Something for Everybody? Art, Community, the Unfamiliar, and Barrie Kosky at the Adelaide Festival

In this chapter, I focus on Barrie Kosky’s work as an administrator, and on how this relates to discourse and practice around art, taste and community. In the first part I focus on Kosky’s time as Artistic Director of the 1996 Adelaide Festival, in which he demonstrated a competency with arts administration in ways that expanded the understanding of the role of Artistic Director beyond that shown by his predecessors. As a rare example of a young practising artist rather than a seasoned professional arts administrator in the role of a successful Artistic Director, Kosky paved the way for a string of practising artists at the Festival’s helm in subsequent years. In the second part, I frame the objections to Kosky’s Adelaide appointment in relation to other Australian approaches to season programming and to a discussion on art and community. What does it mean for an arts organisation to provide something for everybody? I argue that Kosky answers this by recognising a diversity of tastes undergirded by a shared orientation towards the new. I end the chapter by drawing links to Kosky’s work in Berlin in relation to barriers to access to the arts.