In the first two decades of this century, debates around arts and cultural policy became for a time sharply polarised over the framing of relations between culture and commerce. On one side there were those associated with the ‘creative industries’, an idea that blurred the distinction between the two, opening the way to a thoroughgoing economism. On the other side were those who resisted this development, seeking to defend an idea of culture as outside of or independent from industry.
In our recent book Fringe to Famous, we offer a perspective on cultural production in Australia ‘after’ the creative industries. The sense of the ‘after’ is not to suggest that the creative industries can simply be put in the past. As one of the leading proponents of the idea in Australia, Stuart Cunningham, put it in launching the book in Brisbane, the creative industries concept, or closely linked concepts, ‘continue to circulate robustly in industry, education, research and policy in numerous places around the world’.
Our contention has only been that the high point of creative industries as a position-taking rhetoric has now passed. In this incarnation, it could be seen as having belonged to the cluster of initiatives in centre left politics of the late 1990s and early 2000s that we might broadly term ‘Third Way’. The most influential formulations emerged from the Blairite New Labour project in the UK. Its central premise was that a pragmatic accommodation with post-Thatcherite neoliberalism might enable progressive aspirations to be realised in ways that more radical or oppositional approaches seemed unable at the time to achieve.
In taking a distance from this moment, we sought to develop a more open, dialogic approach to Australian cultural production—one that avoided polemics for or against the creative industries in order to revivify older approaches that have acknowledged differences and tensions between culture and economy while also recognising and valuing positive articulations between the two.
In his review of Fringe to Famous in the last issue of Arena, Justin O’Connor approves of our distance-taking from creative industries, but sees a similar distance-taking from the other side of the argument as betraying a basic misunderstanding of contemporary capitalism. Our differences here are worth expanding on, as they bear on current possibilities for cultural politics and cultural policy in Australia.
Sorry, withered fringe hooned up
Justin O’Connor, Jul 2025
How economists killed Australian fringe culture, and why the sensible centre can’t help.
O’Connor takes a generally pessimistic view of the immediate prospects for Australian cultural production. He sees most of what has emerged in recent decades as pale in comparison with the radical countercultures of the 1960s and 1970s. The problem is more than superficial, being rooted in the material conditions in which culture is made: ‘Cheap housing, free health, free education, easy social security payments, the warp and weft of the older countercultures—these have mostly gone’.
The position hinges on larger arguments about a fundamental incompatibility between commodified forms and genuine cultural innovation or political transgression. A condition for a thriving fringe today, O’Connor suggests, would be a ‘certain de-commodification of urban spaces’, a move that would be vigorously opposed by commercial interests and their political enablers. Until there is a concerted pushback against the latter, we can expect little more than a dismal ‘wannabe world of young artists trying to “break in” to the business’.
Our position in Fringe to Famous is more open to the possibility of countertendencies and historical reversals. It is grounded in the longue durée perspective of Australian cultural historians such as Peter Kirkpatrick, Ann Galbally, Richard Haese, Anne Coombs, Richard White and one of our authorial team, Tony Moore, who have documented fringe and bohemian cultures in Australia going back at least to the 1860s. This perspective has the effect, as we put it in the book, of ‘relativizing or normalising the counterculture, framing it as an event in a series rather than a more extraordinary rupture after which everything must be seen anew’ (14).
Two of the five case studies we discuss in the book were chosen in part because they cannot easily be interpreted with reference to the counterculture. The first is Indigenous screen, as represented by artists such as Warwick Thornton, Wayne Blair, Ivan Sen and Rachel Perkins. The relevant fringe in this case has not been in urban bohemias or youth subcultures, but in media-making practices in Indigenous communities in regional and remote Australia. The second is digital games cultures of the early 2000s, which are of interest in having ‘no clear anchor in the countercultural moment of the 1960s and 1970s’ and as therefore ‘out of phase with more established cultural forms’ (186‒7).
But even in cases where there is an obvious lineage from the counterculture—such as music and alternative comedy scenes in Melbourne and Sydney—we see contemporary fringe formations as having been reinvented by new generations. In comedy, young stand-up, cabaret, burlesque, absurd, parodic and sketch comedians with radical agendas are working across a plethora of small urban spaces and translating their work to popular audiences via community and public service media, cinema and online channels. The Melbourne International Comedy Festival—a 1990s creation of stalwarts from the 80s Alt scene—has been an ongoing seed bed, nurturing new generations of migrant, refugee, working class, LBTGQI and Indigenous comedians—the last through the grassroots nation-wide Deadly Funny outreach.
Our chapter on music highlights a new generation of punk bands championed by the Sydney-based recording collective R.I.P. When R.I.P. punk-soul band Royal Headache performed at the Sydney Opera House, such was the energy unleashed by performers and fans that the heavy-handed police clampdown went viral around the world. Among other examples we discuss is Bloods, whose lead singer Marihuzka Cornelius, a child refugee from Panama, has taken strongly oppositional positions around gender and race in the music industry.
Such examples establish an empirical case for the resilience and inventiveness of new generations of artists. Melbourne’s inner north indie live music scene has seen successive waves of re-energisation and politicisation, from the Save Live Australian Music (SLAM) rallies of 2010 to more recent activism around the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
To this we might add that narratives of decline are often generational. O’Connor’s arguments in relation to commodification were once marshalled against the very moment that he takes to exemplify the cultural plenitude from which we have now fallen. There is nothing today, as he sees it, to compare with the radical energies of the counterculture, but for the CPA intellectuals who came of age in the Australia of the 1930s and 1940s, it was the counterculture that was the moment of decline—the rock n roll 1960s representing little more than capitalist accommodation.
We suggest in Fringe to Famous that there is much that can still be learnt from revisionist efforts to break free of the cultural despair of that mid-twentieth century generation on the Left. This was, ironically, a project in which O’Connor himself participated in the UK context. We try in the book to recapture the idea of hybrid formations in which artists find a provisional or relative autonomy, notwithstanding their imbrication within a larger capitalist economy. This idea was, as O’Connor puts it, a ‘core thematic of those working in political economy, cultural studies, the “production of culture” schools, and others, stretching back to the late 1950s and 1960s’.
What is our position, then, on the commodification argument? Can anything be said in general terms about the implications of marketisation for innovation and transgression? It is hard to answer this question in the abstract as the answer we would want give is one that resists abstraction, but the following three propositions might provide a basic statement.
The first is that in engaging with the mainstream, fringe artists do not encounter ‘capital’ but rather concrete institutions—including some, such as public service broadcasters, that are not even commercial businesses. Most of these institutions are organised around profit and the commodity form; those that are not are highly prone to bloodless managerialism: this much, for artists, is so obvious that it hardly needs to be said. But institutions also have a historical density and internal complexity, being crosscut by other logics, by interests, obsessions and idiosyncratic quirks that are not always profit-oriented—not to mention inertia. While they may have a distinct ‘grain’, they are also terrains on which many different agendas can be played out.
A second is that the commodity form in the cultural sector is highly dependent on contexts external to it. O’Connor asks, ‘Does mainstream culture still need the fringe?’. The phrasing confuses things in putting ‘culture’ on both sides of the equation, but if we ask instead whether businesses in the sector need culture, the answer is surely yes. Managers and accountants are generally clueless as commissioners, producers or talent spotters, having little familiarity with contexts in which ideas of cultural value are formed. This gives those who do have roots in these contexts a leverage that can sometimes be considerable.
A third and related proposition would be that agency in the relation between the mainstream and fringe does not run only one way. If fringe artists are often ‘played’ by business interests—and we do not question that they are—commercial organisations can also be ‘played’ by those with roots in the fringe. In Fringe to Famous, we document many such cases, as well as artist-run businesses where the business form is made to serve the art rather than vice versa. We might write off such initiatives as insufficiently radical, but the problem then may not be with the artists so much as with a closure of the mind to anything other than impossible standards. O’Connor asks if there is ‘anything entering the capacious maw of contemporary streaming that could be called transgressive or iconoclastic?’, but there is a distinct sense that he has decided the answer in advance.
Where we would agree with O’Connor is that the post-1950s revisionist tradition on the intellectual and academic left has also had its problems. These problems have long been recognised within the tradition itself—a locus classicus in Australia being Meaghan Morris’s 1980s essay ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’—but they are nonetheless also real. Over half a century, a sharper and sharper edge has been sought against the older Marxist tradition, reducing the latter almost to a cartoon cut-out. The cost has been a loss of critical attention to the contradictions and disjunctures between culture and commerce within capitalist economies—a loss that reached its logical endpoint in the unabashed economism of creative industries.
Our hope in Fringe to Famous, however, is that having now passed that moment we might rediscover alternatives to the polarised opposites that have recently been offered: on the one hand, an austere critical refrain determined to confirm long-held theoretical convictions and, on the other, a blithe optimism unable to admit to moments of negativity, lest they offer a corner from which the other side can stage a nightmarish return. We would like to think that this is project in which, at some point, we might find with O’Connor some more common ground.
The paperback edition of Fringe to Famous was published by Bloomsbury August 2025