As the world fills with lies, Australia silences those who make us question

A character visits an art gallery in New York. He wants to see works by Andy Warhol. He enters a room “filled with images of Chairman Mao. Photocopy Mao, silk-screen Mao, wallpaper Mao, synthetic-polymer Mao”. The character, from a 1991 novel, finds the experience freeing: “Had he ever realised the deeper meaning of Mao before he saw these pictures?”

The deeper meaning of Mao – what is that? Estimates suggest Mao was responsible for the deaths of between 30 million and 45 million people. Many died violent deaths, and torture was widespread.

Credit: Illustration: Joe Benke

These facts – Andy Warhol’s portrayal, in nice bright colours, of a mass murderer – pose a simple question: should all future Warhol exhibitions be cancelled?

The question sounds foolish, doesn’t it? And yet effectively the same question was posed this past fortnight to some of this country’s most senior arts leaders, about an Australian artist, and it seems to have been met with a resounding “Yes! Cancel the exhibitions!”

The basic facts are now well known. Almost 20 years ago, Khaled Sabsabi made a work containing images of Hassan Nasrallah, then leader of Hezbollah (one part of Hezbollah was then listed as a terrorist organisation in Australia – much later, the whole organisation was listed). After Sabsabi was chosen this month to represent Australia at the next Venice Biennale, The Australian newspaper pointed this out. Another of Sabsabi’s works focused on the September 11 attacks. A Liberal senator asked questions in parliament. Arts Minister Tony Burke called Creative Australia, the nation’s official arts council, to discuss this, though he denies he told it what to do. Within hours, Creative Australia decided that Sabsabi would not be going after all.

Condemnation is deserved, in many directions. The Liberal senator’s question was facile. The minister failed to ensure an important Australian artist’s independence was protected. More embarrassingly still, Creative Australia failed to do this: if the arts leadership of this country won’t defend the complexity of art (or at least, given the mysterious silence around several aspects of the affair, is content to leave that impression), then who will?

Outside these individual failures, which are serious, the event tells us some disturbing things about this moment.

Underlying the episode is a misreading of the way art works: an assumption that art can and should be read literally. Art can have meaning, certainly, but that meaning is always shifting in the intimate exchange between a work and the person who experiences it. Art is very often about something, but to suggest that art says just one thing (in this case, that Sabsabi glorifies terrorism) is to mistake art for advertising.

What is particularly concerning is that we are making this mistake about art at the same time as we are making another serious mistake about politics; and that the two mistakes are inversions of each other.

In Donald Trump’s first term, his supporters told us to take the president seriously, but not literally. By now, there seems to be widespread acceptance that Trump’s stated intentions can be disregarded. As weeks go by, this seems an insidious form of denial. Trump is heading more firmly than before in the directions he has long indicated he wants to go: wrecking institutions, replacing stable alliances with an axis defined by strength and weakness, destroying the climate, harming immigrants.

We have reached a topsy-turvy place when we are being told to treat Trump, more or less, the way we used to treat art. The surface can be ignored; his words should be decoded for deeper meanings. Works of art, meanwhile, should be read only at their most superficial (and most damning) level.

A clue about the danger of this inversion lies in Trump’s treatment of Volodymyr Zelensky. He is, said Trump, a “dictator”. He should not, Trump told us, have started the war. This is Russian propaganda, now become American propaganda, designed to convince us that lies are true. As the writer Masha Gessen argued during Trump’s first term, drawing on George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, this is a defining feature of totalitarian regimes. As lies become the fabric of society, when statements both must be accepted and cannot be accepted, reality slides away.

Take the recent apparent use of Nazi salutes by Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, two of Trump’s best-known supporters. No, we are told, they were doing something else.

This is the landscape before us. At a moment when the most powerful people in the world are doing their best to destabilise reality, to make us distrust even what we see with our own eyes, the one group that has always had a responsibility to question the way power works – not by undermining reality but by forcing us to see it clearly – is being sidelined.

Artists are an easy target. As individuals, they have little power. If you want to misrepresent their work, who will stop you? But it is sad, because they so desperately want the rest of us to read their work properly, which is to say, with attention to the ambiguities it contains. Meanwhile, we have a powerful American president only too happy to be misread – and many are doing everything they can to help him.

The book mentioned above is Mao II, by Don DeLillo. In part, the novel is about the way that artists have become assimilated, made non-threatening, and what that means for society. DeLillo warns of the types of power that arrive to take their place.

Like Warhol’s pictures, and perhaps Sabsabi’s work, the book asks many questions around power and celebrity, dictatorships and democracies, propaganda, images and the different ways conformity is compelled in different societies.

They are questions worth thinking about – especially now. But not, it seems, in Australia.

Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

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