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.

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

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.

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

Well, that didn’t take long. Approximately three hours into the 26^th Biennale of Sydney, one of the contributing artists launched a withering antisemitic outburst from her platform as DJ for the launch party, and battle lines were drawn up. There’ll be plenty of excuses offered, but when DJ Haram of New Jersey, denounced the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire” and led a chant of “From the river to the sea”, it was clear that the worst expectations of the Biennale’s detractors had been realised.

Prior to this evening, Biennale CEO, Barbara Moore, had taken pains to assure us the exhibition was free of prejudice and there for everyone. Moore was speaking at the press launch on behalf of Artistic Director, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, who had opted to stay away, so we could “focus on the artists.”

You may think it’s a peculiar strategy for an Artistic Director to avoid addressing the media at the launch of a Biennale for which she has selected the theme and the participants. When Juliana Engberg decided to take an overseas junket rather than be present for the launch of her program for the one-and-only Melbourne International Biennial of 1999, it was widely believed her absence contributed to the failure of an event that ended in a financial sinkhole. As Al Qasimi is experienced, intelligent, and not at all the shy-and-retiring type, one can only wonder what she was thinking.

What’s more surprising is that a large section of the media bought this explanation. Linda Morris, in the Sydney Morning Herald, took her usual option of reporting whatever she was told:

It was a deliberate curatorial choice, a spokesperson said, to platform the artists whose works are installed across five primary exhibition venues.

“Hoor felt strongly that the media preview must be about the individual artists who make up this edition,” the spokesperson said. “She has chosen to let their work, their histories, and their voices take centre stage…” The Biennale said Al Qasimi’s decision not to attend was driven entirely by this artist-first philosophy, rather than a reaction to any external events or commentary.

Really? Even the most trusting of journos might suspect Al Qasimi was anxious to avoid awkward questions about her political beliefs at the start of the show. She was far less reticent in Nagoya last year, when fronting a press conference in her role as Artistic Director of the Sixth Aichi Triennale. On that occasion Al Qasimi wore a T-shirt with the word “Palestine” emblazoned across it; denounced “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, and railed against “colonialism and occupation”.

She might have done the same in Sydney, had the Bondi massacre not changed the equation, blurring the lines between legitimate compassion for the sufferings of the Palestinians, and mere antisemitism.

Over the last few months that distinction has only grown more problematic, as hate speech has become more widespread, and government efforts to rein in pro-Palestinian demonstrations have inflamed protesters’ anger.

During these months, the Biennale has drawn unwelcome attention to itself by allowing participating artists to post outrageous messages on social media. It began with ‘ArtSeen ambassador’ Bhenji Ra gifting us a picture of a rabbi in a bloodstained smock, treading on a baby doll; and continued with Biennale artist, Feras Shazeen, posting an image on Instagram that equated Jewish philanthropists, John Gandel and Morry Schwartz, with the leader of the Australian Neo-Nazis. Schwartz wrote to the Biennale in protest, but as of this moment the post is still extant, and Shazeen is taking his place in Biennale events.

The excuse is that old chestnut, “freedom of speech”, which often seems to work in only one direction.

Now, DJ Haram (“haram” in Arabic means “forbidden” or “sinful”), has pushed that excuse to the limits. In response to the predictable outcry, we find:

Biennale management on Saturday confirmed a review of DJ Haram’s performance was under way, while issuing a statement that she did not “represent the views of the Biennale of Sydney, our board, or our government and corporate partners”… “The Biennale of Sydney did not commission, approve, or have prior knowledge of these specific remarks,” a spokesperson said on Sunday, adding “each project undergoes a risk assessment reviewed by a dedicated committee to ensure legal and operational obligations are met”.

Only a conspiracy theorist would suggest that the Biennale commissioned DJ Haram’s remarks or had any advance warning of what she was about to do, but the merest glance at the artist’s track record should have set alarm bells ringing.

I wrote last month about receiving an analysis of Biennale invitees that argued: “70 of 175 participants, or 40 percent of the program, engage directly with anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian narratives at a high or moderate level.” If a critic of the Biennale can make such an analysis, was it too difficult for the organisation itself to calculate the degree of risk involved? What was the relevant committee doing? Was it inconceivable that a few of these politically engaged artists might engage in activities that damaged the show’s standing?

For the Biennale, at this juncture, the chief concern is not whether this year’s offerings attract audiences or not - it’s whether ongoing funding and sponsorship take a hit. The danger is a rerun of 2014, when Artistic Director, Juliana Engberg, sided with a group of disgruntled artists and succeeded in severing the Biennale’s ties with founding sponsor, Transfield. The loss of that dependable revenue was bad enough, but the example it set was even worse. The Biennale had shown that a loyal sponsor could support the show from the very beginning, only to be dumped because of the poorly researched political grievances of a handful of artists.

I’m not about to dwell on the events of 2014, but the outcome created a financial headache for every Biennale that followed, and this year has the potential to do the same. After Jewish sponsors and sympathisers withdrew their support because of their mistrust of the Artistic Director and her choice of artists, it was left to Al Qasimi to arrange the necessary sponsorship through family companies.

Not only is it unlikely such arrangements will continue into the future, it’s unlikely that Jewish sponsors will come running back. Worst of all, the anger over DJ Haram’s diatribe has resulted in numerous calls for federal and state governments to reassess their funding of the Biennale. The Australian quoted David Ossip from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, who argued:

the government had to “put in place measures to avoid the festival being infected with further hate.”

“It is also imperative that governments stop issuing blank cheques to festivals, implement a robust code of conduct which festivals need to abide by and implement accountability measures for events which receive public funds and fail to meet the standards of decency most Australians would expect,” he said. “Receiving public funds is a privilege, not a right.”

The funds in question amount to $1.6 million from Create NSW, and a further $879,000 from the federal arts agency, Creative Australia. Remove almost $2.5 million from the budget and it’s hard to see how the Biennale could continue.

DJ Haram may feel pleased with herself for torpedoing the Biennale with her aggressive actions, but she won’t have to suffer any consequences. Ferocious calls to revoke her visa are of no account, as she has already left the country. It’s the Biennale – chiefly Hoor Al Qasimi and Barbara Moore, who will have to face the music.

Can you hear any violins being tuned? If this latest scandal follows the usual pattern there will be critical reports and commentary in the Murdoch press and the Australian Financial Review, and virtually nothing from the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC, Crikey and other mastheads. Kelly Burke got there a day late for The Guardian. The great silence will allow state and federal governments to believe that – as usual – they only need to keep quiet for the scandal to quickly blow over. It’s amazing there has been no mention of the DJ Haram performance in these outlets.

Dee Jefferson set the tone in The Guardian, in an article that passed a benign judgement on the Biennale even before it had opened. She began by listing fears that this year’s exhibition was destined to be a “hate Israel jamboree” at worst; a hotbed of pro-Palestinian politics at best.” She quickly assured us these concerns “are not borne out by the festival itself.” (festival?)

Instead, the show is “complex and nuanced. It’s light on spectacle and slogans; not a political chant but rather a polyphony of voices – more than 80 artists from 37 countries – singing their own songs.”

Good call, Dee! With a bit of luck you won’t have to retract anything, just so long as The Guardian doesn’t take the DJ Haram story any further.

Meanwhile, my old stomping ground, the SMH, keeps distinguishing itself as one of the most “supportive” papers in the business. It’s offering 2-for-1 tickets to subscribers to the Biennale’s Art After Dark; it has published two anodyne previews by Linda Morris, and a tiny review by Joanna Mendelssohn (a real vote for the future of art criticism here!), which told us: “Ignore the carping critics. Look at the art.”

Ah, those carping critics. I’d happily ignore them if they could be located. All I can find at most outlets are cheerful propagandists who don’t accept that a string of antisemitic comments from the Biennale DJ on opening night might be at all newsworthy.

The impression this sends is that antisemitism is just another one of those things the nasty Murdoch mob likes to beat up out of nothing. Surely there’s nothing antisemitic in referring to the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire”? Those Jews are awfully touchy. It’s not much of a story is it? Not like a 2-for-1 ticket offer.

Pardon the sarcasm, but one gets tired of art scandals being swept under the carpet again and again. The SMH may prefer to believe there’s nothing wrong with artists exercising their ‘freedom of speech’ in a forceful manner, but to allow such blatantly hateful public outbursts to go unnoticed, is to keep pushing the threshold of acceptability a little further each time, until “Jew hatred” has become socially acceptable. This is the term the Jews themselves prefer, even though their opponents insist on calling out “Zionists”. Beyond the choice of words, the effect is much the same: a growing wave of hatred that fosters division in a country that prides itself on being easy going and open-minded.

To allow people in public positions, including artists, to make hateful statements about Jews, Muslims, or any other group, with no pushback, is not a sign of open-mindedness, it’s pure cowardice. Hatred breeds hatred, in a relentless cycle, until something terrible takes place. The fact that we’ve already seen something terrible, at Bondi, has done little to cease the flow of vile commentary. I’m not suggesting we throw opinionated people in gaol or ban them from public events, but it’s essential that extremist views (on all sides) not go unchallenged by the media or the politicians. Disagreement is healthy, but conspiracies of silence only make a bad situation worse.

For the Biennale there is a real danger that even the most supportive governments will come under sufficient populist pressure to pull or seriously reduce funding. The organisation should be still more anxious about losing the trust of corporate sponsors who don’t wish to be involved with ugly, self-generated scandals; and private donors who don’t expect their money to support political positions they find abhorrent. It’s the Biennale’s responsibility to keep its participants in line when it is allowing them a public platform. It’s not sufficient to play Pontius Pilate and wash one’s hands of a disturbing incident.

[This story is moving fast. As I write, consulting firm, PwC has just announced it’s pulling its sponsorship from the Biennale immediately, saying: “We condemn the comments made and reject antisemitism and all forms of hate.” This prompted the SMH to finally pick up the story, a mere four days after the opening, recycling what had already appeared elsewhere. The ABC finally ran a story five days later, after the incident had been referred to the police.]

Following DJ Haram’s opening night antics, it’s astonishing to read what Barbara Moore told Linda Morris before the show opened:

In response to heightened tensions following the December Bondi killings, Moore has personally vetted every work in the exhibition. “Multiple times over, in fact,” Moore says. “This is a culturally diverse program rooted in community care. We want to ensure everyone feels welcome and safe. Our commitment to artistic freedom is a commitment to exploring difficult ideas, but our process ensures an environment free from harassment, discrimination, and racism. We ensure that line is never crossed.”

Perhaps Barb might like to revisit that “personally vetted” comment. Or the bit about everyone feeling welcome and safe. Or that line about freedom from discrimination. The tacit support of a spineless media is not the kind of support that will pay the Biennale’s bills when it has alienated the trust and good will of its financial backers. This is the time for Biennale management to step up and take charge before another great Australian institution is brought down by the weight of its own hypocrisy.

So much for the Biennale’s tortured politics, I’m saving a review of the art for a later date and working on other projects this week. In recognition of the latest Academy Awards, I’ve reviewed Sinners, the film that scored a record 16 nominations, for four wins. I wasn’t entirely surprised the movie didn’t measure up to the lavish praise it has received from all quarters, but still taken aback by the way director, Ryan Coogler, combined several different genres in a manner that never allowed a plausible relationship to develop. Can 97% of critics be wrong? You bet.

This week, in preparation for another Sydney Biennale, I finally got around to reading Brook Turner’s Turbulence & Transcendence, the book published last year to celebrate the exhibition’s 50^th anniversary. The fact that this sturdy volume, produced by Black Inc. comes in a limited edition of 500, with a cover price of $299, suggests a firm belief that it holds little appeal for the general public. The target audience is institutional, supplemented by those high-net-worth individuals who might be counted on to support the show.

The title has rather a portentous ring to it. Turbulence & Transcendence? It could just as easily be called Flatulence and Forbearance.

Turner had a lot of ground to cover, necessitating crucial decisions about what to include and exclude in a brisk overview of 24 exhibitions dating back to 1973. The result is highly readable, but it’s a glorified scrapbook rather than a history. Each staging of the Biennale is given its own chapter but discussed in a different manner. Some chapters concentrate on particular artists or artworks, others focus on the issues that were topical at the time. Certain themes, such as funding problems and policy wrangles, recur with relentless regularity.

There’s broad agreement that the Sydney Biennale has played a vital role in bringing Australia into the world of international contemporary art, but there can be few people who have seen all 24 iterations, including its amateurish, low-key launch at the Opera House in 1973. Penelope Seidler is mentioned in the text, but I’m unable to think of a second candidate. I was still at school in the country during the 1970s, but I’ve seen every Biennale since then, with the exception of Tony Bond’s Boundary Riders of 1992/93, which was staged while I was living overseas. On the whole, turbulence has been a more prominent feature than transcendence.

From the 1980s onward I’ve reviewed most of those Biennales and have vivid recollections of some of them. The standouts for me were Nick Waterlow’s Biennales of 1986 and 1988, and René Block’s ‘blockbuster’ of 1990, The Readymade Boomerang. In retrospect, although I had my reservations, I’ve come to view Charles Merewether’s show of 2006, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s of 2008, and Dave Elliott’s extravaganza of 2010, as important exhibitions.

If it’s taken a little while to appreciate these Biennales, this is partly because they were such huge, sprawling affairs that it was hard to get an overview at the time. With many mediocre works mixed in with the memorable ones, viewers had to strip away the weeds to find the prize specimens. Another problem was a preponderance of dreary videos that required hours of attention for little reward. Writing a review, you feel a certain obligation to watch these things rather than simply walk on by.

Other instalments, such as Catherine De Zegher and Gerald McMaster’s show of 2012, and José Roca’s rivus of 2022, were less ambitious but more focused than some of the earlier, carnivalesque Biennales. They had an unusual sense of sincerity and integrity, even if the art was less spectacular. Richard Grayson’s show of 2002 gets points for an engaging quirkiness. For sheer degree of difficulty – not counting the Biennale’s early years – Mami Kataoka’s show of 2018 deserves some sort of award. Not only did Kataoka have to deal with Ai Weiwei at his most obnoxious, but her budget was so threadbare she donated part of her fee to help secure artist participation.

The less successful Biennales were the ones that simply recycled fashionable names from the international contemporary art circuit. Although these exhibitions invariably came with a high-falutin’ theme and a complex theoretical rationale, they were essentially fashion shows in which the Artistic Director called up all the artists they had used on previous outings.

Brook Andrew’s Nirin of 2020 stands out as a genuine groundbreaker, not because of the outstanding quality of the work, but because of its variety and an overdue focus on Indigenous artists. Nowadays, that breakthrough has become a new orthodoxy, but this should not detract from the genuine vitality of a show that found its historical moment.

If I had to nominate the absolute worst of the Biennales, it would have to be Juliana Engberg’s contribution of 2014, You Imagine What You Desire. From the first media event, the Director showed she was not a team player. It was no longer “the Biennale” it was “my Biennale”. The rationale was incomprehensible, the selection of artists disappointing. The final whammy came when Engberg sided with a group of politically sanctimonious artists who threatened to pull out of the show unless the Biennale sever its ties with its founding sponsor, Transfield.

The issue centred around Transfield’s management of Nauru and Manus Island detention centres and Australia’s inhumane policies towards refugees. Although Luca Belgiorno-Nettis had very little involvement with that part of the Transfield operation, he stood down as Chairman of the Board, taking with him the exhibition’s most reliable source of long-term sponsorship.

Engberg’s egocentric actions resulted in a funding crisis that made life incredibly difficult for those directors who followed, such as Stephanie Rosenthal and Mami Kataoka. The entire episode now reads like a premonition of the recent fracas over Writers Week in Adelaide, in which a herd-like political reaction torpedoed a major cultural event.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed artist boycott dominates Turner’s discussion of the 2014 show, although there is much more that could have been said. He informs us that Engberg declined to be interviewed for the book.

She should have made the effort. One of the problems with this exercise, is that Turner seems ready to believe anything former Artistic Directors told him when they complained how their heroic efforts were met with spite and scorn from the critics. He is even willing to join in on the act, making catty comments that insinuate the critics were misguided and destructive in their comments when they suggested that a director’s golden vision might have led to a dud exhibition.

It’s understandable that an author of a specially commissioned corporate history of the Biennale should feel an obligation to put a positive spin on the story, but that need not require such a defensive approach. Turner may be an experienced arts journalist and feature writer, but there are many occasions in the book when he betrays a lack of knowledge in relation to the visual arts. The most visible signs are the clangers left in the text: calling the artist, Arman, “Armand Arman”; telling us that Sheila Hicks was educated at the Bauhaus; referring to the “NGV Indigenous Art Triennial”, when the show is held at the NGA, etc. These are simple errors. The more complex issues are matters of opinion in which Turner has chosen to believe one party over another.

Having written many thousands of words on the Biennales, including two large pieces per show over a 20-year period, I was disappointed to find a line or two extracted from these articles in order to prove what a misguided, negative, disaffected fellow I was – for no apparent reason aside from congenital misanthropy and conservatism. I’m not overly sensitive about bitchy comments, or frightened of disagreements, but when you’ve written about 3,000 words of painstaking commentary only to be summed up in one sentence taken out of context, it feels as if there is an agenda at play.

To maintain the fiction that I’ve been a relentless scourge of the Biennale, most of my positive responses have been ignored, or framed with lines such as: “even John McDonald didn’t hate the show.” One gets a little tired of being treated like a cartoon villain.

To take a single example, what should I make of a quotation from one Ossian Ward, about “Sydney’s creeping conservative attitude to contemporary art, fostered by the traditionally dominant grumpy art critics such as John McDonald and, before him, Robert Hughes”?

While it’s tempting to note that Ossian was the name of the imaginary Gaelic poet in James MacPherson’s literary hoax of the 1760s, the real issue here is the childish name-calling. It’s a mystery to me as to why Turner would consider this a worthy inclusion in his book. To say someone is “conservative” or “grumpy” is no more than a dumb slur, intended to disqualify the critic with cool readers who see themselves as radical and enlightened. Frankly, I’m flattered to be bracketed with Robert Hughes, even by way of a sneer. If trying to make dispassionate sense of a show that promises much but delivers little is “conservative”, I’ll take it any time.

What we see with our friend, Ossian, and indeed, with Brook Turner, is a textbook example of what is required of an arts writer in a post-critical world. The ruling idea is that one must be blindly supportive of an exhibition, accepting the claims of the curator or artists as gospel truth. If Lynne Cook or Jonathan Watkins or Isabel Carlos believe their Biennales were masterpieces, the critics have no right to disagree. It’s not all that different from Donald Trump telling us the US consumer has never had it so good. The official line is not to be questioned, even if it seems palpably wrong.

Perhaps the most important point to be made vis-à-vis criticism is that it must have an argument to back up a point of view. Flippant one-liners, puffed-up opinions, statements of tribal belonging, do not qualify. Because it requires a little space and time to construct an argument it’s often believed that criticism is too demanding for contemporary attention spans.

In Turner’s case, he is trying to cover an enormous amount of territory in a compact set of chapters. The book is more than 400 pages, with only a handful of images, so it’s clear that a truly comprehensive history of the Biennale would require several volumes. He has set out to make his prose lively and accessible, but the result is an extended piece of feature writing that relies heavily on interview material and ‘colour’. Although the author has done a lot of homework, his lack of familiarity with art and art history is palpable. This means that his account lacks authority, falling back on a collage of quotations that rarely add up to a convincing account of an exhibition.

Writing criticism means writing from a knowledge-based perspective, and this is another reason why critical commentary has become so unpopular in the mainstream. Today we believe data can be acquired instantly from Google. There’s little recognition that knowledge might be more than facts and figures, or whatever skewed nonsense AI can cobble together from the trash it finds online.

If one doesn’t have that knowledge it’s tempting to pretend it’s not worth having. Rather than weigh up conflicting accounts of the various Biennales, it’s easier to accept the official line and dismiss any criticisms as the disgruntled ravings of “conservatives”. This may be one way of writing a compact book on a vast subject, but it’s unscholarly and dishonest. It clings to the contemporary idea that truth is merely provisional, that it’s fine to carve out your own version if it suits your purposes.

A more determined historian would adopt a dialectical approach, weighing contrary viewpoints and arguments to arrive at a plausible conclusion. It’s obviously much simpler to throw in a handful of quotations like raisins into a cake mix, depending on whether you want to make a positive or negative impression.

The other aspect of Turner’s book that becomes tiresome is his readiness to see the past through the lens of present-day ideology. This means we are constantly being treated to tut-tut mentions of a lack of women, or lack of Indigenous content, when both those deficiencies have been remedied in the steady evolution of the exhibitions. It should be obvious that the Biennale, like all other art events, has been subject to different influences and forces over time. To look disapprovingly on the past, armed with the moral rectitude of the present, is a dismal but widespread tactic. It’s a way for the writer to distinguish himself as the right kind of person, unlike those grumpy “conservatives”.

It might have been worthwhile to interview some of the grumpy types, to hear their first-hand accounts. Likewise, Turner might have spoken with the late Michael Gleeson-White, who was brought in to sort out the Biennale board in the early 2000s when they were going through an acute financial crisis. Michael had brilliant stories about the way money was being spent and some of the simple things required to turn matters around. He doesn’t even score a mention in this book, and he is certainly not the only one who has missed out.

If there are a few strands that keep repeating in Turner’s lively patchwork narrative, it’s the constant struggle for the Biennale to secure funding, and deal with accusations of secrecy or lack of transparency. Sometimes these themes are linked, as when the Biennale board fought to stave off attempts to put the show under the banner of the AGNSW or the MCA, or to allow outside groups to have their say in who should be the artistic director, or which artists should be included.

This year is no different. Jewish sponsors have been alienated by a selection committee’s choice of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, as Artistic Director for 2026. To make up the shortfall in funding, Al Qasimi has been able to draw on sources associated with her wealthy family in Sharjah, but this begs the question as to what money will be available in 2028.

The problem has been exacerbated by overtly antisemitic social media posts from a couple of Biennale artists, which have drawn protests from Morry Schwartz, former board member and publisher of Turbulence & Transcendence. Now, with yet another ugly conflict under way in the Middle East, there is every possibility that this year’s exhibition will be subsumed by the political controversy that has become such a corrosive feature of the contemporary art scene, both in Australia and abroad.

As Turner tells us, in chapter after chapter, the Biennale of Sydney is no stranger to controversy. In the early days, it was generally believed, even by founding sponsor, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, that controversy was a useful addition to any exhibition. Today, we are in the strange, invidious position that any criticism of organisations, curators or artworks is viewed as purely destructive, while aggressive political statements are considered acceptable as “free speech”. The result is the earnest fairy floss we find in the mainstream media, at once so vapid, and so concerned with ticking all the right boxes.

It would be beneficial for the cultural health of this country if we could get back to a place in which we can talk freely about the pros and cons of an exhibition or a particular work without worrying about whether the artist or curator belongs to some protected species. It would be even better if we could see politics as only one potential preoccupation for artists, rather than the major reason for their inclusion in a show. The controversies generated by criticism work to the overall benefit of the art scene. The controversies that arise from not conforming to a dominant ideology have a purely toxic effect on the creative spirit. As funding sources dry up and audiences grow more disaffected, it’s time we made some fundamental choices.

Art and film columns are both back this week, the latter looking at Searchers, a problematic exhibition at the National Art School Gallery, on Graffiti and Contemporary Art. It proves to be one of those unhappy marriages that makes one feel it might be best to leave them alone so they can sort it out in private. The film being reviewed is The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s ambitious bio pic about the Christian visionary who led the Shakers from Manchester to the New World. It felt like a good move until the sect’s unusual practices stirred up the same hostilities that had forced them onto the high seas. It seems religious non-conformity will always get you into trouble. Much better to join the cutting-edge contemporary art crowd, where rebellion need not interfere with lifestyle.

Turbulence & Transcendence: Biennale of Sydney, The First 50 Years

By Brook Turner

Black Inc. Melbourne, 2025, 432 pp. $299

Last week I received what I thought was an irresistible invitation: to attend a first screening of the National Theatre Live presentation of Hamlet at the Hayden Orpheum. As Shakespeare’s tragedy is arguably the most famous play ever written, I thought it would be a packed house. This seemed to be the case when we met with a foyer full of people, but upon entering the cinema found a mere handful of elderly viewers. Apparently, everyone else was going to the Elvis movie, or Wuthering Heights.

One might think that with Chloë Zhao’s Hamnet sending moviegoers a reminder of Shakespeare’s brilliance, there would be plenty of people eager to reacquaint themselves with a recognised masterpiece. Instead, there were barely a dozen attendees. This was odd for Sydney – a city in which audiences will queue up for a cultural event that means zero to them, just to say they saw it first.

Such a poor turn-out begged the question: “Have people lost interest in Shakespeare, or was there something about this production that kept them away?”

I wouldn’t discount the first proposition. Anybody who could say they enjoyed Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, would be unlikely to sit through a single act of Hamlet. We appear to be so far gone in our taste for trash that even the greatest works of literature need to be turned into Marvel comics to make them acceptable for a mass audience. This may not be true, but it remains the working assumption that drives the big studios and those directors who believe everything needs to be mulched into pop cultural form for easy consumption.

As for the second idea, it requires a steely nerve to look at the way Robert Hastie’s NT production differs from previous Hamlets. First and foremost is the casting of Hiran Abeysekera - almost certainly the first Sri Lankan actor to play Hamlet on the London stage, or probably anywhere outside of Sri Lanka. The role of Ophelia was played by Francesca Mills, who has dwarfism, although I believe we now talk about “little people” - a euphemism that immediately conjures up thoughts of leprechauns.

Horatio was given a gender reassignment, being played by Anglo-Chinese actress, Tessa Wong, while the role of Queen Gertrude fell to Indian actress, Ayesha Dharker. Everyone else was more-or-less what might be expected in any standard production, so long as we accept a suitably multicultural cast of extras.

Having scanned a swathe of reviews of this production it was noteworthy that most critics never felt it necessary to mention the heterogeneous nature of the cast – although it’s (unavoidably) the first thing that strikes any viewer. Most people will do a little homework before shelling out to attend an expensive NT production, or even a cinema broadcast, so one can only speculate whether this exercise in diversity casting acted as a discouragement.

I know no-one will say they didn’t want to see Hamlet played by these actors, but then most people will cheerfully lie rather than admit a lack of interest in something considered politically virtuous. In surveys at art museums, visitors always say they’re eager to see more Indigenous shows, but when those shows are staged, the supposed enthusiasts don’t turn up.

The contemporary cultural sphere is saturated with hypocrisy and moral blackmail, largely due to our efforts to ‘decolonise’ art galleries, movies, theatre and TV. It’s no coincidence that this trend coincides with the abandonment of criticism in the mainstream media. In place of a rigorous assessment of some cultural event, written by an experienced, knowledgeable critic, we get puff pieces and softball interviews that wouldn’t risk a harsh word – partly because the writer doesn’t have a clue about the topic. Evidence may be found in any issue of the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age. A critic as forthright and outspoken as Robert Hughes seems no less of an historical figure than Dr. Johnson - one of his heroes.

There’s an unspoken assumption that it would be wrong to criticise a production that has been radically inclusive in its casting, as if we are obliged to admire the latest Hamlet because of the cast’s ethnicity rather than their performances. To suggest there is anything unusual or inappropriate in the choice of actors is simply unthinkable – running the risk of being called a bigot and a racist. But why do we go to the theatre? To enjoy a play, or to feel we are being ‘supportive’ of someone’s idea of social justice?

Great works of literature, like Hamlet or Wuthering Heights, can sustain any number of interpretations, but one would hope that each variation illuminates parts of the work we haven’t considered, or shows its ongoing relevance to our times. The tactic of using a diverse cast of actors is the simplest and most reliable way of winning ‘critical’ approval, if gushing praise may be considered to be criticism. We are expected to be so delighted that Hamlet is Sri Lankan or Ophelia a “little person” that the quality of the portrayal or the niceties of the production are barely discussed. The cast and the director are cocooned from negative judgments, but also insulated against positive comparisons with other productions.

With this Hamlet, only a handful of reviewers timidly suggested that Abeysekera raced through the soliloquies too quickly, chewing up those sentences that great actors of the past have savoured. He tossed off famous lines for comic affect, draining scenes of any sense of drama or tragedy. It seems he had decided to play Hamlet in a Chaplinesque manner, or as some kind of slacker – sitting in a plastic chair, wearing a white beanie, gazing at poor Yorick’s skull.

His performance was energetic but scrappy, not at all emotionally involving. Tessa Wong’s Horatio felt even more misguided. Not only did Wong pronounce her lines in a muffled voice, she came across as a caring & sharing big sister, looking out for Hamlet and others.

Francesca Mills showed herself to be one of the play’s most formidable actors, with great diction and a wholehearted delivery. Yet she was obliged to caper about like a manic toddler, running all over the stage wearing a set of angel wings that made her look as if she had just come from a children’s costume party. This bit of business seemed designed to emphasise her small stature, daring us not to notice. The effect was comical in an awkward way. Were we supposed to laugh with or at the actress?

I’m trying to respond only to the quality of the acting, but it’s impossible to dissociate the performance from the performer. It would require an ideological purism that few people possess to see nothing unusual in the choice of actors to play these famous roles. It’s as if we were expected to ignore a whole herd of elephants in the room.

As the production adhered closely to the text, one must consider Hastie’s Hamlet to be a textbook example of ‘colour-blind casting’. The theory behind this practice is that it allows talented actors the opportunity to play roles from which they would be excluded by dint of ethnicity. In the past, this didn’t prevent Hollywood actors from putting on ludicrous make-up to play Black people, Indians or Chinese. The most famous piece of Hollywood miscasting must be John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), although Katharine Hepburn as a Chinese woman in Dragon Seed (1944) was also a stretch of the imagination.

When we see these films today the racial anomalies are glaring and ridiculous, but when a black actor is cast in an historical role, as when Jodie Turner-Smith played Anne Boleyn in a 2021 TV drama, we’re expected to take it seriously. It seems that casting a white action hero as Genghis Khan is an outrageous western co-option of history, but to have a black woman play one of Henry VIII’s wives, is to knowingly overturn the racial taboos of an oppressive western culture. If younger viewers who never read a book come away with the impression that Anne Boleyn was black, that’s just too bad.

It’s even more dubious to have multicultural casts in history-based dramas than in Shakespeare’s plays. A play, after all, is a fiction that allows a degree of interpretative freedom. With history, we are tampering with the very fabric of the past, giving a misleading impression that the Tudor or Elizabethan courts were full of Blacks and Asians. It makes a mockery of the narrow racial attitudes that existed in those days.

It’s been frequently pointed out that “colour-blind casting” is not blind at all. It is a deliberate attempt to subvert orthodox interpretations, to “ruin the sacred truths” of the western canon. It could be more accurately called “colour-conscious casting”, but this term has been appropriated by an even more radical fringe who believe it is the duty of directors and producers to actively emphasise topics such as race and ethnicity, to bring out the ‘hidden’ historical biases of the text. This seems like a licence to mess around with any play or story for ideological purposes, although it may be creatively more productive to upset the applecart altogether, rather than merely swap black faces for white ones. Perhaps it’s better to rework Hamlet as Grand Theft Auto or a North Carolina BBQ, (both real productions) rather than shoehorn a multicultural cast into ye olde Denmark.

Maybe, maybe not. One of my worst ever experiences in the theatre was a Kabuki version of MacBeth, which murdered everything that was great about the play. In some cases, east really is east and west is west.

I also have vivid memories of watching a low-budget Vietnamese film about the Vietnam war, in which the American generals were played by Vietnamese actors wearing false moustaches to make them look like bad hombres from spaghetti westerns. It was unintentionally hilarious, albeit not too far from the mark.

If I had to make a bold call, I’d argue that there must be some bedrock of believability if we are to approach a play in a way that allows us to focus on text, production and performance, rather than be distracted by provocative casting choices. This means historical dramas would probably be much better off sticking to the ethnic mix that applied at the time. Hollywood actors do not tend to feature as Bollywood heroes or Kabuki performers. Nobody has suggested it would be a great idea to get white actors to play the lead roles in The Color Purple. In Cairo a couple of weeks ago, I found myself talking to a local professor who told me the Egyptians were so incensed by the “historical revisionism” of a Netflix series with a black Cleopatra that they’ve made their own documentary to correct the record. One wonders what they’ll make of a forthcoming film with Israeli, Gal Gadot, in the lead role!

Plays, novels and other cultural artefacts are expressions of their time, and to play fast and loose with them is to sow discord in our already fragile understanding of history. There are ample opportunities for talented actors of all ethnicities to feature in plays and movies in which historical accuracy is not an issue. Why impose a false ideological grid upon the past, pleasing some viewers but – if my screening of Hamlet is any indication - alienating a much larger number?

When it comes to working out how criticism should address plays, novels and exhibitions that make ethnicity a central part of their program, there is no clear path. I found confirmation of this in an essay by curator, Clothilde Bullen, in the first issue of Blue Art Journal, which has grown from the ashes of the old Art Monthly Australasia. According to the editors of this new venture:

For too long, First Nations art has been under-reported, misrepresented or framed by non-Indigenous perspectives. This has constrained dialogue and left broader audiences without the depth of understanding our cultures demand. Blue Art Journal exists to correct this. We centre Indigenous authority, elevate Indigenous knowledge systems, and prioritise cultural safety, complexity and breadth.

Blue Art Journal creates space for First Nations writers, artists and critics to lead, critique, challenge, experiment and to tell stories on their own terms. Our approach embraces multimodal ways of reading, writing, listening and speaking, recognising that Indigenous knowledges cannot be confined to conventional forms. We champion both emerging voices and senior knowledge-holders to ensure that a broad spectrum of Indigenous thinking shapes the record of our time.

As a rhetorical exercise this is all very stirring and heroic, but it’s not clear how these aims are to be achieved. Bullen’s piece, ‘Seeing Ourselves: The Power of Blak arts writing’ attempts to address these issues, but it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from what she has written. She tells us that white critics have struggled to address Indigenous art but offers only the banal example that it’s wrong to ask whether a work is “resolved” or not. Having written millions of words on Indigenous and non-Indigenous art, I can note that I’ve never worried about whether a work is ‘resolved’. For the most part this is no more than a piece of formalist jargon.

Bullen confesses that it’s just as hard for Indigenous writers to find an authentic Blak critical voice. It all appears to be the fault of colonialism, or perhaps the English language:

Being forced to learn and speak English – the language of the coloniser – was a brutal tool of assimilation. It changed the very brain chemistry of First Nations people, rendering our ability to represent our world view through the mechanism of oral narrative compromised, and in some cases, demolishing it entirely.

For those who are attempting a “post-colonial critique” there are some rough guidelines:

Post-colonial critique looks ‘for’, rather than co-responds ‘with’. This is hugely important, in that there is very rarely a declaration by a non-Indigenous person about their cultural background when they are critiquing Blak art forms, and what they bring to bear knowingly and unknowingly in their approach to Blak work.

If I understand this correctly, a non-Indigenous person who is writing about Indigenous art should first declare their cultural background, so we know where they are coming from. But what are they declaring? Their white privilege? Their unconscious biases? Can a writer’s race or background render their analysis of an artwork invalid or illegitimate? (Would it help if I prefaced every article by saying my ancestors came from Scotland?) Should only Indigenous people be allowed to write about Indigenous art? Are non-Indigenous people somehow incapable of learning about the stories and meanings in this work?

This seems to be where Bulleen’s argument is tending, although she never makes it explicit. She complains about how “deeply challenging” it is having to educate non-Indigenous people, let alone doing so in the language of the coloniser. She tells us:

…it feels almost unholy, as a Blak critic, to wield colonial language to dissect and decontextualise practice in an arts sector where everyone is known to you, and personal relationships abound. We all share the challenge of existing as Blak bodies in these spaces, and we have all had to undertake much transactional labour for others to be heard.

One way of interpreting this paragraph is that Blak critics are different to non-Indigenous ones because they have personal relationships with artists. This is an odd proposition because critics of all stripes and all eras have enjoyed the closest relationships with artists. In its worst incarnation we call this nepotism or favouritism, but it seems as if Bulleen is suggesting that for Blak writers this is business-as-usual. The word “transactional” has unfortunate connotations, even if used without devious intent.

When she attempts to lay down a few principles for a Blak art critique, this is what emerges:

…custodially, was that expression of storytelling accurate? Would your ancestors see this story and recognise what you were trying to say? Did your work contribute to broader aspects of recognition and representation, and who else’s voice from your community was elevated? Did the work contribute to the narrative around structural change and sovereignty?

These ‘questions’ are essentially political and moral impositions. The storytelling may be accurate, but the work of art could still be an aesthetic failure. An artist may consider their ancestors, but they cannot forget they are addressing a diverse contemporary audience. The issue of contributing to broader aspects of recognition or elevating other voices sounds like a burden on any artist who seeks a more individualistic path. Neither does it guarantee a great work of art. Ditto for structural change and sovereignty.

If criticism is to have any credibility, it cannot be proscriptive. The artist’s expression must come first. Any Indigenous artist who took Bulleen’s ‘questions’ as gospel would be following a set of rules imposed by a cultural gatekeeper. This is not criticism at all - it’s merely providing a seal of approval to those who do the right thing. It puts enormous power in the hands of the Blak critic or curator and turns the artist into a drone.

When it’s up to ‘critics’ to decide whether an artist ticks all the correct boxes, it diminishes the power of the art. The best criticism welcomes an artwork as a visual expression of a complex personality, with its own spiritual and intellectual depths. It’s unreasonable to judge a work through its adherence to a political platform, or to expect that every Indigenous artist should feel obliged to speak for an entire race or community.

It’s remarkable how often some radical, liberating gesture turns into an exercise in laying down the law, constricting expression and individual freedom. Bulleen’s ideas about Blak criticism bear little resemblance to criticism per se, which should be sceptical and open-minded, not aligned with a pre-determined set of cultural guidelines.

It would be more accurate to say that the writer likes the idea of a special ‘Blak’ form of criticism but is unable to figure out what it might entail. She blames these difficulties on the use of English, ‘the language of the coloniser’, but without English or some other major language the concept of criticism makes no sense whatsoever. English, for better or worse, is the vehicle for her own ideas, and those of her readers.

It’s hard not to feel that ‘Blak criticism’ is a fantasy, a mere shell of an idea; another term with which to beat the drum on behalf of a political ideology. Like ‘colour conscious casting’, it’s one of those things we are expected to feel morally obliged to approve, even if we struggle to understand how it enhances our engagement with a play or a work of art. By constantly emphasising the importance of “cultural background”, writers and directors are not healing the racial divisions of the past - they are opening them up, discarding the idea that critical judgements should be made on the basis of merit or quality.

I know that such terms are greeted with derision nowadays. Whose merit? Whose quality? Why should we accept the judgements of white colonialist society, etc, etc.? The answer is that such concepts, no matter how abstract or subjective, are far more conducive to dialogue, debate and analysis than those tied to a sense of ethnic belonging, or any other group-defined frame of reference – left-wing, right-wing; based on race, class or sexual preferences. Critics should strive to leave their biases at the door of the gallery or the theatre, not wear them like a set of blinkers. We can never rid ourselves of the cultural baggage than comes with education and upbringing, but neither should we accept that these influences determine our every judgement.

I’m still working on a number of art-related pieces, but none can be published immediately on this site, so please be patient. The art column will return soon. In the meantime, there’s a review of the Wuthering Heights movie that makes no concessions to fans of pop culture. If I say I’m devoted to Emily Brontë and to Shakespeare, you’ll understand what a painful week it has been to see them treated in such cavalier fashion.

It’s depressing to return from sojourns in two Muslim countries only to find Australia tearing itself apart with furious protests about the Israeli President’s visit. All things considered, one must ask whether it was a good idea to invite Isaac Herzog while the situation in Gaza remains so raw and volatile. I can’t speak for those members of the Jewish community who have been singing his praises, but Herzog comes across as an awfully dry stick, not the kind of figure who might inspire public sympathy. On the other hand, with the Bondi massacre less than two months in the past, it’s shocking to see the level of frenzy the anti-Herzog protests have attained, partly in response to the Minns government’s new rules prohibiting the usual city marches. Imagine trying to tell the French they couldn’t march through the streets of Paris!

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the new laws, it’s hard to accept claims that the protests are anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic. Zionism – partly through the extreme opinions of some Zionists - has been designated an unspeakable evil, akin to Nazism. This view of Zionism – one promulgated as a deliberate propaganda tactic by Hamas - seems to dominate public opinion nowadays, but there are many Jewish people calling themselves Zionists who cling to a much broader, more basic definition: as someone who believes in the need for a Jewish homeland.

For the vast majority of people, any fine distinctions between Zionists, Israelis and Jews, are non-existent. Although many will swear they are anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, the anger and hatred on display has disastrous consequences for all Jews, even the most liberal minded ones.

I’d put Morry Schwartz in that category – a publisher who has taken a consistently left-of-centre line on most issues. Schwartz, who resigned from the board of the Biennale of Sydney in 2024, shortly before the appointment of Hoor Al Qasimi as Artistic Director, had previously complained about a posting by the Biennale’s “Artseen ambassador”, Bhenji Ra, that showed a rabbi in a blood-stained robe, treading on the head of a baby doll. The image was conspicuously, undeniably, antisemitic.

The Biennale took a soft line on the complaint, but in January, Bhenji Ra quietly stepped down from this public role. Last week, Schwartz found himself complaining to the Biennale yet again, over a social media post by a participating artist, Feras Shaheen. Under the word “Equality”, in block capitals, Shaheen had written, “Treat your local Zionist like you treat your local Nazi”, and included a picture of Australian Neo-Nazi leader, Thomas Sewell, alongside pictures of Schwartz and billionaire philanthropist, John Gandel.

It would be hard to imagine anything more offensive and provocative than comparing the son of Holocaust survivors to the Nazis, although it appears that the Biennale has simply given Schwartz the brush-off. One week later there has been no public repudiation of this post, which is still viewable on Shaheen’s Instagram feed.

Is this “freedom of speech” in action? Imagine if Schwartz had posted a picture of Hoor Al Qasimi or Randa Abdel-Fattah, alongside an image of a notorious Nazi. There’d be no end to the outrage. The Biennale owes its former board member an apology and should not be seen to be endorsing Shaheen’s inflammatory post. At any other time, they would have suspended the artist pending an inquiry into this incident. Today, the rampant politicisation of the contemporary art scene makes this an unlikely course of action.

It was even more jaw-dropping when, one day after The Australian ran a story about Schwartz’s complaint, this item appeared on J-wire :

The Biennale of Sydney has sought to ease tensions with Jewish community groups by issuing formal anti-discrimination commitments and inviting a senior Jewish representative to an advance preview of its 2026 exhibition…. The festival, running from March 14 to June 14, 2026, this week published a Cultural Safety Commitment Statement declaring “zero tolerance for any form of racism including Islamophobia and antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and all forms of discrimination”. It adds: “We do not tolerate bullying or harassment in any form, whether within our workplaces, our programs, or the broader public discourse connected to our work.”

To back up this noble series of commitments it might be a good start to ask Feras Shaheen to take down his antisemitic post. The Biennale Board may, however, be of the same mind as Randa Abdel-Fattah, who famously told us that “Zionists” have “no claim or right to cultural safety”. Is Schwartz to be henceforth regarded as an evil Zionist by a board of which he was recently a member?

Once again, we see those spurious rhetorical divisions between “racism” and “ideology”. In the minds of many activists, Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation from Adelaide Writers Week was a “racist” act, but to call Morry Schwartz a Nazi is to stand up against a pernicious ideology. I’m not convinced that either Jews or Palestinians constitute a “race”. It’s also worth noting how this version of racism is included with “all forms of discrimination”, along with bullying and harassment, as absolute taboos, although tarring someone as a Nazi seems to be OK. I’m not even sure about “sexual harassment”, if we may believe a 2022 story in The Australian in which it was alleged that a Biennale employee who complained she was being harassed by a colleague, ended up being the one who got sacked.

Regardless of how we might feel about the slaughter in Gaza, which looks suspiciously genocidal, even if many are unwilling to use that word, this is not an excuse for blatant double-dealing and hypocrisy. Multiplying small acts of hatred on the Jewish community in Australia will not compensate for Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza. To assume that all Jews – indeed, all Zionists - are fervent supporters of that onslaught, is no less “racist” than Adelaide’s cancellation of an ideologically committed writer with a long history of extreme statements.

One of the documents I was sent this week was a detailed analysis of the social media postings of the 175 artists participating in the forthcoming Biennale of Sydney. It was presumably compiled by a Jewish person, but that’s only to be expected. It’s the evidence presented that’s most disturbing. “In total,” it says, “70 of 175 participants, or 40 percent of the program, engage directly with anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian narratives at a high or moderate level.”

It continues: “Beyond individual positions, many participants operate within overlapping professional, curatorial, and activist networks that reinforce shared ideological framings. This clustering effect increases the likelihood that similar political interpretations and narratives will be reproduced across multiple works and program streams, amplifying their collective social impact.”

This strikes me as a realistic assessment of the way a major visual arts event, heavily weighted towards one side of political opinion, may serve to reinforce existing prejudices.

It’s also noted there’s not a single instance of an artist with pro-Jewish or pro-Israel sentiments – which should come as no surprise. To take a pro-Jewish position within the Australian contemporary art scene at present – as artists such as Nina Sanadze have found – is to condemn oneself to oblivion. It’s not very different to the experience of Bindi Cole Chocka, who was shunned when she went from being an Indigenous activist to a born-again Christian. Abandon the party line and be shut out of the club. Examples could be multiplied among other artists, writers and musicians. The political mania has spread like a virus, consuming everything in sight, until the most blatant hate speech seems like business-as-usual.

I wouldn’t argue for pro-Jewish artists to be added to the mix for the sake of a dubious ‘balance’. This tit-for-tat mentality only exacerbates the problem. My personal preference would be for the Biennale, and every other arts organisation in this country, to honestly confront its own political biases – starting with the unspoken assumption that contemporary art is only of value if it expresses the right kinds of opinion and allegiance.

This rampant politicisation is one of the reasons why contemporary art audiences are diminishing and sponsorship becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. What company would happily put its name to an exhibition in which the artists are all beating the drum for a militant political position? When it comes to governments there is a constant, hypocritical encouragement for institutions to pursue politically motivated programs, but an unwillingness to provide support when audiences and sponsors fail. The message is: “It’s up to you to make a success of these inherently unpopular policies.” In most cases, it’s an impossible task, yet those galleries and organisations that pursue a more broad-based approach are penalised by savage government funding cuts. It’s a lose-lose situation, testifying to the chaos and confusion that rules within government funding bodies, as they wish to appear virtuous while expecting a return for their dollar.

In his desperation to make amends after any perceived failings vis-à-vis Bondi, Albo seems to have under-estimated the reaction stirred up by Isaac Herzog’s visit. However, it would be impossible to fault his plea to take the temperature down. We badly need to take the temperature down, as it is spiralling out of control, threatening a season of anger and violence.

Until last week, I would have admitted to hardly knowing a word of Arabic, but in Fouad Ajami’s writings, I’ve discovered one very important word: tatbi’a – or “normalisation”. Ajami recounts how the Israel-Palestine Peace Plan agreed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993, was vehemently rejected by the Arab intelligentsia, who saw it as a sell-out. Their preference was to keep fighting until Palestine could secure a greater share of disputed territory, if not all of it (“from the river to the sea”). They held to this romantic, utterly unpolitical view, even though it was clear that Israel’s military superiority would never permit such a scenario.

After four Hamas suicide bombings, and the assassination of Rabin by a right-wing Jewish fanatic, the Israelis voted against Shimon Peres and the Peace Plan, and installed Benjamin Netanyahu. No less a Palestinian luminary than Edward Said – Louise Adler’s supposed mentor – wrote a piece for Time magazine, welcoming Netanyahu’s election because it put an end to the hated Peace Plan.

As a result, the battles have continued to rage, culminating in the October 7 massacre and the full-scale demolition of Gaza. Arafat, who had grown weary of the futile, revolutionary struggle, sought a compromise. His former backers rejected the very concept, but to reject compromise is to turn politics into an endgame, a fight to the death.

In a far less dramatic example, it’s reminiscent of the Greens rejecting Labor’s modest Climate reforms in 2009, and its equally modest housing package in 2023-24. The reason, on both occasions was that these proposals didn’t go far enough. The Greens paid a price at the ballot box, but the Palestinians have paid a catastrophic price as the lives and livelihoods of millions have been destroyed. One doubts that Said would have been so sanguine in welcoming Netanyahu if he could have foreseen the evil the Israeli leader would perpetrate.

The great fear of 1990, for the Arab intellectuals, was tatbi’a – the normalisation of relations with Israel. The ruling idea was that you must not treat your enemy as if he were your equal, or worthy of respect in any way. This leads inevitably to the dehumanisation of your opponent, justifying any act of violence. It could be argued that many Israelis do the same to the Palestinians, but this doesn’t make it acceptable.

We see this fear of normalisation in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s claim that Zionists have no right to cultural safety, and her willingness to expose the personal details of 600 Jewish creatives on social media. She is furious about being cancelled in Adelaide but has evinced no readiness to debate her views with a Zionist. In brief, she wants it all her own way and seems to view any public discussion with her ideological opponents as strictly impossible. She doesn’t appear to want a ‘normal’ political debate, but a public platform to broadcast her own ideas.

We see the same process taking shape at the Biennale of Sydney, with a list of artists wildly lop-sided in favour of one side of the debate, and a Palestinian-Australian artist being allowed to call a former board member a Nazi, with no official pushback. A genuine attempt at ‘normalisation’ would entail a level playing field in which competing viewpoints could be aired, but this is not going to happen.

In the absence of any workable exchange or discussion, we are left with the danger of a major visual arts event feeding the hate-filled narrative that motivates so many of the toxic posts on social media. I’m getting quite a collection of them.

In an essay on the French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch, I recently came across a discussion of “decadence” that speaks volumes to our current condition. Jankélévitch argues that decadence produces “two families of monsters: narcissistic monsters of introspection and monsters of excessiveness.” Both these “families” seek to browbeat others into submission in the name of their own moral tenets. The first corresponds to those virtue-signalling puritans who aspire to reshape the world – and everyday language - to conform to their personal views about race, gender, colonialism or religion. The artworld is overrun with these wowsers.

The second, “excessive” category of monster corresponds to the Trumpian practice of saying and doing the most outrageous, offensive things; daring others to object; frequently threatening those who take a different viewpoint.

Jankélévitch sees both types as a function of our need to preserve life from boredom and stagnation… “for want of real problems, the spirit takes refuge in charades, riddles, rebuses.” In this analysis it’s no surprise such mentalities arise in relatively prosperous, peaceful societies such as Australia. The steady, conservative, middle-of-the-road ethos that characterises most of the Australian population serves as a call to action for those who see only an old-style colonialist, racist mentality at work; or those who wish to mobilise the forces of ‘common sense’ to combat the rising tide of political activism that is upsetting the age-old norms of daily life.

Change is inevitable in all societies, but it’s the speed of change that causes problems. When an active minority seeks to impose new codes and rules on a complacent majority, resistance must be expected. Effective social change takes place gradually, by a process of slow and steady persuasion. It’s not realistic to imagine that everyone in Sydney will automatically start referring to the city as “Gadigal”. It’s not at all likely that people who were horrified by the Bondi shootings, will turn around within a month and become dedicated enemies of “Zionism” – a term that many find unfamiliar.

The response of the newly anxious masses is to turn to nationalistic entities such as One Nation, which defend a simplistic, mythical version of Australian life. The surge of popularity for Pauline Hanson’s ragbag party gives a measure of how far we are from the ideal of “social cohesion” that has become Albo’s new mantra. It’s the Liberals, however, who are the biggest losers, with a party in disarray, the leadership a poisoned chalice, and no clear policy platform. One Nation is grabbing the right-wing vote, while Labor controls the centre left. For the Liberals it’s looking like a choice of whether they stay put in the burning building or jump from the 32nd floor.

The Liberal downfall is a tragedy for Australian political life, because One Nation is hardly qualified to be an effective Opposition, and Labor – free to do as it pleases – has a tendency to become more rigid, secretive and autocratic. Albo doesn’t fear the Liberal Party, he is mostly concerned with the forces of anarchy - the clash of ideologies disrupting his tidy ideas about Australian society. No wonder he’s busy turning “social cohesion” into the political cliché of our times.

My only answer to the malaise into which we’ve fallen, is for people to relinquish the joys of groupthink, and stick to a few basic humanist principles. First of all, accept that Jews, Palestinians, and everyone else, have a lot more in common than those things that keep them apart. Secondly, listen for the authentic voice of intolerance, and recognise that it this also the voice of incipient totalitarianism. Thirdly, stop treating “freedom” or “freedom of speech” as the exclusive possession of one group rather than another. Freedom is an empty concept if divorced from responsibility, and everyone’s chief responsibility is not to use their own freedoms to impinge on those of the Other. This springs from the belief that you possess the Truth and others are in error, which is merely a form of fundamentalism, and by implication, extremism. There’s nothing praiseworthy, honourable, or decent in being an extremist.

Artists, above and beyond the rest of society, have a reputation as free thinkers, devoted to the realm of imagination and creativity. Instead, the current version of radical chic finds too many people lapsing into mindless conformism or opportunism. What a betrayal of the artist’s vocation to see the way so many have devoted themselves unquestioningly to a Manichean view of politics in which right and wrong, good and bad, are never to be questioned. True freedom should not consist of the right to join a party, but a fearless disposition to question everything.

I’m working on an art piece I can’t publish right away, so the only new content this week, is a review of Hamnet, Chloë Zhao’s film about Shakespeare, in which the Bard spends much of his time in London becoming successful and famous while his wife, Agnes, deals with family matters in Stratford. I can see lots of good things in this movie, and I bow to the power of the ending, but the hermetic nature of Zhao’s storytelling often leaves the viewer in the dark. As we know very little detail about Shakespeare’s marriage, the story is highly speculative, another good occasion to cultivate one’s scepticism.

There are cities around the world that are almost interchangeable in their blandness. Cairo is not one of them. One could never say Cairo lacks character - if anything it has too much character. As an outsider, in town for only a few days to see the Grand Egyptian Museum, I felt it was the closest thing I’d ever experienced to chaos-as-a-way-of-life. It’s exhilarating and exhausting.

I wasn’t surprised by the city’s infamous traffic and soon got the hang of crossing a road in small stages, but the way the Cairenes drive is symbolic of a philosophy of life. Every driver seems to be competing for the smallest space, pushing through tiny gaps, playing chicken with the cars to their left and right, blowing the horn constantly, brushing pedestrians who are too slow to scramble across several poorly defined lanes. You’d think drivers would be in a constant state of hypertension, but one of my Uber drivers was calmly texting on his phone while he executed these daredevil manœuvres.

In Cairo I did something I never do in Sydney, taking the higher bracket of Uber, the so-called ‘Uber Comfort’. Invariably the car would be beaten up, dirty, and devoid of seatbelts or at least of seatbelts that fasten. I didn’t dare sample the standard UberX ride. Nevertheless, one can only express a First World relief that Uber has taken away the haggling and arguing which previously attended every taxi ride in places such as Cairo, Jakarta or New Delhi. Now one gets charged such a ridiculously small amount that tipping is a moral obligation. As most of the homegrown taxi companies have made crude attempts to rip me off over the past year or so, I’m thinking that Sydney should be added to the list of Uber-only cities.

In Cairo, driving, like life in general, is a matter of muddling through. With at least 23 million citizens the city has one of the highest population densities in the world. Up to one million have made their homes in historic cemeteries! In her book, Cairo: City of Sand, Maria Golia notes that eighty percent of Cairo rests on precious arable land, built up over thousands of years by silt deposits from the Nile. The land that could feed the hungry hordes is used to house them.

In this human beehive it seems impossible that so many people manage to find ways to earn an income, support their families and basically survive. Almost two-thirds of the dwellings in Cairo are reputed to be outside of any building code. They collapse with regularity, reverting to the yellow-grey sand that colours everything. Look left, look right, there are thousands of shabby, decrepit-looking apartment blocks teetering on the brink of oblivion. Roads have been chainsawed through slums, leaving buildings that look as if they have been sliced in half. This squalid vista is broken by magnificent mosques and handsome public buildings of a bygone era, still clinging to shreds of their former dignity.

The Egyptians’ propensity for treating life philosophically may also explain their tolerance for supreme leaders. Although none of have enjoyed the adulation showered on Gamal Abdel Nasser (in office: 1954-70), the Egyptians have largely accepted a succession of authoritarian governments as a way of controlling a teeming, diverse population. The only exception to the pattern may have been the election of Islamist, Mohamed Morsi, whose reign of less than a year was ended by a coup d’état in July 2013. Notwithstanding revolutionary flare-ups such as the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square of 2011, there has not been much evidence of democracy in action. On the way from the airport to the city, I counted no fewer than 62 pictures of current President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, usually looking wise and benevolent. Taking a different route on the way back, I only managed 38. Can you imagine encountering 38 pictures of Albo’s mug as you drive to the airport in Sydney or Melbourne?

To walk down the street in Cairo is to step over piles of sand or rubbish; to negotiate broken pavements and holes that could break an ankle; to breathe in air filled with off-the-charts levels of pollution. The noise never lets up. The surprise is to descend to the subway and find a clean, modern train network. It’s almost an oasis after the life of the streets.

As for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which I’ll be writing about soon, it’s a stupendous feat. In terms of the quality of exhibits and the careful planning that has gone into the building, it’s already one of the great museums of the world, and easily the greatest museum project of the 21^st century. At a reputed cost of a billion US dollars, it’s almost as expensive as the Powerhouse Museum ‘revitalisation’ in Sydney. One of the chief differences is that in a city bisected by the Nile, the GEM wasn’t built on a flood plain. Neither did it choose to launch with a $13 million exhibition on shopping malls. A more incisive point of comparison is that the GEM is a supreme tourist drawcard that will pay for itself in no time at all, while the tripartite Powerhouse is destined to be a relentless drain on the public purse until some future government pulls the plug.

It’s sobering to think that the Great Pyramid of Khufu has been standing for almost 5,000 years, but last week the Minns government began demolishing the Wran building at Powerhouse Ultimo, which has only been in place since 1988, when it won awards for architect, Lionel Glendenning.

Australian politicians’ love of cultural vandalism knows no bounds. Had Uluru been situated on Sydney Harbour it would have been turned into rubble by now. It’s a wonder the Harbour Bridge hasn’t been replaced with something a bit more up-to-date.

In the kind of article we’ve come to expect from the Sydney Morning Herald, Linda Morris recently addressed those people who were “impatient for reopening” the Powerhouse in Ultimo. The problem is that nobody is impatient to see this useless, expensive rebuild. The public is mourning the Powerhouse, not looking forward to a dazzling future.

Back in Cairo, in comparison with the GEM, the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square is a sad relic – full of antiquated vitrines covered in scratches and cracks, labels peeling off walls, layers of dust, and whole rooms full of junk. But if one looks only at the objects that missed out on relocation to the GEM, it’s an astonishing treasure trove. Even the smallest pieces would be valued highlights in most Australian galleries.

Perhaps the only non-Egyptian artefacts on display were a pair of boomerangs - a remnant of a time when someone had noticed that the ancient Egyptians had used similarly shaped ‘throwing sticks’. One crucial difference was that the Egyptians fashioned their boomerangs from stone and ceramic, which made them less likely to come back, but perhaps better suited to accompany a hunter on his journey to the afterlife.

This mini-travelogue is by way of partial explanation as to what I’ve been doing over the past week – in Saudi Arabia, then Egypt. I can see by the news there’s plenty of issues to grapple with on Australian soil, but more on that when I get over the jet lag. The most recent art column looks at Data Dreams: Art and AI, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art - a show that wasn’t all that it might have been, but a step in the right direction for an institution that needs to build its audience. The film being reviewed is Nuremberg, in which Russell Crowe proved to be just perfect for the role of Hermann Goering. One hopes it didn’t come too naturally.

Less than a month into the year, the cancellation of Adelaide Writers Week has provided a prime example of the way the Australian arts ‘community’ (for want of a better word), is poisoning itself with politics. It’s the cultural equivalent of smoking a carton of fags a day – an addiction that will destroy your health and wellbeing, making you the kind of person everybody else wants to avoid. When it comes to audiences, the political tub-thumping is a distinct turn-off.

I say this in full recognition that we are political beings, and a vigorous exchange of views is part of the lifeblood of any liberal democracy. What we’re seeing in the arts is something quite different: a fiesta of intolerance and ideological rigidity. There are issues such as climate change that tap into widespread public concerns, but the angry “antizionist” push is purely divisive because the overwhelming majority of Australians are oblivious to hair-splitting distinctions between ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘antizionism’. According to one of my readers, “One is a conversation about Jewish statehood, the other is bigotry”. In practice, both are used as a thinly disguised code for antisemitism – and this, just like Islamophobia – is a place where culture goes to die.

It’s a tired observation that the tendency to judge artists not by their work but by ethnicity, religion or sexual preferences, has generated negative reactions, creating rifts where none previously existed. Yet even this doesn’t explain the moral confusion and lack of open-mindedness on display in Adelaide.

Australia’s arty types urgently need to remember Kant’s categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would be done by. In other words, try affording your perceived opponents the same consideration you claim for yourselves in this laidback country. Part of the public grief and outrage over Bondi was the thought: “Such things don’t happen here!” The rising level of aggression and hatred that goes under the banner of ‘free speech’ only makes it more likely that such violent acts will occur with greater frequency.

My recommendation to anyone consumed by the traumas of the Middle East is to remember there are many other subjects that invite attention from artists. For instance, when did engaging with nature become less important than political activism? Where politics can be narrow and toxic, nature is expansive and inspiriting. If you’re feeling exhausted from shouting slogans at demos, try a week in the bush to restore a sense of proportion.

I was impressed by the ecstatic feedback that followed a review of Mary Tonkin’s show of bush landscapes at the S.H. Ervin Gallery recently. It felt as if this was exactly what people had been hanging out for. Likewise, there has been a huge response to the first iteration of the Australia China Art Residencies Art Prize, which has taken landscape as its theme, partly as a way of avoiding politics, but also because it’s a subject that unites the Australian and Chinese artists who are taking part. It may be a cliché, but the Earth is our common inheritance, regardless of how we choose to divide it up into nations or private property. To be human is to be part of the natural world long before we are adherents of any creed or country.

The history of civilisation on this planet has been a war on nature we’ve only recently begun to recognise as a war on ourselves. For a thousand years we’ve been firm in our belief that we are not an organic part of the natural world, but its masters. For the environmental historian, Donald Worster, this is the difference between Arcadian and Imperial ecology. The latter views the natural world as a kind of factory turning out goods for human consumption - and this is still the ruling idea of our time, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and drive other species to extinction.

In the past, the sheer abundance of nature seemed to promise an endless harvest, but industrial progress and population growth have seen us burn through resources at an alarming rate. In the early Middle Ages, the ‘green and pleasant land’ of England was one big forest. Nowadays the jungles of the Amazon are disappearing just as rapidly.

Artists and writers have always been in the forefront of the Arcadian view of ecology. William Blake mocked the progressivist idea that a ‘New Jerusalem’ was being created by the “dark, satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution. Wordsworth showed his contempt for science when he wrote: “We murder to dissect”.

For more than ten years I’ve been involved on a voluntary basis with a project of the Australian Wildlife Conservatory that has taken 24 artists to four remote locations around Australia. The artists have made work that was exhibited and sold a year later, raising funds for the organisation. Almost a million dollars has thereby accrued to AWC coffers.

These trips, which I’ve been able to share, have been the among the very best experiences I’ve had in decades of writing about art. The fifth and last excursion saw six artists spend a week at Newhaven, an AWC property on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. Those artists – Sophie Cape, Nicolette Eisdell, Pamela Honeyfield, Michelle Hungerford, Charmaine Pike and Ana Pollak – made work for a show held at Sydney’s Defiance Gallery last September. For the first time, a version has travelled to Victoria, where it may be seen at Sofitel Melbourne on Collins for the next couple of months.

The exhibition has been undertaken in the spirit of charity, largely thanks to Emily Choo, Senior Partnerships Manager, and Clive Scott, Arts Ambassador Sofitel, who have been instrumental in bringing the hotel on board, affirming a longstanding connection with the visual arts. The paintings are for sale, with the money going back to the AWC. In brief, it’s a project on behalf of endangered Australian species, for which everyone has given freely of their time and effort.

I’ve written about the AWC projects on many occasions, but after spending a year observing the skewed priorities of the local art scene I feel a greater urgency about this topic. Conservation is an issue everyone can get behind, not one that causes sharp divisions. Within an expanded understanding of the landscape genre, artists make works that respond to a particular environment, celebrating the need for wilderness in a world given over to the Imperial view of ecology.

Wilderness, almost by definition, is land untouched and unspoiled by human agency. The AWC is trying to return substantial parts of Australia to the conditions that existed before feral cats and other invasive species wreaked havoc on age-old ecosystems. They are restoring populations of marsupials brought to the brink of extinction, and reviving fragile environments damaged by cattle and camels. For these sanctuaries to exist, the AWC has to own the property, ensuring that it can’t fall into the hands of mining companies or cattle stations. At Newhaven, the AWC works in collaboration with the traditional owners, the Ngalia-Warlpiri, on the removal of feral animals and fire management. It’s a partnership that works to the benefit of both parties and the land.,

The Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed us a negative view of wilderness – being the wasteland in which Moses and the Israelites wandered for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land, Canaan – nowadays the lands of Israel and Palestine. The wilderness was a testing ground for the Israelites’ faith and belief, and they came perilously close to blowing the whole thing.

The idea that wilderness – be it desert or forest – was merely an obstacle to human progress, only began to be questioned during the Romantic era, notably by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had lofty ideas about ‘the state of nature’. But it would not be until figures such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir came along, that the idea of preserving wilderness for its own sake became a serious proposition. Thoreau’s famous line of 1851, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world”, was an intensely radical idea, going against the grain of an era of rapid expansion and development, in which the pioneers established themselves as folk heroes.

Muir (1838-1914), who played a leading role in the creation of America’s first great National Parks, saw nature as a temple, sacred to God. He was a vehement opponent of the materialism that most Americans embraced as the key to achieving national greatness.

It’s been 136 years since Muir and Teddy Roosevelt gave us Yosemite National Park, and in that time the exponents of wilderness have fought a losing battle against the forces of rampant development. Today we are probably no longer at a crossroads, but beyond a crossroads, in which environmentalists are scrambling to save what they can from the wreckage. Every year brings higher temperatures, catastrophic floods and fires, the shrinking of the Amazon and the polar ice caps. The new ideal of a ‘Promised Land’ is not a fertile region that can be cultivated and exploited, it’s a place where humans do not tread, or at least, where a small population of Indigenous people have found ways of living in harmony with nature.

Scientists agree that the health of the planet requires such areas of wilderness, where biodiversity can flourish. This is the mission of organisations such as the AWC, and it should be far more attractive to artists than the angry political wrangles that are turning the cultural arena into a battlefield. A more desirable metaphor would be a garden, perhaps a wild garden.

What distinguishes the artists in the show at Sofitel on Collins, and Mary Tonkin at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, is a willingness to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart”, as John Ruskin advised in his magnum opus, Modern Painters, “and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”

Ruskin’s prose was often a deep shade of purple, but he was capable of flights of eloquence and was never anything but sincere in his beliefs. It’s that kind of sincerity, the direct experience of nature, which has such value and profundity for artists.

Some will argue that artists can be political partisans and lovers of nature at the same time, but few of us can realistically balance two extremes within our psyches. Others simply dismiss activities such as landscape painting as relics of another era.

John Berger, perhaps unwittingly, sparked a reaction against landscape in Ways of Seeing when he analysed Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, as a celebration of private property. It’s important we recognise that landscape today is less concerned with private ownership of a piece of land than collective responsibility for the fate of the planet. Talk to any dedicated landscapist and it’s clear they are thinking of the bigger picture, not one small corner. They are concerned, as Ruskin advises, with the “meaning” of nature, even if they have no answers that may be expressed in words. The solution lies in what they put on canvas or paper, although it’s a solution that seems to change from day to day, like the weather. The greatest works of art are born from uncertainty rather than ideological conviction. When we approach a subject in a spirit of curiosity, struggling with our own doubts, we are more likely to produce a work of value than when we set out to signal allegiance to a fixed concept. Most works of political art are created with a moral purpose and thoughts of an audience, but landscape can be a journey of exploration in which the artist serves as their own audience and critic.

To be lost in the wilderness is to find ourselves separated from our beliefs and convictions, being prepared to ask fundamental questions about the most important things in life. The psychologists speak of a phenomenon called ‘The Wilderness Effect’, which says that spending two or three days in a natural setting has a positive impact on our mental and bodily health. Spend two to three weeks, and the benefits are allegedly multiplied. But who has the time? For me, a week is an optimum communion period. Were I to spend three weeks in the bush, I’d be pining for my books and laptop.

With the Newhaven trip, Kathryn Millis and Anna Howard have made a documentary which is screening with the show. It reveals how the experience of a week spent working in this remote landscape had a powerful emotional impact on the artists. Private traumas rose to the surface and were dissipated by the steady, solitary engagement with the landscape during the day, and the company with others in the evenings.

The lesson of Newhaven is that the artist’s ideal experience of nature is one of inwardness. It’s the antithesis of being part of a crowd in which everyone seems to share the same mind. A stint in the wilderness encourages self-awareness, and that’s something we desperately need to cultivate before AI does all our thinking for us.

The art column this week looks at Ron Mueck: Encounter, at the Art Gallery of NSW, a show of 15 figurative sculptures, some exceptionally large, others tiny. I’m no longer surprised by anything from this artist, but if you’ve never experienced Mueck’s work close-up, you’ll be astonished by the fastidious detail and the strange, sad aura these works possess. The film being reviewed is Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, a black comedy about a middle manager in a paper factory who loses his job and plots a novel way back into the workplace, over the dead bodies of his peers. In the age of AI, it’s ‘kill or be killed’ - an excellent reason to get back to nature.

Discussing the gradual disintegration of Writers Week at this year’s Adelaide Festival, artistic director, Louise Adler, has said: “I am so sorry this masterclass in poor governance has landed us in this position.” She may be speaking with unusual candour, because it is her own bad governance that created last week’s cultural debacle. Anybody who spends five minutes investigating Dr. Randa Abdel Fattah’s public statements and social media posts, will see that giving this person a platform at the Writers Festival was asking for trouble.

“Trouble”, however, seems to be Louise’s second name. Faced with a choice between a path of diplomacy and one of provocation, she’ll scoot down the latter without a second thought.

Adelaide has given us the Khaled Sabsabi affair all over again, with an uncanny mirroring of events. An outspoken advocate of the Palestinian cause was selected to a prestigious gig, then deselected, then reinstated, while the arts community went into paroxysms over censorship and (government) interference. The selected/deselected figure was portrayed as a victim and a martyr, while public figures fell over themselves to denounce this outrage.

Perhaps the most inexplicable part of the collapse of Writers Week is the way the Festival Board responded to the aggressive approach of its artistic director. Adler has made it clear that her idea of curatorial control brooks no interference from anyone. If she chose to platform a Palestinian activist with a history of making statements many would characterise as hate speech, members of the board had no right to question this decision. We learned this week that last year the board had gone so far as to commission a risk assessment in relation to Abdel-Fattah’s participation.

After Adler allegedly declared: “It’s too late, I’ve already invited her,” businessman, Tony Berg resigned from the board. His colleagues appear to have gone back into their shells, until the massacre in Bondi created a sense of panic.

After Bondi, and the huge public outpouring of sympathy for the victims, ‘trouble’ was looking more like ‘disaster’. The board, faced with the prospect of protests and condemnation for platforming Abdel-Fattah, decided to cancel her invitation, not imagining this would lead to the implosion of Writers Week, as more than 180 participants pulled out in protest at the curtailing of Abdel-Fattah’s right to free speech.

It was startling to learn, later in the week, that the victim, martyr and heroine of this free speech controversy had written a letter last year demanding the deplatforming of Jewish American journalist, Thomas Friedman, and that Adler and two colleagues threatened to resign unless the letter-writer got her way. Were any of the 180 writers and participants who pulled out in support of Abdel-Fattah, aware of this episode?

Friedman was subsequently told his participation wouldn’t work because of “scheduling issues”. For revealing this apparent hypocrisy, Tony Berg became the butt of Adler’s anger. “I consider discussions at the board table to be confidential, she said, “and I’m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It’s indicative of the way the former board operated – a rich case study for future management students.”

In other words: “My response to your question is to insult Tony Berg, because I expected my own actions and statements would remain behind closed doors.” The comment about “management students”, like the crack about “poor governance” in her grandstanding resignation letter, expresses a none-too-subtle desire for a board to be no more than a rubber stamp.

On the 7.30 Report this week, in an interview with Michael Rowland – whose professionalism could find room for a little more mongrel – Adler got on her soapbox and forcefully related her version of events. The one incisive question Rowland asked was: Had Adbel-Fattah “gone too far with some of the comments she has made about Israel and Israelis?”

Specifically, he quoted her statement of March 2024, that “if you’re a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety,” and another line from the start of last year: “May 2025 be the end of Israel.”

Adler replied: “I don’t invite writers to Adelaide Writers Week because of their social media activity. Those two statements have since been deleted – I don’t know when they were deleted. These statements exist but she’s not being asked to come to AWW because of her social media feed, she’s been asked to come and talk about a novel she’s written called Discipline – a novel that’s topical, of this moment, and I thought was worthy of a conversation.”

Once again, to translate: “I don’t give a stuff about what she’s posted on social media, no matter how offensive or inflammatory. She was invited to talk about her new novel.”

If the novel happens to be all about Palestinians needing to stand up and be counted, we’re expected to believe this has no connection to Abdel-Fattah’s social media posts. Those posts are apparently not worth worrying about (Abdel-Fattah has a mere 61,600 followers on Instagram), while a possibly tasteless piece of political satire by Thomas Friedman prompted threats of resignation.

To demonstrate her balanced approach, Adler told us how she’d also platformed Tony Abbott, “for his book that celebrates the colonisation of Australia.” Presumably Tony Abbott wasn’t one of the writers who pulled out in support of Abdel-Fattah, but it’s revealing that rather than inviting an Israeli author, Adler believes the colonisation of Australia is an effective counterweight to what is happening in Gaza. Revealing, but not surprising. More of that later.

By Wednesday, Writers Week 2026 had been cancelled, Adler had resigned as director, a new board had been appointed, and Abdel-Fattah was threatening to sue SA Premier, Peter Malinauskas, for defamation, alleging “he made a public statement that suggested l am an extremist terrorist sympathiser and directly linked me to the Bondi atrocity. This was a vicious personal assault on me, a private citizen, by the highest public official in South Australia. It was defamatory and it terrified me.”

Malinauskas denies these charges, saying he merely expressed a personal view that, in light of the Bondi massacre, it was the wrong choice to platform an outspoken enemy of Israel. His letter, which has now been revealed, stresses that he is expressing an opinion not issuing a directive.

Whether or not this long-shot defamation action ever comes to court, Abdel-Fattah has already announced a public fund-raiser for her legal fees and has raised upwards of $66,000. As a law graduate, Abdel-Fattah would know that defamation is a hard row to hoe in Australia, but if she were happy to spend the money – or other people’s money - such a case would create a huge publicity splash.

What happened on Thursday might encourage such an action, as the new board issued an abject apology to Abdel-Fattah, and told her she would be welcome to speak at the 2027 festival. This is astonishing, considering we have no idea what Abdel-Fattah might do or say over the next twelve months. If she pursues her defamation action we could be treated to the bizarre spectacle of an anointed participant in Writers Week engaged in a court case with the Premier while she says whatever she pleases from the podium.

Malinauskas, who was immediately asked if he would be issuing an apology to Abdel-Fattah, replied: “What for?” In taking this stance, he is one of the first politicians (let’s not mention arts administrators!) in Australia to stand up to the intimidatory tactics of those who loudly defend their own right to free speech while seeking to cancel others. Are we to assume the Premier doesn’t enjoy the same right to express a personal opinion that Abdel-Fattah jealously claims for herself?

The statement issued by the new board was cringeworthy in the extreme. Chair, Judy Potter, said: “We apologise to Dr. Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.”

As if this wasn’t humiliating enough, Ms. Potter also extended the apology to Louise Adler, saying: “We acknowledge the principled stand she took in the extremely difficult decision to resign from her role as director… Louise is a revered figure of Australian literature who we hold in the highest regard. Her contributions to, and stewardship of, Adelaide Writers’ Week in the time she has been the Director (2023 – 2025) have been outstanding.”

Hey Judy, this is the person who just tanked your literary festival, which attracted 160,000 visitors last year, generating tens of millions of dollars for the state. Your festival is now faced with defraying expenses already incurred and repairing the damage inflicted on its reputation and credibility.

This is the person who wrote in her resignation letter, subsequently published in The Guardian: “In my view, boards composed of individuals with little experience in the arts, and blind to the moral implications of abandoning the principle of freedom of expression, have been unnerved by the pressure exerted by politicians calculating their electoral prospects and relentless, coordinated letter-writing campaigns.”

She quipped that “South Australia’s tourism slogan could be “Welcome to Moscow on the Torrens”.

Judy, you say you hold this person in the highest regard, but she doesn’t reciprocate those sentiments. You see her as a revered figure, while she sees you as a bunch of mugs. This “outstanding” person has destroyed your festival with her reckless programming, insulted you in public, and acted in the most sanctimonious manner. Indeed, she has implied that the board was influenced by anonymous forces with “fat chequebooks”, and complained it had bowed to “pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians.”

As for Abdel-Fattah, she has very graciously accepted your grovelling apology, saying “she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.” She also suggested she’d be back “in a heartbeat” if her good friend Louise was reinstated as director. Given its predilection for spineless self-abasement, the board might very well go along with this condition. I’m only surprised Abdel-Fattah didn’t demand that Peter Malinauskas step down as Premier before she agreed to appear on next year’s program.

****

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Adelaide fracas was the speed with which writers jumped on the express train out of Writers Week, putting the issue of “freedom of speech” over any possible qualms about the person they were valorising by their actions. Not only did it show how quickly so many supposedly independent thinkers will adopt a herd mentality, it demonstrated that in this ideological climate, any attempt to lower the temperature of debate only risks pushing it to new extremes. It also revealed the huge gulf that exists between what we might call the Australian intelligentsia and the public. I doubt that many average Australians, upon acquainting themselves with Abdel-Fattah’s views, would be so ready to stand with her shoulder-to-shoulder.

It’s been mentioned on many occasions, but the truly unforgivable part of the writer’s behaviour was her willingness to celebrate the events of October 7, going so far as to treat reports of rape, torture and murder as if they were Zionist propaganda. No matter how we might rail against Netanyahu’s barbaric onslaught in Gaza, with its purposeful cruelty and soaring death toll, this does not – and can never – excuse the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Barbarism is barbarism, no matter who is the perpetrator, and if principles of human rights have any viability we cannot pretend one appalling act of violence is an outrage, but another is somehow justified by history and circumstance.

What made the horror of October 7 even worse, was that those Israelis who were targeted were among the most liberal-minded and sympathetic to the sufferings of the Palestinians. The hate-fuelled, genocidal extremists were sitting in Netanyahu’s cabinet, not attending a popular music festival.

In a piece published one year into the carnage in Gaza, Abdel-Fattah wrote: “If you ask me about hope, there was a glimmer on October 7. It was palpable, real, and exhilarating.”

Palpable, real, exhilarating? It’s extraordinary that anyone sitting back in their lounge room in Sydney should feel this way about an event in which innocent people were murdered in the most sadistic fashion. It’s also a ridiculous idea. By any pragmatic assessment it should have been obvious that October 7 gave Netanyahu the excuse he needed to try and wipe Gaza off the map. Even in the social media messages Abdel-Fattah quotes in the wake of the attack, we find Palestinians expressing a palpable dread as to what will happen next.

Hamas may have believed they would unite the Arab world behind them with this act of violence, splintering the growing cosiness between the USA and Israel, and Middle Eastern powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The opposite has occurred, with the group having grown increasingly isolated. Its great success has been with ‘progressive’ groups in the west, who have gone over wholeheartedly to the Palestinian cause.

This has a lot to do with Netanyahu’s uncompromising violence, but also with the way Hamas and its allies have framed the debate.

In a memorandum issued after October 7, Hamas called for their actions to be put into a broader context, namely “all cases of the struggle against colonialism.” They also identified Zionism specifically as “a colonialist project”, and Israel as an “illegal entity”.

In this we see the roots of the ideology that equates the establishment of Israel at the end of the Second World War, with the British takeover of Australia in 1788. We also see the reason why they believe the massacre of October 7 should be excused. The reason was that the Jews deserved it, because of the decades of misery they had inflicted on the Palestinians. The attack was frequently described as a “jailbreak” or a “break-out”, as if these murderers were escapees from a prison camp.

For Judith Butler, the influential American professor who gave us “Queer Theory”, October 7 was “an act of armed resistance”. She went on: “It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an antisemitic attack, it was an attack against Israelis.”

Butler claimed: “the violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus… Israelis point to the murder of Israeli Jews as evidence that Palestinian terrorists hate Jews, when in fact it was just that they were fighting a colonial power. If it were a different colonial power, they would also fight them and it wouldn’t be considered antisemitism.”

It’s so simple when you think about it! What appeared to be a brutal massacre was in fact an armed uprising against a colonial power, and therefore perfectly understandable. In other words: They had it coming. Bad luck for the hapless victims who were merely the pawns of history.

Abdel-Fattah is in the habit of quoting Judith Butler approvingly. She struck her own blow against the ideological enemy two years ago when she “publicly shared a link to a private WhatsApp group that included 600 Jewish creatives, leaking their names, photos and personal details in the process, which prompted the Albanese government to introduce new doxxing laws.” Many from this group claim they are still dealing with the consequences.

All of this makes it difficult to believe in the hurt and offence Abdel-Fattah supposedly felt when the board suggested “it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”

No-one was suggesting Abdel-Fattah had a hand in the terrorist act, but it would be disingenuous to believe that her statements and actions had not been offensive to Jewish people - even those who may be vehemently opposed to Netanyahu’s actions.

Frantz Fanon, today hailed as a patron saint of ‘decolonisation’, provided a useful term that explains the willingness of so many people in the Australian art and literary community to excuse the crimes of Hamas while being driven into a frenzy by the crimes of Netanyahu. In Black Skin, White Masks, he writes: “Good - Evil, Beauty — Ugliness, White — Black: such are the characteristic pairings of the phenomenon that… we shall call ‘Manichaeism delirium.’”

Fanon saw “Manicheanism delerium” as a condition that allowed the white coloniser to view the black subject of colonisation as his diametric opposite. Where the coloniser was civilised and inherently good, the colonised was savage and bad. One was a higher form of humanity, the other barely qualified as human.

This pretty much describes the attitude of the Netanyahu government towards the Palestinians, who have consistently been treated as less than human. Yet it also sums up the attitude of Hamas apologists such as Abdel-Fattah who saw October 7 as “a glimmer of hope” and don’t believe Zionists have any right to cultural safety.

This tendency to divide the world into extremes of black and white leads inevitably to violence and intolerance. It is the very opposite of politics, often described as “the art of compromise”, or in Bismarck’s famous words, “the art of the possible”. When one group denies the basic humanity of its opponent, every violent act becomes justified. Your own violence is dressed up in heroic colours, while your opponent’s is viewed as pure evil.

This is the point we have reached in Australia, with an art community that has given its sympathies to one side of the debate in such militant fashion it is willing to forget about October 7 and treat an outspoken activist as a martyr and a hero.

On the other hand, as we learn from another article in The Australian, when the Iranian-born writer, Shokoofeh Azar declined to join the mass exodus from Writers Week she was bombarded with messages such as “You should be killed like the Israelis”.

In a Manichean view of the world those who do not think the same way as you, can only be your enemies - fellow travellers with your subhuman opponents. Those who try and find the right and wrong on both sides are accused of “both-siderism” – as if there is inherent nobility in being a bigot.

One reason the groundswell of anti-Israel feeling has grown so precipitously is that it is forever being associated with concepts such as colonisation and decolonisation. The Jews, once viewed as refugees from Hitler’s ravages, are now widely seen as colonisers, or “settler-colonisers”, who have displaced the rightful owners of the land.

There is, however, a huge difference between the British colonisation of Australia and the Jewish resettlement after the Second World War. Both may have had a drastic impact on the resident population, but one was a premeditated act of conquest, while the other was viewed as a return to an ancestral homeland. Looking at the rhetoric being thrown about in Australia over the past year or so, that difference is being obliterated.

Instead of “Israelis” or “Jews” the only word being used is “Zionists”, who are portrayed as irredeemable fascists – regardless that there are many shades of Zionism. Indeed, Abdel-Fattah makes the fine distinction that she is not an antisemite but an anti-Zionist. It’s too fine of a distinction for many people.

A former diplomat who knows a lot about this issue, tells me that the extreme view of “Zionism” has become standard fare over the past 20 years, as the possibility of a two-state solution has faded into nothingness. Both sides are now speaking in terms of absolutes: Israel has pursued the total destruction of Gaza, while the Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea” calls for nothing less than the expulsion of the Jews and the end of the state of Israel.

In Australia, the Palestine protest marchers have made common ground with Aboriginal activists, as fellow victims of “colonisation”. Here one might look to the Israeli philosopher, Assaf Sharon, who says: “the point of attaching the label ‘colonisation’ is not to analyse but to criminalise. Rather than a critical concept, it is a weapon of criticism. Or rather, of delegitimation.”

All this is accompanied by the inevitable calls for “decolonisation” – a term so vague it can be made to mean anything one chooses. Judith Butler believes it promises “emancipatory joy”, but Sharon terms it “another slogan cosplaying as policy”, and quotes Fanon, who wrote: “Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.”

We can see this playing out in the willingness to overlook the violence of October 7, and the threats and insults thrown at those such as Shokoofeh Azar. When I criticised the protests held out front of the NGV in August, I received the same kind of hateful diatribes from anonymous trolls.

Fanon’s words should give pause to all those ‘progressives’ in the arts community who use the word “decolonisation” so reflexively, as if it were, ipso facto, a virtuous activity. Campaigns to “decolonise the museum” have proven to be confusing and culturally destructive, as nobody has any real idea what they entail. In the absence of a clear program, it effectively refers to policies that are advantageous for a certain group of people and exclusionary for others. It has become a way of opportunistically seizing public assets to advance private agendas – as we see with the catastrophic Powerhouse project, which associates itself with this kind of rhetoric. All those who work for public institutions would do well to think twice before embracing this fashionable but dangerous concept, if that’s the right word for something so intellectually blurred.

When Abdel-Fattah says: “the goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony” (i.e. Israel), we can recognise all the favourite rhetorical devices.

Jewish journalists, Ariela Bard and Julie Szego, have both written articles expressing their horror and frustration that so many female writers who call themselves feminists have been willing to die in a ditch for someone who has questioned the reality of the rapes and murders that took place on October 7. Is the issue of freedom of speech so absolute – so Manichean – that these feminists are prepared to overlook such a grotesque detail?

This raises a further question about the limits of “free speech”. At what point does free speech become unacceptable hate speech? Does the truth play any part in this, or should we be allowed to lie and spread baseless accusations at will? An article by a former editor of mine, Shelley Gare, reminds us of Karl Popper’s dictum from The Open Society and its Enemies, that we should claim, “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

Abdel-Fattah has shown by her statements that she has not the slightest degree of tolerance when it comes to the hated “Zionists”. The same might be said about Adler, an artistic director who seems determined to act in defiance of her own Jewish identity. I can understand Jews saying unfair and hateful things about Palestinians and vice-versa, but I’m puzzled by a Jewish person who goes out of her way to say spiteful things about Jewish interests.

This was ostensibly the point made by former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, who has written an article describing how his friendship with Adler came to a sudden end when she appeared to abandon any pretence of journalistic objectivity and embrace conspiracy theories about wealthy Jewish powerbrokers.

If we look for a way to make sure Writers Week never repeats this year’s ordeal, the first requirement would be a board of knowledgeable people who can discuss the artistic director’s choices and not be so easily cowed into submission. Too many boards of Australian cultural organisations are packed with stooges who make no useful contribution, either intellectually or financially. The previous festival board, with the exception of Tony Berg, allowed Adler a free hand, and suffered the consequences. The new board has already abased itself. What is needed is an active process of consultation, in which the pros and cons of possible invitees might be discussed. This is not control, it’s a practical way of dealing with disputes before they arise.

Could Writers Week this year have been saved? Rather than cancelling Abdel-Fattah, perhaps the board might have invited her to sit on a forum alongside a writer such as Michael Gawenda and let them discuss their differences with a suitably neutral moderator. Would Adler have agreed to such an impeccable exercise in free speech, or viewed this as intolerable interference with her program? The stance she took on the 7.30 Report, was that Abdel-Fattah was invited as the author of a novel, not as an activist. Some may argue this is about as convincing as Abdel-Fattah’s insistence that being an anti-Zionist who calls for the destruction of Israel is not evidence of antisemitism.

One wonders if all those writers would have pulled out had such a forum been a possibility. It could have aired a lot of festering issues and given opposing groups a platform to address the public. If Abdel-Fattah chooses to grace the 2027 Writers Week with her presence it should be in the context of dialogue and debate, where her views may be challenged and defended. If she believes her position is rock solid, she has nothing to fear. It would simply be a matter of having the courage of her convictions – something that is lacking in all those anonymous haters who like to threaten people online, and those cowardly arts administrators whose backflips are of Olympic proportions.

The Adelaide saga has eaten up the week, getting progressively worse from day to day, which makes the latest art column something of a relief - being devoted to one of Australia’s most dedicated landscape painters. Mary Tonkin: Among the Trees at the S.H. Ervin Gallery is a genuinely uplifting start to a year that’s already looking ominous. The film being reviewed is Kokuho, a three-hour Japanese epic about a Kabuki actor, that broke box office records at home and is being well-received around the world. Even allowing for the miseries of Adelaide Writers Week there are still plenty of reasons to believe that art is a damn good thing.

We’re only a week into 2026, and the shockwaves are already spreading. Nobody is lamenting the downfall of Nicolás Maduro, but the manner of his unseating should make everybody nervous. It’s almost unthinkable, but we’re watching the United States revert to the Age of Imperialism – when the great powers took it upon themselves to conquer and exploit the weaker nations, spreading their version of ‘civilisation’. The major difference this time is that Trump has been brazenly honest in admitting it’s a grab for Venezuela’s oil reserves. Unable to sustain the fiction that he came, like Simón Bolivar, as a “liberator”, he’s already talking like a gangster, threatening anybody who stands in the way of his big takeover.

2026 is the Lunar Year of the Horse but it’s shaping up as a bucking bronco. We may find ourselves hanging on with white knuckles as the political and economic outlook grows more unstable.

Faced with such terrifying portents it feels almost frivolous to ask: “Where does this leave artists?” Nevertheless, that’s precisely what I’m going to explore, as this site is chiefly dedicated to the cultural perspective – or rather, to arguing that culture is one of the essential aspects of life. Although politicians seem to believe it’s an easier target for cuts than health, welfare or education, (let alone sport), when culture is diminished the whole quality of life suffers.

I don’t know if artists should be comforted by the thought that the arts tend to flourish in times of repression and instability, but the new year is sure to generate a wave of artworks responding to the political and moral challenges of our times. Amid a volume of banal demagoguery, the best and smartest practitioners will rise to the challenge.

Whatever political issues occupy the spotlight this year, for artists the biggest threats will probably come from a contracting market. While works of art may not be directly affected by Trumpian economics, many wealthy collectors will view art as a luxury they cannot afford. As the financial outlook tightens, the commercial galleries will be among the first businesses to feel the pain.

This will hasten the migration of the art market online – a trend that’s already accelerating, as a new generation of collectors feels no special need to view the actual work before they buy. The danger in this approach is that the best works often photograph poorly, while mediocre ones look brilliant. Do these online daredevils care? Probably not.

From the dealers’ point-of-view, it will be harder to justify the cost of rent and staff. Some will consider closing their galleries and acting as agents, hosting occasional pop-up shows. Artists will feel the pinch in having to balance slender sales against the costs of materials, studio rental, framing, photography, transportation and storage. Some will consider relocating from the city to the regions, others will work at a day job – or work longer hours at their day job.

The artist’s predicament is made harder by the scaling back of part-time teaching positions, as technical colleges and universities abandon art courses. It’s a vain hope to apply for a grant from a government funding body, many artists believing their chances are next to zero. In the eyes of those I’ve spoken to over the past year, the funding bodies are widely regarded as “a joke”. It’s been well documented on this site, and in The Australian, that approximately a third of those who sit on selection committees are also grant recipients. Creative Australia has created the perception of a clubby group of people giving handouts to each other and rejecting anything that doesn’t align with their ideological preferences. When queried, the organisation insists its processes are “robust”. Well, “impregnable” might be a better term.

Meanwhile, Create NSW, showing an unprecedented concern for the “privacy” of grant recipients, has chosen to conceal the identities of those who are awarded sums of public money. This secrecy about how taxpayers’ largesse is bestowed should be considered a scandal, but the media doesn’t appear to see a problem.

At a time when the market is faltering and artists need all the support they can get, government is pursuing its own opaque agenda. It’s partly because budgets have been shot to bits by large-scale infrastructure projects which have blown out by billions of dollars; partly because the current crop of politicians see the Arts as a very low priority. This would be more understandable if the NSW government wasn’t simultaneously pouring hundreds of millions into a Powerhouse project that is the mother of all white elephants.

This year will see many funding issues come to a crisis point. The Australian Design Centre is facing closure after state and federal governments removed both grants – while praising the organisation for its great work! The Museum of Contemporary Art is in scarcely better shape and will struggle to keep the doors open without an injection of funds. Further examples could be multiplied. I’ve been writing about the arts for decades and have never known government bodies to act in a more high-handed, foolish and destructive manner. Their decisions simply do not make sense, being apparently designed to alienate audiences and waste vast sums of money. It’s no surprise that these brutal, stupid policies come with a complete absence of accountability.

What a torrent of sins are committed in the name of fairness and social justice. Where did we get the idea that art’s mission was to right all the historical wrongs? Who decreed it was the sacred duty role of the state to support self-consciously ‘marginal’ enterprises instead of well-established ones?

Ultimately it does no-one any favours to allocate funding in relation to ethnicity, sexual preferences or religion. Being black or white, gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, does not automatically confer any degree of artistic talent, but to assume that minorities are somehow more ‘deserving’, is a sure-fire way of stirring up anger and resentment among the most open-minded people in Australia – namely artists.

Maybe I’ve led a sheltered life, but I can’t recall meeting any artist who was overtly racist or homophobic. Old-school misogyny is largely a thing of the past, and until recently, antisemitism or Islamophobia would have been strictly taboo.

It’s time museums and funding bodies stopped pretending they are doing something heroic with ideologically constipated policies that equate quality with identity. If we lose our willingness – or ability – to make judgements in terms of aesthetic quality, this opens the door to mediocrity on a grand scale. When we can’t say a work of art is good or bad, there’s little incentive to keep looking.

This should not be a controversial view, but the artworld today is so hopelessly stitched-up, so full of self-imposed political protocols and taboos, that almost nobody wants to give an honest assessment of a work of art. Not long ago this was the job of the critic, but nowadays the newspapers and magazines are stuffed with profiles and puff pieces that treat every artist as a genius.

In such a milieu artists are more necessary than ever, as a wedge against a depressing orthodoxy. The club of favourites is very small, a fact that is verified on a weekly basis. This week’s instalment was an announcement from Arts Minster, Tony Burke’s office that he is extending the appointment of APYACC artist, Sally Scales, to the Council of the National Gallery of Australia for another three years – as if there were no more experienced or qualified Indigenous candidates. He’s also adding Ben Quilty to the Council, which is not exactly a left-field choice. Whatever we might think about Ben – and opinions are very mixed – it would be hard to deny that he is a firm institutional favourite.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of these appointments, is that NGA director, Nick Mitzevich, has announced he intends to hold the controversial APYACC show that was canned when the “white hands, black art” controversy broke out early in 2023. Contrary to what you may have read in the papers, a great deal of damaging testimony has never been released to the public, so claims that the group are “exonerated” are somewhat premature. As Sally Scales has work in this show it’s a strange move to appoint her to the Council. Meanwhile, Dr. Nick is also rumoured to be working on another Ben Quilty show, which might conventionally be seen as a good reason not to have Ben in the boardroom. Apparently, the phrase “conflict of interests” is not part of the NGA vocabulary – although it may have taken its lead from Creative Australia, where committee members simply leave the room when their own projects, or those of colleagues and family, are discussed. It would be a rare occurrence that you came back into the room and your fellow committee members said: “Sorry, we hated it”.

Where Dr. Nick and Tony Burke, are concerned it’s apparently considered an advantage to have people on the NGA Council who are also taking part in its exhibitions.

Unless you’re one of the golden ones who are so generously supported by institutions, the only recourse for an artist today is Emersonian self-reliance. In his famous essay of the same name, published in 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson argued for the value of “individualism, personal responsibilty and non-conformity”. In the current climate that might mean: “Don’t go around mouthing empty slogans, jumping on bandwagons, or tailoring your work to fit the trends.”

The majority of practising artists have no choice but to fall back on their own resources, making work that may or may not find an audience. As there are always more artists than dealers can handle, many will be obliged to look beyond the commercial gallery model. This means establishing a presence online, entering art prizes, or working with others on co-operative projects. The main thing is not to believe the (art)world owes you a living.

More than most other people, artists put a high value on their freedom – on creativity and personal vision. This assertion of creative freedom is a more radical gesture than devoting oneself to well-defined causes and issues. Political conviction is the prerogative of every citizen, but artists do not have to shape their work to fit in with their politics. There may be more integrity in a painting of a landscape or a vase of flowers than another conceptual masterpiece telling us that racism is bad.

An artist such as David Hockney is not famous and successful because he’s making statements, it’s because so many people respond warmly to the spirit of his work. The colour, the inventiveness, the scale and the humour counts for more than the subject. Hockney’s paintings are defiant assertions of personal freedom, whether they depict a lover, a landcape or a sausage dog. Look at one of his shows and you see a man who loves what he does, and this is one of most powerful impressions one can take away from the experience of art.

One can always tell the difference between those works made with care and passion, and those churned out in mechanical fashion. A true artist may live in obscurity and never sell a work, but that depth of commitment is something that can’t be taken away from them. For many, the fulfilment of making work is the whole point of the exercise. If you’re lucky enough to make a living from art, it’s a colossal bonus.

Artists are necessary for the health of a society in the same way that bees are necessary for the natural environment. Artists help sustain our capacity for imagination. They invite us to step outside ourselves and explore other worlds. We need a significant group of people whose existence doesn’t revolve around a weekly pay packet, even if that means they are relatively poor. For the most impoverished artist there’s always the sustaining fantasy that one day your work will be ‘discovered’ and you’ll become rich - but that’s a bit like fantasising about winning the lottery.

When I find myself complaining about the complacency and corruption that has taken such a death-grip on our culture I’m reassured by the thought that artists have something that can’t be measured in dollars and cents, government grants and appointments, or patronage by public galleries and private collectors. No matter how lop-sided the playing field, they have their own vital core of inspiration that keeps ticking, even when the world turns into the dark and crazy place we’re looking at in 2026. The bad news will come along no matter what we do, the good news is that in the most barren and difficult circumstances, creativity will always find a way to flourish. Happy new year, in spite of it all!

It’s just over a year since I launched Everything the Artworld doesn’t want you to know. What began as a newsletter accompanying articles on art and cinema has evolved into something much more broad-ranging and ambitious. Having always seen the visual arts as one component of a universal culture, it’s been my conviction that one can’t hope to write well about art without some understanding of fields such as literature, music, cinema, history, politics or science. Over the past year those points of intersection have become more important, leading to an expanded form of commentary.

As 2025 sputters to a close it’s time to thank you, the subscribers, who have helped make this enterprise a success, and to take the temperature of where we are now, as opposed to this time last year.

The way the editorial has evolved has been a matter of organic growth rather than calculation, with the motivating force being the endless stream of scandals we’ve seen this year. It’s not just an artworld problem, it’s a cultural problem, with organisations in music and the performing arts also under attack from those who purport to be their guardians. The problem has been compounded by a lifeless performance from a mass media which seems to have given up on criticism and investigative journalism.

It’s not unusual for Australian governments to be reluctant to fund the arts, seeing them as ‘non-essential’ items with a niche appeal that are first to be cut in times of austerity. They hope against hope that the private sector will step in and pick up the tab, but in this country that’s a pipe dream. It’s impossible to imagine a sudden boom in philanthropy when there is little by way of a philanthropic tradition.

There is, however, a huge difference between governments being miserly with funds for well-established organisations, and the current practice of gutting those organisations, pouring the money into untried, unpromising projects for reasons that seem to be founded on bad advice and fatuous ideology. In NSW it’s not simply that funds are being withheld from core institutions, they are being squandered on that extravagant folly, the Powerhouse. We’ve suffered the unedifying spectacle of an Arts Ministry that is tight-fisted to the point of vindictiveness, happy to blow the budget on a single project that will never be anything but a shocking drain on the public purse.

Until this year I’ve never known local governments to be so thoughtlessly destructive, so lacking in foresight and understanding, so willing to abandon quality and embrace chaos. Sad to say, this is happening when Labor is in the ascendency (although the Country Liberal Party is doing some sterling work in this regard in the Northern Territory). Labor is the overwhelming beneficiary of the arts vote at every election, but it has a terrible record of dumping on the faithful. At no time in history has it betrayed the arts more comprehensively than in 2025.

I’m not going to trawl back over those acts of vandalism and treachery, as they are all documented on Everythingthe.com . At this time of year, it’s standard practice to look back on the year that was, picking out highs and lows, but this is not something I’m about to do, as the degeneration of commentary into list-making is one of the blights of contemporary journalism. I’ve never been inclined to write pieces nominating my top ten artists, or the shows of the year, or the young painters to watch, or my hit picks from the Archibald Prize… but this is exactly the kind of thing the Sydney Morning Herald thinks its readers want, believing a list of points is more quickly absorbed by those whose minds have been warped by social media.

The steady rise of subscriptions to Everythingthe.com suggests there is a much bigger audience for the long-format piece than my former editors imagined. I’ve set out to take on issues and examine them from many different angles. What’s most important is that every article – every editorial – should have a distinct point of view. This is the heart and soul of the critical enterprise. It’s not sufficient to ask someone for their thoughts, then get a quote from someone else with a different view, resulting in a ping pong game in which there is no winner. The status quo remains untouched, no blame is assigned, and there is barely any attempt to foresee the diabolical outcomes of today’s bad policies. Such writing creates a blank space in the reader’s mind when there is every reason to feel outrage, but this is what passes for arts journalism.

The editors tick off these ‘nothing’ stories, and say, “Well, we’ve dealt with that one! No need to go back there for a few months, as we don’t want to bore our readers.”

It would be more accurate to say that readers are bored by the bland, aimless nature of the coverage rather than the subject. Every cultural institution has learned that the media nowadays has a short attention span for even the greatest scandals, so all they need do is issue a non-committal statement or a bit of positive propaganda - then clam up. It’s a fact that stories will not be pursued any further, and you can get on with wrecking the joint in your preferred manner.

In these editorials, which have expanded due to the sheer volume of controversy, I’ve tried to take the opposite approach: keeping a watchful eye on stories as they develop, returning to the fray whenever it’s necessary. I recently heard that this site is blocked at all three branches of the Powerhouse. I’m not quite sure how this could be done, but if true it provides a good indication that what I’m saying is touching a raw nerve. Why block a site when you have nothing to fear? It’s a totalitarian manœuvre.

Art criticism per se has virtually disappeared from the mainstream media. My old buddy Christopher Allen at The Australian is the last man standing, and although we agree on many points, he and I are very different writers in terms of style and priorities.

There could be no better illustration of the vital role played by criticism than the way brazen, corrupt, lazy and incompetent behaviour has blossomed in so many arts institutions over the past year, usually with the assistance of state and federal governments that prefer to hide their mistakes rather than deal with ongoing problems. Any questions about how Creative Australia dispenses its grants? “We have robust processes in place!”

The tiny boxes into which newspapers squeeze their articles serve as an indirect form of censorship, forcing writers to leave out a great deal of material that deserves discussion. The mindless rules news outlets have begun to impose on themselves, whereby it’s not permissible to be critical of some museum director, or of whole classes of people for one reason or another, is a betrayal of the idea that the fourth estate is the guarantor of truth in a liberal democracy.

It would be more accurate to say that today we live in an illiberal democracy that sees cowardice and hypocrisy as prime social virtues. Neither is it generally acknowledged that there is – or should be – a firm dividing line between public interest and personal empire building or profiteering. Why are journos so unwilling to call out activities that channel vast amounts of taxpayers’ money into private projects of dubious value? Why are they silent on cover-ups, secrecy and lack of accountability? When Create NSW decided to keep the names of its grant recipients “private” this year, that should have set off all kinds of alarms, but a blatant strategy to avoid transparency barely raised a mention.

There’s no blueprint for writing an end-of-year roundup, as I found when I checked out what some other sites were doing. At Cricket Et Al, rapidly becoming one of my online addictions, Peter Lalor recounted the events of a year that took him and his fellow author, Gideon Haigh, to test matches around the world – all funded by subscriptions. It sounded like quite a party, but also a group effort, with two main writers, a scorer, and a group of guest contributors, and a highly responsive audience. They do public events and even make their own merchandise! Occasionally, another topic takes precedence over the cricket – such as the campaign to prevent the appallingly stupid “restructure” of the State Library of Victoria, where Cricket Et Al was able to mobilise support from all quarters.

I’m envious of the camaraderie, and all those test matches, but Everything the artworld doesn’t want you to know, ain’t that kind of site. Although subscriptions enabled me to travel to London to see and write about the Emily Kame Kngwarreye show at Tate Modern, I’m a long way from being able to go anywhere in the world for an important art exhibition or a film festival. That might be a worthwhile goal, helping expand readership beyond these shores; bringing more of the world into the insular Australian art scene while introducing Australian art to an international audience. But I have to admit, culture doesn’t enjoy the same mass appeal as sport – even a cultish, obsessional sport such as cricket, which frequently lures me away from the keyboard during a test match.

At the fantasy end of yearly roundups, one finds economist, Paul Krugman, casually expressing a new year’s wish “to add a few hundred thousand” to a readership that is already nudging 500,000 subscribers. It probably helps to have spent decades growing your audience as a columnist for the New York Times.

In this country we’ve grown accustomed to seeing culture as an ‘élite’ preoccupation, but it plays a role in everyone’s life, and one can easily underestimate the number of people who take an interest. After a year in which I’ve never worked longer hours, I’m able to recognise the fantastic possibilities of Everythingthe.com . As the mainstream dumbs down its arts coverage, and audiences lose faith in once-reliable organs such as the ABC, there’s a growing hunger for honest, informed commentary.

Over the past 12 months I’ve probably become the best-informed arts writer in Australia, thanks to the volume of information I’ve received from people eager to tell me what’s really going in inside some of our major institutions or recount their personal experiences with state and federal funding bodies. Most of these informants insist on anonymity, which is perfectly understandable, as many of our arts bosses are not only deaf to criticism, but vindictive towards those who don’t toe the party line. I understand that people need jobs, and arts jobs are increasingly hard to come by, so I’m grateful for anyone who is brave enough to speak up about things they feel to be important.

Another thing I’ve discovered this year is the degree to which many people in the arts are not acting out of some misguided conviction or ideological delusion, but through sheer avarice. You may think I’m incredibly naive not to have previously recognised the corrupting force of money, but I certainly recognise it now: in massive handouts to friends and associates; in the capricious game of who gets funded and who gets shut down; in puff pieces that ignore the most obvious points of controversy; the slippery antics of some of our commercial galleries; and the exploitative profiteering of those who bleat most loudly about “ethics” in the Indigenous art world.

It’s one thing to learn about all this bad behaviour, quite another to be able to explore it in detail. One can only write about things for which there is incontrovertible evidence and people willing to testify in public. In most instances a climate of fear and secrecy prevails, permitting dishonest, destructive activities to flourish unchecked.

Allowing for a few precautions, this site has allowed me to take on some juggernauts and raise the level of public awareness of abuses in the arts sector. I know these pieces are being read widely, including by people who will not speak my name unless it’s to spread misinformation. And these critiques are travelling globally. The miracle of the Internet has made New York my second biggest reader base after Australia, and London the third biggest. There’s also a rising readership in South-East Asia, which is possibly the most promising of all areas. The numbers can’t be compared with Paul Krugman’s monumental readership, but they are constantly creeping upwards.

It’s not just criticism that has migrated online nowadays, it’s the entire artworld, with more and more collectors buying works online without having paid a visit to the gallery or studio. There are ever greater numbers of young people who feel no need to experience the “aura” of the work of art, being content to look at art on their laptops and phones. Or maybe they’re not inspired by what they see and prefer to seek out more exciting options elsewhere on the web. Such trends may well be harbingers of a future in which museums struggle to attract audiences and dealers can no longer justify permanent exhibition spaces.

In the cinema there are still good films to be seen, but obscene amounts of money are being poured into blockbusters such as James Cameron’s Avatar series (which is the subject of this week’s review), superhero flicks or children’s movies. It’s not unusual for a quality film to be pulled from the theatres after only a few days if it fails to attract audiences, or to find oneself almost alone at a screening.

We live in a distracted world in which the age-old pastime of reading for pleasure is rapidly disappearing. As all my reading is a pleasure (with the exception of the odd catalogue essay), I find it almost impossible to get my head around this situation. The decline of reading means the decline of memory and reflection, with facts being retrievable at the touch of a button. Yet this glut of information doesn’t seem to be making us more thoughtful or reasonable in our political attitudes. We are drowning in prejudice and conspiracy theories, relying on how we “feel” in deciding what’s right or wrong, true or false.

It should be accepted as a great privilege to be proven wrong from time to time. It’s no shame when facts need correcting or one’s heroes prove to have feet of clay. What’s important for a writer is to be able to draw conclusions from the body of evidence one has accumulated. If the evidence proves to be faulty, or the conclusions badly drawn, it’s OK to change course. A bigger problem is the determination to persist in error when you know you are wrong - to give balm to your ego, or to engage in elaborate coverups to protect wrongdoers and institutional reputations. It’s just as bad when journalists refuse to investigate leads, preferring to accept the inherent goodness of those who are habitually buttering them up.

I don’t know where we lost touch with principles and commonsense, but these qualities are in short supply in the Australian artworld, and the malaise is not restricted to this country. I’m hoping in my small, stubborn way, that Everythingthe.com is making a contribution to the greater good. Although I understand the need for occasional diplomacy, I’ve never been able to write things that I know to be false. Neither have I been happy to accept everything I read or hear, without further scrutiny. These things are so fundamental it feels slightly ridiculous to be stating them as a profession de foi, but a glance at the torrent of vileness on platforms such as Elon Musk’s X forces a recalibration of ‘stating the obvious”.

If you’re still with me after this rave, I hope you’ll stick with it for another year, as I keep scratching away at the cultural fabric, trying to remove a few stains. I aim to be fearless, though not reckless, and am grateful for the support and encouragement I’ve received from readers. It’s a lot of toil, but it would be much harder without dialogue and feedback. The stony silence that radiates from those I’ve criticised or queried is offset by the comments of subscribers who feel the same need to know what’s going on, and the same frustrations at the hijacking of our public culture. In unity there is strength, in dialogue there is a solution to those problems brought about by secrecy and stonewalling. I’m aiming to recharge the batteries a little over the next few weeks and come out as strongly as ever in 2026. See you there.

It’s impossible to ignore the events at Bondi this week, which are crowding everything else out of the news cycle. In Australia, where we pride ourselves on our easy-going, fair-minded ways, an act of terrorism feels especially shocking. We may be a successful multicultural society that shuns all forms of extremism, from both left and right, but the downside is a fog of conservativism and complacency.

Albo is copping a hammering in The Australian and other outlets, because of his government’s slowness to combat a rising tide of antisemitism. In fact, he’s only being consistent with the cautious, babysteps approach he’s taken with almost every policy, even though Labor has its highest percentage of seats since John Curtin won office in 1943. The difference is that a slowness to adopt the recommendations of reports on gambling or public sector appointments, hasn’t been thrown into the spotlight by a single catastrophic event.

Dragging the chain on Jillian Segal’s report on antisemitism now looks like a major error. Although early complaints about the report from media and politicians were vociferous, saying it would have a negative impact on freedom of speech and university funding, the most voluble critics, such as Greens Senator, Mehreen Faruqi, appear to have retreated into a discreet silence. All the controversy has slowed the process of debate, as the government has failed to come to any decisions as to which of Segal’s recommendations should be adopted or rejected. The problem is that for platforms such as Elon Musk’s X, which has devolved into a moral sewer, “freedom of speech” means the freedom to say racist, hate-filled, utterly false things, with the intention of fomenting violence. Now, in a panic, Labor is forgoing the discussions, and implementing Segal’s recommendation holus-bolus.

There’s substance to the charges of inaction even if much of the outrage has been exaggerated for political effect, with no likelihood that any response would have had the slightest impact on the terrorists. For the hapless Coalition it’s the first foothold they’ve had since the election, and Sussan Ley was quick to sound the call on Labor’s sins. Unfortunately, she wouldn’t go so far as to discuss gun control – as this might offend the party faithful and cause more defections to One Nation.

The unscrupulous Benjamin Netanyahu - the man responsible for the greatest security failure in Israel since the Yom Kippur War of 1973 – has a lot of hide to attack Albo’s failings. A world leader with any decency would be expressing his sympathy with those who have lost friends and family, rather than trying to score political points. It’s dumbfounding to be lectured by a man whose uncompromising violence in Gaza has helped stir anti-Israel feeling all over the world.

The Labor Party may feel it is being unfairly attacked but it has played a passive role in a gradual normalisation of antisemitism in the arts sector that has been underway for the past two years. It’s not that bodies such as Creative Australia, the Sydney Biennale or other major arts organisations have been marching around waving banners, it’s been a more subtle process of taking sides in the Gaza conflict – identifying those who take a pro-Palestinian stance as good, and those who support Israel, as bad. At root, it’s as dumb as that, but there are several shades of prejudice involved.

Just because we live in a multicultural democracy don’t expect neutrality. Many people seem incapable of feeling outrage at the IDF’s actions in Gaza without looking for someone to blame closer to home. Although a sizeable percentage of Jewish people are fiercely opposed to the actions of Netanyahu’s government, they are assumed to be uniformly endorsing the slaughter. It has become a term of abuse to label someone a “Zionist”, as if this were the worst thing in the world, but a Zionist is simply a person who believes the Jews have a right to a homeland. There are many shades of Zionism, from extreme right-wingers to those who argue that the Palestinians have the exact same right to a home – the famous “two state solution”. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a Zionist.

To deny any group of people a place to call ‘home’ is an acute form of brutality, but there’s a strand of opinion that believes it’s sinister for the Jews to claim such a right. In the Australian art world, this has become a weird article of faith for a lot of people who are neither Jews nor Muslims.

I’ve occasionally wished the Jewish Film Festival was a little less obsessed with the Holocaust, but the past year has shown why it’s important to keep issuing reminders. Many young people who have casually embraced antisemitism in their fury over Gaza, have completely forgotten about the tragedies of the Second World War. Such a failure of historical awareness is rapidly becoming one of the most alarming traits of our age. A 2018 survey in Russia found that more than half of those aged between 18-24 had no knowledge of Stalin’s crimes. I imagine the same holds true for China, where discussion of Mao’s horrors is discouraged.

Atrocities that have defined the identities of modern nations have made little impression on many who have embraced the Palestinian cause so indiscriminately. Simplistic ideas about “colonialism” are being used to equate Israel with the British colonisation of Australia. Crude analogies are being made between the Palestinians and Aboriginal people, setting off emotional triggers in those who are quick to engage their feelings rather than their brains, ready to convert history into tabloid tales of heroes and villains.

The first and most obvious sign of the drift towards political insensitivity was the inappropriate choice of Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia in next year’s Venice Biennale. I’ve been through this issue many times and am not going to rake over it again. Suffice to say, this is not the time Australia should be sending either a Palestinian partisan or a hard-line defender of Israel to Venice.

In the wake of the Bondi attack, accusations are flying that the Australian government has shown undue partisanship by recognising a Palestinian state. Although the obvious spur for this action was the unrelenting, inhumane nature of the IDF campaign in Gaza, when we gratuitously identify ourselves with one side of the conflict, at one of the world’s major cultural events, it adds fuel to accusations of bias.

Creative Australia’s lack of political awareness and the woeful failure of its selection processes have been exposed by The Australian, which pointed out the close connections between those who dispose of CA grants and those who receive them. But these articles were completely ignored by other outlets that preferred to believe in the inherent innocence of all concerned. An “independent” investigation into the Sabsabi affair found there were vague procedural problems with CA, but nobody was to blame. It’s getting to the stage that every time I hear the words “independent investigation”, I automatically think “cover up”.

The failure of these processes is a topic widely discussed by artists who feel they have no chance of getting a grant if they are not part of an inner circle or at the very least a favoured demographic. In a recent article we find the former head of Opera Australia, Lyndon Terracini, now working in Verona, calling for a two-year freeze on CA funding while its “broken fundamental mechanism” undergoes a thorough review.

This followed revelations that CA had run up a $636,126 bill for international travel over the past two years. Personally, I don’t think this is as big a scandal as the process of calling for people to apply to be members of CA committees. It should be obvious that those most eager to sit on committees have an agenda for themselves or their associates. A quick glance at where the grant money has gone for the past couple of years bears out this suspicion. Neither is it clear how candidates are selected for these roles, or who does the selecting. What qualifications are required apart from being approved by CA officers who may share the same political predilections? For grant applicants, the process of “peer assessment” often means being judged by a group of like-minded friends or ideological enemies.

None of this is evidence of antisemitism but even allowing for the fact that Australia is home to a million Muslims and only 117,000 Jews, the amount of money handed to Sabsabi and his colleagues suggests a completely lopsided set of priorities.

Looking elsewhere, let’s not forget Abdul-Rahman Abdulla’s brief stint on the Council of the NGA, cut short by a series of militant social media posts. When the appointment took place on September 2023, one month before the October 7 massacre, Arts Minister, Tony Burke, welcomed the new member saying he would provide “authentic leadership” which reflected “modern Australia”. When Abdullah was quietly retired from the Council a month later, neither Burke, nor NGA director, Nick Mitzevich, would say a word. So much for “authentic leadership”. This was one moment when a decisive statement by the Minister would have demonstrated a commitment to separate our arts institutions from the divisive realm of politics.

Then there was the protest in the front of the National Gallery of Victoria at the beginning of August, calling for the museum to sever ties with major sponsor, John Gandel, who was condemned for his Zionist views. In this instance, the antisemitism was out in the open and inexcusable. When I wrote a piece condemning the protest, I received hate mail from those heroic types who love to breath fire on political issues while remaining anonymous.

The Biennale of Sydney has also come under scrutiny for choosing Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi as its next artistic director. As another outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, Al Qasimi’s appointment allegedly brought about the withdrawal of some of the exhibition’s Jewish sponsors. The shortfall has been made up by Al Qasimi’s connections in Sharjah, while concerted efforts have been made to portray the director as being chiefly focussed on the art, not the politics.

Many people, myself included, have been hesitant to judge Al Qasimi’s Biennale until we’ve seen the show, but last week brought a news item that didn’t inspire much confidence. Yoni Bashan writes how publisher, Morry Schwartz, until recently a Board member of the Biennale, was shocked to find the official “ArtSeen Ambassador”, performance artist, Bhenji Ra, posting a picture on Instagram of a rabbi draped in blood-stained Israeli and American flags, with his foot on a baby doll.

Schwartz emailed the Biennale’s chairman, Kate Mills, and vice-chair Matt Crocker on August 10. Bashan writes: “He attaches the photo and asks how it’s even possible that this person is still an ambassador for the Biennale. He compares the image to ‘the worst Nazi caricatures of baby-eating Jews’ and says ‘there is no walking this sickness back’.”

Two days later, Schwartz is told the ambassador has been reprimanded and promises not to do it again. But, like the Smiths’ sweet and tender hooligan, it was a case of ‘not until the next time’. It took a fortnight for Ra to start posting pro-Hamas images from a Gaza solidarity rally. This time when Schwartz wrote in protest there was no reply.

One week after this article appeared we have the Bondi shootings, which makes Bhenji Ra’s postings look utterly reprehensible. How can someone call themselves an “ambassador” for the Biennale while sending out these inflammatory posts? What is an “ambassador” anyway, and why do we need one? It sounds horribly close to Lisa Havilah’s “Powerhouse Associates” program, which has put more than $2.5 million into the pockets of a handful of favoured individuals.

According to the Biennale, the ArtSeen program is “each year shaped by a prominent local artist who curates a bespoke program of events designed to platform and uplift their community.”

Ra’s program promises “extra surprises along the way!” She’s certainly delivered in that respect, although it’s an interesting question as to whose community is “uplifted” by antisemitic hate posts. As her Instagram account appears to be private, this doesn’t argue any great community outreach. It’s interesting to note that Number One on her list of followers is the Powerhouse Museum, confirming the connections that exist between organisations and individuals that seem to enjoy special privileges in NSW.

What all these stories add up to, is an unpleasant sense that the (understandable) outrage generated by the IDF assault on Gaza is being channelled into a generalised hatred for Jewish people. The gradual build-up of such feelings has consequences, leading to the dehumanisation of those stigmatised as the enemy. The attack in Bondi may have no direct connection to artworld bigots, but it should serve as a wake-up call that demonising an entire community is not a parlour game. As a medium of communication that informs the greater culture the visual arts play a role in the way we relate to the world around us. When artists who make one-sided political statements are ‘grant approved’ it implies official acceptance and approval.

The Betoota Advocate got it right in its response to the Bondi incident and “Australia’s unorganised, point-scoring, online activists”. The self-sustaining momentum of those who like to associate themselves with “issues” on social media has been halted by the extraordinary empathy the public has shown for the victims. The killings have put a human face to an abstraction, reminding us that figures such as 87-year-old Holocaust survivor, Alexander Kleytman or 10-year-old Matilda, were ordinary, good-hearted people who could not be equated with the ideologically motivated hatred so casually embraced by the Australian artworld.

Perhaps the greatest saving grace over the events in Bondi is that Ahmed Al Ahmed, the bystander who tackled the gunman, was himself a Muslim. In this battle between two western suburbs shopkeepers we can see that the actions of the terrorists should not be associated with the Muslim community any more than the carnage in Gaza should be laid at the door of Australia’s Jewish community.

The overwhelming public outcry and sense of solidarity with the victims has apparently shamed into silence those who like to identify themselves with hot button political issues - although it remains to be seen whether this is actual shame or merely a strategic withdrawal. Will the Biennale’s ArtSeen ambassador, Bhenji Ra, be posting her sympathies for the victims of terror?

The art crowd loves to strike heroic poses, think of itself as inherently subversive and politically radical, but with the Gaza conflict, this dilettantish posing has been subsumed by a mob mentality. We need to be able to feel compassion for the Palestinians without letting these sympathies curdle into hatred for another group of people who should not be expected to answer for Netanyahu’s barbarism. Politics, like religion, is infinitely darker and more dangerous than the self-styled rebels of the artworld like to imagine and needs to be handled with care. Instead of plunging in wildly with feelings inflamed by anger, we need to pause and think.

At the beginning of what has turned out to be a sombre week I was immersed in the world of fashion, writing an art column about the National Gallery of Victoria’s summer blockbuster, Westwood/Kawakubo, and a review of Sadie Frost’s documentary on Twiggy, the first super model. Both exhibition and film are highly recommendable, although it requires a wrench of the psyche to step away from the nightmare at Bondi and accept that fashion has its own vitality and validity. Life goes on, despite the attempts of murderous fanatics to make us angry and fearful. There’s nothing praiseworthy about the great Australian complacency, but it’s a far better option than national paranoia.

This editorial has been slow to arrive because of travel and other commitments, but there’s never any shortage of subjects competing for attention. I was thinking of writing on another topic until I read the latest instalment in the agonising saga of the Powerhouse, delivered by the Sydney Morning Herald’s arts scribe, Linda Morris. The resulting buzz means the time to respond is now.

This week we find Linda building on what has become a growing tendency to include a few queries and criticisms. Little by little, the critical voices are making themselves heard in these articles.

This may have something to do with the departure of the editor known as BS, who seems to have been sent back to the ranks, with buttons missing and sword broken, after a few ignominious years in the top job. Who can forget his quisling editorial, ‘Let’s all get behind the Powerhouse Museum renovation’, of Feb. 2024, which sneered at “special interest groups, including some patrons, critics and unions” who “complained and carped” about the “renewal”. His rousing conclusion was “the time has surely come to bite the bullet and support the government’s sensible preservation plan.”

If BS had done nothing else but write this utterly foolish, misleading editorial, he would have richly deserved the boot. Let’s hope the new editor, Jordan Baker, takes a sceptical line with the Powerhouse, and with the virtuous claims of the Minns government that her predecessor found so congenial. Let’s hope we never hear of Powerhouse CEO, Lisa Havilah, saying: “I’ll just get Jordan on the phone…”

The signs of change are there in Linda’s most recent piece, but despite the flurry of excitement among Powerhouse supporters who feel the tide may be turning, I’m not at all persuaded. Please note the way La Havilah’s plan to “upend the hierarchy of the museum” is presented as a reasoned proposition, when it’s the kind of thing the Huns and Visigoths would find alarming.

Criticisms of this “plan” are raised, but the fiction of a balanced argument is doggedly maintained. By now, it should be clear we’re not dealing with a carefully plotted strategy for growing audiences and extending the boundaries of museology. The Powerhouse “renewal” is a bloated mess that gets messier by the month as further expensive, hare-brained initiatives are added to the package, and large sums of money are channelled into the pockets of friends and “Associates”. When we read of Havilah boasting she has “102 collaborators from western Sydney, 117 from NSW, 90 nationally and 97 internationally,” one wonders how many of them are on the payroll? How many have been gifted trips, residencies or other perks? Vincent Namatjira may live in Central Australia, but the NSW taxpayer has just paid for him to spend three months at the Cité des Arts in Paris.

The Powerhouse project has become the cultural equivalent of driftnet fishing, scraping up all the funding that previously sustained an entire arts ecosystem. For this monster to indulge its megalomaniacal schemes, the Australian Design Centre has been effectively defunded, the Art Gallery of NSW has been financially crippled, the Museum of Contemporary Art has been virtually assigned to oblivion, and 18 regional galleries have either lost their state government lifelines or been given a slimmed-down handout, for which they are expected to be grateful.

The Havilah “plan” isn’t for a radical new “museum of the 21^st century”, it’s for no museum at all. Whatever is being planned by way of performance spaces, function centres, contemporary art shows, artist residencies, rave parties, story writing competitions, dormitories, market gardens, demonstration kitchens, and science fiction blockbusters, have nothing to do with anything we might expect from a museum. As former PHM curator, Kylie Winkworth, is quick to remind us, it’s all outside the museum’s legislated remit. Call it what you like, but the Havilah Powerhouse is no museum. As to what it actually is, well that’s a mystery Sherlock Holmes would struggle to solve.

For once, the title of the SMH article, ‘Is our new ‘museum’ brilliant, bonkers or just a big box?’ provides a relatively accurate description of its contents: a whole lot of fence-sitting, as criticisms of the Powerhouse are matched with comments from supportive ‘experts’.

When one of those experts is David Borger, the chairman of the PHM Board, and a blind supporter of this plan, one should not expect objectivity. Another fan is Gus Casely-Hayford, director of the Victoria & Albert’s new East London branch, who has been a dependable source of praise, although he doesn’t seem to understand – or prefers not to acknowledge - the massive differences between his institution and the Powerhouse.

Gus gushes: “Powerhouse is in the vanguard, part of a generation of institutions around the world who are enfranchising young and diverse audiences through transformational contact with wonderful things. I salute them.” Really?

The third expert is Alex Poots, director of The Shed, New York, – “an early inspiration for the Powerhouse and leader of community engagement and ‘democratic’ programming’” The big question is: “Who brought Mr. Poots to Australia, and for what purpose?”

Answer: Powerhouse and the University of Technology, Sydney, brought him out to speak at a conference. It would be pure discourtesy were he to say the project sucks.

As Winkworth observes in an email she sent me this week: “The Shed is NOT a museum. The Shed at Hudson Yards is a commercially focussed event space designed for art fairs, commercial functions, theatre and performance. Like Carriageworks. To my knowledge there has never been a museum exhibition at The Shed. It has no collection and no remit for museum exhibitions.”

I’ve been to The Shed and can confirm this description. Alex Poots is a venue manager, not a museum director, and this may be how Havilah ultimately sees herself. The Shed styles itself as “a cultural institution of and for the 21st century,” which is very similar to the rhetoric Havilah uses to describe her “vision” for the Powerhouse. One might also note that The Shed has been beset with financial problems since its opening in 2019. The significant difference is that Havilah is responsible for the care and display of one of Australia’s largest and most important museum collections of close to 500,000 items.

When the CEO says “2,500 objects from the Powerhouse collection will appear in the opening shows,” she doesn’t give any indication of the way these works will be used. Current form suggests they will be incorporated into ‘creative’ displays devoid of history and context, treated largely as ornaments. The underlying assumption is that audiences are bored with traditional museum displays and need to be constantly titillated by arty juxtapositions of disparate items devised by ‘creatives’ rather than curators.

This strategy, which presents itself as a radical new approach to museum display, is already a cliché that has worn out its welcome. When a museum decides to abandon scholarship and chronology in favour of spectacle and novelty, don’t be surprised if – rather than getting excited - audiences quickly lose interest. As I write, I’ve just seen a LinkedIn post by Dolla Merrillees, Havilah’s predecessor as CEO of the Powerhouse, who sounds a warning in precisely these terms. In contrast to Gus Casely-Hayford, she argues “this is not a debate between ‘traditional’ and ‘progressive’ museology,” but between a museum and an entertainment centre.

Linda Morris tells us that Havilah’s strategy “is primed for the TikTok generation, for audiences who may have felt excluded from traditional institutions, and for multicultural communities largely absent from the museum’s collection.”

On the surface this sounds generous and inclusive, but the base assumption is that today’s museum visitors have had their attention spans eroded by social media to the point where they can’t concentrate on reading a descriptive label. The ‘TikTok generation’ seem to be mostly on the lookout for cool places to photograph themselves.

Is this the vision of the museum Havilah favours? A selfie magnet? An indigestible mixture of political correctness and mindless fun, of zero educational value? From the very beginning, education has been one of the core missions of the public museum, but Havilah’s model for a museum of the 21^st century is, as Merrillees observes, an entertainment complex.

Havilah has form when it comes to treating education with disdain. Outlining her management philosophy in a public forum in Adelaide in 2021, she boasted about “…never explaining or trying to educate.” When it came to consultation, she was similarly brusque. “I didn’t ask the audience what they want,” she said. “I ignored the data.” (This speech has subsequently been taken down from the relevant website at the speaker’s request).

Now, this person who doesn’t ask audiences what they want, and ignores the data, is talking about reaching those who feel “excluded” from traditional museums. “Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?” as Freddie Mercury sang. If people feel excluded from museums, surely the best strategy is education and outreach, not dumbing down the exhibits in the hope that hypothetical visitors won’t find them too intimidating.

Every museum has a natural audience of educated, middle class people, 45 years and older. Debraining the exhibits is an excellent way of alienating this core constituency while gambling that new visitors will come running. The search for a new demographic has proven to be a costly failure for many museums, and the Powerhouse is already burning public money on a whim and a prayer.

I’d argue that most people visit museums to be educated as well as entertained. They expect a certain standard of expertise and wish to learn from the displays. This is what makes the museum experience more rewarding than a visit to a video parlour or a shopping mall. Yet Havilah is so unwilling to accept this distinction that one of her inaugural exhibitions in Parramatta will be about shopping malls. Morris writes: “The Mall is a $15 million-plus deep dive into the psychology of the shopping centre, showcasing Australian brands.”

This conjures woeful memories of the opening exhibitions at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 1991: Caravans of the Future and TV Times, but neither of those dopey shows cost $15 million. Add to this the $18 million budget for the Task Eternal “space” exhibition, and we find $33 million being spent on two events that promise to be incredibly tacky. The National Gallery of Victoria does the biggest and best designed exhibition presentations in Australia, but none have cost anything remotely like $15 million or run for more than a few months. If Havilah were prepared to look outside her own thought bubble, she could learn a lot from the NGV’s success. Instead, she is pursuing a costly model that can only end in disaster. And we’re paying for it.

The Powerhouse’s opening shows are set to run for up to two years, but as the novelty wears off, attendances will slow to a trickle. The mammoth initial expense will be joined by skyrocketing financial losses, until the government is forced to do something drastic.

Although shopping for merchandise is now part of the standard museum experience, I confidently predict the Powerhouse will find the public views the museum as a place of wonder, and the shopping mall as one of utilitarian consumption. To transform the museum into a celebration of the shopping mall is to strip it of its identity. As Australian shopping malls are among the ugliest and most formulaic in the world – try comparing them with their Japanese counterparts! – the exhibition risks being a festival of mediocrity.

As for that furphy about “multicultural communities” supposedly “absent from the collection”, are we expected to believe there will be a massive increase in attendances if there are more displays devoted to particular ethnic groups? It needs emphasising that the PHM has always paid attention to these communities, as a vital part of the changing nature of Australian society, but this was done without conspicuous virtue signalling.

Havilah’s “vision” as outlined by Linda Morris, is a thoroughly patronising one. She seems to believe that people in the western suburbs never come into central Sydney to see exhibitions or attend cultural events. Or perhaps she thinks they’re desperate to avoid this onerous journey and get all their artistic thrills in Parramatta.

She also imagines that people in multicultural communities are so immersed in their own practices they can’t appreciate input from other groups. If this were true the entire nation would be nothing but a collection of ghettos and tribes, filled with fear and hostility towards their neighbours. Yet the success and vitality of Australia as a multicultural society is based on the ability of different groups to live together and appreciate each other. The over-emphasis on communities and ethnicities could be seen as a recipe for division rather than harmony. Not everybody wants to spend their lives within the boundaries of ethnic traditions which may not suit their needs or ambitions. Life in Australia allows choices, not demanding that individuals stay within ethnic subcultures or assimilate to a dominant model.

The spiralling costs of Havilah’s “vision” raise questions about whether Powerhouse Parramatta will need to charge attendance fees, which would seriously undermine the rhetoric about “communities” and disenfranchised groups. Nothing is more discouraging for those who feel “excluded” from the museum than a hefty admission charge. But without such charges it will fall to the NSW government to subsidise attendances, pouring more of taxpayers’ money into this cultural sinkhole.

Finally, one of the most fanciful – and revealing – comments in the SMH article is when Linda blandly accepts that Powerhouse Parramatta “will probably exceed its 2 million-visitor first-year target.” This is the most fatuous claim La Havilah is peddling, and the only person who seems to be buying it, apart from Linda Morris, is NSW Arts Minister, John Graham. Guggenheim Bilbao reputedly got 1.35 million in its first year. The Art Gallery of NSW is claiming attendances of 2,034,098 million over 2023-24. It will be a miracle if one million people make it through the doors at Parramatta in its first year. Whatever it gets in Year One, in its second year, those numbers will plummet. There may not be a third year.

When Havilah speaks about “upending the hierarchy of the museum so it’s in the service of story, in service of the community and in service of industry,” the operative word is “story”.

In a recent book, the American critic, Peter Brooks has spoken out against “the mindless valorization of storytelling” that we see everywhere today. “Story” as a concept has become so overused and all-encompassing, we need to stand back and rethink what it entails. If everything is a story, does that mean all stories are of equal value? Can we speak of true and false stories? Important and trivial stories? Interesting and boring ones? When the response to a critical review of an exhibition or a film is: “Well, lots of people really liked it!”, the thinking is that your story is no better than my story, so why do we need to make value judgements? Why should we believe the latest Marvel superhero flick is inferior to Citizen Kane?

One can already see the impact of this tendency in the way the Task Eternal exhibition is shaping up as a mishmash that threatens to put astronomy on the same plane as science fiction and Indigenous ideas about the heavens. If one story is as good as another, we may as well forget about any progressive accumulation of scientific knowledge and say the Sun revolves around the Earth.

While every writer sets out to tell a story of some kind, the tendency to call everything a “story” is closely related to Trump-era tropes such as “alternative facts”. When we select which facts or stories we choose to believe, we are in dangerous territory, accepting that lies are as good as the truth. Placing a new museum “in the service of story” puts an undue emphasis on narrative, because an item of material culture may raise more questions than it answers. Experience is complex, and museums need to reflect that complexity, not construct stories with clearcut heroes and villains. Museums should be in the service of truth not fiction, but it’s fiction that holds a special fascination for Ms. Havilah.

In an ideal world, political speech would also be judged by its truth content, but John Graham, like so many of his peers, prefers propaganda and fables - in a word, “stories”. Today the successful politician is not the one with the best policies, but the one who tells the best stories - narrative being more persuasive than facts and figures. The claim that two million people will visit Powerhouse Parramatta in its first year is a fairy tale that attempts to justify the outlandish sums of public money that are being squandered.

Another story in the process of being sold is the “Culinary Archive” being put together by former publisher, Julie Gibbs, one of Havilah’s favourite “Associates”. For the past few years this project has been widely regarded by many in the gastronomic community as a bit of a joke. As more details have emerged, it’s looking like an out-and-out folly, with a price tag that would make any commercial publisher gag.

An archive is one thing, a book another. Imagine a publication of more than 1,000 pages, packed with old Sydney restaurant menus, beautifully shot pictures of wooden spoons and whisks used by such luminaries as Gibbs’s former husband, Damien Pignolet, and profiles of many inconsequential people in the food industry. It’s hard to know exactly how much Ms. Gibbs has received so far, but if we average out the combined Associates payments disclosed to Budget Estimates, we get annual figures of $35,524, $106,480, $136,204 and $153,68, or $431,889 in total. I have no way of knowing the actual figure, but it could be much higher. In a different institution a staff curator or a professional archivist might have undertaken this task for a lesser sum.

According to Leo Schofield, who declined to contribute to the book, the project came along at the right time for Julie Gibbs, who has greatly appreciated the boost to her finances - as anyone would!

I doubt that many of the authors Julie worked with during her years at Penguin, received more than $400,000 for a work in progress. One experienced food writer suggested to me that if this massive tome had any market potential, “the very savvy Ms. Gibbs would have taken it to a commercial publisher.” It doesn’t require a sage-like understanding of the publishing industry to know you are unlikely to score the jackpot for a thousand-page compendium of old restaurant menus. The Powerhouse is where the money is!

As I don’t have a clear idea about the full contents of this book, I may be caricaturing it somewhat, but I’m not exaggerating the soaring costs of this exercise, or the likelihood that it will struggle to find a market. This is obviously not a worry for the CEO, who has never been concerned about whether anybody ever buys a Powerhouse publication. Under Ms. Havilah’s leadership I seem to recall that the cost of publications one year was well over $300,000, against a return of approximately $18,000. What a luxury to be able to “ignore the data” knowing the Minister has complete confidence in your free spending ways and will keep supplying the cash, even if it sends other organisations to the wall.

Dreary facts, spreadsheets, expert opinion, public submissions, historical precedent, economic modelling, can all be cheerfully discarded so long as you have a good story to tell. There is no arguing against a story, because – unlike an argument - it can’t be refuted, disproven, won or lost. One sentence buried in the SMH article provides an insight into the way Havilah views her role: “Opening up the museum to create worlds are [sic] part of our legitimate mission that the government has given us to do.”

A Creator of Worlds, no less! I thought instantly of the lines from the Bhagavad Gita spoken by Robert J. Oppenheimer, after the first atomic bomb test: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”. Oppenheimer’s thought might serve as a more accurate reflection of the impact of the Powerhouse project on the cultural life of NSW, but that’s a different story.

The only extra piece I have for you this time around is an art column on Harrie Fasher’s exhibition, Before Dawn, at the Orange Regional Gallery. It’s a bold and ambitious show by an artist who actually did something constructive with a Creative Australia grant of $50,000, starting her own bronze foundry in a country town, making herself the centre of a network of friends, assistants and collaborators. This exhibition is Fasher’s first museum survey, and it’s winning her a lot of admirers. If you’ve got the talent, you don’t need to be on the Powerhouse payroll.

A couple of weeks ago, The Australian asked me whether our art museums had lost the courage to show genuinely controversial works. It’s a question that doesn’t allow for a yes-or-no answer, because it would be ridiculous to show a controversial work purely for the sake of causing a rumpus. I’m sure this is something lots of institutions have done, but they never want us to believe they are doing it for the publicity.

It’s one way of sticking pins into the necrotic rump of the media, which only seems to get excited about the visual arts when there is a heist, a huge auction price, a cunning forgery or a public outrage. It could be argued this was precisely what the Oz was doing by compiling a list of controversial works that have made headlines in former years. Nevertheless, in the age of cancel culture the newspaper had a point, and it was a revealing exercise for writer, Tim Douglas, to look at art controversies past and present to see what has changed.

Back in 2000, when serving as curator for the Federation exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, I included a component which featured 20^th century works of art that reflected significant political issues, or had created controversies in their own right.

An obvious starting point was Norman Lindsay’s Pollice verso, a large pen and ink drawing first exhibited at the Royal Art Society of NSW in 1904. It featured a crowd of naked ‘pagans’ – centurions, gladiators, a boy with a leopard, a smiling Bacchus, and a plentiful supply of buxom nymphs – giving the “thumb’s down” to a pitiful, scrawny figure dangling from a crucifix. It represented Lindsay’s rejection of “Christianity, that communist uprising of the underworld”, and his embrace of the classical “civilisation” of Greece and Rome.

The response was predictably hysterical. The critics were dismayed Lindsay did not use his pen for the cause of niceness instead of evil, but while decrying the “bestial” nature of the image they kowtowed to his penmanship. Intellectuals such as Julian Ashton and A.G. Stephens wrote spirited defenses of the picture, with profligate use of the word “genius”. For Ashton, Pollice verso was an historic event. He announced: “at last a great work has been produced in Australia.”

For Lindsay’s detractors the drawing was an act of blasphemy and provocation. The arguments raged for weeks, with the Bulletin receiving a stream of complaints from angry subscribers. The most original contribution was a long poem from a clergyman, who ranked Norman second only to the Devil – much to his delight, no doubt. Finally, the Bulletin published a pusillanimous editorial explaining that the work represented “the challenge of Pleasure to Asceticism, but not necessarily Pleasure’s victory.” This was a feat of imagination that left Lindsay’s efforts in the shade.

There is a postscript to this episode. Within a few days of the work being shown in a group exhibition in Melbourne in 1907, it was purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria for 150 guineas, reputedly a record price for an Australian pen and ink drawing.

Here, in embryo, is a pattern for most of the art scandals of the century that followed. An act of provocation is followed by public outrage fuelled by a scandal-mongering press. Debate rages, then dies down, and the work is purchased for a major collection. As for the overt insult to Christianity, many institutions today would barely blink at such an attack, although they would be horrified by any work that criticised or satirised Islam – and not just through fear of a jihad. But as subsequent events have shown, there’s a point at which museums have been too complacent in assuming that Christians will simply turn the other cheek. More of that later.

Another flashpoint was the Archibald Prize of 1943, when William Dobell’s portrait of Joshua Smith was the subject of a lawsuit over whether it was actually a caricature. Today that distinction seems frivolous, as many Archibald Prize finalists would be flattered by the term “caricature”, but the court case almost ruined Dobell’s life. Although he won the day, the experience proved deeply traumatic.

Skip forward to 1973, and James Mollison’s purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles for what was then the Australian National Gallery. I won’t trawl back over the “Drunks Did It” headlines, and the sustained apoplexy at the AUD$1.3 million (US$2 million) price tag. The affair is often credited with helping bring down the Whitlam government, which was being hammered for its free-spending ways.

Attitudes towards such extravagant purchases have changed so radically over the past 50 years that when current NGA director, Nick Mitzevich, thought it was a good idea to spend $14 million on a commissioned sculpture by Lindy Lee, an Australian artist whose reputation cannot be remotely compared with that of Jackson Pollock, both the Coalition government, and its Labor successors seemed to think this was no big deal. The press too, has been suitably indulgent. Virtually the only dissenting voices have been Christopher Allen and Yours Truly.

The major argument for those who support the purchase seems to be that “Lindy’s such a nice person”. I agree completely, but whether that’s a sufficient justification for handing over a record wad of money for a large, poorly finished sculpture is another matter.

One story the Oz passed over was the occasion in 1982 when Juan Davila’s multi-panelled Stupid as a Painter, was removed from the 4^th Biennale of Sydney by the vice squad on the basis of obscenity. The work was subsequently restored to the walls thanks to the intervention of Premier, Neville Wran, who decreed the police had no role in judging works of art. As for Davila himself, the scandal was the making of his reputation in Australia. From now on, as a renegade avant-gardist he could do no wrong in the eyes of critics and curators, even if his trademark brand of provocation rapidly took on predictable overtones.

Ironically, Stupid as a Painter became a millstone around the artist’s neck, being his only picture that everyone was eager to talk about. I wanted to include it in Federation, but when I rang Davila he angrily refused permission and his moral rights were respected. In 2006, when Davila was given a retrospective at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, he made sure the work was omitted.

Today, Davila’s trademark brand of deliberate perversity, pop culture and high art appropriation feels tedious, while the quality of his painting has declined, but he is still an institutional favourite, being given a solo exhibition within the 2024 Sydney Biennale. The edge may be blunted, but the aura of controversy remains a temptation for institutions that wish to show how daring they are by hanging his works.

Returning to the topic of religion, the Oz article also mentioned the scandal over the photograph, Immersion (Piss Christ) by American artist, Andres Serrano, which caused mayhem when exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1997. The image featured a cheap plastic effigy of Christ on the cross immersed in what looked like a bottle of pee. It was one of the most notorious images by an artist who specialised in notoriety.

Serrano had quickly made a name for himself with series on the themes of sex and death, so religion was an obvious target. I thought it was a calculated act of careerist provocation and meeting the artist, who had the limpest of limp handshakes, didn’t inspire any greater confidence. Nevertheless, the NGV, under the directorship of Timothy Potts, decided to play up the controversial angle in their press releases. It proved to be a mistake, as two enraged Christians attacked the work with a hammer. When Potts ordered the removal of the photo for reasons of “public safety”, he was widely pilloried for his hypocrisy and cowardice. Moral of the story: Don’t court notoriety for publicity purposes. Second moral: Never underestimate the power of religion in public discourse, which is far more likely to stir up anger than anything to do with sex. Religious belief is a matter of faith, not reason, and artists who insult the faithful are playing with fire.

The last I heard of Serrano he had made an appearance in the Epstein files, exchanging emails with the disgraced financier whom he had photographed. Even for such a connoisseur of controversy this may not be the kind of publicity one would relish.

Finally, to mention just one of the many controversies associated with David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, there was that moment in 2021 when these habitual scandal mongers finally cracked. This was when Spanish artist, Santiago Sierra, called for local Indigenous people to donate blood for a work called Union Flag. Although intended as a blow against colonialism, it was taken in quite the opposite way by the local First Nations crowd, who went ballistic. For the first time, MONA, which regularly embraced controversy, backed down and cancelled the work.

It was a turning point for MoNA’s carefree image as it showed that its sense of perfect freedom had given way to pressure from a particular lobby group who quickly demanded a seat on the board of the museum and a say in its exhibition program. Had the MoNA people held the line, explained and defended the project, they may not have got the Indigenous community to participate, but neither would they have made a rod for their own backs.

As we’ve seen with Creative Australia’s farcical handling of the on-off-on Khaled Sabsabi selection as next year’s representative at the Venice Biennale, the biggest problems arise when an arts organisation flip-flops on a controversial commitment.

Having arrived in the present, it’s worth noting the different nature of today’s art scandals, and the different attitudes of press, politicians and public. The Oz article mentions the split between Mike Parr and his dealer, Anna Schwartz, over a performance-installation of last year called Sunset Claws in which the artist wrote graphic accounts of Hamas and Israeli atrocities on the walls on the gallery. Mike probably felt he was being admirably even-handed in his extreme commentary, but that’s not the way Anna saw it.

Although we are a long way from the action, the Israeli-Hamas conflict is probably the single most divisive issue in the Australian art world today. So many people have come down heavily on the Palestinian side, it leaves an unpleasant impression of anti-Semitism, particularly for Jewish artists such as Nina Sanadze, who has written about the hostility and marginalisation she has encountered. On the other hand, there are the moronic antics of figures such as Pauline Hanson, which promote Islamophobia. The tendency to view Khaled Sabsabi as some kind of martyr to bureaucracy is another weird development, because his reputation has only been enhanced by the Creative Australia backdown. I strongly believe that to send an avowed pro-Palestinian to represent us in Venice at this time is no less of a mistake than it would be to send a dedicated Zionist. Whatever our personal views of Gaza, the Australian government should not be seen to be taking a partisan position.

It’s easy to say, “Oh Khaled is a lovely fellow who believes in universal peace,” but his work and his public positions give a very different impression, and impressions are important.

Gaza is symbolic of the political confusion that dictates the way contemporary art is perceived in Australia today. The art community is in a frenzy over conflict in the Middle East but is prepared to accept all kinds of injustice in its own backyard. To reiterate from the Oz article, it’s a “schizoid” state of affairs, with a public culture that is simultaneously libertarian and puritanical. We react with anger at the merest hint of censorship or government interference, but are comfortable with an incredible degree of favouritism, nepotism and corruption, so long as the ‘right’ people come out on top.

The institutional obsession with identity politics has created a situation in which it’s taboo to say a word against anyone declared a protected species, while other artists are effectively cancelled because they are not members of any favoured minority. It’s foolish, unfair and guaranteed to breed resentment, especially when a few artists are allowed to buck the trend because of their social connections or political postures.

All of this is happening because the media and the politicians allow it to happen, preferring to turn a blind eye to obvious rorts, bad management, and ideological narrowness, rather than take a principled stand.

It’s not that the media has entirely lost its love of scandal - which still sells papers and gets ratings, but it has developed a countertaste for ‘good news’ stories designed to warm readers’ hearts. The ABC news site is an obvious example, allowing readers to curate their own feelgood newsfeed according to their “mood”, but it’s easy to find plenty of arts stories that are no more challenging than press releases.

Take, for instance, Nick Galvin’s recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, about Kayleen Whiskey and her “pop desert art”, currently the subject of a survey at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

A breakout tells us: “It’s impossible to spend time with Kaylene and not feel good about yourself and the world.”

Ah, don’t we all want to feel good about ourselves and the world? It seems the solution to our misery is to go hang out with Kayleen in Indulkana, a five-hour drive from Alice Springs. There we can be charmed by her cartoonish pictures of Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, Wonder Woman, Cathy Freeman and other popular heroines.

I was charmed when I first encountered these works about seven years ago. It was amusing to find a desert artist making a form of riotous folk art which combines figures from popular culture with Indigenous motifs. By now, the charm is wearing thin, even as the art world raises Whiskey to superstardom. The artist has racked up so many awards and honours, and been exhibited in so many public venues, it would seem as if she’s making masterpieces for the ages. But it’s essentially one gag, even when turned into an animation or an installation.

There are many artists out there who have spent the best part of their careers painting portraits, without ever attracting the attention of the NPGA. They can’t be thrilled to see a painter with a career of less than ten years, and a style that remains utterly static, given a major survey. Even leaving aside the gospel of First Nations First, it’s the happy, funny aspect of the work that appeals to the curators. It’s a victory for the cult of Niceness that is ruining our cultural health with its sugary confections.

Australian art museums have convinced themselves that going head-over-heels for an artist such as Kayleen Whiskey allows them to appear to be open-minded and subversive all at the same time. “Wow! You’re showing this funky Aboriginal lady who paints Dolly Parton! That’s really wild.”

My concern is not that art museums are showing artists such as Kayleen Whiskey, because there should be room for all kinds of art in the contemporary firmament, it’s the undue prominence they assign to such light-weight work when there is a volume of art to which they never devote the slightest attention.

Neither is the problem confined to Australia. When I read Max Delany’s piece in The Saturday Paper about Hany Armanious being invited to have the opening exhibition at the revamped Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, I was left wondering if Hany had managed to make something that resembled a compelling work of art. A quick glance at the HMI website quickly laid those suspicions to rest.

Armanious’s exhibition Soup Stone featured a familiar collection of off-beat, nondescript bits of old junk lovingly crafted from polyurethane resin by assistants. This meant each piece was really a precisely detailed sculpture of a bit of old junk. That’s the central paradox of this work. The secondary paradox is: Why would the Henry Moore Institute consider this to be so sensational they would call on Hany Armanious for their opening exhibition? One might assume that with Henry Moore as their presiding deity, they would take an interest in sculpture, but Hany’s work is sculpture only in that it is three-dimensional. He puts a few things together, such as a worn-out ping pong racket and two rows of corks, then gets others to do the casting.

It would be just as easy to call this anti-sculpture, although Max giddily calls it “a critically acclaimed tour-de-force”, returning for a season at Buxton Contemporary in Melbourne. “Critically acclaimed” because the UK critics had never seen anything in an art gallery that tried so hard to not look like art.

Armanious himself says: “sculpture is something I’ve never been consciously interested in,” - which is a curious admission for the Head of Sculpture at Sydney’s National Art School. It would be a bit like the Prime Minister saying, “I’m not much interested in what goes on in Parliament.” It must be reassuring for the students. By way of consolidation, Max sees references to Brancusi, Duchamp, Giacometti, Picasso, Bourgeois, the ancient Egyptians and Arte Povera. There is also alchemy, animism, fetishism, voodoo, the sacred and the tragicomic – all invested with ritual, “metaphysical weight” and “cultural memory”. And more.

This goes to prove either that the author has been smoking something with powerful hallucinogenic effects, or that it’s always the most minimal work that offers the greatest opportunities for wide-ranging interpretation.

What’s apparently exciting about Hany’s work is that it looks like nothing much. Anyone scavenging for treasure on council cleanup days wouldn’t give these objects a second glance – and that’s what we’re supposed to admire.

If we go back to the Oz’s claim that Australia’s art institutions are no longer prepared to show challenging, controversial work, we need to understand that they honestly believe work such as Kayleen Whiskey’s ‘pop desert art’, or Hany Armanious’s resin replicas of junk are challenging and controversial. What’s being challenged are our conventional ideas about the nature of art, although anybody who has the slightest acquaintance with contemporary art will recognise these gestures as old hat. Come to think of it, an old hat made from resin would be a pretty typical Hany work.

The whole issue of whether a work of art is meant to challenge an audience harks back to the early days of the avant-garde: to Courbet’s Realism and all the movements that followed. The aim of those early-modern artists was to “épater les bourgeoisie” - to shock or amaze the middle classes, a group that had been a byword for small-minded materialism since the days of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The problem with this idea, which invests so much contemporary art with a distinct odour of dead horse, is that the middle classes have been shocked so often they’ve come to like and expect it. Yet somehow, artists are still trying to jolt audiences out of their “conventional” ideas of art and museums are still being impressed by their efforts.

So in answer to the Oz’s question as to “whether anyone has the courage anymore to put on genuinely controversial artworks,” we may need to look firstly at the audience, which is no longer shockable in the same ways. Sex is not really an issue, unless paedophilia is involved. Religion is not an issue, unless Islam is being denigrated in some way – and no gallery would ever venture willingly into these scary areas. We are even less shockable when we consider the huge sums of money spent on works of dubious aesthetic value. Somehow it is now taken for granted that art – even shallow, fashionable art – is ultra-expensive. Neither is there much uproar over the large amounts of public money being gifted to a small group of artists one might call ‘insiders’.

Perhaps the real danger for institutions today is not that audiences will be challenged and offended, it’s that they will be bored by the limited nature of exhibitions tailored to suit contemporary political pieties. The public comes along to art museums hoping to see something good, not for a lesson in social justice. As MoNA has shown, most viewers would prefer to risk being offended rather than being patronised and preached to. Instead of accusing today’s art museums of a lack of courage, it would be more appropriate to say they lack focus, breadth, discernment and – why not say it? – taste.

The art column this week looks at Euan Macleod: Glacier at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, a venue that persists in hosting exhibitions by well known painters who do not fit the current institutional frameworks. Macleod has nothing to prove, having been at the top of his game for a long time, but this show of works based on repeated visits to the Haupapa Tasman Glacier is a startling experience. We don’t see a lot of snow and ice in this country, but there’s plenty on display at the Ervin.

At the movies, I’m looking at Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, a remake of a 2003 South Korean film that achieved a cult following. This new version seeks a mass audience, transferring the action to America, with big name actors Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. It’s a twisted crime caper in which two misfits kidnap the CEO of a major corporation, thinking she must be an alien plotting the downfall of this planet. You may think that’s a fair assumption about the CEOs of most major corporations, but few people feel motivated to do anything about it. Whether it’s art museums or aliens, it’s hard to get a reaction nowadays.

Every time I sit down to watch television I’m reminded why I so rarely sit down to watch television. It hasn’t always been this way. There was a time when one could rely on the ABC or SBS for something sharp and entertaining, worthy of attention. Nowadays it’s necessary to study the TV guide carefully or risk being exposed to programs guaranteed to turn your mind to jelly.

Today’s ABC thinks that culture is something grown in a petri dish in a laboratory. In place of arts programming it prefers the kind of inane quiz shows that were once the preserve of the commercial stations. It has an unshakable belief that any and every show is improved by the presence of a gaggle of unfunny comedians for whom it provides a virtual welfare service. Despite ABC Chair, Kim Williams’s pronouncements about the need for a “critical culture”, the broadcaster is utterly phobic about criticism, unless it’s some airy generalisation about the evils of “colonisation”.

In an article in The Australian, from September last year, Helen Trinca set down Williams’s passionately held views on the subject:

Kim Williams says that in general, “criticism in Australia is in a moment of nadir… We need to really lift it up,” he says. “Critical culture is fundamental to a good creative environment, to good cinema, to good television drama, to literature, to the visual arts, to music. On the most generous-hearted assessment of the Australian creative landscape you’d have to say that we’re not doing well… We need to get behind critics, we need to develop critics, we need to invigorate our critical culture, because these things matter to the intellectual rigour of the culture, they matter to the kinds of ambition in the culture.”

Hear, hear! One year later, the ABC is giving us programs such as Portrait Artist of the Year and The Art Of… I’m not going to venture a blow-by-blow critique of these shows because, like most of the Australian population, I can’t bear to watch them.

To go through these programs systematically, giving a detailed analysis of their banalities, would be like writing a painstaking critique of the Da Vinci Code – it’s simply not worth it. The very fact that we live in a world in which conferences, scholarly publications and soon entire university departments may be devoted to Taylor Swift, is not a good reason for spending excessive amounts of time on terminally shallow subjects.

Writing about the visual arts or the cinema, I like to get into the nitty gritty, but with the ABC I make no apologies if I deal in generalities.

When the ABC began screening its Art Works program in early 2021, I was dumbstruck by its vacuity. I wrote at the time that I didn’t expect it would be around for long, but here I was completely mistaken. This frothy milkshake was served up three years in a row, and has given rise to another cringeworthy series, The Art Of… But who’s watching? It’s almost as if the broadcaster has to find a use for presenters who are still on contract, whether it be Nabila Benson telling us everything’s “awesome!”; or Leigh Sales, who nowadays seems to be reduced to introducing Australian Story; or that endless supply of comedians who pop up on every second program.

The last genuinely popular ABC arts program was At the Movies with David Stratton and Margaret Pomeranz, which ran from 2004-14. It borrowed its format from a famous American program of the same name, featuring movie critics, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, which succeeded for the same reasons: it featured two knowledgeable, opinionated people who argued about films, often having completely different points of view.

This may not sound like revolutionary programming, but it worked. Ever since David and Margaret called it a day, the ABC has given up on any form of critical approach. The immediate replacement for At the Movies was a short-lived seminar of comedians who horsed around, displayed their ignorance of the cinema, and largely agreed with one another. The show soon disappeared without a trace. The ABC had learned absolutely nothing from the success of At the Movies, not understanding that viewers enjoy a vigorous exchange of well-informed opinions, and are bored rigid by aimless, self-regarding chit-chat.

Over the past decade the broadcaster has doubled down on those lessons not learned. Art Works was stupefying in its nullity, being a jazzy ‘magazine’ style program hosted by the enthusiastic Nabila, who made a virtue of her unfamiliarity with every topic. She gushed, ooohed and aaahed about everything she encountered. It was like someone who never imagined there was such a thing as “the arts” being introduced to the subject on a weekly basis. Imagine Mary Beard on the BBC exclaiming, “Ooooh! Who would’ve thought the Romans wore togas! That’s awesome!”

Despite a fundamental lack of knowledge, gushy Nabila was exactly the kind of presenter the ABC wanted because the quality the station values most highly is personality. The show’s masterminds decided, early on, that because the arts are inherently boring and uninteresting one had to give the public a presenter who could generate a bit of excitement, providing them with something to look at or laugh about. Many of the segment presenters were no better. I’ll never forget watching self-styled narcissist, Deni Todorovic, in beard and frock, wandering around the Mary Quant exhibition in Bendigo exclaiming: “This is another one of my favourites!” It was a shameful trivialisation of a significant exhibition. Last thing I heard about Deni is that they was subject to a restraining order, although restraint doesn’t seem to be their forte.

Let’s not dwell too long on Kim Williams’s call for “intellectual rigour”. For the organisation he helms, the arts are subordinate to the most superficial brand of entertainment. Today, the ABC’s base assumption that culture is inherently boring is even more strongly ingrained. It’s believed the only way to make the visual arts palatable is to find some “personality” and a bunch of “celebrities” for formats that make the gardening program look like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation. Between 2016-22, the ABC gave us no fewer than six series of Anh’s Brush with Fame, in which comedian and wannabee artist, Anh Do, created a succession of amateurish portraits of celebrities, who had to pretend to be overwhelmed when confronted with these daubs.

And so we come to the ABC’s “new” visual arts extravaganza, Portrait Artist of the Year. Like most ABC arts programs, it’s a shameless facsimile of a BBC program. One precursor you may remember was Star Portraits with Rolf, in which the now unmentionable Rolf Harris brought together three professional artists to paint a portrait of a celebrity, who got to keep the work he or she liked.

The precise model is a UK Sky Arts program of the same name, now in its 12^thseason. The format is exactly the same, even the rather juvenile sets are identical. The major difference is that the UK judges and artists have been replaced by Australian judges and artists. Another difference is the quality of the art and the commentary, but that’s a sad fact of every program the ABC copies from the UK.

One imagines the ABC was contractually obliged to stick rigidly to the established UK format, but it may have seen the show as a way of capitalising on the enduring popularity of the Archibald Prize, which the broadcaster previously tried to exploit in an embarrassing three-part series fronted by Rachel Griffiths.

Portrait Artist of the Year is a competition in which nine artists, both amateurs and professionals, paint portraits of three celebrities who are invited to pose for a four-hour session. At the end of the session, the celebrities view the portraits and choose their favourite, while three “expert” judges choose a winner who will progress to the finals.

Once again, we find that familiar ABC fascination with comedians and celebrities. The show is hosted by actress, Miranda Tapsell, and carrot-top comedian, Luke McGregor. The three judges are Abdul Abdullah (an artist the ABC simply adores) in his trademark baseball cap; Bree Pickering, director of the National Portrait Gallery; and Robert Wellington, a consummate dandy who teaches at the Australian National University. Viewers might expect that ‘arty’ types all dress like Wellington but will be pleased to learn they can also be refreshingly good blokes, like Abdul. Pickering is the benevolent face of the institution that will accept a picture from the eventual winner of the competition.

In each episode the action proceeds along a predictable path, as participants strive to keep proceedings cheerful and up-tempo. The judges are nice to everyone, the celebrities play along (or try to), the artists keep smiling through gritted teeth, and the presenters – or rather McGregor – attempt to crack jokes. It’s an orgy of insincerity that results in a bunch of hasty, rather ordinary paintings that are praised to the skies by all and sundry.

Having made the commitment to watch this series, I found I could only last two complete episodes. The solution was to watch the beginning and end of the other episodes, and fast-forward through the middle. In this way I was able to follow everything through the six preliminary heats and avoid two hours of aimless, meandering blather.

Morbid curiosity kept me glued to the set. I was personally acquainted with at least one of the artists and had seen work by some of the others. It’s entirely possible I’ll come across the same painters while judging another art competition, of which Australia has a surfeit.

However, there is something depressing about a group of artists being obliged to produce a portrait in four hours in front of a camera. This is not how successful works of art come into the world. It’s a dubious form of showbusiness, closer to sport or a game show. It gets particularly gruesome when the music tinkles and swells to provide the correct emotional cues. I felt sorry for some of the painters who simply didn’t have time to correct (or scrap) works that went off in the wrong direction. The show is selling a misleading, undignified idea of what artists do, and for most contestants it was a hopeless cause. At best they gained a precious bit of public exposure for enduring this ordeal.

What’s really depressing is the ABC’s obsession with ‘celebrities’, most of whom seem to be actors or presenters associated with their own programs. The celebrity sitters, carefully chosen to represent a cross-section of ethnicities and sexual preferences, are referred to as “our beloved celebrities” or “our much-loved celebrities”. (I’m reminded of the NGA referring to Lindy Lee as “revered.”) Does the ABC believe we should be worshipping their employees, as if they were gods? Are we supposed to feel a deep emotional attachment to these people?

In Victorian times, the “celebrities” were homely old chaps like Charles Dickens or Thomas Carlyle, with Queen Victoria the most “beloved” of all. They were famous because they were people of outstanding achievement. Today’s celebrities are chiefly famous because they appear regularly on TV or in the movies. There’s no guarantee of any special quality beyond good looks or an extrovert personality. The Victorians required substance, while we’re content with anyone who shouts: “Look at me!”, and Your ABC is delighted to cater to current preferences.

Although the judges make a range of critical comments when left alone with the works at the end of each episode, it’s a very fleeting discussion. Most of the exchange centres around whether an artist has captured a good likeness or revealed some aspect of the sitter’s personality. With portraiture this is standard fare. For the most part they make strenuous efforts to be nice about all the paintings, although one wonders what they say when the cameras are turned off.

It would be laughable to suggest that this program reflects Kim Williams’s ideas about a “critical culture”. It is an exercise in popular entertainment – even though it may be tedious and repetitive – that treats everyone as wonderful, warm human beings. It reflects a more general ABC attitude towards the arts: they have to be fun and accessible for everyone.

I’m becoming increasingly allergic to this insistence on obligatory fun. Art is not always fun. It can be painful, difficult, dark, upsetting, profound and moving. It can transport us with its beauty or shock us with its insights. It can be hard to look at, while also being hard to ignore. It can make us re-evaluate the world around us, and those attitudes we take for granted. It can lift us out of our everyday existences and make us feel inspired.

None of the above is likely to happen with Portrait Artist of the Year.

Feeling as if I hadn’t plumbed the full depths of the ABC’s arts coverage, I also tuned in for the latest episode of The Art Of… in which artist, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, examined a major philosophical problem: Why are we so obsessed with looking good?

Although it’s obvious that everyone would sooner look good than bad, some of us are more obsessed with our looks than others. Take Ramesh, or instance, whose wardrobe in this program made Nabila Benson look like a model for Country Road. Presumably the show’s producers felt it required a peacock to get to the bottom of the thorny question about “looking good”.

Ramesh, like Abdul, is good ‘talent’. He’s extroverted, articulate and self-confident. If you don’t spend too long thinking about the things he says, it comes across as a very lively presentation. In this show he had brisk conversations with four people: photographer, William Yang; Elaine George, the first Indigenous fashion model to appear on the cover of Vogue; artist, Joan Ross; and choreographer, Kelley Abbey. None of this stuff was earthshattering, but it wasn’t terrible. What gradually wore me down was Ramesh’s constant self-referencing, as if he were the measure of all things; and the air of political righteousness that accompanied his pronouncements.

This was most obvious in the conversation with Joan Ross, who makes witty collage works and animations, drawing on images from the colonial era. Listening to Ramesh’s commentary, one could imagine that “colonialism” was one of the most pressing problems we face today – an unspeakable evil that poisons our daily lives. Really? I thought we’d dispensed with colonialism a long time ago, even if some of the old attitudes die hard. This was the ‘serious’ side of the “looking good” discussion, although the links between colonial oppression and good grooming were not precisely drawn.

As a presenter, Ramesh was content to parrot a lot of received wisdom about race, sexuality, power and identity that gets passed around in the cooler echelons of the contemporary art scene. It may be music to the ears of ABC arts producers, but it sounded to me like the voice of a clique who have become firm institutional favourites while decrying the oppressive society in which we are condemned to live. Look at the artists whose work is being purchased by the major art museums, those who are being given commissions by public bodies and sucking up grants from agencies such as Creative Australia and Create NSW. The same names turn up again and again. It’s a club.

Most club members, like Ramesh on the ABC program, know how to hit all the right notes with a kind of “critical” commentary that laments our rotten world and tells us how to smarten up our attitudes. This is not a sign of a “critical culture” it’s a chorus of conformity that allows entrance to that charmed circle considered to be the ‘right kind’ of artists. To these creatives and their enablers it’s perfectly acceptable that their work should be collected and funded by public bodies, because they are providing a moral service to the benighted taxpayer. They are paragons of virtue alongside those dumb artists who make work without thinking about politics, race or gender – and as a consequence, have been scrubbed from institutional wish-lists.

What concerns me about all of this, in a post-critical world, is that the dice are now seriously weighted in favour of those who understand the importance of cultivating a certain public image, the right attitudes and the appropriate contacts. Hasn’t it ever been thus? Yes, but never so much as today, when there are almost no voices in the media that will call out nepotism, corruption, favouritism and unfairness.

Instead of putting on frivolous shows that help promote the careers of anointed favourites such as Ramesh and Abdul, the ABC might demonstrate its commitment to a “critical culture” by coming up with programs in which people put forward arguments about works of art or movies or issues; programs where intelligence supplants the rule of obligatory niceness. It’s disagreement that grips audiences, not an exotic presenter’s predictable recitation of political platitudes.

If the national broadcaster really did have a will to do something for our culture, Four Corners might consider an investigation into the way the Powerhouse Museum has been burning public money with zero accountability, en route to a massive financial blowout. If there was ever a blockbuster story of cultural vandalism, government irresponsibility and institutional overreach, this is it. How about it, Kim?

This week’s art column catches up with the exhibition, Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia, at the National Museum of Australia. It’s the culmination of an intensive research project led by artist, Zhou Xiaoping, who has traced connections between Chinese and Aboriginal people, from the 19^th century to today. Along with a large collection of social history material, the exhibition includes work by Zhou himself, and eight contemporary Indigenous artists with Chinese ancestry. There’s never been a show like it in this country.

The movie being reviewed is The Choral, which opened this year’s British Film Festival. Directed by Nicholas Hytner, with a script by Alan Bennett, and Ralph Fiennes in the lead role, it was a safe choice for first night. Having spent a fortnight sampling odd, depressing arthouse flicks, followed by a couple of dismal evenings with the ABC, it was a great relief to come across this film.

Infancy conforms to nobody; all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.

R.W. Emerson, Self-Reliance

I’ve lost count of the number of people who’ve said to me: “I’m dying to know what you make of the thing in the basement at the Art Gallery of NSW!” Leaving aside the thought that it sounds like a story by H.P. Lovecraft – “The Thing in the Basement” - I can answer that question right away. I had such a negative reaction I was almost physically repelled.

Nevertheless, it’s not sufficient, even in a world that’s forgotten the role of criticism, to simply say: “I liked it”, or “I hated it”. There are many, many questions raised by Mike Hewson’s mega installation, The Key’s Under the Mat, in the space we must now refer to as the Nelson Packer Tank, in the building we must now refer to as Naala Badu. To get the most obvious one out of the way, as quickly as possible, it’s pointless to ask: “But is it art?”

If a work is given (substantial) space in a public art museum, and nominated as art, then it’s art. It’s not worth arguing about definitions. It’s far more important to ask what kind of art; whether it’s good or bad, successful or a failure.

There’s also the strategic question of who the artist is, and why he should be given the singular honour of taking possession of such a big hunk of the AGNSW ahead of many better known, better performed candidates. Before this project was announced I knew virtually nothing about Mike Hewson - a native of Christchurch, trained as an engineer, who has spent the past decade making large scale installations in public places and galleries.

The first piece featured on Hewson’s website dates from 2013, being one of a series of large-scale digital prints featuring images of Christchurch before the earthquakes, laid over urban spaces that had been damaged and altered. It’s a clever idea, but rather one-dimensional. You see it, say: “Oh yeah, I get it,” and move on.

In hardly more than a decade Hewson has gone from making installations for alternative spaces such as First Draft or Alaska Projects, to occupying prime real estate at the AGNSW. It’s an astonishing career trajectory for any artist, especially when we see that the 30 projects featured on his website are often variations on the same themes, aiming to complicate our understanding of a public space or building.

Hewson’s sudden surge to prominence may be a tribute to his own drive and initiative, but it helps that the AGNSW’s senior curator, Justin Paton, is also a native of Christchurch, who was working at the Christchurch Art Gallery at the time of the earthquakes. At the very least, Paton has been acquainted with Hewson’s work from the beginning.

It may also help that Hewson appears to be a very good friend of Beau Neilson, who is rapidly making a name for herself as a cultural entrepreneuse in Sydney. I’m not suggesting he’s benefiting from her personal wealth, but as with Paton, the contacts must be useful. As Beau is also on the Board of Trustees of the Powerhouse Museum, it will be interesting to see if Hewson is in line for some sort of project from director, Lisa Havilah, who likes to spread the love among “associates”.

If the artist has capitalised on his contacts, that’s only what all artists seek to do, with varying degrees of success. As he works out of a gigantic warehouse-studio in Alexandria, employs a team of skilled assistants, and a lot of heavy machinery, it appears that Hewson’s career is on the successful side of the ledger.

So much for the artist, it’s the art that raises the biggest issues. If you haven’t been along yet, the installation includes a sandpit, a pool, changing sheds, a communal barbecue, a laundry, a kiosk, swings, a sauna, a steamroom, racks of towels and slippers, fully grown palm trees, a shack for an artist-in-residence, an elaborate climbing frame, a glass booth for a DJ, scattered hunks of recycled stone, scattered bricks and plastic buckets, even a vending machine where you can buy the artist’s merchandise. That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but you get the picture.

As a playground, the installation seems to be working well. On the day I looked in, the place was full of children running in all directions, making a lot of noise. There were mothers anxiously chasing after their offspring or placidly watching them play in the sandpit. A bunch of cool-looking dudes were clustered in a corner staring at their laptops. A few people were sitting in the sauna, fully clothed, laughing awkwardly. Nobody seemed to be making much use of the barbecue or the tables where artists are encouraged to be creative, but I presume there are busier and quieter periods. There was no DJ in residence, but the music was still blaring out throughout the space, sounding more like muzak than anything that commanded attention.

The arrangements may look anarchic but they are the fruit of meticulous planning. In creating this riotous enclosure, Hewson laid a false floor to conceal water pipes and power cables. Tonnes of stone were lifted into place, slabs of metal cut and welded. It must have been one hell of an install job. The time it necessitated appears to have shortened the season of the previous Tank installation, Yalu, by Ishmael Marika and the Mulka Project, which was part of the Yolngu Power exhibition.

Viewers were given only 30 days to experience this exceptional work, almost certainly the most successful installation ever created for this difficult space. Simple, atmospheric, evocative, Yalu was the antithesis of The Key’s Under the Mat and was cut short to make way for the funfair.

When the AGNSW is prepared to ditch an outstanding Indigenous work in favour of Hewson’s project, we see how much importance it is assigning to this installation. Another indication is that the catalogue tells us the show “opened 4 October 2025”. The gallery has provided no closing date, suggesting that it could run for months or years, or at least until the novelty wears off.

Under current circumstances, this may be an congenial idea for the AGNSW. The installation is attracting a steady stream of parents and children who might not otherwise be drawn to an art museum, helping boost attendances at a time when the gallery is reeling from brutal government funding cuts that have led to staff lay-offs and the scaling back of the exhibition program.

What could be better than a long-running child magnet in the basement?

To answer that question, let’s go a little deeper into the meaning and ramifications of The Key’s Under the Mat. A first observation is that it conforms to a wellworn definition of avant-garde art, namely, work that blurs the distinction between art and life, or even looks forward to the withering away of the special category of ‘art’ into everyday life.

The standard approach to an art gallery, even a modern or contemporary gallery, is to sample works arranged on neutral-coloured walls or in open spaces. We’re not supposed to touch these works or interact with them in any way, except through our imaginations. We are invited to contemplate what we see, striving to appreciate the artist’s talent, skill and intelligence. The greatest works of art, according to the poet, R.M. Rilke, send the message: “You must change your life”.

This ’standard’ approach has been under assault for the past century, or at least since 1917, when Marcel Duchamp exhibited a porcelain urinal as a work of art. By now we’ve seen every possible novelty or gimmick, intended to “subvert” our experience of the art object, but audiences still seem to prefer looking at works of art that don’t require their active participation.

The Key’s Under the Mat is what is quaintly termed “a social sculpture” being all participation, and only “art” because the AGNSW chooses to recognise it as such. It’s immediately reminiscent of some of the devices and events designed by Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle; the sprawling, room-sized assemblages of Jason Rhoades; and – in the barbeque area – the communal meals of Rirkrit Tiravanija, with whom Hewson studied in New York.

There have also been many works designed specifically with children in mind, but I couldn’t name another on such a grand scale.

By pitching the work as essentially a playground for children and adults, Hewson and the AGNSW are daring us to dislike it. To say, “Bah humbug!” is to play the Grinch who hates Christmas, or the snob who detests pop culture. The show exerts a kind of moral pressure on us to play along, saying how great it is to see all these little kids having such a marvellous time at the art gallery.

This is why so many people who loathe this event are unwilling to say so in public. Nobody wants to be viewed as an elitist or a party pooper. Nobody wants to be the one who spoils the kiddies’ fun.

The problem is that these kids are not having a great time at the art gallery, they’re having a great time in a whacky children’s playground that just happens to be in the basement of the art gallery. They would be having the same experience had the work been created for Darling Harbour, or Barangaroo or a Westfield Shopping Plaza. It’s not the work that lends status to the gallery - it’s entirely the other way around. By hosting this event and calling it “art”, the folks at the AGNSW have conferred a rarefied kudos on an installation that might be considered funky but utilitarian in another location. In doing so, they may have more to lose than to gain.

Had I come across Hewson’s work in some other context, as a public playground, I would have been impressed by the ambition and innovation on display. To encounter it in the privileged domain of the AGNSW, is to be disconcerted by the inappropriate nature of the venue. Call me a snob, but I would argue there’s a certain dignity the public art museum needs to preserve at all times. It is a special place where rare and valuable works of art may be sampled by the public. To visit the gallery should not be the same as visiting Luna Park or an adventure playground. The first-hand experience of art is something that is unique to the individual.

The playground, by contrast, is a communal affair, with fun and leisure its major aims. Allow children to believe that visiting the art gallery is like visiting a playground, and they will find the standard gallery experience to be incredibly dull and boring. Who wants to stand around looking at pictures when you can play on the swings or in the sandpit? Play is all about oneself, about one’s body, about living in the moment. The experience of looking at art is contemplative. It takes us out outside ourselves into another dimension.

The famous “aura” of the work of art that Walter Benjamin saw as endangered in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, is being rapidly dissipated by the growing number of people who prefer to experience art online. When a major gallery endorses the idea of art as a fun, participatory, undemanding experience, it only emphasises the lack of appeal in looking at a bunch of old pictures hanging on a wall.

Today, art appreciation is suffering a generational divide like never before. The majority of visitors for art museums and major exhibitions are aged 50 and over, while the number of visitors in their 20s is shrinking. The problem is that these older visitors are the ones who pay to see shows, spend money in the shops and cafes, and become members and donors. In their mania for luring the “young demographic”, galleries risk alienating this core audience which helps to pay their bills and justify their existence.

I’m finding that The Key’s Under the Mat is exactly the kind of show that makes many older gallery-goers despair of the place, whether or not they say so out loud. The target audiences for this event are not core gallery patrons, but parents seeking distraction for their kids, and those using the basement as a cool place to hang out, for a short while at least.

It’s a self-contained entertainment, not a long-term audience builder. The installation allows the AGNSW to congratulate itself on the great things it’s doing for children, but not to consider the effect it’s having on adults who see only a lot of junk that has no place in the museum. One might even argue that it’s depriving kids of the many and varied art experiences they might have at the gallery when it’s seen only as a place for play. If my feedback is any indication, the thought that Mike Hewson’s masterpiece might inhabit the nether reaches of the AGNSW for an indefinite period – like some contemporary version of Dante’s Inferno – is deeply distressing to many people.

I don’t think we should be so quick to dismiss the idea that an art museum requires a certain dignity. Nobody wants to be the grouch that spoils everyone else’s fun, but it’s a bad feeling when a certain idea of fun becomes compulsory. For someone like me, who gets their fun from reading a book or looking at paintings, there’s nothing attractive about going the AGNSW for barbecue or a sauna, or to play in the sandpit, but it’s the sight of the gallery celebrating its own populist virtue that’s truly unappealing. Do we need to bribe kids and parents with a playground to get them into the gallery? One gets the impression the AGNSW expects to be congratulated for turning itself into Sydney’s most elaborate child-minding centre, but let’s give them credit - perhaps they’re pursuing a more insidious strategy. The logical next step is to apply for the lucrative government subsidies paid to other child-minding centres. It’s a brilliant way of overcoming those irritating budget cuts inflicted on mere arts institutions.

Mike Hewson: The Key’s Under the Mat

Art Gallery of NSW, Opened 4 October 2025

You know things are looking grim for the Powerhouse when even Linda Morris in the Sydney Morning Herald writes an article full of damaging accusations. Perhaps enraged by the lack of a press release assuring her that everything is just wonderful, Linda relates how a whistleblower has made accusations of “serious wrongdoing” in connection with “hiring and procurement practices”. She also mentions complaints from the Public Service Association addressed to Arts Minister, John Graham:

“The union cited a 56 per cent increase in contract expenses at the Powerhouse from $6.069 million in 2022-23 to $9.485 million in 2023-24 as a reason for concern. Professional fees were separately amounted [sic] to $4.509 million in 2022-23, it said.

The museum had moved to a privatised model for programming content, which largely ignores the museum’s founding act, its collection and the skills and knowledge of long-serving staff, it said.

‘This model is excessively and needlessly expensive,’ the union wrote to the minister. ‘And deeply insulting to our members.’”

Hmmm. Sounds about right. After five or six years, and many millions of dollars, the bill for contractors has finally qualified as news. No-one could ever accuse the folks at the SMH of being hasty in their judgements.

Looking at the most recent Budget Estimates hearing, in which Minister Graham and Powerhouse CEO, Lisa Havilah, were in the dock, Linda found:

The museum was also asked about specific hires, including a private contractor who was allegedly employed at $2,100 a day to help it meet its $75 million fundraising targets. The museum confirmed the total contract value was $175,649 and had been to “assist with identifying prospects and securing donations” for the Powerhouse Parramatta Capital Campaign. The Powerhouse had reached 95.9 per cent of its target, with 14 major donations totalling $71.9 million secured, it said. In response to claims that it had engaged a culinary archive advisor on a fee of $1,000 a day, the Powerhouse replied that it had conducted an open and competitive process for the July appointment and the $162,400 role.

Nothing unusual here, just two external contractors being paid vast sums for tasks that would normally be undertaken by staff. Most cultural institutions have dedicated fund-raisers on the payroll, along with curators and librarians to deal with archives. A “culinary archive” might be a slightly different matter, because it’s another of those fascinating new ideas with which Ms. Havilah is seeking to refashion the museum into something that is no longer a museum.

Having got her steam up, Linda ends by reminding us of the infamous “live tuna performance” at the Powerhouse’s end-of-year celebrations, and its $500-per-head VIP dinner. Take that!

This article inspired me to look at the Budget Estimate hearings of 29 August, and the supplementary questions that ensued. Bear with me, because this is going to be an unusually forensic editorial.

Perhaps the most revealing section concerned the so-called “Artistic Associates”, who have been employed at the Powerhouse on a regular basis since 2021-22. It’s worth looking at the full picture: who was employed, at what level of remuneration.

• In 2021-22, Artistic Associates were Brook Garru Andrew, Susannah Wimberley, Julie Gibbs and Lleah Smith. Total expenditure: $142,100 (an average of $35,524 per person)

• In 2022-23, Artistic Associates were Brook Garru Andrew, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Susannah Wimberley, Julie Gibbs, Lleah Smith and Izabela Pluta. Total expenditure: $638,881 (an average of $106,480 per person)

• In 2023-24, Artistic Associates were Brook Garru Andrew, Agatha Gothe-Snape, Susannah Wimberley, and Julie Gibbs. Total expenditure: $614,727 (an average of $136,204 per person)

•In 2024-25, Associates were Agatha Gothe-Snape, Susannah Wimberley, Julie Gibbs, Ceridwen Dovey, Kylie Kwong, and Ainslie Murray. Total expenditure: $817,226 (an average of $153,681 per person)

For the period 1 July 2025 – 30 August 2025, Associates are Ceridwen Dovey and Kylie Kwong. Total Expenditure to date: $63,803. If this continues at the same rate until June 30 2026, total expenditure will be $765,636 (an average of $382,818 per person).

As you can see, the Associates form quite an elite group. Although the most recent figure sounds excessive, one needs to remember that no detailed record has been provided of the actual amounts paid to individual Associates, or the way payments might fluctuate in the course of a year.

It’s also worth noting that the Powerhouse paid the Associates extra artist fees of $33,950 in 2023-24, and $11,400 in 2024-25. This allegedly brings the total cost of the program over four years to $2,376,087, although when I did the sums it came to $2,385,039. Hey, what’s a mere $8,952 when we’re talking millions! You can already add $63,803 to whichever total you prefer, and that’s not even counting how much has been spent over the past three months.

The really big question is: “What exactly have these Associates done to earn their money?”

The Powerhouse website is short of detail when it comes to the Artistic Associates, providing no more than 3-5 lines on what they are supposedly doing. Those descriptions are vague and self-reflexive, focused on the museum’s own programs. Once again, one wonders why staff couldn’t have handled these tasks. When searching the site using the names of individual Associates, there’s nothing much to be found. Does an interview between Julie Gibbs and Kylie Kwong, reprinted from a November 2024 edition of The Saturday Paper count as a paid service?

Havilah would probably argue the Associates are taking the museum in new directions, such as contemporary art, the culinary and literary arts. Her critics would counter that most of this has no place in a museum of applied arts and sciences, being well catered for by other kinds of institution. Yet this argument is of secondary relevance alongside the extraordinary salaries that have been handed to the Associates for work that is virtually invisible.

It indicates a willingness to view these Associates – most of whom seem (coincidentally) to be longterm acquaintances of Havilah’s – as highly skilled consultants who need to be paid a top professional rate for their services, whatever those services may be. It also suggests a distrust of existing staff, especially the curators, who might not be fully on board with the gleaming new vision of the museum La Suprema is putting forward – even if it often seems she’s making it up as she goes along.

Another question worth asking is whether any Associates have continued to receive payments as “artist fees” or other handouts after they have finished their terms? And if so, how much and in relation to what projects?

This brings us back to the $9,485 million paid out to consultants in 2023-24. Has there ever been a museum director in Australia with such fondness for outside consultants? It’s a taste that runs contrary to the Labor government’s own stated objective of cutting back on the expensive consultancies favoured by its predecessors. As usual, the Powerhouse is the exception to the rule.

We can cheer on an investigation by an upper house committee “examining the operational, staffing and program impacts of budget and recent restructures,” not to mention “reliance on external contractors and private consultants”. Whether it comes to grips with the problem and manages to do something about it, remains to be seen. To this point, parliamentary committees have been largely toothless, easily brushed aside by governments that prefer to keep making the same mistakes at huge, unnecessary, public expense rather than admit they got it wrong.

As for the other inquiry being sponsored by the Department of Creative Industries, Tourism and Hospitality, when we learn “the Department has engaged an independent firm” to investigate the whistleblower’s complaint, one can only feel cynical about the prospects of a result. We’ve seen a procession of these “independent” inquiries which never seem to find that anyone is to blame for anything. Think of this year’s “independent” inquiry into Creative Australia and its processes, following the Khaled Sabsabi debacle. Surprise, surprise, nobody was to blame, and CA could go on to boast about what a good year it had been. Ask CA about those processes, and one learns they are “robust” – although fundamentally the same as they were before the inquiry.

One might speculate there are two motivating factors behind Labor’s historic betrayal of the Powerhouse, the first being the politicians’ belief they can buy votes in the western suburbs by backing Powerhouse Paramatta to the hilt. (It’s a rather pathetic idea that this aimless edifice will win votes while federal Labor has dropped the well-liked western suburbs MP, Ed Husic, from the Ministry.) The second is the conviction that processes were already so far advanced when they assumed power, it was impossible to wind them back. This has led to an implicit endorsement of Havilah’s patronising vision for the western suburbs, and her frankly bizarre ideas about what constitutes a new kind of museum.

Feeling empowered and invincible, the CEO has acted on her convictions and splashed out freely on expensive consultants and her pet Artistic Associates program. This has led to excessive, inappropriate expenses that can only be an embarrassment to a government that is busy shredding other cultural institutions.

Even if John Graham is committed to see the Powerhouse circus through to the finish line, there’s no reason why he needs to accept the multi-million-dollar wastage of funds on frivolous handouts to anybody Havilah deems worthy of her/our munificence. Indeed, the Dear Leader’s self-confidence has reached new heights when she can brazenly announce that the opening show at Powerhouse Parramatta will be about space and cost a mere $18 million. This, at a time when every other institution is virtually begging in the streets. Please remember Mr. Graham, you are her boss, not vice versa. It only looks like you are obeying orders.

We can get some idea about the nature of this space extravaganza when we learn that Sarah Reeves, Astronomy and Space curator at the Powerhouse for almost twelve years, resigned in May and took a job at the Bureau of Meteorology. Surely any curator in this specialised field would see a space exhibition as an incredible opportunity. The problem may have been that Reeves, who has a PhD in Astronomy, could not come to terms with the kind of show Havilah and her cronies envisage. We know, for instance, that the CEO doesn’t draw much of a line between science and science fiction.

It’s said the curator who has replaced Reeves on the project is Anna May Kirk, an artist who makes makes objects from glass. This is right in line with the typical Havilah approach to curatorship, where she favours those without specialised knowledge or expertise. I believe the role of curator of Health and Medicine is now being filled by Cara Stewart, a sound artist. Indeed, it would be worth looking at the number of artists employed in roles that formerly required experience in the field. In her new version of the museum, the CEO values creativity over know-how. This may sound pretty cool but as the Public Service Association notes, it’s an insult to those who have spent their lives studying a particular subject. It also confers an absurd prestige on artists, whose funky ideas are considered more important than any in-depth understanding of the collection. The result does away with any pretence of scholarship, which is obviously felt to be too boring or difficult for audiences today. Items in the collection, drained of context, become a series of theatrical props.

My own conviction is that the director who underestimates the public’s desire to learn from a visit to the museum, rather than simply be entertained is engaged in a tragic folly. Education should not be so easily dismissed. It is, after all, an historical raison d’être for the museum.

Any parliamentary inquiry should look at the people who have left the Powerhouse, and those that have been hired, as long-standing curators have been replaced with utterly unqualified people from many different walks of life with no museum experience. It appears that many newly created positions are fanciful in the extreme. Towards the end of 2023, the Powerhouse Museum Alliance published a long list of curatorial positions that have been lost. If there’s a list of current curators and their titles, I’ve yet to locate it.

An inquiry might look at the brain drain that has taken place under the Havilah regime, and her preferred, hierarchical form of management, whereby she surrounds herself with loyalists that owe their employment to her whims. It’s eerily similar to Donald Trump’s style of leadership.

One of the problems I had when examining the Budget Estimates, is deciding whether John Graham is suffering from wilful self-delusions, or whether he has internalised his spin doctoring to the point where he simply blurts out whatever happens to be the most convenient answer, even to a parliamentary committee.

As you may recall, in June, 18 regional galleries had their 4-year recurrent funding applications rejected by the NSW Ministry of the Arts for no apparent reason. In April, the Australian Design Centre had its $300,000 allocation chopped by Create NSW, following the removal of a $200,000 annual grant from the Federal Ministry of the Arts in January. In August, the Art Gallery of NSW announced drastic staff cuts after it saw $7.2 million sliced from its budget.

In the same month the Ministry made the magnanimous gesture of restoring partial funding to some of the applicants they had dumped in the first round. This allowed the Arts Minister and his minions to trumpet their own generosity, when the overall effect remained a murderous, unjustified cut for most institutions.

One of the organisations given a discounted grant was the ADC, which received $150,000, leaving it to make up a shortfall of $350,000. This week, after months of canvassing for private support, the ADC bowed to reality and announced it would be closing by June next year, pending some miraculous rescue.

This is what John Graham told Budget Estimates when quizzed about the cut in ADC funding:

I can understand why they were concerned. I’m certainly sympathetic to them and the views of the galleries. They’re doing fantastic work. The good news is the two-year funding round has funded many of those regional museums and galleries. It has also funded the Australian Design Centre. They’ve had their funding now confirmed for two years. They’ve got that certainty, and that’s good news.

Soooooo sympathetic. So much good news but still closing! Perhaps Mr. Graham would consider working for less than a third of his current salary, just to demonstrate how easy it is do “fantastic work” with so little money.

To the Minister’s chronicle of good news we must add the near-death of Sculpture by the Sea; the financial agony of the Museum of Contemporary Art, which is now charging entrance fees; the scaling back of staff numbers and exhibitions at the AGNSW; and the complete defunding of Broken Hill City Art Gallery – the oldest regional gallery in the state; not to mention the uncertain prospects of many other regional galleries.

Just as interesting is the effort to claim that the money lavished on the Powerhouse bears no relation to the money pulled from other cultural organisations. When Mr. Graham was asked by Greens MP, Cate Faehrmann, to account for spending on the Powerhouse that reveals “a 275 per cent increase from last year to this year. That is 98.8 million to 279 million,” his answer was evasive.

“I don’t want to waste your time,” he replied… “I’d encourage you to go through it in more detail with the agencies. There has not been a change of the percentage order that you’re suggesting. It’s really about how this is reflected in the accounts.”

Neither was Mr. Graham forthcoming when asked about an additional $67.6 million in funding handed to the Powerhouse for the financial year 2023-24. That question was taken on notice. He did explain, however, that a $10 million increase in PHM staffing costs was because the museum was preparing five major exhibitions - which might leave the AGNSW wondering why it has had to drastically reduce staff numbers while preparing its own major exhibitions.

Finally, there is a great deal of confusion as to what expenses are being assigned to the Powerhouse, to Create NSW, and to “major works”. Is it an unworthy thought that by distributing costs under different headings the Department is able to conceal the total amount involved? It’s equally unclear how much has been raised from private sources that will eventually be refunded to the government.

Lisa Havilah was asked about figures that show “the capital expenditure for the museum is increasing an enormous amount. Last year the revised budget for capital expenditure was $17 million, and then this year it’s $154 million.” She replied: “The total government allocation towards the revitalisation of the Powerhouse Museum in Ultimo is $250 million. Of that, the Powerhouse is raising $50 million through a philanthropic campaign.”

Is that an answer? I thought the goal for private contributions was $75 million.

After reading the Budget Estimates transcripts, anybody would be confused about how much government money is actually being spent on the Powerhouse. $279 million? $154 million? An additional $67.6 million? $10 million on staffing? This is not even counting the Create NSW grant recipients whose names have been kept “private”, who may be preparing Powerhouse-related projects.

Former PHM curator, Kylie Winkworth, has calculated that between now and 30 June 2026, the government is set to spend $1,655,000 per day trashing the old Powerhouse and propping up the new model, which isn’t a museum at all. Let’s put these figures into perspective. The ADC’s entire yearly budget could be met with less than 8 hours’ worth of the funds being lavished on the Powerhouse. The AGNSW’s budget cuts could be restored by four days of Powerhouse largesse, while one or two days would be enough to restore complete funding to the regional galleries.

Is Treasurer, Daniel Mookhey, asleep at the wheel? This is not a squabble among a group of ‘arty’ types, it’s a catastrophe in terms of infrastructure; jobs; the ability of arts organisations to service audiences and raise revenue; and the ultimate, ongoing costs of running three Powerhouse venues in separate parts of the city, none of them remotely capable of paying their way. If Treasury decided to dispense with people with economic expertise and replace them with artists who had interesting ideas about capitalism, questions would be asked.

The way the Powerhouse is evolving (or devolving) is not an arts problem it’s a financial sinkhole of cosmic proportions that the Ministry will not be able to spin away with gushing, insincere press releases. To achieve this fabulous result the Minns government will have destroyed cherished state heritage; crippled successful, productive arts organisations; wasted a gargantuan amount of taxpayers’ money; and turned an important museum into a tacky sideshow devoid of an identity. In the eyes of the world it will be a colossal embarrassment.

Just imagine, Dan, if government had spent only $200 million on a facelift for the Powerhouse at Ultimo, there would have been an extra $1.8 billion to waste on other crazy projects.

The art column this week travels to the Blue Mountains to see The Scales by what, a survey by one of Australia’s most original contemporary artists. When so much recent art is dreary and oppressively moralistic, the artist known as ‘what’ has kept the rebellious spirit of the avant-garde alive. I’d recommend the show as a cure for the moroseness one feels when confronted with the kind of art that government committees seem to like.

The movie is Guillermo del Toro’s take on Frankenstein, a project the Mexican director has been talking up for a long time. I had hopes for this film but was ultimately disappointed by the crowd-pleasing action scenes and special effects, which tended to swamp any underlying profundities. In other words, it was too tacky for comfort, rather like the Powerhouse. The major difference is that del Toro’s movie is making millions, not spending them.

Although Khaled Sabsabi’s latest $100,000 handout has grabbed all the headlines I thought it might be an interesting exercise to look at the other recipients of Creative Australia’s recent $1.6 million splurge, so lavishly celebrated on the funding body’s website. It has turned out to be a much bigger story than I anticipated.

The $1.6 million, we’re told, is being “invested” in “ambitious new commissions for leading Australian artists,” which begs the question: “By what criteria do we define a ‘leading Australian artist’, and who is doing the defining?”

Next up: “What benefits are to be expected from this ‘investment’, and who will be collecting?”

It could be argued that the best definition of a “leading Australian artist” is a commercially successful one whose work is sought after by private collectors and public institutions. A commercially successful artist may be unlikely to be applying for a grant, but this is not a hard & fast rule.

A more realistic definition of the current grant allocation process would be as a cultural welfare payment, assisting those artists whose work is judged to have little commercial potential. This doesn’t refer to unfashionable painters and sculptors, it means artists who make large-scale installations, performance pieces, and overtly political or issue-based works that rarely appeal to private or corporate buyers.

By this definition, Creative Australia – much like the old Australia Council – is making a moral judgement on the work it supports. One reader reminds me that “the justification for government subsidies used to be summed up by the phrase ‘the pursuit of excellence,’” an expression now out of favour. It’s clear that ‘excellence’ is not the ruling criteria for a grant nowadays, it’s virtue. CA is not thinking in terms of aesthetics but whether a project may be seen to advance a worthy political agenda.

The full name of last week’s grant program is the Visual Arts Crafts and Design Framework Major Commissioning Projects (Individuals and Groups). It’s intended “to support the creation of a new body of works” on the basis of “a confirmed invitation to present a new commission at an institution before 30 June 2027.”

What’s most frustrating about the CA announcement is the lack of detail. Of 16 grants of $100,000, nine identify the commissioning venue (although Jean Barth’s project is listed as “New York, details to be announced”), while seven simply give us the name of the lucky artist or artists.

Even when a project is singled out for a mention, there’s a dearth of information. We read that “Dr. Baden Pailthorpe… is collaborating with AFL star Adam Goodes on a major new commission exploring sport, identity and cultural history,” but that provides little idea of what the project entails. Please note that Baden’s title of “doctor” is used, leaving us in no doubt as to his credentials.

Shannon Lyons’s mid-career survey at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, will highlight “her experimental and site-responsive practice.” This is the greatest level of detail provided for any of the successful applicants.

Somehow, we’re supposed to get excited about 16 grants of $100,000 handed to artists we may have never heard of, to make works that are neither named nor described, for institutions that in seven instances remain unidentified. I suppose this is an advance on Create NSW, which now insists on keeping even the names of grant recipients “private”, but it’s still a dismal attempt at transparency and accountability.

The details are obscure because we the public allow them to be obscure. None of the journos who wrote a story about Khaled Sabsabi scoring yet another grant, seems to have asked any questions about his fellow grant recipients. Don’t ask AI, because it only echoes the press release.

Short of ringing each artist and inquiring about their project – the proper journalistic thing to do - I searched in vain for further information. Almost the only news I found was an entry in Art Collector about Izabela Pluta’s commission for The Lock-Up in Newcastle. Pluta’s Cavitation: Breathing Ocean, promises “to translate compressed air into image, sound and sculptural form”, in order to “explore “the fragile ecologies of breath, pressure and migration across oceanic environments.”

When one looks up Erin Dickson, she appears to be a British artist residing in Australia. She’s listed as a UK artist for a residency at Bundanon, and her website has a UK address.

On the Questions and Answers section on the CA website we read:

I am a foreign national living or working in Australia. Am I eligible to apply?

No. Only Australian citizens and Australian permanent residents may apply to this program. Foreign nationals who are permitted to live and work in Australia by holding visas such as a Special Category visa or a Bridging visa are not eligible to apply.

So is Erin Dickson English or Australian? If the former, she appears to be ineligible for a grant. Another recipient, Jakub Dorabialski comes from Poland but is presumably now an Australian citizen. Does anybody check these things? It wasn’t long ago that MPs were being disqualified for holding dual citizenships.

Mel O’Callaghan, a virtuoso at securing grants, has been given another fistful of dollars for a project at the Sydney Opera House. Yet it could be argued that Paris is the artist’s main residence, where, by all accounts, she is not exactly starving in a garret. Her vie Parisienne might fall foul of this rule:

I am an Australia citizen/Australian permanent resident living and working overseas. Am I eligible to apply?

No. You must reside in Australia to apply.

Nevertheless, this one is easily circumvented, as O’Callaghan is an Aussie and can say she lives in Paris and Sydney. There’s no requirement to declare how long one spends in this country or another.

Curiously the CA webpage says that in 2025 the program will award 15 grants in total, but they appear to have awarded 16. The lack of detail makes it impossible to see how this affects the overall budget. Is each recipient getting $100k, or some greater or lesser sum? Did CA decide to expand its budget or add recipients to acquit the entire amount?

With both CA and its predecessor, the Australia Council, the grant system has always tended to favour a certain kind of artist – one who aims to be included in institutional exhibitions and have works acquired by public collections. Any interest from private collectors is a bonus. The work these artists make is often too big, too aggressive, too ephemeral or simply too uninteresting to attract private money, but this only makes it more imperative that government funding bodies and public museums should come to the rescue.

In the past, these institutional artists were figures such as Mike Parr and the late John Nixon, who made a big deal of their own uncompromising radicality. Today’s institutional artists are more likely to be concerned with issues of gender, ethnicity or some other hot political topic. Artists who only paint pictures – even great pictures - never received much attention. Today they are even more likely to be ignored, as the politics of the present dictate new forms of inclusion and exclusion. Nowadays, Parr and Nixon would have to overcome the stigma of being aging white Anglo males in an environment which has little time for such a demographic, but I’m sure they would’ve managed it. I’d never write Mike off!

The common distinction was between “commercial” and “non-commercial” artists, the former being those who earned a living by selling work to private collectors through private galleries; the latter a group of visionaries and radicals showing us the way to a better world. For this service, they seemed to believe the state owed them a living.

It always reminded me of high school, where we argued about “commercial” bands who craved success in the pop charts, and those more rarefied specimens favoured by teenage connoisseurs. In retrospect, with both rock bands and artists, I’ve come to believe the distinction between commercial and non-commercial is completely spurious. Under the glorious capitalist system there are many kinds of market and many ways of being commercially successful, whether you get your money from private collectors or government arts agencies. A truly radical artist would reject the system altogether, not expect it to pay a fee for every act of political subversion.

To do this, an artist would have to be independently wealthy or prepared to live the life of an ascetic. Not many are so pure of heart, not even Cézanne, who may have been an ascetic, but owed his income to his father, who was a banker. There are plenty who lived “as if” they were beyond material considerations while being comfortably off. Godfrey Miller lived a monkish existence but was never short of money. I could name many other examples.

The best of these artists had an overpowering devotion to their work and were fortunate enough to be freed from the burden of making a living. This was their good luck, but it’s the opposite end of the spectrum from those who those who believe what they’re doing is so important they deserve to be rendered free from material cares by the state. The Greeks called this hubris, and as Icarus found, it often leads to a fall. Yet even hubris might be better than the hard-nosed cynicism some have displayed in figuring out how to extract maximum funds from a flawed and delusional system.

This brings us back to the CA grants, which seem to have been lavished on a group of artists who fit within the approved ideological guidelines. Most of them have made their way through exhibitions such as Primavera or the Ramsay Prize, or contemporary venues such as the IMA, Artspace, PICA, or Gertrude Street. They may have academic credentials, but little public profile.

One criterion is that the applicant “must have a confirmed invitation to present a new commission at an institution before 30 June 2027. The institution can be Australian or international and must pay you a cash artist fee. Institutions are defined as galleries or organisations with a publicly accessible space for the presentation of visual arts and crafts.”

So what exactly is the commissioning venue contributing to each project? Are these projects dependent on securing a CA grant? What’s the breakdown of costs?

For instance, if Gordon Hookey has been invited to make a work for an exhibition at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, to what degree is the museum prepared to subsidise the preparation of this work? Are they going to fly Gordon over for the show? We know, under the conditions of the CA grant, they must be paying him a fee. What then, is the rationale for the CA payment? We all know Scandinavia is expensive, but for $100,000 Gordon could afford to fly first class and enjoy a nice long stay at a 5-star hotel, with maybe a cruise around the fjords thrown in. As his work is one long tale of injustice and oppression suffered by Indigenous people, this seems a very congenial way of making amends.

When we read that Jean Barth’s New York host is “yet to be announced”, this appears to be at odds with the requirement of a confirmed invitation from an institution. The surprise is that the press release chose to highlight such an omission, when it could have slipped Barth in with the list of names that provides no detail whatsoever. The suggestion is that he/she is one of the more notable artists, and “New York” a badge of prestige.

When there is so little detail, we are left to imagine how each proposal could account for a sum of $100,000. A large part of the money must be seen as a gift, justified by some hypothetical breakdown of what a commission might cost. This is the danger in funding projects that are still on the drawing board. Who’s to say I’m right or wrong if I estimate the work may take 1,000 hours, when it only requires 100?

We’re back at one of the key questions: “Who is making these choices?” The CA website tells us the successful applicants have been selected by a peer assessment panel, but there is no disclosure of the identities of those who sit on these panels. This is because “Creative Australia does not publicly disclose the exact members of individual grant-specific panels, including for the 2025 VACDF Major Commissioning Projects, to maintain confidentiality and impartiality in the assessment process.”

This hasn’t always been the case. From the 1990s to early 2010s the former Australia Council published full lists of its peer assessors in its annual reports. From 2017-19, a Pool of Peers, featuring over 400 names, was downloadable from the Oz Co site.

A change of policy began to take hold from 2019, coinciding with the entrance of Adrian Collette as CEO. It was bolstered by the appointment of Franchesca Cubillo as Executive Director, First Nations Arts and Culture, in early 2020, who argued for more diversity in the pool of peers, and greater confidentiality to protect assessors from outside influence.

By not disclosing the names of panellists it was believed this would reduce the risk of bias and influence, preserve the privacy of assessors (especially First Nations assessors), and – allegedly – fall in line with international best practice. This may be so if we look at Canada and Great Britain, which don’t disclose the names of assessors, but the Netherlands discloses the names after two years, and in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts lists all its panellists.

Even in Canada there are random public audits whereby grants are reassessed by an external panel; and profiles of the composition of these panels, telling us how many artists, how many curators, how many First Nations reps, how many Mounties, etc. while not naming names. New Zealand also has random audits, while the UK will allow an independent observer, such as a journalist, to sit in on panels.

Australia has the least transparent, least accountable system within this international peer group.

In this country the only way to obtain further information or challenge decisions, is through the Freedom of Information process, which Labor, continuing the good work of its predecessors, has rendered almost useless. The other option is to get a politician to take up your cause in Senate Estimates. Here, I can only say: “Bon chance!”

We are left with a system that withholds a vast quantity of information from the taxpayer, who is funding the entire process. The government is complicit in this ethic of secrecy, vesting CA with complete authority to spend money as it chooses, while disclosing virtually nothing about its selection processes or the nature of the projects being funded. CA says panellists are “experts”, and Arts Minister, Tony Burke, hastens to agree.

No one seems to have challenged the claim that keeping the composition of peer assessment panels secret aids confidentiality and impartiality. It could just as easily be said that it provides an ethical shield that allows CA to avoid public scrutiny. When there is no mechanism for public accountability it is impossible to see whether those who hand out the grants have any relationship with the recipients, which acts as an encouragement to nepotism and cronyism. Neither are we able to see who is to blame when something goes wrong, as it did with artist, Casey Jenkins, who in 2020 was awarded $25,000 by an anonymous peer assessment panel for a controversial work involving self-insemination. Jenkins saw the grant rescinded due to public outrage, then went on to sue CA, winning a “six-figure settlement”.

To justify the high level of secrecy, it would help if CA could produce examples of corrupt behaviour that bedevilled the grants process prior to 2019. This is obviously something they would prefer to avoid, but in the absence of evidence, we have no alternative but to trust them.

If I remain sceptical it’s partly because of the way these peer assessment panels are constituted, with people applying to be on a panel and being approved by anonymous officers of CA. Once again, the safeguards against conflicts of interest are almost non-existent, as we’ve seen with the high level of crossover between those members of the Eleven Collective who sit on panels and those who have been given grants. Neither should we be sanguine about the number of peer assessors who become grant recipients within the same year.

These dubious processes have become so normalised that Gina Fairley could write a piece on Artshub last year titled (no kidding) Why being a peer can help your career. Gina spoke with CA Board member, Kitty Taylor, who explained that “once you see the process of how it works, you have such a better understanding of how to write your [own] grants.”

“It’s also about networking, because you are thrown in with a bunch of other people who are working in a similar space to yourself, which I think is great.” It sounds like an advertisement for the army.

The problem with this upbeat view is that it treats the unavoidably grey aspects of sitting on a panel as if they were major attractions. Kitty also tells us that you get paid, and can apply for grants yourself, so long as you declare an interest and temporarily step aside. Sounds great! Where do I sign up?

Surely the only honourable reason for sitting on a panel is that you believe you can make a positive contribution to arts and culture in Australia. The rest is a slightly awkward, self-serving added extra. Here, I defer to Aristotle, who felt that honours and offices were a bigger incentive for partaking in civic life than remuneration or networking opportunities. We’ve come a long way from old Athens.

It must always be better to invite appropriate people to sit on panels rather than send out a general call for volunteers and then choose the ones you like. This may be a labour-saving measure for CA staff, but it’s almost guaranteed to attract panellists who have particular interests they want to advance, or friends and associates they wish to assist – perhaps on a quid pro quo basis. I won’t claim that everyone thinks along these lines, but it doesn’t require an acute observer of human nature to imagine these possible outcomes.

It’s widely believed that corruption requires some form of dishonest or criminal behaviour for personal gain, but it can also be defined as an abuse of power. When government agencies deliberately withhold information that would help the public decide whether their money is being well spent, many would argue this qualifies as an abuse of power. It doesn’t require an evil genius to pull the strings - it’s sufficient to create structures and processes that enable decision-making to go on behind closed doors, with no apparent accountability accruing to those who make those decisions. These processes may play out behind a veil of secrecy, but the results are trumpeted proudly in inane press releases, anticipating our approval. If your artistic career is flagging, or you’re hankering to join a club of bright, like-minded people, you should stop messing around and apply for the CA peer pool at once.

The art column this week is more like an essay, and an extension of some of the themes of this editorial. The topic is Sculpture by the Sea, which has had an annus horribilis, but is still managing to pull the crowds at Bondi. More than any other Australian art event, SXS dramatises the gulf that exists between institutional and popular art, balancing the most refined sculpture with an array of gags and gimmicks. This has earned it the disdain of organisations such as CA, which prefers to ignore the show’s large contribution to the local economy and hand money to their own kind of artists (see above). It’s about time such funding priorities were questioned and SXS provides an ideal test case.

This week’s film review grapples with Luca Guadagnino’s After the Hunt, a tale of sexual assault and political intrigue at Yale that would work better if the plot were not so congested and the issues more clearly defined. Julia Roberts does her best in a largely unsympathetic role, although she’s no worse than anyone else in a film that paints an attractive picture of those Ivy League colleges Donald Trump would seek to destroy. I dread to think what he’d make of Creative Australia.