Creators make culture not bureaucracies
Guest Post by Marcus Westbury
September 11
Where does culture actually come from? It’s a question that we don’t usually ask but it’s one with some major implications.
We should ask it more often. Conversations with audiences, artists, creators and administrators have convinced me that our basic assumptions about culture are wrong. We mistake the major arts centres, theatres, festivals, galleries and museums where culture ends up for the places where it actually comes from.
Of course galleries and institutions play a vital role in the whole creative ecosystem as presenters, collectors, inspiration and vital outlets for the work of creators, but they’re rarely places of actual creation. Yes, they can commission and develop new work but it’s not, and probably shouldn’t be, their core purpose. If the whole arts and cultural funding system were really interested in creation, we would need a different model.
The arts world has become a very top heavy place. It is heavily bureaucratised — full of people whose job as curators, directors, bureaucrats and administrators is to select, pick winners and administer while the creators themselves almost always do it hard. Even our large performing companies are only peripherally creators. They play a far greater role in keeping alive and reinventing our collective memory than in producing original new work.
I wonder whether Australia’s European cultural history has somehow left us wanting to keep the artefacts and trappings of European culture while skipping the forces that led to it. Most of contemporary Europe is as concerned with practically and financially supporting artists to create as it is in building museums.
To me any system — such as ours — that places its priorities on building grand arts centres, impressive museums and large-scale galleries ahead of nurturing artists is an exercise in placing culture at precisely the wrong end.
For most artists, creation is a series of tasks to be completed at street level: finding somewhere to play, somewhere to rehearse, somewhere to exhibit, somewhere to work with relatively limited capital. Finding somewhere to print or publish or enough money so you can do it yourself. Finding somewhere to sell your work or somewhere that is cheap and flexible that you can afford not to for a while.
At heart I am an initiativist and not a bureaucrat. I believe in initiative, experimentation, entrepreneurship and innovation. I believe in creation and not administration and I’d like to think that that spirit could be closer to the centre of our cultural thinking.
Art is created in the intersection of our actions and our ideas. It is not an academic exercise. We create both art and culture; as consumers, propagators, as carriers, as hosts, as fans, as commentators and — most importantly of all — as citizens.
Arts centres, however, don’t create culture. They are the net that catches it as it falls. They hold it up for us to reflect on and look at it. But it is people in studios, with cameras, in bedrooms, in small companies, in garages, on laptops, in offices, and in broken-down rehearsal venues who actually create it. What do they need to do it better?
We should flip the traditional hierarchies over. Rather than place our culture centres at the top, it makes far more sense to think of them as at the bottom. It is time we placed far more emphasis on creation and development than reproduction, middle management and bureaucracy by thinking about those street-level tasks and challenges. Time to recognise that culture — and, by extension, art — is not large and grand but small, dynamic, co-operative and competitive creation and to nurture it right at that point. Time to flip the system over and put the bureaucrats and administrators on the bottom and put the creators back at the top.
Cross-posted from my life. on the internets
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Comments
11 Sep 09 at 15:26
Great piece! And what a good idea to put creators back where they belong. What also bothers me is romanticizing the starving artist. Yes, suffering causes art. But it also means people say, this is too hard, stuff it! Starvation also means people create from a place of fear. It also causes death both of the artistic impulse and the artist.
...12 Sep 09 at 11:37
I'm not for starving, but it did produce Knut Hamsun's 'Hunger', and probably most of Dostoyevsky.
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