book review
Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy Deborah Stevenson
University of Queensland Press St Lucia Queensland 2000 ISBN 0 7022 3003 0 RRP $29.95
In Art and Organisation: Making Australian Cultural Policy, Dr Deborah Stevenson of the University of Newcastle, provides Museum National readers with an accessible means of updating their knowledge of arts and cultural policy practice. Stevenson offers an overview of shifts in arts and cultural policy-making at all levels of government since 1983, the commencement of Labor's thirteen years of governance led by Hawke and then Keating.
Art and Organisation not only reviews Labor's cultural policy statements, Distinctly Australian (1993) and Creative Nation (1994) and the Coalition's pre-election policy of 1996, For Art's Sake-A Fair Go for All of Us. lt seeks to contextualise the discourses repositioning the arts as a sector of the cultural industries through a consideration of related trends. Such trends include: intensifying State Government riva lry and entrepreneurialism; the heightened claims of regional cultural development; and the emergence of cultural tourism. Importantly, Stevenson also returns to recently neglected questions of women's creative and representational priorities, arguing that it is made necessary by the ever more corporatised framework of arts and cultural policy-making processes. The breadth of the book reflects its origins in lectures presented to postgraduate arts administration students at the University of Technology, Sydney.
If readers are unfamiliar with influential figures such as Pierre Bourdieu, Paul Di Maggio and Janet Wolff and the key Australian contributors to the discipline, the book is useful because it refers to their arguments. These authors are listed in the 'Select Bibliography' but their absence from the 'Index' does not facilitate fluency in their ideas. Stevenson acknowledges that the industry development approach to arts and cultural policy-making is at odds with artistic integrity. However, she does not adequately seize her opportunity