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?

Folks might remember I talked a while back about the ‘Creative Brisbane’ event we’re presenting tonight as part of the Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival. The response to both this conversation and to the BrisCulture concept has been really exciting. I thought, therefore, I’d post a quick notice to let people know details of the event, should anyone who hasn’t already responded to our rsvp be interested in checking it out. Details are available at the BrisCulture website, and on the Facebook event page. Over the fold, I’ve posted the programme for the evening.

Well, the day has arrived! BrisCulture’s ‘Creative Brisbane’ event takes place tonight at the Old School of Arts, 166 Ann Street (in the Bleeding Heart Gallery) courtesy of our partners The Eidos Institute.

I thought it might be useful if I gave a quick run down of how the event will proceed.

The bar, cafe and gallery space will be open from 5pm. If you’re coming after work, please feel free to join us for some refreshment and you may also wish to enjoy the exhibition in the Bleeding Heart Gallery – a truly wonderful space.

We will be commencing our conversation in the gallery at 6pm. Professor Bruce Muirhead of Eidos will be chairing the event. The seminar will begin with a brief opening presentation from me about the BrisCulture concept, and then be thrown open to a discussion between the panelists and audience around the themes of ‘Creative Brisbane’. At the conclusion of proceedings, I will talk briefly about where we intend to take BrisCulture in the future.

There will be an opportunity at the close of the session for participants to register their interest in future events and projects and leave written comments.

We expect to conclude around 7.10pm, at which point we invite and welcome attendees to share a drink and some tapas on the front deck. There will be a cash bar and some free nibblies. All proceeds will go to support the ongoing gallery and community work of Bleeding Heart. The bar will be open until 8.30pm.

We’re extremely excited about our inaugural event, and are looking forward so much to seeing many of you there, meeting and interacting with you, and beginning to shape a sustainable cultural future for our town together!

Update: Some initial reflections on the evening have been posted at BrisCulture.

Update: Tony Robertson has posted his photos of last night’s event to Picasa.

While literature about Creative Cities abounds, every city has its own urbanism and its own distinct culture. A ‘one size fits all’ model doesn’t map neatly onto the specificities of place. While Brisbane is now on the arts map with new cultural infrastructure capable of attracting visitors in the hundreds and thousands to major exhibitions and events, what of the sustainability of the city’s everyday lived cultural experience and production? Our town has proved its value in fostering distinctive and innovative forms of cultural practice – the germination of the music scene in the Valley or the arrival of grunge lit being notable moments in time. But much of this activity takes place ‘underground’ – it bubbles up alchemically from below; drawing energy from serendipitous connections and a sense of locale. Although we welcome the era of government support, public art and creative industries policy, we contend that embedding, celebrating and fostering emergent practice is a task still to be thought out.

That’s the task we’ve set ourselves. It sounds ambitious, but it’s realisable because we’re approaching it as an exercise in making connections and fostering the art of public conversation and collaborative policy making. You can read about the project at BrisCulture and stay tuned for our first event. As part of the 2009 Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival, we are hosting a joint event with The Centre for Policy Development, and in conjunction with the Eidos Institute, on the 26th of May at the Old School of Arts in Ann Street, Brisbane – Creative Brisbane: Rethinking Innovation. This will only be the beginning – we’re conceiving BrisCulture as a rolling series of events, policy interventions, performances and conversations which exists in a virtual locale as well as in the spaces of the city.

If you’re interested in all this, whether as a Brisbanite, an occasional visitor, or just curious about the town, I’d encourage you to join our Facebook group, which will be utilised to keep everyone in the loop. I’m very excited about this project, and I think it will lead to some really interesting things!

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?