Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Drawing on dozens of original interviews and close analysis of Australian examples sampled from across 40 years of "indie" music, comedy, film, computer games, and graphic design, Fringe to Famous explores how some of Australia's leading cultural practitioners negotiate their position between the margins and the mainstream in the contemporary period.
Fringe to Famous critically re-examines the relations between "independent" and "mainstream" cultural production at a time when the very meaning and relevance of those terms is being widely debated. In recent decades, critically-aware artists and their entrepreneurial business partners have engaged in a playful negotiation of marginal and mainstream tastes, harnessing the values associated with the creative underground-transgression, independence, authenticity-for both aesthetic and commercial ends. At the same time, crises in the business models of commercial media industries and the proliferation of online distribution have made "mainstream" increasingly difficult to define.
Synopsis
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.