‘Else-where’ : essays in art, architecture, and cultural production 2002-2011

“Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002–2011 is a synoptic survey of the representational values given to art, architecture, and cultural production at the closing of the twentieth century and the opening of the twenty-first. Written primarily as a critique of what is suppressed in architecture and what is disclosed in art, the essays are informed by the passage out of post-structuralism and its disciplinary analogues toward the Real (denoted over the course of the studies as the “Real-Irreal,” or “Else-where”). The essays collected in “Else-where” cross various disciplines (inclusive of landscape architecture, architecture, and visual art) to develop a nuanced critique of a renascent formal regard and elective exit from nihilism in art and architecture that is also an invocation of the highest coordinates given to the arts – that is, formal ontology as speculative intelligence itself, or the return of the universal as utopian thought “here-and-now.”

Cultural policy in Australia

 In early 2010, more than 15,000 people gathered on Bourke Street in front of Victoria’s Parliament building to register their protest against an unpopular government decision.1 The colourful crowd chanted and marched, sported placards and banners, and listened to speeches by local identities.

What were they protesting about? Climate change? Refugees? The war in Afghanistan?

No, they were protesting about a decision by Liquor Licensing Victoria to enforce onerous security requirements on live music venues in Melbourne. The new regulations had led to the closure of one of Melbourne’s best-loved rock venues, a Collingwood pub named The Tote. Many other venues were threatened with the same fate.

This was a protest about cultural policy.

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.

Cultural Protectionism 2.0 : Updating Cultural Policy Tools for the Digital Age

This chapter explores cultural protectionism 2.0, i.e. the normative dimensions of cultural diversity policies in the global digital space, asking what adjustments are needed and in fact, how feasible the entire project of diversity regulation in this environment may be. The complexities of the shift from offline to online and from analogue to digital, and the inherent policy challenges are illustrated with some (positive and negative) instances of existing media initiatives. Taking into account the specificities of cyberspace and in a forward-looking manner, the chapter suggests some adjustments to current media policy practices in order to better serve the goal of sustainably diverse cultural environment.

Cultural policy of the GLC

Loraine Leeson shared a panel with Hilary Wainwright and Linda Bellos OBE to speak about the cultural legacy of the Greater London Council. As a former member of the GLC’s Community Arts sub-committee in the 1980s, she drew on this experience to highlight the usefully different model offered by its arts policies to the top-down, target-driven arts funding structures, which are so familiar today. GLC policies led to a different kind of art, and with new life now being breathed into the Labour movement, younger generations are looking to lessons from the past to learn how things can be done differently.

The cultural policy in Italy and the innovations of the XXI century

The paper analyzes the development of the first experiences of the sixteenth century cultural policy in Italy until the beginning of the twenty-first century with the institutional reform initiated by the Minister Dario Franceschini. In the pre-unification State it has been many important contributions of several local rulers who imposed conservation policies to prevent the dispersal of works of art. After the unification of Italy (1861) the laws of protection of the national heritage have helped to initiate the first important initiatives that have developed in practice only at the end of the twentieth century. Great institutional innovations and regulatory activated in the twenty-first century and of which this paper provides some important insights and deepening.

Aligning communication, cultural and media studies research and scholarship with industry and policy : Australian instances

This article reflects on aspects of what is claimed to be the distinctiveness of Australian communication, cultural and media studies, focusing on two cases – the cultural policy debate in the 1990s, and the concept of creative industries in the 2000s – and the relations between them, which highlight the alignment of research and scholarship with industry and policy and with which the author has been directly involved. Both ‘moments’ have been controversial; the three main lines of critique of such alignment of research and scholarship with industry and policy (its untoward proximity to tenets of the dominant neo-liberal ideology; the evacuation of cultural value by the economic; and the possible loss of critical vocation of the humanities scholar) are debated.