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Showing posts from 2016

Have you ever been to a movie?

Senator James Paterson wants Blue Poles sold , and all funding of arts and sport stopped, to help pay off our national debt. The estimated $350 million the painting might gather would represent about 0.07% of our $470 billion gross national debt. Paterson claims that we "fund $7 billion a year into the arts". He's wrong. Federal spending on the arts this financial year is $639 million. Not even close. The budget he's referring to is the culture budget and includes everything from arts, the ABC, libraries, museums, and even zoos. I imagine he's not actually suggesting we wipe all those things away. Or does the Senator genuinely believe that a society with a little less debt is better than one with libraries, a national broadcaster and working artists? Has he ever been to a movie? Does the Senator also realise that the $7 billion government investment in culture makes a $50 billion economic impact? Does the Senator mean that we should ignore this r

On the Value of Arts and the Place of Subsidy

[A version of this piece was first published in The Courier-Mail on 5 September 2016]  More Australians go to art galleries each year than go to AFL and NRL games combined. The creative industries employ more people than agriculture, construction or mining. Around one million people will experience this year’s Brisbane Festival, Brisbane’s international arts festival. Theatre, dance, circus, music, stand-up? With almost 500 performances across three weeks, it’s all on the menu. How do we value this love for arts and culture? A festival is a remarkable thing. People relax and become more receptive to the unfamiliar. It’s all in the name. During the festival of a holiday or the festival of a dinner party, we let our guard down and allow ourselves to absorb new ideas and experiences. It’s also when artists reach for things at the very edge of their imaginations. You could say that ‘‘why not?’’ is the festival spirit. Part of it is making sure people have access. B

Orlando, Hate and Homophobia

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The attack in Orlando was a gay hate crime. The Prime Minister today initially omitted this fact from his expression of sympathy. He later changed his language , calling the mass shooting “an attack on the gay community and an attack on all of us - on all our freedoms, the freedom to gather together, to celebrate, to share time with friends.” He went on to say that there “are people outside our country, and some within it, who hate the freedoms that we enjoy and would seek to threaten them and undermine them with violence... Together, at home and abroad, we continue the fight against terrorism and stand up for the values of our free nations.” There seems to be no acknowledgment of the glaring irony. What are these “freedoms that we enjoy”? Certainly not the freedom to marry. For that, we must argue the case during a plebiscite that is sure to unleash homophobic hate. It's difficult to feel that it's "an attack on all of us" when the LGBTQ community ar

Australia, the Australia Council, and the Erosion of Cultural Rights

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This week the Australia Council allocated more annual fund ing to small-to-medium arts organisations than ever before. Yes, you heard right. In announcing $28 million to go to these organisations each year, it invested more, not less, in operational, multi-year funding than it had in recent years. This funding round saw more of a realignment of support than a reduction. Here are the figures: 2009-10 2010–11 2011-12 2012-13 2013-14 2014-15 To Key Orgs $21.2m $22.1m $21.4m $21.1m $22.8m $23.1m Total Funding $163.5 $163.8 164.5 174.8 199.2 191.5 It remains unclear, though, what other programs will be available to complement this multi-year funding, if any. In the past, a good variety have been available to organisations both with and without operational funding. It will be important to see how many of these, and indeed others available to individual arti

Vale, Bob Ellis, an Australian Colossus.

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Bob Ellis, one of the great, Protean figures of Australian cultural and political life, passed away on Sunday afternoon after battling a rare liver cancer. A magnificent fig has fallen. Bob was never dull - he was hyperbole's bosom friend - and always wrote and behaved with the future and morality of his beloved nation at heart. He could compose a phrase like no other, making it sing like a thought never before sung, whether for a politician's speech, an essay, criticism, or a film or play. He was one of our great writers, a thinker, a contributor, a scoundrel, a provocateur, a melancholic warrior, a comrade. His roguery and relish marked him as an Australian Gore Vidal. Like no other, he inhabited the forests of politics, arts and culture equally. He was indisputably an Australian colossus. Many years ago, I loved directing a workshop of one of his plays at Sydney Theatre Company. Ever since, like many others in my field, I mostly saw Bob in theatre foyers. The

On Simon Stone's 'The Daughter'

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I saw Simon Stone's debut feature film ' The Daughter ' recently. It's a terrific film, with an Ingmar Bergman-like tautness and a keen understanding of film form that makes for a deeply affecting experience. The film is derived from Ibsen's 1884 play ' The Wild Duck ', which also stimulated a stage production written and directed by Stone in 2011 . That production has played a few places in Australia, as well as Amsterdam, Vienna, London, and at Oslo's Ibsen Festival. Stone has had a sometimes uneasy relationship with Australian theatre, particularly in regard to his adaptations of plays by other authors. But it has not affected his now terrifically successful career in Europe. Last year his production of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman for Vienna's Burgtheater and Theater Basel earned him a best director award. In March this year, he staged Ibsen's Peer Gynt in Hamburg, while in July his take on Lorca's Yerma will open at