Cross-posted from Marcus’ blog.
From my small air conditioned bubble in a sweltering Melbourne the abstract economic gloom of stock shocks and far away corporate collapses is getting less and less abstract with each passing day. Anecdotal reports of jobs drying up, businesses closing, incomes evaporating and people fast becoming un or underemployed are mounting around me.
It is probably a good time to remind myself just how much of the culture that I find interesting is the product not of the big budget top end of town but of the unique possibilities of the down side of the economic cycle. It seems obvious to me that in cultural policy – as with almost everything else – changing times call for changing approaches.
Yet the impending new realities have not gained much traction in our cultural debates. Over the last few months, I’ve been travelling up and down the east coast and dealing with arts agencies and organisations at various levels. I’ve been a little surprised at how little recognition there is that cultural policy – like most forms of government policy – can and must adapt and respond to economic conditions.
Each phase in the economic cycle creates a different set of cultural possibilites and problems.
Booms – like the one that we have experienced for a decade or more – have their obvious upsides. They are great for sponsorship and advertising, they create thriving commercial markets for visual arts, they improve ticket sales, they boost government revenues and potentially spending. At their best they allow creators to create and to more readily access people with money to buy and support their creations.
Yet all the money that sloshes around in boom times comes with its own problems. Valuable things become far more expensive – volunteer and paid labour is much more competitive to come by, space is at a premium, the demand commercially for creative talent can crowd out cultural initiative and low budget DIY creative activity becomes increasingly rare. Frankly, when it is too easy to make money or too much money is simply chasing too few opportunities in the “high status” world of creative cachet the reality is that a lot of diabolical shit from websites, to film and TV to any number of sponsored indulgences gets made and sold.
On the flip side, busts and recessions have their own set of perils and possibilities. The downsides are dire and self evident – dwindling arts budgets pale beside the damaged wrought in lives destroyed and certanties upended. Yet recessions can be great times for low budget cultural initiatives. Space – the almost impossible to find holy grail of artists in the boom times – becomes relatively cheap and available. Higher levels of unemployment means that talent has more time to experiment and innovate and less temptation (or opportunity) to chase big bucks elsewhere. Large scale cultural production – with its expensive overheads and high costs – becomes relatively more difficult. Small scale production – which works best when there is a very high ratio of initiative and labour to expenses and overheads – benefits immensely from the rapidly falling costs.
It’s no secret that I am a fan of the low budget at the small scale. It is reflected in almost everything that I have ever been involved with and is undoubtedly a bias from my formative experiences. It is a product of coming of age in Newcastle in times of 40 percent youth unemployment and finding some sense of purpose not in an imported static professional culture that came from above me but from a dynamic, evolving, often ramshackle and at times hard culture that was around me. Different times and different economic conditions create different cultures and different people. I would never have ended up stumbling upon this path if employment opportunities in those years had been more plentiful.
Looking at a post boom Melbourne it is easy to forget how much of what I love about this city is the product of the last great recession of the early 90s. Its laneway bars, its smart graffiti, its living CBD, its distinctive inner suburbs of eclectic shops and retail strips, its creative community are not the product of arts agencies or central planning but of the fertile ground, cheap space, and hard working initiative of a decade ago. The city is a rich ecology not created through central planning but grown in economic detritus and forged in the harsh and searing furnace of hard times.
Assuming that dire predictions of recession and stagnation prove true, then we are heading towards a similar point in the cycle again. Perhaps it’s time we started to ask ourselves what will this legacy will be?
As a former 1980s Glebe, Darlo, Gunnery and Woolloomooloo squatter of some ill-repute, all I have to say about the matter is:
Unemployment benefit – the greatest and best arts subsidy the Government can provide.
I’ll now slink back to my middle-class technocrat’s job.
It’s ok to have a comment.
Too true Tyro Rex. The Hawke and Keating Scholarships. Great post Marcus. I also think that hard times cann lead to resourceful and creative chaos. Maybe even the rents will go down. Works for me.
For years (decades) I’ve thought of writing a novel. It has never happened and I suspect the main reason is that I get very good money from a vocation that also requires or inspires me to work very hard. There aren’t many nights when I don’t take work home. The combination of that and my high-need teenage kids means that most nights I go to bed utterly shagged.
I must confess there are times when I have a hankering to chuck it all in and retire to some lonely forested part of the country beside a clear winding river, there to laze in a hammock writing my potential remainder-bin filler. Alas there’s a thick risk-averse streak within me and I suspect I’ll never get there unless a really potent recession makes the tough decisions for me.
I like recessions too. They inspire creativity and tangential thinking. I was a visual art student during the 90’s recession, it was the best time of my life.
Actually what I will say about this, in proper seriousness.
A few months ago I was getting all nostalgic for the lost Sydney that I knew in my youth. This is in the context of my exile to the off-world colony of Brisbane, mind you. All those places, that beautiful grunge, paved over (Woolloomooloo), turned into officially sanctioned art (Gunnery), tarted up with countless renovations and populated by people who I would probably hate if I knew them. All gone. The freaks either dead, living some sort of abject existence god knows where, turned into professionals and intellectuals, or successful. You know, grown up … normalised. All gone. Some years ago I spent a little while reminiscing (errr… shouting over the speakers at Club 77) with a certain now-successful leading music producer about those days, which of the old timers we still see and who we don’t. His first band changed my life (or maybe it was the drugs, who knows) one Sunday evening in the Strawberry Hills pub.
Anyway as my wife pointed out to me, that Sydney is *lost*, and the last 10 years of living there was shit in the extreme, I was so unhappy with teh daily shit of existence in that place even as I joined the ranks of the affluent professional. Fuckers moving into Darlinghurst from Mosman or Gordon and then complaining about derros and junkies! Fuck em. And in retrospect, I’m glad I’m out of there. Life here in the colony is much better.
But the future? Who knows. At the time we were convinced we were changing the world – killing rock music – and we weren’t successful in that particular cultural revolution, and I will hate Nirvana to the grave for that very fact. But change the world, in our own little way we did, even if we all we did was give The Presets a style template to cut and paste into the fucking entertainment fetish hyper-spectacle. It’s not anyone ever completely completely disavowed ‘conform to deform’ at the time either.
I don’t know what will be the new template – is it possible to predict? When I get this reflective I just want the whole fucking thing to *burn*. To the ground. That’s just a wild, Dionysian, destructive impulse to a lost youth I suspect. But the arts infrastructure environment has been too focussed on ‘big’ and not enough on ‘micro’. But I bet the “best” responses will just end up being accidental anyway.
The thirties were not that bad. The worlds greatest revolution happened in Spain.
People were slim and inventive and entertained each other. Pre Hayes code movies were really hip and happening…oh who am I kidding. We’re so fucked.
living some sort of abject existence god knows where,
Hello. Not too abject actually. Oh and how I laffed learning how to weld at artschool in the early nineties realising under my goggles that it was wasn’t economically rational in the least. Thanks to which (economic rationalism) then in its ascendency, art could not longer be for its own sake and had to mangle itself into a viable business, had to show a profit and I lost interest. I simply couldn’t work out how you turn a profit or flog installations.
(Ex Bourke St, squatter).
I wouldn’t go as far to say that i am in *favour* of recessions. I occasionally nostalgise my formative years and then quickly check the nostalgia against the suicides, the self destruction and the dispair that went along with it.
What does interest me strongly though is that recessions are times when the map of possibilities changes really dramatically and a smart personal, political and policy response is to recognise that and work with it rather than against it. Things that were once really tricky can become really easy (finding space and time) and things that were once really easy (anything involving capital, money and sponsorship) suddenly become very hard.
I’ve not been pushing the point but i’ve tried to engage senior arts type people from three different states in discussions about this and haven’t really found anyone who wants to think about it. They’ve only really begun to think it through to the extent that it might hit their budgets and not as a changed environment that requires changed responses.
My big fear is the danger that all the policy effort will go into to relieving the downside. It will only take a few major organisations to start screaming about declining revenue and the entire discussion will be sidetracked into yet another funding argument. The upside and the non funding policy setting (work for the dole rules, or the incentives and disincentives in the property laws, etc) will be an afterthought. I guess we’ll see.
“That’s just a wild, Dionysian, destructive impulse to a lost youth I suspect”
lol i lost a fair bit of my youth wandering around the Brindabellas praying for Dionysis and Sissy Hackshaw Glich to lead me to the mushies.
Horray for the Burke St squats. Dad had a studio in the basement of ours in 80-82, and several of the walls between the gardens out back had been torn down so we seemed to have a huge space out the back. such luxury, if you didn’t mind the outside shower shared with the squat next door, no cistirn on the toilet, the damp, the roaches, the police raids etc.
enough BOT.
the boredom of that downturn was prob what drove me to what little art i ever got involved in, volunteering at the New Theatre, some weird cabaret in a tiny theatre on Oxford st, Rocky horror on friday nights. with the exception of the New Theatre everything was so close, and even that wasn’t so far away that i couldn’t walk home.
No matter how much i got involved there were people around us, including my dad, who were trying to make a go of their art 24/7, some still are. many of them seemed to think that it would go on forever. But it is the businesses that started then that seem to have lasted. there is a sucessful fertility service in Sydney that was concieved in the Bourke St squats, if you will pardon the pun.
I’m wryly amused at how the Sydney people are happy to relate that they’ve succeeded professionally and financially, and bemoan the fate of ‘freaks’ – drug addicts and the mentally ill ‘cosmic waste’ from the 1970s. How restrained: no-one has mentioned the value of their house yet! No-one dares mention what has happened to most of us, including, I am sure, some of the soi-disant successfuls – average income, average job, ordinary suburban existence like mine. Somehow, Melbourne still gets it – as she always has – while Sydney was only ever a Zsa Zsa pretending to slum it awhile. Jenny, some counsel for you from my experience: if there’s a novel in you, you should get on and write it (or forget about it!). I hold down a more-than-fulltime average-level media job, and am on the third draft of an 80,000 word novel. And I assure you, moving to a bush block in the Southern Highlands for a few years didn’t help me write it. The offer of an academic friend’s office in the evenings, when he was overseas, did the trick.
He went overseas in the evenings?
He went overseas and yes indeed, the offer was the use of his office in the evenings …
Culture of Hard Times?
Oh no. Don’t tell me they’re gomma start wheeling out that boring old fart Bertolt Brecht again.
Threepenny Opera anyone?
A few more garrets and starve ‘em I say – only then will have world class art.
If we have to have a recession to get rid of mobile phone shops, poker machines, metal seats in cafes and foccaccia, I’m all for it. I’d love to see the world reclaimed by second hand book stores.
Just when we get an artistic reponse to the downturn, the upturn will be underway and nobody will want to know about depression-era drama. Your standard rant against bloat and excess won’t do, people.