marcus westbury

[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 [...]

THERE’S no lack of people lining up to take on unpaid or poorly paid roles volunteering their time for arts organisations. With the possible exception of charities, and community groups, very few areas of life are more reliant on voluntary labour than the arts. But what responsibility does the arts have to the unpaid? Put [...]

It can be incredibly difficult to kill an arts company in this country and damn near impossible to simply let it die a natural death. Come the apocalypse, the only things likely to survive are cockroaches, email spammers and arts companies. Yet finding a way to let things die is vitally important in the realm [...]

For what i think is the first time, my weekly column in The Age is up and on the web site. DIGITAL technology has created two opposing cultures. One where copyright rules are enforced by a phalanx of lawyers with no regard for artistic intent or respect for legitimate creativity, and another — in our [...]

From my small air conditioned bubble in a sweltering Melbourne the abstract economic gloom of stock shocks and far away corporate collapses is getting less and less abstract with each passing day. Anecdotal reports of jobs drying up, businesses closing, incomes evaporating and people fast becoming un or underemployed are mounting around me. It is [...]

From the Not Quite Book notes. Click here for an explanation… Traditionalists will hate me but I am less and less convinced that artforms are a particularly useful way to slice up the way that cultures are talked about or resourced in the world. The qualities that interest me are far more about the resonance [...]

I was asked recently by the folks at the Department Of Culture and the Arts in WA to take part in a forum about “Creative People” as part of their process to develop an “Umbrella Policy Framework” for the state. I thought it might be useful to post the notes here that i made for [...]

From the Not Quite Book notes. Click here for an explanation… I have a problem with the word “Art.” I duck the question of what is and isn’t Art. I’ve resorted to all the flippant throw away clichés: that like pornography “I know it when I see it”; that “I don’t know what it is [...]

I am stuck in Singapore for a few days. There is nothing quite like being bored and away from the constant series of distractions that pepper my life to focus the mind a little. I’ve decided to spend at least some of this time productively by digging through some old notes I’ve compiled and posting [...]

A new series, Culture Shock, is in the early stages for ABC TV (Australia). All going to plan (which these things rarely do in my limited experience) we should begin filming around around July and the series should air in about October 2008. Yes, I already know that the title is a bad cliché – [...]