Not Quite Art

Where is Australian culture coming from in the 21st century? Writer and presenter Marcus Westbury takes us from geeks broadcasting to audiences of millions from their bedrooms, to a remote Indigenous community in the Northern Territory via the Melbourne Writers Festival and little bit of high-end experimental sound art. Marcus is on a search to find a new generation of Australian artists and audiences for whom the tyranny of distance - the thing that had defined Australian culture for so long - is essentially irrelevant.

The second episode in the series, Unpopular Culture, looks at why the culture that a whole generation of creators has grown up with is considered illegal. Digital remixing and sharing on the internet has turned our culture into a dirty, digital collaborative pool that exists at or outside the margins of copyright law. Marcus Westbury takes us from the high-tech, cutting-edge electronic art at the International Symposium of Electronic Art to a 'Creative Commons' salon in Brisbane in search of an unlikely collaboration between artists and…lawyers. 'Featuring' Elvis, Moses, Stanley Kubrick and Tom Hanks, Unpopular Culture, takes a serious look at how the day to day norms of digital culture have long moved on from the letter of Australian and international copyright law.

How do we collect, archive and categorise a fragmented, diverse and exploding digital culture? In DIY Museums Marcus Westbury visits a Pop Culture convention and works his way through an army of Star Wars characters and anime geeks to find some artists producing original and evocative Australian culture. From the convention, he travels via a DVD distributor, to some of the country's leading cultural institutions. Marcus is trying to figure out the place and role of museums in a world where visits to museum websites now outnumber physical visits to museums by a factor of 10 to one, and where traditional ideas of 'authority' are under attack from an army of armchair experts. He also visits a DIY museum and asks if everyone is a curator and a collector these days? Is being a museum in the bold, new digital cultural world a help or a hindrance?