Revealing The Arts (or as one speaker put it: R Tarts)

[Frank Howarth]

I spent a day and a half last week at an interesting forum co-hosted by the Australia Council and the ABC (that’s the Australian Broadcasting Corporation for you non-Australians) titled “Revealing the Arts: creative conversations and solutions for the digital era”. So I thought I’d do a bit of blogging about it…

All the program, speaker info and some other blog stuff are at www.revealingthearts.com so I’m not going to repeat the program. But by way of basic context the Welcome intro in the program is:
Are you wondering what’s happening to arts and culture in the new
digital world? Where will the money come from? How will we manage
rights? Where do we find creative partners? What works and what
doesn’t? And what are we leaving the next generation?
The Australia Council for the Arts and the ABC invite you to be part of a
selected group of strategic thinkers, artists, practitioners and directors
who will uncover the opportunities for the arts that the digital era
presents.

So I went along, hoping to get some ideas for the Australian Museum. The audience (100 or so people) seemed to be dominated by performing arts, but maybe it seemed that way because they spoke loudest (projection…) but with a good smattering of the cultural spectrum, including a bunch of digital natives (make up your own vision of what/who they are).

First session was “Get ‘em while they’re young – Arts education”. Great keynote from John Richmond of Teachers TV (UK mob; see www.teachers.tv) His whole talk is somewhere on the R T arts site. Really pushed the point that the arts are for all (great clip of a class of deaf and hearing impaired kids writing and performing an opera from scratch). The discussion at the end of the session was a bit all over the place. Points about whether the digital activity is just to get people in to see a real (ie live) performance, or exists on its own merits. Clearly (to me) its both, depending. A bit of a view that the “young” have well and truly got it and the old need to catch up.

Second session: “Show me your arts: availability and access”. Good stuff on what the Powerhouse is doing in/on Flickr, and what a few more are doing on Picture Australia. Also good stuff on the National Library’s TROVE site (see http://sbdsproto.nla.gov.au/sbdp-ui/). All through this discussion and then throughout the forum the thorny issue of “rights” (eg copyright etc) came up. Lots of discussion about how the music (record) industry blew it a few years ago, and over protection is rampant in some areas. But as one twitterer put it: they closed the gate, but it was no longer attached to the wall. So most people simply went around it. Best points were: don’t be too safe. Get the images up there. Deal with issues if they occur. Don’t use uncertainty as an excuse to do nothing. Also good comment on a better legal framework for archiving of born digital material, and some sort of “legal deposit” framework, as for printed stuff.

Also, good comment about how Australia’s collections desperately need to be/should be digitised. If that doesn’t happen, no point in pushing digital access. We are being left behind.

The third session (day two) was called “Show me your money” and opened with a talk by Hans Petri about the company Opus Arte which records and sells (mainly) opera performances. His point is that being commercial isn’t bad and “brand” is a part of the arts world. He was very pragmatic about rights: they are a part of the commercial world. Get used to it! He had a nice catch phrase for what Opus Arte does: “entertainment with integrity”. And they must be good because the Royal Opera House bought the company to be part of their commercial arm.

Lots of good stuff in this session on how to be commercially successful in the arts in a digital world – too much for here so try and get the download of this session. The interesting issue for me was, should museums try and emulate the “live” opera broadcast into a cinema, and if so what would it be? The opera bods made the point that you can reach maybe three or four thousand people in a single live venue for an opera, but 50 thousand if its broadcast into cinemas at the same time.

An interesting case study was presented in session five about Opera Australia’s Aussie Cosi (Google it and ye shall find it on Facebook and YouTube) which was a range of web based intros into and background to the current Opera Australia production of Cosi Fan Tutte, produced by David Ford. The vodcast mini docs are aimed at “humanising” the production by introducing the real people behind it. And based on what we saw at the forum, David did a good job. I think Opera Australia wanted to broaden its audience to a younger more web savvy group, but David showed stats that indicated that most of the web engaged audience was in the 45-60 age group by a big majority. I think they succeeded more in enriching the experience of their existing audience. Not a bad thing, but not entirely what they intended.

There are clear parallels here on what we in the museum exhibition business could do more of to give an experience of the “behind the scenes” of a major exhibition.

Now back to session four which was called “Who owns your arts”? And it was LOTS of complex (and completely inconclusive) discussions on rights. Most commentators seemed to be saying that (free) digital access increases all other access, including the stuff generating a financial return (case in point: note from me to Vampire Weekend fans: you can download their new single “Horchata” for free from their site, as a teaser for their new album due in January…). The Wikimedia guy had a nice (and probably not original) line that if it isn’t on the web it doesn’t exist. The conclusion, if there was one, is that copyright law isn’t keeping up – “it’s a dinosaur”.

The final session was imaginatively titled “Where to now?” No more nice plays on the “arts” word – I’m sure they could have done something with the “arts-end” of the conference. It was hard for me to draw much cogent out of the discussion, except perhaps we should do more of this. Good tweets about the benefits of simultaneous webcasting of the conference (thanks ABC!) and the twitter feed. (Mind you the quality of most of the tweets confirmed what I had thought for a while about the ability of Twitter to convey intellectual content. It seems better geared to commenting on what Brad Pitt did for his last birthday). Some good comments from Kathy Keele (CEO, Australia Council for the Arts) that “its about artists and access – as many people as possible see the art” and from Kim Dalton (Director of Television for the ABC) that we have been in a “mapping, sketching and description exercise here over the last day; we are IN the digital environment and the boundaries are blurred”.

So what did I get out of those one and a half days from a museum perspective? Most of my points are in the stuff above. It was good to have this discussion across a wide range of the arts, more creative ideas came out. I think we are doing the digital stuff better than the performing arts, but there are some ideas to follow up, like what is the parallel for us to a live opera broadcast? And much as he has his good points, it has to be more than Neil MacGregor of the British Museum doing a talk to camera walkthrough vodcast of an exhibition. And we do need to get those collections digitised and out there. And that damned “rights” issue is there for us too…