Merit not race should rule our arts policy

A Sally Gabori painting in the National Gallery of Victoria.

Lesser mortals might think it could not be done, but the recently released “Revive” report proves otherwise. Tapping an impressive list of the nation’s finest minds, the government has managed to produce a 110-page cultural policy that entirely ignores merit, artistic value and aesthetic excellence.

Of course, that omission doesn’t stop the policy from announcing a bewildering range of initiatives. Whether they will generate anything worth seeing, hearing or reading is hard to say; what is certain is that scores of commonwealth arts funding bodies are set to change their name, while experiencing more subdivisions than an ooze of overfed amoebas.

Even parsing the document carefully, it isn’t easy to understand the rationale underpinning this severe bout of organisational incontinence.

Anthony Albanese and Tony Burke attend the launch of Labor’s national cultural policy at The Esplanade Hotel in Melbourne’s St Kilda. Picture: NCA NewsWire / David Geraghty

To take just one example, the policy recognises, in tones mingling disappointment with surprise, that “managers, record labels and publishers have been more successful at identifying and promoting new artists and voices than government institutions”. The private sector has, in other words, done it better; if so, one might suggest, let it get on with the job.

But no, two new taxpayer-funded entities, Music Australia and Writers Australia, will be established. “Deliberately designed to reach into the commercial sectors”, the new entities will, the document promises, “become those sectors’ policy engines”. Quite what that means, if anything, is (no doubt wisely) left unsaid; but it is hard to resist sending an urgent telegram to the managers, record labels and publishers these “policy engines” will target: start worrying, details follow.

Nor do the difficulties end there. If there is an identifiable core to the document, it is its headline theme, endlessly repeated, of First Nations First.

That snappy title encompasses a plethora of initiatives, a few worthwhile, many highly questionable. However, what the policy, like its equally woeful Coalition predecessor, singularly fails to do is to carefully define its terms. Instead, it systematically conflates First Nations art, in the sense of art that perpetuates Indigenous artistic traditions, with First Nations artists. The distinction matters because many outstanding Indigenous creators produce works that make little or no use of Indigenous materials, techniques and iconography.

Take 16 artists of Indigenous origin who would be familiar to observers of today’s Australian art scene: Karla Dickens, Katie West, Jazz Money, Dean Cross, Kaylene Whiskey, Elisa Jane Carmichael, Heather Douglas, Yhonnie Scarce, Otis Hope Carey, James Tylor, Lorraine Connelly-Northey, Jonathan Jones, Reko Rennie, Tony Albert, Wanapati Yunupinu and Christian Thompson.

While there are clearly judgments involved, it is reasonable to say that only five of those artists (Douglas, Carey, Connelly-Northey, Jones and Yunupinu) place substantial reliance on Indigenous iconography – and even then their works are significantly shaped by techniques, materials and images that didn’t figure in the traditional repertoire. As for the others, they can be described only as contemporary Australian artists, whose broad approach is difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from that of their non-Indigenous counterparts.

A woman looks at painting White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) by Mark Rothko.

To say that is not to suggest their background plays no role in their work; art always expresses an artist’s experience.

But there is a world of difference between recognising that Marc Chagall, Man Ray and Mark Rothko were profoundly affected by their Judaism and proclaiming, Nazi-style, that their work is “Jewish art”.

Nor does the similarity between the work of the artists listed above and that of their non-Indigenous counterparts amount to a criticism: the same could be said of Sally Gabori, who was surely one of Australia’s greatest contemporary painters. Indeed, the extraordinary originality of Gabori’s work, which bears no resemblance to Kaiadilt iconography, is an unmistakeable sign of her genius.

Sally Gabori.

What the commonality of aesthetic reference does mean, however, is that there is no reason why those artists should be treated differently from other Australian artists. Contemporary art is contemporary art, and if government assistance is to be provided it should be allocated on the basis of merit, not of race or ethnicity. It is the quality of artists’ work, not the colour of their ancestors’ skin, that deserves to weigh in the balance.

But the rhetoric of identity is far more convenient for bureaucrats than the harsh test of talent; it is simpler to determine whether an artist is Indigenous than it is to assess whether they know how to paint. And as well as exempting the funding bodies from having to exercise intellectual and aesthetic judgment – which might lead to the elitism the document scorns – the illusion that cultural policy will redeem the nation’s past sins allows arts administrators to position themselves on a moral high ground that criticisms of their actual decisions cannot reach.

All that would be of little importance were it simply a question of wasting a few dollars; compared with the follies currently afoot, the sums involved wouldn’t even count as small change.

But as philosophers have known for centuries, there is a difference between “natural kinds” – the terms we attach to elements of the natural world – and “human kinds”, which are the labels we give social phenomena.

Call a type of bird whatever name you like and that won’t alter its behaviour; but devise labels such as yesterday’s “primitive artists”, who were to be pitied, or today’s “First Nations artists”, who are to be privileged, and you conjure social cleavages out of a shared humanity.

In the end, what is wrong with the segregationist approach is not just that it will fund bad art; it is that it ignores, and potentially undermines, one of Australia’s greatest achievements – an achievement that the aesthetic commonality between the work of our contemporary Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists strikingly highlights. What we have created is not a multicultural society; it is a society of multicultural individuals, whose intellectual and aesthetic frame of reference vastly transcends their origins.

For sure, we each have roots; but unlike trees, we also have feet to walk, eyes to see and ears with which to hear, allowing us to forge something entirely new from the richness that surrounds us.

That, in a fundamental sense, is what culture is about. We think of it as referring to the past – as an inheritance.

But the word derives from the future participle of the Latin verb colere, which means the growing that will be done on this ground in the time ahead. “Revive” will not breathe even greater life into that common ground, helping secure its fruits for the generations to come; rather, by splintering it into fractured terrain, it will breed division, resent­ment and – worst of all – a culture of pretentious mediocrity.