PODCAST · arts
Arts In 30
by ABC Australia
Your ultimate guide for staying in the know and getting inspired. An essential wrap-up of arts news and the best interviews, brought to you by the Arts team at ABC Radio National.
Episodes
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Weekender: Best of the year - movies, music, theatre and more
Ce and Sky share their favourite picks of 2025. Movies mentioned includes Freaky Tales, KPop Demon Hunters, Twinless, Sirat, The Secret Agent, Sinners, One Battle After Another, and One of Them Days. Music mentioned includes Kathryn Joseph - We Were Made Prey, Ethel Cain - Willoughby Tucker, I’ll...
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Weekender: Best TV shows of the year, the fifth Indigenous Art Triennial, and arthouse Summer films
Rudi Bremer from Awaye joins the team to take us to the NGA where After The Rain, the fifth National Indigenous Art Triennial is bringing together a remarkable collection of work under the supervision of Artistic Director Tony Albert. And with Summer holidays ahead, we recommend our TV shows of…
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Sarah Hanson-Young on local content quotas and ABC funding plus proposed changes at the State Library of Victoria
Last week, the federal government passed legislation that will require video streaming services with more than 1 million Australian subscribers to invest 10 percent of their Australian expenditure or 7.5 percent of their gross Australian revenue into new Australian productions each year. The bill...
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Weekender: Wake up Dead Man wraps demagoguery, faith, grace, and power in a fun mystery & Evelyn Araluen returns with The Rot
Three films in, at a point where most franchises have run out of ideas and started phoning it in, Knives Out has returned with its best episode yet in Wake Up Dead Man. With a star turn by Josh O'Connor and an exceptional ensemble, it's an examination of faith and belief, of the potential for…
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What constitutes success (or failure) in Hollywood? And Peyton Reed on the 25th anniversary of Bring It On.
Wicked: For Good has launched to a big opening weekend, taking in $226 million US in worldwide box office revenue, a substantial improvement on the already successful first film. But that makes it something of an outlier for Hollywood this year. Industry experts have pointed out that - accounting...
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Weekender: Breaking consensus on Pluribus and Wicked For Good manages to land the broomstick
Everyone in the world has come together in a single voice: shared perspective, shared understanding, shared goals - harmony. That's both the plot of Pluribus and a rough summary of how critics have reacted to the show. But Ce and Sky aren't entirely won over and share their concerns about the…
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The fraying relationship between universities and the arts
Arts degrees are expected to cost $55,000 next year, but despite the rising cost to students, we’re seeing restructures, closures, and redundancies at one university after another. And the strain between the tertiary sector and the arts has been a consistent theme throughout 2025, with Meanjin…
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Weekender: Running Man and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You take on the perils of parenthood and Rosalia makes a play for album of the year
Rose Byrne puts in an award-winning performance as a woman under pressure in the excellent If I Had Legs I'd Kick You. Glen Powell takes on an all-powerful media company in a dystopian future for the sake of his sick daughter in The Running Man. And Sergei Loznitsa returns to tragic flaws of the...
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Local content quotas announced for streaming platforms and David Szalay wins the Booker
The Federal Government has announced plans for a local content quota for streaming video services in Australia. Any service with more than one million subscribers will be required to spend a percentage of their revenue on Australian content. Julianne Schultz and Guy Morrow take us through the...
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Weekender: The Diplomat gets chaotic, Dangerously Modern provides a showcase of Australian art, and Die, My Love is a showcase for Jennifer Lawrence
There’s a simple pleasure in seeing competent people doing their job well, which is one of the draws of The Diplomat, a show that follows in the tradition of the West Wing in balancing high stakes political drama with chaotic personal drama to great affect. As it enters season 3, and the chaos...
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Australia Design Centre set to shut down after six decades and accessibility in the arts
The board of the Australian Design Centre has announced that the centre will close on June 30, 2026, unless additional funding can be secured. The call comes after the centre lost out on significant ongoing funding from both Federal and State governments. CEO Lisa Cahill discusses the ADC’s…
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Weekender: Horror picks for the spooky season, alien conspiracies and kidnapping in Bugonia, and Twinless gets two thumbs up
It's Halloween, so Ce and Sky are diving into horror films and exploring what they love about the genre alongside a few picks - some famous and some a little more niche. One horror film that's out this week is Bugonia, by Yorgos Lanthimos. It's a remake of the South Korean film Save The Green...
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No TDM exception on copyright, songwriters push back against the politicisation of their songs, and Theatre of the Oppressed
The Federal Government has announced that it won't institute a Text and Data Mining exception on copyright, an idea raised as a possibility in the Productivity Commission's recent report. Arts organisations across Australia are hailing the decision, and Nicholas Pickard from APRA-AMCOS discusses...
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Weekender: Jacob Elordi's physicality shines in Del Toro's Frankenstein and deliver us from musical biopics
It’s 1982 and Bruce Springsteen is on the verge of super-stardom, but the Boss, unready to leave the past behind, holes up in a house in New Jersey and records Nebraska on a four-track tape deck. Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is a new biopic charts the making of this classic album, but the...
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A basic income for artists and harmonising cultural leadership in Australia's orchestras
After a three-year pilot program, Ireland has made a basic income scheme for artists a permanent policy, citing not only increased productivity and mental health, but a positive return on investment for the money spent. Moira Fleming, from Ireland's National Campaign for the Arts shares details...
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Weekender: Wayward maintains its direction, on the hunt against After the Hunt, and two great art exhibitions.
Featuring troubled children in a small American town, an outsider who can sense that something is wrong, and hints of the supernatural, Wayward seems influenced by the work of Stephen King, but Ce argues that the new Netflix series fares a lot better than most of King's actual adaptations. The…
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László Krasznahorkai wins the Nobel Prize for Literature and how the arts engage with politics and the environment
A “compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.” That’s how the jury for the Nobel Prize for Literature described the work of Hungary’s László Krasznahorkai, who was awarded the 2025 prize. For those of us who haven’t had a chance to dive...
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Weekender: Taylor Swift breaks her own records, The Invocations wins a prize, and why is the current glut of caper films so disappointing?
Taylor Swift's twelfth album, Life of a Showgirl, has broken sales records and immediately jumped to the top of the charts across the world, but critical praise has been in shorter supply. Has a return to the production team of Max Martin and Shellback led to a reinvigorated pop star? Or are the...
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From the Riyadh Comedy Festival to the EA acquisition, why does Vision 2030 see Saudi Arabia making a huge investment in the arts?
The Riyadh Comedy festival continues this week and while comedians like Louis CK and Bill Burr defended their decision to perform, many of their colleagues and fans have been forthright in their critiques. The festival is one small part of a major investment in the arts by Saudi Arabia as part of...
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Weekender: Bad Bunny headlines the Super Bowl, The Lowdown makes a play for show of the year, and Dwayne Johnson asks for your consideration
Bad Bunny is one of the biggest musicians of the 2020s, with multiple hit records and a massive worldwide fanbase. With the recent announcement that he'll be headlining the Super Bowl half-time show, we look back at his 2025 album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos, and discuss why the announcement has raised...
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Two major literary awards celebrate Australia's best writers & recreating the sound of Indiana Jones
Two major prizes — The Prime Minister's Literary Award and the Queensland Literary Awards — have announced their choices over the last week, adding an exciting new pile of books to the must-read pile that we're all trying to work our way through. We meet two of the authors who are being…
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Weekender: One Battle After Another and Spinal Tap II tell very different stories of the world
With two major films launching this week, The Screen Show's Jason Di Rosso pops in to share his thoughts. One of Hollywood's major auteurs, Paul Thomas Anderson, brings us his second adaptation of Thomas Pynchon, turning Vineland into One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio in an...
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Jimmy Kimmel's suspension and return & more details emerge about Meanjin
Last week, ABC chose to suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live! from broadcast, after criticism from the Chairman of the FCC. The network has now reversed that decision and Kimmel will be back this week, but the decision has led to protests, boycotts, and a lot of concerns about the state of free speech in…
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Weekender: The Studio sweeps the Emmys, the lingering power of The Names, and a Springsteen rarity revealed
Claire Nichols from The Book Show joins the team to talk through the biggest name in comedy at the moment: The Studio. With a record-breaking 13 Emmys at the 2025 awards, we share our takes on what's made the show such a critical darling. Sky makes the case for The Names, by Florence Knapp, a…
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The 2025 Emmy Awards' winners and losers, and Arts Project Australia mounts a major exhibition
The state of television and streaming is perhaps more precarious than it’s been since before the “streaming revolution”... so what do this year’s Emmys tell us about which way the industry is going? ABC News' Velvet Winter takes us through the stats and the pleasant surprises. Arts Project...
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Weekender: The case for genre fiction in the Top 100 and a new Australian supergroup
Welcome to the Arts in 30 Weekender, where we're setting the news aside and sharing our tips on what to check out and what to skip from the world of the arts. With voting for the Radio National Top 100 Books well underway, we argue the case for genre fiction being among the best of the century…
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Meanjin to close after 85 years and Anthropic agrees to $1.5 Billion dollar settlement with authors
Meanjin is set to shut down after 85 years, with the board of their publisher, Melbourne University Press, saying that it’s a purely financial decision. But is financial viability the metric that a literary magazine should be judged against? Former editor Jonathan Green takes us into the finances...
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Tropfest lives, and filmmaking under the eye of the Iranian government
Tropfest, the biggest short film festival in the world, has been resurrected six years after it was last staged. With a slew of sponsors and partners, the new Tropfest must contend with a world which has embraced short-form video as a sort of default mode of expression online. Founder John Polson...
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Major changes in Opera Australia leadership and Campbell Addy's eye for movement
After a challenging 12 months, which saw the exit of the CEO and artistic director and a ten million dollar operating deficit, Opera Australia has announced a new leadership team: new CEO, new Chair, and a new director of music, with the artistic director role now split between music and opera.…
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More than 50 authors withdraw from Bendigo Writers Festival and celebrating the best poetry of the century
More than 50 writers pulled out of the Bendigo Writers Festival over the weekend, as did the festival's official bookshop, after organisers sent a code of conduct to some speakers less than 2 days before the festival was due to begin. The code included advice that speakers 'avoid language or…
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Productivity Commission considers a copyright exception for AI companies and awards season in Darwin
Last week, the productivity commission published their interim report on Harnessing data and digital technology. Among the ideas under consideration is a 'fair dealing exception' that would cover the text and data mining that is used to train generative AI models. The creative sector has been…
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Should credit companies decide what content is allowed? And award-winning science photography
Two online game platforms, Steam and Itch.io, have removed hundreds or thousands of games that are tagged as including adult content. They've said that the move was necessary because they were at risk of losing access to the financial institutions like Visa, Mastercard, and Paypal, that allow…
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A 10 year plan for the arts in Australia and a short history of street art
What will the arts look like in Australia in a decade? And what could it look like with a plan and strategy that’s looking that far into the future? A new paper is recommending a 10 year national arts and culture strategy and a ministerial council that brings together federal, state and local...
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Judging a film festival and how Taylor Swift inspired Pete Murray
Winning a film festival prize can launch an independent movie far beyond the festival circuit, leading to critical attention and international distribution deals. But in a space as subjective as the cinema, how does a jury pick their winner? Two members of the MIFF Bright Horizons jury, director...
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Another round of layoffs hit the games industry & an amibitous start for Creative Futures
After a fourth round of layoffs have hit Microsoft's games division, what does it mean for the industry at large? And with comments from competitors like "I don't think Gamepass can co-exist with other models, they'll either kill everyone else, or give up," is Gamepass a boon for consumers or a...
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Is there any appetite for risk at Creative Australia? And the story behind the art of Emily Kam Kngwarray
Khaled Sabsabi is once again Australia's representative to the 2026 Venice Biennale, after the Board of Creative Australia reversed their previous decision to rescind his invitation. Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, says that Instead of...
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Politicians and musicians clash over Glastonbury chants and Anna Wintour steps away from the role that's defined her career
UK punk duo Bob Vylan have the political world in an uproar after their set at Glastonbury Festival, which included some inflammatory language about Israel and Gaza. But Bob Vylan were far from the only act to speak out from the stage. UK journalist Ash Sarkar takes us into the battle of words...
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"It has never been harder to make a living in the creative sector." What's gone wrong in Australia's arts capital?
For decades, the assumption has been that if you're from one of the smaller towns in Australia and you want a career in the arts, you'll have to move to Melbourne. But, according to a new report tabled in the Victorian parliament last week on the cultural and creative industries, "It has never…
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Hollywood studios sue AI company and Creative Australia takes aim at music listening habits
"A bottomless pit of plagiarism." That's how Disney and Universal have referred to Midjourney — a generative AI platform — in a new lawsuit that alleges significant copyright infringement. Reid Southen shares what he discovered in his research, which is quoted extensively in the lawsuit. Last…
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Marg Horwell takes home a Tony and the Perth Cabaret Festival ceases operations
Marg Horwell has taken home the Tony Award for best costume design for a play for the Broadway production of The Picture of Dorian Grey, adding to her collection after taking out the Olivier Award for the West End production last year. As part of their exploration of reforms begun last year, the...
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Is the government ignoring evidence of rock art degradation at Murujuga? And Daniel Browning hangs up the headphones
The Federal Government has given a proposed approval for an expansion of Woodside's North West Shelf gas project near Karratha in Western Australia. But Professor Benjamin Smith — an expert in world rock art — claims that the rock art at Murujuga, which is up to fifty thousand years old, is being...
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Judges quit the Queensland Literary Awards over Black&Write decision & Michelle de Kretser wins the Stella Prize
K.A. Ren Wyld won the Black&Write! Fellowship, only to have it withdrawn at the last minute over comments she had made on social media. Since then, at least seven judges have stepped down from their roles on the Queensland Literary Award in protest, and an open letter from First Nations writers…
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Behind the scenes at Eurovision and major losses at national companies
Eurovision is a phenomenon in Australia, with more than 450-thousand people tuning in for the final this year. But what's it like to compete in this global extravaganza? And what impact does it have on a musician's career? Electric Fields, who represented Australia in 2024, share their experience...
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The value of cultural diplomacy and the winner of the Archibald Prize
Over the last few years, the European Union has set out to include art and culture in their diplomatic work in Australia. Around the opening of their latest exhibition, Inside Pompeii: Origins of a European Way of Life, the EU Ambassador, Gabriele Visentin, shares his perspective on the value of...
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International musicians to platform local artists in NSW under Michael's Rule, and curating a brand new biennale in Mongolia
NSW has become the first state to reinstate Michael's Rule for touring musicians, with the Minn's government offering a $20,000 discount on the hire of state owned venues for international acts that provide a platform for a local support act. Maggie Collins, the Executive Director of the...
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New voices and deep engagement: the importance of criticism
For almost a quarter of a century, Peter Rose has steered the Australian Book Review as its editor, giving a space for Australian writers to engage critically with the work of their peers, and the wider literary world beyond our shores. As Rose steps aside, he reflects on why criticism remains an...
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The arts at the polls
Australia heads to the polls on the 3rd of May to elect a new federal government. And while the campaign so far has centred on the cost of living, the result will also have a major impact on the arts. What are the most important issues for those working in the industry? And what would they like...
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The Oscars embrace stunt design and Maud Page takes over at the Art Gallery of NSW
The Academy Awards have announced a new category, which will recognise the best stunt design in a film, but what does it take to actually pull off those stunts safely? Keir Beck, who has worked on everything from James Bond to Mad Max, takes us behind the scenes. The Art Gallery of NSW, one of…
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Can the arts industry revive its appetite for risk? And are the visual arts a gig economy?
Whatever their medium, artists deal with sensitive topics, often taking a critical, anti-establishment approach. But at the moment, some artists are finding that their art, and their opinions, can see them shut out of the business. Leading arts figure Louise Adler discusses what arts…
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Creative Australia, local quotas, and AI theft: Tony Burke revives Labor's arts policy
In 2023, the Labor Government launched a major arts policy, Revive: a five year plan that promised substantial funding and a renewed focus on the arts by the Australian Government. With Australia heading to the polls on May 3rd to elect a new Federal government, how has the reality stacked up...
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Arts In 30 have?
Arts In 30 currently has 61 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Arts In 30 about?
Your ultimate guide for staying in the know and getting inspired. An essential wrap-up of arts news and the best interviews, brought to you by the Arts team at ABC Radio National.
How often does Arts In 30 release new episodes?
Arts In 30 has 61 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Arts In 30 is created and hosted by ABC Australia.
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