It’s almost impossible, really, to sum up a year in something as complex and multiple as arts and culture, but if one trend stood out it was the maturity of the online environment. This was the year in which online culture moved from being an important and growing aspect of the space generally to the site of the world’s most important cultural and political issues.
In particular, people woke up to the significance of online media for the social and political worlds. The year’s most important movie, The Social Network, was about Facebook. The film itself married a taut script to cleverly understated direction. Written by Aaron Sorkin as a court-room drama, it told a satisfyingly moral tale about the perils of fame and the costs of entrepreneurial belief. The drama stimulated a considerable discussion about the implicit class and gender structures built into the Facebook algorithms. Perhaps appropriately, it also bestowed the ultimate 20th century imprimatur on the Facebook story: a Hollywood feature.
The year’s biggest media event — WikiLeaks — was also a profoundly online phenomenon. Media outlets have long published juicy leak stories, of course, and organisations to promote whistleblowing have been tried before. But none have had the same impact or published quite as much classified and secret material as WikiLeaks. Journalists and editors were forced to take note of the changing technical aspects of their craft, in which sophisticated information and encryption technologies are becoming as important as shorthand and shoe leather.
As Bernard Keane noted this week, the internet has changed the balance of power between the world’s elites and an increasingly connected and informed citizenry. Many — including Julian Assange — think of this trend in informational terms, but in truth it is a far more cultural phenomenon than we realise. The changes being wrought to our economy by new technologies such as social networking and collaborative editing appear to be bearing out the predictions of academics such as Scott Lash and John Urry, who foresaw a “culturalisation” of the global economy in the 1990s.
In the cultural industries themselves, information technology has already profoundly transformed the way consumers and producers interact. The newspaper and book publishing industries collectively spent much of the year navel-gazing. Would people still read printed books or newspapers? Could journalism or novel-writing survive as living crafts? As circulations spiraled downwards and e-readers transformed the economics of the publishing industry, all bets were suddenly off.
The fate of the music industry, however, shows cause for optimism. Music is 10 years ahead of newspapers in adapting to the consequences of digitalisation. Believe it or not, people are still buying and listening to music. While the big record labels continue to struggle, the live performance sector is experiencing astonishing growth. If there has been one surprise of the US economic downturn it’s been the robust sales of music festivals there, which mirrors the roaring trade for the live music experience enjoyed by Australian promoters. With the summer festival season about to begin, the success of music festivals such as Meredith, Falls, Woodford and the Big Day Out reminds us that the gatekeeper model is still a very valid model … as long your fences actually work.
Speaking of gatekeepers, 2010 also saw the first steps by big media to try and re-erect the online paywalls that most newspapers had removed at the start of the decade, starting with Rupert Murdoch’s London Times. The Times‘ readership fell off a cliff immediately, leading many to doubt the viability of the experiment. New media guru Clay Shirky argued it signalled the beginning of a shift back to an older style of publishing, in which media outlets such as The Times ceased to be broadly read journals of record, and returned to their roots as specialist newsletters.
The struggle of Big Content to try and hold back the tide of online change has seen several big lawsuits continue through the year. In February, we saw the Federal Court hand down its decision in the Men at Work case, in which a music publisher successfully sued record label EMI and songwriter Colin Hay for back royalties over a flute riff in Hay’s famous 1981 hit Down Under. February also saw AFACT, a consortium of big content firms, fail in their attempt to sue internet service provider iiNet for the illegal downloading they claimed it was facilitating.
But perhaps the most significant event in Australian cultural policy in 2010 was actually a protest. In February, more than 15,000 people gathered on Bourke Street in front of Victoria’s parliament building to protest against 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.
The protests were the biggest against a government decision about culture in a generation, and marked a new milestone in the cultural policy debate in Australia. For perhaps the first time, ordinary citizens marched to support their right to attend contemporary music venues, and made cultural policy an election issue. The Brumby government quickly agreed to a sweeping series of reforms, and by years’ end Liquor Licensing director Sue McLellan had departed. Whether the Ballieu government will live up its election slogan of “Liberals Love Live Music” remains to be seen.
The Victorian venue protests were — or at least should have been — a wake-up call to Australia’s arts establishment, which continues to equate “artistic excellence” with a narrow palette of 19th century, European artforms. In response to such criticisms, the capital-A arts lobby, led by opera director Richard Mills, mounted an amusingly trenchant defence of “heritage arts”. It largely fell on deaf ears. As 2010 draws to a close, it is apparent that the status quo in arts funding policies — in which opera and classical music receive vastly more funding than nearly any other type of cultural expression — is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
[The year’s most important movie, The Social Network … told a satisfyingly moral tale about the perils of fame and the costs of entrepreneurial belief.]
Did we watch the same movie? The one I saw was about theft. Brilliant sociopath Mark Zuckerberg stole the online-network concept from the Winklevoss twins and Divya Narendra. The film ridiculed the Winklevoss twins, making them look pompous and vain, while showing convincingly that their mistake had been to trust a fellow Harvard student who calculatedly ripped them off.
Continuing the theme, iiNet wins the right of ISPs to facilitate more theft, evading all duty of care towards the way its services are used.
Meanwhile Larrikin Music successfully turns the Federal Court into a tool for legalized theft, stealing money from Men At Work in the most cynical intellectual property claim this country has ever seen.
Watching over all this with no concept of what’s going on or what to do about it, the newspaper companies demonstrate why they are not intellectually ready for the 21st century. Their paywall efforts are an attempt to safeguard the content they write from theft. But this content is swiftly going down in value as it becomes easier and easier to duplicate or imitate, in ever-growing volumes, at ever-decreasing costs. Soon it won’t even be worth stealing. Their real asset–if only they could see it–is the authority with which they write that content.
As no-name content gets cheaper, more prolific, and less reliable, an authoritative masthead that people can trust becomes more and more rare, and thus potentially more and more valuable. If they concentrated on shoring up that credibility while opening up the content to all browsers, the newspapers could differentiate their advertising rates from all the riff-raff out there and charge huge premiums for trust. But that would require imagination. Maybe they should give the Winklevoss twins a call.
In the case of Iinet vs AFACT, the key issue at stake is who gets to make the determination that someone is infringing copyright. Iinet’s position is that a court must decide. AFACT position is that any unproven allegation is sufficient, and the ISP has the duty to act. Note that AFACT is not suing the infringer : they’re suing the ISP.
That’s like suing a toll road operator for bank robbery, simply because a bank robber used it during their getaway.
Most rock and pop music is to most classical music as most graffitti is to most Monet. Most people do not buy music; they buy fashion. Yesterday’s “great” rock music is quickly supplanted by the next, and the next, day’s. “The king is dead – long live the King!” It is a triumph of commercial marketing over music. Its currency is imitation, usually of US models, complete with the obligatory imitative dress, appearance and lingo, which seeks to approximate that of uneducated Afro-Americans and “white trash”. Meanwhile it pretentiously claims to be new or creative. The excitement it generates depends on physiological factors, such as reaction to the obligatory loudness, which produces adrenalin, repetition (“he who knows little often repeats it”), and the pelvis resonating to loud bass frequencies, as well as on an adolescent craving “to belong” at all costs and fear of ridicule otherwise. These have long been profitably exploited by the “music” giants, who happily “take candy from the kids”.
Few pursue music that is not heavily marketed to appear “fashionable”, despite immense opportunities to do so nowadays.
There is nothing wrong with publicly funding public access to art which has stood the test of time. The author and others are either intellectually dishonest or strangely ignorant in not acknowledging that the performing arts of opera, theatre, symphony concerts and ballet are expensive to stage – this is because they employ numerous skilled and dedicated workers – technicians, set-builders, carpenters, etc. There is no fat.
Do we want to ban Shakespeare, Ibsen, Verdi, Mozart, Tolstoy, Rembrandt, Monet, etc. etc. because the unproven demand funding as a right? The more the better, but don’t tell us that one artist is as good as any other, just as you wouldn’t say that a Test cricketer is as good as any backyard cricketer.
The difference between a skilled artist and a non-skilled one is that the former could, if they chose, do what the latter does, but not vice versa. A Ferrari is a better car than a Kia. This is not elitism, but demonstrable.
Finally I commend Richard Mills’s piece (the link to it is in the above article), and find it pathetic that Ben Eltham calls it “amusingly trenchant” (which it it not) and that it “largely fell on deaf ears”, perhaps reflecting his wishful thinking more than any research he has done that that is the case. Perhaps he could attempt a point-by-point critique instead.
When in the previous post I wrote: “just as you wouldn’t say that a Test cricketer is as good as any backyard cricketer” I meant “just as you wouldn’t say that any backyard cricketer is as good as a Test cricketer”. Apologies.
The Italian philosopher Croce observed that “all art is contemporary”. If today’s people are artistically moved (as distinct from fashionably moved) byart disdainfully dismissed by Ben Eltham as “19th century” or by art from the time of the Pharaohs or any other time or place, then that art is also today’s art.
Too many beautiful old buildings have been demolished by developers self-interestedly replacing them with rubbish in the name of “progress”, too may ancient forests have been desecrated, and we should not be so arrogant and ignorant as not to show respect for those greats who have preceded us and whose work will outlive us.