marcus westbury

IN POLITE company in arts circles these days, you do not mention the “e” word. No, not e-books or e-commerce or the other electronic innovations running a wrecking ball through Australia’s much loved big-box retailers. The uncomfortable e-word in the arts is “elite”. The arts are in a bind when it comes to elitism. Once [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There is now an updated 2009-10 version of this data here. I’m basically just posting this here so i can link to it from this discussion over at Larvatus Prodeo. But it’s a reminder though that I’m involved in many debates and discussions about arts funding and policy priorities in Australia at the moment (most [...]

From The Arrival by Shaun Tan CALL them subcultures, genres, specialities or whatever, but culturally we are fast becoming a society of cross-pollinating subspecies. Australia has vibrant pockets of passion for everything from Korean film, contemporary theatre, comic books, hacker culture, art deco architecture, indigenous painting, poetry, hip-hop, opera and jazz. At face value, they [...]