One Year of Everything

# 620

Keeping an eye on the artworld for another year…

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.