Under the facade of ‘diversity’ lies the real problem in Australian arts

Anyone with any judgment would have avoided choosing an artist connected with the nations involved in the bitter Middle East conflict as Australia’s Venice Biennale representative. Can you imagine the apoplectic outrage if a Jewish artist had been selected?

Australia’s cancelled Australia’s Venice Biennale representative Khaled Sabsabi and his work You, in which he idealises the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah

The Australian artworld has been in turmoil for a couple of weeks, as readers will probably know, over the sudden cancellation of plans for the commonwealth to be represented at the Venice Biennale by the Lebanese-born artist Khaled Sabsabi. Open letters and petitions have been written, outrage has been freely vented and many virtual tears shed on social media. People are speculating about how and why events could have unfolded as they have, asking who pulled the strings, and demanding redress.

Sadly, many aspects of this story remind us what a small, parochial and self-satisfied world the Australian contemporary art establishment is. I couldn’t help thinking of those British crime series where gruesome murders unexpectedly happen in the kind of village where such things never really occur – places dominated by a stuffy old squire, a few rather vulgar newly rich upstarts, a neurotic clergyman and a gaggle of old gossips.

That’s not really so very different from our funded artworld, run by a tiny group of curators and academics and dealers and the pet artists they include in all their official exhibitions, carefully selected according to global fashion trends and what is quite literally called a “diversity grid”, a process that produces just the kind of outcome that you would imagine. And under the façade of “diversity” lies the reality of conformity, smugness and groupthink. Ideology is the great comfort of the conformist mind: no need to think for yourself when you just consult the checklist.

And this is what has led to the present crisis. Of course it is a catastrophe for the Australia Council, which – in case you missed this – was rebranded Creative Australia in 2023 because the appellation “creative” can include all the sub-artistic categories (advertising people, fashion designers, furniture designers) that our museums increasingly rely on to attract audiences with a diminishing capacity for the attention that art requires.

It is catastrophic for the culture of a country when its highest art funding body selects an individual for one of the most public and visible exhibitions in the world, and then decides or is compelled to back down on that choice less than a week later.

What does this say about the independence of arts funding from political interference?

What does it say about freedom of speech and artistic expression?

Clearly it is legitimate to be seriously concerned about these questions.

But in this case, as it happens, the catastrophe is entirely of Creative Australia’s own making. A bitter conflict is once again taking place in the Middle East and this time – far more than in earlier instances, and perhaps because it is drawing towards an endgame – it has had a poisonous effect on Australian culture, public discourse and individual behaviour. We are now seeing acts of vandalism and anti-Semitic slogans of a kind that would once have been unimaginable in our country. Islamic clerics are openly preaching hatred and violence; and this will as usual provoke an anti-Islamic backlash.

A still from Khaled Sabsabi's You, 2007. MCA.

Under these circumstances, anyone with any judgment would have avoided choosing an artist connected with the nations involved in the conflict. There would, needless to say, have been apoplectic outrage from the anti-Jewish mob in Australia if a Jewish artist had been selected for Venice.

And we should be clear: this has nothing to do with censorship, or limiting the right of artists to express their views; it is about an entirely different matter, the choice of an artist to represent our nation in a prominent international exhibition. In such a case it is not only appropriate but essential to ensure that the work selected can in some sense represent the nation, and certainly not divide it.

So what happened at Creative Australia?

Even before the Senate Estimates Committee hearing this week, it was clear that one of two things had gone wrong: either the staff or board hadn’t done their research properly and hadn’t taken the trouble to consider the record of their candidate, or that they had failed to understand the social and political implications of their choice. As was revealed during the Senate Estimates hearing, the debacle involved both of these things.

First of all, there was no investigation of the artist’s prior career. According to Collette’s testimony, he at least was unaware of an earlier work by Sabsabi, Thank You Very Much (2006), which features film footage of the September 11 attacks on New York. But the project officers handling this application had to know of what is in fact one of his most notorious pieces. The board was thus not properly briefed and apparently even misled by their own staff.

Meanwhile it turns out that Collette and the board did know about another work which appears to glorify the late Hassan Nasrallah, head of the terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which they considered “controversial” but evidently acceptable.

A woman holds a portrait of slain Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Iran's capital Tehran. Picture: AFP

In either case, we are forced to conclude that Creative Australia is fundamentally both incompetent and dysfunctional. Clearly research was superficial, but more importantly inherent ideological bias prevented staff at all levels and ultimately even the board from appreciating what the facts actually meant.

It is disturbing evidence of the alternative reality in which such official bodies exist that while the staff were seemingly pursuing an ideological agenda, even members of the board must have thought that the choice of a Lebanese artist, in the current circumstances, would be “edgy” and “challenging”.

Then their decision was announced in the real world, a world of daylight and common sense in which sympathising with terrorists is not edgy, it’s collusion in mass murder. It’s not “challenging” to advocate the obliteration of another people and their nation, like university crowds who chant “from the river to the sea”, it’s advocating genocide. Of course people were going to ask questions in the press and even in parliament; of course controversy would erupt and the government would be severely embarrassed.

Sabsabi is probably not personally a bad man, and I wrote about his work sympathetically in the Adelaide Biennale almost a year ago. It is understandable that he may have strong feelings about the devastating conflicts in the Middle East. But it is hard to see how he couldidealise the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, as he undoubtedly does in You: there is a limit to how much “ambiguity” can be read into an image of Nasrallah’s face suffused in light and multiplying as he claims victory in war over Israel. In reality Nasrallah was not only a terrorist murderer and a puppet of the oppressive Islamic Republic in Iran, but destabilised the government of Lebanon and brought death and destruction upon his own people. It is particularly difficult to understand this blindness considering that Sabsabi’s family migrated to Australia in 1978 to escape the Lebanese civil war.

Sabsabi had already boycotted the Sydney Festival in 2022 because it received modest funding from the Israeli embassy to help put on work by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Just a year ago, he was a signatory to a petition to cancel Israel’s participation in the 2024 Venice Biennale (“no Genocide Pavilion”) with an exhibition by Ruth Patir – a demand to which thousands of artists and others around the world enthusiastically added their endorsement, without any misgivings about suppressing artistic freedom.

This was another matter about which the Creative Australia Board, as it appears from the Senate Estimates Committee session, was not briefed by their staff, and one which, as I have been privately informed, particularly embarrassed and infuriated the government.

Now a new petition is demanding Sabsabi’s reinstatement on the grounds, naturally, of freedom of artistic expression. A number of Australian artists have signed both petitions, including Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, Hoda Afshar – whose ambivalence about the oppressive regime in her home country I pointed out in November 2023 – Richard Bell, Janet Burchill and Agatha Gothe-Snape, not to mention one of Australia’s Venice finalists, Hayley Millar Baker.

Artist Hoda Afshar. Picture: Saul Steed

Readers can make up their own minds whether individuals who can bring themselves to sign petitions upholding diametrically contradictory principles are culpable, disingenuous or just dense.

It is worth adding that, to his credit, the man who was to be commissioning curator for Sabsabi’s exhibition, Michael Dagostino, did not sign the original anti-Israel petition.

But back to Creative Australia, and to the question of how the choice of Sabsabi was made in the first place. If you read the various official statements, open letters, etc, you will repeatedly come upon language which implies objective and disinterested judgment, professional expertise, transparency and – perhaps the favourite, “rigorous process” or alternatively “robust process”. Sabsabi and Dagostino told The Saturday Paper, for example, that they were “selected through a rigorous process”. Whatever that process was, it doesn’t seem to have been quite robust enough to find out that Sabsabi had signed a petition that sought to deny Ruth Patir’s freedom of artistic expression while also being vehemently anti-Israel.

As a matter of fact, anyone who really understands how that “rigorous process” works knows that it results in the same small cabal of artists deciding on grants and appointments for each other. The process of peer assessment means that colleagues take turns funding each other, and as we have seen recently, this can lead to some very questionable outcomes, especially for smaller project grants, since the large company recurrent funding tends to be stable from year to year. In some cases, it can be little more than I leave the room while you look at my application, then you leave the room while I look at yours; all pretty robust and transparent.

A remarkable story by The Australian’s Yoni Bashan and Nick Evans reveals how these networks of mutual benefit function in practice.

It shows how various members of the Eleven Collective, founded by Sabsabi in 2016, have received around $1m in grants in the last few years, including, just to take one example, $71,000 to Hoda Afshar, half of which was assessed by two other artists in the collective. The article also reminds us that Hoda Afshar received a tax-free grant of $160,000 as Sydney Myer Creative Fellow in 2021, before expressing viciously anti-Semitic opinions on social media.

Sabsabi is also on the Board of the Biennale, which has just appointed another anti-Israel individual, Hoor al-Qasimi, as director of the next Biennale in 2026. We can look forward to another avalanche of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel propaganda next year.

But the real question is how artists, as in this case, find themselves on Creative Australia panels in the first place and are able to hand out money to their friends. Who gets picked and who is excluded? This is the root of the corruption and involves the complicity of Creative Australia staff who advise on the composition of panels and help their favourites – those of the same political beliefs – get into the system and wield power, as well as personally applying for and receiving grants. All of this snowballs towards a system that is increasingly dysfunctional and disconnected from any idea of serving and promoting Australian culture.

And who’s supposed to be in charge of our national arts funding body? At the time of the decisions in question, the board consisted of: Robert Morgan (chair); Wesley Enoch (deputy chair); Adrian Collette (CEO); Larissa Behrendt (who was not present in the meeting that decided to cancel the commission); Caroline Bowditch; Alexandra Dimos; Stephen Found; Rosheen Garnon; Amanda Jackes; Lindy Lee; Caroline Wood; Courtney Stewart; and Kitty Taylor. The decision to revoke the selection of Sabsabi was unanimous, although the following day Lindy Lee resigned from the board in hand-wringing contrition, though no doubt too late to save her reputation among her anti-Israel colleagues.

A few things spring to mind about the board’s composition. The first is its spectacular gender imbalance: nine women to four men.

A second is that it is so intellectually lightweight; there are several people with experience in administration and business, and some figures in the arts, but no one who could be expected to have vision at a national level. And much of the experience in the arts is in drama and music, but very little in the visual arts, apart from Lindy Lee – which also makes her position and role in this case all the more invidious.

These weaknesses both in intellectual calibre and aesthetic vision mean that the board is much more at the mercy of its arts officers than it should be; it is more or less obliged to accept advice which may be, as in this case, disastrously misguided and even ideological.

It is interesting to note that two of the principal officers involved have since resigned. This is probably a very good thing.

Many arts boards in Australia are weak and ineffectual, and the standard has undoubtedly declined over recent decades, partly because of compulsory DEI appointments.

The board of the Australia Council should be composed of eminent figures, including practitioners, art historians and thinkers.

Their duty is to oversee the operations of the council and if necessary rein in rogue staff and corrupt peer panels, to ensure that arts funding in Australia rewards excellence and the humane values of civility, tolerance and freedom, not work that overtly or covertly promotes poisonous and divisive ideologies.