Blogging politics, culture, sociology and life from Brisvegas
My post on the Goldthorpe/Chan studies into cultural consumption stimulated a lot of debate here a while back, spilling over into a second thread.
Yesterday, I had an article published in the Higher Education Supplement of The Australian which sought to tease out some of the implications at greater length.
Please read the comments policy. If you would like an icon beside your comment, please register a Gravatar.
There is a Comments Preview function below the typing box which activates when you start typing.
Larvatus Prodeo is an Australian group blog which discusses politics, sociology, culture, life, religion and science from a left of centre perspective. more»
A well-written and interesting piece, which I really enjoyed, and which made a nice change from much of their commentary. Many thanks for giving me something thoughtful to read.
Yep, as usual Mark brings up some important points – and not just about the opera LOL. By the way, playing of the national anthem is not uncommon at the opera.
Mark’s right when he points out we need a new cultural policy. This has become increasingly apparent since David Throsby first examined the issue in 2006 for Currency Press.
My own view is that governments simply don’t take the arts and culture seriously, especially at bureaucratic/administrative level. Arts portfolios are typically given to eith erjunior ministers – the Howard Government’s strategy – or tacked on the end of much larger portfolios, for instance in NSW where Frank Sartor has nominal responsibility for the arts in a huge portfolio that covers some of NSW’s most pressing problems.
The result is that “cultural policy” as such is rarely developed, let alone examined, beyond its obvious opportunities for feel-good media stories and ribbon-cutting events. Big institutions soak up the lion’s share of arts funding while a few crumbs are thrown to individual artists (often with fingers crossed, lest they do something too controversial).
We’re not helped by the standard of debate about culture in Australia’s media. It’s still a common practice for bored tabloid editors on a slow news day to toss a cadet journalist the assignment of trawling through the latest arts grant announcements for juicy tidbits. A story about “taxpayers money” going to fund some outrageous creative indulgence is inevitably the result.
C List government ministers (the status of an Arts Minister) love rubbing shoulders with A List show biz celebs.
A lion’s share of arts funding goes to initiatives that employ A List show biz celebs.
It’s not hard to work out how that happens.
Garrett used to be an A List show biz celeb. Does that fact make him more or less likely to break with decades of ministerial habit?
The figure that is often missing from these sorts of debates is that of the artist. Of course, the division between high and low art is unsustainable, but the debate also becomes fairly useless when it just becomes about diverting some dollars from X and giving them to Y, instead.
What sort of policies and programmes need to be put in place which will allow artists, of all sorts, make a dignified living? What sort of policies need to be put in place to make institutions and organisations sustainable? What levels of accountability should there be and how much will that cost? It’s often the case that when arts organisations, or individuals, get a grant a substantial amount gets swallowed up in administrating it. How much money is spent by the Australia Council, for instance, in administering grants, as opposed to how much actually goes into making art?
I have always been amused by how closed the Judith Wright Centre set is compared to the openness and neverending goodness that is freely available to all at the Powerhouse. There was news this week that the Regent Theatre in Queen Street is about to be closed and replaced with a multi storey highrise.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/locals-ready-to-fight-for-regent/2008/02/14/1202760456693.html
On another note it appears the Normanby Hotel is in line for a major crackdown.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/normanby-may-be-forced-to-close/2008/02/14/1202760463460.html
“…allow artists, of all sorts, make a dignified living?”
Leo Bloom: Actors are not animals! They’re human beings!
Max Bialystock: They are? Have you ever eaten with one?
Interesting and stimulating article, Mark. Some thoughts from an historian’s perspective. The study of popular culture of the past has been a mainstay of historiography for some quite considerable time now, as an aspect of social history. (I have a lovely collection of lyrics of songs from the American Revolution, both British and American, mainly set to traditional tunes, usually of some political significance, back then.)From a personal point of view, I’m a film fanatic, a soapie addict, B&B, an avid consumer of literature that would probably best be desctibed as part of the canon, a regular watcher of TV Drama, and have even been known to watch dramja on commercial TV, Underbelly and Chronicles of Sarahj Connor being an example. But I don’t like Bryce Coutenay. And, of cfourse I read history till its coming out my ears. And I don’t think I’m that different to the rest of the masses. This division betweeen high and low culture has mostly been nonsense, and I suspect it always has been. Most books from the so-callede canon were best-sellers in their day.I imagine if I’d been an Ancient Greek I’d have cracked up completely over those low comedies of Aristophanes.
Yes, Nabs.
For someone whose former band’s show has been described as “Painters and Dockers meet G.G. Allin” I think a dignified living might be stetching it for me too.
What are we to make of artists who play like a “chimpanzee on speed”?
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/sacked-drummer-a-chimpanzee-on-speed/2008/02/14/1202760464328.html
I had a WTF moment the other day while driving to work. The presenter on ABC FM asked if someone who was serious about music could like jazz. It’s possibly the silliest question I’ve ever heard. (Given a choice between, say, Berlioz and Monk, I’d choose Monk every time, but both would be trumped by Bach. Or Robert Johnson.)
Sacked for playing like a “chimpanzee on speedâ€?? That’d be a KPI for most rock drummers. No time wasters though.
“The presenter on ABC FM asked if someone who was serious about music could like jazz.”
Good Lord. Said presenter still has a job?
Goldthorpe and Chan’s project I don’t think bears much relevance to the concept of a ‘cultural elite’ in the sense that it’s been used by right-wing cultural warriors. Such people aren’t saying that those they call the ‘elite’ attend the opera or any of the other standard high culture-type activities- symphonies, ballet etc. I think they would are more likely to be targeting patrons of the ‘avant-garde’. Patronizing a performance of Fidelio is fine: we all know Beethoven is ‘Art’. But Andres Serrano? another matter entirely.
>
Goldthorpe’s assertion that “Status is now attached to material consumption, not cultural consumption. People with status show who they are through expensive cars and houses, rather than by going to museums and the like.” is hardly revolutionary. This has always been the case. There has never been any correlation between great wealth and good taste. Wealthy people may be over-represented at the opera in places where such activities are the mark of status. But where they are not many won’t bother.
>
A lot of it has to do with the price of a ticket. Last night I attended one of the Myer Free Summer concerts featuring mainly Romantic French composers. It was attended by a wide cross-section. A similar wide cross-section will attend exhibitions of the already ‘legitimated’ arts whether it’s Caravaggio or Picasso. The patronage at a Gertrude St gallery is not so representative.
>
I’m not sure I can agree with you Mark that the canon is a 20th century invention. Certainly Shakespeare was ‘pop culture’ but he also lived at a time when England first emerged as a literary power of global significance. Apart from Chaucer there had been no English ‘high culture’. He himself was not so well remarked upon by the haute culture; those such as Spencer were more highly regarded at Court which was the measure of ‘canonical status’. Literary accomplishment at the time being a means to display one’s skills as a courtier. Then as now there was a free interaction between canonical-type stuff such as the very sophisticated polyphonic compositions, folk music and intermediary grades as practiced by minstrels and players such as Shakespeare.
>
I do remember a list of ten writers of significance drawn up in the midst of the 18th century. The list was to demonstrate the quality of English literature. Funnily enough Shakespeare was number 10, cited almost begrudgingly, for being a master of the popular tongue. ‘Canons’ whether marked by officialdom as required reading or (more appropriately) just the list of classics as indicated by their endurance will continue, and have so. The medieval Church had its own canon. We in the age of Romantic Personality each have our own.
Mark
I read it and enjoyed it, especially as it largely draws on my own shtick!
Let me tell where you can improve your thinking immensely for next time.
1. You do not adequately establish that anybody thinks there is a superstrata of “elite” people with unique and exclusive access to high Culture. That is, we ask who says there is a “fabled elite” and of whom are they alleged to consist? To this extent, your argument does smell a bit as if you are chomping on straw. This is particularly compounded by your opening with a scene from the opera, where you draw attention to the “old money” crowd, but you do not give any hint that there were also non-elite or working class types burping, farting, scratching their balls, but equally appreciating and enjoying the performance. This leads one to ask if there is in fact a narrow range of cultural activities overwhelmingly indulged in by the great unwashed, but not be the opera-attending ‘old money” toffs.
2. I have now read Goldthorpe and Chan’s article. it is bad social science research; really bad. I was particularly surprised they neither hypothesised, let alone tested multicollinearity between “social status” and “social class.” As I argued on the HV versus LS this correlation is huge.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/01/13/cultural-elites-dont-exist-study-finds-continued/#comment-427751
3. Your article does not highlight the KEY finding of Goldthorpe/Chan and that is while there might not be a small “cultural elite” who consume ONLY HC, the class of “omnivores” who consume the whole spectrum is overwhelmingly made up of “high status” people. the great unwashed are largely absent from HC. This thus negates your argument “In effect, there is only pop culture.” Wrong. There really are differences between High, Middle-brow, Low, and what I call Simian Culture. This point is not understood by Goldthorpe and Chan.
4. HC is appreciated and enjoyed overwhelmingly (if not exclusively) by those raised in highly cultured and educated environments either through family or education. The same people or “class” are equally likely to indulge in all cultural strata as well.
4. The lower down the class/education ladder one goes, the more restrictive their particpation in the full vertical cultural offering. Darts, the dogs, and NASCAR yes, opera, chamber music, and cocktail parties or even pub dinners exchanging quips from Milton, Nancy Mitford, J’amie King, Benny Hill, Homer, and riffs from Mozart, ah, no.
I hope this helps.
That’s to mistake both Goldthorpe and Bourdieu – what’s being discussed is bourgeois taste and status being correlated – not those with “great wealth”.
The phrase Bourdeiu uses to describe the taste regime associated with the wealthy is haute bourgeoisie, I recall. How the bourgeoisie is to be utterly distinct from those with great wealth is mysterious. After all the meaning of the world was used by Marx and means ‘merchant’. Technically it means someone who lives in a town, but I don’t think the homeless guy in Carlton figures here.
>
Whatever. I
mistakemisunderstand neither.>
Goldthorpe says:
Alright not ‘great’ wealth necessarily but wealth nonetheless. Please indicate a time and place where status was not displayed widely by the acquisition of the expensive but instead by inexpensive cultural products. I believe that the material displays of wealth are almost universal unless there’s some especial stoicism required of the ruling class as, say, in ancient Sparta. My point is that Goldthorpe and Chan appear to be presenting a commonplace as fresh insight.
>
When the consumption of cultural products is viewed as a status activity then it will be participated in by those who wish to do so to display status. Remember the lyrics of Cole Porter’s “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”:
Funnily enough this ‘anti high culture’ barb was written by someone who, along with Gershwin, defines that American classical music form the Jazz musical.
>
The unravelling of this cultural hierarchy by which the wealthy no longer need attend the opera and are now just as likely to be seen backstage at an Aerosmith concert is not a new phenomena. Read some of Tom Wolfe’s articles from the 60s, he enthusiastically describes this process.
>
Bourdieu does mark a correlation between ‘cultural capital’ and the consumption of cultural products manufactured in the ‘restricted field of cultural production’. By this latter he means stuff that requires some learning or rare attribute to fully appreciate. In this light there most definitely is a ‘cultural elite’ and it does not correspond to the consumption of ‘high culture’.
>
Caravaggio’s work is easy to understand – it’s representative after all. Many people still struggle with Pollock. I wonder if a study were done on the backgrounds, the habitus of those who enjoyed the compositions of Gyorgy Ligeti or the novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet (does anyone actually enjoy Robbe-Grillet?) would you find evidence of a cultural elite in the sense that Bourdieu (and incidentally the rightist cultural warriors) mean it? I’d speculate, probably you would.
>
However given the polycentric aspects of both status and culture in (post)modern democracies you’ll find there are all sorts of cultural elites. They’ll be people who scoff at you when they find that your cd collection has the Berlin Symphony Orchestra’s 1923 performance of the glorious 9th, don’t you know, dolt, that 1928’s how it’s done. You’ll find people who scoff at the fact that your cd collection has no DJ Shadow in it (and you think you know hip hop), you’ll find people who scoff at the fact that you own cds (vinyl man vinyl). All ‘elite’ all different. All pretty much irrelevant to the cultural wars.
>
For myself I follow the Beavis and Butt-head school of taste: I like stuff that doesn’t suck, and I don’t like stuff that sucks.
>
Incidentally, habitus is a very old word and coined in its modern sociological context not by Bourdieu but by Marcel Mauss.
My intention in writing the article was to provoke a debate, so I don’t want to circumscribe possible contributions by saying too much myself, except to say that the sorts of issues raised by Ben and Fine are the ones I think are more interesting to discuss – since my intention is to argue that many of the current positions on arts/cultural policy are badly framed.
But I should clarify some small misconceptions.
JG:
That’s odd, as I didn’t have you in mind when I was writing it.
(1) I wasn’t writing a summary of Goldthorpe/Chan but highlighting one finding to make a broader point. My assumption is that those interested can find Goldthorpe/Chan for themselves, which isn’t difficult, as you’ve demonstrated.
(2) I don’t think either that interpretation of their findings or your dismissal of their research is right, but I’m not going to argue the point.
Adrien:
Yes, I’m aware of that, but I was writing a newspaper opinion piece, not a textbook. Bourdieu in any case turns ‘habitus’ into a concept rather broader than what Mauss had in mind.
More correctly, it meant someone who was a full citizen of a town – which implied both freedom from feudal subjection and the possession of means.
I think you’re missing both the distinctive class structure in France Bourdieu is discussing and the related distinction in Marx. The petit bourgeoisie are those who are in fact owners of small capital – for instance shopkeepers. The haute bourgeoise in Marx’ time meant large capitalists, but in Bourdieu’s usage what he’s describing as those we would describe as the upper middle class – who may be employees (think senior associates at law firms, salaried managers) or may be in an ambiguous position with respect to the Marxian categorical distinction around the ownership of the means of production (for instance, a partner in a professional firm). Or they may be capitalists. The whole point is that it’s an ascription of status which does not necessarily correspond to wealth – again a distinction explicit in Goldthorpe’s earlier studies – many of the skilled workers he surveyed earned more than say, civil service clerks, who enjoyed greater status. What was interesting to him in the 60s was the blurring of the cultural distinction between the two groups.
I don’t think JG grasps the status/class distinction well, incidentally.
But, as I say, I don’t want to get bogged down in the sociological niceties and would be more interested in a discussion about where we go from here in terms of arts/cultural policy. Of course, people can discuss what they like, but I’m just noting the restrictions I’m placing on my own participation in the thread.
Ps – thanks Jon, Ben and Paul – glad you liked the article!
I think one way in which arts/cultural policy became poorly framed is when arts institutions decided to start referring to the “arts industry”. This came from a misguided desire to give art some sort of respectability, to frame what art does in a way that politicians can understand. It’s an industry with export potential etc. etc. The trouble with this is that it can then be judged like any other industry, so that funding occurs only in case of ‘market failure’. And I guess if the market failure becomes too great, you can just pull the plug on it like any other industry.
One other problem is the one Ben alludes to. Most governments have just seen arts as a nice add on to society, not anything essential and the ministers have little or no understanding of how it works, even as an “industry”. But those red carpet events sure are nice to go to. One hopes that Garrett might be better as he is, or was, an artist. But I’m not holding my breath.
Is it a logical conclusion of this piece that ‘high arts’ should be defunded? Mark doesn’t say this in quite so many words, but …
Given that Garrett is not likely to find the arts budget ballooning in this ‘razor gang’ fiscal environment, he will have to make hard choices. If popularity becomes the new measuring stick — as suggested by Mark’s observation that “a lot more people follow sport in the papers and on TV and discuss it around the proverbial water cooler than those discussing the finer points of Verdi’s Macbeth” — then the conclusion is obvious.
Of course, if you cut back on funding for the symphony orchestras and opera houses, you are torpedoing the careers of a lot of young artists.
Any young women or men out there who have devoted themselves to the cello, or classical piano, or operatic singing, or ballet — well, we’re very sorry. But look on the bright side, McDonalds is recruiting.
Hey, maybe we could find a bit of work for these discarded performers in community theatre, assuming they’re versatile enough to dump their previous artistic training in favour of what the more popular entertainments require.
All seems rather ‘neo-liberal’ to me.
As an afterthought, Mark’s popularity-based argument is eerily reminiscent of the university administrators’ position that student demand must be the final determinant of resources.
Ditch your ‘hard subjects’ if the students don’t want them, just as in Mark’s arts policy, you’d ditch the opera if not enough people attend it.
Such reasoning was much decried here at LP in respect of the unis, so its surprising to see it come up in respect of the yarts.
Well said Mark, I’d like to add that habitus can have an even wider meaning that not only takes into account the social and psychological attributes of a person but their biological charcateristics as well. Sex is part of habitus, as is height or hair colour or the robustness of health. It’s useful because it helps to get around the nature/nurture dichotomy which can be helpful but is a sometime hindrance to understanding.
>
On cultural policy. I was re-reading Framing Culture last week and was struck by the frustration of the author in the fact that cultural theory has little influence on cultural policy. Surely that can’t still be right, I said. Is it? I don’t know. Perhaps someone’d like to update me. When I was a film journalist I was asked to write something on the fact that those working in the film industry have little awareness of, or use for, film theory. I don’t think my co-author got what he bargained for with my take but he’s stuck it on his website so he’s not entirely ashamed of it.
>
Thing is, cultural policy aside, how does cultural theory influence cultural practice? I’ve said that it doesn’t but that’s an exaggeration. Many people who work in the cultural industries know something of various theories. Many don’t. How it affects their actual work depends on the work they do to large extent. In the Art scene there’s a lot of it and much of it, not all, is counter-productive. The music scene is the opposite, there are many people involved in such that attend the VCA or the like but it’s not required. Contrawise, in film it seems that to have attended either the VCA or AFTRS film schools to get a look in funding wise is required.
>
This brings me to my final point: why is public policy privileged? I have argued that the default setting of many young filmmakers to a publicly funded career is antithetical to their ambitions and that there are aspects of the system that impede free-flow creativity. That said, there are also aspects of our extremely unadventurous business culture that do likewise.
>
Nevertheless the political spectrum seems unnecessarily grafted onto the culture: industrially, theoretically and yes even politically.
>
On the one had we have the ‘left-wing’ culture for whom cultural production seems to be all about issues that are not strictly pertinent to the success of an industry: national identity for example. Here public funding is sacrosanct and any critique of it is to be supressed.
>
On the other hand there’s the ‘right-wing’ culture which is all about entertainment and money no matter how base or frivilous appended by a maddening disregard for the necessity of a national culture at all. Here public funding of the arts is a shocking waste of money even tho’ such funding is dwarfed by straight-up grants made to various sporting institutions and sundry corporate welfare items.
I kinda think both yes and no. On the one hand the Arts can’t be reduced to an industry. Here I’d invoke the notion of vocation which is a sense of something you do with your life, the prime purpose of your life, whether it pays or not. Ther are many famous examples: Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka, Vincent Van Gogh.
>
To take an example from some for whom art has certainly paid off, let’s take the Rolling Stones. The Stones properluy began when Jagger and Richards met and realized they both had a passion for what were termed (in the US) race records. They formed a band that gelled very well. It was the right time and place and they shot forth as we all know. Now I’d wager if it hadn’t been the right time and place Jagger would now be a hi-falutin’ businessman (with an excellent record collection) but Keef would be still playing music even if it was down the pub. For him it’s a vocation.
>
That said it’s also an industry. Shakespeare was an artist but he was also a businessman which is agood thing for him ’cause in those days the theatre owners had copyright on the plays they produced. The writers were hired help. Anyway there’s a limit in an economically rationalist age to the extent that politicians will indulge the whims of those who feel they are artists, or fund cultural activities that have no substantial appeal. Wem won’t change that anytime soon.
>
The notion of a cultural industry btw is something I first encountered reading the Frankfurt school, who were hardly capitalist lackeys.
I’d like to back up Adrien’s point about the right-wing “cultural elites” narrative: it has nothing whatsoever to do with haute bourgeoisie tastes. Instead, it’s about the disparity between educated/bohemian tastes and values on the one hand, and less educated/working class tastes and values on the other.
Nobody may go to the opera any more, but university educated mums and dads still watch the 7.30 report while the working class watch ACA. Arts students listen to indie/post-rock/proto-punk/etc. while apprentices listen to Nickelback and Creed. In each case, the former get the arts funding.
Some conservatives may have elitist, high-cultural agendas when it comes to arts funding, but at least they admit that they’re going against the tastes of the majority. But progressives also often have agendas to push. The reality is, arts funding almost always goes against the “public taste”.
How much funsing is there in music. I know there’s certain kinds of funding for ‘cultural’ stuff as in various forms of ‘ethnic’ music, what appears at festivals and classical stuff, but down the pub rock n’ roll, jazz, hip-hop.
“The greatest arts subsidy ever invented” – Ignatius Jones.
>
All the musos I know hustle hard in the rain (take their come up and reinvest it again) and get jackshit from the govt.
>
Unless they’re on the dole of course.
No, not at all, Paulus. That’s not the conclusion I’m implying. I’m trying to burst a few balloons so we can see more clearly.
What I’m suggesting is that the popularity arguments for arts funding usually made by major companies (ie more popular than the footie) are spurious, and wrong, and shouldn’t be relied on. I’m also suggesting that those who claim that the marketplace should decide are hypocrites when it comes to the art forms they prefer, or want to defend for what are essentially political reasons.
I am distinctly not arguing for funding to be based on popularity. What I am arguing for is for a rethink of what arts/cultural policy is for, and what funding is meant to promote. Fine is quite right to say that includes the interests of the artist, and I think Ben is on the same track. We need to have a discussion about what the appropriate principles are, which starts by rejecting as far as possible all the silly tangles and political nonsense these debates have been tied up in. Cut the Gordian knot, and let’s have some real “fresh thinking” but any claims as to the benefits of proceeding in a particular direction should be backed by evidence not prejudice (in the other sense of the word) or for that matter, personal taste.
I’ve got my own view, but I’m much more interested in doing some brush clearing, as it were, to see what others can come up.
Pretend you’re at the 2020 summit!
One last response, because this also goes to a misunderstanding from JG.
JG wrote:
That’s to ignore two aspects of what I said. Firstly the point that there are very very few exclusive consumers or aficionados of HC alone. The reference to the toffs at the opera at the beginning is meant to make a point, which I didn’t perhaps elucidate as I was trying to be suggestive rather than didactic. That is – they’re mainly only there on opening night and there aren’t enough of the “must go to the opera as it’s my bourgeois duty” types around to sell all the tickets in the house even then. I referred also to Ferres and Adair’s paper, which draws on the market research they conducted on behalf of major performing arts centres. They’re very well aware of this – and very well aware that some of the strategies they tried which sought to appeal in effect to status failed. They’re also aware that there’s significant overlap between their audience for “high art” performances and what are normally seen as “suburban” tastes – ie musicals.
Similarly, and it’s important to distinguish between certain forms so I don’t necessarily think the 7 30 report/ACA comparison tells us anything (and there’s more crossover there than you think, Leon), it’s less and less possible to assume that “apprentices” are all listening to metal and arts students to post-punk, as band promoters I know are all too aware of. For people who are in the practical business of creating and promoting art, these distinctions work very badly indeed in marketing terms and in terms of understanding their audiences.
Now it may well be the case that there are few working class people among the “omnivores”. But that’s again less of a hard and fast assumption than it used to be, and arts companies are getting better at working out how to connect them with these forms – in a declining market for them generally. Note that I made the point that HC forms struggle to attract any sizeable audience at all these days.
My argument generally is to suggest that the realities of consumption practices and patterns are now much more complex than almost all of the tired arguments and dichotomies suggest, and that’s what people need to take into account.
I’d draw attention once again to the two apparently opposed bases for cultural policy I referred to – democratising culture and culturing democracy. What we in fact need to do is learn to think outside this particular dichotomy.
Enough from me!
Or maybe not!
Yes, I agree. But the famed “luvvies” are as rare as the aristocratic culture vultures. Again the same people who are watching a physical theatre performance at the Powerhouse are at pub trivia the next night.
The two poles of the “culture wars”, I’m suggesting are more akin to phantom armies clashing in the night than any real sociological groups.
Ha!
That, in my experience, is so true.
Seriously, good point, Adrien.
Mark mentioned the Powerhouse. It’s a good example because part of the rethinking they have had is to use their popular comedy program to cross-promote other more “avant-garde” or “arty” things. And it works. Also, Zen Zen Zo, who specialise in physical theatre, based on various Asian traditions in performance, including Butoh, do gangbusters sales at the box office and as far as I’m aware aren’t publicly supported, because they know how to relate to, and challenge, audiences simultaneously.
Have a looksee around their website:
http://www.zenzenzo.com/
Because Brisbane has both a very lively arts scene and lacks even the residual bourgie theatre going habit (and honestly, who’d go and see a later David Williamson play out of duty?), lots of creative stuff goes on here. Because it has to.
NSW, incidentally, is the state government that supports arts/culture the least.
Deliberate scare quotes, btw.
The concept of “avant-garde” also lacks much in terms of a referent in terms of actual arts practice. It’s just another way that these debates get bogged down too much in terms of categories peculiar to high modernism.
I’ve got a few of CDs (including The Last Beautiful Day by New Buffalo) that have the Arts Victoria logo on them, which means they got funded for some part of the recording or production of the CD.
In an ideal world there wouldn’t even be an Arts Minister.
In an ideal world there’d be no tax agents, Mr Block.
Heh.
I am curious about Kim mentioning Butoh.It might be good art form to think about with regard to funding.
I lived in Japan in the 80’s with a person who was studying physical theatre . Kazuo Ohno was giving open lessons and people came from around the world to sit with him and hear about performing.
We would traipse around small theatres and halls supporting small groups and other individuals putting on performances. There were always new pieces to see and a small crowd was pretty much guaranteed.
As far as I’m aware all of this developed without any state support . People made the effort to get to Japan and spend as long as they could under the visa restrictions at the time studying this form.
Butoh is a mesmerising and astounding type of physical theatre but it would seem to me to require a lot of experience of it’s ideas before it is appreciated by an audience member.
Is that an elitist attitude? Maybe but expose someone who has never seen Butoh to a 60 minute performance and I bet most will think it is incomprehensible.
Does the possibility that some art forms are difficult to access and require a fair bit of preparation on behalf of the viewer mean they will be less likely to be sympathetically considered when it comes to state funding?
I would hope not and even if some art forms are not popular or easily comprehensible hopefully some funding will be available for them.
In Japan all that time ago butoh was a strong and vibrant new art form and it emerged and grew without state support but to say it was popular or well patronised would be a exaggeration.
Yes, I’m sure there’s a few people out there like me who watch the 7:30 report as source of information and ACA/TT when I went to have a good laugh (although the chasers do a good job of picking out the good bits).
Mark: “What I am arguing for is for a rethink of what arts/cultural policy is for, and what funding is meant to promote… We need to have a discussion about what the appropriate principles are… let’s have some real “fresh thinkingâ€?…”
Sounds good. I think that to have a productive discussion about a huge topic like this, it helps to have some commonly-understood data and conceptions already in hand, as a kind of working vocabulary.
You should start by acknowledging the great achievements of your predecessors. For instance, Australia in 2008 is filled with museums and libraries and ballet companies, in a place which not so very long ago was a prison camp and a great big desert. That’s a pretty impressive achivement. (How many opera companies do you see lying around in Siberia, say, or Chad?) So, how did your elders do it? What did they do right, and wrong? What did they leave undone, and why? What do some of the main players of that time think about what they did? (Some of them are surely still alive. Go ahead. Ask them.)
Numbers are important. How much money does the federal government really spend right now on arts, for a population of 20 million? How is it spent? (Partial grants all over the place, or direct full funding of “national” institutions by the feds?) What’s the breakdown for, say, arts education, physical infrastructure of institutions, maintaining pre-existing collections and repertories, creating new work? What’s the percentage breakdown for, say, maintaining continuity with traditional Western arts practices and institutions, both “high” and “popular”; maintaining a distinctly Australian national character and profile in arts; maintaining indigenous cultural institutions; and paying off the various scams and shakedowns of bullshit identity-politics hustlers?
Same questions for the state and city levels. What are the dollar amounts for all this stuff at present? If it’s unsatisfactory, well, in which areas precisely, and why?
What are Australia’s natural strong and weak suits in arts practice? (Every nation does some things better than other things. Do you want to spend effort and money on emphasizing and promoting the things you already know you do well, or on improving the things you do less well?)
Does “arts policy” mean just funding artists and arts institutions, or does it mean something different, or a bunch of things?
j_p_z, those are excellent questions.
Sticking to my encouraging debate posture, I’ll just point out that the federal government provides a minority of cultural funding (broadly defined – including things like local libraries as well as opera companies or arts centres). There’s a passionate rant about NSW spending the least here:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/festival-fun-belies-arts-battle-ahead/2008/01/10/1199554826128.html?page=2
There are facts and figures here:
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4183.0Main+Features12005-06?OpenDocument
Let me, in passing, make a national apology for the awfulness of the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ website.
murph, interesting comments indeed about Butoh…
Arts funding should go to preserve/showcase the canon; and to allow as many as possible to participate as cultural producers; and to promote new art forms; and to support new artists.
It’s a basket of things. Which is what arts funding policies in this country already pretty much do. In Victoria at least. Nobody’s complaining too loud down here.
And yes most people who enjoy opera also enjoy contemporary musical forms. It is still worth spending a little money to preserve opera however. Why? I don’t really know. Just because we can, maybe. Call it state art. I like state stuff. It’s done in common. It can’t be done by an individual.
Maybe that’s because Vic spends about $27 a head more than Qld and $38 ish more than NSW, wbb!
As per my previous comment, though, you’d have to drill down into the figures to work out how much is for “arts” per se. And it’s too late at night for me to do that!
People certainly are complaining loudly here. The state government just cut a lot of small org’s funds – which forced the closure of several. Things are meant to be on a “business plan” model here, and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with that, but normally a business knows that it needs to seek more funding with much more notice than a ministerial letter and a month to adjust. (Though the announcement was delayed, suggesting conflict and dissension in the gov’t ranks). The latest thing is regionalisation, I think, or some other -isation. Now most of these changes are not in themselves a bad thing, but they’re in the context of a limited pie. What happens is that every time a new Minister comes in (and the changes are frequent), or you get some new advisors/consultants/whoever, they feel they have to make their mark with a change in direction. They quickly learn that the Treasurer or Finance Minister won’t increase the size of the pie, so… the obvious happens.
It’s to everyone’s benefit to have reasonably stable criteria for funding, and for funding to be for reasonable periods to enable people to plan, and actually make some art as well as scramble for money the whole time (and the “let the market decide” argument usually ignores the fact that marketing costs money!).
It’s also to everyone’s benefit to have a coherent framework or set of aims. The current state government policy, while in some ways admirable, could also be described as far too comprehensive and incoherent.
So what we have, even if everyone is reasonably happy with their dosh, is jerrybuilt over a long period of time, with little rethinking about what it’s all supposed to be for. Those are the sort of questions that I’m trying to prompt discussion about. Maintaining things as they are is also an inherently conservative position (in both senses of the word). Now maybe that’s the goal. If so, it could be done better. It also tends to crowd out innovation. Maybe innovation’s not the goal (though it’s hard to see how it couldn’t be – even opera, as Windschuttle knows, was produced very differently years ago, even if he’s quite wrong to see a bit of an adult theme as anything new!)…
I think everyone, including the glorious taxpayer, suffers if there isn’t some back to first principles thinking, and that includes deciding what the principles and aims of cultural policy are. Unlike funding for sport, or other stuff, it’s always going to be questioned, and a lot of the answers given just aren’t convincing or good enough.
To be sure! My lovely gay boy neighbours who flew to Adelaide to see the whole Ring cycle would agree with you when they vary their opera Saturday nights with J-tv Sunday nights!
I hope I’m not interpreted as knocking opera. I like it, though I can rarely justify the expense. It’s just that, for reasons which I think reading my article makes clear, it’s a good example of many of the contradictions and muddles arts talk and the arts policy walk is prone too.
Not sure if any one mentioned it earlier, but this (type of) debate brings to mind the audition of Paul Potts on Britains Got Talent a year or two ago.
The last half of this clip is a bit nauseating (the commentary, the aerosmith) but the first part is gold. (makes me go all teary…)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k08yxu57NA“Shakespeare was an artist but he was also a businessman which is agood thing for him ’cause in those days the theatre owners had copyright on the plays they produced.”
The right to copy manuscripts in the time of Shakespeare was a Crown monopoly held by the Stationers’ Company, the printers’ and booksellers guild of the City of London.They regulated the licensing of books on behalf of the Crown and was authorized to seize and destroy unlicensed copies. Once a work was registered with a member printer, at a cost of sixpence, that printer held the exclusive right to reproduce it. Decisions about who was able to register a work was pretty much up to the opinion of individual printers and the historical register shows that companies of actors sometime could register plays. Ben Johnson, I think, registered his own plays and had folios printed.
You know, sometimes it occurs to me that I care about some strange things.
d
“I think everyone, including the glorious taxpayer, suffers if there isn’t some back to first principles thinking, and that includes deciding what the principles and aims of cultural policy are. Unlike funding for sport, or other stuff, it’s always going to be questioned, and a lot of the answers given just aren’t convincing or good enough.”
Is this similar to the thinking which was embodied in the Dawkins reforms to education spending in the 1980’s ? One consequence of back to first principle analysis seems to rest on the concept that a mass audience equals democratisation of an art form. From such a conclusion the user pays mentality isn’t far behind or a grant tied to some form of audience count improvement.
As wbb mentions a mix of funding might be the ideal . I think that tying funding to audience numbers might well help disseminate and popularise some art forms but perversely reduce the breadth of experiences available to be seen .
The best arts funding project I can think of for Victoria would be support for contemporary original music venues. This might partly take the form of rebates for soundproofing, or possibly grants for new venues, rehearsal spaces, etc.
Rock and roll ain’t noise pollution.
And we are all the better for it.
Like I said, murph, I’d be opposed to a policy that relied on popularity as an index of success or worthiness.
yeah I usually tend to put avant garde in quotes to emphasize this unless I’m talking about modernist stuff in which case I reckon the term applies. Andy Warhol et al put paid to the avant garde. Even couter-culture is somewhat dodgy. As Laurie Anderson said how can something be avant garde if a performance artist’s shock of the new is appropriated a week later in an ad campaign for shampoo.
>
I personally think that the mainstream oughta go back to their caitious ways vis a vis imitating bohemia. There’s an awful lot of naff tatoos out there.
Andrew Bolt is. He wants more cheesy pix of tulips.
Yeah. As I understand it however, plays were often written without a view to printing them. Printing was a new technology at the time. Ben Johnson would’ve been more hip than Shakespeare – Trantino to Scorsese if you like. The owners of the players’ companies owned the plays, not the playwrite. Shakespeare owned a chunk of the King’s Men. What legal process led to the publishing of the First Folio I don’t know.
>
But I’m wading off topic. Sorry.
Marl
I’d draw attention once again to the two apparently opposed bases for cultural policy I referred to – democratising culture and culturing democracy. What we in fact need to do is learn to think outside this particular dichotomy.
In terms of state involvement I am not very comfortable with using “democracy” as a policy goal. HC and great art are by definition elite, and government funding should endeavour to encourage that elitism. Where the “democracy” goal does have merit is in providing sufficient funding to enable as many people as possible to be able to participate as spectators of great art and performance
In terms of low/pop culture, it is difficult to sustain arguments for ANY government involvement, except, for example, to build infracstructure such as sporting and performing arenas, facilities in schools. Pop culture should be an organic cry from the streets fed by Darwinian cultural selection, not featherbedded by superannuated state-run committees
I am not a fan of directly funding artists. OTOH I support massive funding of great arts institutions, such as State Art Galleries, Museuams, Opera Australia, the state Theatre companies, NIDA, VCA, AFRTS, Australian Ballet, Bell Shakespeare, etc. But the institutions themselves should select and nurture the artists, not government committees.
Well in the film industry, strong = actors (obviously), weak = writers. There’s normally a panel discussion/whingefest about funding structures and restructuring arguments in order to make Oz screenwiriting better. Given that writing is materially the cheapest thing to do in film I reckon it’s totally irrellevant. There’s simply a limit to things that policy can fix.
>
I do recall a screenwriting class at the AFTRS once. It was a read thru of three scenes by different students. The first two were very ordinary bits of social-realism: banal conversation about nothing in particular. The third was a very funny comedy of errors based on a series of unlikely coincidences.
>
The teacher praised the first two and panned the third!!! Why? ‘Cause the third one wasn’t ‘realistic’. There’s a default to an aesthetics of the dull in this country. It goes back a long way. Policy might address this, as in we now have a policy to hire screenwriting teachers that actually have good taste.
Funding, funding, funding. I’m not a puritan about this for either side. And altho’ I’ve done some artsy stuff over the years I know most about film so that’s what I’ll talk about.
>
A little story:
>
Couple years back I was the Melbourne International Film Festival. They have regular forums featuring various Q&A, panel discussion type events.
>
One featured this Adelaide lad: Murali Thalluri. He’d made a film, 2:37. No experience. Never been to film school, didn’t even know what a clapper board was for. Naturally he wouldn’t get a look in with the FFC or anything. So he got the Who’s Who and rang all the rich people in Adelaide. He raised the budget ($800 000) twice. He had to because his first investor pulled out the first week of shooting. He spent the evenings calling round and managed to make the Friday payday.
>
He was 19 when he started writing it, 22 when I met him. 2:37 was accepted at Cannes.
>
The other forum featured 3 VCA graduates. They’d graduated around 3 or 4 years previously and had just made their first state-funded post-school shorts. I’ve worked on these things they have budgets in the mid 5 figures. This lot were sittin’ around having a bit of a bitchwhinge:
>
It’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding
>
You get the idea.
>
Now it’s not that hard to get funding for them. It is a bit like the dole office tho’, you’ve got to play your cards right, fill in the forms and wait in line. It’ll probably take ‘em around 10-15 years to make their first feature (if they do) and most of ‘em won’t make a second.
>
So I said: well what about this Murali kid. He doesn’t know anywhere as much as you guys and he wrote his flick, got the investment he needed, finished it and shipped it to the world in less than a third of the time it’s taken you guys to finish your VCA degrees and make your first post-grad short!!
>
Yeah? they said, that’s great. But it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding it’s so hard to get funding
I think JG has summed up everything that I think arts funding shouldn’t be about. Well done John!
>
Where can I start? Pop culture as Darwinian struggle? Oh dear, why don’t we let them all starve in garrets while we’re at it? The reality is that ALL arts practice is a highly risky enterprise – just ask those many classical musicians who aren’t lucky enough to enjoy a salaried position in an orchestra. If you want to see cultural darwinism, go to a NIDA audition – there you’ll see some serious selection pressure.
>
And this is the problem of arts institutions as nurturers of artists – it’s not actually in their interest to do it. Their role is to showcase the great work of the past, and John will be happy to know that by the standards of the Australian arts scene, they do get large wads of funding to do this. Which makes sense if, as John apparently does, you believe that artists should struggle their way forth from the teeming mass of low culture.
>
Conversely, as Adrien alludes to, a lot of original work happens outside of the institutional context, and bodies like the film commissions and AFTRS have a terrible record in supporting new writing talent. That’s because they too are locked into an institutional structure where they valorise certain types of creativity according to an outdated model of what the “industry” should look like – you can’t get funding to make a feature if you haven’t made a couple of shorts, and you vcan’t get script development funding if you haven’t already had a writing credit. And heaven help you if your experience is in something like, say, video art or TV commercials.
>
So what’s the answer? I believe we need to refigure our cultural policy around the creation of new work. Institutions can help with new work – the state theatre companies do a much better job than the operas, for example – but ultimately most new work is created by independent artists or small companies. The very people who don’t get funded most of the time, because they don’t have the bums on seats and can’t satisfy criteria like “organisational integrity.”
>
That’s if you want new Australian work. You might now want new Australian work. You might just want the top 10 of the global entertainment industry and the greatest hits of the 17-19th centuries. In that case, subsidies to Hollywood studios for making “blockbusters” here and some big iconic buildings are the way to go. In other words, the status quo.
There is an interesting mix of things that the Queensland State Government has chosen to support. I think that the Kelvin Grove Urban Village has been a good concept as has the buiding of Goma.
http://www.arts.qld.gov.au/arts/index.html
As I said earlier I remain unconvinced that the Judith Wright Centre has ever operated at a level where the General Public are informed what is on and made welcome when they arrive. It is probably the nearest thing to a venue run by and for an elite in Brisbane.
Ben Eltham
If you disagree, back it up. Apart from that, your post said absolutely nothing about culture or policy.
That’s odd, because it appears to discuss what sort of cultural policy Ben advocates…
steve, what sort of experiences make you think that about the JWC? Just interested.
“There’s a default to an aesthetics of the dull in this country.”
Would that be dun-coloured realism? Very interesting points, BTW Adrien. I’ve heard similar stories from friends who’ve worked on local films about dealing with people with the same approach as your VCA graduates.
Another problem is low-level corruption, the scale of which I have no real idea of, but I have a few anecdotes. I don’t know if it’s an arts policy issue, strictly speaking.
One anecdote: My partner’s mother, who has spent most of her life acting on and off, worked on a small-scale theatre production a few years ago. The promised payment was more of a gratuity, (less than a thousand dollars for half-a-dozen performances – it was never going to cover the hours she put into it,) but it was enough to help her get by after taking time off her day-job to rehearse etc. As I understand it, there was a small grant secured to cover this and other costs.
The woman administering funds etc took off for a holiday to South-East Asia when the production had run its course, and she never saw a cent. It being a relatively small amount, and her having no real idea how to proceed (and in spite of some help and encouragement), it was never pursued legally or otherwise. What did happen, however, was that a talented actress with a lot of experience was finally – and this wasn’t the first time something like this happened to her when dealing with small productions by arts insiders – soured from working in the theatre again.
As I said, I don’t know on what scale this sort of thing happens, but lack of accountability seems like a sure way to poison the well of talent, as much as anything else.
I know a bit about the film industry, because it’s how I make my living and have done so for quite a few years. I dont want this thread to turn into a bitch fight about funding arrangments, because it’s tedious and it doesn’t really answer any questions.
But just a couple of general points. Film is rather different from other arts in that funding is almost always done as an investment, not a grant, which means that there’s always some sort of market imperative attached. Therefore, in general terms, it’s actually sales agents, distributors and broadcasters who are supplying a lot of the finance. So, whenever we want to make a complaint about Australian film, it’s just factually incorrect to solely blame government agencies. Producers have to flog their product before it’s made. It’s called a ‘pre-sale’.
Secondly, the whole funding landscape will change in the new financial year for two reasons. One is that the two Federal bodies, the AFC and the FFC are being amalgamated into one and no-one knows what their funding priorities wil be. The second (which has already happened) is that the a new tax-offset has been put in place to encourage greater private investment. The FFC reckons this will increase investment by about 40% within a couple of years. It should create more financing opportunities for people who feel they don’t fit into the current funding landscape.
In general terms, I think what needs to happen in arts funding is more long term funding security for artists and organisations. The opposite of John Greenfield. There also needs to be more opportunities for artists to be able to exploit their intellectual property. For instance, in some European countries, artists get slice of their work’s re-sale value for the life of the work, not just from their initial sale.
Long term funding is essential because that gives artists the time and space to really develop work properly, not in a half-arsed fashion as so often happen.
In France, if you produce a film one year, you automatically get investment the following year to keep developing work. In Australia, we’re starting to get there. For instance, Film Victoria will give major slices of investment to proven production companies to develop a slate of projects. So, instead of writers going piece-meal to a funding body, the produciton company pays for the development. This gives control of work back to proven artists and trusts their judgement.
In general terms, I favour policies that give control of hte money back to the artists.
Another really useful thing the government can look at is freeing up dole conditions for artists. Just accept that people are using dole money to make art and that it’s legitimate. Ask any artist of a certain age and they’ll talk about the importance of the Fraser/Hawke/Keating Scholarship when they were young.
By the way, I’d go along with pretty much everything Ben has to say. Except I think you’re being a tad harsh about the funding bodies.
Having said that. Mark, you might want to do some research about a scandal which engulfed the Pacific Film and TV Commission. A government enquiry identified it as a really stuffed entity. A role model for what you don’t want.
Ben disgrees with John G or does he?
>
Klaus -
Yep. You can tell an Oz film poster at a hundred paces. It will feature:
>
1. Ugly, garish colours
>
2. Typefaces that were trendy for two weeks 15 years ago
>
3. At least two (male)dickhead local celebs with greasy hair who would only get into showbusiness in a country that views mediocrity as a virtue.
>
4. In the background with a third-rate haircut and a fourth-rate wardrobe, wearing a meek expression, will be the token girl whose part will basically be to lend facile support to the hero. This role will played by a woman who’s likely to become a superstar five minutes after she steps off a plane in LA or London.
>
But if you say that to a bunch of film people they will simply reject you out of hand and proceed to shoot another film that has all the latest techniques of 70s made for TV midday movies only without the quality scrips.
Fine, yep, I know about that.
Some retorts
And exactly how do you sort out the proper artists from people who just don’t want a job? That would open a huge loophole. It would also bring down even more credentialism in the creative industries. Some panel or committee would be set up and you’d be an ‘artist’ if they approved you. These committees are a plague upon our house. The are stuffed to the brim with people who know everything about the arts except how to have an idea. Forget it.
Again this will lead to credentialism and cronysim. We already have that. I remember working for a bloke who’d made his entire living from grants. He was in his 50s before first turned down he seriously described it as ‘fascism’. I mean he was serious. And here’s the other news, the guy wasn’t talented. He was good at spinning bullshit and kissing arse.
>
Just accept facts as Umberto Eco did. He was offered an Arts ministry once, turned it down. Art is an inherently anarchistic, capitalist endeavour, he said. There’s no point in being the minister for the arts.
And
I’ve applied for three (film) grants in my life and gotten ech one. I helped a friend apply for an arts grant once. Here’s a story. I wrote the arts grant applaication the same year I got funding to do a short film.
>
The film application needed: the script, a detailed budget, a cast list, a crew list, a shooting schedule.
>
Thje arts application required a filled-in form and 750 words of postmodernist bullshit.
>
When I finished the film I was required to give two copies to the funding committee along with receipts demonstrating what I’d spent the money on with explainations for any budget variance. This I did.
>
My friend received $10 000 of taxpayer’s money and he drank it. It didn’t stop him getting more grants and he never had to repay the money.
Yep, the structure and administration of government funding for film is quite separate at both state and federal level from funding for other artforms.
I’ve been involved in arts funding at both levels on and off for a long time now and the biggest ongoing problem is trying to cater at least a bit for almost every one of the demands made above, all of which have their merits. There is triennial funding available both to institutions and to individual artists. There are separate programs for individual artists (now mostly project-oriented), for festivals and events, and for institutions — theatre and dance companies, writers’ centres and so on. Popular culture is getting more and more of a look-in. So, finally, is new media.
The trouble is that the pie never gets any bigger, which means smaller and smaller slices for larger and larger numbers of funding categories.
One of the advantages of arts funding at state level (and I found this was quite as true of Victoria as it is here in SA) is that within each artform, and often across artforms, most of the grants recipients know (of) each other, and rather than allowing nepotism or other forms of corruption this actually forces people to keep their noses clean, as the gossip level is usually quite high. If Klaus K’s example at #58 happened here, it wouldn’t be long before everyone in theatre circles — including the people on the grants committees — knew about it.
One other and comparatively recent problem that nobody’s mentioned yet is that as the administration of arts funding tends more and more towards business models, the result is similar to what has happened to academics as universities went the same way: you end up with, say, four fine young musicians spending many untrained and unpaid hours in work for which they have no aptitude, producing business plans, drawing up budgets, filling in forms and hustling to get bums on seats, instead of working on their next concert.
PC
This is true but how do you avoid it? You can receieve patronage but that’s rare. Even corporate funding of the arts is done via committee with strings attached. Public funding uses public money so there’s certain accountability issues. You can run your own show and the advatage of that is altho’ you have to the humdrum stuff you can do it your way. It’s a good point but I don’t see a way out of it unless you’re stuff makes enough money to hire accountants.
Um “most of the grants recipients know (of) each other..most of the grants recipients know (of) each other”.
>
????????
In film funding, perhaps, but otherwise that’s a well-worn cliche with very little basis in fact. (I would say that, wouldn’t I, but still.) And what would you propose in their stead, to ensure fair distribution of funding?
All the arts funding committees I’ve ever been on have been made up almost entirely of practitioners in the artform(s). One of the annual four-day Literature Board marathons I remember particularly clearly included Amanda Lohrey, Judith Brett, Roger MacDonald, the Roberts Dessaix and Drewe and the Johns Tranter and Iremonger (the late and much-lamented). At state (Vic) level I particularly remember the one involving Daniel Keene, Barry Hill, and, again, Judith Brett. None of these people could be accused of having no ideas.
No idea; I was merely pointing out that it was a problem.
I assume that was a bit of bad editing; if so it’s now been corrected by some kind moderator.
Our comments are crossing, which accounts for the weirdly discontinuous nature of this conversation.
“If Klaus K’s example at #58 happened here, it wouldn’t be long before everyone in theatre circles — including the people on the grants committees — knew about it.”
Well, several years later I note that the person in question is a language teacher and I really don’t know if she does theatre anymore, but I haven’t seen her name attached to anything in that capacity for a while. It may well be that it did catch up with her, and I’m sure that these things do eventually. I mean, cast and crew of that production were never going to work with her again!
Nothing. Treat it as a business. Seek an audience globally go out and compete.
In Arts funding too. Perhaps more so. I’ve got a bit of experience there. There’s also the problem of ideologically motivated funding. I really wish the idea that you can change the world by exhibiting some obscure ‘political’ bit of whatever on a Friday afternoon on Gertrude St would go the way of the Dodo. ‘Politics’ is a really good way to rationalise and make defesinble a lot of crap.
>
That said there’s heaps of good stuff in the arts, at least in Victoria, more than film so I’m not complaining too loudly. But cliches get worn well for a reason.
>
The ????? was in aid of my puzzlement at how a close-knit group of recipients and approvers can facilitate the keeping of clean noses?
“These committees are a plague upon our house. The are stuffed to the brim with
people who know everything about the arts except how to have an idea.”
Silly comment, with no evidence attached to it. Usually means person has been rejected and feeling bitter.
Adrien, Im not sure what the point of your arguments are, except you don’t like Australian film much. Fair enough. I’m not very interested in having that argument with you, because I find it a little tedious and beside the point for this thread. As I pointed out the films you don’t like get made because they have sales agents and distributors attached, not because they have government funding. Go and check out the FFC website and learn how films get financed.
How do you sort out the dole arrangments? They tend to sort themselves out in an informal sort of way. People tend not to want to stay on the dole. The pay isn’t great.
Cronyism? Credentials? Sigh! You seem to be contradicting yourself. First you think the dole shouldn’t be loosened because how do you prove you’re an artist. And then you complain about ‘credentialism’? You worked for an artist you thought untalented? Just your opinion, I guess.
Art is essentially capitalist? I guess we can do away with all government funding, then. But then you wouldn’t have got your filmmaking grants, would you? Simple-minded stuff, I think.
But don’t worry. If you want to make something larger than a short, then you’ll be faced with the market imperative. You should enjoy it.
If Klaus K’s example at #58 happened here, it wouldn’t be long before everyone in theatre circles — including the people on the grants committees — knew about it.
>
That’s true. If you actually ripped people off and went on holiday you’d be fucked. But that’s not the same as the sewing circle arts ghetto type thing.
>
PS Sorry for all the dreadful spelling errors. For some reason I’m really hungover today.
Oh I see, sorry — your blockquote came out all cattywumpus. It’s because of the gossip, like I said. People know they simply can’t get away with stuff like that: someone will see, know, find out, put two and two together, whatever, and talk about it. To everyone. NB the phrase “close-knit” is yours, not mine, and it’s not the one I would have used, because I think its connotations don’t fit what actually goes on. “Hothouse”, p’raps?
But what I’m arguing is that that exists only in people’s imaginations, popular strawghetto though it be. There are certainly a lot of people who know each other and each other’s work, but there is no ghetto and no circle (both of which imply a closed shop), not least because the populations both of the funding bodies and of the artists in various artforms are constantly shifting.
PC I ain’t some Boltaburbian 4WD drive type of Maccas munching fat arsed dickwad that gets all his info from Rupert Murdoch. I’m the very model of a modern inner-city wanker. I got the tatoos to prove it. And I’ve been involved with the arty-farts since forever. It’s not a myth, it’s true.
>
What’s interesting is the denial. It’s like the Cultural Elite thing. There’s a (actually many) Cultural Elite(s). But the group that so frequently gets targeted as such is apparent. Oversimplified and lampooned as it is by News Ltd etc. Yet it exists. Stop the denial. Where’s the shame?
>
Say it loud. I’m out and proud. I am a dodgy boho pervert who slakes himself upon the very goats and curses family values and channel 9. Stuff you, you shopping mall Stimpies.
Yes, I’d picked that up, which was precisely why I was so surprised at your taking of a position more commonly found among disgruntled unsuccessful grants applicants.
Agreed absolutely about the Cultural Elites (pronounced Ay-leets and doubtless drinkers of latte pronounced lar-tay), which exist no matter how you define or qualify ‘culture’. Perhaps it would be more useful to analyse the Sub-Cultural Elites. But as far as the alleged ghettoes are concerned I can only conclude that your arty-farts are more ghettoised than my arty-farts.
Also, I think your ’sewing circle’ metaphor is implicitly sexist, trivialising as it does a pursuit traditionally associated with women.
*Runs away*
PC – There’s no sewing circle.
Adrien -Yes, there is.
It seems to me Adrien you need to offer up some argument, rather than assertion for this. But, as I feared, threads going to turn into an argument about who gets funding and who doesn’t, which is so unproductive.
Bollocks. It’s actually reminds me of Pulp Fiction when Mia tells Vincent that ‘you little scamps’ ie hitmen are ‘worse than a sewing circle.’ Bringing sexism into this is just a way of evading the argument.
If you’re suggesting that I’m bitchmoaning at my unsuccessful grants application history, you’ve missed. I’ve applied for three grants in my life. Got ‘em all. Don’t do it anymore. I made like Johhny Rotten and switched over into free enterprise. (This is not a love song.)
>
Long black with a dash of milk.
I don’t really live in an arty-farts ghetto. Despite it being almost compulsory, I have declined to participate in the clique-ey-ness that Melbourne is famous for. After listening to the ‘clever’ coversations of the smart crowd:
>
Drone 1: Last year when I was in [insert name of trendy foreign country here] I met a [insert name of currently fashionable social type here] who said…..
>
Drone 2: Yes I think [insert name of this season's fashionable theorist here] had a lot to say …..
>
Drone 3: Have you got the latest [insert name of currently fashionable producer or mindless electronic music here] cd.
>
Year after year after year, you begin to understand what all these terrible clever people are saying. They’re saying: b’ah, baaah, b’aaaaaah.
FINE – I actually have no idea who gets funding these days. I don’t give a tinkers. Years ago I made decision not to go down that path for various reasons. One of the ebenfits is that you don’t feel resentful when you’re passed over.
>
But my experience in the Fortitude Valley scene in Brizvegas, the various localities of the Sydney Scene and the north of the river side of the Melbourne arts scene informs me well. There is a circle, more a scene than a circle. And this is something I find it baffling to have to generate evidence for.
>
Personally I don’t care about funding. I think facilities are a good idea, resources, places to gather. But I don’t think the problems of Australian culture can be solved by policy. The idea that the government can and/or will solve all our problems is one of the problems of Australian culture. Gebnerally these problems that can only be solved by people changing the way they think.
>
Clue: it’s not a group exercise.
I’m thinking maybe a way to go forward here would be to identify those things wherein policy can make a difference and discuss those policies. And also identify those areas in this it can’t. I’d say it can’t generate ideas. It can, perhaps, remove impediments to making those ideas whole.
Yes I agree. As I said, I’m much more interested in what principles should guide policy as a starting point – that’s more important than whether x gets funded or y doesn’t. The big question is what cultural policy is for. No one’s expecting policy to solve all the problems of the nation, but there’s a third way (dare I say!) between naive idealism and wearied cynicism.
Underlying aim of cultural policy should be to foster creation of content people actually flock to.
People who say it should be to preserve cultural identity are putting the cart before the horse, despite how important that is. No one’s going to watch your social-realist suburuban comedy if the actors are Champagne Comedy runner-ups, the screenwriters copywriters 9-to-5, the photography ugly as shit, the director some VCA sook, etc. Ergo no one’s going to have their sense of ‘Australianness’ reinforced.
Focus on substance, and focus on popular appeal. The Kulcha will sort itself out.
Agree. (And like most people who bother to comment on topics like this, I have all SORTS of crackpot opinions about how best to promote the growth of the arts; but lone rants, fun and therapeutic though they may be, don’t usually make good policy.)
So look at it this way. Government can have very different motives than actual artists, in spending public funds on an arts policy. The “policy” is not necessarily for the purposes of getting everybody to love Shakespeare or even Tony Kushner. It has social and political uses that, from a gov’t point of view, probably take precedence. It’s for the good of the country at large, even the people who insist they don’t like Art, not just for the artists.
For instance, having a bunch of big-ticket national arts institutions (say, just at the very top end: a world-class opera, ballet, symphony, art museum, national library and national theater) is actually a very useful diplomatic and soft-power instrument; your government can point to these things and say to the world, “See, we’re seriously wealthy advanced people with culture to burn.” It helps you to be seen as a player in the big leagues, which is a cloaked method of national defense. It generates world tours and world visits from others, brings in money, and is great for espionage, ask the Bolshoi. And if you have world-class institutions in all the key Western traditions, then it implies you’re a grown-up and not “quaint” or “colorful” or “vibrant” (i.e., “pathetic”).
At the state and city level, having big-ticket arts institutions makes your locale on the whole a more pleasant place to live, which attracts high-end foreign investment, corporate headquarters, and tourist money. It also improves quality of life (people rarely get mugged in front of the National Opera House), which greases the wheels of every kind of commerce. Having your population be relatively artistically literate means they are more educated, more advanced, and probably more peaceful and civilized, too, though that’s not guaranteed.
(Also, since many artists in most disciplines tend to skew leftwards politically in a generally unthinking fashion, it keeps busy a lot of tiresome left-wing halfwits who otherwise might be making some sort of real trouble; this way they’re just harmlessly mocking Christianity, white people and capitalism for the ninety-millionth time in a stupefyingly uninteresting fashion. Keeps ‘em off the streets.)
But what about the avant-garde? Don’t they deserve funding too? Of course! Last era’s worthless avant-garde is this era’s “modern classic,” or at least a fragment of it is, and since there’s no way of telling which splinters will survive, it pays to spread out your bets a little. Also, artists who are lower down on the food chain (i.e., not A-list successful) often tend to be very helpful educators and facilitators of beneficent social policy in otherwise hard-to-reach parts of society. I have many friends who have improved the lives of countless disadvantaged people through the generous (and long-armed) reach of their arts practice.
Well, this is getting too long now. COMING UP NEXT: HOW TO DO IT
Oops, when I said “agree” at the top of that last one, I meant I agree w/ Mark @ 80. I actually sort of disagree with H&R, we crossed comments.
And
That’s an interesting dichotomy. The problem with the first point of view is that anything that will pay doesn’t need funding from the public sector. The film industry in Australia features a lot of small to medium production houses that mostly make ads, some tv and the occasional film. One of the aesthetic problems with Oz film is that it looks very much like TV, small wonder when most of those working on ‘em spend 99% of their professional life shooting Blue Heelers or TVCs. (Hint: the camera doesn’t always have to placed at eye level guys, and it moves too y’know. It’s called steadicam).
>
Bitch bitch bitch.
>
The point is that the production houses’ main business is TV production. Film is largely a subsidized area that is a part-time boutique concern. No-one is taking the risks or fostering the skills to make cinematic movies. This leads to a negative feedback loop. We don’t make cinema, those who want to do so move overseas reinforcing the fact that we don’t make cinema.
>
The market fundamentalists have a point with respect to the film industry. It is addicted to public subsidy. Films are actually cheaper to shoot than they’ve even been. Access to global markets is unprecendented. Global communication networks mean that Australia’s isolation is no longer material. Yet there’s this: It’s so hard to get funding, it’s so hard to get funding blah blah blah.
>
What Australia needs is a Roger Corman type; a Jack Warner, a Sam Goldwyn.
>
But in policy terms one of the major impediments to Oz film entering its own market is the blockbooking system. This is a form of Hollywood protectionism by which local distributors are compelled to book 9 bad films if they want the one blockbuster that’ll pay the bills this year. It’s anti-competetive. That’s a definite area of policy concer. But that takes guts. The only guts in Canberra are the big bloated ones hanging over the belt.
>
Also, the film industry bureaucracy seems almost tenured. For the last decade or two it’s always been trendy to talk hardball about markets, territories, audience share: y’know like real moguls. Well I reckon if you wanna go that route fine. Then go it. If you’re in charge of development at the FFC and the Oz film industry has a bad year, you get sacked. That’s much better job security than the suits at the studios get.
>
There’s actually an argument that the only kind of stuff we should fund is the ‘avant garde’ stuff for the simple reason that it doesn’t have a market. Funding ‘avant garde’ stuff can get you in major deep shit with the Bolataburbians. And for every Atom Egoyan there’s a million pieces of shit. Still funding the uncommercial does have a certain valifity, you are helping make manifest stuff that wouldn’t any other way. Funding stuff that does have a market is a subsidy. And subsidies have certain inherent problems. In this case there’s no pressure to actually get an audience. Why when you’re getting paid anyway?
>
There’s also a conviction that Oz films don’t make money. Some people seem to think it a law of nature.
Absolutely. You can’t create a ‘national culture’ by committee decree. France, which is no slacker when it comes to ‘national cinema’ has a history of film which have contributed to their culture both domestically and abroad. French filmmakers don’t have to define their national culture, it’s not a problem for them of course. But we shouldn’t stress about that. We should just make good films.
>
Incidentally one of the iconic films from this country, Mad Max was made on private funds. Reason: the govt wouldn’t fund it, Philip Adams actually went to war against it. This at a time when the govt threw money at filmmakers. The reason they wouldn’t fund it was it didn’t define national culture. Funnilly enough it ended up helping to do just that.
>
Why don’t we make car movies anymore?
What Australia needs is a Roger Corman type; a Jack Warner, a Sam Goldwyn.
>
How remiss of me. I should’ve added a Christine Vachon. She’s the Roger Corman of today. She probably wouldn’t like me saying that.
>
Check out her: Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through the Barriers to Make Movies That Matter.
Adrien, you need to understand you know very little about how films are actually made.
“The market fundamentalists have a point with respect to the film industry. It is addicted to public subsidy. Films are actually cheaper to shoot than they’ve even been. Access to global markets is unprecendented. Global communication networks mean that Australia’s isolation is no longer material. Yet there’s this: It’s so hard to get funding, it’s so hard to get funding blah blah blah.”
Films aren’t cheaper to make than they’ve ever been. How do I know this? Because I’m constantly budgeting projects and have been doing so for quite a few years. I assume you’re referring to digital technology. There are some savings to be made but they’re not that great. They’re more than off set by the costs in labour, which is the major cost in making a film. Health and safety, legal, insurance and accounting, overheads and marketing costs have all increased much more than the pace of inflation. Post-production costs have also increased greatly because of the quantity and quality of deliverables you have ot supply to a distributor. Even if you shoot digitally, you have to deliver on film because there are no digital cinemas in Oz. There are ways around some of these issues, but they only apply to certain sorts of small films. I’ve seen many people put together $40,000 to shoot a film in which everyone defers their wages. It’s rare that they can ever find the money to complete and deliver. You noted Murali Thurali’s film in a post above. Please note that was completed with FFC and distributors finance. But publicists don’t talk about that, because the story of the maverick filmmaker working outside the system is a much juicier one.
You seem to admire the French film industry. Of course, that’s one of the most heavily subsidised ones in the world. A percentage of the box-office gross of every non-French film shown in cinemas goes to French film production. Most other European industries have similar structures. Of course, we’re limited ot what we can do becaue of the FTA. Europeans realise art is central to who they are. The first time I went to an international film festival, I was struck by the confidence of European filmmakers. They seemed to take it for granted that they and their work should be supported by the state. The sad ones were the people form Eastern Europe (this was in ‘92), who as someone said, they’d lost the dictatorship of the state, but now they were faced with e dictatorship of the marketplace. No government support, you see.
I also think Christina Vachon is a fantastic producer. But don’t be fooled that there is no government support in the US. In comes in the form of tax subsidies, otherwise investors would find much safer vehicles for their cash.
“If you’re in charge of development at the FFC and the Oz film industry has a bad year, you get sacked.”
I wonder why you think this, when the FFC has nothing to do with development?
Again, please refer to the FFC website and find out what they actually do. The Oz film industry works as an example of the mixed economy, for good or ill. No film or television (except for short films) gets finance unless there is substantial market attachment. The market fails regularly, as it always does. Distributors aren’t infallible and producers certainly don’t take the audiences for granted.
Because they are boring.
Because the female movie-going demographic de jour doesn’t like them. They like weepy chick flicks.
Chick flicks are also boring, but chicks go and see them.
The standard answer by every hack to the criticisms of our highly inefficient indutry is this:
There was this chap once. Lad from the bronx. He didn’t know how films were made. Never learnt the proper technique. Never bothered to find out the funding structures or do lunch in LA. Name of Stanley Kubrick.
>
If cats like you were in charge of the Bronx he probably would’ve turned out a doctor.
>
Take this:
Bang up job. See the Oz film industry is whaat’s know as NOT A SUCCESS. When you have been working away at something that is NOT A SUCCESS. Then your claims to experience are not pertinent because you are part of something that is shite. Gettit.
Hallelujah! The dude gets something.
In other words the standard way of making a film still makes it expensive. So what? See there are other ways of making films. A film is a series of moving photographs spliced together,. In essence, that’s it. People who realize this tend to make breakthroughs. Please consider the early careers of Mr Kubrick, Jim Jarmusch, Jean Luc Godard etcetra etcetera.
>
You’re saying they still cost because of costs associated with variou regulations. The regulations are immaterial to the essence of cinema. Photography and editing are. They are a lot cheaper. Imagination, hello?
>
Tchnically true but immaterial to my point about people who enjoy the tenure of bureaucrats whilst cliaming to make competative cultural products. Please refrain from this technocratic crap Fine. It’s exactly the kind of shite that mires this country in its quagmire. People like you are great for the industry, the airplane industry. Lots of talented people by tickets to LA. You should get a percentage.
Sorry Adrien, but dummy spitting doesn’t constitute an argument.
You’ve managed to ignore most of the points I’ve made. So, when you’re prepared to be civil, I’ll continue the conversation. Otherwise, I assume you’re acting in bad faith.
Can I just make the point that one of the reasons why we ask people in the comments policy to refrain from posting excessively is so that people don’t feel they’re constrained to take a position for or against a prolific commenter. People are still most welcome to join in this debate de novo as it were.
Sorry, Mark. I realise the discussion has wandered off into a really unhelpful dead-end.
No need to apologise, Fine.
It seems to me like the FTA is just a mechanism to ensure we keep feeding our talent into the US machine, and to stunt any prospect of a truly thriving domestic industry.
In fact it sounds all too much like a convenient excuse. Haven’t you guys found a workaround for such protectionism in four whole years?
Sadly, no. Any good ideas H&R?
Seems to me that certain qualities inherent in the film business make it an unlikely candidate to be re-shaped for the better by government cultural policy intiatives. Best the government could probably do is create small policy tweaks of a mostly technical nature (having to do with tax breaks and financing regs and so forth) that would make certain projects possible which couldn’t otherwise thrive in the market.
One important (and rather public) thing the government could do for film and TV, is to fund the production on state television of a weekly anthology show (viz., with different casts and directors and writers each week) that had a strong unifying premise, sort of like the “Twilight Zone” was in the US in the 50s – 60s. That show gave an enormous number of young talents a chance to get an early paycheck and some key experience. It was a great show with a singular vision but with infinite variations, which served as a sort of laboratory and finishing school for young actors and directors looking to refine their chops and get some exposure.
An anthology show gives lots of young artists a shot, and by having a strong central premise it gives everyone a baseline of standards that they must work with and effects they must achieve. It’s crucial in a show like that to have a sort of governing aesthetic, which gives both artists and audience a strong criterion for judging success or failure — without which the ‘educational’ aspect for the young artists is largely lost (i.e., no excuse of complaining that ‘the stupid audience doesn’t understand!’ if your horror show isn’t scary or your comedy show ain’t funny).
But beyond doing things like that, I think a government cultural policy should be concerned not with one art form in particular, but with the general arts/public/infrastructure interfaces, and with what an enhanced arts environment could mean for the nation at large.
ah, the browser ate the contribution I’d been pecking at all night and now I want to give up, but I have some things I want to get off my chest. So watch out, ’cause now I’m annoyed.
Here’s some of the things I would like to see in a government Arts policy.
Any measure of the “cultural life” of some place must include how many people are making a crust out of art and any arts policy has to be primarily concerned with the people producing art. (I want to call them ‘producers’ but I do not think that word means what I think it means :^) What kind of careers can artists, art technicians and art managers expect to have, and how can those careers be made more attractive? We *need* more good artists, but at the moment the talent pool is limited to people who are prepared to live a sort of hand to mouth existence indefinitely. Really, I could care less about the content of the work people are doing, so long as there is work being done.
Art schools in all disciplines should be teaching their senior students some business principles, but my experience is academics are at best uninterested and sometime openly hostile to even permitting the ATO on site for a lunchtime presentation. This should be taught in schools, but I’m loathe to suggest the government should intervene directly in curriculum, so this would have to be some sort of ‘continuing and professional education’ arrangement.
There also has to be a lot of support for small-scale venues as part of the career development process for artists, such as regional/community theatres and galleries, with some sort of positive incentive or outright quota requirement for mounting new work.
The government should also be providing more commissions. Original music and poems for the opening of a new Parliament, for instance. I also like the idea of incentives for private organisations to commission new work. (I have a romantic attraction to the ‘industrial musicals’ that large American corporations would commission in the 50s and 60s, that would be performed for their staff at annual meetings and made available for purchase.) More documentary commissions from the Government as well. (I am also keen on the legacy left by the New Deal’s programmes – not just the art-centered activites like Federal One and the Public Arts Project, but also the Farm Services Administration and the Resettlement Administration)
Oh, and the value of cultural diplomacy really needs to be better appreciated.
d
Darryl Rosin is quite right. There should be more all-around practice at all levels, because after all practice makes perfect, and less is not more in this context.
The thing that serious (and esp. non-commercial) artists need the most, apart of course from a hot young thang to act as a muse, is cheap housing and work space, — and the work space has got to be near-by the living space,– in an area where there are a bunch of other working artists, both next door and down at the pub. Historically, nearly all the best new stuff in any genre gets done in some sort of ‘community’ context, not in solitary garrets. There are actually social-science studies of the phenomenon. You should designate a couple of small or mid-size towns where the housing and loft space is cheap, as officially artist-friendly, and make it possible to make a living in these places; and then new work can be kick-started there and eventually shown elsewhere as well. Also usually good for real-estate prices in the given community.
Also, basic arts literacy should be encouraged in education at all levels, because this will lead to increased consumer demand. If I went to a cricket match and said I only liked the part where the guy hits the ball and the rest is boring and stupid, you would chuckle condescendingly and then explain that I just didn’t understand all the intricacies of the game. Same with a lot of art. No wonder many people don’t like classical music, when nobody has ever explained to them why it sounds the way it does. They just think it’s being ponderous on purpose, the way I might think cricket was being baffling on purpose, just because nobody had explained it to me.
Also, people love displays of unusual prowess or expertise. That link that SC posted of the opera-singing salesman is telling: the same people who applauded and burst into tears listening to him sing, would probably fall asleep during a 3-hour performance of Manon Lescaut. It doesn’t occur to them that without an entire institutional infrastructure of opera, there wouldn’t be any opera music for the salesman to sing. But everybody loves an Ugly Duckling story, so give ‘em one whenever you can; it increases exposure and literacy.
You should have a show on TV that is an arts version of a combination of Australian Idol, Iron Chef and Whose Line Is It Anyway?, where people who are skilled in a particular art form show off their chops in a fun context. It would whet people’s appetite for the stuff, and also provide bits of literacy on the sly (PANEL TO GUEST PIANIST: “Okay, now play ‘Crocodile Rock’ in the style of Satie.” SOME OF THE AUDIENCE: “Huh, that was cool. So who’s this Satie bloke?”)
Also, people love competition and they love tradition, and it increases their level of interest for just about anything. You could have national state versus state competitions in, say, theatre, with the rules changing every year: best Shakespeare, best Noel Coward comedy, etc., with little traditions at the national level, like the All-Star jam and the late-night travesty version.
There’s all sorts of stuff you could do. I’m a little suprised by the low level of participation on this thread so far. You’ve got a brand-new government that seems amenable to new ideas, and plus you have this big summit thingy coming up. It seems all you latte-sippers who want more Kulcha have your perfect moment to get it; so get busy already why don’t ye.
I keep seeing suggestions on this thread of things that are in fact already being done and in some cases have been being done for twenty years. There’s quite a lot of information on the subject (though again not film funding) here. The categories of audience development and professional development have received steadily increasing attention at state level here in SA in recent years, but then we have not one Arts Minister but two, and the senior one is the Premier.
I’d be interested to hear Mark and Dr. Cat’s ideas about this issue. Especially in the area of literture and publishing, which I know very little about.
jpz, you’re idea re the anthology show was done for a couple of years with Bryan Brown’s series Twisted Tales and Twisted Tales 2. But it’s something we need more of.
Fine, happy to have a go — my personal knowledge of arts funding at federal level is pretty dated, but I’ve stayed involved at state level in one capacity or another. Can you be more specific about what you’d like ideas about?*
*I give this sentence 1/10. No grant for her.
Yes Fine you’re quite right. I apologize. I did spit the dummy in a rush I’ll try and inhale deeply and count to ten. It’s just that I have had some very frustrating conversations with people in the film industry who simply are unable to see that a lot of what is thought essential to the process is external. Trivial even. To wit:
None of these things is essential to making a film. They are all part and parcel of filmmaking as an industry however the point that I have made often is you don’t have to do it this way. There are alternatives.
>
You say I know nothing about filmmaking. Well, with all due respect, that’s bollocks. A film consists of exactly three essentials: 1. A camera and material by which one records moving images, a means of splicing those images together, an image.
>
That’s it
>
I can already feel your eyes raised to heaven. But what I’ve said is true. Sound is external, scripts are external. The screenplay did not originate as a creative innovation but was actually the result of a demand by Mack Sennett’s accountants. Sennett made films by building sets for a scene and having his vaudevillians improvise according to his off screen prompts. You can see this done in Chaplin.
>
Why mention this? To illustrate that not even the script is an inherent part of the filmmaking process. Naturally these days you’ll be very lucky to get a picture made without a script. But it is possible to do so. It is also still done: Think Jean Luc Godard, Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs), Wong Kar Wai.
>
Naturally these people are exceptions, I’m not suggesting we remodel the Oz film industry according to the retro purism of la nouvelle vague. What I’m trying to get across is that there are many ways of doing things and that one thing essential to creativity is to think outside the conventional. This involves a stage of uncensored brainstorming.
>
So here we are trying to discuss policy. You remind me that 2:37 was completed by the FFC. Yes. You inform me that the French film industry is heavily subsidized, yes. See I am aware of this. And I’m not arguing carte blanche for an entirely pprivatized industry. Hollywood ‘protectionism’necessitates government interferance in most other industries.
>
But these are my points of concern. As you pointed out my knowledge of the script funding process is out of date. I haven’t paid much attention since that pompous and much over-rated Dalton report was published. But my point is that the public sector oversight of the Oz film industry contains inherent difficulties.
>
Perhaps I’m wrong. Would you care to answer the following:
Sorry for some reason the following short paragraph disappeared from my comment:
>
Why do I mention script history and the rest? Simply to illustrate that what is absolutely essential to filmmaking really involves only a few things. Italian neo-realism produced some of the best films ever made with almost nothing, not even actors a lot of the time. So if even actors and writers are non-essential we can put H&S regs, lawyers, marketing etc etc to the side. We can most definitely put aside our default setting re public vs private sector desirability. Set a goal: a successful industry, and storm the brains, yeah?
>
Goes before the para that begins – “So here we are trying to discuss policy…”>
Pc, I guess I’m asking what you about publishing and writing within the bounds of cultural policy. What’s going on? What could policy do, if anything, to assist Australian writers and publishers?
Adrien, thanks.
I don’t want to go into a long spiel. I do appreciate there’s many ways to make a film. In fact, you don’t even need a camera and a splicing machine. You can just scratch directly onto a piece of film and project it. Many good films have been made that way.
I also agree that to set up private vs public sector desirability is nonsense. My concern is that the full spectrum of films get made. From Kriv Stenders who shot ‘Boxing Day’ in three takes and in one day, to Baz Luhrmann’s huge vision. What I want to see is that, and everything else in between. I want to see new hybrid forms, first time filmmakers and people who have doing it for 50 years. I want to see new ways films to be exhibited and distributed and I’d love to see audiences who are eager to see everything that’s made here, as well as everywhere they make films.
I wish I could give a one sentence answer to how it can be acheived, but I can’t. I do know that to blame any one sector of the ‘industry’ is also silly. Some people are brilliant, others are fools and you find both kind everywhere.
And to briefly answer your questions
1. Scriptwriting feature films considered over the average time it takes to develop does not pay very well, yes or no?
Pays horribly.
2. Ultimately the green light for a feature made in this country will be given by a public sector employee who does not have to oversee profitable films in order to keep their job, yes or no.
No. The green light needs ot be given by someone in the market place. Sales agents, distributors, broadcasters. This triggers the bureaucrats tick in the box. The bureacrat won’t bother with the film until you bring the market finance to the table.
3. The avaerage production time for an Australian feature film is still a good chunk of a decade, yes or no.
The production time isn’t, but the development time is thought to be 4 – 6 years.
Actually Fine when I asked about average production time I meant development. If production took 4-6 years we’d be making Kubrick look like Ed Wood.
>
I think the answer to 2. is actually really yes. The bureaucrat ticks the box. Of you have to go to someone in distribution to get an endorsement first. But the buck stops with the bureaucrat.
>
Now first let’s consider that a film’s potential success, commercially and artistically are actually hard to predict. There’s the famous anecdote of the Fox suit telling Lucas that he didn’t see much potential for a flick with the words ‘War’ and ‘Star’ in the title. Illustrating that a film can be a flop but still be long term significant we can likewise draw on sci-fi both Metropolis and Blade Runner were flops commercially but highly influential and groundbreaking. I don’t know about Lang but Scott expected that his film would be a blockbuster.
>
Going back to Kubrick to further illustrate. He made three films in the 60/70s. Each one was thought to be a long shot commercially, each one was a massive hit. One of the execs at the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey was heard to say “Well that’s the end of Stanley Kurbick”. It wasn’t.
>
Why bring this up? To illustrate that powerful instinct is probably a better judge than all the world’s marketing dickheads on what will work. It’s hit and miss but I have my doubts that either distributors or bureaucrats are the best people to decide what films will work. I’d suggest that, considering the conservatism typical to both fields, this set-up might be the reason OZ films typically lag behind the world trends. The 4-6 year development might be another. So might the fact that you’re better off, financially speaking working at McDonalds then writing a script.
What yer havin’? Black or white?
White.
It goes back to the old saying; ‘No-one knows anything”.
And you don’t ‘have to go to someone is distrbution first to get an endorsement”. You have to get a local distributor and an overseas sales agent to supply at least 50% of the budget. ‘Endorsement’ implies a casual flick of the pen. No, it’s cold ard cash and they have to feel they have a good chance of getting it back. You really need to stop blaming bureaucrats. It’s more complex. And yes the marketing people get it wrong all the time too.
But, I fear this discussion is dominating this thread. So, I think I’ll just back off a bit.
#105 ????? WTF?
Well Fine I thought the thread was about cultural policy, actually it’s about the existence or not of an elite, but whatever.
Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not blaming bureaucrats, I don’t bear them any ill will whatsoever. I’m just trying to consider it from a design perspective. I have discussed aspects of this issue at length. In the link I’m responding to the Dalton Report. One of my arguments is that:
The paper itself was an example of how the slow moving apparatus of the public sector is not compatible with the fast-paced, risk-taking required of a successful film industry:
I fear that it is this sort of slow moving pace, this over-emphasis on due process that is possibly the reason why it takes half a decade for some to get their screenplay produced. The culture of the public sector is itself an impediment. Requiring approval from distributors is part and parcel of this. The essential relationship is between the creatives and the audience. Everyone else is support for this. But here it seems the other way around.
>
The bureaucrats do not face penalties if the films don’t make cash. They simply require a distributor’s stamp. Distributors aren’t really the people to pre-approve a film; make it and show it to ‘em sure. But greenlighting projects. That’s not what they’re good at. That skill requires ‘em to imagine a completed picture from a treatment or pitch.
>
Incidentally the Dalton Report presented in a private secotr scenario would’ve got him fired. It’s sloppy, it distorts information, it doesn’t ask the right questions and it goes on at length about irrellevant matters.
>
Sounds kinda like the meetings back when I was working at TAFE.
Fewer bureaucrats and more people filled with aesthetic ambition is what this country needs. Great art is a vicious passionate competition to try and attain the greatness of the masterpieces. The ancient Greeks called this an agon. It was the agonistic nature of late archaic and classical Greek culture that produced the “glory that was Greece.”
Enter the great classical scholar.
What tosh.
Agon has a different meaning in Greek drama from Greek politics:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agon
And, it should be obvious to everyone that those who were entering this “passionate competition” were all males whose ability to do so was dependent entirely on the work of women and slaves and the possession of wealth. This sort of reactionary nonsense gets us nowhere.
Kim
Ah, your Norma Rae rant does not show my argument to be “tosh” in the slightest. Nor does your baseless assertion on “reactionary nonsense.” And what is has to do with cultural policy is even more baffling.
With his every utterance, Greenfield only reinforces the fact that he is an absolute idiot.
God save us from ignorant experts whose intellect unfortunately does not match their egos.
Couldn’t have put it better myself!
adrian/kim
You would both do well to extend your appreciation of great art and ancient Greece beyond Wikipedia!
Um Kim, according to your link agon does have several meanings all of which are a variation on a contest of one kind or another. The hypocrisies of Greek democracy are rightly reviled by us possibly because we have luxury of doing so (was ‘higher culture’ possible without cruellty?) but it doesn’t mean that competition isn’t a factor in producing excellence in whatever field including the arts.
Sure. Though it’s rarely on a level playing field.
But JG, unless he’s just showing off his classical learning (ha!) presumably means:
(a) there should be no government funding at all; or
(b) artists should fight it out in an actual arena (funded by channel Ten – reality tv show style).
Of course, logic is not JG’s strong suit, and most likely the comment is just reactionary piffle designed to draw attention to himself as usual.
Well I don’t know about that, you’re being sarcastic aren’t you. Government funded or not there’s always an element of competition in the arts. There’s also a big fat dollop of doing your own thing.
>
Reality show where artists fight for their firsy solo show Survivor style, just with black turtleneck sweaters and wierd cats: Soho Survivor.
>
Don’t think I’ll be watching it.
>
The only reality show I’m interested in is: Let’s Hunt And Kill Billy Ray Cyrus.
JG however has performed one service.
He’s raised the romantic spectre of the individual genius which haunts too may of these discussions.
That particular figure was exploded by Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School – the latter more firmly than the former with the idea of “cultural production”. There is no doubt that any creative practice is a practice of co-operation and that underpins the aspect of competition.
That’s where postmodernism and intertextuality make sense.
But in terms of funding models, there’s too much of a legacy of this romantic conception in the attacks on the dreaded “bureaucrats”, as though individual brilliance were always destined to be frustrated by collective stupidity.
It firstly ignores the fact, as anyone involved in commissioned work for the private sector will know, that bureaucracy isn’t an attribute particular to public sector arts bodies.
It secondly begs the question, with its concomitant image of the artist starving in a garret (which is a nineteenth century trope) as to where these individual genii get their dosh from. Much art work is just work, and practice, and not done best as an avocation in one’s spare time from a day job.
I saw the article as gesturing towards this issue as well.
Did he? With all due respect to Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer etc I don’t think the notion of cultural production does away with the reality that ideas tend to be developed by individuals. They aren’t developed in a vacuum, to be sure. There’s an industrial matrix and a ‘code’, novels, paintings and the rest don’t pop out of nowhere. But collectivity can also be an impediment to creative work. I’m not advocating Romantic mythology (which in many ways was itself a political polemic) but committees don’t create, some people are highly creative most aren’t etc.
>
There’s also the concept of the ’sublime’ why is the work of certain artists so manifestly superior? You can’t ‘prove’ that its of a higher quality but somehow it is. Highly idiosyncratic and lateral work like, say, David Lynch’s can’t be boiled down to standard practise either.
Absolutely. Hollywood is mired in bureaucracy of a particularly destructive kind. In fact Australia film industry, at work, is much more stripped down and efficient and much less encumbered by the status politics that create countless protocol layers. However that said, the way we choose which projects to work on leaves something to be desired because there’s little room for risk or intuition. Marketing research and the rest aren’t exactly useless but they don’t tell the whole story. If they did it would be easy to pick winners.
It might be a discussion topin, may not. But one idea I fielded in one of these type discussion back in the days when I cared was that we should set up an old school film studio. Hire directors, actors, writers. generate genre pictures and have a suit give ‘em all assignments.
Some loose responses to various threads:
>
the value of creativity and originality versus intimate knowledge of one’s craft:
>
Adrien, surely the point about Kubrick is that he very quickly mastered the technical aspects of film-making. All the stuff I’ve read or heard about Kubrick suggests he was a nutter for technical details, loved cameras, even had a special aperture ens made for him so that Barry Lyndon could be photographed to look like a Joshua Reynolds painting …
>
I would suggest that film-making is like most artforms – it requires capital investment, technical ability, plus some good ideas, plus an element of market appeal and a sprinkling of luck … Tyler Cowan writes well about this kind of thing.
>
Writing and literature policy – is the forgotten aspect of Australian cultural policy. Broadcasting and film get more than a billion dollars funding all up, after you include the ABC, SBS and the film bodies, while publishing gets tuppence. This is unfortunate because Australia’s international contribution to literature is very strong. And according to the ABS, we’re a nation of readers – we have one of the highest magazine readerships in the world, some remarkably healthy publishers, and a swag of successful writers. I would say we should reward this success with more funding …
>
the figure of the artist and the concept of romantic genius ….
>
boring … but probably still valid. most artists live in relative poverty, and most new work comes from independent artists or small collectives … let’s not get carried away though. great teams make great art all the time, from theatre companies to visual arts collectives to collaborating authors. Kim makes some excellent points, as usual.
>
Fine’s discussion of film making …
>
seems like its grounded in detailed experience to me. I would only add that perhaps one of the biggest problems of a small market in Australia is that the green-lighting decisions are made by a relatively small number of distributers and/or broadcasters … one of my favourite papers by Demos looked at the huge stimulus to the British scene made by the advent of Channel 4 … it increased the amount of production and encouraged other broadcasters to commission more work too. The value of small, dynamic independents can be very helpful in creating a richer arts “ecology” – also dealt with very nicely in Keith Gallasch’s 2005 Platform paper “Art in a cold climate”
>
But yes, I agree with Fine, more diversity please
Well I was gonna shoot my mouth off on this topic too, but having bothered to actually read the thread through for once, I see most of the points I was gonna make have already been made.
Firstly jpz’s observations about why governments fund the arts. Yes, it’s not so much about noble uplifting motives as about putting on the bling (or the Ritz as they used to say) to send a message. A bit of conspicuous cultural consumption at the city, state or national level helps bait the hook for the kinda investors, skilled immigrants and tourists you want to attract.
Also never underestimate the power of the opening night of something like the main attraction at Melbourne International Festival, MIFF, the new State Gallery wing or some AO or internationally acclaimed musical opening night for getting pollies, captains of industry, titans of sport, top academics and science wizards, media mavens, visiting firemen and various fixers, flappers and courtiers into their boiled shirts for a little off the record wheeling and dealing at the crush bar and/or piss trough during intermission. The occasions for such interactions will continue to be funded whether you like it or not. Only the stage sets and music will change.
OK, that’s eight figures at least a year out of Government budgets for the big old classical art forms. But what about the more lively arts like modern music, performance art and edgy theatre?
Here I lean more towards support by ommission rather than by commission. Melbourne’s still bouncy music scene happened for a range of factors that were never planned to make it so. Like an abundance of cheap inner city housing, combined at the same time in the late seventies/early eighties with a very relaxed dole regime, a liquor licensing regime that prevented local venues from being swallowed up into pokies barns like what happened in Sydney, new affordable music technologies (Tascam 4-track!) and crap weather, TV and no internet which forced us to entertain ourselves in decaying Fitzroy terraces and St Kilda mansions.
Oh and drugs. Cheap pot and speed, magic mushrooms were only a drive to Red Hill golf course away, you could still get decent acid and ecstasy instead of those awful STP/speed/MDA concoctions now passed off as trips and X and the smack was sold through word of mouth networks that could personally vouch for its lack of additives. Plus no one could afford cocaine much back then either, the greatest timewaster of all illegal drugs.
You see the problem. An alignment of unrepeatable circumstances and logistics. So let’s not try to repeat them but instead have the nous to recognise and get out of the way when similar but different brews seem to be bubbling up now.
But also, don’t forget to add a little mainstream intolerance, repression and contempt to the mix. Those boho rockpools need to be heavily salted with grains of irritation in order to produce the odd pearl. I am certainly looking forward to being all comfortably sold out yet surly and sarcastic about the next few generations of arty little twats. It’ll do ‘em good, the lazy slackarse bastards. Back in my day….
I also have few things to insert into the filmmaking discussion between Adrien and Fine but I’ll wait until I’m either properly drunk or completly sober or both.
However, I will say that Matt Saville’s “Noise” is one of the very few Aus films I’ve seen that got actually real local dialogue right, both in delivery and in content and context. For such a mouthy country, Australia’s film (and theatre) industries haven’t thrown up many memorable examples of how much fun we often have with the mother tongue.
Hard to argue with that. What new music ever got offa the ground due to financial support? (let’s leave the trivial art form – film – out of this for five minutes)
But I don’t think that was the point being made. I think it was reinforcing the importance of collaboration and cooperation against Greenfield’s “noble individual” trope.
As to “the Sublime”, that’s the Romantic reaction against the Kantian rationalism of aesthetic judgement. It’s really a thinly secularised religious concept. Funding bodies may not be able to pick it, but there’s no particular evidence that markets would either. And the reality of rising and falling reputations suggests that it’s hardly a universal judgement – as I said Bourdieu’s whole point was to drag such notions down from their pedestals.
Same with Peter Greenaway, who came to film making from an art school background.
But that ignores questions that occur as inner city areas change – where do you go for cheap rehearsal spaces? How do you get a gig when the pubs are full of pokies? And others – Do the technicalities of making a quality recording just come about by osmosis? How do you know enough about the realities of the industry not to be ripped off by promoters or venues?
Bit off track – but happy birthday for last week, Herr Bahnisch!
Many thanks, Lefty E!
The best cheap rehearsal space is a loungeroom.
Pubs may be full of pokies in Sydney – but in Melbourne still, only half the pubs are full of pokies. There’s still enough venues. Funding – beyond free drinks and a few bucks at the end of the night is still all that’s required to nurture up and comers.
Quality recording are funded by music companies.
Which band couldn’t have got to where it did without government funding? And why were they more deserving than the others?
As for being ripped off; well you have a point, Mark. TAFE courses for band mgrs, then!
OTOH – Victoria Rocks – has 7 million ready for all interested over the next 4 years.
“As to “the Sublimeâ€?, that’s the Romantic reaction against the Kantian rationalism of aesthetic judgement.”
You would do well toread Mario Praz’s “The Romantic Agony”. The whole concept of the tragic solitary artist dying of consumption or whatever was pretty much invented as a response to those dark satanic mills harnessing honest yeoman into machines of production smoking out a green and pleasant land.Fuck that. The industrial revolution created the audience for the commercial viable mass-produced novel, magazine story/serial, radio play, records, film etc. We often crap on about Shakespeare as a pinnacle of high Western culture but often overlook Dickens, a master storyteller, superb prose stylist and one person more than any other who gave voice to ordinary people during one of the most extraordinary upheavals in human history.
And Dickens, like Will, didn’t see himself as engaged in some solipsistic agon-ish struggle but rather as a bloke trying make a good living out of stories he really wanted to tell anyway. While slipping in an odd edge here and there.
I’ve met a few people in my time I’d regard as truly great artists and despite spme of their rambunctious private lives and socialisation, when it came their their work, they were serious. ruthless and discplined.
The myth of the muse just pouring out through you like some captive vessel is just that. Generally. A myth. Whether you’re Jane Austen, Jimi Hendrix, Angela Carter, Jackson Pollack, Mozart or Caravaggio, what your audience (and frequently your biographers) don’t see is the many long lonely hours mastering your craft and medium.
OK. William Blake and Mozart excepted. And a very few rare others like them. They were crasied and touched, if not given an atomic wedgie, by the gods.
But my basic point is this. Being recognised as great artist takes a lot of very hard work, and even then you still might not be great or recognised. Anyone who’s serious to this point about creating great art deserves all the support they can hustle, from tolerant lovers to flexible patrons. Competition with other artists may be an incentive but it’s never the real inspiration.
So let’s help ‘em whenever we can but don’t make it too easy. Put the brillant bastards through a few hoops first to see how committed they are.
A bit of elbow grease never hurt a masterpiece yet.
I have a major problem with you last comment WBB, about Victoria Rocks handing out 7 million for, as you listed, recording and touring projects by mostly established acts.
Sure I could buy a few bands funded to SXW in Austin. That makes sense as a commercial market seeding exercise. But why the yellow rubbery fuck do the Faux frontman and Charlie Owen need our tax dollars spent on solo recordings? If they haven’t got the wit and connections to hustle some studio, mixdown and mastering time on their own, then what are they doing fronting up to claim funds as genuine creative inner-city musos?
Basically (and as you may have already pointed out), the whole $7 million Vic Rock fund should just be spent on soundproofing venues and subsidising cheap rehearsal space. And then just let nature take it’s course. Even fucking record companies never could consistently pick winners and I’m fairly certain governments will be even worse when it comes to this particular exercise.
I’m gonna have words about this with anyone high enough who stands still long enough to listen to me.
Disgusted
of St Kilda ‘83.
Not my opinion at all when I had a band living next door, wbb.
Yeah, well, that’s nice, but Melbourne’s not the whole country!
I doubt anyone is suggesting “picking winners” for bands, but I just wonder if there isn’t a little bit of the rock and roll rebel about your view, wbb. What’s objectionable about a bit of infrastructure for musos?
Yeah, Nabs, but he was still annoyed one night when he found out he was at the wrong ball. Could have got patronage from the Emperor instead of a lowly ArchDuke. Poured out his whinges about the money he coulda made in a letter. I have a copy somewhere.
I’m not sure that’s the sort of “agonistic competition” Greenfield has in mind?
“And then just let nature take it’s course.”
Should read “its”. I am so embarrassed right now I could drink more whiskey while listening to more of Sophe Lux.
And she didn’t get any Government grants did she? Oh no, her well-off brother fronted the studio time.
It’s not what you do but who you know that likes what you do.
OK, this should be the Sophe Lux link.
http://www.sophelux.com/
The Noble Individual trope is still alive and well in the imaginations of many, possibly most, novelists and poets; not coincidentally, the writing of imaginative literature is probably the most solitary and individual of artforms, though some painters might disagree. Literature is a form in which the integrity of the voice is a central plank in the whole project, so it’s hard to see quite how things could be otherwise.
But even so, even with with poetry and fiction, you’ve still got the editor, the publisher, the book designer, the agent, the faithful partner without whom etc, and who knows who-all else contributing to various stages of the finished product.
Literature often feels like the last stronghold of the anti-popular, pro-high culture brigade, too. Among other experiences I have been howled down for wanting to give a grant to a project that was a proposal to finish an already half-written, highly imaginative and skilled novel about anorexia (rejected by the others on the grounds that it was ‘therapy not art’, as though those two things were mutually exclusive), for wanting to support an Aboriginal writer’s desire to publish her book in her own voice as she wrote it, without the extensive (white) editorial intervention being urged by her publishers (the only other person who agreed with me on this one, incidentally, was Helen Garner), and for wanting high-end genre fiction like Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore considered for ’serious’ literature awards, arguing (fruitlessly) that one good crime novel is worth half a dozen mediocre “literary” ones.
And as for getting sessions on blogging, fanfic, e-zines or any other kind of online writing and publishing onto the program of a writers’ festival — forget about it, unless you are unusually fortunate in your administrator and fellow committee members.
That is, literary types tend, on the whole, to be intellectually and culturally — if definitely not politically — conservative.
I’m getting the feeling that a lot of people here don’t realise there are two distinct and discrete groups of people involved in the arts advocacy/policy/grants process. There are the public servant types for whom bureacratic work, admin, and to an increasing extent policy-making itself, in state or federal arts departments, are their proper fulltime job; and then there are the artform reps, all of whom are arts practitioners and ‘peers’ of the applicants — dancers, guitarists, jewellers, web designers, publishers, playwrights, actors — and who are perdiodically convened to read and assess the various categories of grants applications (individual projects, organisations, festivals and events are the main programs) and decide who gets the dosh.
And contrary to the waft and burgeon of constant rumour on the subject, I’ve never been to a single meeting of one of these committees where people weren’t falling over backwards in their attempts to be honorable, reasonable and transparent in their decision-making.
Now listening to an obscure Smiths B-side, “The Draize Train” – a brilliant guitar instrumental which sounds like sixties Stones with antebellum funkiness fooling around with a classic Led Zep Page riff.
Just tossed off as a B-side. Now that’s art to burn.
I take your point about the loneliness of the long distance writer PavCat. My point though is that they’re not sitting there waiting for lightening to strike their foreheads but rather grinding it out whether they feel like it or not. And then having to get to it to market which yes does involve others with professional attitudes from editors to accountants to typographers.
Hmm, reading back through the above, it seems I had a point to make. If you work out what it was, could you let me know too?
Fuck it, I’m gonna put on Iggy Pop’s New Values and finish the Glenmorangie.
I may be some time.
Glenmorangie sounds pretty good. I personally am drinking mere
champagnesparkling whatsit, and am about to stop and go to bed like a sensible person.Oh absolutely, the serious/good/dedicated ones are indeed. Couldn’t agree more. That comment isn’t actually a reply to yours even if it serendipitously looks a bit like one, sort of — they crossed, I took a long time writing mine and got interrupted twice.
Also, no trashing Charlie Owen in my earshot, please. He should be given whatever he asks for.
“Don’t look down
they’re making sorta crazy sounds
don’t look down no
don’t know who else came to kneel
on this empty battlefield
but when i hear that crazy sound i don’t look down
from central park to shanty town
i always hear that crazy sound
from new york to shanty town
there’s always something else
don’t look down. no
i went this morning to the cemetary
to see old rudy valentino buried
lipstick traces on his name
he never looked down
’cause they were making crazy sounds
from central park to shanty town
he always heard that crazy sound
there’s always something else
don’t look down. no
when i see you standing there
i can’t see the clothes you wear
i just hear that crazy sound
and i can’t look down
i’ve always heard that crazy sound
from new york to shanty town
there’s always something else
don’t look down. no
don’t look down
don’t look. don’t look down
no i won’t be bored i won’t be there
look at life it’s no piece of cake”
- words and music: James Osterburg.
And more likely to be read by a considerable portion of the public too.
Many reviewers have similarly argued that John Le Carre’s stuff is “literature” and Dorothy L Sayers cheekily sent up “high literature” thus in Gaudy Night:
Well then sorcie, you should enjoy Michael Frayn’s “The Tin Men” where one of the characters, a wannabe novelist, spends all his time writing the blurbs for his unwritten first books, rather than than the book itself. And the blurbs themselves are a hilarious piss take of how you’d blurb Amis pere, Bowles, Greene, Waugh, Powell, Fowles and all the other Anglo literary grandees of the era. Then the Frayn-created character blurbs Frayn himself – in his first novel.
It’s almost as funny as Dylan and Davenport’s “The Death of The King’s Canary” when it comes to parodying distinctive voices in 20th century Brit posey and prose.
” The whole concept of the tragic solitary artist dying of consumption or whatever was pretty much invented as a response to those dark satanic mills harnessing honest yeoman into machines of production smoking out a green and pleasant land. Fuck that…”
“In his tender defence, allow me to say this: without at least some sense of self-importance and preciousness, the striving nobody has very little to feed into his creative gas tank but what you would call ‘emotional negatives’: raw ambition, anger, desperation, jealousy, necessity, revenge, the fucking great artistic chip on his shoulder. Believing that what you’re trying to create is capital g Great and will one day be vindicated as such by external recognition is an important component of the strategies you deploy to protect your creative drive, especially when the Damoclean reality (to be ignored however the hell you can) is that you just might, sadly, turn out to not have what it takes to be an artist after all.”
*Coughs, shivers, hawks, spits…*
And in their ears a great voice said,
‘To have great music we must commission
It. To commission great music
We must have great commissioners.’
There was a blast! And summer was over.
– Frank O’Hara, “Romanze, or The Music Students”
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it.
– Jasper Johns
It’s not hard, not far to reach,
We can hitch a ride to Rockaway Beach.
– Vasari, ‘Lives of the Artists’
actually I think most of the great lines about the nature of Art come from “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai”…
PERFECT TOMMY: Pictures don’t lie.
RENO: The hell they don’t. I met my first wife that way.
BUCKAROO: No no, don’t tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.
JEFF GOLDBLUM: Why is there a watermelon there?
RENO: I’ll tell you later.
LECTROID: We are not in the Eighth Dimension, we are over New Jersey. Hope is not lost.
FWIW, I’m a great believer in the artistic genious in his/her garret. But I also reckon they could occasionally use some state funding. Which they do.
Yes, you are right, Mark. I was off with the fairies there. The government builds MCGs and Mobile Phone Company Arenas for sportspersonages – so I’m with you.
(Melbourne might not be the whole country but there is no reason the whole country can’t aspire to be as much like Melbourne as it can.)
Kim
Ancient Greece was an agonistic culture. Agons occured among the tragic poets, the comic poets, court orators, in the democractic fors of the ekklesia and Buole, Olympic/Pythian Games, in the agora of the demes, amomg sophists, philosophers, women, historians, on the battle field.
This agonistic culture reached its apogee in classical Athens, a time when liberal democracy and private property ownership peaked.
But JG, unless he’s just showing off his classical learning (ha!) presumably means:
(a) there should be no government funding at all.
Actually Kim, I am providing you with a foundational insight into western culture. Also, I said very clearly I favour government funding.
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/02/14/fable-of-the-cultural-elite/#comment-439041
Kim
That’s where postmodernism and intertextuality make sense.
Actually, it is the agonistic nature of great artists and great art that produces intertextuality; great artists try to match and exceed other great artists. Who gives a flying fuck about some mid 20th century dreary minor european marxists on art? Who have these drips influenced?
You’ll learn all you ever need to know about intertextuality by studying Homer, Hesiod, Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Herodotus Euripides, Aristophanes, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustive, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Austen, Dickinson, Oscar Wilde, and Freud than you will ever get from your attempted nouveau canon in Benjamin, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Irigary, Butler, McKinnon, Looking For Alibrandi, and all their misanthropic two-bit hangers on.
Starving in a Garrett (dedicated to “Scrofula Jack”)
Consumption-ridden wordsmith he
Hungry and alone
For his high art he’d not take pay
But waits to hear the phone
His two thousand rejection slips
Decorate his peeling walls
Palsied hands warmed o’er one gas ring
While night around him falls
Thank Christ for Medicare, he muses
And for Vinnie’s soup and bread
And with Rudd’s new Labor Government
His submissions may now be read
For Peter G an artiste is
A singer of renown
And likes to save the planet and stuff
Not leave fellow toilers to drown
But Peter’s never known the clutch
of poverty’s icy breath
Nor has he had to make his art
Under imminent shadow of death
You see old Scrof won’t compromise
Or prostitute his art
Won’t write op ed for New Idea
Though income-wise that’s smart
So Peter G we beg you
To save this icon bright
Before he’s carted off to die
And cough into endless night
My point about Kubrick was that he was a guy who thought in ways that contrasted with conventional views and succeeded because of that. This opposition between elusive creative powers and technical know-how is a false dichtomy. You’re helping make my point.
>
You are indeed right re. Barry Lyndon. Kubrick was a fan of ’source lighting’ meaning that the lighting in his films looked like it came from the sources of lighting in the scene. For Barry Lyndon this meant candles for night scenes. In order to film in candlelight he fitted a Carl Zeiss lens manufactured for satellite photopgraphy to an old rear projection camera he bought from Warner Bros.
>
This kind of innovation doesn’t tend to come from the convention ridden. Kubrick was one of those people who asked why not?
>
Without the camera techniques created for 2001: A Space Odyssey btw there’d be no Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica. 2001 wasn’t the first film to use the blue screen, (Kubrick and prod designer Ken Adams used it for the ‘Major Kong rides the bomb sequence’ of Dr Strangelove) but it was the first flick to really show what it was capable of. The Shining was the first movie to really show what steadicam could do.
>
None of this demonstrates that creative individuals are not at the centre of artistic endeavour. Quite the opposite really. And Kubrick’s career does nothing to demonstrate the necessity of public funding for the cinema, quite the opposite.
Neither Blake nor Mozart are excepted. Mozart was brought up to be a musician and Blake apprenticed as a printmaker. But this has nothing to do with the Romantic artist/technical skill false dichotomy at work here. A lot of people have studied the guitar as long and hard as Hendrix. And they’ve never produced anything as sublime as the solo in ‘All Along The Watchtower’, today’s average English student has a better education than Shakespeare could possibly’ve had. So why don’t we have a Hamlet every year, or even a Much Ado About Nothing?
>
Mmmm must be the way the funding is structured. How did Queen Elizabeth structure her funding.
I know this is a very long thread and I may have lost concentration — but Adrien, is anyone, anywhere, arguing here that that’s not the case?
I’m certainly not. Everything I’ve seen and heard on both sides of the funding process has been oriented towards facilitating the creative process by making it materially easier for the artists to get on with it. Government arts funding was established, and has been maintained, as a support mechanism. As anyone who’s ever tried it knows, the starve-in-a-garret thing is pernicious nonsense, except perhaps for artists whose low blood sugar causes them to have interesting hallucinations.
Not exactly. What is being drawn is this false dichotomy between a stereotypical view of the ‘Romantic artist’ and an industrial ifracstructure, technical skills etcetera.
>
There’s an inference here that artists will starve unless they receieve public funding. Okay. The other inference here is that creativity is a simple matter of training and infrastructure. This lampooining of the Romantic artist is somehow being used to discredit the view that at the heart of artistic endeavours are individuals who have ideas. There is a sublime aspect to artistic endeavour that cannot be made manifest by cultural policy.
>
The seminars and Q&As I’ve been privvy to re screenwriting in Australia always address the same problem: the lack of quality writing. And there’s always this: we have to restructure the funding, we need to do this to the funding, that to the funding blah blah blah.
>
But you do not need that much in terms of infrastructure to write. Pen, piece of paper, a computer a typewriter. There ain’t that much to it materially. So the problem has nothing to do with the way the funding is structured. it’s about shit writing, pure and simple. You can buy a talentless, tone deaf guitarist all the equipment s/he can use. It won’t make ‘em Keith Richards.
>
There are limits.
>
I think this gets away from the meat of the issue anyway. The arguments between structuralist/poststructuralist advocates of social views of artistic production and the ‘bourgeois’/Romantic individualism of critics like Leavis is for me rather boneheaded. Individuals live within society, can only be ‘individuals’ in society. Literature, painting, installation, pop songs whatever are all social phenomena. Burt Bacharach didn’t pull his schtick out of a hat, there was a format for the pop song. There was a language with which to express it etc. But the language and the format do not write “This Guy’s In Love With You”, he does.
>
This argument (like so many) is full of false ideologically motivated dichotomies: individual/social; public/private; commerce/art, inspiration/technique. All of these things are compatible not at loggerheads. Each one cannot exist without the other. To me the thig to do is to stop entering into the same old (boring!) arguments, strat with the end in mind and examine the mean bearing mind the limitations.
>
One of the limitations is that cultural policy does not create artists. It might make it easier for ‘em but it doesn’t create ‘em.
My taxpaying money for Scrofula Jack?
Turn it up, Sorc, I’d demand it straight back,
Let him hack on through the garrety nights,
I’m no bleeding heart (and I’ve seen how he writes).
The seven levels of Artistic achievement.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7art.htm
If you wish you can compare the artist with the surfer please check the next link- but we surfers are so much more focused on the spiritual rather than the recognition or the money , man.
http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7surf.htm
John Compost-Heap, WTF has Looking for Alibrandi got to do with it?
It’s a kids’ book for teenagers. Not high art or po-mo or lit crit.
And more importantly it resonates with bi-cultural Westie kids and like that other popular fiction, the Harry Potter series, gets them reading – which is the whole point of using good teen fiction in schools.
If you don’t like it I am sure Mummy will write you a note so you can sit outside the Deputy’s office and translate Horace from the original Latin while English classes are on. But no cheating! Et loco utriusque manuum in traba commodo
But is there? You are the one making the inference. Unless you meant implication, and if you did then I’m not sure I agree that that is what’s being implied. This is another false dichotomy, as you suggest yourself at the end of your comment.
Most people know it’s a silly argument, anyway, about starving without funding. All one has to do is read the letters and diaries of a few artists from the era before public funding to know that sometimes they’ll starve and sometimes they won’t. Virginia Woolf worked constantly and extremely hard at her bread-and-butter articles and reviews in order to be able to afford to spend time writing fiction. TS Eliot’s friends passed round the hat to try to persuade him to leave his fulltime job at the bank. Shakepeare worked his butt off as an actor.
But again, is it? I assume you’re referring to Nabs’s comments above, but I read them as meaning only that hard work is necessary to be a successful artist, not that it’s what makes a successful artist.
Well, it can be made manifest if cultural policy is the difference between a talented writer with no private income having time to write a novel in the first place and not having time to.
Couldn’t agree more, there. Someone, quite possibly you, up-thread (or possibly on another thread) was arguing that the problem was not the writers but the prevailing taste in ‘dun-coloured realism’ scripts and I think this is absolutely right. Another problem I’ve noticed is that a lot of Australian screenwriters seem to be verbally rather than visually oriented and insufficiently aware that the basic structural units of screen narrative are the scene and the shot, not the paragraph and the sentence. Those two things produce the ghastly combination of a reliance on dialogue to create meaning and kick the plot along, and a misguided straining after ‘realistic’ dialogue, and what you end up with is that fine actor Colin Freils dropping all his terminal G’s, because the director thinks that’s how coppers talk, while being far more garrulous than the character ought to be because the writer has dreamed up some clumsy pretext for him to give the whole back-story in conversation. Gah, pah, don’t get me started.
I agree. But again, is anyone (here) seriously arguing that it does?
Friels.
*blush*
I was gonna pick that up PC, but felt sure you’d probably be back to fix it yourself. I agree wholeheartedly with the rest of your comment though.
Dialogue in Oz movies so often winds up sounding like a fucking radio play, written by teenagers. It should be thought of like direct speech in fiction – with the camera and soundtrack doing the job of the omniscient narration.
I reckon a lot of screenwriters either don’t understand this at the basic level, or don’t trust the director and editor to get it right and feel the need to cram it all into the dialogue. That and not giving the audience much credit.
Ah, it’s the whole ’show, don’t tell’ problem all over again!
PC – You’ve really got to stop giving me English lessons. To infer something is to derive a conclusion from facts or premises. To say that the Romantic notion of the artist as noble and starving is past it in furtherance of an argument for public funding I think infers what I said it does. It can also be said to imply something. I don’t see what dichotomy you are referring to, false or otherwise.
Read the letters and diaries of anyone before the modern era and you’ll find they sometimes starve. At least the artists and writers could write.
Nabakov’s comments are an attack on the notion of the artist being a conduit for ‘the muse’; the shamanastic notion associated with the Romantic movement and described quite well by MH Abrahms whose book The Mirror and the Lamp suggest good metaphors for the classical and Romantic conceptions of the artist respectively.
>
This critique of the Romantic artist stems from John G’s assertion of the Western Canon and the associated Great Names. I suppose his inference is that Sophocles didn’t require and Australia Council so why should we.
>
I’m not going there either. You hit upon the crux of the problem:
Well it was me, the ‘dun-coloured’ (I think it was a different but comparable phrase) was someone else tho’.
>
Who’s taste are we talking about here PC? Who’s taste? Not the audience. So then who? This is what I mean, there’s a long standing preference in this country for what is called ’social-realism’. Why is the country investing in this stuff, why do we keep investing this stuff?
>
I’d argue there’s a whole bunch of reasons but I’d wager we wouldn’t if the security of the employment of those who pick this stuff was linked to the success of the films. The trouble is that everyone I meet who seems to be in charge is a literal minded, beige coloured, middle brow’d and absolutely conventional sort who believes they actually have some kind of remarkable taste. (Actually that’s an exaggeration).
They must be aware of it by now. They’ve been told often enough. They just don’t know what they’re doing. Trouble is the dialogue is lame as well. It’s based on someone’s notion of ‘real speech’ but it’s nothing of the kind.
>
The trouble as I see it is, in this country, we believe we need authorisation: either by some kind of officialdom or ‘the people’. So if a kid gets into art school they are an ‘artist’. The dodgy politics, the failed mediocrities, the dubious postmodern theory of art schools is irrellevant. Stamp! You are an artist and they will spend the rest of their lives thinking: I am an artist, no matter the CRAP they produce.
>
If you don’t get in you’re not an artist. So that’s Spielberg, Kubrick and Fassbinder out then.
>
Who decides who is an artist and what is a worthwhile project? Ultimately it’s the audiences/readships and time. It’s not 100% reliable but it is a better mode than whatever processes that lead to the creation of so many unread books, unwatchable films and the creators of same languishing in various institutions, sitting on boards and picking the next generation of unwatchable films and unread books.
sorecer
John Compost-Heap, WTF has Looking for Alibrandi got to do with it?
It’s a kids’ book for teenagers. Not high art or po-mo or lit crit.
FMD. So school kids today are to be denied great art because it does not serve the ideological interests of the state and its culture warrior bureaucrats?
What do Australia’s audio-visual Kultural Kommisars greenlight nowadays? The excerable Marking Time
Another problem I’ve noticed is that a lot of Australian screenwriters seem to be verbally rather than visually oriented
If the school and university humanities programs had not been taken over by philistines, the humanities would instill its graduates in the masterpirecs of the visiual arts from painting to sculpture to pottery to film. Further, how can one not be profoundly influenced by the visual in Homer, Blake, Dante and music?
That doesn’t matter FDB. Directors are allowed, indeed obliged, to slash scripts. They do it all the time. So do actors. It’s not a screenwriter specific problem. It’s a cultural problem.
>
I know I’m harping on about Kubrick a bit too much but he used to ask this vital question: Is It Interesting?
>
We don’t ask it.
To illustrate that I’m not entering into the public/private argument, Greenaway is an example of the Romantic artist – publicly funded to be so. He originally studied painting I believe and then worked as editor. His films are very much literate, particularly in the classical tradition of Western painting. So to evade the market/subsidy argument and get to the point: why wouldn’t there be an Australian Peter Greenaway?
>
The answer would be illuminating. Greenaway’s backers are mostly French. The French film industry tends to treat films as artworks. They don’t apply the approval process standard in Oz and the US. They regard the director as an artists and market whatever s/he does. At least that’s what this dude told me when I interviewed him.
>
He helped produce The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. And he wears beautiful suits.
>
I’m not suggesting we adopt the french mode of film marketing btw. Wouldn’t work here.
“I know I’m harping on about Kubrick a bit too much but he used to ask this vital question: Is It Interesting?”
So he asked that vital question, but then he went ahead anyway and made Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut?
Maybe he just didn’t stick around long enough for the answer.
Barry Lyndon and Eyes Wide Shut are outstanding. But what would me and Martin Scorese know anyway.
‘Dun-coloured realism’ (which someone did indeed say somewhere) is a much-quoted phrase of Patrick White’s from his much-anthologised 1958 essay ‘The Prodigal Son’, and he was using it then to describe the prevailing mode in Australian writing. I offer this fact not as an English lesson (much less as, ahem, recommended reading, though I do agree that Abrams is a worthy critic very much worth reading; I only offer English lessons when some bully is monstering other people over their “errors” and getting it wrong himself as well, or when, as in this case, the meaning was genuinely ambiguous and unclear) but in the spirit of providing clarificatory information.
Sluggo: nice criticisin’, even if I don’t agree with you. Haven’t seen Eyes Wide Shut as am seriously not a fan of either star’s work, but I though Barry Lyndon was a terrific movie.
“That doesn’t matter FDB. Directors are allowed, indeed obliged, to slash scripts. They do it all the time. So do actors. It’s not a screenwriter specific problem. It’s a cultural problem.”
Oh of course they are. That’s not a reason to put more dialogue in though – put in less and let the director work out how to tell the story with picatuwers. That’s my point. A script full of overwrought dialogue will likely lend towards a fascinating mix of predicability and incoherence with a big dollop of WTF? as everyone other than the writers wrestles with the script to try and make the thing hang together. A script with frugal dialogue will bring the vision of others in the project to the fore – director, actors, cinematographers, constume designers, sound designers, blah di fecking blah.
What’s unclear about it? Who was I monstering? And what about this false dichotomy of mine? I wasn’t wrong either here or here: http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/02/10/windschuttle-should-be-ashamed/#comment-438786
>
BTW those parantheses are inappropriate.
>
FDB – Most scripts have too much dialogue. In fact screenwriters are known to do this on purpose. They know the suits’ll slice slice slice so they pad it out to protect their darlings. Ever read Tarantino’s origibnal scripts. Check out True Romance he’s got scenes in there that go one for days.
Talking at cross purposes I fear Adrien. I’m saying how it should be, you’re saying how it is. I doubt we disagree at all.
I didn’t think we were. I’m just saying it’s not just the screenwriters who know jackshit. Everyone knows him.
Oh FFS, if you insist. Apologies to people who have no interest in whether Adrien is ever wrong, and I will try to get this over with quickly.
The context; you could, in that sentence, have meant either ‘infer’ or ‘imply’ — which as you rightly point out are not synonymous — depending on the subject of the sentence, which is also unclear.
On this thread, nobody (read the rest of the sentence; it’s not all about you), and on the comment you linked to, the person you were trashing.
You said “The other inference here is that creativity is a simple matter of training and infrastructure. This lampooining of the Romantic artist is somehow being used to discredit the view that at the heart of artistic endeavours are individuals who have ideas.” Which implies that you think it’s got to be either the one or the other, though, as I have already acknowledged, you address this later on.
BTW you have misspelled ‘parentheses’.
And that is all.
JG at 159, 160 and 161 – I’d be tempted to suggest that you quit while you’re ahead but…
In any case, I have no intention of allowing this thread to descend into tedious diatribes about teh evil postmodernists in education. I’m sorry that Donnelly et al have that market cornered in the MSM, but there may well be another blog somewhere where you might find some interest in such effusions. There’s none here.
I introduced the ‘dun-coloured realism’ phrase deliberately to allude to White, although to qualify, I don’t think the realism in question is strictly synonymous with the one he is referring to. I knew that you would know what I was on about, Dr Cat!
Erm, it’s pretty clear Dr Cat wasn’t calling Adrien a bully.
PC – There is no false dichotomy and I do not imply there is one. And you were addressing me so it’s hardly egocentric to ask just who it is I monster. You say you only engage in English corrections when someone’s being a monster, am I? Here or there? No.
>
I was trashing someone who was trashing someone else. Hello? And your extensive and patronising critique of my doggerel missed because you didn’t bother to check it against the tune. The duel in verse, sadly, an almost lost art.
>
I submit you’re on my case not for the reasons stated but because my criticisms might be undermining those funding committees you’re so fond of and you can’t answer ‘em directly.
No stoushing, thanks.
Read the sentence again Adrien:
“I only offer English lessons when some bully is monstering other people over their “errorsâ€? and getting it wrong himself as well, or when, as in this case, the meaning was genuinely ambiguous and unclear”
The key part is “or when, as in this case, the meaning was genuinely ambiguous and unclear”.
I say: You’ve really got to stop giving me English lessons.
>
PC says: I only offer English lessons when some bully is monstering other people over their “errors� and getting it wrong himself as well
>
Klaus says: Erm, it’s pretty clear Dr Cat wasn’t calling Adrien a bully.
>
Really why is that? Seems pretty clear to me that the inference is there. But apparently it’s not all about me, I have to read the rest of the sentence. This is the whole sentence:
‘Ahem’? What is this ‘ahem’? Perchance it means: you can’t cite a book ‘less you work at a Uni? Izzat right? Anyway maybe PC’s lecture about the meaning of inference (it should be imply apparently) is not an English lesson. Perhaps it refers to someone else but I can’t honestly say who. And after all that who was I bullying? Well here’s the answer:
And on this other thread what did by monstrous bullying consist of? Writing new lyrics to “Danny Boy” in furtherance of poking fun at someone who wrote new lyrics to “Danny Boy” in furtherance of poking fun at someone. Geez I’m a regular Amon Göth.
>
I submit that this here’s a gang thang. Is like: we don’t like what you say senior so we gonna get together and kick you a beet.
Last warning. Get over it, and get on topic, please.
Klaus, the inferance is clear and the meaning wasn’t ambiguous. And there was an implied reference to the previous stoush. But I apologize, I realize how you saw it. ‘Nuff said, I suspect neither PC nor I want to natter at each other.
>
What I actually suspect is that the arguments over public private sector arts funding create tender nerves. Anyone who seems to be from the ‘other side’ tends to twinge ‘em. I myself think that particular dichotomy isn’t as pertinent as people think it is.
Well, your suggestion that there is a ‘gang’ working against you conveniently precludes any third party opinion that disagrees with you, so I’ll not put anything further on the assumption that you refuse dissenting opinions in advance. Good luck and good night.
Adrien, just to clarify, I’ve made the point before – we don’t at LP encourage threads to become debates between one or two people, and particularly not ones about the opinions of one prolific commenter. We’re quite different from Catallaxy in that regard, and our main aim is to open up discussion to the broadest possible number of people. I’d encourage you, therefore, to restrain your enthusiasm accordingly.
You could always have a cultural policy that turned Australian culture into a lot of long, zany arguments over nearly nothing. The Irish and the Middle Ages did it for, well, ages.
Just sayin’.
Sluggo, nice theorisin’. I think Australian culture is actually that already, though. Think how much money they could
give to Charlie Owensave.Just to repeat something on-topic and important that habitually gets lost in the intense feelings around the arts-grants-applications subculture and its sub-subcultures: I don’t know about film funding, but in all artforms covered by the Departments for the Arts, there are no “sides” in this funding bizzo. As I’ve said at #136, it’s the artists’ fellow artists who distribute the dosh, at least in my experience (Vic, SA and Federal levels), with a steady turnover of membership on those decision-making boards and committees. The bureaucrats facilitate this process, but they do not make the money decisions.
You don’t need a policy. We’ve already got the Internet.
Gosh, I walk away for a day in it gets even wilder in here. Anyway, I’m in Perth for a conference, where Greenaway is the key note speaker. Any questions you want me to ask him?
Speaking of cultural elites, Janet A. today is just… special:
Have we come full circle with this nonsense?
Janet is promising “A New Silence” – well, amen to that, sister!
“Greenaway is the key note speaker. Any questions you want me to ask him?”
Why?
gandhi, i do not follow Janet A much because there is always something more interesting to do. Though, having quickly scanned the piece that you linked to, i would have thought, it was time she was either sacked or resigned from her ABC board position.
She took on the job on the basis of not commenting on the day to day to running of the corporation according to memory. Her nasty attack on Jon Faine, an ABC employee, breaches that arrangement bigtime.
Mark
As I have explained to you many times before, I have no interest in Donnelly and have not mentioned him. Does he highlight the agonistic nature of great art and the intertextuality of great art over at least the past 3,000 years?
Shorter Janet Albrechtsen: People are being rational, realistic, grown-up and courteous to each other, and Kevin Rudd is a highly skilled politician, and what we have here is two centrist parties, and most Australians would quite like to see less vicious, pointless parliamentary stoushing, and I Don’t Like It.
What a gruesomely dishonest, disingenuous, paranoid piece of writing. Not to mention, like, barking.
joe2, good point.
I suggest we all write letters of outrage to the Fairfax Meejah: Rupert doesn’t care, and Kev is too busy.
Yeah I got a question for Greenaway. I know he’s been busy in the fine arts, and I know his film-making has been going down the modernist lines of ‘liberating’ cinema from the tyrannies of the narrative. And it’s been intetresting. But his ’straight’ screenplays a la Belly of an Architect, The Draughtsman’s Contract and The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover were sooooooo good.
>
Could he please do just one more. Pretty please with sugar on top? I’ll be his best friend.
>
The answer will be no, but the ‘why’ might be interesting.
I’ll try, Adrien.
Cheers Fine
>
I’ve met him before he’s very …serious
I’ve got a question for Greenaway too.
“What’s the capital of North Dakota?”
And I dunno Adrien, I really liked “Prospero’s Books”. It was an extended mediation/visual essay on my favourite Shakespeare play with a superb voice turning the pages for you.
But I’ll give you The Draughtsman’s Contract – a cool mathematically-plotted age of reason pyschosexual thriller and The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover – a bloody bawdy Jacobean drama coolly set in the roaring Thatcher years.
If only Greenaway had a translatable sense of humour, he could have made a fine fist out of Tristam Shandy.