marcus westbury

What follows is the text of the speech i gave at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. This is pretty much a straight cut and paste of my speech notes so it may not read all that well on the screen to others and is inevitably full of typos, poor punctuation and general [...]

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 [...]

Regular readers or those following the arts policy priority debates that have been happening around the traps will have noticed that the Australia Council has responded to my graph of their 09/10 grants by art form with one of their own that you can see above or read about on their site. As you would [...]

Just catching up on some old updates around here. This one was in The Age before the election. NOT long ago, 15,000 people gathered in front of the Victorian Parliament to protest against an unpopular government decision. They chanted and marched, sported placards and listened to speeches. They weren’t protesting about refugees, climate change or [...]

I have been absolutely useless with keeping things up to date around here. I put it down to a combination of events at Renew Newcastle (where events in the city have forced us to bring forward a few medium term plans), the embryonic development of a Renew Australia (a national scheme to seed local “renew” [...]

This graph is a breakdown of Australia Council arts funding last year by artform. Despite recent scare campaigns that have suggested that Australia was somehow in the throes of doing away with the “heritage arts” in favour of “new media” there doesn’t appear to be much evidence of it in the numbers!  Right click “view [...]

THE news last month that Arts Victoria and the Victorian government was not getting around to notifying successful applicants for their 2010 arts grants in time for them to actually do their projects hit a raw nerve with me. It has an ominous ring for many who have schlepped around in the underfunded, under-appreciated bottom-feeding [...]

TO ALL of you who have suddenly developed a concern for the lack of originality in art and culture: Thank you! I’m pleased, but frankly, I can’t say I entirely understand it. To be honest much of the reaction to the Sam Leach’s winning of the Wynne prize has flat out confused me. It’s not [...]

Was Cate Blanchett seriously asking for $30 million for the performing arts last week? The big splash is a common provocation but not necessarily one to always be taken literally. To be fair, Blanchett did more than just ask for money. She made a passionate speech defending the social and economic role of the arts [...]

There is something slightly disingenuous about the spin that came with the Australia Council’s More than Bums on Seats: Australian Participation in the Arts survey released last week. At the very least, it’s a double-edged sword. At the superficial headline level, the report shows that Australians love and value the arts. But dig a little [...]