Imagine a story about a middle-aged artist named Bill Smith from Sydney’s eastern suburbs, who has been the recipient of major grants, residencies and commissions awarded by federal and state bodies for the past three years, while sitting on influential boards and committees. On the way, Bill made a couple of videos that appeared to be critical of Muslims but explained that he was merely being ironic. His real motivations were spiritual and humanistic, and he views art chiefly as a tool for communication.
Earlier this year Bill was involved in a nasty controversy but subsequently absolved of anything inappropriate and showered with apologies. It has now been announced that both Creative Australia and Create NSW are giving him further grants, the former for $100,000, the latter Very Hard to Find. Can anyone enlighten me?
One wonders, would the vast bulk of ‘progressive’ people in the Australian artworld think this was a wonderful, much deserved honour? Would journalists be queuing up to sing Bill’s praises and hope this helps with any residual pain he might still be feeling after his earlier contretemps?
My hunch is that these days Bill would be hammered by fellow artists and the media for being a privileged white cis male of modest talent, who has been gifted far more than his share of public funds by out-of-touch committees that need to be held accountable.
Imagine if Bill’s name was Cohen, and he was revealed to be a member of a Jewish artist collective that occupied seats on those committees that handed out the grants. Imagine if Bill had made a work in 2000 with Benjamin Netanyahu’s face on T-shirts (but only as a “provocation”); had previously signed a petition demanding that Muslims be excluded from the Venice Biennale, and had pulled out of a show because it had received a donation from by a peace-loving Islamic arts organisation?
In such a scenario, it’s most likely Bill’s latest $100,000 government windfall would be greeted by angry editorials, questions in parliament, and petitions.
Let’s leave Bill aside, and consider the real-life case of Khaled Sabsabi, famously selected to be Australia’s representative at the 2026 Venice Biennale in February this year, subsequently de-selected in a blaze of publicity, then reinstated in July. The re-instatement was accompanied by a torrent of abject apologies from Creative Australia officials who competed to decry their own decision to cancel the appointment, and hope that Khaled had not been too grievously offended.
This week, Creative Australia continued to make reparations by gifting Khaled a further $100,000 for “a major new presentation” at the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide. The press responded predictably, The Australian and Sky News were not fans, while the remainder seemed to think it was a great idea.
What struck me with both sets of reports was the tedious repetition of the-story-so-far, which took up most of the allotted space. There was little attempt to put this new grant into context, and no detail provided about the further grant from Create NSW. In typical fashion, the NSW Arts Ministry seems to be hiding everything from the prying eyes of the taxpayer, so it might be expected the journalists would do the necessary digging. Ha!
Even more alarming than the value-neutral recital of known facts, were those glaring imbalances in the stories. Kerrie O’Brien in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age gave us a brief rerun of what we already know, then quoted Erica Green of the Samstag Museum, telling us that Khaled is a marvellous artist. No analysis, no alternative voices.
But first prize for journalistic fudge must go to Dee Jefferson in The Guardian, who told us that “the two commissions represent a silver lining in a tumultuous year” for the artist. A silver lining in a cloak of pure gold!
The entire story painted a picture of an innocent man wronged by a cruel and confused system. She quoted Khaled’s dealer, Josh Milani, saying how the decision to dump the artist from the Venice gig had “set in motion the dismantling of his career and livelihood.” Really? The opposite would be closer to the truth.
She quoted CA’s Acting Chair, Wesley Enoch, falling on his butter knife, confessing that Khaled’s work had been “mischaracterised” and apologising for all the “hurt and pain”. She concluded by quoting a statement by the artist and his commissioner, Michael Dagostino, that the reinstatement: “offers a sense of resolution and allows us to move forward with optimism and hope after a period of significant personal and collective hardship.”
At no stage did the writer appear to question the inherent rightness of the new grants or even bother to discuss them. The entire story was a recap of the newspaper’s party line on the Sabsabi affair. Nobody was invited to put a contrary point of view or analyse the recipients of this new government largesse. Sorry Dee, but this was not journalism, it was propaganda.
The Guardian story gave the unambiguous impression that Khaled, his politics and his work, were beyond criticism. He was a victim of prejudice who was now seeing justice in action.
Sky News predictably denounced You (2007) the controversial Sabsabi video of that appeared to glorify Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah. This was also the view of shadow Arts Minister, Julian Leeser. As usual, the real Arts Minister, Tony Burke, chose to be even more shadowy, declining to comment. But this is old news. If Sky did actual news rather than performative outrage, they might have asked how any artist could be the recipient of so many handouts in such a short space of time.
The Australian was even lazier in its recycling of the previous scandal, now considered “Not a Problem” by Creative Australia. One might imagine the complete list of grant recipients would have provided fuel for another anti-woke diatribe, but the usual opinion-mongers have yet to catch the smell of fresh meat.
To get to the heart of the matter, one needs to look at Christopher Heathcote’s piece in the June issue of unfashionable Quadrant, which I’ve referred to in a previous posting. It’s worth recapping, because he puts his finger on the problem:
“The Senate Estimates Committee and the media fixed on Creative Australia’s failure to consider political risks when selecting an artist to represent the nation. What also should have concerned them was how Khaled Sabsabi was awarded top-level grants in three consecutive years—the Creative Australia Award for a visual artist (2023), then a Rome residency on a Creative Australia Fellowship (2024), then the Venice Biennale (2025). The former Australia Council barred individual visual artists from receiving successive annual grants. To thwart favouritism and rorting, there were stipulated time frames before a funding recipient was eligible to apply for another program grant. But Sabsabi’s case shows consecutive grants authorised and favouritism openly occurring.”
Three major CA handouts within three years – make that four! Add in the Create NSW grant, plus another major commission for Barangaroo metro station unveiled last year, and one begins to think Khaled’s next grant should be to write the definitive guidebook on how to extract unlimited funds from public entities.
Heathcote also points out that of 19 delegates accepted for CA’s 2022 Biennale delegates program – which sends curators as observers to the Venice Biennale – 17 were women, one intersex, and one male. The following year’s program resulted in 15 delegates – every one of them female. Depending on your standpoint, this is either a much-needed corrective for generations of male domination, or a blatant contradiction of CA’s own “diversity grid”.
Even the most militant feminist would have to admit there is not a vestige of ‘balance’ in these statistics. It looks like a program of state-sponsored revenge on historic male chauvinism.
Back to our hero - among his other honours, Khaled is a board member of the Biennale of Sydney and sits on the committee that chooses a director – which this year selected Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi of Sharjah, whose outspoken pro-Palestinian stance has angered Jewish donors. It’s apparently of no great relevance that Khaled participated in Hoor’s Sharjah Biennial of 2013 or received a production grant from the Sharjah Art Foundation in 2016.
Khaled and Michael Dagostino are both members of Create NSW’s Artform board for the Visual Arts. The stated purpose of these boards, is “to assess applications made to the Arts and Cultural Funding Program and provide recommendations.” One would love to know more detail about these assessments and recommendations. It’d be fascinating to know who was rejected, and why.
There are many useful connections which are also family affairs. Khaled’s wife, creative producer and educator, Yamane Fayed, sits on the NSW Artform board for Community Arts & Cultural Development, and is a director of the Arts and Culture Exchange (ACE) of Western Sydney. Michael’s spouse, Marian Abboud, is a director of the Think + DO Tank Foundation, and artistic director of the Next Wave Festival. As an artist she is working on at least two public commissions and has been included in Hoor’s Biennale of Sydney. There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but it’s worth noting just how knotted the networks have become.
I haven’t even mentioned Khaled’s membership of the Eleven Collective, a group of Australian Muslim contemporary artists he initiated in 2016, which - as The Australian has pointed out - is generously represented on CA committees and in the ranks of CA grant recipients. I won’t trawl back over the statistics, merely note that another group member, Hoda Afshar, is also among the CA grant recipients this year.
Is this starting to sound slightly overwhelming? Without a team of researchers, it’s virtually impossible to keep track of the grants and awards, committees, and possible conflicts of interest in which Khaled and his closest associates appear to be involved. My list is nowhere near exhaustive, but it should be sufficient to at least question the fanciful media narrative that this artist is some kind of outsider whose career was threatened by being selected, then dropped, from the Venice Biennale appointment. It would be interesting to know the percentage of Khaled’s income that has come from sales of artwork to private clients, compared with numerous injections of public money. Likewise, one wonders how many of his works have entered public collections as personal donations under the Cultural Gifts scheme.
A source who did the work the journos have failed to do, added up all the cash Khaled has received from CA since 2015, and sent me a list of 13 separate payments for solo or group projects, totalling $508,513. I suppose one could say it averages out at a modest $50k a year, but try to name another artist who has been so generously treated by the federal arts funding agency. Neither does this figure include funds received from the NSW government or other bodies.
Has any Australian artist ever been more successful in hoovering up such fabulous wads of taxpayers’ dollars? CA should consider an extra award for this achievement.
It wouldn’t have worked nearly so well had Khaled been Bill Smith of Bellevue Hill. The secret of his success lies in his ability to mobilise identity issues so effectively. A Muslim from the western suburbs, involved in community issues, a former hip hop performer… What’s not to like? Any political message is embedded within layers of “spiritual” engagement. Whatever horror we feel for the murderous destruction in Gaza is translated into sympathy for an artist who is overtly aligned with the Palestinian cause. I’m not trying to be cynical, the proof is to be found everywhere in the Australian contemporary art scene, which has declared itself massively on the side of Palestine. I can understand this well enough, until it degenerates into mere anti-Semitism, which has happened too frequently for comfort.
While Australian Muslim artists are being praised and rewarded, Australian Jewish artists feel they are being treated as pariahs. This is an unhealthy situation for a liberal democracy such as Australia, which prides itself on its openness to all creeds and cultures. We should be able to feel outrage at the destruction in Gaza without translating those feelings into the mindless adoration of artists such as Khaled Sabsabi, or the mindless rejection of Jewish artists. Part of that openness means being able to question the awarding of one grant after another to an artist who ticks the right boxes. I’ve avoided any consideration of Khaled’s actual work because whether he is a good or bad artist, a genius or a hack, is irrelevant to the bigger issue: should one artist, Khaled or Bill Smith, be handed so much public money, when most artists struggle to make ends meet?
The issue is one of basic fairness. The funding bodies and the media seem to believe that Khaled, because of his identity and the stated nature of his work, deserves a disproportionate share of public funds to those artists who don’t fit the same nebulous social justice criteria. This apparently absolves our public funding bodies from any suspicion that they are engaged in acts that bear a perilous resemblance to nepotism and corruption.
When Creative Australia can release a report boasting about what a great year it has been, we can see how far they are from admitting and dealing with endemic problems such as conflicts of interest. Arts Minister, Tony Burke, must have thought he was entering the Cistercian Order when he assumed this role, as he seems to have taken a vow of silence on every issue, and a marshmallow media is not about to press him for responses. The defining features of our present-day cultural landscape are cover-ups, lame excuses, code of silence. Where, in this most complacent of countries, is the anger? The endless complaining is a waste of time when there is no sign of resistance. If you think it’s OK that one artist gets so much when most artists get nothing, just keep on believing everything you read in the papers.
This week’s art column visits Indonesia for the latest instalment of Art Jakarta, an art fair that allows insights into the warmth or coolness of the art market in South-East Asia. Indonesia is a fascinating, complex case study, with first-rate artists, an emerging group of collectors, but an economy that doesn’t seem to work well for anyone except the wealthy. This year’s Art Jakarta revealed some of the survival strategies that artists and dealers are putting in place.
At the movies, I’m sampling the 2025 Irish Film Festival, with a comedy and a drama. Fran the Man is a genuinely funny mockumentary about the assistant manager of an amateur football team in Dublin. Christy is a low-key but compelling tale of a disaffected teenager in Cork, trying to reconnect with a family and a community he hasn’t known since early childhood. Both these films are notable for their ability to make us feel the smallest things in life are of utmost importance. Ah, ‘tis a grand thing to get away from all the ideological claptrap that bedevils Australian art and cinema to find a country focussing on stories that speak to everyone.
In line with the Arts Minister’s vow of silence, we need you to vow never to relinquish your noise making!
It seems that for the modern 'create' sector even the pretense of , rule of law , transparency and the like is no longer needed. It is just about power .