Platform Papers > Issue 06: Art in a Cold Climate

Shooting Through: Australian Film and the Brain Drain

by Keith Gallasch

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Paperback. $12.95 rrp. Publication October 2005

ISBN 0 9757301 2 6

Are most artists bottom feeders, scavenging the leftovers of the major organisations, the arts omnivores? Most live at the bottom end of the ‘small-to-medium sector’ of the arts hierarchy, yet they produce the most innovative and relevant work.  So writes Keith Gallasch, in this study of the Australia Council’s declined interest in the new. Ten years ago the Council was active in support of emerging forms. This year, in a leap back to the future, it dismantled the New Media and Community Development boards, catering to its most vital sectors.

Arts practitioners are disappearing from the ranks of the Australia Council in favour of appointees with a ‘general interest’ and a free-market rationale, writes Gallasch. ‘If you deride a nation’s artists and if you turn the Council into a machine driven by economic criteria it can easily be dismantled in those terms.’

It’s time to rethink the Australia Council, he says, to make it less a grant-processing machine and more a spur to creative innovation and relevance. ‘After thirty years of development surely the arts are sufficiently mature to embrace this?’

Keith Gallasch is Managing Editor of the arts magazine RealTime. He co-founded the performance company Open City, and created new works at Sydney’s Performance Space 1987–96. He is a dramaturg and critic, was a member of the Australia Council’s Literature Board (1983–85) and produced its In Repertoire series.

This issue also includes responses to Storry Walton.

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Keith Gallasch's argument for publication in the January edition.