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April 29, 2008
Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo has been trying to facilitate a broader conversation in the blogosphere about creative Australia around the 2020 Summit. He supports a call for fundamental rethinking of the purposes and aims of arts and cultural policy argued for by Ben Eltham at the Centre for Policy Development. If we are faced with an entrenched bias in funding to major performing arts companies, then the 2020 Summit's focus was on traditional arts funding.
Though there is a need to value the arts and to argue for a more sustainable future for the sector, this came at the expense of ideas development in areas such as architecture and built environment (a key link to the sustainability agenda), design (a key link between creative and other industries, from manufacturing to services) and the emerging area of digital content and the creative economy. Stuart Cunningham said in New Matilda that:
I was intrigued that when mention was made of "digital content", it was mostly assumed that this meant infrastructure or digitising the content of cultural institutions. These are both crucial aspects of the digital agenda, but the key point is that there is a whole new industry sector emerging out of the convergence of communications, culture and social innovation. By 2020, Australia should be participating strongly in a rapidly expanding digital economy..... And understanding the "creative economy" means grasping the fact that there are more workers in creative occupations outside the creative industries than inside them. Creative skills are needed right across the economy. Digital content creation is set to become the general purpose technology of the 21st century.
If we need to move away from the ‘cultural heritage’ industry that is merely interested in digitizing the past, then we need to avoid Amercian technoculture , with its cyberutopiane ffusions about an egalitarian, chaotic system, ruled by self-governing users with the help of artificial life and friendly bots.
the 2020 Summit pretty much failed to explore the implications of creativity in the post Napster digital world of the internet; a world of BitTorrent, high speed broadband, peer-to peer sharing, Flickr, MP3 players and YouTube. The file-sharing---60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers--- has happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording , television and film industry. So what does this mean for Creative Australia?
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