Why is the gender pay gap wider in the arts than other fields of employment? We mined the data looking for possible reasons.
Kate Winslet in the 2015 film The Dressmaker. The film was based on the novel by Australian writer Rosalie Ham.
Screen Australia, Film Art Media, White Hot Productions
Literature funding has been cut brutally in recent years and writers' incomes are disastrously low. Yet books shape our national identity, forming an often invisible bedrock for the wider economy.
Teresa Margolles’ Nirin installation at the recent reopening of Carriageworks in Sydney.
AAP Image/Mick Tsikas
Arts service organisations advocate for artists and help develop artforms. Cuts in NSW signal a more targeted approach to reduced government support for the arts and culture.
The Australian Ballet rehearsed Sylvia in November last year.
AAP/Bianca De Marchi
The arts and cultural sector was plunged into crisis three months ago and pleaded for help. Now a federal rescue package has been announced – but who is it for and is it enough?
The Bell Shakespeare Company – established with support from the Trust – had to end its touring season of Hamlet early due to coronavirus.
Brett Boardman
Arguments for Australian culture focus on what it should say to demonstrate its worth - rather than the government’s capacity to listen. Our history of conservative cultural leadership show they can.
A new quarterly essay looks at changes in how we market Australian performing arts – but is this necessary in a globalised digital marketplace?
The Australian Ballet, here performing Monument, is one of the 29 Major Performing Arts companies whose funding is guaranteed. Artists are calling for these 29 organisations to lose their special status.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Among growing feelings of despair in the Australian arts sector, more than 700 leading artists and arts-workers have signed a petition calling for the Major Performing Arts framework to be abolished.
Kate Sherman and Nicci Wilks in Theatreworks’ 2016 production of the play Animal. The acclaimed Melbourne theatre company has lost its long-term Australia Council funding.
Theatreworks
Both the Australia Council's and South Australia's new five-year arts plans talk the talk, but fail to provide vital arts funding and structural support for a diverse arts culture.
Bill Shorten walks past the painting The Pioneer by Frederick McCubbin at the NGV Australia in Melbourne on May 11.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Labor's arts election policy includes more funding for the Australia Council and the ABC. But while this is welcome, arts and culture deserve far greater attention.
Dancers rehearse at a 2016 media call for The Australian Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Of our 28 major performing arts organisations, only three have female artistic leaders.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Why do students still describe Australia as a 'young' country lacking culture? Are our universities doing enough to to teach Australian films, artwork and books?
Opera is treated differently to other artforms in Australia.
AAP Image/Tracey NearmyAAP Image/Tracey Nearmy
It is a strange reality but opera as an artform is always given special and arguably preferential treatment by governments and other influential forces in Western society. This happens, it seems, regardless…
Nearly three-quarters of Australians go to live art events, such as Dark Mofo in Hobart.
Stefan Karpiniec/Flickr
New survey from the Australia Council shows pretty much all Australians engage with the arts, and 8-in-10 do so online. However more people are ambivalent about public arts funding, and more people think the arts are too expensive.
Ken Thaiday’s dance machines layer people, animal, land and sea.
Carriageworks
Ken Thaiday Snr, an internationally-acclaimed artist from Erub Island in the Torres Strait, has been awarded a 2017 Red Ochre Award. Thaiday's work draws on dance, the people and land of the islands to produce elaborate masks and headdresses.
Visitors take in Cameron Robbins’ Field Lines at Dark Mofo at the Museum of Old and New Art.
Mona/Remi Chauvin
Many great artists died in 2016: Bowie, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Paul Cox, Shirley Hazzard. It was a year of creative foment and as always, intense debate about the importance of the arts to a thriving, democratic society.
Sydney Opera House during this year’s Vivid Festival: now, more than ever, we need artists to tell us the truth.
Tibor Kovacs/Flickr
There was once a sense of excitement about creating a genuinely Australian culture and making our own way in the world. What's happened to that optimism?
David Bowie was the master of reinvention. Can the arts sector follow suit?
Brandon Carson/Flickr
A culture of 'managerialism' has bled the arts of originality and purpose. We need a changed mindset and an arts and culture think-tank that is separate from the Australia Council.
A changing of the guard…will it make a difference?
Shutterstock
The organisation Senator George Brandis described as having an “iron wall” around it, is refreshing its sentinels. This week’s announcement of four new appointments to the Australia Council Board represents…
Principal Fellow (Hon), Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, University of Melbourne