Every year, as the media issues a cavalcade of banal reports on the Archibald Prize, a progressive disenchantment settles on artists and other denizens of the art community. The gulf between the way the prize is presented to the public and the way it appears to those with a stake in the game is widening with each cycle, as criticism and commentary become further divorced from reality. In a milieu in which everything to do with the arts has to be “fun” and “nice”, while simultaneously being heavily politicised, it’s a depressing scenario for those who refuse to subscribe to these – often contradictory - requirements.

In this sense, Richard Lewer’s Archibald winner repays careful study. It’s an undeniably ‘nice’ painting of a charming, elderly Aboriginal lady, on a cheerful orange backdrop. Yet it’s also part of a PR offensive intended to restore legitimacy to the APY Artists Collective - subject of an extensive investigation, of which the findings have been buried by state and federal governments. In this way, an inoffensive, likeable painting becomes a tool for propaganda.

The cynicism that attends the Archibald and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW, leads to constant speculation that the good stuff will be found in the Salon des Refusés, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. This expectation usually fails to ignite, as the Salon provides more of the same, but this year, we’re getting closer to the mark. As usual, there are a number of portraits one might view as inexplicable omissions from the Archibald, while the landscapes left out of the Wynne raise serious questions.

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When you’re the richest woman in the world, it’s only to be expected that someone will make a movie about your life. When you’ve capped a long and illustrious career with the kind of public scandal that keeps the tabloids in business, there’s little chance the inevitable bio pic will be admiring and respectful. In the wake of a 2023 Netflix documentary series called The Billionaire, The Butler and the Boyfriend, French director, Thierry Klifa, saw the potential for a black comedy based on the last years of Liliane Bettencourt (1922-2017), the woman at the helm of L’Oréal cosmetics.

The Richest Woman in the World is consistently entertaining, but more likely to make you gasp rather than laugh out loud. Isabelle Huppert, formidable as ever, plays the wealthy protagonist, Marianne Farrère, head of the Windler Group. Marianne is a cool customer, the supreme ruler of her family company. Her husband, Guy Farrère (André Marcon) is content to play a secondary role, while everybody else in the boardroom recognises that Marianne’s word is law.

The matriarch’s sovereignty is so complete she seems bored with the business. She has little time for her daughter, Fredérique (Marina Foïs), a self-styled writer and musician whose lifestyle depends on the corporation and her husband’s seat on the board. For Marianne, entertaining government ministers, attending cultural events and attending to public relations are all slightly tiresome chores, undertaken dutifully but without enthusiasm.

Everything changes during a shoot for a luxury magazine (called Selfish), when Marianne encounters the flamboyant photographer, Pierre-Alain Fantin (Laurent Lafitte). Unlike everyone else, so deferential in her presence, Pierre-Alain respects no-one and nothing. He’s loud, camp and abrasive, deaf to any opinion but his own. He tells Marianne her outfit is all wrong and supervises while she goes rifling through her wardrobe. Marianne is delighted by the boorish treatment, and even more pleased by the photo spread.

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Since I started this site about a year and a half ago, I’ve been thrilled by the number of readers who have sent me tip-offs, suggestions, articles to read, and other information. Some of them are regular correspondents, others are one-offs. Some are happy to comment in public, while others prefer to remain anonymous. I understand why anonymity is important for those wanting to avoid victimisation, but it also means there are some claims I’m unable to substantiate - and what can’t be proven generally can’t be written up without raising legal and ethical issues.

And so, to the anonymous “art lover” who has sent me some hair-raising tips about a major museum, I’m grateful for the information, but at this stage can only watch and wait.

Whether or not they lift their heads above the parapet, there’s a large group of people out there with an interest in arts and culture eager for a critical perspective on topics covered in the most sycophantic and shallow fashion by the bulk of the mainstream media.

If our public art institutions, politicians and funding bodies were doing such a great job that the only valid response would be to praise their efforts, we might consider ourselves well served by the kind of coverage served up by Disneyfied mastheads such as the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age, which have decided they no longer need critics. Surely, it won’t be long until they no longer need journalists, as it’s much cheaper to let AI repackage the press releases.

Having survived an attempted assassination by the paper I served for decades, I’m now able to sit back and reflect on the changes we’ve seen in the cultural landscape over the past few years. There’s no doubt the field has become more centralised, with small cliques of insiders appearing in many different locations. Institutions are quietly adopting rigid political stances that are never defended when challenged. In the absence of criticism and investigative journalism, remaining silent is the best way of ensuring you’ll be able to carry on with any dodgy practice. What’s even more alarming is that much of the media is not only willing to ignore obvious rorts and wrongdoing, it supports such activities, writing puff pieces on demand.

By now the rot has set in so comprehensively one can only be pessimistic about our chances of ever getting back to a more even-handed artworld, in which works are assessed in terms of quality not identity, by people with knowledge and experience. Most of the curators who fit this description have been marginalised and may expect to remain in this state until retirement or retrenchment. The wretched Powerhouse is the worst example of this process, but the malaise has spread like a virus.

A spectacular lack of vision from politicians and government funding bodies has created fearsome imbalances in which value-for-money, grass-roots activities have been defunded, while extravagant empire building is rewarded. There is only one possible outcome: a monumental financial and cultural meltdown. It’s only a matter of time, but the process is already well underway. The soaring support for the populist policies of One Nation shows how all that empty rhetoric about “social cohesion” is merely disguising policies which exacerbate division.

Political unrest is not only to do with inflation, cost-of-living, or the neglect of rural areas, there are powerful cultural factors at work. If we look to the United States, the Trump campaign was able to make highly effective use of the so-called “Culture Wars”, to stir up public anger. It enabled a sleight-of-hand whereby voters were so inflamed by these issues, they voted for candidates likely to have a negative impact on their jobs, educational opportunities, health care and welfare.

At some stage the jovial Barnaby Joyce may have to explain how One Nation can reconcile its support for disaffected rural and working-class Australians with its cosy relationship with a billionaire ideologue such as Gina Rinehart. One way of avoiding such questions is to keep hammering away at “cultural” issues, which includes public anxieties about migration and Indigenous affairs.

In this sense, Albo’s mob are playing into the hands of their enemies. The Federal Budget was a washout for arts and culture, with few significant cuts or windfalls. Most notable, for me at least, was the complacent support given to the National Cultural Policy, with its five shaky “pillars”, and extra funding for Creative Australia, as a reward for another year of dysfunction and scandal. It’s clear the Treasurer is happy to leave all the cultural stuff in the hands of Arts Minister, Tony Burke, who has shown a complete unwillingness to question any of the status quos he has created.

There are dangerous outcomes of the government’s cultural policies, and one of the worst has been the steady shift of political priorities in funding bodies, the national broadcaster and associated media. This has seen public money and exhibition opportunities channelled away from some groups, such as those of Jewish or Chinese origins (not to mention the Old White Blokes!), and lavished on those who identify as Indigenous or Muslim. In saying this, I’m simply identifying an obvious shift in focus. I’m not saying that Indigenous or Muslim artists are in any way inferior or less deserving than their Jewish or Chinese counterparts, I’m arguing that artists of all creeds and ethnicities should be allowed the same opportunities. This may sound like pure fantasy in the current political climate, but it is the way a healthy liberal democracy stays healthy.

What should be a source of alarm for the government is that their funding priorities and policies tend to mirror the views of that strident alliance of pro-Palestinian and Indigenous activists, who draw a false equation between Israel and Australia as “settler colonies”. The upshot of this political manœuvre, which ignores the radical differences between both forms of settlement, is create a group of saintly figures who are history’s heroes and victims, and another who can only be portrayed as villains. It’s historically preposterous to maintain such a fiction, but one sees the impact of these ideas in every part of our cultural life.

For instance, last week, I went to see Holding Light at the Bondi Pavilion. The show, organised by the Shalom collective, is billed as an “artistic response to the Bondi Beach terror attack” and includes work by both Jewish and non-Jewish artists. It’s a modest display of 28 works, both amateur and professional, incorporating painting, sculpture, graphic art, ceramics, photography and installation. Easily the most powerful piece is Michael Puterflam’s half-hour video, in which the families of those killed in December’s terror attack talk about their loved ones.

The film puts a human face to the victims, reminding us that every person, no matter how ordinary, had some part of them that was extraordinary. It should be required viewing for those celebrity antisemites who feel their freedom of speech is being impugned if they are expected to refrain from inciting hatred and violence.

While there’s a sombre, elegiac aspect to most of the works, there are also pieces that celebrate survival and resilience, such as Camille Fox’s Filled with Blessings – a portrait of her granddaughter, a young woman who has her whole life ahead of her. There’s even a painting by an Indigenous artist, Munganbana Norman Miller, who obviously doesn’t subscribe to the “settler colonies” narrative.

The most accomplished work is Ella Dreyfus’s Nature Morte – Zikaron, a suite of twelve photographs featuring flowers gathered from the Bondi Beach Memorial and left to dry. The faded bouquets against a black background make a simple statement about memory and mortality. Our memories of the Bondi killings will gradually fade, like the flowers, but these images will remain. It’s a piece that should be acquired for a public collection.

I searched for reviews of this show but the only ones I could find were in specialised Jewish publications, which is pretty much as expected. One might think that an exhibition linked to the Bondi massacre, which generated such an outpouring of public grief, would attract more attention. Instead, anything with a Jewish connection seems to be met with silence by a large part of the media. I’ve also begun to wonder about an ABC News Radio interview last week, in which I was cut off when saying something positive about Michael Zavros’s Archibald portrait of Alex Ryvchin. It didn’t register at the time, but afterwards I began getting inquiries about this rapid change of subject. It can’t be checked either way, because the ABC chose not to preserve the interview online. I doubt I’ll be asked to comment on arts matters in the future.

It may sound naïve or idealistic, but I genuinely don’t understand why so many people can’t be shocked and angry at the Netanyahu government’s callous actions in Gaza and Lebanon, without directing their anger at Jewish Australians or whitewashing Hamas’s barbaric crimes of 7 October. It’s the mentality of the mob, given respectability by the complicity of media outlets that quietly avoid some topics while going overboard on others.

One subject drawing torrents of gushing adulation from the media, is Khaled Sabsabi’s contribution to the Venice Biennale, which may be found in not one, but two venues. This double dose is a direct result of the cancellation of Sabsabi’s selection, which led Biennale director, Koyo Kouoh, to agree to host the show as part of the Aperto section. When Sabsabi was re-selected he took the opportunity to hang on to the Aperto space while also making work for the Australian pavilion. In the meantime, Kouoh had died, and no-one was about to change what she had set in train.

As a result, the controversy worked in the artist’s favour, making him “one of only three artists in the event’s 131-year history, to present work in both a national pavilion and the biennale’s main exhibition,” as an ABC report breathlessly informed us last week.

Unlike a large contingent from Creative Australia, I didn’t make it to Venice for the party this year, so I can only go by the reports available online or news from friends. This means I’m in no position to make any definitive judgements about either khalil, at the Arsenale, or conference of one’s self in the Australian pavilion. It’s not presumptuous to imagine that the lack of capital letters in these titles is intended as a sign of the artist’s modesty.

The former is described as a 40-metre-long painting of abstract lines, with a 64-minute video of abstract forms superimposed over the top. It obviously needs to be experienced first-hand, but it reminded me of those students at art school who try to turn a bad painting into a work of contemporary genius by projecting images onto it. I hope this is an uncharitable suspicion. As the work was completed in record time at Abdul Abdullah’s studio in Thailand, one can only suspect Sabsabi had a little help from some of the local elves. If he painted the whole thing himself, it’s most probably a feat of sustained industry rather than inspiration.

As for conference of one’s self, which is loosely based on Farid ud-Din Attar’s famous 12^th century Persian poem, The Conference of the Birds, it too relies on large abstract pattern paintings, arranged in a hexagon, with shifting forms projected onto the surfaces, but it’s the peripheral additions that sound so intriguing.

According to an AI summary of the press accounts, “Visitors enter the central space through one of two interchangeable “thresholds”. These entrances feature door hangings inspired by Sanjak—sacred ceremonial textile banners used by Sunni, Shia, and Sufi communities. The banners were hand-stitched by a multicultural women’s hub based in Parramatta, Western Sydney.”

Meanwhile “The walls surrounding the installation are adorned with selected Islamic scripts chosen by Sabsabi to act as a symbolic form of spiritual protection inside the pavilion.”

Without having seen this multimedia installation one may ask two questions. Firstly: “How is it that the pavilion in Venice, which in theory represents the entire population of Australia, has been transformed into a showcase for Islamic religious signs and symbols, including masses of Qur’anic script that most Australians are unable to read?” Regardless of all the claims that Sabsabi is presenting a peaceful Sufi version of Islam that “operates as a broader metaphor for how coexistence, global unity, and healing from displacement require a deep, personal connection with both the inner and outer self,” I daresay this is not a display that will resonate with the average Australian. Some may see it as a great moment in multiculturalism but others will find it profoundly alienating. Needless to say, most Australians will not be visiting Venice to check it out, meaning that it’s mainly an expression of how we wish to be seen in the eyes of the world.

Second question: “Even if we allow that Sabsabi’s installation is a statement on behalf of peace and coexistence, how can Creative Australia justify transforming the Australian pavilion into a pulpit for a particular world religion?” It must be beholden on the government body that manages the pavilion to ensure this biennial display is a secular one, not devoted to the promulgation of any sectarian belief.

Imagine if CA had chosen a devout Christian who filled the pavilion with benign quotations from the Bible, and erected crucifixes and other Christian symbols around the doorways? (Remember Bindi Cole Chocka, the Indigenous artist-activist, who found Jesus and saw her artistic career disappear?) Imagine if they’d chosen a Jewish artist who coated the walls with quotations from the Torah in Hebrew, and displayed the signs and symbols of Judaism?

Neither of the above scenarios could ever have been taken seriously, so why turn the Australian pavilion into a shrine for the Islamic faith? It’s not exactly an unexpected scenario, when Sabsabi has said: “For me, Islam is the core, the foundation – and the inspiration.”

One of the most startling Instagram posts I’ve seen from Venice, was by Liz Ann Macgregor, the former director of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, who wrote: “Lovely moments at the Australian pavilion today. The sounds of the performance by the Anasheed from Western Sydney resonated out across the Giardini (not filmed)” The picture shows Sabsabi presenting four Sufis in long white robes and skull caps, who have just performed – or are about to perform – “spiritual songs and devotional chants popular throughout the Islamic world that express love for the Prophet (Peace be upon him)”.

I take this description from the website of the 2024 Adelaide Biennial, in which the same group, Ahbab Al-Mustafa, were flown down to perform in front of Sabsabi’s installation. I’ve been unable to find any information as to who funded Ahbab Al-Mustafa’s trip to Venice and their accommodation. Was the visit paid for or subsidised by Creative Australia? Did the artist dip into some of the money he’s been paid for his efforts? Was there a crowdfunding campaign in the western suburbs? I’d love to know.

Once again, imagine our hypothetical Christian artist flying in a group to sing hymns, or our Jewish artist bringing in a cantor to lead the faithful in prayer. It’s unthinkable – and so it should be. The Australian taxpayers who are bankrolling the Venice pavilion, have every right not to be subjected to expressions of any religious persuasion. Faith should be a personal matter, not a public imposition.

I’ve not been able to find a single report on the Australian contribution in Venice that asks any meaningful questions or portrays Sabsabi’s show as other than a triumph. The artist is universally written up as a hero who had to overcome the indignity of being unjustly cancelled before fighting his way back into the job. My position has been clear from the beginning. Given the ongoing bloodshed in the Middle East it was never appropriate to send an artist to Venice who has such clear partisan associations, especially when the CA selection processes were highly questionable. The heavy-handed religious aspects of the display only throw these concerns into sharper relief.

There was always a danger that this project would portray Australia as a clear supporter of one side of the Gaza conflict, making a mockery of all our diplomatic tightrope-walking. In reality, it has gone much further, professing our national allegiance to Islam even as the local news runs tabloid shock-horror stories about the ISIS brides returning to Australia. This religious charade in Venice has every possibilty of feeding into an already inflamed, divisive narrative. Commonsense would have suggested we avoid the tangled politics of the Middle East, let alone setting ourselves up as a bastion of one particular faith.

The media have done their best to make sure there is only good news from Venice, but if the tide turns, the government will have to explain why Sabsabi was reinstated when the nature of his work, past and present, has remained the same. It’s a case of institutional authority being swayed by a campaign that was perceived as capable of inflicting electoral damage in seats where there is a substantial Muslim population - seats such as that occupied by Arts Minister, Tony Burke. The government could not allow the impression that dropping Sabsabi was an implicitly anti-Muslim act. The result was a complete capitulation, which has allowed the artist to treat the Australian pavilion as a temple of worship.

It’s the other side of the coin to the government’s chain-dragging with Jillian Segal’s report on antisemitism, which was left to gather dust on a shelf until the Bondi incident induced a sense of political panic. As a result, all the report’s recommendations were rushed through without due discussion or debate, which may give rise to a whole new set of problems.

The overall picture is one of a culture in disarray, in which the government makes poor decisions for opportunistic, cowardly or ideologically blinkered reasons that can only lead to further disarray, while preaching the gospel of “social cohesion”.

While all this has been going on, the big cultural news last week was Delta Goodrem coming fourth in the Eurovision Song Contest. This inane extravaganza enjoyed saturation coverage across the media, as if all of Australia was hanging on the outcome of the contest. I felt like a visitor from another planet observing some incomprehensible frenzy among earthlings. When Dara from Bulgaria won with her Bangaranga number, that seemed a perfectly appropriate result. Nothing could have better summarised this festival of formulaic kitsch. At least it shows that audiences would sooner dance than sit around swooning at the false sentiment of some power ballad.

One may view the rise and rise of Eurovision – a contest in which we are geographical interlopers – as a sign of our ever-growing willingness to be deadly serious about shallow entertainment, while tolerating all sorts of abuses in the sphere of so-called high culture. Whatever distance once existed between these two poles, it is rapidly disappearing. To pause this descent into oblivion would be a bit like pausing a toilet in mid-flush, but against all the odds, I think it’s still worth a try.

The most recent art column is a chronicle of the triumph of trash, being an elegy for the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW. The oldest art competition in Australia is now one of the most ridiculed, as it drifts ever further into irrelevance while practising all the cutest political stances. The Sulman, however, came as a pleasant surprise, being better than expected. All hope is not lost.

The film being reviewed is The Devil Wears Prada 2, which I watched with every expectation of another mindless, frock-and-celebrity affair, but found the comedy underpinned by a fierce lament for the death of journalism. It may be a sign of our times that the only way to get a critical message across is to enclose it in the glossy carapace of a Hollywood blockbuster.

Although the Archibald Prize grabs all the headlines, the Wynne Prize deserves our respect as Australia’s longest running art competition. The Archibald was first awarded in 1921, but the Wynne launched in 1897, thanks to a bequest of £1,000 from Irish-born businessman and pastoralist, Richard Wynne (c.1822-97). It turned out to be a good investment as the donor’s name would otherwise have vanished into the mists of history.

Wynne never saw the prize that bears his name, but he must have had a fair idea of the kind of work it would attract. The award is for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists completed during the preceding 12 months.”

Over the years many great paintings have won the Prize, including iconic works such as G.W. Lambert’s Across the Black Soil Plains (1899) and Hans Heysen’s Mystic Morn (1904). Looking over the list of winners, it’s a Who’s Who of important Australian artists, from Russell Drysdale and William Dobell to Fred Williams and William Robinson. Although the Prize is hypothetically awarded to a landscape painting or a “figure sculpture”, it’s rare for a sculptor to emerge as the winner.

The first signs that the Wynne was losing its way appeared in the 1990s, when abstract paintings that merely suggested landscape, began to feature prominently. The first Aboriginal paintings were equally controversial, partly because almost every one could be classed as a depiction of country while departing radically from the conventions of western landscape.

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It’s a rare to discover a blockbuster movie is better than expected, but that’s the case with The Devil Wears Prada 2. It’s not exactly The Godfather 2, but it’s one of the few sequels that outshines the original. I’m not saying it’s a timeless classic of the cinema, merely that it’s sharp, entertaining and surprisingly topical. When one thinks of the luxury-brand trash served up in the Sex in the City movies, it’s clear that director, David Frankel, has set his personal bar a lot higher.

It’s still the story of a high-end fashion magazine, with all the clothes, accessories and celebrity cameos, but there’s a genuine attempt to connect with the Zeitgeist in a way that transcends the gloss and glamour. One can imagine scriptwriter, Aline Brosh McKenna thinking: “What’s the difference between the magazine business in 2006, when the previous film appeared, and today?

The answer is that the glossy magazines have been virtually strangled to death by digital platforms. Publications that were slow to embrace social media and cement their online presence have struggled to survive, no matter how venerable the brand. At the same time, media ownership has fallen into the hands of unscrupulous multi-billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, who will forever be known as the man who gutted one of the world’s most respected newspapers, The Washington Post.

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When you meet the curator of an exhibition carrying a protective helmet and fluoro vest, it can only raise concerns about what you’re about to see. When that show is the Archibald Prize for portraiture, it’s tantamount to a red alert – although the curator, Beatrice Gralton, tried to assure me the protective gear related to another project altogether.

If it were that easy to be protected from the Archibald Prize, I’d race out and buy a helmet and a vest immediately. By now I’ve resigned myself to the idea that no barricade, no lucky charm, no vaccine can keep the annual scourge of the Archibald at bay. It comes along at the start of flu season and infects the entire nation. It’s at its most virulent within the first few days, before settling in for four weary months.

I’m going to concentrate on the portrait prize and leave the companion shows, the Wynne and Sulman for another day.

With the Archibald, it’s now traditional to say: “It’s the worst ever!”, but this is like saying “Lest we forget” on Anzac Day. It’s a timeless ritual, honoured by many.

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This piece was written for The Australian, but while it awaited space in the paper, the firm of Trump and Netanyahu decided it would be a great idea to bomb Iran. As a result, the story was put in the fridge, on the assumption that few people would be planning a trip to Saudi Arabia while hostilities persisted. As this poorly conceived war lingers on, the exhibition came and went. For the record, I’m posting the article here, without the paywall.

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On a warm night in Diriyah, the ancient capital of Saudi Arabia, the walls and buildings are reverberating to the booming, machine-gun delivery of Palestinian rapper, Shabjdeed. The music is deafening, drowning out any attempt at conversation. A group of foreign journalists is fleeing for cover, but the courtyard is crowded with glamorous young women dancing, tossing their long hair from side to side.

It’s the opening of the Third Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, held in the JAX district of Riyadh. Ten years ago, such a scene would have been unthinkable, unspeakable. From the 18^th century, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by Wahhabism – a strict, puritanical sect within Sunni Islam that rendered the Kingdom one of the most conservative places on earth. Not so long ago, visitors would have found Saudi women to be uniformly dressed in the black abaya – a long robe that covers the wearer completely, and the niqab, a veil that allows only the eyes to be seen. Dress codes were strictly enforced by the religious police.

Everything began to change in 2018 when Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) told US Sixty Minutes that clothing should be decent and respectful, but otherwise the choice would be “entirely left to women”. He followed up by disbanding the religious police in 2019, although this didn’t send Saudi women rushing to adopt the latest western styles. Today, one sees a mixture of looks, from the traditional black abaya and niqab, to different forms of headscarf, (the hijab), to the same kinds of skirts, pants and jackets one might find anywhere in the world.

Most of the young women dancing to the rap music were bare-headed, wearing long, robe-like dresses that looked stylish and expensive. Black is still the colour of choice but it’s not obligatory.

The Biennale is part of MBS’s Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil revenue, diversify the economy, and make the country a venue for high level sporting and cultural events. The plan is to hold a biennale for contemporary art every second year in Riyadh, and an Islamic art biennale on alternate years in Jedda. With each new exhibition, the Saudis have grown more confident. Last year’s Second Islamic Biennale was an impressive, original exhibition, combining contemporary art with religious and historical artefacts, some of them more than a thousand years old.

The two previous Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennales were under the direction of western curators. The current one is the first to be headed by two Artistic Directors from the Arab world, Nora Razian and Sabi Ahmed. In a region in which contemporary galleries are largely funded by private money, both directors work for private art foundations. Razian is Head of Exhibitions at Art Jameel, Dubai and Jedda; Ahmed is projects Advisor for the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai. They were assisted by four international curators.

It’s been apparent for a long time that the Middle East has become a major source of money and energy in the contemporary art market. The Art Basel group has just launched a new art fair in Qatar, competing with Art Dubai, which is holding its 19^th edition this month. Hoor Al Qasimi, the Artistic Director of this year’s Sydney Biennale, has hosted no fewer than 15 Sharjah Biennials. The big event of 2026 is set to be the opening of Frank Gehry’s long-awaited Guggenhem Abu Dhabi.

There are obstacles that stand in the way of this boom, the first being the political instability of the Middle East. The international art set are notably reluctant to visit places too close to a war zone, with the ongoing carnage in Gaza and more trouble in Iran acting as a discouragement. MBS is championed as a reformer by a grateful population, but many westerners cannot so easily forget the hardline policies of the past, or the 2018 assassination of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. There’s also a practical problem in that most of the great works of art are already in museums, making it hard to put together outstanding permanent collections no matter how much cash is on the table.

Substantial loans from other world museums are one solution, but it’s contemporary art that offers a new way forward, with the Diriyah Biennale signifying Saudi Arabia’s aspirations to be the cultural leader of the region. Inevitably, this means embracing a field that prides itself on its critical approach to social, political and cultural issues.

In the Kingdom there are obvious constraints on the ‘freedom of speech’ which artists in Australia prize so highly. Any work which criticised the Royal Family or the government would be an unlikely starter. The Saudis have been reassessing their relationship with with Israeli in recent years, but there are no Israeli artists in the exhibition. Fortunately, although contemporary artists will always feel obliged to make political gestures, there are countless ways to do so in such an oblique manner no-one could possibly take offence.

This is implicit in the shows’s theme: In Interludes and Transitions. It suggests an indeterminate state, poised between past and future, tradition and progress, Europe and Africa, reflecting the balance MBS seeks to preserve in his Vision 2030.

The catalogue introduction is a small masterpiece of artspeak, packed with all the appropriate jargon and references, without a clear proposition in sight. It’s vaguely about “the movements, migrations, and transformations that have long connected the Arab region with the world.”

The show featured over 100 works by 68 artists from 37 countries, including Australia, represented by Yolgnu painter, Naminapu Maymuru-White; photographic artist, Alana Hunt; and Afghan emigré, Elyas Alavi. The selection was not what one has come to expect from these big international events, incorporating artists from the Philippines, Sudan, India, South America, South Africa, and all parts of the Arab world, with far less emphasis on Europe and the United States.

The Biennale was a rejection of the western hierarchies but also a continuation of the ‘decolonising’ approach that is changing the composition of these exhibitions. This year’s Biennale of Sydney has a similar mix of artists.

It’s an approach that often works better in theory than in practice. There were few highlights in this Biennale, with most works providing variations on wellworn themes. One show stealer was the installation, House of Eternity, by French artist, Théo Mercier. It consisted of monumental sculptures made from compacted sand, in which seemingly fossilised artefacts such as a car, ventilators and turbine wheels sat alongside ammonites and termite mounds. A meditation on the forces of time, the pieces were arranged in the manner of an archaelogical dig.

It was partly the grand scale of Mercier’s work that set it aside from many other exhibits. Among other standouts was a sound-based installation by Ecuadorian artist, Oscar Santillán, in which noises made by visitors triggered responses from the sculptures. There was a large, coloured abstraction by the renowned Lebanese artist, Etel Adnan, translated into a wall-sized ceramic mural, and a room full of giant, worm-like sculptures by Egyptian artist, Nour Mobarak, based on fungal networks, but referring to the Greek myth of Daphne who was transformed into a tree.

The Biennale was best appreciated when put in context with all the radical changes taking place in Saudi Arabia, and the eagerness with which the country is opening its doors to the rest of the world. It’s one of the rare good-news stories in the Middle East today.

Another major venue just around the corner, is the Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art, which was hosting a sprawling exhibition on the theme of marriage, titled One Night of a Lifetime. It featured almost 40 artists from the Arab world and elsewhere, exploring the rituals, ceremonies and psychology of marriage - in works ranging from large-scale installations to tiny, intimate objects. An unlikely topic for a contemporary art show, it made a space for itself somewhere between conceptualism and kitsch.

Along with the contemporary art and design galleries of the JAX district, Diriyah is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with a history dating back to a time before the Middle Ages. The old fort and palace have been restored, and are now major tourist attractions, surrounded by state-of-the-art facilities.

Another UNESCO site is AlUla, an oasis in the northwestern desert, in which inscriptions in stone dating back to 644 CE, are juxtaposed with postmodern architecture and a spectacular sculpture park set amidst sand dunes and towering, craggy peaks. A 90-minute flight from Riyadh takes one across a seemingly endless expanse of grey sand the Bedouins would traverse on camel. One might never be as excited as those ancient travellers must have been to arrive at a place where palm trees flourish around springs of fresh water, but it’s still a revelation.

AlUla’s popularity is growing rapidly, with the expectation that by 2030, more than a million people will have visited the site. The tricky part is how to manage this influx, preserving the fragile natural environment and heritage material from the ravages of mass tourism. In this sense the isolation of the settlement is its saving grace, allowing the Saudis to regulate the flow of visitors. Climate is another safeguard, as few would wish to arrive from June to September when temperatures are routinely in the mid-40s.

AlUla has recently opened a new art museum, called Arduna (“Our Land”), with a high-profile loan exhibition from the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Until 15 April). One could see works by artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Klee, Kandinsky, Dubuffet and Hockney, alongside pieces by Middle Eastern artists. Upon leaving the museum there was a banquet with hundreds of people. We finished the evening sitting under a huge starry sky, eating dates and listening to music.

This is the way Saudi Arabia is seeking to repair its forbidding reputation and transform itself into a user-friendly destination. For many, the Kingdom will always be an uncomfortable proposition, but in recent years the internal changes have been spectacular, generating feelings of optimism and ambition that permeate all levels of society. The popularity of MBS is not due to the fear of a tyrant, but because of the sweeping reforms he has brought about, and the positive impact they have had on the quality of everyday life. The traditions may be feudal, but the outlook is global.

This sense of being contained within an age-old culture, while looking to a brighter future, was the implict message of one of the works in the Biennale. In The Run, a single-channel video by Saudi artist, Ahaad Alamoudi, we watch a young woman in a long white robe running across a barren landscape. After 20 minutes she smashes through a screen on which another landscape is imprinted, pushing on into the desert. What she is running towards is NEOM, the site of MBS’s proposed city of the future, a cornerstone of the 2030 Vision program. Work is already far advanced on this science fiction metropolis, but we can’t tell whether Alamoudi is racing to embrace the vision or running straight past. The artist has told interviewers she has chosen to believe the dream, but like all humanity’s grandest schemes there’s a niggling element of doubt that can never be put to rest.

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale: In Interludes and Transitions,

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 30 January - 2 May 2026

John McDonald flew to Saudi Arabia, courtesy of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale

At a time when our art institutions and funding bodies have become beacons for social justice rather than art it’s only to be expected that the Archibald Prize will reflect this trend. But on reflection, perhaps “reflect” is too soft a term. It would be more accurate to say “embrace” or “reinforce”, or “plunge head over heels into” a fantasy that sees the public gallery as a sanctuary in which all minorities and special interest groups are given their day in the sun.

Well, not all minorities. I wondered aloud last week if Chinese-Australian artists would play a more visible role in this year’s Archibald Prize. The answer is that they are completely absent - which justifies the effort behind the inaugural ACAR Art Prize, with which I’ve been involved. It’s a good indication of prevailing attitudes when Peter Godwin wins $100,000 and is ignored by every major media outlet with the exception of the Australian Financial Review, while Sean Layh winning the $3,000 Packing Room Prize at the AGNSW is treated as a massive scoop by newspapers, TV and radio.

I’ll save a critical overview of the Archibald for the time being and use this editorial to look more broadly at what the prize represents today.

If anything, the 2026 event is even more obsessed with Indigenous artists, artists with disabilities, and celebrities. The result is outstandingly mediocre, a sideshow rather than an art show. Rather than the best possible exhibition, the trustees have aimed for the most inclusive one. The media responds by treating the Archibald as a dependable bit of ‘colour’ to spice up the news pages - a slice of light entertainment.

This year’s selection has already had the fire-and-brimstone treatment from Christopher Allen in The Australian, and I can only marvel that he’s still able to summon up reserves of indignation.

As for the Sydney Morning Herald, I shouldn’t be surprised when I find some new travesty, but the paper seems to have developed an insatiable appetite for humiliating itself. Along with all the usual newsy piffle, the Herald got Michaela Boland to write an assessment of the show that is so far off the planet I felt embarrassed for the writer. Michaela made her name as a dogged arts reporter, but she’s no critic – which should have been obvious from a previous attempt last year. Aside from being a small anthology of clichés (“There’s life in the old girl yet”, “Something for everyone”), the piece tells us that “five years after his death, Nicholas Mourzakis [sic] has breathed life into neurologist Jack Wodak.” If I’m sceptical of this astonishing, supernatural feat, it’s because I believe Mourtzakis is still with us.

It was bizarre to read that the previous Archibald was “kaleidoscopic chaos”, but this year is “a cogent and accomplished show”. Let’s be realistic: last year was a mess, and this year is a bigger mess. A once-proud journal of record spreading blatant misinformation.

And if Michaela’s musings didn’t provide sufficient stimulation, the SMH followed up with an incisive piece by Linda Morris, telling us the show is no longer dominated by “men in brown suits”, with today’s entries distinguished by their “vibrancy” and “splashes of colour”. To this revelation, I’d add that the show is no longer dominated by artists with basic skills, but open to any old tat that comes along.

What have we gained from this liberatory celebration of deskilling? In its early years the Archibald may have suffered from the conservatism of the trustees, but today it has become so facile, so stupidly populist, so desperate for attention, that it resembles one of those TV game shows in which anybody can have a go at making a fool of themselves while a studio audience laughs and claps on cue. The Archibald has been reinvented for a facile age that sneers and yawns at aesthetic ambition.

For many it has become wearisome to think of art as something with a history and a tradition that aims to lift us momentarily out of the humdrum routine of our lives. That’s all too hard, too dull, too heavy. Better to view art as a passing distraction, a source of quirky images to post on social media.

It may be uncool to say this, but I’ve always imagined the role of our public institutions, and indeed the press, as one of safeguarding those values upon which our communities have been built. Instead, we now have galleries, media and entire government departments prostituting themselves, trying to be popular with a younger generation who will inherit a world in which they’ll never be able to afford a house, are saddled with crippling higher education debts, and forced to endure a natural environment ruined by our carelessness and greed. I won’t speculate on employment prospects in a world run by AI.

For governments (and here the NSW state government is the gold standard), the solution to these generational problems is that old favourite: “bread & circuses”. Rather than encourage a critical, engaged, inquiring frame of mind, the preference is for young people not to think too much. Scott Morrison doubled the price of an Arts degree, and in four years, the Albanese government has not managed to correct this blatant injustice.

A favourite tactic is to make everything more ‘accessible’, taking money from museums and galleries – the repositaries of collective memory – and spending it on the ephemeral pleasures of parties, festivals and sport. Don’t worry if you haven’t got a home, a job or an education, let’s have some fun!

The complicity shown by the media is partly explained by the fact that corporate ownership is not focused on public benefit, but on the wellbeing of owners and shareholders. This creates an editorial imperative to go easy on anyone who provides advertising revenue or simply holds out the carrot of an ‘exclusive’ (self-serving) story. Exhibit A this week is an ecstatic Daily Telegraph feature on Powerhouse Parramatta, titled ‘Western Sydney’s new era begins…’ The ludicrous boast that the Parramatta venue will attract 2 million people a year is dutifully repeated, along with furphies about jobs, tourism and economic development. Not a single critic of the project was consulted for an opinion or quoted.

This piece was treated as news, and put behind the Telegraph’s paywall, but it really should have been categorised as “Partner Content”, the coy term the paper uses for paid propaganda articles pretending to be features. There are at least five warm & cuddly stories about Powerhouse Parramatta classified as “Partner Content” - a term that suggests your client is happy with the treatment they’re getting. There are numerous other stories praising the glorious achievements of the Kazakhstan, sorry… Minns government, all presumably paid for with funds provided by the taxpayer. It’s good to know your money is being put to work so productively, and the Telegraph is telling it like it is - for a suitable fee.

One wonders if the payments to the Telegraph are being factored into the funds lavished on the Powerhouse, or if they’re coming from some other part of government expenditure. It would be interesting to know how these payments compare with the $300,000 taken from the Australian Design Centre that is forcing the closure of that organisation.

The media used to see its role as keeping government honest, but today it serves as a paid branch of government public relations. It was hardly any different at the Sydney Morning Herald when I was there, with editorials devoted to the wonders of government policy, although these gushes were not identified as “Partner Content”.

What passes as a craven editorial policy soon becomes internalised, as journalists realise what they need to do to please management. To make matters less onerous, there’s a natural tendency among many of today’s journos to believe that any member of a sacred minority cannot be criticised or investigated. The result is an endless procession of stories telling us, in the immortal words of Devo, it’s a beautiful world we live in. The galleries serve up the fatuous content, the government gives it a tick of approval, and the media sings its praises. The only missing element is the public, which is frequently uninterested or downright hostile about the way their taxpayers’ dollars are being spent.

Neither should we neglect the staggering hypocrisy involved, as Arts Ministers pour money into every marginal project, approve galleries’ efforts to turn themselves into offices for social justice, and then penalise the same institutions for not getting the desired attendance numbers or a higher level of private donations.

It’s an institutionalised version of that old adage involving a cart and a horse. Rather than responding to the constantly evolving nature of public taste and opinion, our cultural masters like to issue instructions on what we are allowed to like. If the masses don’t respond with shouts of glee, the fault lies with them, not with those arty missionaries who have done all the right things, morally and politically.

In the decay of the Archibald into a debased artefact of popular culture, the public’s perennial preference for a skilfully painted portrait that captures a likeness is satisfied by a group of dull photo realist pictures. The field is thereby cleared for the ghastly mixture of show biz frivolity and obligatory inclusiveness that makes up the rest of the selection.

I say this while recognising that criticism of the Archibald is completely superfluous. The trustees were apparently so pleased with last year’s efforts they have doubled down on all fronts. It may seem like a great idea to include as many Indigenous artists as possible, but is Adrian Jangala Robertson such an outstanding talent that he needs to be seen in all three prizes? Are we so charmed by a group of artists with disabilities that every year we need to include four or five of them?

This is the message one takes from the AGNSW foyer, which has turned over an entire wall to an installation called Pet Palace by artists from the Little Orange Studio in Campbelltown, “celebrating the animals we love and the unique bonds between pets and their owners.”

With the Young Archies on one wall (dominated by kids with Chinese surnames!) and the Pet Palace on the other, along with Mike Newsome’s childrens’ playground in the basement of the other building, the AGNSW is starting to resemble a glorified child-minding centre. It’s the most devious strategy yet to attract ‘the young demographic’.

The gallery is aware that all the attention lavished on so-called “neurodivergent” artists exerts a form of moral blackmail on the viewer. We’re supposed to think it’s wonderful that the AGNSW devotes so much space to these marginalised artists, but the degree of devotion sets up a false equivalence between artforms, suggesting that works by untrained, amateur artists, with or without disabilities, are to be viewed in exactly the same way as those by professional artists who may have spent months on an Archibald entry. It’s flattering for the amateurs and profoundly disappointing for the professionals. The gallery congratulates itself for helping the disabled artists while alienating those who believe art is a matter of superior skill, talent and insight, not mere self-expression. It’s a blow against the privileged ones! You don’t have to be a visionary to paint your cat or dog.

I’ve had a longterm interest in what used to be called Outsider Art or L’Art brut (‘Raw art’), once helping with a campaign for a specialised museum in Parramatta, but this work fares awkwardly when placed in a conventional fine art context. We need to accept the laboriously titled “neurodivergent art” as a special category, and make value judgements within that category. Instead, the Archibald – and the AGNSW in general – wants us to believe it’s all just “art” and art is fun for everyone.

For a fraction of the money squandered on the bloated Powerhouse project, the state government could have established a functioning Museum of L’Art Brut, relieving the AGNSW of its overpowering sense of responsibility. Much better spend some money on the artists with disabilities than on Lisa Havilah’s “associates”. The government might also have found its funds better spent in turning Martin Sharp’s house into a museum. It would have been a fitting tribute to the Australian artist who, 13 years after his death, remains our best-known international export.

Having spent more than a decade seeking support from government and private enterprise, the trustees of Sharp’s estate have finally consigned the home and contents to the auction block. It’s yet another black mark for a city that not only has a dearth of public museums but specialises in mistreating the existing ones.

Not the smallest part of the ongoing madness is that hundreds of millions have been spent on “venues” and function centres such as Carriageworks, the Cutaway at Barangaroo, White Bay Power Station and the gutted Powerhouse Ultimo. It’s hardly likely these vast empty interiors will be hosting parties and performances, day after day. An exhibition space would make fuller use of a building, but for Arts Minister John Graham and his myrmidons, galleries and museums don’t suit their passion for the night life.

One of the unsung outcomes of the AGNSW’s reign of virtue is that a lot of wellknown artists have begun asking themselves if it’s worthwhile entering these prizes. The Wynne, known as a prize for landscape, is almost devoid of conventional landscapes this year. There is the predictably high percentage of Aboriginal art (which is landscape by definition, if not by recognition), a good deal of urban images, and a very ropey selection of sculptures and ceramics.

The Archibald too, is lacking many of the artists who used to appear with some regularity. I don’t know whether they’re entering and being rejected or have simply given up. Either way, it must be a miserable experience to have worked hard on a portrait only for it not to be selected. It must be catastrophic to find the show packed with works of dubious merit that tick the right ‘identity’ boxes. Next comes the obvious question: “Is my painting inferior to that?”

In the next art column I’m going to take a closer look at this year’s Archibald and try to find a few positives beyond the odd splash of colour. If I had to make a prediction as to a likely winner, I’d nominate Loribelle Spirovski for her portrait of singer, Daniel Johns. Spirovski had one of the best entries in last year’s show and also features as a subject this time around, in a portrait by Tsering Hannaford. As the stock phrase goes, she’s having a moment. I only hope I haven’t put the mozz on her.

In what’s been another busy week, I haven’t been able to apply myself to new exhibitions or movies. By way of feeding the beast, I’ve posted catalogue essays on three paintings for a forthcoming Menzies auction: two by Jeffrey Smart, one by Fred Williams. The film review is also an historical piece, looking at William Wyler’s 1949 movie, The Heiress, which I introduced at the Cinema Reborn festival last week. I realise the fashionable view is that History is (mostly) boring – as a headline in the SMH informed us earlier this year, but I’ve always had a sneaking fondness for it.

Cinema Reborn is a unique Australian film festival that screens newly restored prints of classic films. Like a lot of film buffs I’ve been volunteering my services every year, introducing a movie. This time it was, William Wyler’s The Heiress. In acknowledging the cinema as an art form for all time, not simply a venue for new releases, I’m running that address as this week’s film column.

•••••••••

Reading about the golden years of Hollywood might be a good preparation for the next installment of Jurassic Park. The heroes of this era - legendary directors such as Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and William Wyler - had to routinely defend their artistic turf against the rapacious assaults of apex predators such as Sam Goldwyn, David Selznick and Harry Cohn - the big studio executives who controlled the purse strings and held the contracts. These moguls were perpetually at war with star directors who had very precise ideas about what they wanted from a film.

Wyler, often singled out as Hollywood’s most “celebrated” or “acclaimed” director, had to fight every inch of the way with the studio bosses when making many of his best-known films. If it wasn’t the studios, it was the Hays Code, in force from 1934-1968, which demanded that movies reflect a puritanical type of “American values”.

With The Heiress of 1949, Wyler enjoyed a lttle more leeway than usual. His previous movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, about a group of former servicemen returning to civilian life after the war, had been a smash hit, but it had finally worn out his patience with Sam Goldwyn. Tempted by the promise of creative freedom he had thrown in his lot with Frank Capra and George Stevens in an independent production company called Liberty Pictures. It was a venture that died almost before it began, with the box office failure of Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life convincing its director that going it alone was a recipe for financial disaster.

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In January 1965, Fred and Lyn Williams returned from seven months in Europe, where they had pursued an exhausting schedule, absorbing more art than most travellers would see in a lifetime. Williams had won the coveted Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship in 1963 and was determined to make the most of the opportunity. Fred and Lyn drove all over Britain looking at Gothic cathedrals, spent three weeks in Paris, and a solid two-and-a-half months in continental art museums.

The trip was a testimony to Williams’s voracious, broadranging appetite for art, even for medieval stained glass or classical sculpture, which bore no apparent relation to his own work. Whereas many artists visit museums looking for an idea they can adapt and use, Williams wanted to see everything, absorbing experiences that might never find their way into one of his pictures. This vast store of visual information makes it difficult to pinpoint influences, as Williams would work intuitively, painting in the landscape but drawing on his recollections of the art he had studied in museums.

In some of Williams’s pictures one may catch glimpses of Cezanne or Courbet, but his primary focus is the landscape itself. A barnstorming tour of Europe had confirmed his belief that Australian scenery represented a new, virtually untouched subject for a painter. Before setting off overseas he had been producing the most original and dynamic works of his career in the You Yangs series. When he got back, he simply picked up where he had left off.

Patrick McCaughey describes the moment in his monograph on Williams: “When he returned home in January 1965 it was as though he picked up the brush the morning after the last paintings of the year before. That says a lot about the nature of his art and the certainty of his direction. He literally carried his vision with him intact, feeding off his own art; one painting stimulating the next, one series provoking its counterpoint.” ^[i]

In the period from 1963 to 1968, Williams would reinvent Australian landscape painting, one innovation following another. The uncanny aspect of his work was the way it felt distinctively Australian, even though he had dispensed with all those recognisable features of the bush that had made artists such as Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen into national icons. Both were given knighthoods for images that stirred local pride and love of country. They were the best of what a later generation of artists would derisively call “the gumtree school”.

At a time when abstraction appeared to be an unstoppable force, Williams was wary of associating himself with the traditions of nationalistic landscape but equally unwilling to abandon his connections with observable reality. His solution was to paint recognisable landscapes, drawing upon studies made en plein air, creating detail through gestural touches with a spontaneous, abstract appearance.

In pictures painted in the You Yangs, in Upwey and Lysterfield, Williams had dispensed with the last vestiges of the Claudean legacy. No heroic gum trees towered over his flat fields. No endless blue horizons shimmered in the distance. The trees in Williams’s paintings were small and straggly, hardly more than a swipe of the brush topped with a blob of paint. The grounds he preferred were usually brown or ochre, a far cry from those bucolic idylls where sheep grazed in grassy fields.

Williams’s scenes were instantly familiar, in a way that made Streeton and Heysen’s pictures look like stage sets. Williams had captured the flat, disorderly nature of Australian topography, in which trees and scrub fought for moisture under the rays of a burning sun. At first glance this was a harsh, featureless environment, but Williams had learned from his study of the old masters, how to instill a sense of rightness into paintings that flirted with formlessness.

His bestknown procedure was to lay two strands of piano wire across a canvas, dividing the picture plane into four segments. This showed how he should cluster his tiny dabs of paint to create the most subtle of compositions.

One can see this method at work in Pond in Landscape, where one strand of wire would have run diagonally from the top left-hand corner of the painting, just touching on the edge of the pond in the foreground, before exiting on the right-hand side, towards the bottom. The other piece of wire seems to have run from the top right-hand corner and exited towards the bottom on the left, grazing the right edge of the roughly brushed cloud.

There is an empty space where the wires crossed, and the faintest trace of a line that carves up the ground into proportions that echo the classical ratio of the Golden Mean. Indeed, if one were to superimpose the famous diagram of the Fibonacci Spiral over the rectangular plane of the earth, it’s an almost perfect fit, with the pond slotting into the area where the tip of the spiral turns in upon itself.^[ii]

This is one way that Williams was able to impose a near-classical order on the rampant disorder of the bush. Such a precise underlying structure is the reason his paintings have a timeless dimension. The way Williams constructed a picture is not fundamentally different from how an artist of the Renaissance might have mapped out a fresco or an altarpiece. His revelation was that these methods worked just as well in depicting an Australian landscape devoid of the striking, dramatic features that attracted famous Romantics such as J.M.W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich.

The modernity of Williams’s work asserts itself in the forms of the pond and the cloud, which mirror each other in the top and bottom planes of the picture, providing visual anchors for sky and earth. The artist has made no attempt to reproduce the characteristic textures of cloud or water, painting these features in the manner of an Abstract Expressionist, with crude swirls of pigment and brushstrokes left clearly visible. The cloud is not exactly white, but a dirty pale blue with a tinge of yellow and grey. The pond is a patchwork of blue, white, black, brown, and grey. It is not inserted into the earth but plastered defiantly on top of it.

Williams was not concerned with integrating the features of the landscape into a naturalistic vista. If it were not for the cloud, the sky in the painting would be a void, with none of the features we associate with the sky in a conventional landscape. Constable famously believed the sky to be “the chief organ of sentiment”, but in this picture, Williams has left the sky purposefully blank, as if to avoid symbolic or emotional connotations.

It’s the ground in Pond in Landscape that receives the bulk of his attention. The earth is loosely brushed in, with a thinned-down application of paint that appears darker or lighter in a haphazard manner. The deliberate lack of depth throws the black-and-white spots of paint that represent trees and shrubs into sharp relief. Williams has presented these features as a scattering of calligraphic marks written on the landscape.

One of the most seductive features of the work is the sheer physicality of this mark-making. It’s thrilling to follow the swipes and smears of the brush, the blobs of paint flicked spontaneously onto the canvas. The basic geometric structure of the work consists of nothing more than two rectangles, but the details are electrifying, as if a swarm of angry insects has descended on the dull, brownish expanse of the landscape.

For most artists, this dirty, washy brown would be a colour to avoid, but Williams knew it would serve as a perfect foil for the vivid black-and-white daubs of paint he would apply to the picture. He also knew the surface could be animated even more effectively by including the tiniest flecks of blue and yellow in the black-and-white mix. We don’t know whether this was a matter of calculation or instinct - simply going with something that ‘felt right’ or adding a detail the painting seemed to ‘need’.

With Williams, more than any other Australian artist, it’s impossible to find that point where the head dominates the heart or vice versa. In his recently published Diaries^[iii] he reveals himself to be sceptical of art theory and of art with a political agenda. He comes across as a supremely practical painter, more concerned with the way a painting is made rather than subject matter, relying chiefly on the judgement of the eye in deciding what succeeds and what doesn’t. A theory for Williams was an airy, intangible proposition, but a technique could be tried and tested in the studio. If he stuck doggedly to landscape in an age of abstraction it’s because he believed that centuries of knowledge accumulated by artists should not be thrown away in pursuit of a fashionable new idea. Art may come and go, but the landscape would endure. In paintings such as Pond in Landscape he aspired to transcend art’s perpetual search for sensation and make works that seem as fresh today as they did in the 1960s.

FRED WILLIAMS
(1927-1982)
Pond in Landscape 1965
oil on canvas
96.5 x 106.5 cm
signed lower left: Fred Williams
inscribed verso: POND IN LANDSCAPE

^[i] Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927 -1982, 2008 revised ed. (orig.1984), Murdoch Books, Sydney, p. 165

^[ii] https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/design/the-golden-ratio-the-ultimate-guide-to-understanding-and-using-it

^[iii] Patrick Mccaughey (w. John Timlin) ed. The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963-1970, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2025

If one were to compile a checklist of motifs commonly found in Jeffrey Smart’s paintings, Outside the Ministry would tick almost every box. All it needs is a lorry to compete the set, but it’s easy enough to imagine a long strip of asphalt and a fleet of trucks on the other side of the massive stone wall that dominates the composition. As ever, Smart gives us part of a story and invites us to imagine the rest.

Walls play a prominent role in Smart’s paintings, helping to establish the geometrical frameworks he saw as an essential part of every composition. It hardly needs noting that Outside the Ministry makes precise use of the classical ratio of the Golden Mean in the division of the canvas into two rectangles, and the severe diagonal line of the steps.

Smart’s walls also enable him to excise the middle ground from a picture, a procedure he may have learned from Edward Hopper. By refusing a calm, orderly recession in the manner of a classical landscape, Smart is showing a disinclination to engage with the eternal verities of Nature. A scene by Claude Lorraine allows us to gaze into an infinite horizon, but a typical Smart painting will place a figure in the foreground and a set of buildings in the distance. There is a disconnection between these elements because the centre of the picture is dominated by a fence, a wall, a mound of earth or a road that screens out everything in between.

This creates a subtle sense of dislocation perfectly suited to Smart’s preference for urban settings. If Nature is eternal, then cities are in a constant state of flux, depending on the wealth or ambition of their inhabitants. In a busy metropolis such as Shanghai, for instance, the skyline seems to change from week to week. For Smart, the city and its surrounds provided an endless source of visual stimulation. He had no time for those who interpreted his work as a social critique or a vision of modern alienation, contending that artists shouldn’t style themselves as seers or prophets – although this didn’t prevent him from stacking his work with private jokes and satire.

Smart was unimpressed by those contemporary artists who took themselves more seriously than their art. In the studio, he felt that craftsmanship should be more important than any need to make a political statement. He would have been horrified by today’s widespread belief that the identity of the artist is more important than the quality of the work.

In Outside the Ministry, the only natural element is the sky, with its fluffy white clouds. The wall, which may be concrete or limestone, acts an impregnable barrier against the rest of the world, although there’s a warmth in the yellowish colours Smart has used. When we learn the title of the painting it seems to match the popular impression of most government ministries: entities that would like us to believe they exist only for our benefit, but whose inner workings are secretive and inexplicable. Ministries are fortresses in which decisions are made that shape our lives as citizens, not always for the better.

It was opportune to study this image shortly after viewing Paolo Sorrentino’s film, La Grazia, in which Tony Servillo plays a fictional President of Italy. For Sorrentino, it was the latest in succession of political movies, including scathing portraits of leaders such as Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi. The message from all these films is that politics is a game largely played behind closed doors, determined by factors that are revealed to the public only when some new scandal arises.

Smart’s Ministry lives up to this reputation. Aside from the legs of a large statue, all we see are bare, flat surfaces. The bald man in sunglasses could be a politician or a senior bureaucrat, a lobbyist or a businessman. Perhaps he’s a mafioso, carrying a valise stuffed with cash to be handed over to a corrupt public servant. He must have some form of business to transact at the Ministry, otherwise he wouldn’t be found in this barren location, waiting for a car or a contact. Like most characters in Smart’s paintings, his identity and motives are inscrutable, although there are many tantalising clues.

This imposing setting conjures up thoughts of the totalitarian ministries in George Orwell’s 1984 – Ministries of Truth, Love, Peace and Plenty, which stand for their exact opposites. It’s a disturbing fact that the second Trump administration has done an excellent job in turning these fictional departments into reality.

It would be interesting to know if Smart has modelled the bald man, or the two small figures engaged in discussion at the top of the stairs, on any living persons. Faces such as those of Giorgio Morandi or Alma Mahler have made sly appearances in his paintings, although the artist always claimed to use figures in a purely generic manner, as indicators of scale rather than keys to the meaning of a work.

The most famous generic figure in Smart’s œuvre is probably the portly bald man with one arm, in Cahill Expressway (1962). The bald protagonist in Outside the Ministry could be an Italian relation. In both pictures, the anonymous figure stands beneath a public sculpture that seems to have some heroic purpose but appears only in fragmented form. For Smart, all such statues could be the offspring of the ruin in Shelley’s Ozymandias – a monument to human vanity, mocked by time. There is a wry humour in these throwbacks to a classical world inserted into a cosmopolitan landscape being constantly remade by people whose values are forever changing.

One of Donald Trump’s more fanciful ideas is for a garden of American heroes featuring statues of important people, but this would be essentially a gallery of celebrities. The more grandiose monuments such as The Statue of Liberty, (or to use the title bestowed by its creator, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi: Liberty Enlightening the World), are based on abstractions. This is the kind of statue Smart gently mocks in the form of a leg of a giant allegorical figure protruding from a robe or toga. The obvious disjunction is between the lofty ideals embodied in the sculpture, and the grubby realities of politics and bureaucracy. The statue, in its way, is no less of a barrier against reality than the wall.

We might also consider the two yellow triangles, a no entry sign and the black-and-white striped poles at the top of the steps, to be another kind of artwork. These items bear the same resemblance to modern sculpture as the garden hose Smart would use as a model for The sculptor with work in situ (1984-85). In many of his other paintings, a traffic sign doubles as public art. These parodies of the avant-garde act as a vein of absurdist comedy in Smart’s work, a running gag on the legacy of Duchamp’s readymades.

The obvious architectural reference for Outside the Ministry, is the EUR – the site for the Esposizione Universale Roma of 1942, which was waylaid by the Second World War. Commissioned by Mussolini, the EUR was intended as a showcase of Fascist architecture. Today, after numerous changes, it’s a fashionable business and residential district.

I visited the EUR with Jeffrey Smart as part of a day-long tour of the archtectural highlights of Rome, courtesy of a knowledgeable taxi driver named Francesco, whom Jeffrey had befriended. The EUR was our final stop, its monumental, rationalist design a vision of a future that never eventuated.

The building in the background of the painting, which we assume to be the “ministry” appears to be loosely based on the EUR’s most iconic structure, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, often referred to as the Square Colosseum. It was intended to encompass Italy’s past, present and future in one design, incorporating a sleek, repetitive façade with a massive flight of steps and a collection of classical-style sculptures, representing aspects of Italian history and culture. The effect is weirdly reminiscent of one of Giorgio di Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.

Smart has drawn on these diverse elements, squaring off the rounded arches on the front of the Palazzo. Although made from concrete, the building is clad in travertine, lending it a creamy appearance Smart borrows for wall and steps. Conceptually, it exposes historical artifice and pretension, disguising a modern building material with a thin layer of stone favoured by the ancient Romans. It tells us that Mussolini’s dream of Italian glory was merely skin-deep.

A readymade movie set, the EUR has appeared in numerous films by a roll call of directors that includes Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci. This connection was not lost on Smart, who greatly admired the Italian movies of the 60s and 70s, and counted Bernardo Bertolucci as a friend. The cinematic influence is reflected in Outside the Ministry, which resembles a film still in which a mysterious man in sunglasses acts out a scene from a story we’ll never know, from a movie that only ever existed in the mind of the artist.

JEFFREY SMART
(1921-2013)
Outside the Ministry 1970
oil on canvas
80.0 x 90.0 cm
signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART

When Jeffrey Smart left Australia to make his home in Italy in 1965, he had already fallen out of love with the cutting-edge art of the day. Pop Art, Op Art, hard-edged abstraction were all the rage, but he could never see himself following any of those trends. As he recounts in his autobiography, Not Quite Straight (1996), Smart had found his direction in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, gazing upon the Alexander mosaic retrieved from Pompeii. The mosaic is based on a Hellenistic painting, long since lost, but the artist took heart in confirming that the painters of ancient Greece had been realists.

Smart had no time for Clement Greenberg’s doctrine that art progressed by stages, jettisoning aspects of theatricality until it became an ‘object’ in its own right. He felt that realism was timeless - a manner of making art that recurred throughout the ages, albeit in different guises. He saw the fashionable movements of the 1960s as flimsy and ephemeral, enjoying a burst of celebrity that would be extinguished when some new fad came along.

By 1982, Modernism had sputtered to a conclusion, and the short-lived moment of Postmodernism was fading fast. It seemed as if time’s arrow had missed the target, and all artistic tendencies had to learn to live together.

That was the lesson to be taken from the Venice Biennale of that year, which Artforum saw “at best as disorganised and at worst as a disaster.”^[i] One feature the magazine’s reviewer particularly disliked was “a nightmare of figuration — a warehouselike amalgam of heterogeneous works, primarily realist in persuasion and marked, in general, by bathetic emotional states.”

That ‘nightmarish’ figuration – including work by Lucian Freud, Avigdor Arikha and Antonio López García - may have piqued Smart’s interest, but he would come away from the Biennale feeling disenchanted by the chaotic spectacle of so much incompatible art crying out for attention.

Four Seats, Venice Biennale is his response to that experience. Smart has depicted four ugly seats arranged in pairs in the Giardini enclosure where the national pavilions are located. No artist but Smart might have visited the Biennale and found the most inspiring sight to be a set of park benches chiefly notable for stolid design and drabness of materials.

This is characteristic of the artist’s habit of finding “beauty” or at least something of interest, in scenes most people would barely notice. His paintings of highways, traffic signs, flyovers, lorries, and bare concrete structures invite us to look more closely at things we take for granted, implying that nothing is so utilitarian it doesn’t contain some faint trace of an aesthetic impulse. Smart brings the ‘non-spaces’ of the world to life, reinforcing the idea that one of the functions of art is to add an unexpected new dimension to everyday experience.

Not the least puzzling aspect of these pictures, which may be seen as a diptych, is whether we are looking at two pairs of seats or the same one in a different setting. Although the sign in the top panel is blue, and the one in the bottom yellow, the benches look remarkably similar. The litter in the top panel has been cleaned up in the bottom, while one wooden slat is slightly darker in colour, but it’s possible Smart used only a single pair as a model.

He lists Australia on the blue and yellow signs as a nod to the land of his birth, accompanied by Denmark, Bolivia and Norway. Great Britain appears on the blue sign but is replaced by Finland on the yellow. As Bolivia has never had a pavilion in the Gardini, and was not represented at the 1982 Biennale, one may see this as a gag.

The Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, famously argued that art’s role was to “make strange”, and these seats Smart found at the Biennale certainly fit that category. They give the impression that the designer has tried to create something for the Giardini that resembles modernist sculpture. Henry Moore made figures out of concrete, but these benches seem more closely aligned with Carl Andre’s minimal arrangements of concrete blocks or firebricks.

Rather than isolating the seats as misunderstood objects of beauty, Smart may simply be using them for satirical purposes, as in paintings such as The sculptor with work in situ (1984-85), in which the abstract “sculpture” is modelled on a garden hose; or Playground at Mondragone (1998), which features a bright red climbing frame that resembles a Minimalist public sculpture. This painting, in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW, served as an unwitting prophecy for for a gigantic milk crate Sydney City Council considered erecting in 2014 as a $2.5 million adornment for Belmore Park. The project would be scrapped in 2016, when costs blew out to $9 million.

The satire may be seen double-edged, as a whimsical comment on a Biennale so lacking in substance that Smart found more to admire in the park benches, and a sly dig at the art (and furniture) displayed in public spaces. In Venice, a city in which much of the architecture dates back to Renaissance times, one glance at these seats makes us suddenly, sadly, aware of the gulf that separates past from present.

JEFFREY SMART
(1921-2013)
Four Seats, Venice Biennale 1983
synthetic polymer paint on fibreglass canvas
71.0 x 46.5 cm; 88.5 x 64.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Jeffrey Smart

^[i] Kate Linker, ‘Venice Biennale 1982: No Form, Little Commitment’, Artforum, November 1982, p.84

Over the past year I’ve been involved with an ambitious project, the Australia China Artist Residency Art Prize. It’s an initiative of the Chinese property group TWT, headquartered on Sydney’s North Shore. In typically Chinese fashion, the idea was put into action almost immediately, despite concerns that we would leave ourselves inadequate time - hardly more than three months - to gather a strong field from Australia and China. As it happened, everything moved with remarkable speed. We received almost 300 submissions, which were whittled down to 61 finalists, two-thirds from Australia, one-third from China. What was most exciting was the exceptional quality of the work, which made it difficult to choose a final exhibition.

We gave first prize of $100,000 to Peter Godwin for his painting, Li River (Pale Peak and Mist), which sprang from a visit to Guilin province, where the artist confronted a fairytale landscape depicted by generations of Chinese artists. Godwin had to find a way to paint this scene that didn’t simply mimic the brush-and-ink artists but paid homage to those traditions. The result is a landscape imbued with a Chinese spirit of place, quite unlike anything previously attempted.

Two further prizes of $5,000 each, contributed by real estate empress, Monika Tu and her company, Black Diamondz, were for Digital Art and for work by an artist under 30 years of age. The former went to Geng Xue, swiftly becoming recognised as one of today’s leading exponents of multi-media, with a three-channel video called Seven-Day Dream, that incorporates glass sculpture, AI and Celtic mythology. Don’t ask me to explain the details.

The winner of the Supernova prize for a young artist was Ziyuan Shi, for Echo, an outstanding installation piece that combined a video of a gorge in the Kimberley with a shallow tank of water in which hollow ceramic rocks coloured in the distinctive ochres of the region, circulated and bumped into each other, making a delicate chiming sound. Both idea and execution could hardly be bettered.

We gave a Highly Commended to another staggeringly well-conceived work, To install a heart in Taihu rock, by Xiaoxue Zhang; and Commendeds to a mind-boggling painting of a hay bale by Deirdre Bean, and a video landscape created with nano technology by Suxuan Jiang, that resembles a brush-and-ink painting in motion. This piece is also being shown at the 2026 Venice Biennale.

I won’t go into any greater detail, aside from noting that this first-ever iteration of one of this country’s richest art prizes, attracted a range of big-name artists from both Australia and China, including Indigenous artists, Naomi Hobson and Jenna Lee. The exhibition included paintings, sculptures, ceramics and installation, and a jaw-dropping selection of digital works. In brief, there was room for both tradition and innovation.

The competition was open to Australian and Chinese nationals, but the Chinese artists had the extra difficulty of getting work to Sydney in time for the show. Given this hurdle, the response was overwhelming.

The nominal theme was landscape, interpreted in the broadest possible manner, a subject chosen for its universal appeal but with one eye to avoiding the shallow yet strident political statements that have become so commonplace in contemporary exhibitions. The theme also encouraged artists to demonstrate their relationship with the culture of the other country. Peter Godwin did this superbly, as did Ziyuan Shi. In judging the prize, we took this cross-cultural exchange seriously, paying close attention to Australian artists who had visited China and vice versa.

Now here’s the punchline. Although we have tried mightily to attract media attention for this event, most outlets – with the exception of the Chinese language media – have not shown the slightest interest. I’m going to try and analyse this calculated snub.

The chief motivations behind the ACAR Art Prize were to assert the ongoing strength of cultural ties between Australia and China, and to address a local decline in interest in work by Chinese artists who were all the rage a decade ago. While these artists (including a large group of emigres who have come to live in Australia), are still making high-quality work, the eye of art fashion has turned elsewhere.

Not long ago, Chinese artists featured prominently in the annual Archibald, Wynne and Sulman competitions at the Art Gallery of NSW. Indeed, it was widely believed to be only a matter of time until a Chinese artist such as Jiawei Shen or Fu Hong emerged as a winner. Instead, Chinese artists faded out of the picture as they ceased being selected. The big push nowadays is for Indigenous artists.

In an ideal world the trustees of the AGNSW would not play favourites or privilege one type of artist over another, but there’s no denying there’s been a shift in preferences. Within a week or so we’ll learn the make-up of this year’s Archibald season exhibitions and see if the Chinese fare any better.

While this has been going on, TWT has been supporting cultural connections between the two countries with a residency program that sends four Australian artists to China every year and brings four Chinese artists to Australia. The most recent Chinese artist to take advantage of this program was rising star, Cao Yu, along with her husband, sculptor Hu Qingyang, whose work has been collected by White Rabbit Gallery and the National Gallery of Victoria. Both artists have work in the ACAR Art Prize exhibition. Cao Yu’s startling video piece was created during her residency in Sydney.

Unlike their peers in the property world, TWT has also purchased contemporary Australian art on a regular basis and will use the Prize to add to its corporate collection.

If this sounds like an ad for a property group, it’s mainly an ad for the kind of activities many local – and larger - corporations could undertake had they the inclination. In promoting awareness of Chinese culture, the ACAR Art Prize is not that different from the annual Korean Australian Arts Foundation Art Prize, which raises awareness of Korean culture. I’ve been working with that prize for the past 12 years.

When it comes to supporting cultural activities, Australia has a lot to learn from South Korea and China, although there are marked differences between these Asian nations in terms of state vs. private sponsorship, and the kind of product each is prepared to export to the world. Successive Korean governments have sold K-culture to the entire planet, but the Chinese, while funding a lavish program for public artworks at home, have been conservative to the point of paranoia with their overseas ventures.

With China, we need to look to individual artists who show with leading art dealers around the world, while opportunities to exhibit at home have become progressively more constricted. A project such as the ACAR Art Prize can be welcomed by Chinese officials in Australia, even if they themselves would be unlikely to sponsor a transnational art exhibition or competition.

The entire event has been conducted in a spirit of good will, generosity and camaraderie, with complete transparency. So why has the media given it the cold shoulder?

I think the most likely reason is the reason for hosting the prize in the first place: a widespread antipathy for China that has found its way into the media landscape in recent years, like weedkiller being used on a thriving crop.

Xi Jinping’s authoritarianism may have done little to endear China to the rest of the world, but we can’t be contemptuous of the economic might of our biggest trading partner. At a time when Donald Trump seems to decide US foreign policy with a spin of the roulette wheel, we are in no position to sneer at the Chinese when they present themselves as a bastion of stability. We may diverge from the Chinese government on many issues, notably human rights, but the only way to proceed is through respectful disagreement.

The late, unlamented Morrison government tried to score political points at home by demonising China, and we paid a heavy price economically. Albo has acted in a more responsible manner, and the trade has come trickling back. It’s a simple equation: no matter how much we might disagree with the Chinese it’s far better to have them as friends and partners rather than enemies. Significant differences of opinion are better discussed in diplomatic circles rather than blazed across the front page of a tabloid.

The more subtle approach now favoured by the Australian government hasn’t prevented a large part of the media from voicing its criticisms and suspicions of Beijing – and we shouldn’t expect anything different. The free exchange of opinion is one of the qualities that distinguishes us, honourably, from China. I wonder, though, if that negative political sentiment hasn’t found its way into the cultural sphere, prompting arts organisations and arts journalists to avoid Chinese topics.

My first trip to China was in 1989, a month before the Tiananmen Square uprising, and I’ve been back many times since. Like other repeat visitors, I’ve learned to take the rough with the smooth, to accept the constant swings between openness and repression. What’s undeniable is the resilience of the Chinese people, the rapid progress in infrastructure and social services, and the inexorable growth of prosperity. The arts have played a role, but it’s been a bumpy ride. The years when Chinese contemporary art was at the forefront of every international exhibition are over, but as revealed by regular shows at the White Rabbit Gallery, there’s still a lot of excellent work being made.

While the mainstream media apparently finds nothing worth covering in a new art prize that unites Australian and Chinese artists in what is essentially a gesture of friendship, there was no delay in reporting how the University of Queensland Press had dumped a forthcoming children’s book illustrated by Matt Chun (AKA. Matthew Jones), an artist who has become better known for antisemitic hate speech than for his artwork.

If one looks dispassionately at the things Chun has posted on social media, which I won’t repeat here, or his rabble-rousing attempts to demonise the Jewish philanthropists of Melbourne, it’s hard to see how any reputable publisher could view him as someone they’d wish to support. He’s not exactly a role model for children. Nevertheless, Chun’s sacking has triggered the same chorus of outrage that flared up when Adelaide Writers’ Week dis-invited Randa Abdel-Fattah. Once again, we’ve read about a shocking assault on free speech which prompted a group of concerned writers to sever ties with the publisher. One of them was Randa Abdel-Fattah herself.

As UQP published Abdel-Fattah’s novel, Discipline, and stood behind her during the Adelaide debacle, it’s hard to believe they’ve become rabid enemies of free speech overnight. The point all these disgruntled writers and serial self-cancellers seem to overlook is that the ‘free speech’ they champion is never really free. When you exercise your democratic right to say hateful things about other people, with every possibility of stirring up prejudice and violence, the subjects of your speech are paying a price. The risk you take by going to extremes is that the tables may be turned, and suddenly it’s you that gets handed the bill – which is exactly what has happened in Matt Chun’s case.

When your ‘free speech’ offends against basic standards of human decency, it’s even more obscene to play the victim or the martyr – or to let your friends put you on a pedestal. There are many, many people horrified by Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon, myself included, who don’t feel the need to vilify fellow Australians born into the Jewish faith. There was no necessity for Chun to spew ugly rhetoric, and every reason to expect there would be consequences. It’s no more noble to be a Jew hater than to be a Muslim hater. It’s all frankly disgusting.

Despite the predictable hullaballoo, as Chun’s buddies rally around and cry foul, there are plenty of people – both Jew and Gentile – who will welcome UQP’s firm action. Although the publisher is wearing a sad face, it must be a relief to get rid of so many would-be firebrands in one blow. UQP will not close-up shop, like Writers Week, but it will be more cautious with its choice of talent.

“I cannot bear to publish my next book, which I am currently writing,” said Abdel-Fattah, “with a publisher that has empowered bullies.”

The last book was Discipline, perhaps the next one should be titled Self-Awareness.

Bullies, racists, perpetrators of cultural violence, political stooges of the right-wing press… UQP has certainly gone downhill fast! It’s amazing how rapidly friends can be turned into mortal enemies. In the fantasy world in which Matt Chun and his friends live, they are free to offend whoever they like, but oh, quelle horreur! when a publisher declines to endorse their actions.

I don’t know about you, gentle reader, but I’m so fatigued by these endless, sanctimonious charades of victimhood from aggressive bigots that I can’t help feeling the act is wearing very thin. There are only so many times one can be outraged over some alleged crime against freedom of speech. There are limits as to how often you can attack “Zionists” and pretend you’re not being antisemitic. There’s got to be an end to this historically threadbare equation between Palestine and Australia as “settler colonies”. The lead actors in this farce may be eager for repeat performances, but by this stage the audience is heading for the turnstiles.

I doubt that Australian literature would be much poorer if none of Matt Chun’s friends ever published again. It is, however, an irreparable loss that David Malouf died this week. A gentleman and a scholar, a writer of great precision, a poet of exceptional ability, David was arguably the greatest literary figure on UQP’s books. When I think of his quietly spoken and civilised demeanour compared to the loud-mouthed ideologues who have jumped ship, cursing as they go, it’s easy to see the difference between a writer who has made his mark for all time, and those most likely to disappear in a cloud of hot air.

Is this tedious, repetitive story, featuring the same cast of outraged writers worthy of more attention than the inaugural ACAR Art Prize? Obviously, I don’t think so, but unlike those big-hearted warriors of free speech, I’m probably biased.

It’s worth noting that the current exhibition at the White Rabbit Gallery is called The Hooligans, in reference to the Chinese term, Liumang, which was once used to refer to anyone who offended against the social order. One didn’t need to be a political activist or a criminal to be classed as a “hooligan”, it was enough to be gay, an outspoken feminist, a defender of heritage or community action. Apply the term to Australians with the same rigour and we’d all be hooligans.

In China there are very real dangers in opposing the social and moral tenets laid down by the government. One may be arrested and imprisoned on the smallest pretext with no chance of a fair trial, but these are extreme measures. It’s far more common for the state to exercise a little friendly persuasion, and most rebels quickly take the hint.

The White Rabbit show brings together works by 28 artists who have been prepared to take their chances and buck the system. Not all of them live in China, and many take an oblique approach, such Yu Ji, whose small painting at the entrance of the show depicts a red tiger lazing on the ground. The title is translated as The Tiger’s Butt Cannot be Touched (2023). Its near neighbour is a sculpture by Tian Longyu of a life-size elephant covered in tiger stripes, with a tiger’s face implanted on its backside. Both works are variations on the old adage about the dangers of catching a tiger by the tail.

A large painting by Meng Site, also represented in the ACAR Art Prize, called Future Land of Happiness (2023), is a surreal satire that transforms a street into a circus. The symbolism is insistent, but perfectly ambiguous.

There’s nothing mysterious about some of the work in the upstairs galleries, such as Chen Zhe’s The Bearable (2007-10), a photo series that documents the artist’s compulsive acts of self-harm, or Chen Lingyang’s Twelve Flower Months (1999-2000), being a dozen photos of the artist’s menstrual cycle accompanied by twelve different flowers. Chen frames her explicit images within hand-held mirrors and other devices of traditional Chinese culture, but it remains a highly provocative installation.

As is often the case at White Rabbit, the best is saved for last, with a top floor display of eight large paintings by Song Yongping, that chronicle recent decades of Chinese history in a riotous, no-holds-barred fashion reminiscent of Jörg Immendorff’s Café Deutschland series (c. 1980), which did a similar job on German history. Song’s paintings are loosely but vigorously painted, imbued with a savage energy. The last in the series, which shows deposed Premier, Zhao Ziyang, practicing his golf swing in Tiananmen Square surrounded by tanks, pandas and watermelons, was reputedly painted during a residency in Sydney.

For a Chinese artist to make paintings like these requires genuine courage, but that fierce, rebellious spirit is everywhere in The Hooligans. It shows us that no matter how restrictive or heavy-handed the state may be, artists will always find a way of expressing themselves, inserting a wedge of freedom into the crushing weight of conformity demanded by a paternalistic, surveillance culture that keeps a close watch on the public and private lives of its citizens.

Compare the bravery and intelligence of these Chinese artists with the political grandstanding of that noisy crowd of Australian writers complaining that their ‘freedom of speech’ has been threatened by a publisher refusing to work with a brazen antisemite. In China there are very real consequences for stepping out of line, and no way of knowing when you might have overstepped the ever-changing boundaries of official permissibility. Yet artists know it’s better to adapt, to be flexible and stay in the game rather than opt out and sulk.

In Australia, even the most vociferous extremists can do pretty much what they like, often with the financial support of government funding bodies and other philanthropic groups. When a publisher decides to pull the plug, a mass self-cancellation event ensues, like lemmings racing for the cliff. Yet it’s hard to believe the UQP walk-out will result in any financial hardship for the main actors. Given the willingness of our own paternalistic state to support partisan and politically inflammatory activities, these heroic types shouldn’t have to wait too long for their next cultural welfare cheque.

By way of something different, the current art column looks at the exhibition, Holding Ground at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, which features 17 artists working in various regions of NSW, responding to the encroachments of climate change. There is a political point of view being trumpeted in these works, but the most pressing concern has been to capture the beauty of a natural environment gradually being lost. The exhibition serves as a reminder that all the energy being directed into the politics of the Middle East, seems to have been siphoned away from environmental issues that have only become more urgent in recent years.

The film review looks at The Stranger, François Ozon’s faithful take on the novel by Albert Camus. It’s a stylish and sensual adaptation that introduces us to a man almost completely devoid of human feeling. Meursault is neither good nor evil, he’s simply a blank who enjoys life as it comes along, until he commits a murder. Today, this kind of ‘hollow man’ feels like an increasingly familiar social type – a receptacle for whatever attracts their attention, spurred to action without any need for knowledge or reflection. For Camus - a writer who understood what rebellion really meant - it was the role of art to analyse this phenomenon, not to promote it.

The ACAR Art Prize, ACAR Arts Centre, St. Leonards, until 18 June, acar.org.au

The Hooligans, White Rabbit Gallery, Sydney, until 17 June, whiterabbitcollection.org

According to independent curator, Gavin Wilson, the world is lurching toward “an environmental eclipse”. A lot of scientists and environmentalists would be ready to agree with him and provide the evidence. As for the rest of us, it’s perplexing where the debates about climate change now stand. In the United States, which exerts an overwhelming influence on the rest of the world, the Biden administration took a constructive stance on climate issues. Yet when the 2024 election campaign came around, the Democrats seemed terrified of mentioning the environment, treating it as a guaranteed vote loser.

In 2021, a large part of humanity was gripped by existential terror over the impact of global warming. By 2024, a populist countermovement had emerged, claiming the climate threat was vastly exaggerated: a piece of left-wing alarmism that would cost workers their jobs. Although the science remained the same it was the political rhetoric, fuelled by social media rabble-rousing, that was altering public opinion.

For governments supposedly committed to climate targets, the rational way to proceed would have been to double down on the argument that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables did not herald an employment crisis but a necessary transfer of jobs between industries, as a new, cleaner form of energy took centre stage. One can’t say the same about an AI revolution set to decimate the workforce with the complicity of corporate and political leaders. For those replaced by AI there is no fall-back.

Beyond economic logic, which calls for a gradual changeover to renewables to minimise the effects on employment and industry, there’s a moral argument. Even if it hurts the profits of major multinational corporations and forces governments to rethink their policies, isn’t it better – in an absolute sense - to phase out fuel sources that are polluting the environment, despoiling the planet for future generations, and causing endless global conflict, as we’ve seen with the fracas over the Strait of Hormuz?

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Albert Camus’s L’Étranger (1942), is the kind of novel every bookish teenager once felt compelled to read. Less than 70 pages, it’s not much of a commitment, but it leaves an indelible impression. I read the book at high school and have returned a couple of times since. Unlike much of the literature consumed in one’s teens, Camus’s novel feels just as striking when read at a mature age.

Often known as The Outsider in English, following Stuart Gilbert’s translation, (no longer considered the standard), it’s as disturbing today as it must have been to readers in the 1940s. Part of its impact comes from Camus’s bare, unembellished prose, inspired by Hemingway, but it’s also a philosophical novel, viewed as one of the key works of existentialist literature.

Existentialism, a leading intellectual current in the years following World War Two, is not much spoken about nowadays, perhaps because we’ve internalised its insights so successfully. To say that humanity is alone in a Godless universe, and if God does exist, he doesn’t care, probably describes the beliefs of most people in the western world, who go through their lives with scarcely a thought for the hereafter. We may tolerate all forms of religious belief and feel religion is vaguely a good thing, but for most people God no longer plays a central role in their day-to-day existence.

Those who practice some form of faith would reject existentialism, and always have, but it’s no longer a matter of urgent debate. Most of us today are existentialists without even knowing it, which is why many viewers will find that François Ozon’s film of Camus’s novel touches parts of the psyche which have lain dormant for years.

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Last week I was speculating that it would be some time before we found out the membership of the “Five Expert Panels” appointed to advise Arts Minister, Tony Burke, on an update to Labor’s National Cultural Policy. That original document of 2023 gloried under the title, Revive, the new one doesn’t have a snazzy name, but I’d like to suggest Dead Again.

Anyway, I was completely wrong in believing Tony would keep these names under wraps. The panellists were revealed almost immediately, and what a list it is. Fifteen people are spread across five committees, with the same titles as last time: First Nations First, A Place for Every Story, Centrality of the Artist, Strong Cultural Infrastructure, and Engaging the Audience. Four panellists are involved with the theatre; three with film; three with music; two with other branches of the performing arts; one with a literary group with a Southeast Asian emphasis; there is one Aboriginal arts administrator, and precisely one artist: 30-something Holly Greenwood, who specialises in stylised paintings of pubs and has an exhibiting career of roughly ten years.

As to what experience Holly has sitting on advisory boards, mingling with a wide variety of artists and art institutions, and considering their needs, that’s a complete mystery to me. For all I know, Holly may be a dazzling intellect and a dedicated advocate with first-rate organisational skills, but she doesn’t appear to have much of a track record. One of her claims to fame is that she is the daughter of actor, Hugo Weaving and artist, Katrina Greenwood, but this is not exactly relevant. Rather naively I would have expected the Ministry to choose an artist – or curator, or academic, or arts administrator – with a lot more experience. How Holly’s name rose to the top of the pack is anyone’s guess. One suspects it’s another case of elevating a bright young person over a lot of worthy oldies who may take a narrower view of the government’s cultural agenda.

All these panellists are expected to use “their lived experience and specialist knowledge to inform the Minister for the Arts and the Policy Advisory Group on key issues and themes related to their pillar. They will draw these insights from the public consultation and advise of any additional issues that should be considered.”

The dictionary defines “pillar” as “a tall, vertical structure of stone, wood, or metal, used as a support for a building, or as an ornament or monument,” or “a solid mass of coal left to support the roof of a mine.” Well, which is it? The government would like us to think of these panels as an ornament to Australian culture, a monument to their visionary approach to the arts… but perhaps they’re just holding up a roof over a hole in the ground.

Whatever we make of Tony Burke’s five pillars of wisdom, the real action lies with the Policy Advisory Group, which consists of nine arts executives, including five CEOS. There are three people from Creative Australia: CEO, Adrian Collette; Chair, Wesley Enoch; and Deputy Chair, Rosheen Garnon, along with representatives of the Melbourne Fringe; Screen Australia; the Australian Film, Television and Radio School; the Sydney Opera House; the Creative Writing program at the University of Technology Sydney; and the Australasian Performing Right Organisation.

Please note, there is not a single visual arts specialist in this group. This means, from a grand total of 24 appointments, the only visual arts person is Holly Greenwood, unless we count Chad Creighton, who is CEO of the Aboriginal Art Centre Hub of WA, which could hardly be seen as representative of all artists, art galleries, museums, art schools, and art organisations - both professional and amateur – around Australia.

I hope I don’t sound too cynical if I suggest this augurs badly for a visual arts sector that is already under pressure – partly from the narrow-minded policies of state and territory governments, partly through its own deficiencies of imagination and policy.

In the former category, one need think only of the NSW State government pouring hundreds of millions into a Powerhouse project guaranteed to be the biggest white elephant in Australian history, while defunding 18 regional galleries, starving the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art of funds, and effectively liquidating the Australian Design Centre. In the Northern Territory we’ve seen a government trying to sell off a new, long-awaited museum development as a shopping centre.

When it comes to the sector’s self-inflicted wounds, one could start with exhibition programs so devoted to marginal interests they could hardly fail to keep audiences at bay. This reinforces an inability to attract sponsorship when private and corporate funds are needed more desperately than ever before. Neither is there any willingness among institutions to get together and lobby governments for a better deal. Our leading art museums prefer to kowtow to power rather than challenge its decisions.

This timidity has contributed to the virtual exclusion of the visual arts from the panels mulling over a National Cultural Policy. As there is no-one apart from Holly to argue their corner, will we see visual arts organisations speaking out in protest at this neglect? Don’t hold your breath.

The composition of the Policy Advisory Board argues a complete devotion to the status quo. Over the past year Creative Australia has presided over a shipwreck, headlined by the fiasco of the Venice Biennale selection, de-selection and re-selection. At every stage, CA messed up. When media investigations, chiefly in The Australian, revealed an organisation in which favouritism, inadequate oversight and conflicts of interest were rife, CA did nothing to address these issues and the Minister was untroubled. In their annual report, CA boasted about what a great year it had been, as if all the damaging stories had never existed.

Now we find no fewer than three CA executives sitting on the board which supposedly decides on a National Cultural Policy, but not a single person from an Australian public gallery or museum.

Get ready for another year of cultural mediocrity, blurred by ever greater quantities of spin, as the government tells us everything is going brilliantly and the media dutifully reprints their press releases. With the near extinction of critical voices in the mainstream there is no-one ready to question the quality of exhibitions, the ways in which government money is spent, or the tides of nepotism and corruption to which authorities turn a blind eye. If I said the ABC’s arts coverage was fatuous, I’d be flattering the national broadcaster.

There is nothing to suggest a National Arts Policy will address genuine problems such as the poisonous political divisions made evident in the ‘free speech’ fracas that killed Writers Week at the Adelaide Festival. Everything the government and the art institutions have done over the past year suggests they believe the best approach to these issues is to promote artists with narrow, partisan political agendas, and put Indigenous culture in such a position of pre-eminence that a general good will has given way to widespread boredom and resentment.

Any government genuinely committed to sorting out a National Cultural Policy, would have to take a serious look at the way the ‘First Nations First’ precept has become counterproductive, giving a boost to the careers of a small group that purports to speak for all Indigenous people. When galleries and museums are so smitten with an ideological agenda that Indigenous art or ‘women’s art’ or some other category absorbs a disproportionate amount of exhibition space and resources, it can only have a negative impact in terms of audiences and sponsorship.

If a favoured category reflects the temper of the times, one might expect a steady, organic growth of interest and acceptance, as we’ve seen with Indigenous art over the past 30 years. But much of the progress that has accrued has been derailed by an aggressive affirmative action program pushing everything else to one side. Art which was working its way inexorably from the margins has been thrust into prominence, while previously dominant work has been relegated to the margins. The sensible policy would have been to allow for a gradual infiltration of mainstream taste, increasing the percentage of work by Indigenous or women artists, while not abruptly severing ties with art that is familiar and widely appreciated.

In other words, don’t be so ready to dismiss the old white guys who are still making significant art, especially if the alternative is something dull, amateurish or politically dogmatic produced by the right ‘kind’ of artist. The danger lies in promoting second-rate art for reasons that are chiefly political rather than aesthetic.

It’s almost impossible to imagine Tony Burke’s Expert Panels or Policy Advisory Board addressing such a fundamental issue. When the initial “pillar” remains “First Nations First” it tells us to get ready for more of the same. It’s a variation on the time-honoured tactic of trying to dig oneself out of a hole, or perhaps pretending it’s not a hole at all, but a mighty peak.

I’d argue it doesn’t do much for the long-term health of any artform, including Indigenous art, when institutions decide it must take precedence over everything else and defy criticism. One of the tangible results of this hesitancy has been the NGA’s willingness to stand with an APY Artists Collective that has been mired in controversy. The results of a government-sponsored investigation into the group have been effectively buried, as if it’s unimaginable that an Aboriginal arts organisation could be involved in any form of wrongdoing. But this is a story for another time.

Art movements become dull when they attain the status of an orthodoxy. It may have been an exciting breakthrough when Streeton was painting his early sun-drenched Australian landscapes, but years later Australian art was overrun with gum trees and grassy paddocks. The first hard-edged abstractions seemed incredibly radical but were eventually seen as large-scale decorations.

Art needs to be allowed to live, breathe and possibly die on its own terms, not be cultivated artificially in museum hothouses, or kept alive by institutional life support systems. It’s the role of art museums to display and collect the best art of the past and present, not to lay down politically determined rules about what kind of art is desirable or permissible. The best art of all genres must be allowed to rise to the top, while the lesser work falls away. Instead, we’ve become terrified of the concept of ‘excellence’, as if it represents a sinister form of discrimination. Instead, governments have adopted a welfare model for arts funding, channeling money to organisations and individuals with the least commercial potential.

In many countries there is no government support for the visual arts at all, but in Australia we are so committed to this model it would be catastrophic to simply pull the plug. This doesn’t mean, however, that governments should decide which kinds of art are important or irrelevant. The danger in the way this National Cultural Policy is being framed is that it feels unpleasantly proscriptive. First Nations First means putting everything else second, regardless of the preferences of the public or the wider art scene. In the film industry, the same strictures have seen an upsurge in funding for Indigenous films in a milieu in which most Australian movies struggle to find backers. The problem is that audiences haven’t shown a reciprocal enthusiasm.

One can see the virtuous emptiness of the government’s policy ideas in the names they’ve given to the five “pillars”, uncritically retained from 2023. First Nations First lays down a blatant ideological agenda. A Place for Every Story is a piece of syrupy, quasi-democratic sloganeering. Centrality of the Artist is a fine, clichéd sentiment – along the lines of “Let’s put an end to poverty and hunger! – but it means nothing, because artists are no more than pawns in this game. Strong Cultural Infrastructure is a great idea but much of what governments have done over the past year has only served to undermine our hard-won cultural infrastructure. As for Engaging the Audience, a better title might be: Ignoring the Audience or Telling the Audience What to Like.

This feels neither serious nor practical. It’s a smokescreen, a charade of consultation and discussion intended to make us believe the government is listening to our concerns and responding in kind. The Coalition favours highly paid consultancies, Labor prefers committees of experts and stakeholders, but the results are roughly the same: a rubber stamping of policies that are already decided - or being decided by a small coterie of advisors who are not members of any public committee. The visual arts, as previously noted, are barely in the mix.

What we are getting is a top-down program for a national culture that owes more to the Soviet or Maoist model than to any democratic process genuinely responsive to artists and audiences. Instead, we get a duplicitous pretence of caring and sharing, listening and acting.

This is a way of shaping culture, often at the expense of activities that are already alive and well established. It’s not a forest of ideas, but a plantation in which one kind of crop is cultivated while others are treated as weeds. To extend the metaphor, it would be far better if the government saw its role as one of helping to tend and care for a functioning ecosystem, rather than uproot mature trees and substitute rows of saplings. This approach to Australian culture feels roughly similar to the way the palm oil business has tended the forests of Borneo.

Could the Minister contend that the past three years have been a golden age for Australian culture? After a procession of scandals and failures it seems the official response is that nothing needs to change. The National Cultural Policy is a fantasy of control, whereby a paternalistic state lays down an approved path for Australian art and artists. But the first step should be to step back and ask, “What’s going wrong?” rather than bask in self-congratulation.

It would be a great saving in time and money if state and federal governments could simply agree to fund core organisations such as public galleries and museums, and let the public, alternative and commercial gallery sector decide what art is most deserving of our attention. A National Cultural Policy’s first tenet should be to support freedom of choice, not to create artificial hierarchies between different types of art and artist. Not that long ago I would have welcomed the idea of government pursuing a broad-based policy, but having seen the results, and the way it is being presented, I’m afraid this process hasn’t provided cultural leadership so much as ideological confusion. To make such a policy work would require a degree of vision, intelligence and clear-sightedness that is currently in very short supply. When there is no facility for self-criticism but a great readiness to indulge in motherhood statements and positive propaganda, it’s clear our political masters can no longer distinguish policy from public relations.

The most recent art column, on the National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, takes up some of the issues just discussed, but in more specific terms. It’s a show that’s big on style but short on substance, touting its greater mission as the ‘decolonisation’ of the gallery. I can’t offer a clear definition of this process, but it’s hard to see how it would improve matters at an institution already notorious for playing favourites and making bad decisions.

The film review looks at The President’s Cake, a landmark feature from Iraq by Hasan Hadi, that tells the story of Lamia, a nine-year-old schoolgirl obliged to bake a cake for Saddam Hussein’s birthday. It’s a movie in the best traditions of recent Middle Eastern cinema: poignant, dark, funny, and morally complex. One lesson from the Iraqis may be that you don’t need a National Cultural Policy to make a good film.

At a time when Donald Trump is threatening to destroy “a whole civilisation” in the Middle East, The President’s Cake, puts us on the ground during those days of the early 1990s, when the United States was applying the squeeze to Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, following his attack on Kuwait. Hasan Hadi’s directorial debut reveals the price paid by ordinary people when a superpower imposes crippling sanctions and military strikes on a nation already suffering under a corrupt, brutal regime.

What’s most wonderful about this movie is the way Hadi frames his narrative through the experiences of a nine-year-old girl named Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef), who draws the short straw at school and is given the onerous task of baking a cake for Saddam’s birthday. It’s as if we are watching a bizarre quest, with this stubborn schoolgirl going in search of ingredients in the big city, overcoming one obstacle after another.

For us, baking a cake might not sound like an earth-shattering responsibility, but when the teacher tells you that failure to produce the goods may result in the torture and victimisation of your family, it takes on a sense of urgency. What makes it even worse, was that in Iraq at the time, sanctions had made it difficult to obtain the bare necessities of life. Eggs, flour, sugar and baking powder were in short supply and selling for high prices.

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Ideally, I should have written about the 5^th National Indigenous Art Triennial months ago, but somehow the show kept slipping back in the queue. Whenever that happens there’s usually an underlying reason. After reading the catalogue I think I understand my hesitations.

The subtitle of this Triennial is After the Rain, which projects a message of new life and vitality. One thinks immediately of the parched earth of the Outback, where a shower of rain brings forth a sudden explosion of blossoms and wildflowers. I’ve seen this myself, and it’s a sight that raises everyone’s spirits.

This is the way guest curator and artist, Tony Albert, wants us to respond to the work he has selected. It’s a celebration of Indigenous creativity and resilience that encompasses artists young and old, from the Bush and the city. He shows us Aboriginal people as one big happy family, ready to embrace “Queer” identities, and urban ‘Blaks’ like himself, who turn up on country to sample life in the remote communities.

In this respect, Albert has been diligent. The catalogue, a remarkable piece of design by Aretha Brown, includes numerous photos of the curator visiting artists all over Australia. It also includes unctuous letters of invitation he sent in specially decorated envelopes, and extracts from a working journal filled with drawings, paintings, inscriptions and photos. The journal is a work of art, and the same might be said about the exhibition.

I’ve never seen a catalogue with so many photos of the curator, or such a personalised approach to the choice of artists. It’s not mere narcissism or self-promotion, it’s a deliberate strategy to create the impression this is not just another exhibition but a spiritual communion between artists united in their shared Indigenous identity, with Albert as the presiding guru.

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In a week in which federal Arts Minister, Tony Burke, announced a new instalment of a National Cultural Policy, I thought it might be a good time to look at the way another nation, namely South Korea, has carved out a global role for itself by means of art and popular culture.

The exhibition, Hallyu! The Korean Wave, at the National Museum of Australia until 10 May, provides a busy, broadranging survey of the products and innovations that have allowed this most ambitious of countries to propel itself into world consciousness while Australia lingers on the sidelines. If I had to name the most significant point of contrast it’s that South Korea (hence “Korea”) has had an outward-looking attitude towards culture, whereas Australia has become increasingly insular and provincial.

Hallyu – which literally means “the Korean Wave” – has conquered the world with the active assistance of successive Korean governments that have invested heavily in new technology and culture. The turning point was the Asian financial crisis of 1997, in which Korea’s roaring economy hit the skids when it was found many of the giant conglomerates, the chaebols, had been caught overborrowing and were now facing bankruptcy. Relief came in the form of a US$58 billion loan from the IMF, and massive, obligatory restructuring.

One way the Koreans pulled themselves out of this hole was to turn towards hi tech and culture. They realised manufacturing was becoming a liability, and that fast action would allow the country to become a world leader in the new digital economy. By 2010, broadband had been made available to all Korean households, five years ahead of schedule. The total cost was US $24.5 billion, of which only US$1.5 billion came from the taxpayer.

Remember what happened in Australia in 2009, when the Rudd government undertook to provide broadband for 93% of Australians by 2020? The roll-out was barely moving when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013 and expressed horror at the cost of the project. The Coalition’s changes succeeded brilliantly in making the NBN both more expensive and less efficient. We ended up spending roughly $50 billion for a second-rate service.

Maybe we needed a massive economic collapse and an IMF bailout to learn what the Koreans had figured out: that the economic spoils in this brave new world will go to the most connected. With connectedness came new ways of interacting, and new crazes such as the minirooms – a virtual environment that could be arranged and furnished to fit one’s fantasies. The Hallyu! catalogue tells us the miniroom concept was introduced in 2001, and by 2009 two-thirds of Koreans owned one.

Korea’s embrace of the Internet led to surges in online gaming and shopping. It was crucial to the growth of K-Pop, which would become one of the country’s most successful exports.

With the means of communication in place, the Koreans set about providing the content, with a new focus on the arts, subsidised and supported by government. Over the past two decades, it’s not just K-Pop, but Korean gaming, drama, cuisine, fashion, literature and movies that have made steady inroads into global consciousness - and markets. I’ll spare you the figures, but they are phenomenal. What the Koreans realised was that the arts could be a huge international money-spinner and a source of soft power. As the world became hooked on Korean drama and pop music, tourism surged. All over the world there has been a steady growth of Korean language courses, Korean Studies at universities, and dedicated Korean galleries in leading museums, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the British Museum.

The Koreans have a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism – a combination that makes perfect sense, and doesn’t avoid the word, “culture” in favour of that soft term, “the arts”. When Labor was elected with a landslide, it would have been an opportune time to finally coin a Ministry of Culture, with the greater aspirations that entails, instead we have Tony Burke as Minister for “the Arts”: the minor part of a portfolio that also includes Home Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship, and Cyber Security.

The difference is obvious: the Koreans link culture with sport as equally important sources of tourist revenue. We have a Minister for Sport, in Anika Wells, and a Minister for Trade and Tourism in Don Farrell. Sport is given prime importance as a freestanding ministry, whereas tourism is bracketed anomalously with trade, as if tourists were no more than imported goods.

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In Korea, another area that has benefited enormously from government support is the film industry. In Korea, there have been two “golden ages” of cinema – the 1960s, when a variety of films received massive local support; and the early 2000s, which saw the rise of star filmmakers such as Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon Ho, and Lee Chang-dong. The pay-off came when Bong’s Parasite won best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards.

In Australia, our ‘Golden Age’ was the 1970s. An explosion of local filmmaking was fuelled by new talent, new censorship laws, and significant government funding. Local audiences supported the homegrown product and directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford and Phil Noyce went on to forge careers in Hollywood.

Australian films would garner support from the 10BA tax incentive scheme that ran from 1981 to 2007, that allowed investors to claim a 150–100 per cent tax deduction. By the time it was dropped the scheme was considered a rort, but funding responsibilities have largely returned to state and federal governments which have imposed increasingly onerous conditions on the kinds of movies they support. The emphasis has shifted away from creativity towards making Australia a service industry for world cinema. This means we supply studios, sets and technical expertise for foreign film productions, but produce few noteworthy films of our own. The small amount of money made available to filmmakers is subject to “diversity” requirements, both official and unofficial, which results, paradoxically, in a less varied, less adventurous range of features.

It’s impossible to imagine highly successful, politically incorrect Australian films such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) or Alvin Purple (1973) being made today.

Korean cinema has had its own ups and downs, as viewing habits, post-pandemic, have turned towards home screening platforms. Korea’s peak production era of the 2000s, which turned out 50–80 features each year, gave way to a paltry 35-37 in 2024-25. According to Screen Australia statistics, Australian film production, which fell as low as 19 features in 2002-03, came in at 34 in 2024-25.

These figures, however, say nothing about the nature and quality of films, or their success at the box office. Most Australian features struggle to get a theatrical release, and if they do get one, are unlikely to survive for more than a couple of weeks. In the 1970s there was a hunger for local product, but today there’s a widespread perception that if it’s an Australian film it won’t be any good. This is the inevitable result of too many lacklustre productions addressing themes audiences find less-than-inspiring.

Korea may be suffering from a slump in cinema attendances, but the best Korean movies, such as Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, are still finding global audiences. The big “Australian” films are Hollywood co-productions by directors such as George Miller and Baz Luhrmann, which don’t depend so heavily on local funding. To rebuild Australian cinema we need to reinvest in the movies as a creative activity not a service industry. This also means loosening the political strictures that channel disproportionate funding to projects that meet standards of equity, diversity and inclusion which would rule out most of the greatest films ever made.

One of the reasons Korea has been so successful in bringing its stories to the world is that it has been willing to experiment with so many styles and genres, ranging from ‘exotic’ costume flicks to a range of thrillers, dramas and comedies that give a specifically Korean inflection to plots that may originate elsewhere. No Other Choice, for instance, is based on a novel by American crime writer, Donald E. Westlake, previously adapted by Costa-Gavras. In Park Chan-wook’s hands, it has become a parable for the age of AI and globalisation, and their impact on the mentality of the Korean worker.

Although everyone in no No Other Choice is Korean, we can empathise with the characters more readily than we can with the protagonists of so many Australian films, carefully curated to represent every form of marginality. Park’s film is also a black comedy, but most Australian movies over the past decade have forgotten how to make people laugh, becoming increasingly bleak, depressing and sadistic.

The Hallyu! exhibition has a lot of material devoted to Korean cinema, which serves as a welcome reminder of the quality of films this country has produced over the past two decades. What a thrill to revisit the classic sequence from Park’s Old Boy (2003) in which the anti-hero defeats a crowd of violent hoodlums.

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The cinema is my area, but one suspects the major attraction for most visitors will be the K-Pop material. To speak frankly, I’ve always found K-Pop to be inane and formulaic, but for fans that seems to be the source of attraction – and when I say “fans”, I’m not talking about a handful of teenagers. The fan base for K-Pop, according to the Korea Foundation, now exceeds 225 million, worldwide. Brought together, it would make K-Pop fans the 7^th most populous nation on earth. The Hallyu! catalogue claims there are 2.4 million members of K-Pop clubs in Australia alone. In 2011, a major K-Pop concert sold out ANZ Stadium at Sydney Olympic Park, while our most successful entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest has been Korean Australian, Dami Im, who was runner-up in 2026.

Im is one of 160,000 Australians of Korean ancestry, which is more than enough to cause ripples in the social fabric, but this still doesn’t account for the extraordinary popularity of K-Pop, which has also driven multi-million-dollar trends in fashion and cosmetics. Most of the members of leading bands such as BTS and BLACKPINK have contracts with top fashion houses and cosmetic companies.

For my generation the punk revolution came along at exactly the right time, blowing up a music industry that had grown bloated, smug and megalomaniacal. Punk was a rejection of those long-haired guys in kaftans and their concept albums, of heavy metal stodge, disco frippery, and the sugary pop tunes that regularly topped the charts. It was raw, offensive, and defiantly D.I.Y. The massive corporations were suddenly confronted with a viral outbreak of independent labels that gave youth audiences an alternative to the slick, bland products they were offering.

It didn’t last, of course, but for a short while the music business was plunged into turmoil, as the big labels tried to work out where they’d gone wrong. When they finally got the idea, it was a simple matter to package a new group of punk-lite acts, with none of the offensiveness and amateurish musicianship. Suddenly the New Romantics came along, and all the old corporate marketing tactics began to function as per normal.

From a broadly historical perspective, the K-Pop revolution represents the ultimate triumph of corporate packaging and marketing. The bands are all created by studios, following extensive auditions and talent scouting. Successful applicants are sent on intensive courses in singing and dancing that might last years before an act makes its debut. When it does appear, the ground will have been carefully prepared by the company. Music, costumes and dance routines will have been planned with the rigour of a military campaign, while each band member will be allotted a distinctive identity to stimulate the fascination of fans. The boys and girls are all paragons of beauty, with flawless skin, immaculate hairdos and styling, and tons of make-up.

Circa 1978, this would have been seen as the last word in corporate control, the dead hand of calculation that killed any trace of spontaneity. Today, these precisely calibrated acts are tailored to fans’ desires, which in turn inform moves and adjustments in the next wave of bands. It’s a seamless process, in which the music is a jumble of styles, from teeny pop to disco to soul to hip hop, synchronised with costumes and dance routines used as part of a video clip that gets zapped around the world on platforms such as YouTube.

It’s a sobering, slightly scary vision of fandom today, boosted to new dimensions by the Internet. It’s also a picture of a largely non-critical audience, prepared to consume whatever is put in front of them. Although fans will obviously have their favourite bands or performers, it’s their devotion to the phenomenon of K-Pop itself that is so overwhelming. As one sees with other acts such as Taylor Swift, the music seems to be secondary to the experience of being part of an enormous fan subculture that extends around the planet, blurring the cultural differences between countries as diverse as Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Before writing this, I sat and watched a succession of K-Pop videos and couldn’t find an original musical or visual idea. It’s one long mash-up in which uniformly pretty boys and girls jump from one titillating scenario to the next, each video being a mini-movie, with songs pushing banal but attractive messages such as “be true to yourself”.

I thought it was profoundly empty, superficial and depressing, but the fans see this stuff as a source of pure joy, perhaps an escape from a world riven by war, inequality and a climate crisis. One of the most interesting essays in the Hallyu! catalogue is Mariam Elba’s piece which looks at the ways K-Pop fans have used their networks to raise money for charities or to generate support for protest movements. It sounds bizarre, but to celebrate some teen idol’s birthday, a group of fans in Egypt will get together and raise money for the homeless. It suggests, once again, that one of the most appealing aspects of the K-Pop phenomenon is the feeling of solidarity and the power of a group to do things that resist the ugly, brutal problems of everyday life.

If Parasite will always be seen as the film that put Korea on the world map for cinema, the pop music breakthrough was Psy’s Gangnam Style in 2012, a boppy satire about the luxury lifestyles of the nouveau riche who live in the Seoul suburb of Gangnam. It’s a deliberately silly song with a very ordinary dance beat and a hilarious video, but through the power of the Internet it became the first pop clip to register one billion views on YouTube. By 2014, hits had risen to more than two billion.

Unsurprisingly, Gangnam Style and Parasite, are all over the NMA exhibition as recognised icons of Korean culture. What would the Australian equivalents be? Something by Kylie Minogue? Crocodile Dundee?

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The worldwide dissemination of Korean cultural product has been astonishing, and in the case of K-Pop, and the enormously successful online gaming industry, the word “product” could not be more precise. It makes me feel like a hopeless nostalgic to think of pop music as something made by aspiring musos in their garages. The consumers of K-Pop are not in the least disturbed by its shiny, corporatised image, with every band, song and video clip created by teams of people alert to each new trend. Talented but homely singers need not apply, as every K-Pop star looks like he or she was produced by a 3-D printer, working from strict templates of male and female beauty.

At the end of the 1970s, a young, rebellious generation demanded that music drop the artifice and get real again. Today, reality is the last thing the fans want, even if they use their K-Pop idols’ birthdays as an excuse for charitable deeds. I can understand the appeal of all that ostentatious prettiness and immaculate choreography, but the shallowness of the music is hard to swallow. It could all be cranked out by AI, if it isn’t already. It’s the triumph of an escapism that seems to have admitted that reality is too hard to handle.

Australia could learn a lot from the way the Koreans have spread their cultural energy across the entire planet, but the army-like regimentation of K-Pop seems profoundly at odds with local ways of thinking, even allowing for those 2.4 million Aussie fans.

What we need to recognise is the way Korea has got the world hooked on distinctively Korean themes, even when songs are being sung in a language spoken by relatively few people. It’s partly down to a willingness to “self-orientalise”, as one catalogue essay puts it, portraying Korea as a land of costume drama and hybrid glamour. The popular imagination may be tawdry, but it’s easily stimulated by bright and shiny things.

In Australia, culture has taken an inward turn. As we see with the government’s ‘First Nations First’ dictum, the guiding principle today is Indigeneity, to such an extent that every myth or story of colonial Australia is subjected to fierce scrutiny to find what evils were inflicted on Aboriginal people. We’ve lost more than the presumption of innocence - it has become virtually impossible to create significant cultural artefacts that are not overshadowed by this ideological fixation.

A similar problem was addressed by the American essayist, Leon Wieseltier, last year, when he wrote:

“From the standpoint of a liberal order… the indigeneity of the right is no more legitimate than the indigeneity of the left: both introduce a moral hierarchy where hierarchy itself is the moral problem. In a democracy we count cardinally, not ordinally. Indigeneity, moreover, is myopic, a severe narrowing of perspective, another variety of blinking originalism.”

We may consider the indigeneity of the right to be represented by the insularity of the MAGA crowd in the United States, and the surging popularity of One Nation in Australia. Both are populist movements based on emotional responses rather than pragmatic political choices. Followers believe they are true natives of the country where they were born, and resent being viewed as invaders or second-class citizens. They worry about being racially or ethnically outnumbered by newcomers, generating a hostile attitude to migration.

On the left we have the sacralising tendencies of self-styled progressives towards the indisputable indigeneity of Aboriginal people. They have created a new hierarchy in which “the last shall be first, and the first last” as Jesus said. Indigeneity is now the first consideration with every institutional cultural project, to the extent that strenuous efforts are made to insert Indigenous content into every movie, every TV drama and art exhibition. Those who support this process see it as fair and just reparation for the crimes of the past. Those who don’t have crimes on their conscience – and I’m afraid, they are the overwhelming majority – feel bored and frustrated by this political fixation, which often comes across as mere tokenism.

There may even be an argument that before the current over-the-top obsession with indigeneity took charge of Australian culture, the One Nation people were less concerned that their core identity as Australians was being demeaned or threatened. It may also be that such practices have undermined a growing natural sympathy for Indigenous people among the bulk of the local population. The resounding defeat of the Voice referendum suggested a more sceptical attitude.

Where this relates to Korea, is that Korean culture has defined itself clearly to the world in all its variety, while Australian culture has become bogged down in political anxieties that have undermined our strength and confidence. To be so slavishly preoccupied with indigeneity is to be just as insular as those who fear losing the farm to foreigners. Democracy is a messy but spacious form of accommodation that works best when it doesn’t create artificial hierarchies that put some people on pedestals and treat others as untouchables. We need to take a more open-minded approach to culture in this country. True inclusiveness shouldn’t come with a list of people who need to be evicted from the premises.

In brief, Korea’s cultural strategies are positive, up-tempo and outward-looking (almost forcedly so), whereas Australian culture has lost its way in the woods of guilt and insecurity. The mania for calling everything “colonialist” is a form of self-flagellation that does nothing for our social well-being or the way we are perceived internationally. We should take inspiration from the enterprising Koreans and try to understand what makes this country attractive in the eyes of the world.

When we return to the National Cultural Policy, we find Tony Burke’s office has just announced: “Five Expert Panels have [already] been appointed”, as well as a Policy Advisory Group. The Expert Panels “will inform the Minister and the Policy Advisory Group on key issues and themes raised through the public consultation process.”

There is no detail as to who is sitting on these Expert Panels or the Policy Advisory Group, although I could venture a few guesses. As the main priority is to build on the “five pillars” of the 2023 plan, Revive, the entire exercise appears to assume that plan was a complete success. To hold fast to this fanciful belief, it helps to skip over the long list of arts scandals and controversies we’ve negotiated since Labor came to power.

One can be sure the Expert Panels and Policy Advisory Group will contain nobody who will challenge prevailing orthodoxies or question broader government attitudes towards culture. Get ready for another few years of cultural inertia, nepotism, corruption and mediocrity, as private and public money continues to drain out of the arts. In this land of the rubber stamp we ignore the Koreans at our peril because they’ve shown that culture, properly supported and administered, represents a huge economic opportunity.

I’ve been working on other projects myself this week, which I’ll explain at some later date, but managed to post a review of Paolo Sorrentino’s film, La Grazia, a portrait of a high-ranking politician with conscience. Yes, it’s pure fantasy, but if we don’t take a more positive approach, it’s impossible to imagine a day when politics and culture will ever win back our trust.

Hallyu! The Korean Wave

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

12 December 2025 – 10 May 2026

“Grace” is a concept that has inspired volumes of theological literature, so it’s a brave director that takes it up as the theme of a movie. Paolo Sorrentino, one of the most accomplished filmmakers at work today, doesn’t lack the courage or artistry to weave a story around an abstraction, taking it into the most unlikely of settings: the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the official residence of the President of the Republic.

Politics is familiar territory for Sorrentino, but most of his protagonists have been thoroughly disreputable, from Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) to Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (2018). Both those scheming powerbrokers were played by Toni Servillo, a great actor, who has starred in most of Sorrentino’s films. In La Grazia, Servillo finally gets to play a political figure with a scrupulous regard for the law. It may say something about Italian politics that he’s a completely imaginary character.

Servillo’s Mariano di Santo is the President of Italy. Like the hero in Italo Svevo’s novel, Confessions of Zeno, he spends the entire story having one last cigarette, savouring this small act of rebellion against the tyranny of a health program that obliges him to eat quantities of quinoa.

A respected jurist who takes his time considering the pros and cons of any case, Mariano has exerted a steadying influence on the chaos of Italian democracy, having negotiated no fewer than six crises. He’s disturbed to learn that his nickname is “reinforced concrete”, but it’s a tribute to his integrity. Coming towards the end of his term of office, Mariano is hesitating to sign a controversial bill on euthanasia into law and pondering two appeals for pardons. The Italian word for an official pardon is “grazia”.

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