Was the Australia Concil’s abolition of the New Media Arts Board the single worst decision by an Australian cultural agency of the last decade? It’s certainly beginning to look that way.
A screenshot from "Escape from Woomera". Speculation persists that the funding of the game by the Australia Council's New Media Arts Board led eventually to that Board's abolition
Cast your mind back to 2004. John Howard is ensconced in power after comprehensively defeating Labor’s self-destructive Mark Latham. The culture wars rage on the op-ed pages of Australian daily newspapers (remember when people still read daily newspapers?). And in the arts, internal political machinations lead to the axing of two of the Australia Council’s most progressive and innovative funding boards: the Community Cultural Development Board and the New Media Arts Board. It all happens late in the year, with a brusque announcement by the CEO of the Australia Council, Jeniffer Bott, that the Australia Council would be “refocussing.”
At the time, Keith Gallasch called it a “devastating failure of nerve.” The CCD sector organised some relatively feeble protests, while OzCo’s power play steamrolled internal opposition. In response to the criticism, an amazingly poorly briefed Bott organised a series of largely symbolic “consultation meetings” which did little to allay fears that any “consulation” was merely window-dressing. Dark rumours circulated in the sector that the abolition of the New Media Arts Board in particular was payback for its funding of the controversial game mod Escape from Woomerra, which implicitly criticised the Howard Government’s highly politicised refugee detention policies. Artworld insiders like Michael Snelling rallied to Bott’s cause, giving self-serving interviews to arts journalists like myself.
Five years on, what’s the wash up? Bott has moved on, replaced by Kathy Keele, and the Australia Council is playing a desperate game of catch-up with this whole “‘digital culture” thing. But, as we’ll explore in this post, OzCo doesn’t get it. It’s not even close. Read the rest of this entry »
Art Monthly Australia’s “Arts of Sound” issue
November 5, 2009
The cover of Art Monthly Australia's november 2009 issue
The glossy art mag Art Monthly Australia has its latest issue out, devoted to Australian sound art. It’s guest edited by noted US arts writer Douglas Khan (who is doing a speaking tour of Australia in support of the edition) and has been ably coordinated by curator Sarah Last. As Sarah explains in her editorial:
A major aspect of recent media arts theory has been the emphasis on the need for media arts to be considered within its interdisciplinary intercultural contexts, rather than the traditional modernist functions and methodologies applied to historicisation and canonisation in art history. Douglas Kahn has been an international leader in contextualising auditory practices within 20th century arts theory, and more recently an underlying thesis of his work has been … one that rewrites the history of communication. With such a sustained and rigorous focus, together with the respect Kahn’s writings have already demonstrated for Australian practitioners, it is entirely fitting that we utilised Kahn’s influence as a guest editor. Far from being a parochial editorial process, this publication amplifies many distinctly different viewpoints from Australian and New Zealand writers and artists.
Without blowing my own trumpet too loudly, I have an article in the issue, looking at the work of Australian sound artists and experimental composers Joel Stern, Lloyd Barrett, Robin Fox and Anthony Pateras. Here’s a taste of what I’ve written:
In a series of interviews conducted with the artists during 2009, a picture emerges of a small, inter-connected and vibrant Australian artistic community, fertile with cross-collaboration amongst artists significantly engaged with the work of their peers.
The work of the four artists examined here shows a spectrum of sonic practice. Anthony Pateras, for instance, is primarily engaged in compositional practice from a western art music perspective; in contrast, Joel Stern and Lloyd Barrett are much more interested in the sonic textures of their experimental practice; Robin Fox sit somewhere in between. Even so, there are some important commonalities amongst these four artists’ work. All the artists examined here cite a strong commitment to performance in their practice. In varying degrees, all had significant contact with the principles of western classical music before becoming interested in different types of sonic expression. Finally, it can be argued that all share a commitment to what might be termed “pragmatic experimentation” – an artistic experimentation which moves their work beyond what Robin Fox calls the “game of nomenclature” that tends to arbitrarily divide music (whether it be experimental or classical), from art (whether it is sonic or visual), to a practice which draws on both traditions in novel ways.
Julian Meyrick on Australian cultural policy
November 4, 2009
Julian Meyrick. Source: Monash University website.
In a recent presentation to SUNY’s University at Buffalo Law School, well-known Melbourne-based writer and theatre director Julian Meyrick gives a precis of the current Australian cultural policy environment.
Meyrick’s thoughts are particularly relevant because he is part of Peter Garrett’s hand-picked cultural advisory group (along with Marcus Westbury, Cate Blanchett and David Throsby). It’s an entertaining speech that includes some real gems:
“I have been involved in cultural policy for 21 years as supplicant, victim, analyst, clacquer and serial complainer. While there’s been movement, there’s been little change. One document follows another in endless tirelss plodding succession, like a parade of elderly donkeys.”
Meyrick also sketches his amusing experiences in the Creative Australia group at the 2020 Summit, before moving on to Jim McGuigan’s recent discussion of Tony Bennett’s Foucoulvian research in the 1990s in Cool Capitalism, and then outlining the history of Australian cultural policy from the founding of the Australia Council on. There’s also a witty discussion of how the performing arts centres built in Australia in the 1970s were really constructed to address the problems of the 1960s but came online in the very different environment of the 1980s, plus some lovely throw-away lines about the redistributive nature of government arts funding, the intrinsic value of culture, the irreducibility of aesthetic experience, Clifford Geertz, the problems of federalism, and more.
Meyrick ends with a somewhat quixotic call for culture to be made an integral part of “universal citizenship”, a project about which, like John Gray, I am deeply skeptical.
“Consumer culture” – let’s loosely define it as the enjoyment of shopping and the positive identification with the acquisition of consumer goods – has generally not got the greatest press in recent times amongst progressives, liberals and left-wingers. It’s fair to say there is an ambient suspicion, disdain and even fear of consumer culture amongst many cultural theorists, commentators and academics that dates at least as far back as Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and indeed clearly earlier. In more recent times, the likes of Naomi Klein, Thomas Frank, Kalle Lasn and Joel Bakan (writer of the documentary The Corporation) have waged full-frontal assaults on the consumer behaviours associated with market capitalism. The political slogans advanced with these agendas include attacking the brands of corporations, and their symbolic expression, logos, as well as the act of consumption itself (“Buy Nothing Day“).
The reason I mention all this is that it mystifies the academics who study consumer culture in business and marketing schools. In fact, many cultural theorists may be surprised to discover that there is a sophisticated literature exploring what Eric Arnould and Craig Thompson, in a 2005 review article on the subject in the Journal of Consumer Research, describe as “a flurry of research addressing the sociocultural, experiential, symbolic, and ideological aspects of consumption.” Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been meaning to blog this for a few days, but have been prevented from mentioning it until today owing to a bout of the flu.
From Australia’s Arts Minister, Peter Garrett, comes this website:
A message from Arts Minister Peter Garrett – National Cultural Policy, a national dialogue.
Welcome to the National Cultural Policy web forum which will allow all Australians to contribute to the development of a national cultural policy.
This forum gives you an opportunity to help shape Australia’s cultural future. All your ideas are welcome – whether you are talking about cultural issues in your region or a grand vision. In my speech to the National Press Clubon 27 October I identified 3 key themes for consideration:
1. Keeping culture strong;
2. Engaging the community; and,
3. Powering the young.
These key points, along with other ideas, are expanded on more fully in the discussion framework. This is not an exhaustive list however, so use the National Cultural Policy web forum to tell us what you think. With your help, the Australian government will create a policy which celebrates and strengthens our culture.
Garrett made a speech to the National Press Club last week announcing this new cultural policy. You can make submissions here.
Why don’t Australians like Australian films?
October 30, 2009
It’s the debate that just won’t die. Australian films continue to draw just a few percent of total Australian box offices, and the local industry continues to scratch its head and wonder why.
On October 22nd, Metro Screen held a sold-out forum on the issue, chaired by Andrew Urban and featuring a panel of distinguished panelists including Margaret Pomeranz, Tony Ginnane, Troy Lum, Rachel Ward and the new boss of Screen Australia, Ruth Harley.
The debate swirled around many of the same-old, same-old standards of the “what’s wrong with Australian film” issue, which has been debated extensively in the press and the industry by critics and commentators like Jim Schembri, Luke Buckmaster and Lyndon Barber.
Does “Australian film” have a branding issue? Are Australian scripts and movies too depressing, mundane and dull? Are the marketing budgets unrealistic? Does cultural imperialism mean Hollywood is a natural advantage? Should we abandon “telling stories” and instead concentrate on “creating myths”? Do Austraolian film-makers and funding bodies even understand their audiences and why they go to see movies? And is it all about to change with the coming of digital delivery anyway?
One issue that came to my mind immediately was the uphill struggle most Australian cinema faces. Not only is it competing with the Hollywood juggernaut, but the small size of the Australian market means limited sources of capital investment, development funding and ultimately cinematic audiences.
There’s also no doubt that, structurally speaking, the market for film production in Australia is skewed towards blockbusters and against independent productions. That’s just an unsurprising fact of life; even though film has certain unique facets it is still hostage to the sorts of competitive advantages and economies of scale that make it easier to market and screen Transformers than an indie Australian drama.
Having said that, as a cultural economist I am constantly amazed at the lack of price differentiation in cinema. If audiences aren’t going to see Australian films, why not drop the price? It seems insane to me that we expect audiences to pay the same to see a Michael Bay special effects monster as for a $1 million Australian indie. Maybe it would not be more profitable in the long run to do this, but in the name of market share alone it seems to me a no-brainer. Maybe Australian dramas would sell at $9 or $7 or even $5. Of course, there are structural issues to do with distributors and exhibitors that would make this unlikely.
Philip Roth predicts the end of the novel
October 29, 2009
Philip Roth. Image from The Guardian / Orjan F Ellingvag / Dagbladet / Corbis.
Philip Roth is not my favourite writer, but he is surely a good one. One of the post-war American giants – the generation of Bellow, Updike, Pynchon and Morrison – Roth has given Tina Brown a wide-ranging and exclusive interview on the future of books and literature. He’s in full “Lion in Winter” mode, but perhaps that’s not surprising.
To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it’s hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities.
Nor will the Kindle rescue the form.
The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen. Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.
I think Roth is dead wrong. Cultural pessimism often is (the pessimists of 1930’s Europe are an important exception). Technologies come and go, and so do artistic genres and movements with them. But who’s to say that what replaces them is not just as good, if not perhaps better, than what went before? The advent of the novel polished off the epic poem within a generation, but also paved the way for the great era of 19th Century novelists like Balzac and Dickens. In our time, the success of long-form television drama like The Wire and Mad Men shows that audiences still have a hunger for complex, difficult, detailed stories – as Benjamin Schwarz notes in his masterful critical dissection of the first two series of Mad Men in the Atlantic.
The full interview is here.
Houses of the future in New Orleans?
October 28, 2009
A photo by Wayne Troyer of a Make It Right home under construction, in 2008. Originally posted at Jimmy Stamp's Life Without Buildings blog
In The Atlantic, Wayne Curtis explains that the disastrous failure of all levels of government to plan and rebuild New Orleans is having some interesting unintended positive consequences.
Four years after Katrina, the rebuilding of New Orleans is not proceeding the way anyone envisioned, nor with the expected cast of characters. (If I may emphasize: Brad Pitt is the city’s most innovative and ambitious housing developer.) [...]
In the absence of strong central leadership, the rebuilding has atomized into a series of independent neighborhood projects. And this has turned New Orleans—moist, hot, with a fecund substrate that seems to allow almost anything to propagate—into something of a petri dish for ideas about housing and urban life. An assortment of foundations, church groups, academics, corporate titans, Hollywood celebrities, young people with big ideas, and architects on a mission have been working independently to rebuild the city’s neighborhoods, all wholly unconcerned about the missing master plan. It’s at once exhilarating and frightening to behold. [...] Read the rest of this entry »
Newspapers’ death spiral deepens
October 28, 2009
US newspaper circulations are crashing
Two articles in the New York Times yesterday illustrate the depth of the tail-spin newspapers are now in.
One article reports on recent Audit Bureau of Circulations figures of hundreds of US newspapers, which show that circulations dropped by 10.6% in the six months to September. As the Times’ Richard Perez-Pena observes, “the two-decade erosion in newspaper circulation is looking more like an avalanche.”
Over in the Times’ Media and Advertising section, an equally gloomy article by Stephanie Clifford reports that a recent recovery in online advertising appears to be by-passing the websites of newspapers.
Over all, the Internet is the only advertising medium expected to grow this year in the United States, rising 9.2 percent, to $54.1 billion, according to figures released this month by ZenithOptimedia, a media service firm.
Newspaper sites cannot seem to catch that wave. The New York Times Company reported a decline in ad revenue at its newspaper Web sites of 18.5 percent this quarter compared with the third quarter last year. Advertising revenue at Gannett’s newspaper sites also declined. The McClatchy Company was an exception, with online advertising revenue rising 3.1 percent from a year ago, though the rate of growth slowed. (Other major newspaper companies have not yet reported their revenues for the most recent quarter.)
That is a sobering trend for newspaper executives, who once hoped that online revenue would make up for plummeting print revenue.
Sobering? These two trends put together would be enough to drive any media executive to drink.
UPDATE: Megan McCardle also calls it a death spiral.
Hazlehurst Regional Gallery’s Sylvania Waters Project
October 27, 2009
The Kingpins' "Unstill Life" (detail), 2009, from the exhibition page on Facebook
Tonight the ABC screened a documentary on a recent exhibition at Hazlehurst Regional Gallery in southern Sydney entitled “Reality Check”.
It’s a brief but interesting exploration of the curatorial process and ensuing artworks produced as a part of this exhibition, which was commissioned by Hazlehurst’s curator, Daniel Mudie Cunningham, and based around responses to the original Sylvania Waters TV series from 1992.
I haven’t seen the exhibition so I can’t comment on the artworks exhibited, but I thought the documentary raised (though lacked the length to explore) some interesting issues. To begin with, let’s look at the artists selected for the show: Mitch Cairns, Carla Cescon, Peter Cooley, John A. Douglas, The Kingpins, David Lawrey & Jaki Middleton, Luis Martinez, Archie Moore, Ms & Mr, Elvis Richardson, and Holly Williams. Sadly, we don’t get to meet all of them. But as a group, it’s collectively what you might call mid-level contemporary artists, some of whom, like Archie Moore and Luiz Martinez, have real talent and artistic credibility, and some of whom, like The Kingpins, I’ve always thought were better known for their splashy performances and canny artistic positioning than for any ground-breaking originality. I found myself wondering what an older, more established artist might have made of the project … or was I perhaps merely curious as to what happens to all the up-and-coming Primavera stars in 15 years time?
The documentary gives us an interesting snapshot of the artistic process in the 2000’s in Australia. One thing I immediately noticed was the run-down condition of the houses many of the artists lived in, hinting at the often penurious circumstances of working artists, even if few nowadays are prepared to take the next step and attempt a class analysis.
We also get to see some intelligent discussion of the original TV series by Catherine Lumby, who I would love to see doing more television and blogging, as well as some photogenic curatorial glosses from Mudie Cunningham.
Overall, the documentary left me a little disappointed. Perhaps it was always difficult to address so much in 25 minutes, but I don’t feel as though – on the basis of the documentary – that many of the artists really engaged with the subject matter at hand. The exceptions are John A. Douglas, who presents an impressively humane perspective on the difficulties faced by the Donaher family, and Luiz Martinez, who painted a scene from the original TV show that beckons an almost Hopper-esque tabluex of ordinary life.
