334,652 research outputs found
Arts nation: an overview of Australian arts - 2015 edition
No full textThis paper provides evidence as a catalyst for informed discussion about arts and culture in Australia.
Executive summary
Australians value the arts.
A growing number of Australians believe that the arts make for a richer and more meaningful life; they influence how we express ourselves, our creative thinking and new ideas. Understanding the scope and impact of the arts in an Australian context is complex. This first Arts Nation report provides a starting point for that exploration at a national level, and will continue to develop over time.
New analysis using the internationally recognised wellbeing valuation approach is one way of calculating the value of intangibles. It suggests that people who engage with the arts have higher life satisfaction. This is a significant finding given the level of engagement by Australians with the arts.
Nearly all Australians consume at least one form of art and half participate in arts creation each year. Geographic location does not impact on arts engagement as much as you might expect and creative participation has increased amongst some groups with historically lower levels of participation. The 44,000 practicing professional artists in Australia predominantly have portfolio careers, with just 17% working full-time on their creative practice.
The arts are deeply embedded in the cultural sector, and cultural activity makes a substantial contribution to the Australian economy. Cultural activity contributes 4.2 billion from the arts. Expenditure on culture by Australian governments in 2012–13 was 1.3 billion on the arts. Important to note is that the main source of income to the arts is consumer spending, for example, ticket sales for performing arts events generated $1.5 billion in 2013.
Private support for the arts continues to grow, most significantly from private donations. Arts organisations are experiencing rapid growth with the major performing arts companies seeing an 81% increase between 2009 and 2013. Crowdfunding is a small but growing area for Australian artists to raise smaller amounts with a higher than average success rate.
Exploring the way international tourists spend their time in Australia has highlighted the growth in arts tourism. There has been 19% growth over the past four years, with 2.4 million international visitors to Australia in 2013–14 engaging in arts tourism. More than one in four international tourists visit galleries or museums, similar to the levels in the UK and USA. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts are cherished both at home and abroad. Nine in ten Australians agree that Indigenous arts are an important part of Australian culture and audiences for Indigenous arts are growing.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists are proportionally more likely to be nominated for a major Australian art award or participate in an international arts event. The Indigenous visual arts sector is a major contributor to the arts economy and responsible for some of Australia’s most valuable works of art.
This snapshot in time affirms the significance of the arts in the lives of Australians, as well as our international profile. Central to this is our unique position as home to the world’s oldest continuous living culture
Alberta performing arts policy
No full textiii, 97 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.Alberta's first arts legislation, the Cultural Development Act, was passed in 1946. It was followed by numerous policy initiatives to support the arts, including creation of facilities for training of artists, development of agencies and agreements to deal with arts funding, enactment of regulations to guide arts institutions, and creation of various Departmental structures depending on organizational location of this policy sector. The thesis examines the historical evolution of performing arts policy in Alberta from 1905 to 1997 to identify government activities, shifts in policy-making, and methods of implementation. The study utilizes Paul Sabatier's advocacy coalition approach, which treats public policy as determined by the dynamics of the advocacy coalition within a policy sector and the manner in which external factors and system parameters steer policy development. This study concludes that Alberta performing arts policy has largely developed within the context of meta public policies emphasizing economic development and provincial statebuilding
Building audiences: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts
No full textBuilding Audiences examines the barriers to and the strategies for increasing audiences in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts sector. This research investigates the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of current and potential audiences.
What is in the report?
The findings reveal the key barriers facing audience attendance include:
uncertainty about how to behave at cultural events and fear of offending
lack of awareness with audiences not actively seeking information about Indigenous arts
and outdated perceptions of the sector – that it is only perceived as ‘serious or educational’.
Building Audiences also considered several strategies to build audiences for Indigenous arts:
providing skills development, advice and resourcing to Indigenous practitioners within the arts sector;
increasing representation of Indigenous artists in the main programing of arts companies by including more Indigenous people in decision making roles;
promoting relationships between Indigenous arts and non-Indigenous companies to present their work to wider audiences;
introducing children and young people to Indigenous arts through schools and extracurricular activities;
allowing audiences to feel comfortable engaging by creating accessible experiences;
implementing long-term strategies to change negative perceptions of Indigenous arts.
The project was commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts and funding partners include Australia Council for the Arts; Faculty of Business and Law and Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University; Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne
Public Support of the Arts in Michigan
No full textWith the loss in jobs and economic stress in Michigan, arts organizations have seen dramatic decline in corporate and individual support. The Michigan legislature in 2004 was faced with a deficit of over $925 million (Bartik and Erickcek, 2005). All areas of the government have been cut including state funding for arts and cultural institutions through the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs (MCACA). While attendance is still strong, performing arts institutions have seen significant shifts since 2001 from subscription packages to single ticket sales, indicating limited resources for many people. Today, MCACA is the smallest it has ever been since its inception in 1991. Its budget is less than half of its budget in 2003, and support to its arts organizations has consequently been cut in half as well. Because of the creation of MCACA as a state granting agency, most arts and cultural organizations in Michigan do not receive support from local municipalities. The future of MCACA is currently under great threat and if it were to disappear, financially strapped local municipalities would find it difficult to provide funding for the arts. As Michigan shifts from an economy dependent on manufacturing to one focused on entrepreneurial high-tech industries, communities must find ways to attract and retain the best talent to this region. The quality of arts and cultural offerings will be a significant driver for people to make a life decision to move to and stay in Michigan. For this reason, public support for the arts must continue. How can the funding continue and what can be done to secure its future? These are the questions to be explored in this paper
The construction of Karen Karnak: The multi-author-function
No full textThis thesis is situated within the comparatively recent developments of Web 2.0 and the emergence of interactive WikiMedia, and explores the mode of authorship within a Read/Write culture compared to that of a Read/Only tradition. The hypothesis of this study is that the role of the audience has become merged with the author, and as such, represents new functions and attributes, distinct from a more conventional concept of authorship, in which the roles of audience and author are more separate. Read/Write and participatory culture, as defined by this study, is focused on collaboration, and includes the influences of D.I.Y. culture, Open-Source practices and the production of text by multiple authors. Multi-authorship presents a re-thinking of several concepts which support the notion of the individual author, since the focus of multi-authorship is not on attribution and ownership of a finished text, but on the continued malleability of a text. Modes of multi-authorship, demonstrated in the use of the pseudonyms Alan Smithee and Karen Eliot, represent declarative authors whose names signify multiple origins, whilst concurrently indicating a distinct body of work. The function of these names form an important context to this study, since primary research involves the construction of an experimental mode of multi-authorship utilising WikiMedia technology and the interaction of thirty nine participants, who are invited to create a body of work under the collective pseudonym Karen Karnak. The data generated by this experiment is analysed using aspects of Michel Foucault's author-function to identify and determine power structures inherent in the WikiMedia context. The interplay of power structures, including concepts such as identity, ownership and the body of work, affect the resulting mode of authorship and contribute to the construction of Karen Karnak, suggesting further areas of research into the emerging multi-author
Embodied engagement in arts research
No full textThe focus of this paper is to argue the case for embodied ways of knowing in arts research. Recognition of embodied ways of knowing and embodied research has been relatively recent. For too long, arts research had been marginalized in academia, particularly performing arts, due in part to the somatophobia of Western academic cultures. While grounded in dance research myself, I argue that embodied engagement is crucial for performing arts and arts research in general. It is through rigorous and reflective practice that theoretical knowledges and lived experiences can be embodied, made meaningful, and thus contribute to the generation of new understandings. I contend that such embodied knowledge is then available to artists and researchers for subsequent expression and aesthetic communication via a wide range of mediums and interdisciplinary practices. I discuss embodied ways of knowing and suggest some guidelines for undertaking embodied research. I conclude by emphasizing the continuing relevance of performing arts in expressing individual human embodied experience in an increasingly virtual, self-destructive and global world
Arts-based methods for facilitating meta-level learning in management education: Making and expressing refined perceptual distinctions
No full textArts-based methods are increasingly used to facilitate meta-level learning in management education. Such increased use suggests that these methods are relevant and offer a unique contribution meeting a need in today’s management education. Yet, the literature is not clear on what this unique contribution may be even though it abounds with suggestions of varying quality. To explore this matter, I conduct a systematic literature review focused on arts-based methods, management education, and meta-level learning. I find that the unique contribution of arts-based methods is to foreground the process of making and expressing more refined perceptual distinctions, not to get accurate data, but as integral to our thinking/learning. This finding is important, because it imply that certain (commonly applied) ways of using arts-based methods may limit their potential. Finally, I suggest that future research regarding arts-based methods should focus on exploring the impact the process of learning to make and express more refined perceptual distinctions may have on managerial practice to further understand the relevance of these methods to managers
Reinventing the non-profit theatre: a study of the growth of educational work in British non-profit theatres from the 1990s to the present
No full textThis thesis examines why non-profit theatres in Britain have become increasingly involved in educational work since the 1990s, from an historical and institutional perspective. With an assumption that this sector-wide organisational change has been caused by a shift in institutional environments of the arts sector, the thesis proposes an institutional framework, where three different institutional logics - artworld, market and policy - coexist and tend to dominate the institutional context at different times.
Using this theoretical framework, the thesis demonstrates that arts policy and management during the post-war period were shaped by the artworld logic. However, the two decades since 1979 have seen the environments become complicated because the institutional logics of the market and policy gained currency. Criticising the limitation of marketisation theory that has so far dominated most analyses of recent cultural policy, the thesis sheds light on the fact that active intervention by the state has replaced the arm’s length principle and the arts - especially arts education and participatory arts activities - are increasingly used for explicit social policy objectives. This phenomenon is defined as ‘politicisation’ of the arts. The rapid growth of educational work since the 1990s is conceptualised as an organisational adaptation of theatres to such environments.
The case study of four English theatres demonstrates that although the theatres have expanded education under unprecedented political pressure, they also try to implicitly resist external intervention and to maximise autonomy. This implies that politicisation is a complicated process of institutional change: whilst new rules, norms and expectations have been developed under the policy logic, the sector’s romantic view of the arts has been reformulated and old ways of working have persisted. Thus, the recent institutional change in the non-profit arts sector is better understood as an integration of different institutional logics, not as colonisation of the arts world by the market or politics. In these dynamics environments, the non-profit theatre can reinvent itself as a creative educator and social impact generator without fundamental transformation in its artistic and management sides
Institutional Repositories for Creative and Applied Arts Research: The Kultur Project
No full textDigital repositories are playing an increasingly significant role within Higher Education Institutions as a means of managing and promoting research activity. However, there remain substantial disciplinary differences in take up, and the research activity of the visual and applied arts community is notably under-represented. There are both technical and cultural reasons for this absence. Perhaps most obviously, institutional repositories have traditionally been tailored towards text-based outputs, and so have been less proficient at accommodating the more complex multimedia outputs associated with practice-led research. In addition, the specific working practices of arts researchers and their mediation between academic and professional art worlds tends to influence IPR needs and attitudes towards Open Access. Such factors all need to be engaged with in order to develop an effective model of an arts repository that is useful to this sector.
This article will outline the work done by the JISC-funded Kultur project to address these needs. Kultur is a collaboration between the University of Southampton, the University of the Arts London, University for the Creative Arts and VADS, and has been funded as part of JISC’s 2007-2009 Repositories and Preservation Programme. In establishing two new IRs for UAL and UCA, and enhancing Southampton’s existing repository, the project has produced a transferable model of a multimedia repository for arts-based research outputs. The project approach has been strongly user-driven, and the article summarises how enhancements to eprints software have been shaped by the findings of an extensive user analysis. This comprised an online survey of target users, one-to-one follow-up interviews with researchers, and usability tests of the Kultur demonstrator repository. On the policy side, the article also describes the processes of developing an appropriate metadata schema, IPR policy, and institutional policies for embedding the repository. Finally, the article will consider future development, and the scope for building on the findings of the Kultur project for the benefit of the wider arts community
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