marcus westbury

I’ve booked a trip to the USA next year between the 22nd of January and the 13th of February 2011. For the last two years i have been working on Renew Newcastle and i’m keen to touch base with other projects involved in of revitalising cities, urbanism, culture and low cost/ low budget revitalisation of urban [...]

As of today, all of the writing on this web site is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. Practically that means that i encourage people who read the contents of this site to republish it in other non-commercial contexts, to link to it, to use excerpts of it in their own work or [...]

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 [...]

Given that The Age web site folks haven’t exactly been enthusiastic about posting my columns online, i am going to start posting them here as well after a a bit of a delay. I’ll post a new (old) column here each week starting from today. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while but [...]

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 [...]

Based on the fact that i am sweating over my copy this afternoon, i think it is safe to say that I am now officially a newspaper columnist. The downside is that “newspaper columnist” is a sub-profession of human being somewhere above politician and used car salesman and below journalist. I’m not sure that inflicting [...]

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 [...]

I’d resisted posting this for a while because i wasn’t exactly sure how to introduce it. Part of me was tempted to launch into an elaboration of my theory of why and how Adelaide is the least interesting cultural place in all of Australia. It is. Honest. Part of me was tempted to elaborate on [...]

One of the strange things about being on television is that it creates the impression that you’re busy, jetsetting and living some sort of glamorous, high profile existence. To be fair, i did get to go to the Logies but it isn’t all tedious and bizarre nights surrounded by people who dig up people’s gardens, [...]

The second episode of Not Quite Art Series Two goes to air on TV on ABC1 across Australia at 10pm local time tonight. If you’re in Australia, it is possible to download all episodes of the series in full and for free from the ABC web site. However as a lot of people have observed [...]