ABSTRACT
Cultural production and cultural consumption have become sites of contestation in which the commercial value of symbolic goods Aboriginal rock paintings, for example, or ecologically vulnerable wilderness, or beachfront property, as well as 'high' cultural productions in art, literature, music, dance and design threatens to overwhelm their pristine cultural value. These individual acts of cultural consumption permitted and encouraged parallel acts of production, mundane and parochial in many, perhaps most instances, but acts, productions and meanings more nearly within the control of their producers than seems conceivable today. State organization and subsidy of Australian arts and crafts, while undoubtedly a more egalitarian method of supporting the production and consumption of symbolic goods, replacing consumer patronage with state mediation of the arts, is also likely to encourage certain kinds of politically and commercially preferred production over others.
