Australian federal budget 2011: wrap-up of arts and cultural funding

The following article appeared in Crikey on Friday May 13th 2011. 

The 2011 federal budget contained some modest announcements for the arts and culture.

In the Arts portfolio, the government delivered on its 2010 election promise for $10 million over five years in new grants for artists to create work. The funding will support “up to 150 additional artistic works, presentations and fellowships over the next five years through the New Support for the Arts program.”

As well, $400,000 has been found for the federal government’s Contemporary Music Touring Program, a successful program which supports popular mid-level contemporary music acts to tour regional areas.

In broadcasting, $12.5 million has been provided for the proverbially penurious community radio sector, an increase of 25% for a critical area of broadcasting that generally receives very little government support

There was also a package for the screen industry, with a headline figure of $66 million (as we will see, it is actually less than this). Much of the extra money goes to production subsidies through the tax system in the form of lower qualifying thresholds for the Screen Production Incentive. According to Screen Australia, the changes include:

• Lowering the threshold for Producer Offset eligibility from $1 million to $500,000, for features, TV and online programs

• Replacing the Producer Offset for low-budget docos with a Producer Equity payment

• Converting the 65 episode cap to 65 commercial hours for TV

• Exempting documentaries from the 20% above-the-line cap

• A reduction in qualifying Australian production expenditure thresholds, and allowances for a broader range of expenses to be eligible for QAPE.

Some really good news is the restoration of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ screen industry survey, which provided gold-standard data on the state of the industry and which hasn’t been performed since 2007-08 (shortly before the Rudd government slashed funding to the ABS in its first budget).

But how much new money for screen is really here? Go to Budget Paper 2 and you will find that the total extra funding is only $8 million. This is because, quoting from the budget papers, “these changes will be partly offset by $48 million in savings over four years from 2011-12 by removing the Goods and Services Tax (GST) amounts from [qualifying production expenditure] for the film tax offsets and increasing the minimum expenditure thresholds for documentaries to $500,000 in production (from the current threshold of $250,000).”

Money is also being clawed back from cultural agencies through the increased efficiency dividend. Rising to 1.5% in future years, the efficiency dividend hits smaller agencies much harder than big ones. And everything in the arts is small.

The efficiency dividend measures mean the Australia Council is being asked to save $3.3 million over the forward estimates, the Australian Film Television and Radio School will have to find $1 million, the National Film and Sound Archive $1.1 million, the National Gallery $1.4 million, the National Library $2.1 million, the National Museum $1.7, and Screen Australia $759,000. That’s more than $12 million in funding cuts for cultural agencies over the forward estimates.

If we look a little closer at the portfolio budget statements, for instance from the Australia Council, we can see the effects of the efficiency dividend in falling support for artists and cultural organisations. This year there will be “a decrease of approximately $2.5 million in forecast grants expenses compared with 2010-11.” Australia Council grants funding will be only 2% above 2010 levels in 2014-15. But CPI is forecast to run at 3% annually, meaning Australia Council support for artists and organisations will fall in real terms — by perhaps as much as 10%.

In other words, the “New Funding for the Arts” money announced in this budget will be almost completely clawed back by the effects of static funding and the increased efficiency dividend on the Australia Council.

The one really big-ticket spending item in culture was of dubious policy value: the $376 million spend on helping pensioners and senior Australians to make the switch to digital TV. Opposition leader Tony Abbott has already pilloried the program as “Building the Entertainment Revolution”, while our own Bernard Keane and Glenn Dyer have pointed out “the political imperative of ensuring pensioners aren’t left without television as analog signals switch off”.

Personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that television represents an important human service that allows older Australians to stay connected with the broader community. But the spending program should also be seen in the context of the broader budget, in which $211 million in spending is being “saved” from aged care itself. The government appears to be prioritising access to daytime television over places in aged-care facilities.

Money for art and culture is often spuriously disparaged by critics as diverting resources away from the critical services that governments provide. In reality, of course, the numbers are tiny compared to the investments annually in roads, schools and hospitals. But in this case it really does seem as though the owners of television networks are getting a subsidy at the expense of much-needed investment in aged care infrastructure.

Where to next for the Google Book Settlement?

This week a US judge ruled against the Google Book Settlement, the latets in a seven year legal saga that I’ve covered in some depth here.

Jerry Brito has a good explainer of the background of the case:

In mid-2005, the Author’s Guild and the American Association of Publishers filed suit to stop Google from scanning any more books. Soon the Author’s Guild’s case was certified as a class-action lawsuit, meaning that anyone who had ever published a book—millions of authors—would be part of the class represented and would be bound by the result of the case.

An Unsettling Settlement

Three years later, after extensive negotiations, the parties announced they had reached a settlement. Google would pay $125 million up front and would then be allowed to continue scanning books and making them available online. More importantly, Google would be allowed to offer not just snippets, but it would be allowed to sell entire text of books as well. The copyright holder would get about 2/3 of the revenues and Google would keep 1/3.

On its surface, the proposed settlement was a boon for all involved. Google would get to continue digitizing books, authors and publishers would get a cut of the profits, and consumers would get universal access to almost all of the world’s books. But reading between the lines, the settlement proved to be problematic.

Because it was a settlement to a class-action lawsuit, it meant that all authors who had ever published a book were bound. Google could scan any book without first asking for permission. If an author didn’t want his book to be scanned or included in Google’s database, he had to contact Google and opt-out. This would have turned copyright on its head.

As a result, many authors protested. The Author’s Guild and the publisher’s association had negotiated on behalf of millions of authors, and many felt the deal didn’t represent their wishes. Almost 7,000 authors wrote to the court asking to be removed from the lawsuit’s plaintiff class.

Saving the Orphans

Another contentious aspect of the settlement was how it treated “orphan works,” books the authors of which are unknown or can’t be found. It’s a well-known problem in copyright that members of Congress have tried to fix several times.

The problem is that if a company like Google wants to digitize a copyrighted book, and it can’t find its author to ask for permission, then its choices are 1) scan the book anyway and face heavy penalties if the author surfaces later and sues, or 2) leave the book undigitized and out of a universal library. As a result, hundreds of thousands of books are in a kind of limbo, not accessible to readers even if the author may well have been fine with digitization.

The Google Books settlement presented a solution to the problem. Because it bound all authors—-known and unknown—-Google could proceed to scan orphan works without having to worry. If an author later surfaced who didn’t want his book used, he could no longer sue Google. He could opt-out of the program and claim a check for the revenues associated with his book, but no more.

Some welcomed this solution to the problem, but others, including the Department of Justice, pointed out to the court that it would give Google a monopoly over orphan works. Because the settlement would only apply to Google, if another party like Amazon or the Internet Archive wanted to create its own digital library that included orphan works, it would not get the same protection.

And it wouldn’t be easy for other to get the same deal. Short of Congressional action, the only way a company like Amazon could get similar treatment would be to settle a class action suit of their own—a very difficult and time-consuming set of events to replicate. Additionally, because the authors and publishers who negotiated the Google deal are getting a cut of revenue, some have suggested that it would be in their interest to make sure Google remained a monopoly and would therefore not settle as easily with other parties.

What’s Next

Because class-action lawsuits can be as controversial as this one, the law requires that a court approve a settlement before it becomes binding. The court accepted over 500 briefs from various parties supporting or opposing the settlement and early last year held a hearing on the fairness of the settlement. It rejected the case yesterday.

The options available now to Google and the authors and publishers are:

1. Continue litigating the original lawsuit, which is an unlikely scenario.
2. Amend the settlement to make it opt-in, meaning that authors would have to give permission before their books are scanned.
3. Appeal the judge’s decision to a higher court.

Judge Chin seemed to invite a new settlement, saying in his opinion that “Many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the [settlement] were converted from an ‘opt-out’ settlement to an ‘opt-in’ settlement.”

In the New York Times, Robert Darnton, himself a librarian and a strident if highly-0informed critic of the deal, weighed in with this opinion piece:

This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems — legal, financial, technological, political — stand in the way. All can be solved.

The Chronicle of Higher Education carries a good interview with Pamela Samuelson:

It’s the only ruling really that the judge, I think, could have made. The settlement was so complex, and it was so far-reaching. With the Department of Justice and the governments of France and Germany stridently opposed to the settlement, it seems to me that the judge really didn’t have all that much choice. So the ultimate ruling, that the settlement is not fair, reasonable, and adequate to the class, is one that I think was inevitable.

The thing that surprised me about the opinion was that he took seriously the issues about whether the Authors Guild and some of its members had adequately represented the interests of all authors, including academic authors and foreign authors. That was very gratifying because I spent a lot of time crafting letters to the judge saying that academic authors did have different interests. Academic authors, on average, would prefer open access. Whereas the guild and its members, understandably, want to do profit maximization.

The EFF’s Corynne McSherry has this analysis:

On the policy front, the court recognized – as do we – the extraordinary potential benefits of the settlement for readers, authors and publishers. We firmly believe that the world’s books should be digitized so that the knowledge held within them can made available to people around the world. But the court also recognized that the settlement could come at the price of undermining competition in the marketplace for digital books, giving Google a de facto monopoly over orphan books (meaning, works whose owner cannot be located). The court concluded that solving the orphan works problem is properly a matter for Congress, not private commercial parties. Sadly, Congress has thus far lacked the will to do so. Perhaps yesterday’s decision will finally spur Congress to revisit this important issue and pass comprehensive orphan works legislation, that allows for mass book digitization.

That said, the court also got some things fundamentally wrong in its copyright analysis. For example, it states that “a copyright owner’s right to exclude others from using his property is fundamental and beyond dispute” and then proceeds to quote at length from the letters of numerous authors (and their descendants) who share the misguided notion that a copyright is, by definition, an exclusive right to determine how a work can be used. We respectfully disagree. Copyright law grants to authors significant powers to manage exploitation of creative works as a function of spurring the creation of more works, not as a natural or moral right. And those powers are subject to numerous important exceptions and limitations, such as the first sale and fair use doctrines. Those limits are an essential part of the copyright bargain, which seeks to encourage the growth and endurance of a vibrant culture by both rewarding authors for their creative investments and ensuring that others will have the opportunity to build on those creative achievements. Thus, as the Supreme Court has explained, such limits are “neither unfair nor unfortunate” but rather “the means by which copyright advances the progress of science and art.” If the legal issues raised in the underlying lawsuit are ever litigated on the merits, let’s hope this or any future judge keeps the traditional American copyright bargain firmly in mind.

Michael Liedtke of the Associated Press thinks this is a micvrocosm of the larger anti-turst and monopoly challenges facing Google:

This week’s ruling from U.S. Circuit Judge Denny Chin did more than complicate Google’s efforts to make digital copies of the world’s 130 million books and possibly sell them through an online book store that it opened last year. It also touched upon antitrust, copyright and privacy issues that are threatening to handcuff Google as it tries to build upon its dominance in Internet search to muscle into new markets.

“This opinion reads like a microcosm of all the big problems facing Google,” said Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley lawyer who represented a group led by Google rivals Microsoft Corp. andAmazon.com Inc. to oppose the digital book settlement.

Google can only hope that some of the points that Chin raised don’t become recurring themes as the company navigates legal hurdles in the months ahead.

The company is still trying to persuade the U.S. Justice Department to approve a $700 million purchase of airline fare tracker ITA Software nearly nine months after it was announced. Regulators are focusing its inquiry into whether ITA would give Google the technological leverage to create an unfair advantage over other online travel services. Google argues it will be able to provide more bargains and convenience for travellers if it’s cleared to own ITA’s technology.

In Europe and the state of Texas, antitrust regulators are looking into complaints about Google abusing its dominance of Internet search to unfairly promote its own services and drive up its advertising prices.

And Google is still trying fend off an appeal in another high-profile copyright case, one stemming from its 2006 acquisition of YouTube, the Internet’s leading video site. Viacom Inc. is seeking more than $1 billion in damages after charging YouTube with misusing clips from Comedy Central, MTV and other Viacom channels. A federal judge sided with Google, saying YouTube had done enough to comply with digital copyright laws in its early days.

One of my favourite comentators on Google is of course the one-and-only Siva Vaidhyanathan, who is quoted in this excellent Inside Higher Ed piece:

Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia and a notable Google gadfly, said the company overplayed its hand by essentially trying to rewrite the rules governing the copying and distribution of book content through a class-action settlement. “Google clearly flew too close to the sun on this one,” he wrote in an e-mail. “…This is not what class-action suits and settlements are supposed to do.”

Vaidhyanathan said that Google now faces the choice of either continuing to fight for its interpretation of copyright law in the courts or scaling back its plans for a digital bookstore. “If Google decides to take the modest way out, it can still ask Congress to make the needed changes to copyright law that would let Google and other companies and libraries compete to provide the best information to the most people,” the media scholar says. “Congress should have been the place to start this in the first place.”

 

 

 

 

The Australian government reviews its tax concessions to independent film production

The following article appeared in Crikey on March 4th:

The federal government has just finished a review of federal film financing arrangements — and given itself a rather large pat on the back. The result is an endorsement of film financing arrangements in which more and more taxpayers money is being given to Hollywood studios.

Confirming Sir Humphrey Appleby’s famous principle that you should “never commission an inquiry without knowing the outcome first”, the federal Arts Department’s 2010 Review of the Australian Independent Screen Production Sector makes a series of rosy findings about the state of the sector and the effectiveness of the government’s Australian Screen Production Incentive, a large tax refund to film producers.

More money is certainly leaving Treasury coffers: the report states that “in the three years since the introduction of the Australian Screen Production Incentive, the government has provided $412.1 million in support through the tax system, compared to $136.7 million in the three years before the package.”

But delve further into the report, and all sorts of questions start to pop up. First and foremost is the crucial question of whether those extra taxpayer dollars are really stimulating an upswing in domestic production across the board, or merely co-financing large Hollywood studio films such as Happy Feet 2 and Australia.

Arts Minister Simon Crean trumpeted the review’s findings. “The boost in government funding is a great achievement and contributing to the viability of the local film production industry,” he announced in a media release.

“Although it’s still early days, the increase in activity, particularly the production of Australian large budget films, such as Baz Luhrmann’sAustralia and George Miller’s Happy Feet 2, and the box office performance of films such as Tomorrow, When the War Beganshows the government support for the sector is having a significant impact.”

In fact, a close reading of the review suggests that the effect of the new funding arrangements is far less positive than the minister and the department claim. Much of the extra money — $169 million, in fact — has gone to foreign movie studios in the form of international production subsidies, though that’s not a fact that the review chose to highlight. But despite this, levels of foreign production in Australia have actually been falling, as the strengthening Aussie dollar and strong competition from other countries and locations have made the foreign production incentives less attractive.

More private investment has been attracted to Australian feature films, however, and more films are being made. Despite this, the domestic box office takings of Australian feature films has risen only slightly, from 3.8% between 2005-2007 to 4.4% in 2008-2010. That’s better than the subterranean levels of 2004, but still worse than the performance of Australian features in the early 2000s — let alone the 1990s.

As for television, the report found that while drama budgets had increased, total hours for Australian-produced adult television drama had remained steady. The reason? Television production is driven by local content quotas. To quote the report, “Australian television production levels remain stable over time and are closely linked to requirements under the Australian Content Standard.” In other words, the television networks are receiving more taxpayers money to produce drama that they are required to by the regulations. It’s a nice deal if you can get it.

Most of the money continues to flow to the big productions, such as Luhrmann’s upcoming Great Gatsby. These are loved by the industry, as they provide lots of employment for local casts and crew. But the review points out that a large part of the Australian screen sector is made up of small companies, many of which produce documentaries. These smaller firms have struggled to access the tax refunds, owing to high production thresholds. Features and documentaries made for less than $1 million or $250,000 respectively are ineligible for the offset, ruling out a large swathe of the independent sector.

Yet the review thinks this is a good thing, as it precludes the low-budget and arthouse features and documentaries that would be unlikely to make a return in any case. “Lowering the offset threshold for feature films to ensure access for emerging producers would to an extent alter the intent of the offset,” it says, “from one encouraging commercially focused features, to one that includes films less likely to be market and box office driven.”

The review confirms a subtle shift in Australian screen funding priorities away from backing emerging film-makers and new voices and towards big budget, Hollywood-financed productions. This may result in bigger box offices for bigger-budget Australian films — or it may not. The federal government’s last effort at supporting commercial film finance was the Film Film Corporation, a 20-year initiative that acted as a for-profit investor in feature production. The FFC lost more than a billion dollars in that time-frame, booking investment returns of negative 80%.

The new policy gets around this problem by simply giving tax refunds to big producers, regardless of how much money their film eventually makes. And it’s uncapped and open-ended: the bigger the budget of the film, the larger the taxpayer contribution.

The Australia Council’s recent Arts and Creative Industries report

The following article appeared in Crikey on February 4th. There’s been quite a bit of debate over at Crikey in the comments pages of this article, so head on over to see the discussion.

The plan to provoke a profound shake-up to the arts

In a week where so much has happened in the world, it’s not surprising a report from the Australia Council has not made the news. But in the rarefied atmosphere of arts policy, the release of a report entitled Arts and creative industries will make waves — the document, if followed to its logical conclusions, implies a profound shake-up to the current status quo.  Authored by a team of QUT academics led by Professor Justin O’Connor, Arts and creative industries is a long, detailed and rigorous examination of the context, shape and setting of arts and cultural policy in Australia. It’s not quite the Henry Tax Review, but it’s certainly the most academically informed piece of research to be released by the Australia Council in a long time. Beginning with a historical overview of 19th century culture and the genesis of “cultural policy” in postwar Britain, the report then examines each of the issues that has bedeviled the arts debate: the role of public subsidy, the growth of the industries that produce popular culture, the divide between high art and low art, and the emergence of the so-called “creative industries” in the 1990s. It’s as good a summary of the current state of play as you’re likely to find anywhere, including in the international academic literature. O’Connor and his co-writers conclude that “the creative industries need not be —  indeed should not be — counter posed to cultural policy; they are a development of it” and that economic objectives (in other words, industry policy) should be a legitimate aim of cultural policy. Taken as a whole, the argument has big implications for the way Australia currently pursues the regulation and funding of culture. For instance, it argues that “the ‘free market’ simply does not describe the tendencies of monopoly, agglomeration, cartels, restrictive practices, exploitation and unfair competition which mark the cultural industries” and that this in turn justifies greater regulation of cultural industries like the media. That’s a conclusion that few in the Productivity Commission or Treasury — let alone Kerry Stokes or James Packer — are likely to agree with. The report also argues the divide between the high arts and popular culture has now largely disappeared, and that therefore “it is increasingly difficult for arts agencies to concern themselves only with direct subsidy and only with the non-commercial”. This is an argument which directly challenges the entire basis of the Australia Council’s funding model, in which opera and orchestral music receives 98% of the council’s music funding pie. No wonder the Australia Council’s CEO, Kathy Keele, writes in the foreword: “This study proposes to challenge many of our current conceptions, definitions, and even policies.” Intriguingly, the report stops short of any concrete policy recommendations. Perhaps this is because some existed, but were excised from the report. Or perhaps it’s because any recommendations that genuinely flowed from this report would imply the break-up or radical overhaul of the Australia Council itself. As Marcus Westbury this week observed in The Age: ”While the Australia Council isn’t backward in promoting research, reports and good news stories that validate the status quo, there is not much precedent for it challenging it.” That’s because the real guardian of the current funding model is not the Australia Council, but the small coterie of large performing arts companies and high-status impresarios that are its greatest beneficiaries. It won’t be long before a coalition of high arts types, from Richard Tognetti to Richard Mills, start clamouring to defend their privilege.

Some thoughts on cultural innovation and cultural policy, via the Victorian election

I’ve been away from the blog for the last little bit, but the break has given me the opportunity to do some sustained reading and thinking about some of the bigger philosophical issues that revolve around the ideas of “new work”, originality and innovation, and what these might tell us about cultural policy and the everyday experience of creating and experiencing art.

Rather than mount an entire academic paper’s worth of argument here, I’m going to take things from the particular and work my way back to the general … which might well be putting the cart before the horse, but should chart a course for you (and me).

Let’ s tart off with a bit of real-world cultural policy: today’s announcement by the Victorian Labor Party that it plans to amalgamate all of Victoria’s “cultural” agencies into a new mega-department called “Creative Victoria”:

“Under Creative Victoria, cultural organisations and industries currently overseen by Arts Victoria and those relating to screen, digital games and design that reside with the Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development will be brought under the one banner.”

Those who’ve studied a bit of the recent history of cultural policy will know this is thoroughly reminiscent of the formation of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport by Tony Blair’s government in 1997 – the administrative move which is generally considered to have started the whole “creative industries” ball rolling.  There is now a pretty deep literature about the DCMS, it’s lofty intentions, actual actions and the sociological and theoretical underpinnings of the move. A few of the best papers have even been covered here in this blog – Phillip Schleshinger’s paper on think-tanks, Justin O’Connor’s literature review, Toby Miller’s anti-creative industries critique, and Nicholas Garnham’s “From Cultural to Creative Industries” paper of 2005.

As Garnham observes in his paper,

… the use of the term “creative industries” … draws its political and ideological power from the prestige and economic importance attached to concepts of innovation, information, information workers and the impact of information and communication technologies drawn from information society theory.

Garnham puts his finger on the critical point: that creative industries policy is a political idea that can be traced to ideas championing the economic value of creative innovation. Richard Florida and Australia’s CCI centre, while they would not see themselves as fellow-travellers, are indeed partly responsible for promoting to policy-makers these ideas.

Innovation is one of the key terms here, because it the mechanism through which this school of thought connects creativity to economic growth. A case in point is Paul Stoneman’s recent book Soft Innovation. A ‘soft innovation’ is roughly an aesthetic innovation that can be fitted into existing neoclassical concepts of ecocnomic innovation, such as the so-called “technological, process and product” (or “TPP”) innovation defined and insitutionalised by bodies such as the OECD. Stoneman is an economist, and his project aims to carve out a meaningful space for aesthetic innovations in the cultural industries (like books, films and games) in the existing economic theory of innovation. (This poses a few problems, because his models are neoclassical ones which assume things like perfect comeptition, rational consumers and markets that always clear … that doesn’t sound much like the music industry in the era of The Pirate Bay to me.)

Another line of research comes from the CCI’s Jason Potts, who sees the creative industries from an evolutionary economic perspective in which the act as a kind of meta-industrial economic cluster that provide transformative innovations to the broader economy … a sort of storm-cell generating constant gales of Schumperterian creative destruction, if you will.

Both Potts and Stoneman are interested in innovation in a specifically economic sense, which is interesting in itself. They are not overtly interested in, for example, the social consequences or preconditions of cultural innovation, and you would be hard-pressed to fit them into any kind of sociological understanding of innovation such as the social production of art or the social reception and consumption of art.

This matters, because by the time these ideas get bowdlerised and compressed into an election promise, cultural policy begins to force ideas of art and culture into a highly reductionist framework. As they are understood by governments, the value of the creative industries then begins to look like large matrices of employment and income data, and probably of a less-nuanced nature than the gold-standard data like that collated by Peter Higgs.

What we could expect in Victoria under this policy, then, is some sort of gradual skew of cultural policy away from ideas of participation and access, and towards economically-validated special pleading for various well-connected organisations and firms within the creative sector, much as Garnham described happened in Britain. Festivals and “flagship” performing arts organisations are probably best-placed to benefit from this skew, because of their media profile and the social capital they enjoy amongst well-connected board members. Paradoxically, independent artists and small collectives might also benefit, perhaps, out of a general realisation that they provide essential seed-beds of start-ups necessary for the generation of “innovation” – understood as bringing a cultural product to market, of course. Community arts organisations and service agencies may not find the new paradigm as easy to manage.

I’m going to sketch out some more ideas about what I think are some of the problems of innovation theory as it is being applied to cultural policy in a future post.

Foremost among them will be the contention that we need to rescue the idea of innovation from the economists, because the creation of new ideas and artworks often occurs outside markets, for anti-rational reasons, and produces harms as well as benefits. Indeed, there is a strong case that can argued in analogy from theories  in science and technology studies that ideas like “innovation” and “new work” are themselves socially constructed and open to contestation, resistance and subversion – one reason perhaps that Rosalind Krauss famously described “the originality of the avant-garde” as a “modernist myth“.

Cultural policy in Victoria

Earlier this year, I was asked by the Arts Industry Council of Victoria to present an overview of the current state of cultural policy in Victoria, in the lead up to the state election. I’ve just tracked down the video of that speech, and here it is below. If you want to see the slideshow, you can link to it here [Victorian cultural policy presentation3].

Why culture is bigger than the arts: Rebutting Christopher Madden part 2

The main thrust of Christopher Madden’s recent article in response to my criticism of the Australia Council can be summarised by his title, “An arts council by any other name.”

To quote Madden:

Eltham calls for the Australia Council to be ‘abolished’. Yet the agency described in his ‘new model’ – what I will refer to as a ‘culture council’ – looks suspiciously like the Australia Council with a new name and a different focus. The new agency is not described in detail. Is it at arm’s length like the Australia Council? Would it support all of culture, from Facebook to historic places? What powers would it have? How would its ‘radically strengthened and diversified’ peer review processes work? Whatever the details, I would caution that an arts council by any other name would smell as sweet.

Today, an online survey popped into the inbox of my partner Sarah-Jane which, I think, proves exactly why what I’m calling for is not “an arts council by any other name”. It’s a survey of emerging artists who have applied for or been funded by the Australia Council in the past twelve months. Sarah-Jane is a film-maker: a director and producer who has received funding through OzCo’s Story of the Future initiative (an initiative which has since been discontinued). And yet, what are the types of artforms that the survey asks about? Here they are:

A7i. Which types of artistic work have you been practising in over the last 12 months? If you don’t think these options describe your work, please select the best options and add a comment in the box below. Please click all that apply

Music Instrumental musician Singer Composer (songs or music) Conductor Arranger or mixer Sound artist Theatre Performer (eg actor, puppeteer, clown) Director / Assistant Director Designer (set, lighting, costume) Writer/Dramaturge Theatre Maker Dance Dancer Choreographer Designer (set, lighting, costume) Rehearsal Director / Assistant Director Writing Novelist or short story writer Children/Young Adult fiction Non-fiction writer (biography, memoir, essay or history) Poet Digital writer (websites, games, interactive books) Illustrator Playwright Visual Arts Painter Print maker, graphic artist, cartoonist or street artist Photographer or video artist Sculptor Digital animator Installation artist Crafts Potter or ceramic artist Jewellery maker, textiles, or woodcraftsman, or other crafts Hybrid Arts Interdisciplinary artist Community Arts Community cultural development worker Other Other (please specify below)

Notice how there are no film related categories here? That’s because the Australia Council doesn’t fund film-makers – Screen Australia does. Nothing wrong with that.

But what is an issue is the result of that distinction: the fact that OzCo only collects statistics about the things it already funds. We saw exactly the same issue in the Australia Council’s recent research about artists occupations.

You can see the problem here. If OzCo doesn’t fund it, the Australia Council does not consider it an “artform”. The reason for this is not any coherent theory of cultural practice – which is probably just as well, because just exactly what makes jewellery more artistic than cinematography anyway? No, the distinction is all about bureaucratic demarcation.

The result is that things that OzCo doesn’t fund, like game design or film-making, are not part of the Australia Council’s statistics, its evidence base, or its policy advocacy. This alone demonstrates why Madden is wrong: a different council, by another name and with a different ambit of cultural practice, would be a very different organisation, with very different policy imperatives.

Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele replies

Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele has responded to my article in Overland. For the record, she does identify some factual errors in my piece which I freely acknowledge and will address in a subsequent post.

Here is the text of her reply:

Kathy Keele,  Australia Council CEO, responds to Ben Eltham’s Overland 199 article

Ben Eltham’s article raises a number of important issues worthy of further debate. I welcome his passion for the vitality of the arts in this country and the need for a dynamic approach to cultural policy.

I agree completely that culture is much bigger than the arts and indeed that the arts are bigger than ‘what the Australia Council funds’. We made this point in our submission to the National Cultural Policy consultation process. How we set the parameters of ‘culture’ so that it yields a policy that’s workable for government is a good topic for discussion.
But there are a number of points in his essay that need to be corrected.

One of Eltham’s key criticisms of the Australia Council is that its view of the arts is antiquated, remaining largely unchanged from the 1970s. As examples, he names arts practices that are not supported by the council’s art form boards – gaming, genre fiction, online writing, and musicals, to name a few.

The problem is that this isn’t true. For a healthy debate to proceed, it’s important to correct these and some other factual inaccuracies.

• He states that the council ‘funds opera but not musicals (except when opera companies mount musicals)’. This is incorrect. The music and theatre boards have an initiative called Music Theatre which supports the development of musicals.

• He argues for the artistic importance of gaming, and asks ‘why doesn’t the Australia Council support gaming?’ It does. The council has over many years funded artists who create game art works and explore game culture as an artistic practice.

• He states that the council supports ‘serious novels, generally, but not genre fiction or online writing’. Not true. The Literature Board has funded genre novels, interactive media writing, websites, iPhone apps and graphic novels through our New Work and Write in Your Face grants programs. The board recently completed a three-year initiative called the Story of the Future and published the Writer’s Guide to Making a Digital Living.

• Eltham states that the council ‘funds companies that only produce a few works a year but not festivals that produce hundreds’. In fact, each year the council funds dozens of works that are presented at festivals all over the country. We also fund the Major Festivals Initiative which commissions new Australian work for presentation at the seven capital city festivals.

Questioning the amount of funding allocated to these various new art practices is one thing. I worry, however, that his critique is based on an idea that the council doesn’t fund these arts practices at all.

What I want to make clear is that many ‘new’ art practices are currently funded by the Australia Council from within the existing art form boards, through our inter-arts section and, indeed, through programs and initiatives across council. The key criterion, no matter what its form, is that the art is excellent.

I also need to correct the impression left by Eltham that abolition of the Community Cultural Development Board in 2005 demonstrated that the council ‘turned its back on community arts’. He fails to mention that the Community Partnerships Committee, with an upgraded remit to support community arts practice across the nation, was formed the following year. This year Community Partnerships will be allocating approximately $10 million in funding.

Eltham also notes his objections to the funding allocated to the major performing arts companies. It is useful to note that while the Australia Council manages the distribution of this funding, decisions as to which organisations are funded and by how much are set by the six state arts ministers and the federal arts minister.

In spite of these errors and misunderstandings, I do believe Eltham’s piece raises a fundamental question: how do we most effectively fund the ever-changing way that art is created? This question needs to be constantly revisited by those sitting both inside and outside our arts funding agencies.

Kathy Keele
CEO Australia Council for the Arts

 

Rebutting Christopher Madden: part 1

Recently I had a piece published Overland magazine calling for radical reform, perhaps even abolition, of the Australia Council for the Arts. This week, the Overland website carries a response by cultural policy analyst Christopher Madden.

I think Madden’s rebuttal misguided in several important respects and so today I’m going to unpick his piece item by item … but before I do that I think it’s worth saying that we agree on many things. More than that, I welcome this debate – it’s exactly what I hoped to provoke with the piece. Madden’s response to my article is robust, informed, detailed and well-intentioned. It’s also, I think, quite wrong.

Subsidising paid digital content: cultural policy, French style

Ars Technica notes that:

France has decided to try something… novel. The country will attempt to prop up the digital music industry by subsidizing legal music consumption by young people. Under the initiative, citizens between 12 and 25 years old will be able to purchase a “carte musique”—a prepaid card  usable on subscription-based music websites. The card will come with €50 worth of credit, but customers only have to pay €25. The rest will be paid by the French government.

It is interesting to see a national government try a subsidy where out-and-out regulation has failed. But will it work?