marcus westbury

[Note: I am catching up with posting bits and pieces of writing that have not yet been posted here. This was actually published in The Age last November - preempting the recent events at The Tote and The Arthouse. Umm, told you so?]
MELBOURNE does the small scale better than any other Australian city – or [...]

LYNDON Terracini has been outspoken and surprisingly frank about the limitations of Australia’s major performing arts companies in recent weeks. The incoming Opera Australia artistic director has slammed Australia’s orchestras and opera companies as “conservative and predictable,” admitted that Melbourne has been poorly served by Opera Australia from Sydney and, most notably, has drawn attention [...]

In response to some recent posts and articles of mine about arts funding and cultural policy,  Nick Herd from the Australia Council pointed me to this comprehensive history of arts policy in Australia prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It’s very useful background reading for anyone thinking of putting in a submission to the National Cultural [...]

I’ve been using the word “initiativist” recently to define my philosophical approach to culture. I used the term in my lecture in Newcastle the other night and attempted to sneak it into my column in The Age this week but it was removed by an overzealous sub-editor probably on account of it not being a [...]

IS THE best thing government can do for artists always to fund them? A preoccupation with funding is understandable but it obscures many other things governments can do to foster a rich and thriving culture. There are even things that governments can do that cost almost nothing at all.
Funding is actually peripheral for a lot [...]

Musings about the relationship between art and creative industries that originally appeared in The Age. There is probably much more to say on this topic but probably not witout the sweeping generalisations inherent in 700 words.

SHOULD governments fund the arts “for art’s sake”, or should they be developing “creative industries”? It may seem like an [...]

I was commissioned by Meanjin late last year to write an essay about the role that funding bodies play in Australian culture.  It appears in the current edition of the magazine and is now available online. Meanjin is one of Australia’s oldest and most esteemed literary journals and one that is currently enjoying a renaissance [...]

A FRIEND of mine visited Melbourne for the first time in more than a decade last week. The last time he was here was in the early ’90s, in the middle of the last great recession to hit this city. The Melbourne he remembered was the one that was broke and broken. He’d heard about [...]

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 of [...]

The Sydney press is reporting this morning that the NSW state government “has agreed to fund a $1 billion project to finally bring the Sydney Opera House in line with its designer’s vision.” This decision is one that is so staggeringly out of touch with the realities of cultural policy at the moment that it [...]