The slow and subtle conversion of Throw Shapes into a Marcus Westbury fanzine continues today with a link to an essay worthy of your eyeballs. Published in the latest edition of iconic Australian literary magazine Meanjin, it’s a persuasive, comprehensive critique of Australia’s cultural policy and its flailing administrative arms. “Remarkably, it has been almost a generation since we in Australia seriously asked why we support and nurture culture, artists and art forms. It has been decades longer since we asked a larger question about how best to do so.”

Arts students will be quoting from this in their finals for at least the next couple of years, so we figured we’d make some cribnotes of our favourite points. Keep in mind his essay was much more balanced than this summary. Also keep in mind some key words: Outdated, Piecemeal, Convoluted, Overhaul.

THE SYSTEM IS OUTDATED
The point he makes that we want to start this off with here is pretty widely-made, but consistently alarming: “We spend far more money reproducing European music than creating Australian music. The Australia Council spends as much on a single opera company than it does on over 400 separate organisations across music, dance, literature and media arts… True innovation often takes place outside and between categories and happens quickly while funding bodies respond slowly.” So what we’re left with is a backward value system that’s not doing Australian arts any favours at all, favouring tradition over innovation. “Despite several decades of the most profound cultural and technological changes, the structures and strategies of our cultural agencies have remained largely unchanged and unchallenged since the 1970s. So, while the artists and creators whose work I value embrace rapidly evolving modes of production, distribution and collaboration across disciplines, the agencies designed to nurture them remain paralysingly fixed.”

THE SYSTEM IS PIECEMEAL
As a result of resting an entire cultural policy on archaic values and paralysed agencies, the entire system has become piecemeal. Like, really piecemeal. As in, gaps. Everywhere. In fact, what we’re left with is almost zero structures to support our evolving cultural landscape – and new, often-progressive forms of creative output are falling through the cracks. Westbury gives examples: “A graphic novelist—neither an artist nor a writer—is shunted from board to board and agency to agency. A musician who is internationally renowned within a genre can fall into the gap between the grant-funded and the commercial, yet her needs may be less about funding than the poker-machine and regulation-driven reduction of places to play… Grassroots community projects whose dynamism and lack of bureaucratic structures are their great strength discover they are ineligible for or unable to manage burdens of financial support. Writers find their body of work fails to meet strict genre requirements or has been built up through publications in online and niche publications that fall outside the acceptable prerequisites.”

THE SYSTEM IS CONVOLUTED
Grants are supposed to be there to help us, not to scare us off. Westbury rightly makes the point that only a few thousand dollars can make the hugest difference – anyone who’s needed a website made, an EP recorded, a (maga)zine printed, a studio hired, or new equipment will know that. But even small grants are almost impossible to get in time. “Applications are often based on annual deadlines, take months to process, are labour intensive and expensive to acquit. They come with complex obligations that cover everything from logo sign-off, complicated operational policy requirements and creeping political requirements to ensure that governments are not embarrassed.” And on top of that, responsibility for Australian arts and culture is spread over dozens of agencies, councils, departments, initiatives; all separately well-meaning bodies, but collectively dysfunctional and unresponsive. “In such an environment it is far more likely to be their skill in dealing with bureaucracy than creative talent that determines whether they are funded or given a policy voice.” Amen, anyone?

THE SYSTEM NEEDS AN OVERHAUL, YOU GUYS. FOR REALS.
Evolving or updating the existing system won’t be enough – the changes need to start with the underpinnings of Australia’s cultural policy itself. We need a complete overhaul which, according to Marcus, has to begin with a far-reaching, necessarily difficult but entirely belated overarching debate about where our arts and culture are at, and where we want them to be; involving some serious navel-gazing into “the heart and soul of Australia.” This is what makes it so difficult – we can’t just copy and paste it from somewhere else in the world that has bigger film festivals, richer bands or prettier galleries. “While there is much to take from international reference points, Australia’s culture is unique. If there is any place on earth or any parallel universe where the role of the state in enabling, sponsoring, subsidising and supporting culture and creativity has been reconciled then it is uselessly unlike here.”

When the diasporic arts agencies themselves end up being the advisors, the scrutinisers, the checkers, the balancers and the custodians of all the debates, it’s no wonder they’re losing sight of the bigger picture all together. So what we gotta do? We gotta get in on that dialogue. “It is the shift in the culture that will force these issues. Outside the walls of ministerial offices and policy papers the culture moves on. Isolated non-institutional artists are becoming networks of artists. The Facebook group aimed at such people took only three days to outgrow the Australia Council’s own group, which had been established for months. Gradually the informal networks of blogs, websites and publications that distribute so much of our culture morph into policy forums. Criticisms become campaigns and cultures change whether cultural agencies are ready or not.”

HEY GUYS LOOK AT US WE’RE A POLICY FORUM. You can be one too.

Posted by steph in Features, Words

Tags: cultural policy, Essays, Marcus Westbury, Meanjin, Renew Newcastle, Stealing Other Peoples Words And Posting Them On Our Blog