marcus westbury

MakeSpace – a Renew Newcastle project I’m on the road for about a month in the USA and Canada and meeting a lot of people who are interested in Renew Newcastle but don’t know too much about me, Newcastle, the project or its history. I thought i should try my best to put a few [...]

The Room Project, a Renew Newcastle installation I was recently asked to give a talk to the Victorian Association of Performing Arts Centres annual conference talking about how social media is changing the arts and i was specifically asked to use Renew Newcastle as an example. What follows is my notes from that talk – [...]

WHAT is the etiquette for tweeting at the theatre, a concert or any other live performance? Should you do it at all? Or never? Should it be encouraged  even rewarded  or frowned upon? It may not have been the biggest arts story going around in the general community last week but, as you [...]

ARE critics a dying breed? Are the art critics that we’ve come to know (and, occasionally, love) soon to become things of the past? Last month, I joined a panel at the Australia Council’s annual arts marketing summit in Brisbane, asking “Who’s the critic now?” The audience was made up of directors and marketing people [...]

THE dominant cultural form of the 20th century is starting to unravel. What was the dominant cultural form of the 20th century? There are plenty of candidates and no lack of ones that are allegedly under threat. Cinema? Rock music? The album? Radio? The four-minute single? Magazines? Newspapers? Television? Actually, it was none and all [...]

The googlewhack is dead and it’s all twitter’s fault. Last night i inadvertently stumbled across a googlewhack. Well sort of – i actually entered a single made-up word and it came back with one result. Technically, a googlewhack is meant to be when you enter two words into a search engine and come up with [...]