Above: Escape From Woomera, screenshot.
Marcus Westbury’s column for The Age has been exploring some really interesting topics in cultural policy. His most recent column is one of his best. Now posted on his blog, the article examines the relative responses of the ABC and the Australia Council to the disruptive cultural transformations wrought by digital technologies.
Westbury argues that while the ABC has done surprisingly well, “the “Australia Council has retreated further and further away from engagement in contemporary culture. The results are on the board to see.” More over the fold.
Westbury took his cue from the recent joint ABC-Australia Council event, Revealing the Arts: creative conversations and solutions for the digital era (an event we were both invited to, but which we declined to attend, in my case because no travel assistance was offered). It posed a perfect opportunity to examine the relative approaches both agencies took to digital culture:
A cursory glance at the program makes it clear it is aimed squarely at the major cultural institutions that dominate the Australia Council’s budget and its thinking.
That the Australia Council is interested at all is a positive. Their recent “Arts content for the digital era” strategy is a step forward. Yet there are vital basic assumptions that are rarely questioned: that the culture, the cultural organisations that deliver it, the cultural needs and infrastructure of Australia will remain more or less fixed. Technology is merely about the marketing, the branding, the language, the revenue and the education programs. The idea that the culture itself is changing and evolving is rarely considered. Technology merely changes the hype and the pitch to keep the kids interested.
The ABC has long moved beyond that. The broadcaster has realised that in order to justify its continued existence, it needs to keep questioning and evolving its roles. Since the handful of hobbyists built the first ABC website in the 1990s, ABC leadership — to varying degrees — has recognised the importance of experimentation, innovation and branching into new areas. It has not been easy. They’ve got it wrong at times and done so against a background of constant sniping that resources were being drawn away from core areas.
The Australia Council has largely taken the opposite tack. They’ve retreated towards a heritage rump. They’ve engaged occasionally, mostly faddishly, with experiments in new media — they created with much fanfare a new media arts board. They subsequently abolished it. They’ve acted defensively, not inquisitively, strategically or even opportunistically.
As the ABC has invested in new audiences, new ways of doing things and new initiatives, it has largely paid off. Parts of the ABC are growing, parts are vin decline but on the whole it’s a healthy and — most importantly — a culturally relevant system to most Australians.
Meanwhile, the Australia Council sits on narrow terrain that has seismically shifted. The entire world of professional and amateur creation, of ad hoc exhibitions and global audiences opened up by the internet, has been ignored. Changing forms have clashed with archaic art-form definitions. The result is that proportionally less and less Australian art and culture has anything to do with the Australia Council.
As the ABC was divesting itself of orchestras the Australia Council was acquiring them — to the point where they now dominate its budget. As the ABC was opening new media initiatives, the Australia Council was closing them. As the ABC was diversifying into innovation, experimentation and decentralisation, the Australia Council was investing in fewer, more established and more traditional companies. The contrasts could not be more stark.
Over at my blog, I discuss some of the broader historical context of the Australia Council’s decision to turn its back on digital culture:
I think the decision to abolish the New Media Arts Board will eventually be seen as the beginning of the end of the autonomy of the Australia Council – perhaps of the entire Australia Council model. The naked reactionism of the decision has only grown more obvious with hindsight, along with the policy irrelevance of OzCo more broadly. Exercises like Revealing the Arts reveal nothing more than the fact hat The Australia Council as it currently exists is comprehensively captured by the major organisations it funds – despite some cosmetic attempts to “Make It New” and a one-off injection for small-to-medium performance companies.
What do our friends here at LP think?
I agree completely, and I’ve been banging on about it for years.
OzCo’s willing blindness to the idea that technology has for years been integral to the making of art is as plain as day.
They never even got behind amplified music, FFS.
With that sort of history, how are they expected to cope with the FAR more explicitly technology-driven stuff?
Oh no – not ‘amplified music’!
I don’t know a huge amount about Oz Co, so I might be completely wrong. But they do seem to have a huge, unwieldy infrastructure, which doesn’t help.
Amplified music is not music.
End of.
It’s not so much that OzCo has a big infrastructure, it’s that their policy paradigms are trapped in the 1960s. So, for instance, in music all the funding goes to orchestras.
Not that I want to have the orchestra funding argument again here, but it’s a symptom of the way the agency’s policy agenda has been captured by the institutions it funds
I’d agree with all of this about OzCo, but it does leave a question unresolved of how would you do arts funding in a way that avoids institutional capture? Do you say to companies and clients that you have public money for five years, and then you’re on your own?
Has the Australia Council ever been in front, or even beside the 8 ball? Back in my freelancing days I wrote several pieces about the good ole council, and even did some contracting for them (through a tortuous series of other companies). It has every been hostage to political (sadly bourgeois) interests within and without, and almost gob-smackingly disinterested in either representing or soliciting opinion from the vast majority of Australia’s artistic community, preferring instead to cuddle up to toffs from Opera Australia, and the few artists who crack the Council Code.
The Howard years were unkind to the Australia Council from a funding perspective, but they were catastrophic culturally. Not only fostering a siege mentality, but through strategic board appointments encouraging the worst aspects of the council: elitism, bureaucracy, convsrvatism.
I just realised that I have no real idea what the Australia Council and others of that ilk do, what their budget is or how and where its allocated. Is there anywhere I can go to get an overview that makes some sense of $, allocations by state, by category etc?
Has the Productivity Commission done a report? (only half in jest)
Its strange I have no real info as this household + extended hangerson and relos are way above average “arts” consumers of a wide range of goodies. As well my mob (excepting me) are bigger than average producers of “art” traditional drawing painting sculpture etc as well as games 3d and 2d, animation, film, music (mostly loud, clothes design/making etc. Never been a grant or anything received by anyone. Not that they would be opposed – I think its just assumed that kind of assistance only goes to academics or those favoured by academics.
I don’t really know who is who, who does what, who should by charter, do what, organisations not people, in the greater scheme of things.
Does the Australia Council have a role in infrastructer? Is an orchestra infrastructure, software or hardware?
Whose responsibility should it be to provide venues, galleries, concert halls, salons, blank walls, etc?
Does everyone else know all these things and how it works? Am I just lazy?
I’m not asking for rhetoric more like mapping, analysis, gaps, strategy, goals – what other places are doing
I know ,I haven’t read every detail here presented,but, I am not sure on the day I heard Scott from the ABC want to Globalise itself that any comparison between the two could be fair.I hardly know what the Australia Council does,I can find it too easy to find out what the ABC is doing.My objection to the ABC is personal, 24/7 everyday of the year.Engineering is both Art and Science,so is Industrial design,I am very tired of the reactive personalities of the ABC dictating a sense of what they perceive are Australian cultural values.Today I heard Scott suggesting media now is Democracy and Diplomacy.I didn’t know at the ballot box which I don’t visit,that I voted for the Personnel of the ABC and everything it presents!?
Cheers Ben.
Great post. Thanks for the back story about Escape from Woomera. Never heard of it til now.
My biggest regret is not going to the Woomera protests. I was $100 short at the time. The personal stories I heard were unreal – the chaos, getting arrested because you put on a burqa to confuse the cops, bare-footed and dreadlocked hippies chasing armed soldiers out of their camp because guns weren’t allowed.
And even the footage I saw from the two independent protestor documentaries I saw was amazing. Raw human emotion everywhere. I wonder if there up on Youtube now?
If the Australian Council wants to invest in anything – tell the fuckers to invest in making our history accessible. That covers all the arts. And literature too. Nothing would invigorate mixing culture like having easy access to say, the ABC video archive. The prices they charge are prohibitive for the amateur.
Not that either of you are explicitly suggesting it, but I’m unconvinced about the generalization of the Australia Council model (such as I understand it) to new media.
Isn’t it likely to bring the Australia Council’s flaws to a new medium, thus ossifying new media forms, as help them develop?
Thanks Ben for picking up and adding to my earlier comments.
For a quick summary of where the money currently goes, i’ve posted it here: http://www.marcuswestbury.net/2009/11/06/where-australias-arts-funding-goes/
@Robert. I think the problem with digital culture is a symptom of the problems with the Australia Council model rather a cause. I wouldn’t argue for an extension of the current model into the digital sphere so much that this is an example of where the model itself needs a dramatic redesign to allow it to engage with evolving contemporary culture.
I’ve written about those issues far more extensively in Meanjin here: http://meanjin.com.au/editions/volume-68-number-2-2009/article/evolution-and-creation-australia-s-funding-bodies/
@fxh and others interested in where the resources currently go. This are is very difficult to understand and the division between state and federal governments, the Australia Council and other agencies is not easy to understand. Broadly though the Australia Council does not fund infrastructure — that is left for the states. The link at the top of this post summarises it pretty well.
Ah Robert @9 coming from one who opposes the introduction of FTTH that’s a bit rich.
Huggy
One other thing. The process of developing a National Cultural Policy is taking place, in part, online. If you are interested in contriuting or simply in reading what people are saying (there are some great comments and some questionable ones!) the forums are online at: http://nationalculturalpolicy.com.au/
I actually think this process is particularly important. One of the reasons that the Australia Council has been able to drift off up it’s own cul-de-sac is that there is and not been for a long time any larger framework to inform or measure their actions against. Ideally, regardless of what it specifically contains, a Cultural Policy will provide some framework for that.
Robert at #9 is spot on – this is what happened with the New Media board – junkets, Sydney academic in crowd funding, genuinely interesting work overlooked for generic rubbish that reads good on paper but executed poorly.
It was a good thing the New Media board was abolished.
Either Ozco needs a complete overhaul or as Marcus astutely points out – simply comes clean about it’s real function.
Or perhaps the easiest and first step Ozco needs to do is change it’s native tongue from it’s insane fusing of meaningless inane beauracratise and artspeak to english.
marcus – thanks – I’ll read up later in bed on my titchy screened eeepc
the oz co has suffered significant gentrification (rather like an inner city suburb) since the late 80s it has been run, almost exclusively, by the Janet Albrechsons and Keith Windshuttles of the art world.
australias culture is colonial, australia is, in fact a colony. we (almost pathologically) ignore our own diverse contemporary culture in order to sustain third rate operas/orchestras/ballets/dramas that we hope HM QE II might enjoy if she were to pop in unexpectedly. there is vast scholarship on how colonies behave with cultural policy and how they fear their and surpress the emergence of their own culture/s, especially if they’ve an indigenous one.. ben, marcus…you are both right, but nothing new here.
even when we think we are contemporary we are not: “our” dear kate b. doing soooo well on broadway, with an american play, jolly good effort from the aussies there..toodle pip.
everything, from the majority of the buildings we make “art” in to kind of art we send overseas (coals to newcastle) to which arts companies can actually afford to advertise, is desperately self conscious and bears no relationship to the living culture we actually shape. the australia council has simply become a nice funky brochure for the same old stuff. how to solve this:
become a republic
double the arts budget (the ballets are the museums of our performing arts, we always need to take the kids to see the dinosaurs) so we actually look like we care
award contemporary artists, artist run initiatives and small companies the same opportunity for market and audience development as the ballet/opera take for granted
recognise we live in a post-disciplinary digital culture, artists don’t actually “need” to “learn to draw” anymore, unless of course they want to
stop bogging down artists in endless government run buildings and “programs”, let the industry develop itself, de-regulate (australia’s arts industry is one of the most regulated in the western world – good scholarship on this as well).
Build it and they will come.
The digital art forms that are being supressed by Ozco are critically dependent upon wide band communications or they will become yet another boutique fad.
The task of Ozco is to control and supress any-thing that is really new and relevant.
The biggests impediment to the new work is bandwidth
I suppose one could post DVD’s to ones friends or organise a DVD swap meet at the campus or ones club.
The alternative is to support and encourage (demand?) wide band communications links into every home. Proper wide band means fibre to the home.
Perhaps this is just a step too far for our cultural elites who are not part of the Ozco club? Should the unwashed proletarians have access to all this content?
Huggy
Very true Cap’n JM.
The vicious circle of arts funding in Oz runs thusly:
1) “Desperately self-conscious” projects that appeal to some old benchwarmers’ idea of what art “ought” to be are funded.
2) Nobody cares, nobody (in particular, nobody young) pays to come see it.
3) “Oh noes! What-art-ought-to-be is in urgent need of funding or it will wither and die!”
4) Rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile, what art is bumbles along from crisis to obscure crisis, and everybody watches TV.
One thing which interests me is the way that cinemas have picked up HD broadcasting of English opera, ballet and theatre and run with it. You can go to the pictures and see an opera performance 24 hours after it’s occurred in London and pay only about $25 for the pleasure. It’s been a great and unexpected money spinner for film exhibitors. But the Australian opera, ballet and theatre companies haven’t picked up on it all. Don’t know the reasons why, but it’s a great way to democratise their artforms.
This, along with Fine @ 18, is why I think Australian opera would fare so much better socially, creatively and possibly commercially if Opera Australia itself were broken into state-based organisations. Naturally this would lead to smaller-scale projects, but also more relevant and invigorated ones.* At the moment with a national framework, they’re treating opera essentially like McDonald’s. The marketing, the productions, etc is all nutted out on a single narrow level, and even when they’ve finished the gigs only ever do Mel/Syd and are then substituted with a god-awful G&S musical (a musical!) for Adelaide/Perth/Wodonga.
I daresay there’s also so much more talent in areas ranging from technicians to the voices themselves than the ‘national’ company is able to exploit, due to both its own elitism and reasons of pure logistics. City/state companies could soak a lot of this up quite effectively.
Fine: have you seen one of these shows? Does it look like they were shot at a special performence with multiple cameras, and edited afterwards? Are there DVDs available?
I’ve done shoots of live theatre for documentation purposes and it’s devilish tricky getting camera angles and lighting and audio as you’d like without interfering with the show’s lighting design, ( low lux cameras help but its a compromise) the performances ( stage actors being conscious of cameras), and the cameras interfering with audience experience etc. That’s what makes it interesting as a craft.
Rock’n'roll on the other hand is relatively a doddle, I haven’t had a band yet that’s said no to ‘You wanna go live to the internet?…. but I’d like to add a bit more light … oh and could you tell your crowd not to dance in that area unless they don’t mind being seen online’ .. You can probably guess what usually happens. Broadcasting live into a chatroom interface and working the room in text is a hoot. There’s even a sort of ascii text dancing that goes on if it’s that sort of number. I managed to get that little series of escapades documented in a (part) OzCo funded DVD, but not in the new media program, rather community cultural development, so in a very small way, a long time ago (2002) someone in the Australia Council did ‘get digital culture’, a bit, at least one aspect of it.
And Fine, these London Theatre shows you speak of, do you know if they went out live as well as getting recorded and re-screened? If they are what I’m thinking of they did. At the recent Brisbane music festival ( I think thats what it was) they simulcast a live show from thursday island to a biggish screen in queen street mall, and tho I think they used satellite, conceptually it’s the same as if we had a high enough bandwidth NBN to use as the carrier, that presumably make it a ‘digital culture’ phenomenon.
We’ve seen it done before with sport: eg live australian open tennis on the Fed square screen, so if sport qualifies as culture, we do do it, repackage live performances for screens. And therein the answer lies as to why we don’t do it more in the yartz: there’s bucket loads of money in sport compared to other performing arts.
Do you really thing Australian’s would reliably line up in such numbers for a potted screen version of a play with say, OurCate, in it, like Brits will for TheirHelen? I reckon there’s a better chance Brits will line up for a potted screen version of something with OurCate or OurGeoffrey in, and IMO that’s where opportunity lies.
Danny, I haven’t seen any, but I’ve been told they’re poorly shot with just a couple of fixed cameras and I don’t think there’s any post-production. But a distributor told me, it doesn’t seem to make any difference to the audience and people are happy with the look of it. I don’t think they’re live because they wouldn’t be able to be screened at an optimum time here.
It just makes me think why don’t the local major arts companies take advantage for the local appetite for this sort of stuff. The STC is overseas at the moment with ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ with Our Cate and apparently doing well. There would be a decent sized market for this to be broadcast into cinemas. It wouldn’t negatively affect the box office for the live version as it sold out. The STC could earn money and reach more people who haven’t got a hope of seeing the play.
Fine:
They went out live in England, and I guess other more timezone friendly locales.
I’m with your distributor in that audiences can be forgiving of technical limitations, it’s the content that’s the value proposition. A salutary lesson for me was the fact that one of the most successful docos ever, Ken Burns’ ‘Civil War’, had nary a moving picture in it, being mostly archival stills with a voiceover ( Mind you his genius was to make the stills move, now he has an Effect named after him, a standard transform in editing software)- it got the PBS network its biggest audience ever. With some audiences, and I reckon theatre ones are like this, its the bandwidth between the ears that counts.
And I agree, it wouldn’t negatively affect box office, making screen editions available, quite the opposite. Have a look at clips of OurGeoffrey’s Tony best leading actor winning performance, and tell me you wouldn’t prefer to have been in the audience, especially the earlier belvoir street one rather than Broadway tizz. It’s not an either/or proposition, more like: this, then that. Why waste a great show on just the local bums on seats?
Whatever you do, don’t miss the 2010 reprise of his “Diary of a Madman” virtuoso one-hander. After 20 years it’s still top of my list.
“I’ve done shoots of live theatre for documentation purposes and it’s devilish tricky”
OT, but if you want to see an amazingly well-shot play, check out the American PBS recording of “Into the Woods”.
d
taa dazza.. Bernadette Peters, Sondheim.. what’s not to like?
I dunno how, or from when, but I have emblazened in memory Lee Marvin in ‘Iceman Cometh’, Zero Mostel in “rhinoseros”, Alan Bates ‘butley’ and Stacy keach ‘luther’ … I guess the ABC must have shown the American Film Theatre series sometime. They’re terrific.
If I can source them one of them will be every second one of our monthly backyard cinema program for next year.. I’ll let Gary K. know and he can pass the message on if you’re interested.
notice how quickly we’ve moved into discussing opera
perhaps that’s my fault, apols.
the uk opera screenings have been an unqualified success, no doubt about it. and australia’s (so called) major arts orgs are way behind yes. but I would suggest this exercise in audience development is not the democratisation of a form anyway, merely the democratisation of its distribution.
rather: there something called “The Australian Opera” and it is a significant investment (millions of $s, gossip, sponsorship, marketing, advertising, pr, buildings, touring structures, acres of column inches f it so much as farts…&&&..) so therefore it must “represent” something about us … either by design or default..
then why wouldn’t we invest in/support an organisation say, just to pick examples the Australian Network for Art & Technology or the Australia Arts Orchestra or an Indigenous art org(making no value judgments here, simply comparing art forms) at the same level ?
if we wanna be smart and unique and innovative and all that creative stuff we spend money on getting vast government reports into…just imagine….so why don’t we? what stops us taking our actual contemporary culture as seriously as we take everyone else’s culture? where is the equity of forms, the balance of old and new?
i would suggest this is something to do with the ancient politics of cultural status and its power is deeply complex and for some, a virtually religious issue…but we should take it on… if not the operatic arts why not the digital arts…and distributing the operatic arts via digital systems (orchestras in second life, opera on the big screen et al) is not digital arts…its just distribution.
could it be then, that culturally, the forms, we use or “allow” to say something about us are manipulated and constrained by something/one else? or are they manipulated and constrained by our own fear of self?
do we find our own culture so “revolting” that we hide it?
Make your thoughts on the Australia Council known to Peter Garrett’s “culture policy consultation”:
http://www.nationalculturalpolicy.com.au
Robert, I know what you’re saying, but I actually think this is a question of whether OzCo would do a good job of supporting new media arts, but rather whether Ozco is prepared at all for the oncoming tidal wave of digital culture.
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To take an obvious example, as arts media erodes on the ABC and in the newspapers, most of the review journals are now blogs. Yet OzCo doesn’t support cultural blogging in any meaningful way. That’s just a small snapshot of the issue, which is in fact about the sea-change in culture from analogue to digital models across all spheres.
Ben how much money do we have? almost anybody can do a blog, how would you choose who out of the thousands of applicants to fund. Before digital can be the next big thing it will have to find new ways of paying for it self. In the real world whoever has the money is the boss.