Presenter Marcus Westbury travels to Newcastle, Australia and looks at the vibrant art culture emerging from outside the art palaces. Marcus contrasts this with the Scottish city of Glasgow and its transformation from industrial age casualty to the hub of youth art in Europe. Marcus asks whether you can buy culture by building an iconic building or even franchising a McLouvre or McGuggenheim? Or is culture a messy, dirty thing that comes from the bottom up, refuses to behave, is borderline illegal and breaks a lot of occupational health and safety rules?
Is culture a set of elaborate and elaborately-funded life support systems, or an infection that's trying to attack us? What's the difference between a symphony orchestra and a covers band (apart from about $40 million dollars a year) and why does the Australia Council spend more money on a single opera company than all the visual artists and musicians (not including symphony orchestras) in the country combined? This week presenter Marcus Westbury meets the artists who have turned Hosier Lane in Melbourne into one of Australia's prime tourist attractions; hangs out with multimedia musicians The Herd; and wonders why the games industry has so much money but so little content. Creator of the Australian game Escape from Woomera, Katharine Neil, has some ideas why, which she shares with Marcus. We also find out what uncollectable art is.
Where does art stop and business begin? Is the difference between art and commerce whether you make money out of it or whether you are making it to make money? And are artists just the underpaid R&D guys for big fashion, design, music and business? Marcus Westbury ventures into a video art bar, meets an artist who sells ideas, reveals the angst of being a sneaker designer and comes across a magazine that you can only read on a wall. With sneakers on show at the National Gallery of Victoria and every new art movement the basis of an advertising campaign, as a society, are we just the best consumers ever known.
Where is Australian culture coming from in the 21st century? Writer and presenter Marcus Westbury takes us from geeks broadcasting to audiences of millions from their bedrooms, to a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory via the Melbourne Writers Festival and little bit of high-end experimental sound art. Marcus is on a search to find a new generation of Australian artists and audiences for whom the tyranny of distance - the thing that had defined Australian culture for so long - is essentially irrelevant.
The second episode in the series, Unpopular Culture, looks at why the culture that a whole generation of creators has grown up with is considered illegal. Digital remixing and sharing on the internet has turned our culture into a dirty, digital collaborative pool that exists at or outside the margins of copyright law. Marcus Westbury takes us from the high-tech, cutting-edge electronic art at the International Symposium of Electronic Art to a 'Creative Commons' salon in Brisbane in search of an unlikely collaboration between artists and…lawyers. 'Featuring' Elvis, Moses, Stanley Kubrick and Tom Hanks, Unpopular Culture, takes a serious look at how the day to day norms of digital culture have long moved on from the letter of Australian and international copyright law.
How do we collect, archive and categorise a fragmented, diverse and exploding digital culture? In DIY Museums Marcus Westbury visits a Pop Culture convention and works his way through an army of Star Wars characters and anime geeks to find some artists producing original and evocative Australian culture. From the convention, he travels via a DVD distributor, to some of the country's leading cultural institutions. Marcus is trying to figure out the place and role of museums in a world where visits to museum websites now outnumber physical visits to museums by a factor of 10 to one, and where traditional ideas of 'authority' are under attack from an army of armchair experts. He also visits a DIY museum and asks if everyone is a curator and a collector these days? Is being a museum in the bold, new digital cultural world a help or a hindrance?