This machine is made of people: Galileo Chew Chew

Georgia Lucy

Contemporary Art Tasmania

21 October - 18 November 2023

This is what is important for culture: scrappy, open spaces, where ideas are given air and time to see if they work. Culture happens. It comes and goes, and it’s a process and it’s a cycle, and it will always happen and it desperately requires nurturing, and spaces for it to happen, which have often been pubs, like the now-vanished and sadly missed Brisbane Hotel in Hobart or The Tote in Collingwood. I was struck observing the now-multiple Save The Tote campaigns, that in focussing on the venue, it seemed it was being made more important than the bands who played there or the people who were the audience. I don’t think that’s quite right. While I somewhat miss The Brisbane, I don’t quite think the Brisbane Hotel is more important than anything that played in it. I do think though, that the Brisbane was special, more so than the Tote in fact, in that a lot of very different cultural activities came and went there, and it provided a blank canvas for people to try out ideas. This is important for the growth of culture.

But it’s not an innocent process. Artists and bands and DJs and queers change places, and they bring excitement and cool, but they also bring money, and money can ruin things, despite us all needing it to exist. Money can be quite stupid too; it can make people think that the development of culture has to be HUGE and ATTRACT TOURISTS and that IT’S THE ECONOMY, STUPID.

Who was it who was stupid again?