Fringe to Famous: Cultural Production in Australia After the Creative Industries

Fringe to Famous examines exchange between small scenes of cultural production and mainstream institutions and markets. Drawing on Australian examples in music, streetwear, comedy, screen and digital games, it argues that there has been much greater crossover between the two than is generally recognized. The book resists a tendency to represent fringe and mainstream as abstract opposites, bringing a focus instead to concrete historical formations. It offers an alternative both to romantic celebrations of a 'pure' fringe – discredited now by half a century of critical responses to the counterculture – and to an increasingly hardened anti-romantic reaction. Drawing on extensive original interviews, Fringe to Famous offers an overview of transformations in Australian culture since the 1980s, concluding with suggestions for cultural policy 'after the creative industries'. It proposes an idea of 'generative hybridity' between fringe and mainstream that allows us to imagine new possibilities for arts and culture in the 2020s and beyond.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: From Art School to Beer Barn 1. Imagining Hybridity: A History of the Present 2. Subverting the High Ground: The Hybridity of Punk and Post-punk Music in Australia 3. Subcultural Design: Wearing our Art on our Sleeve. 4. From Fringe Theatre to Prime Time: The Case of Comedy 5. Alternative Visions: The Indigenous Wave and Australian Independent Cinema 6. The Fringe in Freeplay: The Independence of Independent Games Conclusion: Designing Osmotic Ecologies References Index

About the Author :
Tony Moore is Professor in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, Australia, with interests in the interplay between creative and political countercultures and mainstream society. He is author of three books and leads the Australian Research Council Projects Conviction Politics: The Convict Routes of Australian Democracy and Comedy Country: Australian Performance Comedy as an Agent of Change. Tony has also worked as a documentary maker at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and commissioning editor at Pluto and Cambridge University Press. Mark Gibson is Professor of Media and Associate Dean, Media, Writing and Publishing at RMIT University, Australia. He was previously head of Communications and Media Studies at Monash University, and has also worked in media and cultural studies at Murdoch University and Central Queensland University, Australia. He has research interests in cultural industries and the intellectual legacy of countercultural movements of the 1960s and 1970s. He is author of Culture and Power: A History of Cultural Studies (2007). Chris McAuliffe is Emeritus Professor, School of Art and Design, Australian National University. He was previously head of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory and Sir William Dobell Professor at Australian National University. From 2000–2013 he was Director of the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne. He taught art history at the University of Melbourne and was Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University (2011–12), USA. Maura Edmond is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism at Monash University, Australia. She researches the contemporary media, arts and cultural industries, with a focus on digital transformation, policy and gender. Her work has been published in European Journal of Cultural Studies, New Media and Society, Television and New Media, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Policy (2021) and Toward Gender Equality in the Music Industry (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Review :
Fringe to Famous rejuvenates enduring but stale debates between intrinsic and instrumental approaches to cultural value with a fresh take on their productive tension but necessary complementarity. It achieves this while diving deep into diverse and exhilarating histories of Australian cultural scenes of recent decades. I learnt such a lot from this book about the richness of Australian popular culture over recent decades. But it's also a superb rethinking of the relations between margins and mainstreams in cultural production. Anyone interested in the cultural industries should read it. Through a deep weaving together of the rich individual stories, communities, and economic negotiations of over four decades worth of pioneering Australian creativity, Fringe to Famous presents a theoretically rich but also very human picture of the complex entanglements of contemporary cultural ecologies. Moving beyond simple binaries of mainstream/alternative, subculture/selling out, independent/co-opted, it situates the economic realities of making a living as an artist within a complex and diverse world where hope for something more, something better as represented by the 'fringe' remains very much alive.