Overview

Having dedicated my life to the creative arts, to expressing my own creativity and nurturing creativity in others, I empathise with Michael Richards and appreciate and deeply respect his contribution as an arts practitioner, catalyst and commentator. He earns my hearty congratulations and commendations for this incisive, revealing and inspirational book, in which he stresses the central role of the arts in human life and explains the benefits they deliver. Through objective analysis and refreshingly clear argument he exposes and dispels common prejudices and misconceptions, and provides a theoretical framework for arts policy makers, managers and practitioners.

His thesis that the arts grow organically matches my own belief that they express the primal life force, a force that flows through us and around us, and through everything that lives. The arts constitute a garden in which we all commune with the life force, in which we grow physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, and without which we cannot live. We have a responsibility to tend this garden with passion and dedication, and to nourish its enduring cycles of evolution and growth. This ground-breaking and vital book shows us how. It is the result of sustained and tenacious research, combining an artist’s passionate perception and imagination with a professional academic’s intellectual rigour. It deserves to be influential. I am confident that it will be, and that it will have far-reaching ramifications for the arts, and for the way we nurture them and help them grow.

From the Preface by Dr. Irene Amos, OAM.

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Table of Contents

• Foreword
• Preface

Part A: Preliminaries

INTRODUCTION

THE RESEARCH PROJECT

THANKS

APOLOGIES

RESEARCH OUTCOMES

Part B: Key Ideas and Definitions

THE ARTS

NURTURING THE ARTS

REGIONS AND REGIONAL

CULTURAL INDUSTRIES AND THE ARTS

EXCELLENCE AND THE ARTS

COMMUNITY, THE ARTS AND ELITES

HOW THE ARTS IMPROVE OUR LIVES

Part C: The Past

HOW ARTS COUNCILS BEGAN

ARTS COUNCIL IN QUEENSLAND

Part D: The LAC and Its Community

AUDIENCE AND MEMBERSHIP

THE VOLUNTEERS

ENGAGING THE COMMUNITY

Part E: Looking Ahead

GROWING THE ARTS

THE LAC NETWORK

EIGHT PRINCIPLES

FINAL THOUGHTS

A NOTE ON SOURCES

• Endnotes
• Afterword
• Appendix I
• Appendix II
• References