2020
17 Apr 2008
Same Old Song and Dance
Ben Eltham finds the 2020 Summit's Creative Australia panel heavy on film stars and light on everything else
Can governments create creativity? Is cultural expression, or even great art, something that can be delivered by a State-run institution or a government grant? Or is it something best left to artists themselves, with the help of the market and free enterprise? Just how do we measure the value of something like "creativity" or "culture" anyway?These are some of the questions which will occupy the 100-odd members of Cate Blanchett's "Towards a Creative Australia" group, the arts and culture component of Kevin Rudd's 2020 Summit. The background paper to the forum frames a discussion around the following: What role does government have in supporting traditional art forms, and in promoting innovation? How can the cultural sector better balance the desire for creative output with the intrinsic worth of the artistic process? How can we foster a population with wide-ranging intellectual and creative curiosity?
When the list of 2020 summiteers hit the media, I explored the bios of the delegates for Larvatus Prodeo. Unfortunately, few of the delegates chosen by Cate Blanchett and Julianne Schultz are equipped to answer these questions of cultural policy, creative innovation and the impact of converging technology on artistic practice.
While in many cases the delegates are highly respected practitioners — some of them are even bona fide stars or the screen or stage — overall the list is unrepresentative, conservative and skewed towards either film or the traditional "high Arts" art forms like classical music and stage theatre.
The sins are mainly of omission. For instance: there is not one delegate from the gaming sector, despite the heavy emphasis made by the Summit about the importance of gaming and other "emerging creative industries". There are no game designers, game industry producers; in fact, there's not even a prominent graphic designer or animator, though there is one digital special effects wizard.
Other art forms miss out too: new media arts, community cultural development, contemporary music, ceramics, jewelry and crafts.
In contrast, the list of attendees is full of film industry representatives: screen actors, screen producers, screen directors and TV broadcasters and media executives. This is not a bad thing in itself: clearly Australia's film industry is an important part of our creative culture. Film and TV does generate significant revenues and employ a lot of Australians — around about $1.5 billion and 16,000 in 2003-4 according to Australian Film Commission figures — but around 60 per cent of this represented by the TV broadcasters.
If you look at the statistics, the value of production from the local game design industry is actually fast catching up with screen. Last year, according to the best recently available figures from the AFC and the Bureau of Statistics, screen production in Australia stood at around $200 million, while game production stood at $130 million.
The concentration on the film industry in the "Creative Australia" group is disproportionate. There are other, far bigger cultural industries than film in Australia - like publishing.
As Michael Heyward from Text pointed out in a long essay for The Age late last year, Australian publishing is a huge but neglected success story: "[In 2003-4] publishers reported income of $1.3 billion — equal to $2.5 billion at the till. Compare this to the Australian film industry. One could weep for its fate. Box office takings last year were $867 million and Australian films constituted $40 million, of which the taxpayer provided a $110 million subsidy."
Heyward points out that this represents a public subsidy of $70 million of public funds over and above what Australian films earned at the box office, leading him to argue that our local film industry is on "life support". As 2020 attendee and Three Dollars director Robert Connolly argued recently in his insightful paper "Embracing Innovation: A New Methodology for Feature Film Production in Australia", excessive government bureaucracy in the film funding bodies has fostered a culture that is far from innovative: "the current production methodology has become entrenched and inflexible in Australia."
In contrast to our unpopular film industry, Australians show a profound love of local writers, and read their books and attend their events avidly. But Michael Heyward won't get the chance to argue for publishing at the 2020 Summit — like the game industry, he hasn't been invited. In fact, no trade publisher has been invited.
There are blind spots like this all over the 2020 briefing document. The stats it presents are highly selective: film gets a thorough profile while contemporary music, publishing and community broadcasting are ignored.
Worse, the document is riddled with methodological inaccuracies. Take page 11, which purports to compare Australian cultural funding between countries and split up between the Commonwealth, States and Territories and local government. The problem with the figures is that they are apples and oranges: the country-by-country ranking only includes the Australia Council, while the broader national figures include the states, territories, local government, the ABC, SBS and the film funding bodies. In fact, there are no internationally recognised and reliable country-by-country public arts funding figures, a problem an OECD working group is currently trying to correct.
But all is not lost. Some of the 2020 attendees, at least, are thinking hard about what a future Australian cultural policy might look like. One of them is Macquarie University economist David Throsby, who has long been an intelligent and internationally respected commentator on the shape and structure of the Australian cultural industries.
Another is Marcus Westbury, who unlike most in the group comes from a decidedly non-traditional perspective concerning the sort of art and culture he is interested in.
Westbury argues not for more arts funding but rather the need to slice away the red tape and government bureaucracy that form the creative constraints and barriers to entry for Australian artists and arts workers.
He writes: "The ratio of compliance costs to capital is more stark in the creative industries than anywhere else is society. The entanglement of public liability insurance, risk assessments, liquor licensing, legal costs, copyright compliance, licensing fees, noise regulations, place of public entertainment licensing and the myriad of other issues involved in creating anything is massive and growing. Not to mention that artists are subject to all the general issues involved in running any kind of small business. It is becoming increasingly difficult to make, show, or sell anything without a massive investment up front to clear these hurdles."
Interestingly, Westbury's idea here is strikingly similar to Robert Connolly's recommendations. Both are complaining about entrenched work practices and meaningless red tape that strangles creativity and stifles innovation. This is the sort of new thinking I hope we hear from the "Creative Australia" group at the 2020 Summit.
We can only hope. But given the make-up of the panel and the background paper they've been given, it looks like we'll see the usual calls for more funding from the entrenched interest groups in film and the performing arts.
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Counting Marcus I could only find five visual arts people, and only one of those was an artist, another a dealer and two museum directors. Don’t go expecting many innovative ideas from that direction either. The whole thing seemed strongly slanted towards the academy, in every sense of the word.
How to enliven interest in the arts at the base community level?
Today’s plan to build 200+ integrated early childhood development centres could be a perfect fit. How would it be possible to build in wide interaction with the creative sector? I guess, for a start, the centres should be designed and constructed by artisans from the communities they intend to serve.
And so on. The vision is unfolding. No problem there.
Now, to consider how these centres should be managed. By government? I think not. By private management corporations? Perhaps, in some cases. But I bet the government wants the subsidised one-stop-shop child-care innovations to be managed by the communities themselves, and that will sound wonderful to some ears. That’s it - community management committees! … A scream is building up from deep inside the memory bank. … I need a cat, a dead pig to boil down, and an urgent appointment to apply the lard rather than be in a position to advise my "neighbours" how they should inform themselves about the arts.
Marcus Westbury is right. The red tape is daunting, so much so that I’ve pretty much given up going for Govt. funding, arts grants, whatever.
It’s true that when you do finally get the budget on place, all those awful compliance costs don’t come out of your pocket, and so it ends up being painless, post the previous pain.
But the hoops and hurdles do drain away the creative impulse. Two years ago I made a feature with and for the town of Maleny on the Sunshine coast.
What fun that was, not a penny was spent on compliance costs. Truth to tell hardly a penny went on anything else either. No one was paid ‘cept the editor.
Yet we came out of it with an authentic, charming 88 minute story on the screen for $5000.
True, it’s no industry model. It paid no one’s bills. But, oh what a respite it was from the funding grind and the second guessing game.
A story got told with no one interfering. A community had fun and copped a coming together of their town identity in the telling thereof. There used to be village shoemakers. I’m for village film makers.
You mentioned lack of contemporary music. You might have meant contemporary popular music, in which case you might be correct. But if you mean contemporary music as understood by people like Marshall McGuire, Darryl Buckley, Liza Lim and Richard Gill, they are well represented. Buckley’s Elision is internationally significant for innovation; Liza Lim one of Australia’s best composers, and McGuire past chair of the New Music Network as well as all his other activities. Richard Gill needs no excuse for being there. There are also Richard Tognetti and Paul Grabowski, no known for sticking with only the tried and true. These practitioners are also movers, innovators and facilitators. The work they do feeds into the work of alternative musics, groups like The Necks who are within this community of artists, and ultimately into popular culture. So, if anything, contemporary music is too well represented. That gladdens my heart. I expect these people will have an influence beyond the audiences they usually attract.
John
I think you’ve missed the whole point, Ben. Shouldn’t you be questioning the fact that "Creative Australia" is assumed to refer only to the Arts and related fields? Why doesn’t creativity in other fields get a mention? If it was intended to be only an Arts forum, why was it called "Creative Australia" instead of "Artistic Australia". There are plenty of innovative, productive and creative people in science, economics, law, agriculture, government, construction, mathematics etc. etc. whose lives are belittled by the assumption that only artists can be creative.
I couldn’t agree with you more, gracog. But it seems the selection has been limited by a conventional and almost archaic notion that creativity is limited to artists and artists are then defined as the manufacturers of entertainment and certain types of luxury commodities ie creativity is trivial and marginal.
On the other hand if you talk about creativity in a wider sense, or you change the definition of artists to "people who create cultural change in any area using any media", then you would suddenly have a very different team of players and a different ball game ie one where creativity becomes critically important but also potentially disruptive for vested interests. You can see that’s not going to get up.
@Ian. Not a good sign if you are counting me as a visual arts person!
It was pointed out to me the other day that when it comes to artforms I’m apparently "everything else".
Ben, this is a nice article. It’s succinct and makes its points well. All I can say is thank god you and Marcus are providing these cogent critiques and thank god Marcus will actually be there. It’s been very interesting to observe the pre-summit commentary. I sense that there’s a growing dissatisfaction with arts policy in Australia and the cracks might be appearing. Another affirmation of the status quo by Labor, or a Keating-esque fellowships for the boys scheme would be unbearable. I hope we can grow up one day.
Gracog and Ian - you’re both right of course. The ambit of "creativity" is wide indeed, and that’s before we speculate on the neuroscientific benefits of Bach, as Robin Archer speculated on Thursday on Radio National’s Australia Talks …. see http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/current/audioonly/ats_20080417.mp…
Julian - thanks for your kind words. There does seem to be the sense that the public policy of the arts and creativity are finally being debated substantially, and that the contradictions and evidence gaps are starting to be noticed. Let’s hope people like Marcus, Robert Connolly and the many other intelligent practitioners there actually get a chance to put up some interesting ideas …
In response to Jnightin - I think the music representation is very narrow and not well geared to the summit questions (as Ben points out in his article). The fact that almost all music representatives are from the classical music sector is quite bizarre. How can this be? Where are the electronic music specialists, the specialists in popular music, the specialists in new interfaces and technologies, the independent labels, the digital distribution specialists? The contemporary music sector as a whole is completely absent (I think you are referring to ‘contemporary classical’). As for Richard Gill, he has actively campaigned against the inclusion of contemporary music in school education and does not believe that the turntable or computer are musical instruments (the last 50 years of music history might suggest otherwise? time to go back to school?). So much for innovation! I for one will look forward to hearing their plan for digital content and innovation. I don’t buy the argument. It’s a limited and ridiculously narrow line-up.
Ben,
Thanks for the Article and this revelation
"As Michael Heyward from Text pointed out in a long essay for The Age late last year, Australian publishing is a huge but neglected success story: "[In 2003-4] publishers reported income of $1.3 billion — equal to $2.5 billion at the till".
Given the quality of commercial free-to-air television what opportunities could be in this sector? Any academic research into hours available for reading or pages consumed?
Hi EarnestLee
yes there is a degree of ABS data about cultural consumption habits of Australians.
As my sister Kate Eltham at the Queensland Writers Centre has sent me the following data based on recent ABS data.
Publishing in Australia comprises more than $3.3 billion (6.7%) of Australia’s production of cultural goods and services – this does not including printing and printing services which contributes a further $9.9 billion (20%) [ABS 4172.0 - Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2007]
· In 2003-04, book publishers sold 128.8 million books with a total value of $1.43 billion to book retailers and directly to the general public. Some $811.9 million (89.2 million books) of these were sales of new Australian titles. Approximately 14% (by value) of all books published were sold overseas, predominantly to the United States and New Zealand. [ABS 4172.0 - Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2007]
· Educational books accounted for 39% of sales, with general non-fiction accounting for 36%, general fiction 15% and specialised children’s books 9%. [ABS 4172.0 - Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2007]
· Australian households spend more on books ($1.6 billion) than any other category of culture, including TV, Pay TV and newspapers. The category of Literature (including books, magazines and comics, newspapers and other printed material) accounts for $3.4 billion per year or a massive 23% of Australian households’ expenditure on culture. By comparison, household expenditure on performing arts accounted for $641 million. [ABS 4172.0 - Arts and Culture in Australia: A Statistical Overview, 2007]