What future for the arts in a post-pandemic world?

Platform Papers, Australia’s leading journal for the performing arts has defied two years of disruption - and an apparent hostility towards the arts - to launch a newly expanded series under a new editor, and a new annual volume of essays on how the arts can shape the nation’s future by bringing the creative imagination and economics together.

This first issue of the New Platform Papers - authored by philosopher Richard Bronk, economist John Quiggin, satirist Jonathan Biggins, Pub Choir director Astrid Jorgensen and others - draws on a Convention of former Platform Paper authors hosted last July by Currency House and the University of Sydney.

This volume also includes the final essay in the original series, No.63, by its founder and patron Katharine Brisbane.

On the Lessons of History looks back over two decades to review outcomes envisaged by 62 past Papers since 2004, and asks why the arts and humanities have become so marginalised in government planning.

Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts at Griffith University and the new General Editor of the New Platform Papers (NPP), commented “the times demand a radical change in our way of thinking, particularly about what the economy and creativity mean in a plan for national recovery.

“What Future for the Arts in a post-Pandemic World? demands we take up the opportunity for social and cultural transformation that lies beyond the COVID pandemic.”

Currency House also announces a major increase in fees to the writers of its two annual NPPs, at $14,250 for each 15,000-word essay. Proposals for the July 2022 issue are now invited.

Following the retirement of Katharine Brisbane in 2018, the new Director of Currency House is Dr Harriet Parsons, her daughter.

Meyrick added “both Harriet and I are concerned with the connections between art forms and the bigger policy picture in which arts and culture are immersed - an enlarged perspective perfectly expressed in the vision, lateral thinking, and wit and whimsy of the contributions to this our first New Platform Paper,

“Rethinking the Papers, making the series anew, is essential as artists and companies face the digital, social, financial, ethical and personal challenges of the post-pandemic world.”

Richard Bronk is a leading academic and author, best known for The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics; John Quiggin is Professor of Economics at the University of Queensland; actor and director Jonathan Biggins is well known as a satirist; and Astrid Jorgenson is founding director of the Pub Choir and, during lockdown, the online Couch Choir.

The Authors Convention and its concluding pre-Christmas publication in December will become an annual event.

New Platform Paper Volume 1 is now available.

For more information go to www.currency.com.au