In a week in which federal Arts Minister, Tony Burke, announced a new instalment of a National Cultural Policy, I thought it might be a good time to look at the way another nation, namely South Korea, has carved out a global role for itself by means of art and popular culture.

The exhibition, Hallyu! The Korean Wave, at the National Museum of Australia until 10 May, provides a busy, broadranging survey of the products and innovations that have allowed this most ambitious of countries to propel itself into world consciousness while Australia lingers on the sidelines. If I had to name the most significant point of contrast it’s that South Korea (hence “Korea”) has had an outward-looking attitude towards culture, whereas Australia has become increasingly insular and provincial.

Hallyu – which literally means “the Korean Wave” – has conquered the world with the active assistance of successive Korean governments that have invested heavily in new technology and culture. The turning point was the Asian financial crisis of 1997, in which Korea’s roaring economy hit the skids when it was found many of the giant conglomerates, the chaebols, had been caught overborrowing and were now facing bankruptcy. Relief came in the form of a US$58 billion loan from the IMF, and massive, obligatory restructuring.

One way the Koreans pulled themselves out of this hole was to turn towards hi tech and culture. They realised manufacturing was becoming a liability, and that fast action would allow the country to become a world leader in the new digital economy. By 2010, broadband had been made available to all Korean households, five years ahead of schedule. The total cost was US $24.5 billion, of which only US$1.5 billion came from the taxpayer.

Remember what happened in Australia in 2009, when the Rudd government undertook to provide broadband for 93% of Australians by 2020? The roll-out was barely moving when Tony Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013 and expressed horror at the cost of the project. The Coalition’s changes succeeded brilliantly in making the NBN both more expensive and less efficient. We ended up spending roughly $50 billion for a second-rate service.

Maybe we needed a massive economic collapse and an IMF bailout to learn what the Koreans had figured out: that the economic spoils in this brave new world will go to the most connected. With connectedness came new ways of interacting, and new crazes such as the minirooms – a virtual environment that could be arranged and furnished to fit one’s fantasies. The Hallyu! catalogue tells us the miniroom concept was introduced in 2001, and by 2009 two-thirds of Koreans owned one.

Korea’s embrace of the Internet led to surges in online gaming and shopping. It was crucial to the growth of K-Pop, which would become one of the country’s most successful exports.

With the means of communication in place, the Koreans set about providing the content, with a new focus on the arts, subsidised and supported by government. Over the past two decades, it’s not just K-Pop, but Korean gaming, drama, cuisine, fashion, literature and movies that have made steady inroads into global consciousness - and markets. I’ll spare you the figures, but they are phenomenal. What the Koreans realised was that the arts could be a huge international money-spinner and a source of soft power. As the world became hooked on Korean drama and pop music, tourism surged. All over the world there has been a steady growth of Korean language courses, Korean Studies at universities, and dedicated Korean galleries in leading museums, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the British Museum.

The Koreans have a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism – a combination that makes perfect sense, and doesn’t avoid the word, “culture” in favour of that soft term, “the arts”. When Labor was elected with a landslide, it would have been an opportune time to finally coin a Ministry of Culture, with the greater aspirations that entails, instead we have Tony Burke as Minister for “the Arts”: the minor part of a portfolio that also includes Home Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship, and Cyber Security.

The difference is obvious: the Koreans link culture with sport as equally important sources of tourist revenue. We have a Minister for Sport, in Anika Wells, and a Minister for Trade and Tourism in Don Farrell. Sport is given prime importance as a freestanding ministry, whereas tourism is bracketed anomalously with trade, as if tourists were no more than imported goods.

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In Korea, another area that has benefited enormously from government support is the film industry. In Korea, there have been two “golden ages” of cinema – the 1960s, when a variety of films received massive local support; and the early 2000s, which saw the rise of star filmmakers such as Park Chan-wook, Bong Joon Ho, and Lee Chang-dong. The pay-off came when Bong’s Parasite won best Picture at the 2019 Academy Awards.

In Australia, our ‘Golden Age’ was the 1970s. An explosion of local filmmaking was fuelled by new talent, new censorship laws, and significant government funding. Local audiences supported the homegrown product and directors such as Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford and Phil Noyce went on to forge careers in Hollywood.

Australian films would garner support from the 10BA tax incentive scheme that ran from 1981 to 2007, that allowed investors to claim a 150–100 per cent tax deduction. By the time it was dropped the scheme was considered a rort, but funding responsibilities have largely returned to state and federal governments which have imposed increasingly onerous conditions on the kinds of movies they support. The emphasis has shifted away from creativity towards making Australia a service industry for world cinema. This means we supply studios, sets and technical expertise for foreign film productions, but produce few noteworthy films of our own. The small amount of money made available to filmmakers is subject to “diversity” requirements, both official and unofficial, which results, paradoxically, in a less varied, less adventurous range of features.

It’s impossible to imagine highly successful, politically incorrect Australian films such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) or Alvin Purple (1973) being made today.

Korean cinema has had its own ups and downs, as viewing habits, post-pandemic, have turned towards home screening platforms. Korea’s peak production era of the 2000s, which turned out 50–80 features each year, gave way to a paltry 35-37 in 2024-25. According to Screen Australia statistics, Australian film production, which fell as low as 19 features in 2002-03, came in at 34 in 2024-25.

These figures, however, say nothing about the nature and quality of films, or their success at the box office. Most Australian features struggle to get a theatrical release, and if they do get one, are unlikely to survive for more than a couple of weeks. In the 1970s there was a hunger for local product, but today there’s a widespread perception that if it’s an Australian film it won’t be any good. This is the inevitable result of too many lacklustre productions addressing themes audiences find less-than-inspiring.

Korea may be suffering from a slump in cinema attendances, but the best Korean movies, such as Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, are still finding global audiences. The big “Australian” films are Hollywood co-productions by directors such as George Miller and Baz Luhrmann, which don’t depend so heavily on local funding. To rebuild Australian cinema we need to reinvest in the movies as a creative activity not a service industry. This also means loosening the political strictures that channel disproportionate funding to projects that meet standards of equity, diversity and inclusion which would rule out most of the greatest films ever made.

One of the reasons Korea has been so successful in bringing its stories to the world is that it has been willing to experiment with so many styles and genres, ranging from ‘exotic’ costume flicks to a range of thrillers, dramas and comedies that give a specifically Korean inflection to plots that may originate elsewhere. No Other Choice, for instance, is based on a novel by American crime writer, Donald E. Westlake, previously adapted by Costa-Gavras. In Park Chan-wook’s hands, it has become a parable for the age of AI and globalisation, and their impact on the mentality of the Korean worker.

Although everyone in no No Other Choice is Korean, we can empathise with the characters more readily than we can with the protagonists of so many Australian films, carefully curated to represent every form of marginality. Park’s film is also a black comedy, but most Australian movies over the past decade have forgotten how to make people laugh, becoming increasingly bleak, depressing and sadistic.

The Hallyu! exhibition has a lot of material devoted to Korean cinema, which serves as a welcome reminder of the quality of films this country has produced over the past two decades. What a thrill to revisit the classic sequence from Park’s Old Boy (2003) in which the anti-hero defeats a crowd of violent hoodlums.

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The cinema is my area, but one suspects the major attraction for most visitors will be the K-Pop material. To speak frankly, I’ve always found K-Pop to be inane and formulaic, but for fans that seems to be the source of attraction – and when I say “fans”, I’m not talking about a handful of teenagers. The fan base for K-Pop, according to the Korea Foundation, now exceeds 225 million, worldwide. Brought together, it would make K-Pop fans the 7^th most populous nation on earth. The Hallyu! catalogue claims there are 2.4 million members of K-Pop clubs in Australia alone. In 2011, a major K-Pop concert sold out ANZ Stadium at Sydney Olympic Park, while our most successful entrant in the Eurovision Song Contest has been Korean Australian, Dami Im, who was runner-up in 2026.

Im is one of 160,000 Australians of Korean ancestry, which is more than enough to cause ripples in the social fabric, but this still doesn’t account for the extraordinary popularity of K-Pop, which has also driven multi-million-dollar trends in fashion and cosmetics. Most of the members of leading bands such as BTS and BLACKPINK have contracts with top fashion houses and cosmetic companies.

For my generation the punk revolution came along at exactly the right time, blowing up a music industry that had grown bloated, smug and megalomaniacal. Punk was a rejection of those long-haired guys in kaftans and their concept albums, of heavy metal stodge, disco frippery, and the sugary pop tunes that regularly topped the charts. It was raw, offensive, and defiantly D.I.Y. The massive corporations were suddenly confronted with a viral outbreak of independent labels that gave youth audiences an alternative to the slick, bland products they were offering.

It didn’t last, of course, but for a short while the music business was plunged into turmoil, as the big labels tried to work out where they’d gone wrong. When they finally got the idea, it was a simple matter to package a new group of punk-lite acts, with none of the offensiveness and amateurish musicianship. Suddenly the New Romantics came along, and all the old corporate marketing tactics began to function as per normal.

From a broadly historical perspective, the K-Pop revolution represents the ultimate triumph of corporate packaging and marketing. The bands are all created by studios, following extensive auditions and talent scouting. Successful applicants are sent on intensive courses in singing and dancing that might last years before an act makes its debut. When it does appear, the ground will have been carefully prepared by the company. Music, costumes and dance routines will have been planned with the rigour of a military campaign, while each band member will be allotted a distinctive identity to stimulate the fascination of fans. The boys and girls are all paragons of beauty, with flawless skin, immaculate hairdos and styling, and tons of make-up.

Circa 1978, this would have been seen as the last word in corporate control, the dead hand of calculation that killed any trace of spontaneity. Today, these precisely calibrated acts are tailored to fans’ desires, which in turn inform moves and adjustments in the next wave of bands. It’s a seamless process, in which the music is a jumble of styles, from teeny pop to disco to soul to hip hop, synchronised with costumes and dance routines used as part of a video clip that gets zapped around the world on platforms such as YouTube.

It’s a sobering, slightly scary vision of fandom today, boosted to new dimensions by the Internet. It’s also a picture of a largely non-critical audience, prepared to consume whatever is put in front of them. Although fans will obviously have their favourite bands or performers, it’s their devotion to the phenomenon of K-Pop itself that is so overwhelming. As one sees with other acts such as Taylor Swift, the music seems to be secondary to the experience of being part of an enormous fan subculture that extends around the planet, blurring the cultural differences between countries as diverse as Korea and Saudi Arabia.

Before writing this, I sat and watched a succession of K-Pop videos and couldn’t find an original musical or visual idea. It’s one long mash-up in which uniformly pretty boys and girls jump from one titillating scenario to the next, each video being a mini-movie, with songs pushing banal but attractive messages such as “be true to yourself”.

I thought it was profoundly empty, superficial and depressing, but the fans see this stuff as a source of pure joy, perhaps an escape from a world riven by war, inequality and a climate crisis. One of the most interesting essays in the Hallyu! catalogue is Mariam Elba’s piece which looks at the ways K-Pop fans have used their networks to raise money for charities or to generate support for protest movements. It sounds bizarre, but to celebrate some teen idol’s birthday, a group of fans in Egypt will get together and raise money for the homeless. It suggests, once again, that one of the most appealing aspects of the K-Pop phenomenon is the feeling of solidarity and the power of a group to do things that resist the ugly, brutal problems of everyday life.

If Parasite will always be seen as the film that put Korea on the world map for cinema, the pop music breakthrough was Psy’s Gangnam Style in 2012, a boppy satire about the luxury lifestyles of the nouveau riche who live in the Seoul suburb of Gangnam. It’s a deliberately silly song with a very ordinary dance beat and a hilarious video, but through the power of the Internet it became the first pop clip to register one billion views on YouTube. By 2014, hits had risen to more than two billion.

Unsurprisingly, Gangnam Style and Parasite, are all over the NMA exhibition as recognised icons of Korean culture. What would the Australian equivalents be? Something by Kylie Minogue? Crocodile Dundee?

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The worldwide dissemination of Korean cultural product has been astonishing, and in the case of K-Pop, and the enormously successful online gaming industry, the word “product” could not be more precise. It makes me feel like a hopeless nostalgic to think of pop music as something made by aspiring musos in their garages. The consumers of K-Pop are not in the least disturbed by its shiny, corporatised image, with every band, song and video clip created by teams of people alert to each new trend. Talented but homely singers need not apply, as every K-Pop star looks like he or she was produced by a 3-D printer, working from strict templates of male and female beauty.

At the end of the 1970s, a young, rebellious generation demanded that music drop the artifice and get real again. Today, reality is the last thing the fans want, even if they use their K-Pop idols’ birthdays as an excuse for charitable deeds. I can understand the appeal of all that ostentatious prettiness and immaculate choreography, but the shallowness of the music is hard to swallow. It could all be cranked out by AI, if it isn’t already. It’s the triumph of an escapism that seems to have admitted that reality is too hard to handle.

Australia could learn a lot from the way the Koreans have spread their cultural energy across the entire planet, but the army-like regimentation of K-Pop seems profoundly at odds with local ways of thinking, even allowing for those 2.4 million Aussie fans.

What we need to recognise is the way Korea has got the world hooked on distinctively Korean themes, even when songs are being sung in a language spoken by relatively few people. It’s partly down to a willingness to “self-orientalise”, as one catalogue essay puts it, portraying Korea as a land of costume drama and hybrid glamour. The popular imagination may be tawdry, but it’s easily stimulated by bright and shiny things.

In Australia, culture has taken an inward turn. As we see with the government’s ‘First Nations First’ dictum, the guiding principle today is Indigeneity, to such an extent that every myth or story of colonial Australia is subjected to fierce scrutiny to find what evils were inflicted on Aboriginal people. We’ve lost more than the presumption of innocence - it has become virtually impossible to create significant cultural artefacts that are not overshadowed by this ideological fixation.

A similar problem was addressed by the American essayist, Leon Wieseltier, last year, when he wrote:

“From the standpoint of a liberal order… the indigeneity of the right is no more legitimate than the indigeneity of the left: both introduce a moral hierarchy where hierarchy itself is the moral problem. In a democracy we count cardinally, not ordinally. Indigeneity, moreover, is myopic, a severe narrowing of perspective, another variety of blinking originalism.”

We may consider the indigeneity of the right to be represented by the insularity of the MAGA crowd in the United States, and the surging popularity of One Nation in Australia. Both are populist movements based on emotional responses rather than pragmatic political choices. Followers believe they are true natives of the country where they were born, and resent being viewed as invaders or second-class citizens. They worry about being racially or ethnically outnumbered by newcomers, generating a hostile attitude to migration.

On the left we have the sacralising tendencies of self-styled progressives towards the indisputable indigeneity of Aboriginal people. They have created a new hierarchy in which “the last shall be first, and the first last” as Jesus said. Indigeneity is now the first consideration with every institutional cultural project, to the extent that strenuous efforts are made to insert Indigenous content into every movie, every TV drama and art exhibition. Those who support this process see it as fair and just reparation for the crimes of the past. Those who don’t have crimes on their conscience – and I’m afraid, they are the overwhelming majority – feel bored and frustrated by this political fixation, which often comes across as mere tokenism.

There may even be an argument that before the current over-the-top obsession with indigeneity took charge of Australian culture, the One Nation people were less concerned that their core identity as Australians was being demeaned or threatened. It may also be that such practices have undermined a growing natural sympathy for Indigenous people among the bulk of the local population. The resounding defeat of the Voice referendum suggested a more sceptical attitude.

Where this relates to Korea, is that Korean culture has defined itself clearly to the world in all its variety, while Australian culture has become bogged down in political anxieties that have undermined our strength and confidence. To be so slavishly preoccupied with indigeneity is to be just as insular as those who fear losing the farm to foreigners. Democracy is a messy but spacious form of accommodation that works best when it doesn’t create artificial hierarchies that put some people on pedestals and treat others as untouchables. We need to take a more open-minded approach to culture in this country. True inclusiveness shouldn’t come with a list of people who need to be evicted from the premises.

In brief, Korea’s cultural strategies are positive, up-tempo and outward-looking (almost forcedly so), whereas Australian culture has lost its way in the woods of guilt and insecurity. The mania for calling everything “colonialist” is a form of self-flagellation that does nothing for our social well-being or the way we are perceived internationally. We should take inspiration from the enterprising Koreans and try to understand what makes this country attractive in the eyes of the world.

When we return to the National Cultural Policy, we find Tony Burke’s office has just announced: “Five Expert Panels have [already] been appointed”, as well as a Policy Advisory Group. The Expert Panels “will inform the Minister and the Policy Advisory Group on key issues and themes raised through the public consultation process.”

There is no detail as to who is sitting on these Expert Panels or the Policy Advisory Group, although I could venture a few guesses. As the main priority is to build on the “five pillars” of the 2023 plan, Revive, the entire exercise appears to assume that plan was a complete success. To hold fast to this fanciful belief, it helps to skip over the long list of arts scandals and controversies we’ve negotiated since Labor came to power.

One can be sure the Expert Panels and Policy Advisory Group will contain nobody who will challenge prevailing orthodoxies or question broader government attitudes towards culture. Get ready for another few years of cultural inertia, nepotism, corruption and mediocrity, as private and public money continues to drain out of the arts. In this land of the rubber stamp we ignore the Koreans at our peril because they’ve shown that culture, properly supported and administered, represents a huge economic opportunity.

I’ve been working on other projects myself this week, which I’ll explain at some later date, but managed to post a review of Paolo Sorrentino’s film, La Grazia, a portrait of a high-ranking politician with conscience. Yes, it’s pure fantasy, but if we don’t take a more positive approach, it’s impossible to imagine a day when politics and culture will ever win back our trust.

Hallyu! The Korean Wave

National Museum of Australia, Canberra

12 December 2025 – 10 May 2026

“Grace” is a concept that has inspired volumes of theological literature, so it’s a brave director that takes it up as the theme of a movie. Paolo Sorrentino, one of the most accomplished filmmakers at work today, doesn’t lack the courage or artistry to weave a story around an abstraction, taking it into the most unlikely of settings: the Palazzo del Quirinale in Rome, the official residence of the President of the Republic.

Politics is familiar territory for Sorrentino, but most of his protagonists have been thoroughly disreputable, from Giulio Andreotti in Il Divo (2008) to Silvio Berlusconi in Loro (2018). Both those scheming powerbrokers were played by Toni Servillo, a great actor, who has starred in most of Sorrentino’s films. In La Grazia, Servillo finally gets to play a political figure with a scrupulous regard for the law. It may say something about Italian politics that he’s a completely imaginary character.

Servillo’s Mariano di Santo is the President of Italy. Like the hero in Italo Svevo’s novel, Confessions of Zeno, he spends the entire story having one last cigarette, savouring this small act of rebellion against the tyranny of a health program that obliges him to eat quantities of quinoa.

A respected jurist who takes his time considering the pros and cons of any case, Mariano has exerted a steadying influence on the chaos of Italian democracy, having negotiated no fewer than six crises. He’s disturbed to learn that his nickname is “reinforced concrete”, but it’s a tribute to his integrity. Coming towards the end of his term of office, Mariano is hesitating to sign a controversial bill on euthanasia into law and pondering two appeals for pardons. The Italian word for an official pardon is “grazia”.

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There’s no excuse for the scandals that have rocked this year’s Biennale of Sydney. It was always clear that the event was being held at a highly sensitive moment, when the world was dividing itself into hostile camps over the ongoing carnage in the Middle East. With previous Biennales I’ve written two pieces: one that decodes the theme and provides groundwork for the exhibition, a second that focuses on the art. This year I’ll continue that practice, although there’s more to be said about the nature of the show than the exhibitors.

Any discussion must begin with the appointment of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi as Artistic Director. The choice was justified by Hoor’s status as one of the most influential figures in international contemporary art, but in all other respects it was an accident waiting to happen.

Hoor had already chosen her list of artists and participants for the Biennale when the massacre at Bondi sent the country into a state of shock, prompting an upsurge of collective grief and trauma. This was not a promising environment for a Biennale packed with artists who have taken an overtly hostile stance in relation to Israel or Zionism.

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Well, that didn’t take long. Approximately three hours into the 26^th Biennale of Sydney, one of the contributing artists launched a withering antisemitic outburst from her platform as DJ for the launch party, and battle lines were drawn up. There’ll be plenty of excuses offered, but when DJ Haram of New Jersey, denounced the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire” and led a chant of “From the river to the sea”, it was clear that the worst expectations of the Biennale’s detractors had been realised.

Prior to this evening, Biennale CEO, Barbara Moore, had taken pains to assure us the exhibition was free of prejudice and there for everyone. Moore was speaking at the press launch on behalf of Artistic Director, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, who had opted to stay away, so we could “focus on the artists.”

You may think it’s a peculiar strategy for an Artistic Director to avoid addressing the media at the launch of a Biennale for which she has selected the theme and the participants. When Juliana Engberg decided to take an overseas junket rather than be present for the launch of her program for the one-and-only Melbourne International Biennial of 1999, it was widely believed her absence contributed to the failure of an event that ended in a financial sinkhole. As Al Qasimi is experienced, intelligent, and not at all the shy-and-retiring type, one can only wonder what she was thinking.

What’s more surprising is that a large section of the media bought this explanation. Linda Morris, in the Sydney Morning Herald, took her usual option of reporting whatever she was told:

It was a deliberate curatorial choice, a spokesperson said, to platform the artists whose works are installed across five primary exhibition venues.

“Hoor felt strongly that the media preview must be about the individual artists who make up this edition,” the spokesperson said. “She has chosen to let their work, their histories, and their voices take centre stage…” The Biennale said Al Qasimi’s decision not to attend was driven entirely by this artist-first philosophy, rather than a reaction to any external events or commentary.

Really? Even the most trusting of journos might suspect Al Qasimi was anxious to avoid awkward questions about her political beliefs at the start of the show. She was far less reticent in Nagoya last year, when fronting a press conference in her role as Artistic Director of the Sixth Aichi Triennale. On that occasion Al Qasimi wore a T-shirt with the word “Palestine” emblazoned across it; denounced “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” in Gaza, and railed against “colonialism and occupation”.

She might have done the same in Sydney, had the Bondi massacre not changed the equation, blurring the lines between legitimate compassion for the sufferings of the Palestinians, and mere antisemitism.

Over the last few months that distinction has only grown more problematic, as hate speech has become more widespread, and government efforts to rein in pro-Palestinian demonstrations have inflamed protesters’ anger.

During these months, the Biennale has drawn unwelcome attention to itself by allowing participating artists to post outrageous messages on social media. It began with ‘ArtSeen ambassador’ Bhenji Ra gifting us a picture of a rabbi in a bloodstained smock, treading on a baby doll; and continued with Biennale artist, Feras Shazeen, posting an image on Instagram that equated Jewish philanthropists, John Gandel and Morry Schwartz, with the leader of the Australian Neo-Nazis. Schwartz wrote to the Biennale in protest, but as of this moment the post is still extant, and Shazeen is taking his place in Biennale events.

The excuse is that old chestnut, “freedom of speech”, which often seems to work in only one direction.

Now, DJ Haram (“haram” in Arabic means “forbidden” or “sinful”), has pushed that excuse to the limits. In response to the predictable outcry, we find:

Biennale management on Saturday confirmed a review of DJ Haram’s performance was under way, while issuing a statement that she did not “represent the views of the Biennale of Sydney, our board, or our government and corporate partners”… “The Biennale of Sydney did not commission, approve, or have prior knowledge of these specific remarks,” a spokesperson said on Sunday, adding “each project undergoes a risk assessment reviewed by a dedicated committee to ensure legal and operational obligations are met”.

Only a conspiracy theorist would suggest that the Biennale commissioned DJ Haram’s remarks or had any advance warning of what she was about to do, but the merest glance at the artist’s track record should have set alarm bells ringing.

I wrote last month about receiving an analysis of Biennale invitees that argued: “70 of 175 participants, or 40 percent of the program, engage directly with anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian narratives at a high or moderate level.” If a critic of the Biennale can make such an analysis, was it too difficult for the organisation itself to calculate the degree of risk involved? What was the relevant committee doing? Was it inconceivable that a few of these politically engaged artists might engage in activities that damaged the show’s standing?

For the Biennale, at this juncture, the chief concern is not whether this year’s offerings attract audiences or not - it’s whether ongoing funding and sponsorship take a hit. The danger is a rerun of 2014, when Artistic Director, Juliana Engberg, sided with a group of disgruntled artists and succeeded in severing the Biennale’s ties with founding sponsor, Transfield. The loss of that dependable revenue was bad enough, but the example it set was even worse. The Biennale had shown that a loyal sponsor could support the show from the very beginning, only to be dumped because of the poorly researched political grievances of a handful of artists.

I’m not about to dwell on the events of 2014, but the outcome created a financial headache for every Biennale that followed, and this year has the potential to do the same. After Jewish sponsors and sympathisers withdrew their support because of their mistrust of the Artistic Director and her choice of artists, it was left to Al Qasimi to arrange the necessary sponsorship through family companies.

Not only is it unlikely such arrangements will continue into the future, it’s unlikely that Jewish sponsors will come running back. Worst of all, the anger over DJ Haram’s diatribe has resulted in numerous calls for federal and state governments to reassess their funding of the Biennale. The Australian quoted David Ossip from the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies, who argued:

the government had to “put in place measures to avoid the festival being infected with further hate.”

“It is also imperative that governments stop issuing blank cheques to festivals, implement a robust code of conduct which festivals need to abide by and implement accountability measures for events which receive public funds and fail to meet the standards of decency most Australians would expect,” he said. “Receiving public funds is a privilege, not a right.”

The funds in question amount to $1.6 million from Create NSW, and a further $879,000 from the federal arts agency, Creative Australia. Remove almost $2.5 million from the budget and it’s hard to see how the Biennale could continue.

DJ Haram may feel pleased with herself for torpedoing the Biennale with her aggressive actions, but she won’t have to suffer any consequences. Ferocious calls to revoke her visa are of no account, as she has already left the country. It’s the Biennale – chiefly Hoor Al Qasimi and Barbara Moore, who will have to face the music.

Can you hear any violins being tuned? If this latest scandal follows the usual pattern there will be critical reports and commentary in the Murdoch press and the Australian Financial Review, and virtually nothing from the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC, Crikey and other mastheads. Kelly Burke got there a day late for The Guardian. The great silence will allow state and federal governments to believe that – as usual – they only need to keep quiet for the scandal to quickly blow over. It’s amazing there has been no mention of the DJ Haram performance in these outlets.

Dee Jefferson set the tone in The Guardian, in an article that passed a benign judgement on the Biennale even before it had opened. She began by listing fears that this year’s exhibition was destined to be a “hate Israel jamboree” at worst; a hotbed of pro-Palestinian politics at best.” She quickly assured us these concerns “are not borne out by the festival itself.” (festival?)

Instead, the show is “complex and nuanced. It’s light on spectacle and slogans; not a political chant but rather a polyphony of voices – more than 80 artists from 37 countries – singing their own songs.”

Good call, Dee! With a bit of luck you won’t have to retract anything, just so long as The Guardian doesn’t take the DJ Haram story any further.

Meanwhile, my old stomping ground, the SMH, keeps distinguishing itself as one of the most “supportive” papers in the business. It’s offering 2-for-1 tickets to subscribers to the Biennale’s Art After Dark; it has published two anodyne previews by Linda Morris, and a tiny review by Joanna Mendelssohn (a real vote for the future of art criticism here!), which told us: “Ignore the carping critics. Look at the art.”

Ah, those carping critics. I’d happily ignore them if they could be located. All I can find at most outlets are cheerful propagandists who don’t accept that a string of antisemitic comments from the Biennale DJ on opening night might be at all newsworthy.

The impression this sends is that antisemitism is just another one of those things the nasty Murdoch mob likes to beat up out of nothing. Surely there’s nothing antisemitic in referring to the “Zio-Australian-Epstein empire”? Those Jews are awfully touchy. It’s not much of a story is it? Not like a 2-for-1 ticket offer.

Pardon the sarcasm, but one gets tired of art scandals being swept under the carpet again and again. The SMH may prefer to believe there’s nothing wrong with artists exercising their ‘freedom of speech’ in a forceful manner, but to allow such blatantly hateful public outbursts to go unnoticed, is to keep pushing the threshold of acceptability a little further each time, until “Jew hatred” has become socially acceptable. This is the term the Jews themselves prefer, even though their opponents insist on calling out “Zionists”. Beyond the choice of words, the effect is much the same: a growing wave of hatred that fosters division in a country that prides itself on being easy going and open-minded.

To allow people in public positions, including artists, to make hateful statements about Jews, Muslims, or any other group, with no pushback, is not a sign of open-mindedness, it’s pure cowardice. Hatred breeds hatred, in a relentless cycle, until something terrible takes place. The fact that we’ve already seen something terrible, at Bondi, has done little to cease the flow of vile commentary. I’m not suggesting we throw opinionated people in gaol or ban them from public events, but it’s essential that extremist views (on all sides) not go unchallenged by the media or the politicians. Disagreement is healthy, but conspiracies of silence only make a bad situation worse.

For the Biennale there is a real danger that even the most supportive governments will come under sufficient populist pressure to pull or seriously reduce funding. The organisation should be still more anxious about losing the trust of corporate sponsors who don’t wish to be involved with ugly, self-generated scandals; and private donors who don’t expect their money to support political positions they find abhorrent. It’s the Biennale’s responsibility to keep its participants in line when it is allowing them a public platform. It’s not sufficient to play Pontius Pilate and wash one’s hands of a disturbing incident.

[This story is moving fast. As I write, consulting firm, PwC has just announced it’s pulling its sponsorship from the Biennale immediately, saying: “We condemn the comments made and reject antisemitism and all forms of hate.” This prompted the SMH to finally pick up the story, a mere four days after the opening, recycling what had already appeared elsewhere. The ABC finally ran a story five days later, after the incident had been referred to the police.]

Following DJ Haram’s opening night antics, it’s astonishing to read what Barbara Moore told Linda Morris before the show opened:

In response to heightened tensions following the December Bondi killings, Moore has personally vetted every work in the exhibition. “Multiple times over, in fact,” Moore says. “This is a culturally diverse program rooted in community care. We want to ensure everyone feels welcome and safe. Our commitment to artistic freedom is a commitment to exploring difficult ideas, but our process ensures an environment free from harassment, discrimination, and racism. We ensure that line is never crossed.”

Perhaps Barb might like to revisit that “personally vetted” comment. Or the bit about everyone feeling welcome and safe. Or that line about freedom from discrimination. The tacit support of a spineless media is not the kind of support that will pay the Biennale’s bills when it has alienated the trust and good will of its financial backers. This is the time for Biennale management to step up and take charge before another great Australian institution is brought down by the weight of its own hypocrisy.

So much for the Biennale’s tortured politics, I’m saving a review of the art for a later date and working on other projects this week. In recognition of the latest Academy Awards, I’ve reviewed Sinners, the film that scored a record 16 nominations, for four wins. I wasn’t entirely surprised the movie didn’t measure up to the lavish praise it has received from all quarters, but still taken aback by the way director, Ryan Coogler, combined several different genres in a manner that never allowed a plausible relationship to develop. Can 97% of critics be wrong? You bet.

If Academy Award nominations were a guarantee of quality, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with a record sixteen, would be the greatest film of all time. The reality is that it’s arguably not as good as some of the features that never made this year’s shortlist for Best Picture. Sinners doesn’t have the depth or drama of Nuremberg or The Testament of Ann Lee, neither of which found favour with the Academy. The obvious reason for its success is that it’s a remarkable exercise in box-ticking, providing all the political and pop cultural triggers that appeal to the kind of sensibility flourishing in Hollywood today.

The film had a brief cinematic release in April last year, before reverting to home viewing platforms where it can be watched at any time. It may yet get another run on the big screen, although that’s for Warner Bros. to decide. In Australia, Sinners was a sleeper at first release, but its later success represents a triumph of global marketing as it has made inroads with an initially indifferent audience.

The aspects of the movie that appeal to reviewers who have given it a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, are precisely what I saw as weaknesses. Coogler has been praised for the way he has stitched together film genres that seem completely incompatible, making Sinners a blend of musical, horror, drama and social history. As unlikely as the platypus, it’s one hell of a high wire act for any writer-director. To my mind, he doesn’t come close to pulling it off.

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This week, in preparation for another Sydney Biennale, I finally got around to reading Brook Turner’s Turbulence & Transcendence, the book published last year to celebrate the exhibition’s 50^th anniversary. The fact that this sturdy volume, produced by Black Inc. comes in a limited edition of 500, with a cover price of $299, suggests a firm belief that it holds little appeal for the general public. The target audience is institutional, supplemented by those high-net-worth individuals who might be counted on to support the show.

The title has rather a portentous ring to it. Turbulence & Transcendence? It could just as easily be called Flatulence and Forbearance.

Turner had a lot of ground to cover, necessitating crucial decisions about what to include and exclude in a brisk overview of 24 exhibitions dating back to 1973. The result is highly readable, but it’s a glorified scrapbook rather than a history. Each staging of the Biennale is given its own chapter but discussed in a different manner. Some chapters concentrate on particular artists or artworks, others focus on the issues that were topical at the time. Certain themes, such as funding problems and policy wrangles, recur with relentless regularity.

There’s broad agreement that the Sydney Biennale has played a vital role in bringing Australia into the world of international contemporary art, but there can be few people who have seen all 24 iterations, including its amateurish, low-key launch at the Opera House in 1973. Penelope Seidler is mentioned in the text, but I’m unable to think of a second candidate. I was still at school in the country during the 1970s, but I’ve seen every Biennale since then, with the exception of Tony Bond’s Boundary Riders of 1992/93, which was staged while I was living overseas. On the whole, turbulence has been a more prominent feature than transcendence.

From the 1980s onward I’ve reviewed most of those Biennales and have vivid recollections of some of them. The standouts for me were Nick Waterlow’s Biennales of 1986 and 1988, and René Block’s ‘blockbuster’ of 1990, The Readymade Boomerang. In retrospect, although I had my reservations, I’ve come to view Charles Merewether’s show of 2006, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s of 2008, and Dave Elliott’s extravaganza of 2010, as important exhibitions.

If it’s taken a little while to appreciate these Biennales, this is partly because they were such huge, sprawling affairs that it was hard to get an overview at the time. With many mediocre works mixed in with the memorable ones, viewers had to strip away the weeds to find the prize specimens. Another problem was a preponderance of dreary videos that required hours of attention for little reward. Writing a review, you feel a certain obligation to watch these things rather than simply walk on by.

Other instalments, such as Catherine De Zegher and Gerald McMaster’s show of 2012, and José Roca’s rivus of 2022, were less ambitious but more focused than some of the earlier, carnivalesque Biennales. They had an unusual sense of sincerity and integrity, even if the art was less spectacular. Richard Grayson’s show of 2002 gets points for an engaging quirkiness. For sheer degree of difficulty – not counting the Biennale’s early years – Mami Kataoka’s show of 2018 deserves some sort of award. Not only did Kataoka have to deal with Ai Weiwei at his most obnoxious, but her budget was so threadbare she donated part of her fee to help secure artist participation.

The less successful Biennales were the ones that simply recycled fashionable names from the international contemporary art circuit. Although these exhibitions invariably came with a high-falutin’ theme and a complex theoretical rationale, they were essentially fashion shows in which the Artistic Director called up all the artists they had used on previous outings.

Brook Andrew’s Nirin of 2020 stands out as a genuine groundbreaker, not because of the outstanding quality of the work, but because of its variety and an overdue focus on Indigenous artists. Nowadays, that breakthrough has become a new orthodoxy, but this should not detract from the genuine vitality of a show that found its historical moment.

If I had to nominate the absolute worst of the Biennales, it would have to be Juliana Engberg’s contribution of 2014, You Imagine What You Desire. From the first media event, the Director showed she was not a team player. It was no longer “the Biennale” it was “my Biennale”. The rationale was incomprehensible, the selection of artists disappointing. The final whammy came when Engberg sided with a group of politically sanctimonious artists who threatened to pull out of the show unless the Biennale sever its ties with its founding sponsor, Transfield.

The issue centred around Transfield’s management of Nauru and Manus Island detention centres and Australia’s inhumane policies towards refugees. Although Luca Belgiorno-Nettis had very little involvement with that part of the Transfield operation, he stood down as Chairman of the Board, taking with him the exhibition’s most reliable source of long-term sponsorship.

Engberg’s egocentric actions resulted in a funding crisis that made life incredibly difficult for those directors who followed, such as Stephanie Rosenthal and Mami Kataoka. The entire episode now reads like a premonition of the recent fracas over Writers Week in Adelaide, in which a herd-like political reaction torpedoed a major cultural event.

Unsurprisingly, the proposed artist boycott dominates Turner’s discussion of the 2014 show, although there is much more that could have been said. He informs us that Engberg declined to be interviewed for the book.

She should have made the effort. One of the problems with this exercise, is that Turner seems ready to believe anything former Artistic Directors told him when they complained how their heroic efforts were met with spite and scorn from the critics. He is even willing to join in on the act, making catty comments that insinuate the critics were misguided and destructive in their comments when they suggested that a director’s golden vision might have led to a dud exhibition.

It’s understandable that an author of a specially commissioned corporate history of the Biennale should feel an obligation to put a positive spin on the story, but that need not require such a defensive approach. Turner may be an experienced arts journalist and feature writer, but there are many occasions in the book when he betrays a lack of knowledge in relation to the visual arts. The most visible signs are the clangers left in the text: calling the artist, Arman, “Armand Arman”; telling us that Sheila Hicks was educated at the Bauhaus; referring to the “NGV Indigenous Art Triennial”, when the show is held at the NGA, etc. These are simple errors. The more complex issues are matters of opinion in which Turner has chosen to believe one party over another.

Having written many thousands of words on the Biennales, including two large pieces per show over a 20-year period, I was disappointed to find a line or two extracted from these articles in order to prove what a misguided, negative, disaffected fellow I was – for no apparent reason aside from congenital misanthropy and conservatism. I’m not overly sensitive about bitchy comments, or frightened of disagreements, but when you’ve written about 3,000 words of painstaking commentary only to be summed up in one sentence taken out of context, it feels as if there is an agenda at play.

To maintain the fiction that I’ve been a relentless scourge of the Biennale, most of my positive responses have been ignored, or framed with lines such as: “even John McDonald didn’t hate the show.” One gets a little tired of being treated like a cartoon villain.

To take a single example, what should I make of a quotation from one Ossian Ward, about “Sydney’s creeping conservative attitude to contemporary art, fostered by the traditionally dominant grumpy art critics such as John McDonald and, before him, Robert Hughes”?

While it’s tempting to note that Ossian was the name of the imaginary Gaelic poet in James MacPherson’s literary hoax of the 1760s, the real issue here is the childish name-calling. It’s a mystery to me as to why Turner would consider this a worthy inclusion in his book. To say someone is “conservative” or “grumpy” is no more than a dumb slur, intended to disqualify the critic with cool readers who see themselves as radical and enlightened. Frankly, I’m flattered to be bracketed with Robert Hughes, even by way of a sneer. If trying to make dispassionate sense of a show that promises much but delivers little is “conservative”, I’ll take it any time.

What we see with our friend, Ossian, and indeed, with Brook Turner, is a textbook example of what is required of an arts writer in a post-critical world. The ruling idea is that one must be blindly supportive of an exhibition, accepting the claims of the curator or artists as gospel truth. If Lynne Cook or Jonathan Watkins or Isabel Carlos believe their Biennales were masterpieces, the critics have no right to disagree. It’s not all that different from Donald Trump telling us the US consumer has never had it so good. The official line is not to be questioned, even if it seems palpably wrong.

Perhaps the most important point to be made vis-à-vis criticism is that it must have an argument to back up a point of view. Flippant one-liners, puffed-up opinions, statements of tribal belonging, do not qualify. Because it requires a little space and time to construct an argument it’s often believed that criticism is too demanding for contemporary attention spans.

In Turner’s case, he is trying to cover an enormous amount of territory in a compact set of chapters. The book is more than 400 pages, with only a handful of images, so it’s clear that a truly comprehensive history of the Biennale would require several volumes. He has set out to make his prose lively and accessible, but the result is an extended piece of feature writing that relies heavily on interview material and ‘colour’. Although the author has done a lot of homework, his lack of familiarity with art and art history is palpable. This means that his account lacks authority, falling back on a collage of quotations that rarely add up to a convincing account of an exhibition.

Writing criticism means writing from a knowledge-based perspective, and this is another reason why critical commentary has become so unpopular in the mainstream. Today we believe data can be acquired instantly from Google. There’s little recognition that knowledge might be more than facts and figures, or whatever skewed nonsense AI can cobble together from the trash it finds online.

If one doesn’t have that knowledge it’s tempting to pretend it’s not worth having. Rather than weigh up conflicting accounts of the various Biennales, it’s easier to accept the official line and dismiss any criticisms as the disgruntled ravings of “conservatives”. This may be one way of writing a compact book on a vast subject, but it’s unscholarly and dishonest. It clings to the contemporary idea that truth is merely provisional, that it’s fine to carve out your own version if it suits your purposes.

A more determined historian would adopt a dialectical approach, weighing contrary viewpoints and arguments to arrive at a plausible conclusion. It’s obviously much simpler to throw in a handful of quotations like raisins into a cake mix, depending on whether you want to make a positive or negative impression.

The other aspect of Turner’s book that becomes tiresome is his readiness to see the past through the lens of present-day ideology. This means we are constantly being treated to tut-tut mentions of a lack of women, or lack of Indigenous content, when both those deficiencies have been remedied in the steady evolution of the exhibitions. It should be obvious that the Biennale, like all other art events, has been subject to different influences and forces over time. To look disapprovingly on the past, armed with the moral rectitude of the present, is a dismal but widespread tactic. It’s a way for the writer to distinguish himself as the right kind of person, unlike those grumpy “conservatives”.

It might have been worthwhile to interview some of the grumpy types, to hear their first-hand accounts. Likewise, Turner might have spoken with the late Michael Gleeson-White, who was brought in to sort out the Biennale board in the early 2000s when they were going through an acute financial crisis. Michael had brilliant stories about the way money was being spent and some of the simple things required to turn matters around. He doesn’t even score a mention in this book, and he is certainly not the only one who has missed out.

If there are a few strands that keep repeating in Turner’s lively patchwork narrative, it’s the constant struggle for the Biennale to secure funding, and deal with accusations of secrecy or lack of transparency. Sometimes these themes are linked, as when the Biennale board fought to stave off attempts to put the show under the banner of the AGNSW or the MCA, or to allow outside groups to have their say in who should be the artistic director, or which artists should be included.

This year is no different. Jewish sponsors have been alienated by a selection committee’s choice of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, an outspoken supporter of the Palestinian cause, as Artistic Director for 2026. To make up the shortfall in funding, Al Qasimi has been able to draw on sources associated with her wealthy family in Sharjah, but this begs the question as to what money will be available in 2028.

The problem has been exacerbated by overtly antisemitic social media posts from a couple of Biennale artists, which have drawn protests from Morry Schwartz, former board member and publisher of Turbulence & Transcendence. Now, with yet another ugly conflict under way in the Middle East, there is every possibility that this year’s exhibition will be subsumed by the political controversy that has become such a corrosive feature of the contemporary art scene, both in Australia and abroad.

As Turner tells us, in chapter after chapter, the Biennale of Sydney is no stranger to controversy. In the early days, it was generally believed, even by founding sponsor, Franco Belgiorno-Nettis, that controversy was a useful addition to any exhibition. Today, we are in the strange, invidious position that any criticism of organisations, curators or artworks is viewed as purely destructive, while aggressive political statements are considered acceptable as “free speech”. The result is the earnest fairy floss we find in the mainstream media, at once so vapid, and so concerned with ticking all the right boxes.

It would be beneficial for the cultural health of this country if we could get back to a place in which we can talk freely about the pros and cons of an exhibition or a particular work without worrying about whether the artist or curator belongs to some protected species. It would be even better if we could see politics as only one potential preoccupation for artists, rather than the major reason for their inclusion in a show. The controversies generated by criticism work to the overall benefit of the art scene. The controversies that arise from not conforming to a dominant ideology have a purely toxic effect on the creative spirit. As funding sources dry up and audiences grow more disaffected, it’s time we made some fundamental choices.

Art and film columns are both back this week, the latter looking at Searchers, a problematic exhibition at the National Art School Gallery, on Graffiti and Contemporary Art. It proves to be one of those unhappy marriages that makes one feel it might be best to leave them alone so they can sort it out in private. The film being reviewed is The Testament of Ann Lee, Mona Fastvold’s ambitious bio pic about the Christian visionary who led the Shakers from Manchester to the New World. It felt like a good move until the sect’s unusual practices stirred up the same hostilities that had forced them onto the high seas. It seems religious non-conformity will always get you into trouble. Much better to join the cutting-edge contemporary art crowd, where rebellion need not interfere with lifestyle.

Turbulence & Transcendence: Biennale of Sydney, The First 50 Years

By Brook Turner

Black Inc. Melbourne, 2025, 432 pp. $299

For Ann Lee, the visionary leader of the Shakers, fornication was the express lane to hell. So fiercely were these beliefs enforced, her congregation had to adopt children rather than create their own. For their Church to prosper, the Shakers needed keep making converts among the ranks of sinners. Small wonder the sect has struggled to maintain its numbers. In the mid-19^th century, there were more than 4,000 believers spread across 18 communities, today there are only two professed Shakers, residing in a village in Maine.

This may not sound like a promising subject, but Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, who gave us The Brutalist (2024), have created a movie unlike anything you will have ever seen before. This time it’s Fastvold in the director’s chair, but as with the previous effort it’s a husband-and-wife collaboration. The Testament of Ann Lee is a bio pic of a remarkable woman, an historical epic, a study of faith and fanaticism, and – believe it or not – a musical.

The story is rigidly structured, proceeding by chapters that show how the Shakers find their origins in Manchester in the mid-1700s, cross the ocean to America, and make a new home in the wilderness of up-state New York. Throughout this journey, both physical and spiritual, the true believers grow progressively more devoted to their religious mission while seeking to avoid persecutions stirred up by their manner of worship.

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Art, like fashion, is cyclical. Hang onto those bell bottom trousers and wide-lapel jackets, and they’ll eventually be cool again. Dust off those graffiti paintings from the late 1970s, and they’ll align nicely with today’s cutting-edge creations – because the “movement” doesn’t seem to have moved at all for the past 50 years. That was the chief impression I took away from Searchers: Graffiti + Contemporary Art, at the National Art School Gallery.

There are 39 contributors to this show, put together by Fiona Lowry and Katrina Cashman, nine of them local graffiti artists commissioned to paint new pieces directly onto the walls of the gallery. These artists - BAGL, BREAK, LAZY, MACH, POWER, RUM, SNAIL, SPICE and TAVEN – may be Australia’s star performers, but their work looks exactly like all the other labels one sees scrawled and smeared on city walls – although I’m sure the connoisseurs view it differently.

For a large proportion of the public, graffiti art is simply vandalism and visual pollution. Few people getting on a bus or train covered in spray-painted squiggles will pause to admire the artists’ efforts. Few will look at a huge ‘tag’ plastered on the wall of a building and feel that urban space is improved by this egocentric decoration. Indeed, many would probably favour the Japanese approach to graffiti, whereby taggers are given hefty fines and prison sentences.

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Last week I received what I thought was an irresistible invitation: to attend a first screening of the National Theatre Live presentation of Hamlet at the Hayden Orpheum. As Shakespeare’s tragedy is arguably the most famous play ever written, I thought it would be a packed house. This seemed to be the case when we met with a foyer full of people, but upon entering the cinema found a mere handful of elderly viewers. Apparently, everyone else was going to the Elvis movie, or Wuthering Heights.

One might think that with Chloë Zhao’s Hamnet sending moviegoers a reminder of Shakespeare’s brilliance, there would be plenty of people eager to reacquaint themselves with a recognised masterpiece. Instead, there were barely a dozen attendees. This was odd for Sydney – a city in which audiences will queue up for a cultural event that means zero to them, just to say they saw it first.

Such a poor turn-out begged the question: “Have people lost interest in Shakespeare, or was there something about this production that kept them away?”

I wouldn’t discount the first proposition. Anybody who could say they enjoyed Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, would be unlikely to sit through a single act of Hamlet. We appear to be so far gone in our taste for trash that even the greatest works of literature need to be turned into Marvel comics to make them acceptable for a mass audience. This may not be true, but it remains the working assumption that drives the big studios and those directors who believe everything needs to be mulched into pop cultural form for easy consumption.

As for the second idea, it requires a steely nerve to look at the way Robert Hastie’s NT production differs from previous Hamlets. First and foremost is the casting of Hiran Abeysekera - almost certainly the first Sri Lankan actor to play Hamlet on the London stage, or probably anywhere outside of Sri Lanka. The role of Ophelia was played by Francesca Mills, who has dwarfism, although I believe we now talk about “little people” - a euphemism that immediately conjures up thoughts of leprechauns.

Horatio was given a gender reassignment, being played by Anglo-Chinese actress, Tessa Wong, while the role of Queen Gertrude fell to Indian actress, Ayesha Dharker. Everyone else was more-or-less what might be expected in any standard production, so long as we accept a suitably multicultural cast of extras.

Having scanned a swathe of reviews of this production it was noteworthy that most critics never felt it necessary to mention the heterogeneous nature of the cast – although it’s (unavoidably) the first thing that strikes any viewer. Most people will do a little homework before shelling out to attend an expensive NT production, or even a cinema broadcast, so one can only speculate whether this exercise in diversity casting acted as a discouragement.

I know no-one will say they didn’t want to see Hamlet played by these actors, but then most people will cheerfully lie rather than admit a lack of interest in something considered politically virtuous. In surveys at art museums, visitors always say they’re eager to see more Indigenous shows, but when those shows are staged, the supposed enthusiasts don’t turn up.

The contemporary cultural sphere is saturated with hypocrisy and moral blackmail, largely due to our efforts to ‘decolonise’ art galleries, movies, theatre and TV. It’s no coincidence that this trend coincides with the abandonment of criticism in the mainstream media. In place of a rigorous assessment of some cultural event, written by an experienced, knowledgeable critic, we get puff pieces and softball interviews that wouldn’t risk a harsh word – partly because the writer doesn’t have a clue about the topic. Evidence may be found in any issue of the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age. A critic as forthright and outspoken as Robert Hughes seems no less of an historical figure than Dr. Johnson - one of his heroes.

There’s an unspoken assumption that it would be wrong to criticise a production that has been radically inclusive in its casting, as if we are obliged to admire the latest Hamlet because of the cast’s ethnicity rather than their performances. To suggest there is anything unusual or inappropriate in the choice of actors is simply unthinkable – running the risk of being called a bigot and a racist. But why do we go to the theatre? To enjoy a play, or to feel we are being ‘supportive’ of someone’s idea of social justice?

Great works of literature, like Hamlet or Wuthering Heights, can sustain any number of interpretations, but one would hope that each variation illuminates parts of the work we haven’t considered, or shows its ongoing relevance to our times. The tactic of using a diverse cast of actors is the simplest and most reliable way of winning ‘critical’ approval, if gushing praise may be considered to be criticism. We are expected to be so delighted that Hamlet is Sri Lankan or Ophelia a “little person” that the quality of the portrayal or the niceties of the production are barely discussed. The cast and the director are cocooned from negative judgments, but also insulated against positive comparisons with other productions.

With this Hamlet, only a handful of reviewers timidly suggested that Abeysekera raced through the soliloquies too quickly, chewing up those sentences that great actors of the past have savoured. He tossed off famous lines for comic affect, draining scenes of any sense of drama or tragedy. It seems he had decided to play Hamlet in a Chaplinesque manner, or as some kind of slacker – sitting in a plastic chair, wearing a white beanie, gazing at poor Yorick’s skull.

His performance was energetic but scrappy, not at all emotionally involving. Tessa Wong’s Horatio felt even more misguided. Not only did Wong pronounce her lines in a muffled voice, she came across as a caring & sharing big sister, looking out for Hamlet and others.

Francesca Mills showed herself to be one of the play’s most formidable actors, with great diction and a wholehearted delivery. Yet she was obliged to caper about like a manic toddler, running all over the stage wearing a set of angel wings that made her look as if she had just come from a children’s costume party. This bit of business seemed designed to emphasise her small stature, daring us not to notice. The effect was comical in an awkward way. Were we supposed to laugh with or at the actress?

I’m trying to respond only to the quality of the acting, but it’s impossible to dissociate the performance from the performer. It would require an ideological purism that few people possess to see nothing unusual in the choice of actors to play these famous roles. It’s as if we were expected to ignore a whole herd of elephants in the room.

As the production adhered closely to the text, one must consider Hastie’s Hamlet to be a textbook example of ‘colour-blind casting’. The theory behind this practice is that it allows talented actors the opportunity to play roles from which they would be excluded by dint of ethnicity. In the past, this didn’t prevent Hollywood actors from putting on ludicrous make-up to play Black people, Indians or Chinese. The most famous piece of Hollywood miscasting must be John Wayne as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror (1956), although Katharine Hepburn as a Chinese woman in Dragon Seed (1944) was also a stretch of the imagination.

When we see these films today the racial anomalies are glaring and ridiculous, but when a black actor is cast in an historical role, as when Jodie Turner-Smith played Anne Boleyn in a 2021 TV drama, we’re expected to take it seriously. It seems that casting a white action hero as Genghis Khan is an outrageous western co-option of history, but to have a black woman play one of Henry VIII’s wives, is to knowingly overturn the racial taboos of an oppressive western culture. If younger viewers who never read a book come away with the impression that Anne Boleyn was black, that’s just too bad.

It’s even more dubious to have multicultural casts in history-based dramas than in Shakespeare’s plays. A play, after all, is a fiction that allows a degree of interpretative freedom. With history, we are tampering with the very fabric of the past, giving a misleading impression that the Tudor or Elizabethan courts were full of Blacks and Asians. It makes a mockery of the narrow racial attitudes that existed in those days.

It’s been frequently pointed out that “colour-blind casting” is not blind at all. It is a deliberate attempt to subvert orthodox interpretations, to “ruin the sacred truths” of the western canon. It could be more accurately called “colour-conscious casting”, but this term has been appropriated by an even more radical fringe who believe it is the duty of directors and producers to actively emphasise topics such as race and ethnicity, to bring out the ‘hidden’ historical biases of the text. This seems like a licence to mess around with any play or story for ideological purposes, although it may be creatively more productive to upset the applecart altogether, rather than merely swap black faces for white ones. Perhaps it’s better to rework Hamlet as Grand Theft Auto or a North Carolina BBQ, (both real productions) rather than shoehorn a multicultural cast into ye olde Denmark.

Maybe, maybe not. One of my worst ever experiences in the theatre was a Kabuki version of MacBeth, which murdered everything that was great about the play. In some cases, east really is east and west is west.

I also have vivid memories of watching a low-budget Vietnamese film about the Vietnam war, in which the American generals were played by Vietnamese actors wearing false moustaches to make them look like bad hombres from spaghetti westerns. It was unintentionally hilarious, albeit not too far from the mark.

If I had to make a bold call, I’d argue that there must be some bedrock of believability if we are to approach a play in a way that allows us to focus on text, production and performance, rather than be distracted by provocative casting choices. This means historical dramas would probably be much better off sticking to the ethnic mix that applied at the time. Hollywood actors do not tend to feature as Bollywood heroes or Kabuki performers. Nobody has suggested it would be a great idea to get white actors to play the lead roles in The Color Purple. In Cairo a couple of weeks ago, I found myself talking to a local professor who told me the Egyptians were so incensed by the “historical revisionism” of a Netflix series with a black Cleopatra that they’ve made their own documentary to correct the record. One wonders what they’ll make of a forthcoming film with Israeli, Gal Gadot, in the lead role!

Plays, novels and other cultural artefacts are expressions of their time, and to play fast and loose with them is to sow discord in our already fragile understanding of history. There are ample opportunities for talented actors of all ethnicities to feature in plays and movies in which historical accuracy is not an issue. Why impose a false ideological grid upon the past, pleasing some viewers but – if my screening of Hamlet is any indication - alienating a much larger number?

When it comes to working out how criticism should address plays, novels and exhibitions that make ethnicity a central part of their program, there is no clear path. I found confirmation of this in an essay by curator, Clothilde Bullen, in the first issue of Blue Art Journal, which has grown from the ashes of the old Art Monthly Australasia. According to the editors of this new venture:

For too long, First Nations art has been under-reported, misrepresented or framed by non-Indigenous perspectives. This has constrained dialogue and left broader audiences without the depth of understanding our cultures demand. Blue Art Journal exists to correct this. We centre Indigenous authority, elevate Indigenous knowledge systems, and prioritise cultural safety, complexity and breadth.

Blue Art Journal creates space for First Nations writers, artists and critics to lead, critique, challenge, experiment and to tell stories on their own terms. Our approach embraces multimodal ways of reading, writing, listening and speaking, recognising that Indigenous knowledges cannot be confined to conventional forms. We champion both emerging voices and senior knowledge-holders to ensure that a broad spectrum of Indigenous thinking shapes the record of our time.

As a rhetorical exercise this is all very stirring and heroic, but it’s not clear how these aims are to be achieved. Bullen’s piece, ‘Seeing Ourselves: The Power of Blak arts writing’ attempts to address these issues, but it’s impossible to draw any conclusions from what she has written. She tells us that white critics have struggled to address Indigenous art but offers only the banal example that it’s wrong to ask whether a work is “resolved” or not. Having written millions of words on Indigenous and non-Indigenous art, I can note that I’ve never worried about whether a work is ‘resolved’. For the most part this is no more than a piece of formalist jargon.

Bullen confesses that it’s just as hard for Indigenous writers to find an authentic Blak critical voice. It all appears to be the fault of colonialism, or perhaps the English language:

Being forced to learn and speak English – the language of the coloniser – was a brutal tool of assimilation. It changed the very brain chemistry of First Nations people, rendering our ability to represent our world view through the mechanism of oral narrative compromised, and in some cases, demolishing it entirely.

For those who are attempting a “post-colonial critique” there are some rough guidelines:

Post-colonial critique looks ‘for’, rather than co-responds ‘with’. This is hugely important, in that there is very rarely a declaration by a non-Indigenous person about their cultural background when they are critiquing Blak art forms, and what they bring to bear knowingly and unknowingly in their approach to Blak work.

If I understand this correctly, a non-Indigenous person who is writing about Indigenous art should first declare their cultural background, so we know where they are coming from. But what are they declaring? Their white privilege? Their unconscious biases? Can a writer’s race or background render their analysis of an artwork invalid or illegitimate? (Would it help if I prefaced every article by saying my ancestors came from Scotland?) Should only Indigenous people be allowed to write about Indigenous art? Are non-Indigenous people somehow incapable of learning about the stories and meanings in this work?

This seems to be where Bulleen’s argument is tending, although she never makes it explicit. She complains about how “deeply challenging” it is having to educate non-Indigenous people, let alone doing so in the language of the coloniser. She tells us:

…it feels almost unholy, as a Blak critic, to wield colonial language to dissect and decontextualise practice in an arts sector where everyone is known to you, and personal relationships abound. We all share the challenge of existing as Blak bodies in these spaces, and we have all had to undertake much transactional labour for others to be heard.

One way of interpreting this paragraph is that Blak critics are different to non-Indigenous ones because they have personal relationships with artists. This is an odd proposition because critics of all stripes and all eras have enjoyed the closest relationships with artists. In its worst incarnation we call this nepotism or favouritism, but it seems as if Bulleen is suggesting that for Blak writers this is business-as-usual. The word “transactional” has unfortunate connotations, even if used without devious intent.

When she attempts to lay down a few principles for a Blak art critique, this is what emerges:

…custodially, was that expression of storytelling accurate? Would your ancestors see this story and recognise what you were trying to say? Did your work contribute to broader aspects of recognition and representation, and who else’s voice from your community was elevated? Did the work contribute to the narrative around structural change and sovereignty?

These ‘questions’ are essentially political and moral impositions. The storytelling may be accurate, but the work of art could still be an aesthetic failure. An artist may consider their ancestors, but they cannot forget they are addressing a diverse contemporary audience. The issue of contributing to broader aspects of recognition or elevating other voices sounds like a burden on any artist who seeks a more individualistic path. Neither does it guarantee a great work of art. Ditto for structural change and sovereignty.

If criticism is to have any credibility, it cannot be proscriptive. The artist’s expression must come first. Any Indigenous artist who took Bulleen’s ‘questions’ as gospel would be following a set of rules imposed by a cultural gatekeeper. This is not criticism at all - it’s merely providing a seal of approval to those who do the right thing. It puts enormous power in the hands of the Blak critic or curator and turns the artist into a drone.

When it’s up to ‘critics’ to decide whether an artist ticks all the correct boxes, it diminishes the power of the art. The best criticism welcomes an artwork as a visual expression of a complex personality, with its own spiritual and intellectual depths. It’s unreasonable to judge a work through its adherence to a political platform, or to expect that every Indigenous artist should feel obliged to speak for an entire race or community.

It’s remarkable how often some radical, liberating gesture turns into an exercise in laying down the law, constricting expression and individual freedom. Bulleen’s ideas about Blak criticism bear little resemblance to criticism per se, which should be sceptical and open-minded, not aligned with a pre-determined set of cultural guidelines.

It would be more accurate to say that the writer likes the idea of a special ‘Blak’ form of criticism but is unable to figure out what it might entail. She blames these difficulties on the use of English, ‘the language of the coloniser’, but without English or some other major language the concept of criticism makes no sense whatsoever. English, for better or worse, is the vehicle for her own ideas, and those of her readers.

It’s hard not to feel that ‘Blak criticism’ is a fantasy, a mere shell of an idea; another term with which to beat the drum on behalf of a political ideology. Like ‘colour conscious casting’, it’s one of those things we are expected to feel morally obliged to approve, even if we struggle to understand how it enhances our engagement with a play or a work of art. By constantly emphasising the importance of “cultural background”, writers and directors are not healing the racial divisions of the past - they are opening them up, discarding the idea that critical judgements should be made on the basis of merit or quality.

I know that such terms are greeted with derision nowadays. Whose merit? Whose quality? Why should we accept the judgements of white colonialist society, etc, etc.? The answer is that such concepts, no matter how abstract or subjective, are far more conducive to dialogue, debate and analysis than those tied to a sense of ethnic belonging, or any other group-defined frame of reference – left-wing, right-wing; based on race, class or sexual preferences. Critics should strive to leave their biases at the door of the gallery or the theatre, not wear them like a set of blinkers. We can never rid ourselves of the cultural baggage than comes with education and upbringing, but neither should we accept that these influences determine our every judgement.

I’m still working on a number of art-related pieces, but none can be published immediately on this site, so please be patient. The art column will return soon. In the meantime, there’s a review of the Wuthering Heights movie that makes no concessions to fans of pop culture. If I say I’m devoted to Emily Brontë and to Shakespeare, you’ll understand what a painful week it has been to see them treated in such cavalier fashion.

Searching for redeeming features in Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, I could only feel grateful the film gave me an excuse to read Emily Brontë’s book for the fourth time. Wuthering Heights, devoid of the coy inverted commas is, without doubt, one of the greatest novels in the English language. Written by a 27-year-old virgin who would die at the age of 30, it’s a book in which sex and death inhabit every chapter. Although the author spent all but a small part of her life in a lonely parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, she left us a tale that is just as strange and powerful today as it was on first publication in 1847.

One of the definitions of a classic is that one may return to it again and again, always finding something new. Wuthering Heights is that kind of book. At the other end of the scale, Fennell’s sexed-up, celebrity vehicle for Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is the definition of trash.

At the risk of sounding too portentous, I’d go even further. This film is not simply a travesty it’s an act of desecration. It takes what has always been for me, and I’m sure for countless others, a sacred book and turns it into a soulless extended video clip in which everything that Emily Brontë created is systematically vandalised.

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It’s depressing to return from sojourns in two Muslim countries only to find Australia tearing itself apart with furious protests about the Israeli President’s visit. All things considered, one must ask whether it was a good idea to invite Isaac Herzog while the situation in Gaza remains so raw and volatile. I can’t speak for those members of the Jewish community who have been singing his praises, but Herzog comes across as an awfully dry stick, not the kind of figure who might inspire public sympathy. On the other hand, with the Bondi massacre less than two months in the past, it’s shocking to see the level of frenzy the anti-Herzog protests have attained, partly in response to the Minns government’s new rules prohibiting the usual city marches. Imagine trying to tell the French they couldn’t march through the streets of Paris!

Whatever the rights and wrongs of the new laws, it’s hard to accept claims that the protests are anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic. Zionism – partly through the extreme opinions of some Zionists - has been designated an unspeakable evil, akin to Nazism. This view of Zionism – one promulgated as a deliberate propaganda tactic by Hamas - seems to dominate public opinion nowadays, but there are many Jewish people calling themselves Zionists who cling to a much broader, more basic definition: as someone who believes in the need for a Jewish homeland.

For the vast majority of people, any fine distinctions between Zionists, Israelis and Jews, are non-existent. Although many will swear they are anti-Zionist rather than antisemitic, the anger and hatred on display has disastrous consequences for all Jews, even the most liberal minded ones.

I’d put Morry Schwartz in that category – a publisher who has taken a consistently left-of-centre line on most issues. Schwartz, who resigned from the board of the Biennale of Sydney in 2024, shortly before the appointment of Hoor Al Qasimi as Artistic Director, had previously complained about a posting by the Biennale’s “Artseen ambassador”, Bhenji Ra, that showed a rabbi in a blood-stained robe, treading on the head of a baby doll. The image was conspicuously, undeniably, antisemitic.

The Biennale took a soft line on the complaint, but in January, Bhenji Ra quietly stepped down from this public role. Last week, Schwartz found himself complaining to the Biennale yet again, over a social media post by a participating artist, Feras Shaheen. Under the word “Equality”, in block capitals, Shaheen had written, “Treat your local Zionist like you treat your local Nazi”, and included a picture of Australian Neo-Nazi leader, Thomas Sewell, alongside pictures of Schwartz and billionaire philanthropist, John Gandel.

It would be hard to imagine anything more offensive and provocative than comparing the son of Holocaust survivors to the Nazis, although it appears that the Biennale has simply given Schwartz the brush-off. One week later there has been no public repudiation of this post, which is still viewable on Shaheen’s Instagram feed.

Is this “freedom of speech” in action? Imagine if Schwartz had posted a picture of Hoor Al Qasimi or Randa Abdel-Fattah, alongside an image of a notorious Nazi. There’d be no end to the outrage. The Biennale owes its former board member an apology and should not be seen to be endorsing Shaheen’s inflammatory post. At any other time, they would have suspended the artist pending an inquiry into this incident. Today, the rampant politicisation of the contemporary art scene makes this an unlikely course of action.

It was even more jaw-dropping when, one day after The Australian ran a story about Schwartz’s complaint, this item appeared on J-wire :

The Biennale of Sydney has sought to ease tensions with Jewish community groups by issuing formal anti-discrimination commitments and inviting a senior Jewish representative to an advance preview of its 2026 exhibition…. The festival, running from March 14 to June 14, 2026, this week published a Cultural Safety Commitment Statement declaring “zero tolerance for any form of racism including Islamophobia and antisemitism, transphobia, homophobia, misogyny and all forms of discrimination”. It adds: “We do not tolerate bullying or harassment in any form, whether within our workplaces, our programs, or the broader public discourse connected to our work.”

To back up this noble series of commitments it might be a good start to ask Feras Shaheen to take down his antisemitic post. The Biennale Board may, however, be of the same mind as Randa Abdel-Fattah, who famously told us that “Zionists” have “no claim or right to cultural safety”. Is Schwartz to be henceforth regarded as an evil Zionist by a board of which he was recently a member?

Once again, we see those spurious rhetorical divisions between “racism” and “ideology”. In the minds of many activists, Abdel-Fattah’s cancellation from Adelaide Writers Week was a “racist” act, but to call Morry Schwartz a Nazi is to stand up against a pernicious ideology. I’m not convinced that either Jews or Palestinians constitute a “race”. It’s also worth noting how this version of racism is included with “all forms of discrimination”, along with bullying and harassment, as absolute taboos, although tarring someone as a Nazi seems to be OK. I’m not even sure about “sexual harassment”, if we may believe a 2022 story in The Australian in which it was alleged that a Biennale employee who complained she was being harassed by a colleague, ended up being the one who got sacked.

Regardless of how we might feel about the slaughter in Gaza, which looks suspiciously genocidal, even if many are unwilling to use that word, this is not an excuse for blatant double-dealing and hypocrisy. Multiplying small acts of hatred on the Jewish community in Australia will not compensate for Netanyahu’s actions in Gaza. To assume that all Jews – indeed, all Zionists - are fervent supporters of that onslaught, is no less “racist” than Adelaide’s cancellation of an ideologically committed writer with a long history of extreme statements.

One of the documents I was sent this week was a detailed analysis of the social media postings of the 175 artists participating in the forthcoming Biennale of Sydney. It was presumably compiled by a Jewish person, but that’s only to be expected. It’s the evidence presented that’s most disturbing. “In total,” it says, “70 of 175 participants, or 40 percent of the program, engage directly with anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian narratives at a high or moderate level.”

It continues: “Beyond individual positions, many participants operate within overlapping professional, curatorial, and activist networks that reinforce shared ideological framings. This clustering effect increases the likelihood that similar political interpretations and narratives will be reproduced across multiple works and program streams, amplifying their collective social impact.”

This strikes me as a realistic assessment of the way a major visual arts event, heavily weighted towards one side of political opinion, may serve to reinforce existing prejudices.

It’s also noted there’s not a single instance of an artist with pro-Jewish or pro-Israel sentiments – which should come as no surprise. To take a pro-Jewish position within the Australian contemporary art scene at present – as artists such as Nina Sanadze have found – is to condemn oneself to oblivion. It’s not very different to the experience of Bindi Cole Chocka, who was shunned when she went from being an Indigenous activist to a born-again Christian. Abandon the party line and be shut out of the club. Examples could be multiplied among other artists, writers and musicians. The political mania has spread like a virus, consuming everything in sight, until the most blatant hate speech seems like business-as-usual.

I wouldn’t argue for pro-Jewish artists to be added to the mix for the sake of a dubious ‘balance’. This tit-for-tat mentality only exacerbates the problem. My personal preference would be for the Biennale, and every other arts organisation in this country, to honestly confront its own political biases – starting with the unspoken assumption that contemporary art is only of value if it expresses the right kinds of opinion and allegiance.

This rampant politicisation is one of the reasons why contemporary art audiences are diminishing and sponsorship becoming increasingly difficult to obtain. What company would happily put its name to an exhibition in which the artists are all beating the drum for a militant political position? When it comes to governments there is a constant, hypocritical encouragement for institutions to pursue politically motivated programs, but an unwillingness to provide support when audiences and sponsors fail. The message is: “It’s up to you to make a success of these inherently unpopular policies.” In most cases, it’s an impossible task, yet those galleries and organisations that pursue a more broad-based approach are penalised by savage government funding cuts. It’s a lose-lose situation, testifying to the chaos and confusion that rules within government funding bodies, as they wish to appear virtuous while expecting a return for their dollar.

In his desperation to make amends after any perceived failings vis-à-vis Bondi, Albo seems to have under-estimated the reaction stirred up by Isaac Herzog’s visit. However, it would be impossible to fault his plea to take the temperature down. We badly need to take the temperature down, as it is spiralling out of control, threatening a season of anger and violence.

Until last week, I would have admitted to hardly knowing a word of Arabic, but in Fouad Ajami’s writings, I’ve discovered one very important word: tatbi’a – or “normalisation”. Ajami recounts how the Israel-Palestine Peace Plan agreed by Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1993, was vehemently rejected by the Arab intelligentsia, who saw it as a sell-out. Their preference was to keep fighting until Palestine could secure a greater share of disputed territory, if not all of it (“from the river to the sea”). They held to this romantic, utterly unpolitical view, even though it was clear that Israel’s military superiority would never permit such a scenario.

After four Hamas suicide bombings, and the assassination of Rabin by a right-wing Jewish fanatic, the Israelis voted against Shimon Peres and the Peace Plan, and installed Benjamin Netanyahu. No less a Palestinian luminary than Edward Said – Louise Adler’s supposed mentor – wrote a piece for Time magazine, welcoming Netanyahu’s election because it put an end to the hated Peace Plan.

As a result, the battles have continued to rage, culminating in the October 7 massacre and the full-scale demolition of Gaza. Arafat, who had grown weary of the futile, revolutionary struggle, sought a compromise. His former backers rejected the very concept, but to reject compromise is to turn politics into an endgame, a fight to the death.

In a far less dramatic example, it’s reminiscent of the Greens rejecting Labor’s modest Climate reforms in 2009, and its equally modest housing package in 2023-24. The reason, on both occasions was that these proposals didn’t go far enough. The Greens paid a price at the ballot box, but the Palestinians have paid a catastrophic price as the lives and livelihoods of millions have been destroyed. One doubts that Said would have been so sanguine in welcoming Netanyahu if he could have foreseen the evil the Israeli leader would perpetrate.

The great fear of 1990, for the Arab intellectuals, was tatbi’a – the normalisation of relations with Israel. The ruling idea was that you must not treat your enemy as if he were your equal, or worthy of respect in any way. This leads inevitably to the dehumanisation of your opponent, justifying any act of violence. It could be argued that many Israelis do the same to the Palestinians, but this doesn’t make it acceptable.

We see this fear of normalisation in Randa Abdel-Fattah’s claim that Zionists have no right to cultural safety, and her willingness to expose the personal details of 600 Jewish creatives on social media. She is furious about being cancelled in Adelaide but has evinced no readiness to debate her views with a Zionist. In brief, she wants it all her own way and seems to view any public discussion with her ideological opponents as strictly impossible. She doesn’t appear to want a ‘normal’ political debate, but a public platform to broadcast her own ideas.

We see the same process taking shape at the Biennale of Sydney, with a list of artists wildly lop-sided in favour of one side of the debate, and a Palestinian-Australian artist being allowed to call a former board member a Nazi, with no official pushback. A genuine attempt at ‘normalisation’ would entail a level playing field in which competing viewpoints could be aired, but this is not going to happen.

In the absence of any workable exchange or discussion, we are left with the danger of a major visual arts event feeding the hate-filled narrative that motivates so many of the toxic posts on social media. I’m getting quite a collection of them.

In an essay on the French philosopher, Vladimir Jankélévitch, I recently came across a discussion of “decadence” that speaks volumes to our current condition. Jankélévitch argues that decadence produces “two families of monsters: narcissistic monsters of introspection and monsters of excessiveness.” Both these “families” seek to browbeat others into submission in the name of their own moral tenets. The first corresponds to those virtue-signalling puritans who aspire to reshape the world – and everyday language - to conform to their personal views about race, gender, colonialism or religion. The artworld is overrun with these wowsers.

The second, “excessive” category of monster corresponds to the Trumpian practice of saying and doing the most outrageous, offensive things; daring others to object; frequently threatening those who take a different viewpoint.

Jankélévitch sees both types as a function of our need to preserve life from boredom and stagnation… “for want of real problems, the spirit takes refuge in charades, riddles, rebuses.” In this analysis it’s no surprise such mentalities arise in relatively prosperous, peaceful societies such as Australia. The steady, conservative, middle-of-the-road ethos that characterises most of the Australian population serves as a call to action for those who see only an old-style colonialist, racist mentality at work; or those who wish to mobilise the forces of ‘common sense’ to combat the rising tide of political activism that is upsetting the age-old norms of daily life.

Change is inevitable in all societies, but it’s the speed of change that causes problems. When an active minority seeks to impose new codes and rules on a complacent majority, resistance must be expected. Effective social change takes place gradually, by a process of slow and steady persuasion. It’s not realistic to imagine that everyone in Sydney will automatically start referring to the city as “Gadigal”. It’s not at all likely that people who were horrified by the Bondi shootings, will turn around within a month and become dedicated enemies of “Zionism” – a term that many find unfamiliar.

The response of the newly anxious masses is to turn to nationalistic entities such as One Nation, which defend a simplistic, mythical version of Australian life. The surge of popularity for Pauline Hanson’s ragbag party gives a measure of how far we are from the ideal of “social cohesion” that has become Albo’s new mantra. It’s the Liberals, however, who are the biggest losers, with a party in disarray, the leadership a poisoned chalice, and no clear policy platform. One Nation is grabbing the right-wing vote, while Labor controls the centre left. For the Liberals it’s looking like a choice of whether they stay put in the burning building or jump from the 32nd floor.

The Liberal downfall is a tragedy for Australian political life, because One Nation is hardly qualified to be an effective Opposition, and Labor – free to do as it pleases – has a tendency to become more rigid, secretive and autocratic. Albo doesn’t fear the Liberal Party, he is mostly concerned with the forces of anarchy - the clash of ideologies disrupting his tidy ideas about Australian society. No wonder he’s busy turning “social cohesion” into the political cliché of our times.

My only answer to the malaise into which we’ve fallen, is for people to relinquish the joys of groupthink, and stick to a few basic humanist principles. First of all, accept that Jews, Palestinians, and everyone else, have a lot more in common than those things that keep them apart. Secondly, listen for the authentic voice of intolerance, and recognise that it this also the voice of incipient totalitarianism. Thirdly, stop treating “freedom” or “freedom of speech” as the exclusive possession of one group rather than another. Freedom is an empty concept if divorced from responsibility, and everyone’s chief responsibility is not to use their own freedoms to impinge on those of the Other. This springs from the belief that you possess the Truth and others are in error, which is merely a form of fundamentalism, and by implication, extremism. There’s nothing praiseworthy, honourable, or decent in being an extremist.

Artists, above and beyond the rest of society, have a reputation as free thinkers, devoted to the realm of imagination and creativity. Instead, the current version of radical chic finds too many people lapsing into mindless conformism or opportunism. What a betrayal of the artist’s vocation to see the way so many have devoted themselves unquestioningly to a Manichean view of politics in which right and wrong, good and bad, are never to be questioned. True freedom should not consist of the right to join a party, but a fearless disposition to question everything.

I’m working on an art piece I can’t publish right away, so the only new content this week, is a review of Hamnet, Chloë Zhao’s film about Shakespeare, in which the Bard spends much of his time in London becoming successful and famous while his wife, Agnes, deals with family matters in Stratford. I can see lots of good things in this movie, and I bow to the power of the ending, but the hermetic nature of Zhao’s storytelling often leaves the viewer in the dark. As we know very little detail about Shakespeare’s marriage, the story is highly speculative, another good occasion to cultivate one’s scepticism.

Chloé Zhao must be a remarkable person to achieve what she’s achieved. Ten years ago, it would have been inconceivable for a Chinese woman to take out Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director, for a film in which hardly anything happens. That film was Nomadland (2020), in which Frances McDormand played a woman who had given up a permanent home and made her life in a camper van. It was a vision of freedom snatched from the staggering poverty and inequality that has consumed America’s working classes.

Nomadland came along at the right time to appeal to a politicised Academy still reeling from the depredations of the first Trump Presidency. It had a singularity of purpose that made the other nominations seem frivolous.

Nomadland was Zhao’s third film, her two previous efforts having barely left a trace at the box office. She followed up with The Eternals (2021), a big budget Marvel Comics Universe production that I haven’t seen, and can barely imagine. By the usual MCU standards it failed with the fans, earning a mere US$402 million.

Hamnet, Zhao’s fifth feature, finds her back in the limelight. It was judged Best Motion Picture – Drama, at this year’s Golden Globes, and is in the running for another Oscar or two. Set in the Elizabethan era, it’s a tale of William Shakespeare and his family, told with an unusual degree of intimacy. True to form, it’s also a slow-moving exercise that builds to a shuddering intensity, although the journey takes almost two hours.

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There are cities around the world that are almost interchangeable in their blandness. Cairo is not one of them. One could never say Cairo lacks character - if anything it has too much character. As an outsider, in town for only a few days to see the Grand Egyptian Museum, I felt it was the closest thing I’d ever experienced to chaos-as-a-way-of-life. It’s exhilarating and exhausting.

I wasn’t surprised by the city’s infamous traffic and soon got the hang of crossing a road in small stages, but the way the Cairenes drive is symbolic of a philosophy of life. Every driver seems to be competing for the smallest space, pushing through tiny gaps, playing chicken with the cars to their left and right, blowing the horn constantly, brushing pedestrians who are too slow to scramble across several poorly defined lanes. You’d think drivers would be in a constant state of hypertension, but one of my Uber drivers was calmly texting on his phone while he executed these daredevil manœuvres.

In Cairo I did something I never do in Sydney, taking the higher bracket of Uber, the so-called ‘Uber Comfort’. Invariably the car would be beaten up, dirty, and devoid of seatbelts or at least of seatbelts that fasten. I didn’t dare sample the standard UberX ride. Nevertheless, one can only express a First World relief that Uber has taken away the haggling and arguing which previously attended every taxi ride in places such as Cairo, Jakarta or New Delhi. Now one gets charged such a ridiculously small amount that tipping is a moral obligation. As most of the homegrown taxi companies have made crude attempts to rip me off over the past year or so, I’m thinking that Sydney should be added to the list of Uber-only cities.

In Cairo, driving, like life in general, is a matter of muddling through. With at least 23 million citizens the city has one of the highest population densities in the world. Up to one million have made their homes in historic cemeteries! In her book, Cairo: City of Sand, Maria Golia notes that eighty percent of Cairo rests on precious arable land, built up over thousands of years by silt deposits from the Nile. The land that could feed the hungry hordes is used to house them.

In this human beehive it seems impossible that so many people manage to find ways to earn an income, support their families and basically survive. Almost two-thirds of the dwellings in Cairo are reputed to be outside of any building code. They collapse with regularity, reverting to the yellow-grey sand that colours everything. Look left, look right, there are thousands of shabby, decrepit-looking apartment blocks teetering on the brink of oblivion. Roads have been chainsawed through slums, leaving buildings that look as if they have been sliced in half. This squalid vista is broken by magnificent mosques and handsome public buildings of a bygone era, still clinging to shreds of their former dignity.

The Egyptians’ propensity for treating life philosophically may also explain their tolerance for supreme leaders. Although none of have enjoyed the adulation showered on Gamal Abdel Nasser (in office: 1954-70), the Egyptians have largely accepted a succession of authoritarian governments as a way of controlling a teeming, diverse population. The only exception to the pattern may have been the election of Islamist, Mohamed Morsi, whose reign of less than a year was ended by a coup d’état in July 2013. Notwithstanding revolutionary flare-ups such as the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square of 2011, there has not been much evidence of democracy in action. On the way from the airport to the city, I counted no fewer than 62 pictures of current President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, usually looking wise and benevolent. Taking a different route on the way back, I only managed 38. Can you imagine encountering 38 pictures of Albo’s mug as you drive to the airport in Sydney or Melbourne?

To walk down the street in Cairo is to step over piles of sand or rubbish; to negotiate broken pavements and holes that could break an ankle; to breathe in air filled with off-the-charts levels of pollution. The noise never lets up. The surprise is to descend to the subway and find a clean, modern train network. It’s almost an oasis after the life of the streets.

As for the Grand Egyptian Museum, which I’ll be writing about soon, it’s a stupendous feat. In terms of the quality of exhibits and the careful planning that has gone into the building, it’s already one of the great museums of the world, and easily the greatest museum project of the 21^st century. At a reputed cost of a billion US dollars, it’s almost as expensive as the Powerhouse Museum ‘revitalisation’ in Sydney. One of the chief differences is that in a city bisected by the Nile, the GEM wasn’t built on a flood plain. Neither did it choose to launch with a $13 million exhibition on shopping malls. A more incisive point of comparison is that the GEM is a supreme tourist drawcard that will pay for itself in no time at all, while the tripartite Powerhouse is destined to be a relentless drain on the public purse until some future government pulls the plug.

It’s sobering to think that the Great Pyramid of Khufu has been standing for almost 5,000 years, but last week the Minns government began demolishing the Wran building at Powerhouse Ultimo, which has only been in place since 1988, when it won awards for architect, Lionel Glendenning.

Australian politicians’ love of cultural vandalism knows no bounds. Had Uluru been situated on Sydney Harbour it would have been turned into rubble by now. It’s a wonder the Harbour Bridge hasn’t been replaced with something a bit more up-to-date.

In the kind of article we’ve come to expect from the Sydney Morning Herald, Linda Morris recently addressed those people who were “impatient for reopening” the Powerhouse in Ultimo. The problem is that nobody is impatient to see this useless, expensive rebuild. The public is mourning the Powerhouse, not looking forward to a dazzling future.

Back in Cairo, in comparison with the GEM, the old Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square is a sad relic – full of antiquated vitrines covered in scratches and cracks, labels peeling off walls, layers of dust, and whole rooms full of junk. But if one looks only at the objects that missed out on relocation to the GEM, it’s an astonishing treasure trove. Even the smallest pieces would be valued highlights in most Australian galleries.

Perhaps the only non-Egyptian artefacts on display were a pair of boomerangs - a remnant of a time when someone had noticed that the ancient Egyptians had used similarly shaped ‘throwing sticks’. One crucial difference was that the Egyptians fashioned their boomerangs from stone and ceramic, which made them less likely to come back, but perhaps better suited to accompany a hunter on his journey to the afterlife.

This mini-travelogue is by way of partial explanation as to what I’ve been doing over the past week – in Saudi Arabia, then Egypt. I can see by the news there’s plenty of issues to grapple with on Australian soil, but more on that when I get over the jet lag. The most recent art column looks at Data Dreams: Art and AI, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art - a show that wasn’t all that it might have been, but a step in the right direction for an institution that needs to build its audience. The film being reviewed is Nuremberg, in which Russell Crowe proved to be just perfect for the role of Hermann Goering. One hopes it didn’t come too naturally.

A few years ago, Artificial Intelligence belonged to the realm of science fiction. Today it is reshaping every aspect of our lives although it’s too soon to say for better or for worse. We anticipate that AI will solve the most daunting problems. It will cure diseases, find answers to the climate crisis, and supercharge our efforts to conquer space. Yet the merest glance at history, let alone the state of the world today, suggests one would have to be supremely optimistic to put faith in these utopian scenarios.

I daresay the odds favour the Terminator hypothesis, in which an all-powerful AI decides human beings are nothing but a blight on the planet and eliminates us as a form of pest control. Don’t be surprised if it starts with the National Party.

Cue ‘Discovery Channel’ voiceover: “But will the dream of AI turn into a nightmare?”

Given that more than 100 million people took up ChatGPT within its first month of release in 2023, Data Dreams: Art and AI, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is a timely exhibition, albeit the merest tip-of-the-iceberg. To do justice to the AI revolution and its implications any exhibition would need to be on a grand scale, requiring an impractically lengthy commitment from viewers.

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It’s taken me an unusually long time to see Nuremberg, but having finally managed this feat it’d be a dereliction of duty if the film slipped by without a review. Writer-director, James Vanderbilt, has created the kind of solid, old-fashioned movie we rarely see any more. The dialogue is excellent, the characters convincing, and the moral of the story too big to miss. It deals with a heavily loaded moment in history in a way that doesn’t simply devolve into a fable of good versus evil.

This is quite an achievement because for the past 80 years, the Nazis have been Hollywood’s most reliable moral miscreants. What’s more surprising is that Nazism today is undergoing a resurgence, which seems to denote a sickness in our society. At the very least it reveals an alarming lack of historical consciousness in those who act as if the war itself was only a movie.

Vanderbilt noticed this when he found that for his own daughter the events of World War Two had no sense of reality. As the veterans of the conflict and the survivors of the concentration camps disappear, that human connection with history is lost. The most terrible events begin to seem like fiction.

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Less than a month into the year, the cancellation of Adelaide Writers Week has provided a prime example of the way the Australian arts ‘community’ (for want of a better word), is poisoning itself with politics. It’s the cultural equivalent of smoking a carton of fags a day – an addiction that will destroy your health and wellbeing, making you the kind of person everybody else wants to avoid. When it comes to audiences, the political tub-thumping is a distinct turn-off.

I say this in full recognition that we are political beings, and a vigorous exchange of views is part of the lifeblood of any liberal democracy. What we’re seeing in the arts is something quite different: a fiesta of intolerance and ideological rigidity. There are issues such as climate change that tap into widespread public concerns, but the angry “antizionist” push is purely divisive because the overwhelming majority of Australians are oblivious to hair-splitting distinctions between ‘anti-Zionism’ and ‘antizionism’. According to one of my readers, “One is a conversation about Jewish statehood, the other is bigotry”. In practice, both are used as a thinly disguised code for antisemitism – and this, just like Islamophobia – is a place where culture goes to die.

It’s a tired observation that the tendency to judge artists not by their work but by ethnicity, religion or sexual preferences, has generated negative reactions, creating rifts where none previously existed. Yet even this doesn’t explain the moral confusion and lack of open-mindedness on display in Adelaide.

Australia’s arty types urgently need to remember Kant’s categorical imperative: Do unto others as you would be done by. In other words, try affording your perceived opponents the same consideration you claim for yourselves in this laidback country. Part of the public grief and outrage over Bondi was the thought: “Such things don’t happen here!” The rising level of aggression and hatred that goes under the banner of ‘free speech’ only makes it more likely that such violent acts will occur with greater frequency.

My recommendation to anyone consumed by the traumas of the Middle East is to remember there are many other subjects that invite attention from artists. For instance, when did engaging with nature become less important than political activism? Where politics can be narrow and toxic, nature is expansive and inspiriting. If you’re feeling exhausted from shouting slogans at demos, try a week in the bush to restore a sense of proportion.

I was impressed by the ecstatic feedback that followed a review of Mary Tonkin’s show of bush landscapes at the S.H. Ervin Gallery recently. It felt as if this was exactly what people had been hanging out for. Likewise, there has been a huge response to the first iteration of the Australia China Art Residencies Art Prize, which has taken landscape as its theme, partly as a way of avoiding politics, but also because it’s a subject that unites the Australian and Chinese artists who are taking part. It may be a cliché, but the Earth is our common inheritance, regardless of how we choose to divide it up into nations or private property. To be human is to be part of the natural world long before we are adherents of any creed or country.

The history of civilisation on this planet has been a war on nature we’ve only recently begun to recognise as a war on ourselves. For a thousand years we’ve been firm in our belief that we are not an organic part of the natural world, but its masters. For the environmental historian, Donald Worster, this is the difference between Arcadian and Imperial ecology. The latter views the natural world as a kind of factory turning out goods for human consumption - and this is still the ruling idea of our time, as we continue to burn fossil fuels and drive other species to extinction.

In the past, the sheer abundance of nature seemed to promise an endless harvest, but industrial progress and population growth have seen us burn through resources at an alarming rate. In the early Middle Ages, the ‘green and pleasant land’ of England was one big forest. Nowadays the jungles of the Amazon are disappearing just as rapidly.

Artists and writers have always been in the forefront of the Arcadian view of ecology. William Blake mocked the progressivist idea that a ‘New Jerusalem’ was being created by the “dark, satanic mills” of the Industrial Revolution. Wordsworth showed his contempt for science when he wrote: “We murder to dissect”.

For more than ten years I’ve been involved on a voluntary basis with a project of the Australian Wildlife Conservatory that has taken 24 artists to four remote locations around Australia. The artists have made work that was exhibited and sold a year later, raising funds for the organisation. Almost a million dollars has thereby accrued to AWC coffers.

These trips, which I’ve been able to share, have been the among the very best experiences I’ve had in decades of writing about art. The fifth and last excursion saw six artists spend a week at Newhaven, an AWC property on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. Those artists – Sophie Cape, Nicolette Eisdell, Pamela Honeyfield, Michelle Hungerford, Charmaine Pike and Ana Pollak – made work for a show held at Sydney’s Defiance Gallery last September. For the first time, a version has travelled to Victoria, where it may be seen at Sofitel Melbourne on Collins for the next couple of months.

The exhibition has been undertaken in the spirit of charity, largely thanks to Emily Choo, Senior Partnerships Manager, and Clive Scott, Arts Ambassador Sofitel, who have been instrumental in bringing the hotel on board, affirming a longstanding connection with the visual arts. The paintings are for sale, with the money going back to the AWC. In brief, it’s a project on behalf of endangered Australian species, for which everyone has given freely of their time and effort.

I’ve written about the AWC projects on many occasions, but after spending a year observing the skewed priorities of the local art scene I feel a greater urgency about this topic. Conservation is an issue everyone can get behind, not one that causes sharp divisions. Within an expanded understanding of the landscape genre, artists make works that respond to a particular environment, celebrating the need for wilderness in a world given over to the Imperial view of ecology.

Wilderness, almost by definition, is land untouched and unspoiled by human agency. The AWC is trying to return substantial parts of Australia to the conditions that existed before feral cats and other invasive species wreaked havoc on age-old ecosystems. They are restoring populations of marsupials brought to the brink of extinction, and reviving fragile environments damaged by cattle and camels. For these sanctuaries to exist, the AWC has to own the property, ensuring that it can’t fall into the hands of mining companies or cattle stations. At Newhaven, the AWC works in collaboration with the traditional owners, the Ngalia-Warlpiri, on the removal of feral animals and fire management. It’s a partnership that works to the benefit of both parties and the land.,

The Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed us a negative view of wilderness – being the wasteland in which Moses and the Israelites wandered for 40 years before reaching the Promised Land, Canaan – nowadays the lands of Israel and Palestine. The wilderness was a testing ground for the Israelites’ faith and belief, and they came perilously close to blowing the whole thing.

The idea that wilderness – be it desert or forest – was merely an obstacle to human progress, only began to be questioned during the Romantic era, notably by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had lofty ideas about ‘the state of nature’. But it would not be until figures such as Henry David Thoreau and John Muir came along, that the idea of preserving wilderness for its own sake became a serious proposition. Thoreau’s famous line of 1851, “in Wildness is the preservation of the world”, was an intensely radical idea, going against the grain of an era of rapid expansion and development, in which the pioneers established themselves as folk heroes.

Muir (1838-1914), who played a leading role in the creation of America’s first great National Parks, saw nature as a temple, sacred to God. He was a vehement opponent of the materialism that most Americans embraced as the key to achieving national greatness.

It’s been 136 years since Muir and Teddy Roosevelt gave us Yosemite National Park, and in that time the exponents of wilderness have fought a losing battle against the forces of rampant development. Today we are probably no longer at a crossroads, but beyond a crossroads, in which environmentalists are scrambling to save what they can from the wreckage. Every year brings higher temperatures, catastrophic floods and fires, the shrinking of the Amazon and the polar ice caps. The new ideal of a ‘Promised Land’ is not a fertile region that can be cultivated and exploited, it’s a place where humans do not tread, or at least, where a small population of Indigenous people have found ways of living in harmony with nature.

Scientists agree that the health of the planet requires such areas of wilderness, where biodiversity can flourish. This is the mission of organisations such as the AWC, and it should be far more attractive to artists than the angry political wrangles that are turning the cultural arena into a battlefield. A more desirable metaphor would be a garden, perhaps a wild garden.

What distinguishes the artists in the show at Sofitel on Collins, and Mary Tonkin at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, is a willingness to “go to Nature in all singleness of heart”, as John Ruskin advised in his magnum opus, Modern Painters, “and walk with her laboriously and trustingly, having no other thoughts but how best to penetrate her meaning, rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing.”

Ruskin’s prose was often a deep shade of purple, but he was capable of flights of eloquence and was never anything but sincere in his beliefs. It’s that kind of sincerity, the direct experience of nature, which has such value and profundity for artists.

Some will argue that artists can be political partisans and lovers of nature at the same time, but few of us can realistically balance two extremes within our psyches. Others simply dismiss activities such as landscape painting as relics of another era.

John Berger, perhaps unwittingly, sparked a reaction against landscape in Ways of Seeing when he analysed Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews, as a celebration of private property. It’s important we recognise that landscape today is less concerned with private ownership of a piece of land than collective responsibility for the fate of the planet. Talk to any dedicated landscapist and it’s clear they are thinking of the bigger picture, not one small corner. They are concerned, as Ruskin advises, with the “meaning” of nature, even if they have no answers that may be expressed in words. The solution lies in what they put on canvas or paper, although it’s a solution that seems to change from day to day, like the weather. The greatest works of art are born from uncertainty rather than ideological conviction. When we approach a subject in a spirit of curiosity, struggling with our own doubts, we are more likely to produce a work of value than when we set out to signal allegiance to a fixed concept. Most works of political art are created with a moral purpose and thoughts of an audience, but landscape can be a journey of exploration in which the artist serves as their own audience and critic.

To be lost in the wilderness is to find ourselves separated from our beliefs and convictions, being prepared to ask fundamental questions about the most important things in life. The psychologists speak of a phenomenon called ‘The Wilderness Effect’, which says that spending two or three days in a natural setting has a positive impact on our mental and bodily health. Spend two to three weeks, and the benefits are allegedly multiplied. But who has the time? For me, a week is an optimum communion period. Were I to spend three weeks in the bush, I’d be pining for my books and laptop.

With the Newhaven trip, Kathryn Millis and Anna Howard have made a documentary which is screening with the show. It reveals how the experience of a week spent working in this remote landscape had a powerful emotional impact on the artists. Private traumas rose to the surface and were dissipated by the steady, solitary engagement with the landscape during the day, and the company with others in the evenings.

The lesson of Newhaven is that the artist’s ideal experience of nature is one of inwardness. It’s the antithesis of being part of a crowd in which everyone seems to share the same mind. A stint in the wilderness encourages self-awareness, and that’s something we desperately need to cultivate before AI does all our thinking for us.

The art column this week looks at Ron Mueck: Encounter, at the Art Gallery of NSW, a show of 15 figurative sculptures, some exceptionally large, others tiny. I’m no longer surprised by anything from this artist, but if you’ve never experienced Mueck’s work close-up, you’ll be astonished by the fastidious detail and the strange, sad aura these works possess. The film being reviewed is Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice, a black comedy about a middle manager in a paper factory who loses his job and plots a novel way back into the workplace, over the dead bodies of his peers. In the age of AI, it’s ‘kill or be killed’ - an excellent reason to get back to nature.

There may be good reasons for the incredibly sparse design of Ron Mueck: Encounter, at the Art Gallery of NSW but I’ve rarely seen a show with so much empty space. We are being asked to accept that Mueck’s detail-perfect, realist sculptures need large walls or entire rooms to themselves to allow us to savour their peculiar intensity.

It’s a plausible idea but the emptiness that surrounds each work is so exaggerated it becomes a distraction rather than a sympathetic mode of presentation. A cynic might argue this is what a gallery does when there’s not enough work to fill the space – in this instance, a mere 14 pieces in the new building the AGNSW likes to call Naala Badu. The Old Woman in Bed (2000/2002), from the AGNSW’s collection, is to be found in the old building (AKA. Naala Nura), sharing a gallery with a suite of Expressionist prints by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945).

Mueck, born in Melbourne in 1958, but long resident in London, is not a prolific artist. Slow and fastidious in his methods, he cannot be expected to deliver a jam-packed exhibition. Nevertheless, Encounter is an awkward proposition as a paid blockbuster, because many visitors will hesitate to pay $35 to see 14 works in bare white rooms. I’m sorry to make this comparison again, but for $40, the National Gallery of Victoria delivers a massive collection of work by Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, featuring the most dazzling exhibition design.

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Park Chan-wook, South Korea’s answer to Alfred Hitchcock, has taken an old American crime novel and turned it into an allegory for our times. When Donald E. Westlake published The Ax in 1997, he was responding to the growing practice of U.S. manufacturers relocating overseas, to places where materials and labour costs are significantly cheaper. This meant bigger profits for the company and its shareholders, but unemployment for local workers. It spelled the death-knell of the ‘good corporate man’ who might have spent his entire life in one industry, working for a single company. Costa-Gavras made an adaptation of The Ax in 2005 that dealt with this dilemma. The new corporate threat that Park explores is the rise of AI, which promises even greater carnage in the workplace.

In No Other Choice, we follow the fortunes of Yoo Man-su (Lee Byung-hun), a middle-aged manager at a paper factory, who is living the bourgeois dream, with a wife, two kids, and a big house in the suburbs. We realise at once this kind of satisfaction is too good to last, and it’s not long before Manu-su is given his marching orders, following the purchase of his company by an American firm.

What follows is a painful series of humiliations, as Man-su attends workshops in which sacked workers sit around and chant, “It’s not my fault I was retrenched”, or words to that effect. The growth of automation has made the jobs pool contract so rapidly there is nothing on offer, even for the most qualified workers. Having reached the end of his tether, Manu-su arrives at a high-risk strategy to get back in the game.

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Discussing the gradual disintegration of Writers Week at this year’s Adelaide Festival, artistic director, Louise Adler, has said: “I am so sorry this masterclass in poor governance has landed us in this position.” She may be speaking with unusual candour, because it is her own bad governance that created last week’s cultural debacle. Anybody who spends five minutes investigating Dr. Randa Abdel Fattah’s public statements and social media posts, will see that giving this person a platform at the Writers Festival was asking for trouble.

“Trouble”, however, seems to be Louise’s second name. Faced with a choice between a path of diplomacy and one of provocation, she’ll scoot down the latter without a second thought.

Adelaide has given us the Khaled Sabsabi affair all over again, with an uncanny mirroring of events. An outspoken advocate of the Palestinian cause was selected to a prestigious gig, then deselected, then reinstated, while the arts community went into paroxysms over censorship and (government) interference. The selected/deselected figure was portrayed as a victim and a martyr, while public figures fell over themselves to denounce this outrage.

Perhaps the most inexplicable part of the collapse of Writers Week is the way the Festival Board responded to the aggressive approach of its artistic director. Adler has made it clear that her idea of curatorial control brooks no interference from anyone. If she chose to platform a Palestinian activist with a history of making statements many would characterise as hate speech, members of the board had no right to question this decision. We learned this week that last year the board had gone so far as to commission a risk assessment in relation to Abdel-Fattah’s participation.

After Adler allegedly declared: “It’s too late, I’ve already invited her,” businessman, Tony Berg resigned from the board. His colleagues appear to have gone back into their shells, until the massacre in Bondi created a sense of panic.

After Bondi, and the huge public outpouring of sympathy for the victims, ‘trouble’ was looking more like ‘disaster’. The board, faced with the prospect of protests and condemnation for platforming Abdel-Fattah, decided to cancel her invitation, not imagining this would lead to the implosion of Writers Week, as more than 180 participants pulled out in protest at the curtailing of Abdel-Fattah’s right to free speech.

It was startling to learn, later in the week, that the victim, martyr and heroine of this free speech controversy had written a letter last year demanding the deplatforming of Jewish American journalist, Thomas Friedman, and that Adler and two colleagues threatened to resign unless the letter-writer got her way. Were any of the 180 writers and participants who pulled out in support of Abdel-Fattah, aware of this episode?

Friedman was subsequently told his participation wouldn’t work because of “scheduling issues”. For revealing this apparent hypocrisy, Tony Berg became the butt of Adler’s anger. “I consider discussions at the board table to be confidential, she said, “and I’m rather surprised that a former CEO of Macquarie Bank has breached those confidences. It’s indicative of the way the former board operated – a rich case study for future management students.”

In other words: “My response to your question is to insult Tony Berg, because I expected my own actions and statements would remain behind closed doors.” The comment about “management students”, like the crack about “poor governance” in her grandstanding resignation letter, expresses a none-too-subtle desire for a board to be no more than a rubber stamp.

On the 7.30 Report this week, in an interview with Michael Rowland – whose professionalism could find room for a little more mongrel – Adler got on her soapbox and forcefully related her version of events. The one incisive question Rowland asked was: Had Adbel-Fattah “gone too far with some of the comments she has made about Israel and Israelis?”

Specifically, he quoted her statement of March 2024, that “if you’re a Zionist you have no claim or right to cultural safety,” and another line from the start of last year: “May 2025 be the end of Israel.”

Adler replied: “I don’t invite writers to Adelaide Writers Week because of their social media activity. Those two statements have since been deleted – I don’t know when they were deleted. These statements exist but she’s not being asked to come to AWW because of her social media feed, she’s been asked to come and talk about a novel she’s written called Discipline – a novel that’s topical, of this moment, and I thought was worthy of a conversation.”

Once again, to translate: “I don’t give a stuff about what she’s posted on social media, no matter how offensive or inflammatory. She was invited to talk about her new novel.”

If the novel happens to be all about Palestinians needing to stand up and be counted, we’re expected to believe this has no connection to Abdel-Fattah’s social media posts. Those posts are apparently not worth worrying about (Abdel-Fattah has a mere 61,600 followers on Instagram), while a possibly tasteless piece of political satire by Thomas Friedman prompted threats of resignation.

To demonstrate her balanced approach, Adler told us how she’d also platformed Tony Abbott, “for his book that celebrates the colonisation of Australia.” Presumably Tony Abbott wasn’t one of the writers who pulled out in support of Abdel-Fattah, but it’s revealing that rather than inviting an Israeli author, Adler believes the colonisation of Australia is an effective counterweight to what is happening in Gaza. Revealing, but not surprising. More of that later.

By Wednesday, Writers Week 2026 had been cancelled, Adler had resigned as director, a new board had been appointed, and Abdel-Fattah was threatening to sue SA Premier, Peter Malinauskas, for defamation, alleging “he made a public statement that suggested l am an extremist terrorist sympathiser and directly linked me to the Bondi atrocity. This was a vicious personal assault on me, a private citizen, by the highest public official in South Australia. It was defamatory and it terrified me.”

Malinauskas denies these charges, saying he merely expressed a personal view that, in light of the Bondi massacre, it was the wrong choice to platform an outspoken enemy of Israel. His letter, which has now been revealed, stresses that he is expressing an opinion not issuing a directive.

Whether or not this long-shot defamation action ever comes to court, Abdel-Fattah has already announced a public fund-raiser for her legal fees and has raised upwards of $66,000. As a law graduate, Abdel-Fattah would know that defamation is a hard row to hoe in Australia, but if she were happy to spend the money – or other people’s money - such a case would create a huge publicity splash.

What happened on Thursday might encourage such an action, as the new board issued an abject apology to Abdel-Fattah, and told her she would be welcome to speak at the 2027 festival. This is astonishing, considering we have no idea what Abdel-Fattah might do or say over the next twelve months. If she pursues her defamation action we could be treated to the bizarre spectacle of an anointed participant in Writers Week engaged in a court case with the Premier while she says whatever she pleases from the podium.

Malinauskas, who was immediately asked if he would be issuing an apology to Abdel-Fattah, replied: “What for?” In taking this stance, he is one of the first politicians (let’s not mention arts administrators!) in Australia to stand up to the intimidatory tactics of those who loudly defend their own right to free speech while seeking to cancel others. Are we to assume the Premier doesn’t enjoy the same right to express a personal opinion that Abdel-Fattah jealously claims for herself?

The statement issued by the new board was cringeworthy in the extreme. Chair, Judy Potter, said: “We apologise to Dr. Abdel-Fattah unreservedly for the harm the Adelaide Festival Corporation has caused her. Intellectual and artistic freedom is a powerful human right. Our goal is to uphold it, and in this instance Adelaide Festival Corporation fell well short.”

As if this wasn’t humiliating enough, Ms. Potter also extended the apology to Louise Adler, saying: “We acknowledge the principled stand she took in the extremely difficult decision to resign from her role as director… Louise is a revered figure of Australian literature who we hold in the highest regard. Her contributions to, and stewardship of, Adelaide Writers’ Week in the time she has been the Director (2023 – 2025) have been outstanding.”

Hey Judy, this is the person who just tanked your literary festival, which attracted 160,000 visitors last year, generating tens of millions of dollars for the state. Your festival is now faced with defraying expenses already incurred and repairing the damage inflicted on its reputation and credibility.

This is the person who wrote in her resignation letter, subsequently published in The Guardian: “In my view, boards composed of individuals with little experience in the arts, and blind to the moral implications of abandoning the principle of freedom of expression, have been unnerved by the pressure exerted by politicians calculating their electoral prospects and relentless, coordinated letter-writing campaigns.”

She quipped that “South Australia’s tourism slogan could be “Welcome to Moscow on the Torrens”.

Judy, you say you hold this person in the highest regard, but she doesn’t reciprocate those sentiments. You see her as a revered figure, while she sees you as a bunch of mugs. This “outstanding” person has destroyed your festival with her reckless programming, insulted you in public, and acted in the most sanctimonious manner. Indeed, she has implied that the board was influenced by anonymous forces with “fat chequebooks”, and complained it had bowed to “pressure from pro-Israel lobbyists, bureaucrats and opportunistic politicians.”

As for Abdel-Fattah, she has very graciously accepted your grovelling apology, saying “she was still considering the board’s invitation to appear at the 2027 event.” She also suggested she’d be back “in a heartbeat” if her good friend Louise was reinstated as director. Given its predilection for spineless self-abasement, the board might very well go along with this condition. I’m only surprised Abdel-Fattah didn’t demand that Peter Malinauskas step down as Premier before she agreed to appear on next year’s program.

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Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the Adelaide fracas was the speed with which writers jumped on the express train out of Writers Week, putting the issue of “freedom of speech” over any possible qualms about the person they were valorising by their actions. Not only did it show how quickly so many supposedly independent thinkers will adopt a herd mentality, it demonstrated that in this ideological climate, any attempt to lower the temperature of debate only risks pushing it to new extremes. It also revealed the huge gulf that exists between what we might call the Australian intelligentsia and the public. I doubt that many average Australians, upon acquainting themselves with Abdel-Fattah’s views, would be so ready to stand with her shoulder-to-shoulder.

It’s been mentioned on many occasions, but the truly unforgivable part of the writer’s behaviour was her willingness to celebrate the events of October 7, going so far as to treat reports of rape, torture and murder as if they were Zionist propaganda. No matter how we might rail against Netanyahu’s barbaric onslaught in Gaza, with its purposeful cruelty and soaring death toll, this does not – and can never – excuse the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7. Barbarism is barbarism, no matter who is the perpetrator, and if principles of human rights have any viability we cannot pretend one appalling act of violence is an outrage, but another is somehow justified by history and circumstance.

What made the horror of October 7 even worse, was that those Israelis who were targeted were among the most liberal-minded and sympathetic to the sufferings of the Palestinians. The hate-fuelled, genocidal extremists were sitting in Netanyahu’s cabinet, not attending a popular music festival.

In a piece published one year into the carnage in Gaza, Abdel-Fattah wrote: “If you ask me about hope, there was a glimmer on October 7. It was palpable, real, and exhilarating.”

Palpable, real, exhilarating? It’s extraordinary that anyone sitting back in their lounge room in Sydney should feel this way about an event in which innocent people were murdered in the most sadistic fashion. It’s also a ridiculous idea. By any pragmatic assessment it should have been obvious that October 7 gave Netanyahu the excuse he needed to try and wipe Gaza off the map. Even in the social media messages Abdel-Fattah quotes in the wake of the attack, we find Palestinians expressing a palpable dread as to what will happen next.

Hamas may have believed they would unite the Arab world behind them with this act of violence, splintering the growing cosiness between the USA and Israel, and Middle Eastern powers such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The opposite has occurred, with the group having grown increasingly isolated. Its great success has been with ‘progressive’ groups in the west, who have gone over wholeheartedly to the Palestinian cause.

This has a lot to do with Netanyahu’s uncompromising violence, but also with the way Hamas and its allies have framed the debate.

In a memorandum issued after October 7, Hamas called for their actions to be put into a broader context, namely “all cases of the struggle against colonialism.” They also identified Zionism specifically as “a colonialist project”, and Israel as an “illegal entity”.

In this we see the roots of the ideology that equates the establishment of Israel at the end of the Second World War, with the British takeover of Australia in 1788. We also see the reason why they believe the massacre of October 7 should be excused. The reason was that the Jews deserved it, because of the decades of misery they had inflicted on the Palestinians. The attack was frequently described as a “jailbreak” or a “break-out”, as if these murderers were escapees from a prison camp.

For Judith Butler, the influential American professor who gave us “Queer Theory”, October 7 was “an act of armed resistance”. She went on: “It is not a terrorist attack and it’s not an antisemitic attack, it was an attack against Israelis.”

Butler claimed: “the violence done to Palestinians has been happening for decades. This was an uprising that comes from a state of subjugation and against a violent state apparatus… Israelis point to the murder of Israeli Jews as evidence that Palestinian terrorists hate Jews, when in fact it was just that they were fighting a colonial power. If it were a different colonial power, they would also fight them and it wouldn’t be considered antisemitism.”

It’s so simple when you think about it! What appeared to be a brutal massacre was in fact an armed uprising against a colonial power, and therefore perfectly understandable. In other words: They had it coming. Bad luck for the hapless victims who were merely the pawns of history.

Abdel-Fattah is in the habit of quoting Judith Butler approvingly. She struck her own blow against the ideological enemy two years ago when she “publicly shared a link to a private WhatsApp group that included 600 Jewish creatives, leaking their names, photos and personal details in the process, which prompted the Albanese government to introduce new doxxing laws.” Many from this group claim they are still dealing with the consequences.

All of this makes it difficult to believe in the hurt and offence Abdel-Fattah supposedly felt when the board suggested “it would not be culturally sensitive to continue to program her at this unprecedented time so soon after Bondi.”

No-one was suggesting Abdel-Fattah had a hand in the terrorist act, but it would be disingenuous to believe that her statements and actions had not been offensive to Jewish people - even those who may be vehemently opposed to Netanyahu’s actions.

Frantz Fanon, today hailed as a patron saint of ‘decolonisation’, provided a useful term that explains the willingness of so many people in the Australian art and literary community to excuse the crimes of Hamas while being driven into a frenzy by the crimes of Netanyahu. In Black Skin, White Masks, he writes: “Good - Evil, Beauty — Ugliness, White — Black: such are the characteristic pairings of the phenomenon that… we shall call ‘Manichaeism delirium.’”

Fanon saw “Manicheanism delerium” as a condition that allowed the white coloniser to view the black subject of colonisation as his diametric opposite. Where the coloniser was civilised and inherently good, the colonised was savage and bad. One was a higher form of humanity, the other barely qualified as human.

This pretty much describes the attitude of the Netanyahu government towards the Palestinians, who have consistently been treated as less than human. Yet it also sums up the attitude of Hamas apologists such as Abdel-Fattah who saw October 7 as “a glimmer of hope” and don’t believe Zionists have any right to cultural safety.

This tendency to divide the world into extremes of black and white leads inevitably to violence and intolerance. It is the very opposite of politics, often described as “the art of compromise”, or in Bismarck’s famous words, “the art of the possible”. When one group denies the basic humanity of its opponent, every violent act becomes justified. Your own violence is dressed up in heroic colours, while your opponent’s is viewed as pure evil.

This is the point we have reached in Australia, with an art community that has given its sympathies to one side of the debate in such militant fashion it is willing to forget about October 7 and treat an outspoken activist as a martyr and a hero.

On the other hand, as we learn from another article in The Australian, when the Iranian-born writer, Shokoofeh Azar declined to join the mass exodus from Writers Week she was bombarded with messages such as “You should be killed like the Israelis”.

In a Manichean view of the world those who do not think the same way as you, can only be your enemies - fellow travellers with your subhuman opponents. Those who try and find the right and wrong on both sides are accused of “both-siderism” – as if there is inherent nobility in being a bigot.

One reason the groundswell of anti-Israel feeling has grown so precipitously is that it is forever being associated with concepts such as colonisation and decolonisation. The Jews, once viewed as refugees from Hitler’s ravages, are now widely seen as colonisers, or “settler-colonisers”, who have displaced the rightful owners of the land.

There is, however, a huge difference between the British colonisation of Australia and the Jewish resettlement after the Second World War. Both may have had a drastic impact on the resident population, but one was a premeditated act of conquest, while the other was viewed as a return to an ancestral homeland. Looking at the rhetoric being thrown about in Australia over the past year or so, that difference is being obliterated.

Instead of “Israelis” or “Jews” the only word being used is “Zionists”, who are portrayed as irredeemable fascists – regardless that there are many shades of Zionism. Indeed, Abdel-Fattah makes the fine distinction that she is not an antisemite but an anti-Zionist. It’s too fine of a distinction for many people.

A former diplomat who knows a lot about this issue, tells me that the extreme view of “Zionism” has become standard fare over the past 20 years, as the possibility of a two-state solution has faded into nothingness. Both sides are now speaking in terms of absolutes: Israel has pursued the total destruction of Gaza, while the Palestinian slogan, “From the river to the sea” calls for nothing less than the expulsion of the Jews and the end of the state of Israel.

In Australia, the Palestine protest marchers have made common ground with Aboriginal activists, as fellow victims of “colonisation”. Here one might look to the Israeli philosopher, Assaf Sharon, who says: “the point of attaching the label ‘colonisation’ is not to analyse but to criminalise. Rather than a critical concept, it is a weapon of criticism. Or rather, of delegitimation.”

All this is accompanied by the inevitable calls for “decolonisation” – a term so vague it can be made to mean anything one chooses. Judith Butler believes it promises “emancipatory joy”, but Sharon terms it “another slogan cosplaying as policy”, and quotes Fanon, who wrote: “Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon.”

We can see this playing out in the willingness to overlook the violence of October 7, and the threats and insults thrown at those such as Shokoofeh Azar. When I criticised the protests held out front of the NGV in August, I received the same kind of hateful diatribes from anonymous trolls.

Fanon’s words should give pause to all those ‘progressives’ in the arts community who use the word “decolonisation” so reflexively, as if it were, ipso facto, a virtuous activity. Campaigns to “decolonise the museum” have proven to be confusing and culturally destructive, as nobody has any real idea what they entail. In the absence of a clear program, it effectively refers to policies that are advantageous for a certain group of people and exclusionary for others. It has become a way of opportunistically seizing public assets to advance private agendas – as we see with the catastrophic Powerhouse project, which associates itself with this kind of rhetoric. All those who work for public institutions would do well to think twice before embracing this fashionable but dangerous concept, if that’s the right word for something so intellectually blurred.

When Abdel-Fattah says: “the goal is decolonisation and the end of this murderous Zionist colony” (i.e. Israel), we can recognise all the favourite rhetorical devices.

Jewish journalists, Ariela Bard and Julie Szego, have both written articles expressing their horror and frustration that so many female writers who call themselves feminists have been willing to die in a ditch for someone who has questioned the reality of the rapes and murders that took place on October 7. Is the issue of freedom of speech so absolute – so Manichean – that these feminists are prepared to overlook such a grotesque detail?

This raises a further question about the limits of “free speech”. At what point does free speech become unacceptable hate speech? Does the truth play any part in this, or should we be allowed to lie and spread baseless accusations at will? An article by a former editor of mine, Shelley Gare, reminds us of Karl Popper’s dictum from The Open Society and its Enemies, that we should claim, “in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.”

Abdel-Fattah has shown by her statements that she has not the slightest degree of tolerance when it comes to the hated “Zionists”. The same might be said about Adler, an artistic director who seems determined to act in defiance of her own Jewish identity. I can understand Jews saying unfair and hateful things about Palestinians and vice-versa, but I’m puzzled by a Jewish person who goes out of her way to say spiteful things about Jewish interests.

This was ostensibly the point made by former editor of The Age, Michael Gawenda, who has written an article describing how his friendship with Adler came to a sudden end when she appeared to abandon any pretence of journalistic objectivity and embrace conspiracy theories about wealthy Jewish powerbrokers.

If we look for a way to make sure Writers Week never repeats this year’s ordeal, the first requirement would be a board of knowledgeable people who can discuss the artistic director’s choices and not be so easily cowed into submission. Too many boards of Australian cultural organisations are packed with stooges who make no useful contribution, either intellectually or financially. The previous festival board, with the exception of Tony Berg, allowed Adler a free hand, and suffered the consequences. The new board has already abased itself. What is needed is an active process of consultation, in which the pros and cons of possible invitees might be discussed. This is not control, it’s a practical way of dealing with disputes before they arise.

Could Writers Week this year have been saved? Rather than cancelling Abdel-Fattah, perhaps the board might have invited her to sit on a forum alongside a writer such as Michael Gawenda and let them discuss their differences with a suitably neutral moderator. Would Adler have agreed to such an impeccable exercise in free speech, or viewed this as intolerable interference with her program? The stance she took on the 7.30 Report, was that Abdel-Fattah was invited as the author of a novel, not as an activist. Some may argue this is about as convincing as Abdel-Fattah’s insistence that being an anti-Zionist who calls for the destruction of Israel is not evidence of antisemitism.

One wonders if all those writers would have pulled out had such a forum been a possibility. It could have aired a lot of festering issues and given opposing groups a platform to address the public. If Abdel-Fattah chooses to grace the 2027 Writers Week with her presence it should be in the context of dialogue and debate, where her views may be challenged and defended. If she believes her position is rock solid, she has nothing to fear. It would simply be a matter of having the courage of her convictions – something that is lacking in all those anonymous haters who like to threaten people online, and those cowardly arts administrators whose backflips are of Olympic proportions.

The Adelaide saga has eaten up the week, getting progressively worse from day to day, which makes the latest art column something of a relief - being devoted to one of Australia’s most dedicated landscape painters. Mary Tonkin: Among the Trees at the S.H. Ervin Gallery is a genuinely uplifting start to a year that’s already looking ominous. The film being reviewed is Kokuho, a three-hour Japanese epic about a Kabuki actor, that broke box office records at home and is being well-received around the world. Even allowing for the miseries of Adelaide Writers Week there are still plenty of reasons to believe that art is a damn good thing.

One question every public art gallery should ask itself on a regular basis is: “What do audiences want?” Too often it seems curators and gallery directors are simply showing work they personally admire or consider ‘important’. If the public doesn’t respond with enthusiasm it only proves that further education is required to eliminate the naïve idea that one might go to a gallery for pleasure rather than moral improvement.

It’s a source of frustration that the public clings stubbornly to its preference for quaint, old-fashioned beauty, appreciating artists with the skill and visual intelligence to transport us out of the everyday mire into an ideal world in which we are at one with nature. This should be no surprise – such feelings are hard-wired into our brains. To prefer art that sends the right ‘messages’ requires a conscious effort to go against our instincts.

The climate crisis may have brought a new political urgency to our relationship with the environment, but I suspect the main reason we enjoy landscape painting is that it appeals to us on a deep, psychological level. A great landscape painter taps into a primal fascination with the natural world that harks back to prehistoric times. Such works make us feel part of something larger than ourselves, something that soothes our everyday anxieties.

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