We featured some of Marcus Westbury’s commentary on cultural policy here at LP around the time of the 2020 summit. Here’s a guest post which originally appeared at his blog - it’s the text of a talk he gave to a forum on “Creative People” organised by the Department of Culture and The Arts in Perth as part of the process they’re undertaking of developing a policy framework for Western Australia.
One of my obsessions at the moment and the focus of the next series of Not Quite Art is our changing cultural geography. By that I mean how the cultures that we are exposed to, that influence and obsess us are circulating in the world.
I grew up in Newcastle, in NSW. When I was a kid, the cultures that I had access to and to which I could contribute were defined by a handful of physical limitations. If music wasn’t played on the radio, available at the local record store or touring through a handful of local venues I couldn’t hear it.
If visual arts weren’t shown in a book or a magazine or a gallery I could physically get to, I couldn’t know about it. If it wasn’t broadcast to me, or I couldn’t physically get to it or records of it, other cultures effectively did not exist.
Through the internet, the proliferation of niche media and the now almost negligible cost of communication, the cultural geography of the world today is incredibly more diverse.
The changing nature of this is particularly significant for a place like Western Australia where so much of the culture is defined by the geography. Not only can you receive culture from all around the world in an isolated place like Newcastle or Perth or Broome or Esperance but - and this is most important to this debate - you can contribute to that culture as well.
For the TV series I’m currently filming, I’ve spent the last little while searching after and filming people who are working in their bedrooms to audiences all around the world. My major realisation is that the world is now full of Creative People with almost no local who have audiences of thousands, hundreds of thousands or millions around the world.
Let me give you some examples.
Last week I interviewed Ben Croshaw, Yahtzee. By most measures Yahtzee is Australia’s most successful cultural critic of his generation. This is despite the fact that he is an English import, lives in Brisbane and his work consists of mainly animated video game critiques.
His work is roughly equal parts a scathing critique, illminating insight into the lazy, formulaic, marketing driven nature of the global video games industry and a rapid fire sequence of smutty dick jokes.
Yahtzee lives in Brisbane. The remarkable thing about his work is that a lot of people watch it and almost no one in Brisbane would ever have heard of him. How many people? At last count about four million people are downloading each episode of his series Zero Punctuation.
To put that in context, last year’s AFL and NRL grand finals rated about 3 and half million people. In comparison this kind of success is almost invisible. I don’t think Brisbane knows that he lives there.
When the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne made the mistake of putting him on in a room with a capacity of about a 150 people last month, they were forced to turn over 300 people away. As one of the staff pointed out to me, “We’ve had real famous people here - movie stars and directors and no one has ever had a reaction like that.”
Alternately, take the example of Paul Robertson an animator in Melbourne. He makes extraordinary animations often in the style of side scrolling computer games. He was in an artist run gallery show in the Next Wave Festival I directed in 2006 and maybe a few thousand people would have seen his work. That’s actually pretty good for an artist run gallery show. That same work has been downloaded by over 700,000 people in the one site (out of about 12) where Paul is keeping track. Given that the work is on Bittorrent and lots of other web sites, you could conservatively estimate that the total audience is at least 3 or 4 times that.
It makes my skills as a festival director pale into insignificance.
Nowhere has this shift in cultural geography been more obvious than in music. Within a few kilometres of where i live in Melbourne there live at least a dozen bands that I’m aware of that could comfortable fill a 200 seat room in most major European cities. Most of them are rarely if ever played on the radio and you’ve almost certainly have never heard of them.
I make an effort to follow these things. But even I get surprised sometimes.
My brother and i went to Thailand last year. He was walking down a street in Bangkok when he suddenly stopped dead in his tracks. His flatmate’s band was playing out of some kids stereo. Now i am not massively familiar with the grindcore scene and I was barely aware his flatmate was in a band. I certainly wasn’t aware that Captain Cleanoff might be on high rotation among the youth of Bangkok.
Now chances are if you tend to invest a lot in any specific definition of Art you may not hear much about these kinds of people or care much for some of these people’s works. It probably doesn’t matter.
Our cultural patterns are changing. Less and less is the pattern of success one of building a reputation locally, then touring nationally, and then internationally in the hope that you will eventually find an audience in London or New York or some or other authoritative centre in the rest of the world. Increasingly it is about connecting directly to audiences or potential audiences wherever you or they are. Most of these people are being watched, or listened to, or commented by small committed communities in London and New York RIGHT NOW.
Patterns of success are changing. What is big here is no longer mcuh a key maker about what is significant elsewhere.
SO, given that this forum is ultimately about policy, the question is how to make policy for this? I’ll take the liberty of throwing up some relatively radical quesitons and suggestions about some issues and strategies that we may need to come to terms with.
Firstly, it is less and less the scale or breadth of local interest that determines success but the intensity of it that interest best determines whether work will travel. Arts communities talk about peer assesment - it is useful and vital but who are the right peers for this kind of work?
We need to reconsider our cultural infrastructure. Processes that assume or extrapolate from what is big, well connected, or significant in the local cultural scene often provide a poor estimation of what will succeed elsewhere.
As audiences are fragmenting, one of the most vital settings that point to cultural initiative succeeding is the viability of small scale activity. In a city like Perth, with a high cost of living and real estate that becomes particularly difficult.This creates a serious problem.
We must learn to validate certain things: Work that is distinctive and not loved by everyone but will be very much loved by someone, Work that can find an audience and knows who its audience is, Work of an appropriate scale - I think we invest far too much in the grand scale and too little in the small scale, We must learn to harness momentum - it’s efficient and necessary in the context a culture that evolves reapidly, and we must Find ways to invest at levels that is appropriate to the work and we must find ways to make policy that embraces Risk.
We need to turn at least some of our attention from the grand scale to the small scale. We should invest at least as much in flotillas as we do currently in flagships. At the very least we should find ways to make an investment on at least the scale of any single flagship company with a remit to invest in and nurture the full diversity of cultural communities within the larger community.
Finally we need to truly start to think globally. We need to look to local creative communities not as oddities and anomalies within the supposed larger communities but as outposts and envoys to the global communities to which they are connected. Most importantly we need to train and support those artists with the skill sets to become significant in those communities.
Great post! I have one quick comment.
Part of modern arts policy should be directed towards mitigating the fragmentation of culture. What I mean is that we need more intermediaries who we can trust to point us in the direction of things we might like.
Take Yahtzee, for example. I’ve probably read some of his articles and reviews in the computer gaming mags, but I never realised any Australian game critic had that sort of international reputation. Well, now I know, and I’ll mosey over to his website and have a look. But if you had not happened to mention him, I might never have found out about him.
Perhaps our local cultural ‘flotillas’ need to be marshalled into formation by something roughly like aldaily.com — the excellent daily digest of current affairs and history articles, which I trust to give me a good heads-up of what’s worth reading on the net.
Or, most probably, something like that is already out there, and I just don’t know about it!
The intersection between the Internet and ‘long tail’ distribution models also fit into here. Mark Ryan, a PhD student of mine, is examining this in relation to the thriving Australian horror film scene. I’ll email Mark and see if he wants to comment).
While the most public manifestations of the Aussie horror genre are films such as Wolf Creek and Rouge, there is a full spectrum of productions going on ranging from big-budget to $1m budget to ‘credit card’ horror films, funded by credit cards, generous parents, working extra shifts at Video Ezy etc., that are distributed through international fan communities by DVD or over the Internet.
The flagship film funding bodies have been recognising this since Wolf Creek, but have historically resisted it, partly because of a cultural disdain for horror, but also because of a deep-seated aversion to public funding and support for genre cinema, which is seen as being ‘too Hollywood’. This is despite the fact that many of Australia’s best known films come out of a horror tradition - Wake in Fright in the 70s, Mad Max and Dead Calm in the 80s.
The recent ‘Not Quite Hollywood’ film no doubt captures some of this, as it rehabilitates the contribution of film directors such as Richard Franklin and producers such as Tony Ginnane and Everett De Roche. But it revivial in the 200s is connected to the general zeitgeist that you describe of DIY, under-the-radar creative cultural production that remains elusive to cultural policy and events like the 2020 Summit.
This is bemusing…the last time I ran into Yahtzee he was living with his parents in Rugby whilst having a curiously standoffish manner in regard to his somewhat derivative adventure games…well, actually it was him regretting that attitude once he found love and moved to a data entry job in Brisbane which I guess is still better than living in Rugby.
If I take Marcus at his word, it’s like meeting the plain kids in highschool who have become stunningly attractive…except culturally.
But in all thing art and culture, if one does not value somthing enough to create it, it has failed the first test, so self publishing is the seed for most wonders.
Why?
You talk about framentation as if it were a bad thing. Westbury’s argument, it seems to me, embraces fragmentation, most notably fragmentation of the little cliques of local elites and gatekeepers who command local flagships like those that infest the small, state-supported arts scene of towns like Perth.
You don’t need intermediaries to point. You just need pointers. Intermediaries are suspiciously like gatekeepers.
I think they’ll be growth in film distribution to niche markets from direct sales, or downloads, via the internet.
But will it grow in the same way music distribution has? The stumbling block always has been that films are a lot more expensive to make. That’s changing, but it’s still difficult.
Terry, I’d be fascinated to find out what your PhD student discovered.
“Intermediaries are suspiciously like gatekeepers.”
So what’s wrong with gatekeepers, Katz?
In relation to film — the medium on which I can best comment — we have long relied on gatekeepers to separate the goats from the sheep.
Let’s say you’re one of the zillion new filmmakers who wants to get a foothold in the industry. You’ve made your first little movie. Now what?
Well, in the US context, you might try to get on to the program of, say, the Sundance festival (Gatekeeper #1). Then, if you’re lucky, you might get a jury prize (Gatekeeper #2). And if you’re super-duper lucky, you might bump into Roger Ebert, persuade him to come along to your screening, and get a high score from him (Gatekeeper #3).
Those processes of selecting and rewarding quality are there for established media (film, classical music, novels, etc.) but not so much for new and emerging media forms. (As always, I must qualify my statement with ‘as far as I am aware’ — which is not very far!)
Apologies for the delay in replying. I’ve been stuck on a remote tropical island with no internet access (literally!) so haven’t had times to respond.
I actually agree that part of the role of cultural policy should be to create structures that circumvent this fragmentation. Actually, i think it is an increasingly important role of social policy. The question of how you manage/ govern/ negotiate consensus in a society of fragmented cultural reference points is a bit of a preoccupation of mine. It’s not one i’ve really got my head around the answer to but i think it will become a dominant political question in the decades ahead.
I don;t think that intermediaries and gatekeepers are necessarily one and the same if they don’t control directly the ability to produce. Where funding and phyisical infrastructure are the vital means to make creative work then a gatekeeper is very very powerful, if they aren’t then they are much less so.
For this series of Not Quite Art, in part i am playing something of the role of the intermeidiary. One episode is based around chasing after people who have already established a large audience globally but may be relatively unknown in the wider community. It would be relatively easy to delude myself that i am doing something to establish them by putting them on TV but the reality is that i am simply belatedly chasing after people who have done that themselves. Their work, unlike that of “traditional artists” is not particularly reliant on gatekeepers for validation.
Film is worthy of a discussion in itself but i think it is probably a great example of the quandary of trying to appeal to a wide range of people locally v. a passionate group of people globally. I think Australian film has mostly been trying for the former at the expense of the latter and is starting to turn around its thinking. The horror genre is a great example but i think the logic of it can be extrapolated to look at film funding in Australia more generally.
Sorry if that was one big brain dump!
Marcus, another great post. Just a quick note in regards to your musings over the fragmenting of consensus and the evolution of gatekeepers - here is a link to an interesting article about Amazon’s user reviewers.
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One idle speculation is that the Amazon debate is interesting, I think, because it shows how the marketplace itself tends to parasitise or co-opt these consensus structures.
Hi, this is Mark Ryan, Terry’s PhD student who has recently finished a PhD on the ‘industry’ of contemporary Australian horror production, which has been eloquently summarised by Terry above. First of all this is great discussion! Picking up on many of these issues, my study has found that there have been over 60 Australian horror films (and hybrid horror/genre films) produced between 2000 to 2007. However, with the exception of Wolf Creek, Rogue, Undead, and the runaway film “Saw” most people don’t even realise Australia makes horror films. In a similar vein to what Marcus is saying above, markets for these films are international. A large proportion of underground titles with budgets below $50, 000 receive international DVD release without a domestic release and ironically Australian audiences have to import these titles. However, mainstream and underground horror production are not completely disconnected. Underground titles can emerge from the underground (produced with low-cost digital video, unpaid cast and crews and financed with limited private finance) but still receive cinema release and essentially become mainstream titles. Moreover, indie filmmakers beginning careers with low-budget horror titles can cross-over into the mainstream to become mainstream filmmakers. For example, The Spierig Brothers who self-financed the relatively low-budget zombie film Undead (2002) have now completed a $25 million vampire film Daybreakers (2008) funded by Lion’s Gate.
In terms of policy though, currently funding structures miss a lot of this production and mandate particular economic models. Many Oz horror films are turning towards straight-to-DVD release as their primary source of recoupment and many of the most successful titles are produced less than $1 million. Yet the new Producer Rebate which is being lauded as the new saviour of the Australian film industry shuts out films below a threshold of $1 million and stipulates that a qualifying film must have a cinema release - which may encourage unviable economic models. Finally, the limitations of cultural policy objectives are clearly highlighted by Aussie horror films.
Cultural policy for the Australian film industry mandates a particular film culture, circumscribes notions of value (emphasising Australianness and films for local audiences, social realism and favours more prestigious art-house films over commercial, non-cultural specific films) and tends to marginalise genre films. Horror films do not present positive depictions of an Australian cultural identity, they are not prestigious films or material for prestigious festival awards, they target niche youth/horror audiences around the world rather than mass audiences or prestigious festival audiences, most are B-grade products and video titles - all of which are to an extent in opposition to the type of Austrlaian film industry Australian cultural policy attempts to develop. Policy should look at fostering grassroots films (through festivals), and aid indie filmmakers in stepping up to the next level (i.e. moving onto films with budgets of $1 million) but also recognising that films can be made on low-budgets these still with the ability of cinema release, and in many cases international rather than domestic releases.
“Yet the new Producer Rebate which is being lauded as the new saviour of the Australian film industry shuts out films below a threshold of $1 million and stipulates that a qualifying film must have a cinema release - which may encourage unviable economic models.”
This is something which really worries me about the Producer’s Rebate. It seems to set up a model that doesn’t acknowledge the realities of changing of distribution patterns. There’s definitely a push to encourage larger production houses with slates with this legislation and there’s strong arguments about why this is the way to go as well. Strength in numbers, using the Rebate to set up viable business models etc. No-one really knows what’s going to work. But you’re pointing to the downside of this model.
I think the ‘prestige festival’ model is also there to give politicians a buzz. They love hanging out on red carpets.
MIFF has done an interesting thing in having a strong sidebar on Ozploitation. It’s an interesting irony that none of these films would have got into MIFF in the firt place.
I wonder if you have any ideas about how low budget non-genre films would go using DVD distribution. I think there’s a real opportunity for documentaries to use these foms of distribution.
Anyway, thanks for the info.
One hypothesis I’ve heard suggested about the proliferation of arts festivals of all kinds in Brisbane up to the early 2000s and their subsequent rationalisation is a particularly opening night loving Arts Minister, replaced by a more shy and retiring one (yes, folks, there are such pollies!)…
Film is not my strong point but horror is a perfect example. I’m not over the details of the intricacies of the funding structure for film (struggling with arts and TV thus far), but i recall that it was strongly emphasised at 2020 that a key priority was to decouple funding for “screen” work from any mechanism dependent on a particular mode of distribution.
Mark Ryan: i’d be interested to have a chat with you about your research. Any chance of emailing me? My firstname.lastame at gmail if you can.
Just to add to this theme, in some instances dvd is a viable business model for “art house” themed very low budget Oz films too, which might get a minimal theatrical release tied to a festival circuit. All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane is a recent example - took about $1 million at the box office, but is all over my local Blockbuster at the moment. A more obscure one I saw a while back - whose name I can’t recall - but basically a bunch of Melbourne and Victorian film students making a film set in Perth - also got significant exposure through dvd and from memory was made for less than 50k.
Meant to add the IMDB link for All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0818897/
Google helped me find the other art house film I referred to - it’s The Actress. According to IMDB, it took $700 at the box office, which must have been its showing at MUFF and other festivals around Oz:
http://www.muff.com.au/2005/content/bestof.html
I saw it on dvd, and again it was there in multiple copies at Blockbuster. I don’t know enough about the economics of it to know what sort of dvd business you’d need to cover costs, but obviously it’s a dvd/festival driven business model.
Not a bad film at all, btw. Nothing profound, but rather neat.
http://www.afc.gov.au/filmsandawards/recentfilms/cannes06/feature_158.aspx
It would be interesting to drill down into those figures Mark. I don’t know anything about this film, but I can play with a few figures, which may or may not be relevant for this film. If a film takes 1 million theatrically, it means that the exhibitor has taken their cut, which is 30 - 40% of the gross box office, the distributor has taken their slice which is also about 30% - 40%. Prints and advertsing has had to be paid for. That’s abour $100,000 - $200,000 for a small release. The producers would have worked on it for a couple of years. They may well still have credit cards to pay off. Or cast and crew may have worked on a deferral basis and need to be paid out of the returns. Or they may have investors who will get their money back first. If that’s the model, they’re not making any money on their release. The problems is then after everyone has busted their gut to produce and distribute the film, is that they only get a tiny return and then they need you get their next film made. It’s that cash flow problem that sinks a lot of people if they don’t approach it really strategically. For low budget films, straight to DVD is actually a lot smarter, if they have an international market.
Obviously, $700 means no-one got paid. That’s absolutely okay. But if it’s only an Australian DVD release, it means that everyone works at a loss.
Provided the arts community doesn’t put out the begging bowl for taxpayer funding I’m happy. It’s headache enough that every time the Olympic circus pops up we have sweaty athletes and those who earn dollars through them demanding fiscal indulgences.
I noted that it’s been released internationally on DVD, Fine. Whether or not that means it will sell or be rented in the UK and the US where it’s available, I don’t know! It appears to have been shown at a festival in the States.
Anyway, you won’t waste your money if you rent it! It’s a cute film - reminded me a little of some recent English and Scottish efforts in a similar vein - it was a hell of a lot better than Cashback - which had a similar theme - and without the overt boy “artsy” objectification of the female body!
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0460740/
Well, I hope it does well. sounds like an interesting film and good on anyone who’s out there trying.
Yep!
It would be interesting to know if there’s much awareness of this sort of strategy among the powers that be in the film funding bureaucracy. Going back to Mark’s points at 9 and the previous discussions we’ve had about “what happens anyway” compared to the aims of cultural policy - some inspired by Marcus’ stuff.
The funding bureaucracies are well aware of these strategies. How they choose to handle them is a different issue. There’s no doubt that the Producers Rebate is meant to produce higher budget films. What happens to the ultra-low budget? Well, I guess everyone gets smarter about using new distribution methods.
What would be interesting is to look at how fims are made in countries like Denmark and Korea. In those countries, local films make up about 25% of the local box office gross. What makes the difference?
I don’t know about Denmark, and I haven’t a clue about whether there’s any state subsidisation (or protectionism) in Korea, but perhaps it goes back to another of Mark’s points - what we’re interested in making, or in our case because we’re talking higher budget films, subsidising the making of. There are Korean horror films, martial arts films, cop films, art house films, romantic dramas, etc.
I think we should be making every sort of film. Genre and non-genre. Art house, rom com etc.
Korea and Denmark both heavy government subsidy and Korea has quotas for their films in cinemas as well. But, I don’t know exactly how their system works.
Quite coincidentally there’s an article about ‘All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane’ in Screenhub today. I can’t link to it because it’s subscription only. But basically it says that it was self-funded at a cost of $42,000 for the shoot. The AFC then invested in it so it could be post-produced. That would be another couple of hundred thousand, I imagine. It’s doing well, but is yet to show a profit. So, more power to them.
Can i just hijack this thread to plug the fact that i’m on Q+A on ABC1 tomorrow night!?
If anyone wants to try and throw a curve ball in the program’s general direction the link is here:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/
Thanks, Fine. When I get time to watch it, I might do a post. Since it’s on a theme close to home as it were!