Artrave

An Unexpected Error
Now you see it... one minute Dr Terry Cutler was the brave new Chair of the Australia Council, the next he had disappeared, and in his place suddenly appeared another man in a suit. Between last September and March Terry Cutler had done most of the usual things a new Chair does to establish their leadership style, with the extra challenge that as an IT business person he was largely unknown to the arts sector before his appointment. Just as both he and his constituency seemed to be getting the measure of the other, he resigned, citing difficulties with his company in the wake of the slide of the dotcoms. Within a week of packing up his palm pilot and leaving, a new email account was established in the name of Mr David Gonski, a name familiar to the arts in his role as President of the Board of the AGNSW and in relation to the government review of the film industry he conducted in 1996. So what went wrong? It is widely surmised that Cutler and the Australia Council's EO Jennifer Bott did not use the same chatrooms, which in terms of the workability of the Council would seem to be a serious enough reason to call it quits. But wherein lay the irreconcilable differences of philosophy? Could it be that Cutler was trying to introduce an upgrade to the OzCo enabling it as a SuperCyber Service Provider with Australian art as global e-commerce and Bott prefers the (hacker-proof) earlier version? Are all messages deleted?