marcus westbury

ARTISTS and sportspeople have a lot in common… really. I’ve never understood the idea that art and sport are somehow opposed to each other. I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, and a little time with sportspeople, and I’ve come to the conclusion that they’ve got more in common with each other than just [...]

I am conducting a little experiment over at Facebook. I’m trying to work out whether it is possible to somehow round up all those people who don’t quite fit the “Art” boxes and as a result never get a seat at the table. My theory is that a relatively small number of highly centralised and [...]

It’s taken me a long time to update it here (hey, i went on holidays in New Zealand for 3 weeks and they don’t have the internet over there yet) but i’ve been asked to sit on a “Creative Australia” advisory panel established by Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett. You can read all about it [...]

I’ve held off on writing this because to be perfectly honest I’m really not sure what the hell happened at the 2020 summit in Canberra last weekend. Several days of attempting to process it and decompress later the only thing that is clear is that the whole 2020 summit process was never clearly defined and [...]

I’m off to Canberra this morning. I had the best of intentions of replying in detail to a lot of the ideas and comments that have been raised over the last few days. But the sheer rate and volume of contributions have made that impossible. I’ve read everything i can get my hands on and [...]

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. Quite a few interesting comments piling up there.

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 [...]

[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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]