More yuppy stuff coming soon: gentrification, cultural policy, social inclusion and the arts

Responding to gentrification has become a key planning issue for many urban municipalities. Local governments need to balance the often-competing agendas of urban regeneration, social inclusion and arts access and participation. This paper argues that arts and cultural units within local government bear the impact of such tensions. More importantly, however, local government policies and their implementation represent a third position in the polarised discussion on the cultural impact of gentrification. The example discussed here is the rapidly gentrifying City of Maribyrnong in Melbourne’s western suburbs: a municipality where any potential realisation of the economic benefits of gentrification is balanced against the needs of a significant population of resident professional artists, and the social inclusion needs of socio-economically disadvantaged residents. Maribyrnong’s arts and cultural unit, like those within many municipalities in the developed world, has had to develop cultural policies and plans as tools for negotiating complex relationships and diverse needs of community members by considering the economic, social and cultural benefits of the arts for all residents.

Turning Victoria into cultural capital: Victorian arts policy 1992-1999

Cultural developments in Victoria represent an example of the industry approach to the arts, which guides contemporary public cultural policy. This approach evolved many years back but it is clearly expressed in the Kennett government’s cultural policy document.

Instrumentalism and the 'helping' discourse : Australian indigenous performing arts and policy

Indigenous arts are significant to the way Australia is represented to the world. Since the early 19705 Indigenous cultural policies, at both federal and state levels, have helped to shape the development of Indigenous performing arts in Australia. Over this period, cultural policies, in confluence with the aims of Indigenous artists and civil rights activists, have produced and reproduced instrumentalist rationales for the support of Indigenous arts. In particular, the sector has deployed <helping' rationales for cultural policies which focus on social and economic outcomes. This article addresses current debates around the instrumentalist purposes of cultural policy and the participation of Indigenous practitioners in reproducing the 'helping' discourse. The article, however, finds evidence of a recent break in the consensus which sees some Indigenous artists resisting the historical imperative for their arts practice to be exclusively focused on instrumentalist outcomes.

Australian cultural and innovation policies: never the twain shall meet?

 In recent years, Australian cultural policy-makers have begun to pay more attention to innovation policy. Several of the Australian states specifically address issues of innovation in their formal cultural policies, and the Australia Council for the Arts has published an Innovation Strategy which purports to constitute 'a coordinated approach to supporting creativity as one of Australia's most valuable assets' (Australia Council 2006).

However, despite this prima facie policy commitment to supporting and fostering innovation in the arts and cultural industries, there remains a disconnect between cultural and innovation policies in Australia. On the one hand, cultural policies in Australia are confused and incoherent in their approach to cultural innovation, and many policy settings as they apply to cultural industries are antithetical to the aims of fostering innovation and R&D. Meanwhile, innovation policies continue to pay only marginal attention to the creative arts and cultural industries. This disconnect will be briefly examined in three fields of cultural policy: arts and cultural funding; copyright and intellectual property policy; and broadcast media policy.

It is argued that rather than promoting innovation, existing policy frameworks in all three areas, when not specifically framed around the protection of vested interests, are often contradictory and inimical to the disruptive influence of innovative artists, technologies and firms. Possible reasons for the disconnect include pragmatic matters of busy ministers and low policy priorities, and conceptual confusion over the status and value of culture.

Growth in Cultural Participation in the City of Sydney: A Review for the City of Sydney

 Research Report commissioned by the City of Sydney

Expertise and the making of world heritage policy

This paper contributes to two emergent areas of scholarship: first, the role of expertise within the domain of cultural heritage practice; and second, international heritage institutions and their processes of governance. It does so by exploring expertise within the context of World Heritage Committee meetings. These forums of international heritage policy formulation have undergone significant changes in recent years, with larger geopolitical forces increasingly shaping process and decisions. This paper foregrounds the idea of these annual meetings as ‘locales’ in order to explore the inflows of expertise that help constitute authoritative decision-making, how expert knowledge is crafted for and by bureaucratic structure, and how the interplay between technical knowledge and politics via an ‘aesthetics of expertise’ bears upon future directions. In offering such an analysis, the paper seeks to add nuance and conceptual depth to our understanding of international conservation policy and the regulatory, governmental practices of organisations such as UNESCO.

Re-imagining the museum: beyond the mausoleum

Through a range of case- studies, including studies from the UK, North America and Australia, this book moves away from the idea that museums are always "conservative" to suggest they have a long history of engaging with popular culture and addressing a variety of audiences. Andrea Whitcomb argues that museums are key mediators between high and popular culture and between government, media practitioners, cultural policy-makers and museums professionals. The book also analyses links between museums and the media, looks at the role of museums in cities and discusses the effects on museums of cultural policies.

The politics of exclusion: political censorship and the arts-as-industry paradigm

In Australia from 1992 to 1999 Jeff Kennett led the Liberal state government in Victoria. Under his leadership an important vision statement for the arts was produced, and ambitious redevelopments of Victoria’s major cultural institutions were undertaken. Kennett’s ‘vision’ included reforms to Arts Victoria (the state-based arts funding agency) and a radical revision of how the arts were to be subsidised. This represented a wholesale adoption of a new policy approach which saw the arts and culture as an industry which could benefit, in particular, the development of cultural tourism for the state of Victoria. This paper argues that while the arts could be seen to have benefited from the Kennett government’s largesse, some parts of the arts sector were excluded and subjected to censorship. Based on both primary and secondary sources, we argue that in this period, the work of artists which expressed a politically dissenting view was actively discouraged.

Cultivating mangement? Managing culture?

Jean Battersby, the founding executive officer of the Australia Council of the Arts from 1968, delivered a lecture in May 2005 which bemoaned a situation in which the focus and funding of the arts appears to have more to do with managers than with artists. Cultural policy and cultural economics have become the staple of the day, so much so that the thought of an economist actually proposing an Arts Council protected from political manipulation and scrutiny—‘with antennae sensitive to public opinion or political advantage’ and ever ready to apply the ‘child of three’ test (Battersby, 2005: 2)—seems an absurdity. Yet, in July 1945, Maynard Keynes proposed that Britain have an Arts Council without government and its bureaucracy intervening in the relationship between artists and their public. The task, as Battersby records it, ‘is not to teach or to censor, but to give courage, confidence and opportunity’ without prescription (2005: 6).

Culture and political party ideology in Australia

Australian federal cultural policy has been shaped by the political party in government in ways that reflect the distinctive ideology of that party. The authors trace the influence of Australia's two major political parties on federal cultural policy, arguing that their distinctive political philosophies have been significant forces in determining the changing shape of cultural policy in diverse ways. The authors demonstrate that, over the past decade, the cultural policies of the two major parties have become less distinctive as each party responds to the same international economic and political challenges. This lack of ideological dichotomy within political discourse has hampered the development of cultural policy that adequately responds to the cultural interests of Australian communities and artists.