Race theory and other identity politics preached by woke art groups
Taxpayer money has been allocated to several arts groups who are putting on shows calling Australia fundamentally racist and saying we live with “white supremacist aggression.”
NSW
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Taxpayers have been slugged more than $2m to fund arts grants for groups that promote identity politics, embrace critical race theory beliefs that Australia is a “structurally racist nation’’ and, according to one prominent painter, often produce works that have “nothing to do with art as we understand it”.
The grants, which were given out by the Arts Council of Australia’s “Re-Imagine: Sector Recovery Initiatives” program, went to organisations that won out in a jargon-heavy application process that prioritised “equity and justice, mobility and exchange, resilience, health and wellbeing, leadership and digital”.
Victorian arts organisation Creatives of Colour, which received $100,000 in taxpayer funds, describes its mission on its website as “maintaining hope in the face of white supremacist oppression in the ‘Australian’ arts sector.”
Parramatta-based Diversity Arts Australia received $100,000. it describes itself as Australia’s “key organisation for cultural diversity and racial equity in the arts”. It last year published a book called After Australia, touted as an imagination of an “alternative Australia … after empire … colony (and) white supremacy”.
Melbourne-based organisation All The Queens Men received $50,000.
Describing itself as part performance art space and part social club, the organisation’s website promotes a “fabulous free monthly social event for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Gender Diverse, and Intersex elders and allies”.
NSW’s Performance Space received $45,000 for its program of works, which recently included a show called LIVE DREAMS: DESTROY. According to promotional material, the show “seeks to radically destabilise the present in a bold re-visioning of the future’’.
“Some of these works seek to overthrow colonial and patriarchal systems and present counter narratives to the dominant culture,’’ it says.
“Others re-map the body and ecology as sites of knowledge, and reinstate cultural, corporal and ancestral heritage. Across an evening of performances, presentations and provocations, LIVE DREAMS: DESTROY interrogates the potential for art to dismantle in order to incite eruption and reckoning.”
Award-winning Australian artist Tim Storrier was scathing of the grant handouts, saying: “Under the general accepted meaning of the term art, large numbers of these grants are given to stuff that has nothing to do with art as people understand it.
“It’s almost a Soviet idea, this thing,” said Mr Storrier, whose art career was launched when he won the prestigious Sulman Prize when he was just 19.
“What it effectively does is take the public out of the equation of what’s acceptable. The average punter wouldn’t put a thruppence to most of this stuff.”
According to Bella D’Abrera, Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute for Public Affairs: “The Australia Council of the Arts should not be using taxpayers’ money to fund Critical Race Theory.
“This dangerous idea, which claims that Australia is irredeemably racist, has no place in Australian society,’’ Ms D’Abrera added.
‘‘Mainstream Australians are egalitarian and do not want Critical Race Theory.
“The very existence of the ‘Re-Imagine Fund’ — through which millions of dollars have been siphoned from the taxpayer by the federal government to fund an array of divisive projects — shows that we now live in a divided nation.
‘‘We have millions of small businesses in Australia which are desperately trying to stay afloat, with people losing everything, yet we are funding organisations to tell us that we are all racists.”
This is not the first time that the Australia Council has courted public controversy.
In 2020, the funding body backed down on its pledge to pay a Melbourne performance artist $25,000 to livestream her self-insemination procedure in an act designed to “elevate the experience of queer reproduction and disrupt heteronormative parenting narratives”.
A spokesman for Arts Minister Paul Fletcher tried to distance the government from the furore, saying: “Australia Council funding decisions are made at arm’s length from government.”
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