marcus westbury

What follows is the text of the speech i gave at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. This is pretty much a straight cut and paste of my speech notes so it may not read all that well on the screen to others and is inevitably full of typos, poor punctuation and general [...]

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 [...]

WHAT IS the largest cultural infrastructure project Australia has ever undertaken? If you guessed the Sydney Opera House or Federation Square, I’m afraid to inform you that you’re not even close. The largest piece of cultural infrastructure in Australian history is under construction even as we speak. A clue? It’s not a gallery, a theatre [...]

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 [...]