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 [...]
What’s so special about Opera? [My Festival of Dangerous Ideas Speech]
October 6th, 2010 7 Comments
Tags: Arts Funding · australia council · Covers bands · Festival of Dangerous Ideas · National Young Writers Festival · Renew Newcastle · sydney opera house · this is not art · What's so special about opera
In Praise of Unpopular Culture
October 5th, 2010 9 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · blogs · cultural policy · Fringe Festivals · high art · Next Wave Festival · Not Quite Art · popular culture · Sonic the hedgehog · this is not art · unpopular culture · youtube · zines
Australia Council arts breakdown
September 28th, 2010 11 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · australia council · Australia Council grants · Opera · trickle down arts · Two track arts world
Time to think beyond the arts funding system
September 24th, 2010 2 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · australia council · Ben Eltham · CPD · More than luck
Updates from the world of arts policy
September 23rd, 2010 6 Comments
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” [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · australia council · Ben Eltham · Centre for Policy development · Christopher Madden · cultural policy · cultural policy australia · Fee Plumley · Kathy Keele · Major performing Arts · More than luck · new media · Opera · orchestras · Renew Adelaide · Renew Australia · Renew Newcastle · Renew Townsville · Richard Gill · Richard Mills · Richard Tognetti
Where Australia Council funding goes – 09/10 version
September 15th, 2010 38 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: 2009 · 2010 · Arts Funding · ArtStart · australia council · Australian arts · dance · hertage arts debate · literatrure · music · National Cultural Policy · Opera · orchestras · theatre · visual arts
Waiting for God knows what, why or how long
August 11th, 2010 4 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · Arts funding in Australia · Arts Victoria · australia council · efficiency of government · user experience of government
Originality? Now there’s a novel idea.
June 16th, 2010 1 Comment
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 [...]
Tags: Archibald Prize · Arts Funding · Arts policy Australia · Australian landscape · conservatism in art · Covers bands · dance · originality · postmodernism · Sam Leach · sampling and appropriation · theatre · tongue in cheek · visual arts · waiting for godot · Wynne Prize
Can i have $30m too please?
March 26th, 2010 5 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: $30m · 19th century artforms · art v bureacracy · Arts Funding · bureacracy · bureacratic arts culture · Cate Blanchett · funding priorities · performing arts funding · Sydney Theatre Company · What the hell should we actually be prioritising spending limited resources on?
Australia Council should burn some midnight oil
March 22nd, 2010 6 Comments
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 [...]
Tags: Arts Funding · Arts funding spin · australia council · Australian Government · contemporary music · definition of the arts · midnight oll · More than Bums on Seats: Australian Participation in the Arts · music in Australia · orchestras · Peter Garrett