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Evolution and creation: Australia's funding bodies
Our funding bodies are designed for the mass scale and based on the idea that culture comes from a relatively small number of large places, yet as Marcus Westbury argues, the dominant trend of our era is that culture is diversifying and moving away from this model.
Responsibility for Australia’s arts, media and cultural priorities is diffused through dozens of other agencies, councils, departments, initiatives, strategies, schemes, corporations and associations. They are all full of passionate and knowledgeable people endeavouring to do good work. Yet collectively they are dysfunctional. Each operates with limited resources, governed by an internal logic rather than a larger strategy. Each is accountable to a self-defined sector or a narrow set of priorities and pressure groups. 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 embrace rapidly evolving modes of production, distribution and collaboration across disciplines, the agencies designed to nurture them remain paralysingly fixed.
Text from Australian Policy Online
Show latest news, more from July 2009.
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