About

Reset

Reset is a collaborative group of people representing the three universities and members of the arts and culture sector in South Australia seeking to understand and reframe the discussion around arts and culture in South Australia, nationally and internationally.

The Reset program is led by Justin O’Connor (University of South Australia), Tully Barnett (Flinders University) and Maggie Tonkin (University of Adelaide)

Arts and cultural policy is in crisis. The pandemic has only made the cracks more visible. Finding new metrics or advocacy angles is no longer enough. We propose a fundamental Reset of the value of arts and culture in society and the role of public policy in ensuring access and sustainability.

Reset is part ‘restoration’ – acknowledging what has been eroded and needs returning to us – and reconstruction – moving on and building anew for the realities and aspirations of the present age.  

Reset will break with the economic and social instrumentalism so dominant for 40 years, and seek new concepts, new languages drawn from heterodox economics, feminism, Indigenous thought, and environmentalism.

Only in this way can the distinct and specific worth of art and culture be retrieved for the present age.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing one look obsolete.

Buckminster Fuller