The Australian Ballet, here performing Monument, is one of the 29 Major Performing Arts companies whose funding is guaranteed. Artists are calling for these 29 organisations to lose their special status.
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Among growing feelings of despair in the Australian arts sector, more than 700 leading artists and arts-workers have signed a petition calling for the Major Performing Arts framework to be abolished.
Untitled Goose Game is an indie game where you are a horrible goose – and it is a global phenomenal success.
House House
Untitled Goose Game is a global phenomenon out of an indie games house in Melbourne. Its success shows us where a little investment in games can lead.
A new report says Australian cultural funding ‘reached its highest point ever’ in 2017/18 – but the full story is a lot more complicated.
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A new report by the cultural think tank A New Approach establishes some useful baselines for Australia’s cultural debate.
Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks in Theatreworks’ 2016 production of the play Animal. The acclaimed Melbourne theatre company has lost its long-term Australia Council funding.
Theatreworks
Both the Australia Council’s and South Australia’s new five-year arts plans talk the talk, but fail to provide vital arts funding and structural support for a diverse arts culture.
Bill Shorten walks past the painting The Pioneer by Frederick McCubbin at the NGV Australia in Melbourne on May 11.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Labor’s arts election policy includes more funding for the Australia Council and the ABC. But while this is welcome, arts and culture deserve far greater attention.
Communications and Arts Minister Mitch Fifield during a press conference in Canberra in June 2018. Over the last six years of Coalition government, there has been a lack of strong policy initiatives and a neglect of smaller arts organisations.
Lukas Coch/AAP
The Coalition government’s approach to arts and culture policy has been one of ad hocism and neglect. Perhaps most serious has been the damage done to the Australia Council and the ABC.
Dancers perform a scene from the Sydney Dance Company’s WOOF: the arts are one of the ways we make sense of our place in an increasingly confusing, and confused, world.
Joel Carrett/AAP
Government support for the arts, culture and heritage is important even in tough economic conditions.
Adelaide has been known as the ‘Athens of the South’, but there are concerns about the current state of arts governance in South Australia.
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At a time when even accountants are looking for a more compelling understanding of value, it is imperative that the arts – where individual experience is central – resist the evangelical call of quantification.
Peter Coleman-Wright and Merlyn Quaife during a dress rehearsal of Bliss in 2010: it is one of few important local operas over the past three decades to have been staged a second time.
Tracey Nearmy/AAP
Australian operas have been written about many pressing topics - from the Stolen Generations to the Lindy Chamberlain case - but few have been staged a second time. What is going wrong?
Traditional support networks too often fail our artists.
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Philanthropists are creating new galleries to share their private collections with the Australian public. But these gifts do not ameliorate the deficit left by declining government arts fundings.
Artist Cathrin Machin successfully crowdfunded her project Beautifully Nerdy Deep Space Paintings & Prints.
Cathrin Machin/Used with permission
Many Australian artists have seized on the chance to crowdfund their work through agents such as Patreon and Kickstarter. But crowdfunding should not be a substitute for government support for the arts.
The income gap between men and women is wider in the arts than the average gap across all industries in Australia. This is especially so for female writers, visual artists and musicians.
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The average Australian female artist is better educated than her male counterpart but earns significantly less than him, new research shows. And artists’ incomes are declining in real terms.
It is a strange reality but opera as an artform is always given special and arguably preferential treatment by governments and other influential forces in Western society. This happens, it seems, regardless…
The creative arts are not a lifestyle choice. They are a life.
Dan Himbrechts/AAP
The plan is there is no plan. On climate change, immigration, energy, marriage equality – pick an area – the federal government displays policy desuetude and political exhaustion. Around the world, the…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne