Persistent Tremors

# 582

The Dance of Arts Bureaucracy. Creative Oz, not Oz Magazine.

This piece comes to you from the United States, where I’m in the midst of a whirlwind trip to Boston and New York. I’ll resist the temptation to report about what’s going on here, aside from noting the general air of embarrassment that descends whenever anything vaguely political enters the conversation. The Americans I was meeting acted as if they were still in shock from the Trump re-election, fearful of what the immediate future holds and what the rest of the world must think. I felt like passing on my condolences.

Back home, it seems remarkable that the tremors from Creative Australia’s selection and de-selection of Khaled Sabsabi are still being played out. My old buddy, Christopher Allen, wrote a long, sensible piece in The Australian, which was only spoilt by a crack about the standard of arts boards declining because of “compulsory DEI appointments.”

If truth be told, the standard of Australian arts boards – and many corporate boards – has always been poor. In the past, too many appointments to the boards and councils of museums were simply rewards for former politicians or sympathetic business types. Any knowledge of art whatsoever was a bonus. Neither was it incumbent upon wealthy trustees to make donations or bequests. Try getting on the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art if you’re not handing over millions!

As for the “DEI appointments”, I think that term should be banished from local discourse. Complaints about “DEI hires” became a mantra for Donald Trump as he steamrollered his way back into power, and there’s a tendency to lump everything under this label - the good and the bad, the deserving and the scammers. For many commentators (although not Christopher) it serves as code for “blacks”, “women” or other groups the writer holds in contempt. In other words, it’s a term now tainted with unpleasant overtones of racism, misogyny, and various -phobias.

Nevertheless, we should be concerned about the way boards of cultural organisations are selected. There is so little transparency that one suspects it’s largely down to who you know. If Abdul-Rahman Abdullah was an inappropriate appointment to the Council of the NGA it wasn’t because he was a Muslim, it was because he was relatively inexperienced. No experienced board member would have imagined it was OK to start sending anti-Israel messages on social media.

So why was he appointed? Was it through the personal recommendation of Nick Mitzevich? It would hardly be unusual for gallery directors to wish to stack their boards with pliable trustees. Was this meant to appeal to Arts Minister, Tony Burke, whose electorate has a large Muslim population? We don’t know the answers to these questions, largely because journalists haven’t bothered to ask them.

I mention Abdul-Rahman only because his case was the most visible instance of a botched appointment. As we’ve seen in recent weeks, the committees at Creative Australia appear to be stuffed with equally dubious appointees, many of them only too ready to hand money to friends and allies. Legally, this is a grey area, but it feels uncomfortably close to nepotism and corruption, regardless of how passionately someone might value the work of a friend.

It's almost a philosophical problem: “Can it be nepotism if you award a grant to a friend or colleague when you genuinely believe their work was the most deserving in the field?” This seems to be the way many committee members would argue in defence of their actions. “It was simply the best proposal. It shouldn’t make any difference if we’re part of the same collective.”

Ethically, there’s not even the pretence of objectivity in such claims, and boards must strive – above all else – to be fair and impartial in their judgements. This becomes more unlikely if those selected to sit on these all-powerful committees are compromised by their past statements, their social media posts, and their professional and personal alliances. If they are not vetted properly it may be through sheer complacency, or because those doing the due diligence hold the same opinions.

Who chose these committee members in the first place? That’s the question journalists should be asking. Instead, the Sabsabi saga has brought forth a torrent of hanky-wringing commentary lamenting how unfair the whole thing has been for poor Khaled and Michael, with much fuss about the need for freedom of speech and expression.

Quite simply, freedom of speech is one thing, but choosing someone to represent the entire nation in Venice, is diplomacy. Following the aggressive campaign to ban the Israeli artist, Ruth Patir, and her curator from the previous Biennale it would have been a bad choice to send an artist who signed the anti-Israel petition. It sends the message that, in matters of art and politics, Australia is wiling to embrace the most blatant double standards.

Instead, the government has been doing contortions trying to balance its commitments to all parties.

Deborah Stone, in The Jewish Independent has published the Open Letter calling for the reinstatement of Sabsabi; the Open Letter calling for the boycott of Israel at the 2024 Venice Biennale; and a list of those who signed both petitions. It makes for illuminating reading.

Sabsabi clearly takes a partisan position, and one could hardly expect him to do otherwise, but neither should we expect the Australian public to accept his views as being appropriate for a national representative.

This simple observation seems to have been lost on most of the commentators who have attacked Creative Australia for cancelling Sabsabi’s selection. They should be more concerned about the lack of professionalism that allowed him to be chosen in the first place.

In his eagerness to condemn this “shameful act of political intervention”, Nikos Papastergiadis, in an utterly superfluous piece in The Age, explained how before choosing an artist for this “highest honour”, a “rigorous” team will consider “the weight of the artist’s past work.”

Clearly this didn’t happen, or perhaps they just put all of Khaled’s videos on the scales and found them impressively heavy. In fact, CA head, Adrian Collette, admitted to Senate Estimates: “We don’t do that. We judge the work in front of us and the potential to fulfil the brief that we are looking for.” He said the board merely considered “the calibre of the artist”.

If the members of the selection committee were aware of the controversial videos that featured Hassan Nasrallah and the 9/11 disaster, they obviously saw no potential problems. That committee consisted of: Mariko Smith, First Nations curator at the National Museum; Professor Anthony Gardner of Oxford University; Dunja Rmandič, director of Mornington Peninsula Gallery; Wassan Al-Khudhairi, contemporary art curator; and Elaine Chia, executive director of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation. Elaine is the only member of the group that I know, and she has hands-on experience of organising the Australian pavilion in Venice.

The first thing one notices is that two members of the committee live overseas. Wassan Al-Khudhairi is a curator of Iraqi origins, who appears to be based in Honolulu. Anthony Gardner is an Australian academic based in the UK. It’s apparently a deliberate policy to bring in overseas expertise to help with this international selection, but could those overseas panel members be fully aware of the politics and tensions that prevail in Australia today, or the ramifications of their choice? I think the answer is “No”. Even travelling overseas for a week, one begins to lose touch with Australian topics.

Al-Khudhairi and Gardner are both well-credentialled, but it would be good to know why these two people, out of a galaxy of possibilities, were chosen to sit on this committee. Who recommended them? What pre-existing contacts did they have with Australian curators, art bureaucrats and artists? Once again, these are questions that journalists should have been asking.

The slackness of the press leads to a debased level of argument, as writers express outrage over the cancellation, or mull around in the shallows, drawing no conclusions. The Sydney Morning Herald, as usual, provided a masterclass in nullity. An elaborate seven-minute video featured journo, Kerrie O’Brien, “explaining” the Sabsabi story. She concluded: “I feel like it’s a big discussion that’s going to keep rolling on.” How’s that for clarity?

Linda Morris had the makings of a story when she reported that Creative Australia had suspended their annual Asia Pacific Arts Awards, saying: “we feel it is important to take a pause at his time.”

A quick look at the list of finalists and judges should have been enough to send any journalist’s antennae waving in all directions. Linda seemed to get the idea, but only managed one garbled paragraph:

“Abdul Abdullah, who in October quit as director of the National Gallery of Australia amid a row over his social media posts on the Gaza war, has been shortlisted in the individual category.”

Well yes, Abdul, who sits on a Creative Australia committee was short-listed for an award, but it was his brother, Abdul-Rahman who was briefly a member of the Council of the NGA. As far as I know neither Abdullah served a term as Director of the gallery. That role, sadly, is exclusively the job of Nick Mitzevich.

When I pointed out this gaff on Instagram it had already been up for 12 hours, and would still be there 12 hours later. But not now (hence no link). Over the course of an entire day the subs hadn’t noticed or corrected the mistake, and no reader seems to have alerted the paper. Whenever there’s a typo in one of these mailouts I get about six messages within the first few minutes telling me about it. I can only conclude these pieces have a more dedicated readership than the woeful arts stories favoured by my former employer. But that’s no big achievement.

Had Linda looked a little more closely at the program of the Asia Pacific Arts Awards, she might – might! - have noticed how neatly it reflects the patterns of interest that exist within Creative Australia, and its cosy relationship with certain artists or types of artist. It even features Khaled Sabsabi on the judging panel.

It's hardly surprising the Awards were postponed as they would have provided more fodder for The Australian’s investigative team. The SMH could have got there first, had there been the slightest interest in actually investigating anything that might dilute the pro-Sabsabi position the paper has adopted.

Perhaps the ultimate mark of media desperation was wheeling out Casey Jenkins, she – or rather “they” – of the self-insemination performance project of 2022 that CA funded to the tune of $25,000, only to rescind the grant when the Murdoch press went on the rampage. History tells us, and Casey tells us too, that “they” went on to sue CA, and walked away with “a six-figure” sum. Why, with that kind of money they could afford quadruplets!

To have been funded for such an ethically dubious project in the first place was luck indeed. To sue CA and get a much bigger pay-out was a sensational result, but Casey still manages to play the victim(s). “Like Sabsabi, my art [surely “our art”?] was cancelled,” read the typically tabloid SMH headline. “Instead of outrage, there was barely a whimper.”

Casey seemed offended that Khaled is getting all the publicity, when they were the original CA blood sacrifice, although they do have some words of admiration for his work.

Did the editors honestly believe we could read Casey’s tale of woe and feel outraged on “their” behalf. Someone decided that Casey would be a real winner with readers while there was no point in looking into how CA chooses its committee members or its grant recipients. I’ll say no more about Casey, as I fear I’m in danger of contracting pronounitis.

As I write this, staring out the train window watching New Haven flash past, I wonder if we’ve reached exhaustion point with the Sabsabi crisis. After all the anger and recriminations, nothing much has changed. Khaled will not be reinstated because the reasons for dumping him have been judged more significant than the embarrassment CA has brought upon itself. It’s undeniable this is a political decision, but so was his initial selection.

From now on we need to attend to the question of the pavilion and stop saying it may be left empty, even if CA has created an internal culture that appears more intent on mourning the de-selection than repairing the damage. To fail to send an artist would be to rub salt into the wounds CA has inflicted on its own dignity and competence. If Khaled and Michael manage to bring their original exhibition to Venice, it will be greeted as the non-official-official Australian entry. The only difference will be that, along with its other sins, the organisation will be blamed for an empty pavilion. CA needs to find two things that have been conspicuously lacking: judgement and courage.

As I’m trying to write while travelling, I’m finding it difficult to do everything expeditiously this week. There’s a new film column, on Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, but the art column is delayed by a day. It looks at the Machu Picchu show at the Australian Museum. I’m sorry to keep the Incas waiting, but they’ve put up with much worse in the past.