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.
John will you be writing a piece on the Dr Bronwyn Bancroft Retrospective currently showing at Boomalli Arts?