Art and capitalism: There is not one kind of capitalism. Capitalism has many flavours that are local. Australian capitalism is different from US capitalism which is different from German capitalism which is different from all the others.
Capitalism is not really an \'ism\'. It is more a description of the actual lump of systems that use the market in varying degrees to organise society.
This said, capitalisms impact on art is positive on the whole as it makes people richer and thus more able to spend their time on culture.
But the lack of a real doctrine of capitalism means that it is really difficult to say what is more \'capitalistic\'.
Why is it more \'capitalistic\' to have or not have monopoly legislation? This has a big impact on culture. If the US had regulations that limited media ownership it then there would be more variety in radio ownership.
Is extending the lifetime of copyright more or less capitalistic?
Is it more capitalistic to spend 3.3% of GDP on the military or to spend an extra percent on training artists and thus subsidizing the culture industry?
Another term that might be used to refer to these questions is \'deregulation\', but even there things become interesting. Is it more deregulating to get rid of intellectual property and copy right or less?
Australia subsidises quite a bit of culture. Some of this is highly effective, in particular JJJ which is effectively subsidized advertising and distribution for Australian music and some of it seems to be pretty ineffective as shown by the subsidy of the Australian film industry. But working out what the cost/benefit of these subsidies is is difficult. It\'s like trying to cost out buying working German submarines or building our own non-submersible ones.
It would be good to see more JJJ style art subsidy. And getting the ABC and SBS to pay lots of people small amounts of money to produce original content by different people rather than just buying stuff or paying for people who have had their go, Roy and HG I\'m looking at you. The BBC is a fairly good model for this, with stuff like radio plays leading to lots of new BBC TV content like the new Dr Who and Little Britain, both of which started out as radio plays.
The ABC and SBS need some more funding, but they should also be pushed toward producing as much new stuff as possible as cheaply as possible. The other way to do this is to subsidize things like Melbourne channel 31, which produces a lot of local content and got people like Rove going. Australia\'s dynamic public radio sector does this sort of stuff really well.
Also, with the net coming in as well as more TV stations via digital broadcasting there are lots of opportunities to give more small amounts of grass roots money as a sort of research subsidy for Australia\'s culture industry.
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