Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

Cultural priorities

Reassuring for creative types to see a Federal Government that starves the Arts of proper funding and support has an Environment Minister who "...strongly believe(s) that alpine cattle grazing is an intrinsic part of the Australian culture", and is offering his Victorian counterpart $15 million to back his belief. Indeed, where would we be without our well-known and deeply ingrained cultural preference for a bit of alpine cattle grazing? Perhaps he should have appeased the handfull of cattlemen affected by letting them graze their beasts in the National Art Gallery; its hardly like the contribution of a few daubers, pencil pushers, and doily-stitchers makes a culture artistic or viable these days. And it's not as if Canberra's institutions aren't knee deep in bullshit anyway.

In fact, the cattle are probably welcome, as the new Director of the National Gallery thinks it should

'...proudly echo our national and international cultural and strategic aspirations [...] America's emergence in the 1940s as an art power coincides with Australia's powerful and continuing defence and economic alliance with the US. The National Gallery's well developed American collection, and its continuing worldwide attention to contemporary art, can be regarded as politically strategic.'

We anticipate the commencement of oil drilling in the foyer, and the sale of now strategically irrelevant Australian artworks to fund a bust of President Bush overlooking the cattle feeding troughs in the main gallery. A larger than life fountain with statues depicting John Howard and his Cabinet in the act of urination will be located on the entrance roof, enabling Australian artists and their patrons to bathe in the Government's elevated benificence towards our culture.

After all, the Minister's $15 million would only fund about 2,500 small arts grants; hardly a priority when pork-barelling rural voters and fawning to the Americans are more strategically important to our culture.

Note: Surely the presumably qualified policy makers at the NGA have perused enough Art History to know that, apart from brief moments with De Kooning, Pollock, and Liechtenstein, America has arguably never been an 'art power' at any time. The phrasing of the report, above, reads like prostration of the basest and most spin-doctored kind. (Indeed, current and growing interest in Indigenous Australian art is likely to have greater international influence than any American 'movement' of the last 100 years. Not that 'cultural elites' would necessarily recognise that when it's not strategically important.)

Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:42 am ::