it is easy to become almost blind to the fact that the majority of the two main streets are broken, boarded up, vandalised, empty, derelict and abandoned. You assume that it is normal and inevitable until occasionally some one with fresh eyes sees it and reminds you to look again. Decades of continuing decline has meant that people have become almost oblivious to it.
I spent the weekend doing a little bit of footwork for some future projects that I’m thinking about (more about that below). I walked a loop of the main streets of Newcastle (Hunter and King Streets) and took notes and photos of the buildings that were empty at street level.
The results marked up using Google Maps below paint a devastating picture of the true state of one of Australia’s largest cities.
Tags: CBD · Decay · empty spaces · Newcastle · Renewal9 Comments
Apparently not.
I’ve long been advocating a more enlightened approach to liquor licensing in NSW and particularly in my home town of Newcastle. I’m convinced (and convinced i can convince most people) that a more diverse culture (and i mean everything from punk venues to jazz clubs) of drinking, dining, music, art and entertainment is a missing catalyst for the rejuvenation of Newcastle’s CBD. It’s also a big part of the way out of the worst elements of Newcastle’s culture of violent dickheadiness that has been the subject of much debate lately.
Late last year, after years of lobbying and complaining the NSW government finally relented and introduced legislation that allows for smaller cultural bars and performance venues and not just poker machine stuffed binge barns. Both the Raise The Bar campaign and Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore cited an episode of Not Quite Art in their campaign for a saner approach in NSW.
Now all this meant that I was pretty keen to get something happening. I immediately began doing some groundwork to see if i could put my money where my mouth has been with a plan to get such a place off the ground in Newcastle. After all, it’s not as though it would be hard to find venues with all the vacant real estate.
It turns out that maybe Newcastle is vacant because of the incompetent Real Estate industry?
Tags: CBD · empty spaces · Liquor licensing · Newcastle · Not Quite Art · Small bars3 Comments
