Themes

Theme 1: Art and Education

  • Teaching the arts.
  • Digital media arts and education.
  • Creative arts in the humanities.
  • Literacy and the literary: Texts at school.
  • Art history: Purpose and pedagogy.
  • Performance Studies: Teaching drama, dance, performance.
  • Ways of seeing: Perception, cognition, affect.
  • Art and healing.
  • Art as self-inquiry.

Theme 2: Arts Agendas

  • Changing the world: Global visions through art practices.
  • Arts policy: The role of local, regional/state and local governments.
  • The arts and collective memory.
  • Arts and heritage.
  • Indigenous arts and arts movements.
  • Feminist art histories and practices.
  • Arts and culture in economic development.
  • Arts in tourism.
  • Art of nature: Ecoaesthetics and the culture of sustainability.
  • Moral aesthetics: The ethics of art and arts practice.
  • Arts as activism: Politics and the arts.
  • Art embodied: Persons in art, the artist as human being.

Theme 3: Supporting the Arts

  • Bottom lines: The economics of the arts.
  • Starving artists and the state.
  • Commercialism in art.
  • The role of government in arts funding.
  • The creative industries in a post-industrial society.
  • Cultural Institutions and Museums.
  • Marketing the arts.
  • Arts advocacy.
  • Sponsorship and philanthropy in the arts.
  • Art trade: Buying and selling arts objects, cultural properties and copyrights.

Theme 4: Art in Communities

  • The arts in a civil society and cultural democracy.
  • The arts in popular culture and the media.
  • Art as propaganda.
  • Art in advertising.
  • Art in public spaces.
  • Art in cyberspace.
  • Architecture as art.
  • Art and religion.
  • Diaspora communities and the arts.
  • Ethnic and tourist arts.
  • Global/local arts: Making the connection.
  • The arts and disability.
  • Indigenous community-based art.
  • Working class and ‘popular’ arts.
  • Online cultures, hacker aesthetics, open sources.
  • Queer culture, politics and gender in the arts.
  • Art in community cultural development and capacity building.

Theme 5: Constructing Art Worlds

  • The work of the artist.
  • The work of the curator.
  • The work of the director and producer.
  • The work of the critic.
  • The work of the arts manager.
  • Artist collectives.
  • Copyrights: Creative commons and other intellectual properties.

Theme 6: Audiences

  • Defining audiences: The role of the reader, viewer, listener.
  • Blurring the boundaries of creator and audience.
  • New artforms and interactivity: From passive viewer to active user.
  • Participatory arts and the arts as participation.
  • Children and youth audiences.
  • Elder audiences.
  • Audience development.
  • Virtual audiences, blogs, cyber-art and performance.

Theme 7: Analysing Artforms

  • The performing arts: Theatre, dance, music and its successors.
  • Visual culture.
  • Moving pictures, from cinema to television and the internet.
  • Textual and literary arts.
  • Photography and video arts.
  • New media and digital arts.
  • Spatial and architectonic arts.
  • Art Music, New Music and experimental music.
  • Multimedia, mixed media and multimodal arts.
  • Hypertext: What is a narrative?
  • Interface art: Design and aesthetics of the web.
  • The nature of the ‘virtual’.
  • The art of games and gaming.
  • Art and advertising: Image, icon, brand.
  • ‘Craft’ and ‘decorative’ arts.
  • Art movements.

Theme 8: Meaning and Representation

  • Mimeses and perspectives on the ‘real’ and ‘representation’.
  • New genres; What is a genre?
  • Minimalism, complexity and art theory.
  • Sense-making: Connecting the arts to everyday life.
  • The artist as intellectual and the intellectual as artist.
  • Cultural theory in art history.
  • Crossing borders: Anthropology and art.
  • Defining the avant-garde: The creative, the innovative, the new.
  • Processes: The author, authority and the authoritative.
  • Products: Aura, authenticity, artefact.
  • Authenticity and voice.

Theme 9: Festivals

  • Festival cities.
  • Cultural tourism and public display.
  • Festival and ritual.
  • Global festivals.
  • Ethnic arts festivals.
  • Regional festivals.
  • Theatre festivals, genres, regions and Shakespeare.
  • Music festivals.
  • Visual arts festivals and biennales.
  • Cultural diversity and festival development.
  • Festival and event management.
  • Book festivals.
  • Film festivals.
  • Festivals and civic engagement.
  • Economic impact and festival development.
  • Why create an arts festival.
  • Rural festivals as social life.
  • Olympic festivals – of real and imagined proportions.

Theme 10: Art and Human Rights

  • Refugee arts and communities.
  • Prison art.
  • Healing broken communities through art.
  • War stories/narratives of war.
  • Relocations/dislocations.
  • Arts of the diaspora.
  • Protecting world heritage.
  • Art rights as cultural rights.
  • Cultural production and militarization.
  • Poetics of occupation.
  • Arts and social justice.

Theme 11: Public Art and Public Policy

  • Public art and civic projects.
  • Art and cultural heritage.
  • Arts policy in local and regional governments.
  • Art and nationalism.
  • Public art policy, the state and politics.