Category: Media Literacy

From StopBigMedia.com:

Play The Game. Then Take Action.

Rupert Murdoch’s media empire just keeps on growing. This summer, Murdoch gobbled up the Wall Street Journal, one of the country’s most respected news sources. Now Murdoch has launched the Fox Business Network. The new channel, which aims to peddle Murdoch’s brand of business news to the American public, will start in about 30 million households – a considerable reach to begin with. Continue reading “Whack Big Media”

Culture vulture
by Tim Elliott
The Sydney Morning Herald
October 15, 2007

Real culture, Westbury says, comes from the bottom up: it’s unruly, often illegal and frequently unloved (at least by the mainstream).

Say the word art and most people think of the Mona Lisa and long-dead Europeans such as Vincent Van Gogh. Mention art to Marcus Westbury and he thinks of weeds, graffiti and video games, plus a lot of other things that most people don’t consider to be art at all.

And in his new series, Not Quite Art, he’s trying to get us to think likewise.

Affable and articulate, Westbury has made a supple and free-ranging examination of where “art” and “culture” come from, while providing a tantalising glimpse of what’s going on away from the big city galleries. “Art excites me,” he says, “but the artists who excite me most aren’t dead and on the walls of revered cultural institutions, they are alive and making things now.”

Westbury, who describes himself as “a very lucky troublemaker”, has been putting together arts events and festivals for the past 10 years; he has worked with graffiti artists, anarchist collectives, major galleries and government policy committees. And yet his resolutely unorthodox take on the art world and a lack of formal art education that makes him perfectly qualified to host a show such as Not Quite Art. Continue reading “Australian TV Show Explores Art Boundaries”