Twitter, the 140-character messaging system, is being embraced by many of Australia’s major arts companies, from Opera Australia to the Sydney Opera House to most major arts festivals.

Some have begun to encourage “tweeting” before, at interval and in some rare cases even during some of their shows. Some theatres are experimenting with reserved zones or sections where punters are encouraged to tweet live during the performances.

Depending on who you ask, it’s radical democratisation unleashing raw enthusiasm, genuine criticism and passion or the barbarians at the gate.

For many traditionalists, the concept is outrageous. The idea that such behaviour could pollute the hallowed halls of our cultural institutions is poisonously problematic. The notion of having less than 100 per cent of your audience’s attention is rude, offensive and disrespectful. The experience of a show is under threat from the glare of iPhone screens and tapping fingers.

Then there are those who argue that Twitter is a natural adjunct to watching a show. Live performance has always been to some extent about dialogue, conversation and social interaction.

In the age of “continuous partial attention”, extending that online is as natural as texting – or perhaps whispering to the person seated next to you.

The arts have much to gain from loosening up, getting with the 21st century and following the lead of many music festivals, conferences, gigs and events where live tweeting has become the norm. Changing times and ageing audiences necessitate some concessions to changing expectations.

I have some sympathies for both sides of the argument. Like most things, it’s probably not really an either/or question  it’s as much about etiquette as absolutes.

Reaching for the mobile in a one-person show in an intimate venue is genuinely rude. It is much less of an issue in the back row of a 2000-seat theatre.

Equally, some robust, engaging, rambunctious performances positively demand to be shouted about both digitally and physically, but an intimate reflection on grief and loss demands attention and reflection.

There is a lot to be gained from experimenting with audiences tweeting in real time. For many younger audiences, it pierces the barriers of intimidation that accompany many art forms. It brings a night at the theatre or the opera in line with a gig at a pub or a moment at a festival where firing off a quick “This is Greatest. Thing. Ever. You Must. See. This.” to 400 followers is as authentic an expression of praise as there can be. What better review could a company hope for?

Being able to tweet a bad experience can have a value for the audience if not the artist. Am I the only person who has has been trapped in shows that are so tediously awful that the opportunity to vent, interact or complain a little would be welcome relief?

At truly awful performances I have resorted to occupying myself with a mental game called “what sort of seizure would I need to fake to get out of here now?” That would have been more fun on twitter.

Beyond the marketing and technological fad, there is a powerful potential here. It is not simply about how connected audiences will respond to existing performances but how they might change the dynamics of performance itself.

Twitter provides a genuine opportunity for companies to discover what an audience is thinking right there in real time. I have spoken at quite a few lectures and conferences that were tweeted by the audience, and I found it uniquely challenging and validating to see people quoting, challenging, and critiquing my comments as I make them. As a director of festivals and events, I’ve found Twitter and Facebook comments written in the moment much more powerful than any review.

In an age of fragmented attention spans and continuous multi-tasking, perhaps the question is not: “How can performers demand the full attention of their audiences?” but: “How can performers adapt to the reality that they will no longer be able to expect it”?

Arts Victoria is usually better than most at this, but in other states and for many programs it’s surprisingly common. Smaller grants programs simply fall off the priority list when it comes to ministerial attention. It’s not just arts and it’s not just Victoria  across many fields and jurisdictions, across governments of all political persuasions, there can be a tendency to treat the recipients of small-scale funding programs with an attitude verging on contempt. In the arts, it is often individual artists and small companies that bear the brunt. Of course they are the ones with the fewest resources  and they are also least likely to kick up a stink.

For those without access to much support, the whole funding process is bewildering and intimidating, even when it’s working well. For many artists and small companies, their entire viability can rest on resources that to government departments might seem like rounding errors. I once worked helping young artists with their first applications  and it constantly reminded me how much they invest emotionally and practically in the outcome.

I did it myself. It seems stupid now, but for my first funding application I made a five-hour round trip to ensure it was received by the inflexible “at our office by 5pm” deadline. At the last moment I read the fine print that stipulated that it be filled out in black  not blue  pen. Almost in tears, I spent an hour camped in the foyer of a government office building tracing over every letter, every number, every word in black for fear of being ruled out on a brutal technicality. All this was in the hope of receiving a few thousand dollars for a project that in a best-case scenario had no prospect of paying me anyway.

For many, every day of waiting comes with a cost: trying to hold off saying yes (or no) to other work while waiting for news; trying desperately to keep a project team together while not knowing if you can pay them or get the resources to go ahead. It’s hard enough, without the additional complication of not knowing when you will know.

In not knowing, it’s also easy to make the wrong call. When the recommended funding for a project I was working on once languished for months on a minister’s desk, our deadlines for marketing and publicity  and for the execution of the project itself  came and went. Faced with no other choice, we decided to go ahead with it.

The sign-off, we hoped, was a formality, and if we didn’t go ahead now it would be impossible. When the decision finally came the minister in question compensated for his delay by unilaterally moving the dates on our project to the following year.

Net result in the real world: a $10,000 deficit and an obligation to do the same program twice. My mistake.

Too often the system is not user-based. It’s to be expected when most artists feel that any support is a luxury, so they rarely complain (not to mention there are obvious risks in alienating those with money and power by speaking up).

If you had the luxury of starting again, you’d begin by designing the process to be relevant to applicants. It would be far more responsive. It would be quick and timely.

It would minimise the onerous compliance bureaucracy that has grown with every petty crisis, and remove the small army of political hacks, spin doctors and advisers who have an inordinate ability to clog up what should otherwise be simple processes for relatively small sums.

That’s probably too much to ask. Still, it doesn’t hurt to occasionally ask a simple question: does this process work as efficiently and effectively for the taxpayers and those it aims to support as it could do? If not, then perhaps we should fix it.

The largest piece of cultural infrastructure in Australian history is under construction even as we speak. A clue? It’s not a gallery, a theatre or an arts centre. It will stretch into virtually every home and workplace. It’s going to cost the Australian people at least $30 billion upfront to build — maybe a lot more if its critics are to be believed.

The answer, if you haven’t already guessed, is the national broadband network. It is a bona fide cultural revolution in the making. It dwarfs every other cultural edifice we’ve even thought about. I’m soon to be a guinea pig — I’m living in the middle of Melbourne’s first NBN test sites, in Brunswick.

The NBN will change a lot about how we create and consume culture in Australia. Within a decade, practically every home, every cultural institution, every venue, large and small, will be connected. They will all have the capacity to distribute film, sound, video, music, literature, images and media of incredible quality at lightning speeds to anywhere in the country and most of the world. It’s an opportunity that media moguls a decade or so ago would not have imagined. Every Australian producer will be exporting to but competing with the world.

The impact on Australian culture will be profound. Yet for the arts community, the NBN has provoked nothing of the discussion, controversy and speculation that usually accompanies the building of a new arts centre. It should — the regulatory, technical and economic rules that will govern the network are being decided even as we speak. Few seem to be really thinking through the ramifications.

Yet it’s the policy settings and incentives and not just the fibre-optic tubes that will determine whether the NBN meets its cultural potential.

How will the network treat local content? The creaky archaic mandate on television content has no place on the NBN, but its design and operation could encourage us to develop locally made and hosted media. Exempting local product from potentially prohibitive download quotas — as some, but not all, ISPs do now for the ABC’s iView service — could make a huge difference to those hosting and uploading here.

What will we be able to access from our cultural institutions and cultural collections? The digitised collections of our galleries, companies, broadcasters, orchestras and archives in Australia could be shared into every home, school and library in Australia.

Think of the gems in the ABC archives, in the National Film and Sound Archive, the collected recordings of our orchestras and opera companies. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of films, images, texts, sounds and other material that have been lovingly and meticulously collected for the very purpose of enriching the cultural lives of all Australians. Many are already digital or could be cheaply digitised and easily shared if we cleaned up the legal mess preventing us from doing so.

The list goes on. How will we treat education? What about all those of us who want to embrace the chance to create? Are we going to be promoting or prosecuting those who grasp the creative potential of the new technology?

Now, you practically need a legal department to work out where you can shoot and what you can make and remix. If we want to unleash the Australian experience, making it much simpler to do so for creative or educational purposes would better any funding program. The NBN is a chance for relatively simple and inexpensive redesigning of the rules. It’s a chance to put all those works that are not commercially available, that are orphaned, that are owned by the state or by public agencies, or out of copyright in every home in Australia. It’s a chance to encourage creative, cottage copyright industries by allowing for newer, fairer, simpler ways to pay copyright holders.

The NBN is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. To take it, we need to sweep aside an inherited complexity of ageing legal structures, outdated logics and vested interests.

We need to return to some first principles: cultural life is a good thing; that creators are encouraged to create; that access to creativity, education and our deep national heritage is an opportunity too good to pass up.

The art form critic that we’re familiar with is neither natural nor inevitable. It is as much a construct of the needs and demands of the media industries, academia and funding systems as it is an irresistible way to interrogate and understand art.

Take a critic for a newspaper or radio station with the brief to review local visual arts, music or theatre. It can be a powerful gig. For a long time the opinion of such people — myself occasionally, and many of my friends and colleagues — held an enormous amount of sway over whether a show was seen or sunk without a trace.

It wasn’t just their expertise that was important, though. The critic has long had control over a vital and rare conduit — the media — between an artist and their potential audiences. For presenters and promoters, convincing a critic to review a show was the essential way to make sure people found out about it. When it came to ticket sales, a positive review and the sense of buzz that came with it went a long way towards ensuring you broke even.

Today, a lot of that has started to unravel. As much as those of us in the media might like to think otherwise, TV, newspaper and radio aren’t the only conduits any more. The internet has created a plethora of blogs, email lists, social networking, and marketing strategies that are cheap, easy to access, and bypass the traditional critic entirely. Word of mouth — long the holy grail of marketing people everywhere — has become massively amplified by Twitter, Facebook, and other social media. We’re all critics the moment we see a show, read a book, watch a film and share our reactions to it. Many of us are creating our own criticism, commentary and feedback without thinking about it.

This commentary is often less informed than that of an art form expert but in some ways it can be far more valuable. We may know nothing about 19th century painting but social media compensates for that. We know our audience better than any critic can. Study after study has shown people take a recommendation or a warning far more seriously from someone they know than from someone they don’t — no matter what their expertise.

Many artists have realised this. Over years of directing festivals, for mostly younger artists, I’ve been fascinated by their reactions to critics. I’ve met many an artist who has built a reasonably successful practice while consciously avoiding mainstream critics. Many ask not to be publicised to them. Their assumption, rightly or wrongly, is that they have much better conduits for establishing a reputation or building an audience and they don’t need the “authoritative” attention of someone who isn’t their audience and may not understand their work.

As media becomes more niche, the role of the popular critic may change with it. It’s becoming less about being an expert to a mass audience and more about becoming the reconnaissance party for a niche one. Perhaps the next generation of critics will know more about the communities of interest they represent than the art forms they’re reviewing. In a world of fragmented audiences, knowing what will interest someone — whether it’s a warehouse gig, a gallery show, a pub performance, an online video or a major institution — may be more important than being the expert in theatre, visual arts or dance.

Follow me on twitter.

Last month in Melbourne i joined a panel at the State Library of Victoria speaking out about the current internet filter proposal. Also on the panel was the parliament’s best and most consistent filter opponent Scott Ludlam, Greens Senator for Western Australia, professional provocateur Catherine Deveny, and Colin Jacobs who is the Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Rather belatedly I’m getting around to posting the audio of the event now.

My contribution focused on the some of the sheer stupidities inherent in this current proposal. The audio of my talk is here.

You can also listen to the other speakers at the forum’s web site.

My upload picture funciton is busted, so here is a video.

CAN YOU make a reality TV show about art? Does the template make visual arts exciting, or do we really get to watch paint dry?

The team behind the American cable series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist thinks they’ve found the way. The show, which premiered on cable network Bravo last week, follows the format of successful reality franchises such as MasterChef, Next Top Model, and The Apprentice. But the aim this time is not to unearth models, fashion designers or corporate bastards but artists.

So how does it work?

For my sins, my firewall-leaping technological proficiency and the irresistible enthusiasm of my editor, I managed to track down a copy of the first episode. Ostensibly Work of Art: The Next Great Artist has 14 competitors chasing $100,000 (never mentioned without the tagline that the loot is provided by “Prismacolor: life uninhibited”) and a prestigious solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. Each week they’re asked to create a new work in an unfeasibly short time to be judged by a cast of prestigious critics and collectors. Sound familiar?

As with any reality show, it’s more about the human drama than the notional subject matter. As you’d expect the “who’s the better artist” package comes bundled with the usual reality TV add-ons. It’s got carefully constructed and often implausibly physically attractive characters, weird artificial weekly challenges, fast-paced editing, immunity challenges, evictions and all the artists living in the same big house.

Much of the pre-publicity around the series hinges on the fact that the show is produced by the production company of Sarah Jessica Parker, pictured. In the first episode, she makes a gratuitous, distracting (and totally unsurprising) “surprise” visit and leaves the cast with an underwhelming inspirational speech.

The first week saw the contestants challenged to make a portrait of a fellow contestant, after they’re paired up. It’s a nice set-up for a balanced combination of insight into contestants’ creative process and an opportunity for a little bitchiness.

Obviously, we’re meant to take sides here. One contestant, Nao, has been selectively edited to be the bitch from central casting. She is a university lecturer, clearly more established than most others, with such a strong sense of her own position that she offers the others gratuitous advice on their work. Attractive eccentric man-boy Miles responds by painting her as a corpse (evoking the tradition of “death portraiture”) though presumably because Miles is such a nice guy, all the producers resist the urge to read too much into this.

Another contestant, Jamie Lynn, informs us all that she is “not just a ditzy Christian blonde Barbie wannabe person — I’m an artist” and in doing so comprehensively undermines her own argument. I took an instant liking to Erik, the guy who has been living in his truck and admits at the beginning that he’s been an artist “for about six hours”. Unfortunately, it showed instantly in his work.

So does the show work? Well, sort of. It’s not the next MasterChef, but it could be a strong staple for cable TV for at least a few series. It’s mostly mindless fun.

I won’t be seeking out the next episode but I will watch for its arrival in Australia.

Call it the benefit of low expectations, but it provides a little more insight into the creative process and artists’ technique than I had expected, and I hope this element will get more air time as the cast is culled and the introductions are dropped.

But really, it’s about television and entertainment, not art. Just as Australian Idol offers bugger-all resemblance to the way in which musicians outside reality TV land make it to the top, Work of Art is only peripherally about creativity. It’s entertaining enough, but by the end, I strongly suspected one of the artists was evicted for reasons of casting as much as creative critique.

Of course, away from reality TV land, art is not really a competition in the conventional sense at all.

It’s a wonderful, subjective, complex chaos of contradictory expectations and contested goals.

But that makes for lousy television.

Only in retrospect, and often long after the work is made, is there any consensus about what “winning” as a “great artist” actually means at all.

It’s something i may get around to writing about myself in the near future, but in the mean time, here’s an open letter from John:

Open letter to the Government

Re: Cooper Report recommendation and its unintended consequences

I will never forget the day in 1990 when an art collector (then a partner in a leading law firm) dropped by my studio. He cheerfully told me that he had just bought a very good Colin McCahon painting at auction at one of the many forced sales of art collections by failed corporations. He had paid less for this painting by a famous dead artist than the typical asking price for a successful artist under 40 years of age. The next five years were economically disastrous  for living artists and gallerists aged between 30 and 40; many did not survive as practitioners. The legacy of those years is still evident today; there is a gap in the demographic of practising artists and gallerists aged 45 to 55 years of age.

The Cooper Report’s proposed forced sale of numerous art collections from SMSFs is destructive folly. The economic and community benefits that would justify this retrospective and draconian directive are very unclear. Artworks mostly have life spans measured in many decades, if not centuries. If these collections must be sold, why not over twenty or thirty years? What is the hurry? The measure is particularly likely to cause irreparable harm to the next generation of indigenous artists.

The mandated liquidation of existing collections will be at individually born cost, not only in terms of reduced superannuation benefits for those facing retirement but also sellers fees (minimum 10%), commissions paid to agents and so on. Or If the works are transferred to some sort of approved  ‘management’ there will be new, additional management costs. The retrospective nature of the directive makes the payment of these costs a Duty:  a hypothecated tax.

This recommendation flies in the face of the government’s commitment to and investment in the indigenous visual arts sector, particularly the art centres. The loss of confidence in the art market as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the report is already being felt. Artists’ incomes – especially for those artists who depend on the sale of their artworks for their incomes – are already being impacted upon.

Over the past few years government policy affecting the visual arts has, far too often, been shaped by advice and recommendations given by persons whose authority to speak about the realities of the sector are based solely in a lack of curiosity.

As reported in The Australian newspaper, Cooper review panelist Meg Heffron was quoted as saying that “the panel did not take the art sectors concerns into consideration because its task was to review the superannuation industry and not all the industries around it”. On the contrary, it is definitely the task of government to take the concerns of the whole community into consideration. I urge you to reconsider this uninformed and harmful recommendation as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

John R Walker

Artist

Later this week, various venues around Fitzroy will host an “anti-gentrification festival” hosted by the “radical craft group” Craft Cartel. Their aim, as they describe it, is to celebrate their presence in the city before they are driven out by what they describe as “crazy living costs”. They’ve even got hold of the stinky, sticky carpet from the much-loved, mourned, dead and soon-to-be resurrected Tote and are making exhibitions, fashion parades and souvenirs from it to raise money for local charities.

It’s easy to criticise this kind of approach. It seems a little naive. It’s certainly neither the first nor the last time that artists in Melbourne and other major Australian cities have complained of being forced out of their stomping grounds by yuppies, developers, nimby regulations, and rising property prices.

It’s certainly difficult to imagine just how this keep-Fitzroy-feisty fest will turn back such an overwhelming tide.

On one level, these kinds of reactions to the changing dynamic over our inner cities are little more than youthful nostalgia. Zoom out a decade or two and the places where artists and creative communities live and meet are always evolving not just because of demographic and economic forces, but from the changing tastes and expectations of artists and audiences themselves.

As much as I’d personally love to see the significant and seminal places of my own formative years preserved, declaring my own once-sacred sites probably won’t help. At its worst, it just invites us to swap a living city for a theme park and dynamic venues for atrophied museums.

But for all the easy pot-shots there is a genuine question here. It’s not merely about how we save any particular place, but how we preserve the ability to make creative places for the next generation. Against the backdrop of much larger forces — the rising speculative value of property prices, the growing (and sensible) policy pressures to move more people into the inner-city suburbs and the encroachment of ever-greater regulation of space — how do we ensure that creative communities still get a look-in?

These are real, live issues and not just for radical crafters. Many artists are constantly fleeing further and further out. Their very presence seems to invite rising property prices. Property investment seminars tell investors to follow the creatives. They seek out cheap space, make it dynamic and interesting and in doing so, they attract the interest of punters, speculators and developers, who, in turn, begin to price them out to the next suburb.

Look over the past few decades as the dynamics have moved from Carlton to Fitzroy to Collingwood, Brunswick, Northcote and beyond.

Against these forces, the way we plan for and support the arts are often inadequate. The way that governments have traditionally made space for the artists — through commissioning buildings and creating cultural infrastructure — has only ever been a fraction of a much greater sum of cultural activity. Then there are all the studios, rehearsal spaces, formal and informal arts infrastructure that artists create and recreate. It’s getting more difficult to find, make and shape these spaces by artists, community groups or others who don’t have much money and don’t expect to earn very much. So much of what we now take for granted in our cultural and community lives was planted and nurtured in cheap space.

The real question is not how do we save a particular place or “nostalgise” a particular suburb at a particular time but how do we ensure that the dynamic continues? How do we keep making and creating new places and spaces for artists to live and work?

There’s no single solution. Inevitably, the near future involves artists moving further afield in search of the underutilised spaces. It must also involve governments setting rules and regulations and offering incentives that encourage creative seeds to be planted and spaces to be used creatively.

Of course, if history, the rest of the world and gravity are anything to go by, this long boom of property prices won’t last forever either. In a dynamic city at some point, inevitably, the booms bust and the cycles begin again.

The exhibition — brought to us by the Victorian Major Events Company, Museum Victoria, Michael Gudinski’s Frontier Events and Premier Exhibitions USA — is one of many new corporate for-profit museum shows that walk a very fine line between museum exhibition and theme park. While great for attendance figures, they can raise some complex ethical questions for our public institutions.

Titanic is not alone. Now or recently touring the world, you will find another show from the same company featuring plasticised human bodies, two Tutankhamun exhibitions, a Princess Diana experience and so many Leonardo Da Vinci shows I’ve lost track of them.

All are the product of companies — in partnerships with everyone from cable TV networks, deceased estates, rock promoters, museums, and established collectors — which live and die by their ability to pull a crowd and the money that goes with it.

I have no doubt the Titanic exhibition will do that. It is a compelling experience. The combination of objects collected from the seabed, historical photographs, recreated elements of the ship and the personal narratives of passengers has a powerful impact. I was holding back tears at the personal stories behind a tragedy that has too easily become a cliche.

For museum attendances, it’s a positive. It is great to see that a museum can be both engaging and informative. It is great to see that a show such as Titanic can attract to a museum an audience inspired by a blockbuster movie.

A visitors’ book full of comments about Jack Dawson (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) indicates where the interest is coming from.

Yet the Titanic show in particular raises a deeper question about striking the balance between integrity and marketing, particularly when presented in public institutions. The commercialisation of the tragedy is a little uncomfortable — the sheer volume of tie-in marketing, souvenirs, and paid photo opportunities is designed to wring the last dollar out of the unwary Titanophile. But there are also some genuine concerns for the integrity of the show and the museum itself.

In packaging up the story of the Titanic, it appears as though the last crucial piece had gone missing somewhere. While the exhibition lauds the efforts of the company RMS Titanic (a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions USA) to collect and preserve relics of the ship, the history of those actions is controversial.

Back in 1985, when Robert Ballard’s team originally found the wreck, they consciously chose not to disturb nor claim salvage rights. They urged all nations to protect the integrity of the site and to leave it undisturbed as a memorial. Only later did RMS Titanic step in and claim those salvage rights — a claim that was the subject of much controversy but was later upheld in court.

One Titanic survivor, Eva Hart, went so far as to accuse the company of “insensitivity and greed”, calling its officers “fortune hunters, vultures, pirates”. This last chapter in the Titanic story doesn’t rate much of a mention anywhere in the exhibition.

I don’t know if I share Robert Ballard’s and Eva Hart’s view about the salvaging. It’s a complex matter and there are plenty of precedents on both sides. What concerns me is the missing chapter. I would expect — at the very least — that the Melbourne museum would engage with and acknowledge that complexity. Every curator I’ve met is mindful of how artefacts come into their possession, and yet there’s no sign of that here. Unchallenged, self-justifying explanations about its “conservation program” are to be expected from a promotions and event company, but is less than I expect from a serious museum.

Blockbuster shows may bring huge numbers of tourists to Victoria and through our big institutions but would sit much more comfortably if there was not a niggling concern that we are stretching our integrity to accommodate them.

The “are video games art?” debate has been simmering off and on for as long as I can remember but it has roared to life recently. Last month, American film critic Roger Ebert poured fuel on the fire in an article suggesting that video games “can never be art”. Australian film critic Lynden Barber ran some of the same arguments here. Tens of thousands of blog posts, comments, articles and accusations later – including quite a few in The Age’s own Screen Play blog – and it would be fair to say that there hasn’t been a lot of movement between the opposing camps.

I’m no objective observer on this one. I believe that video games are a significant, under-explored and under-appreciated cultural form. I grew up with video games. I love playing them both to mindlessly kill time and because I find them uniquely compelling. Six years ago my love of, and frustration with, video games led me to co-found Free Play, an annual independent video games festival and conference in Melbourne. The 2010 event will be at the State Library in August.

But I’m no unabashed apologist either. Structurally, computer games are an unimaginative industry. More often than not they fall well short of their creative potential and many people who love computer games will freely admit that. Free Play came in part from the passions of people whose creative ambitions were constantly thwarted by the commercial imperatives of their employers and was aimed in part to try to foster the same kind of independent sector for games that had long driven innovation in cinema.

Today’s computer games have a lot in common with early cinema. They draw on many creative traditions to create a new one. They can incorporate narrative, architecture, acting, drama, animation, choreography, music, pictures, text and cinema itself and fuse them to create something that can be powerful and experiential or – as I will admit is often the case – superficial and dumb.

So why might cinema be an art form and not games? Both Ebert and Barber rely largely on a quite technical line. A “game” by definition, they argue, is inherently based on rules and competition. Games and art are therefore irreconcilable. The argument to me ignores precedents such as dance – which has both competitive and artistic forms – and the reality of many computer games today that aren’t competitive games in the traditional sense at all.

This isn’t just a semantic debate though. It comes at a time when the Australian game community is political and active. Whether games are art or not is a question with powerful political consequences in a country unique in the world for having no R18+ rating for games.

Games are the only creative form – the only art form perhaps – where creators are banned from making works specifically for adults or dealing with exclusively adult themes. Given the average computer game player is about my age it should be no surprise that the government is being lobbied hard by gamers advocating a change of law.

But do I think games are art? Frankly I’m not sure it’s the right question.

Making games is a skilled craft.I’ve seen games that are as thought-provoking, beautiful, powerful and intriguing as any other cultural form but I wouldn’t suggest that all games are artworks.

It is the talent, tradition, motivations and the consequences of painting for example that defines whether it’s art or not, otherwise every house painter and signwriter would be queueing up outside the Australia Council.

I suspect the debate is largely generational. Games have already made their way into galleries, orchestras play their soundtracks, and their characters are familiar parts of many lives.

To paraphrase Max Planck, the games as art argument won’t triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.