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Indeed, few countries do artrage better than Australia. It’s been a half-century since the ­National Gallery of Australia purchased Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles, and still strong feelings reverberate; recall the protests and vandalism in 1997 that broke over National Gallery of Victoria’s exhibition of Andres Serrano’s Immersion (Piss Christ); “pornographic” nudes by Norman Lindsay in the 1940s scandalised the country; and photographer Bill Henson’s cancellation over his art images of young models (then-prime minister Kevin Rudd called them “absolutely revolting”) was front-page news. Indigenous art, too, has been in the spotlight,  resulting in a continuing ethical debate around who can and cannot tell Aboriginal stories.

The situation has never been more heated than during the past year: drama continues to swirl around the choice of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale. Funding body Creative Australia selected Sasabi, then sensationally dumped him a week later when concerns were raised in the federal parliament’s question time. Of particular interest were two works: Thank You Very Much, a video that uses 9/11 footage of a plane crashing into New York’s Twin Towers and former US president George W. Bush thanking first responders, and  YOU, a 2007 work featuring imagery of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. A backlash from the arts community led to resignations within CA and accusations of censorship. Following an independent review, Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino were reinstated, with CA apologising for the “hurt and pain” caused. Amid the controversy, an exhibition of Sabsabi’s work at Monash Gallery in Melbourne was “postponed”, then reinstated. This month the artist again made headlines when he was awarded a $100,000 grant from CA. In May next year Sabsabi’s Venice show will go to the Biennale – the world’s most prestigious art event – as likely one of its most controversial openings.

The Israel-Gaza conflict has divided the art world. A ­notable casualty in Australia has been the partnership of “kingmaker” gallerist Anna Schwartz and pre-eminent performance artist Mike Parr. Their 36-year professional relationship ended reportedly with a two-sentence email from Schwartz to Parr after his performance commenting on ­Israel’s involvement in the war in Gaza. During the third leg of his show Sunset Claws last year at Schwartz’s Melbourne gallery, Parr painted words – including “ethnic cleansing”, “Palestine” (as well as “Hamas raped women and cut off the heads of babies”) – on a wall, before splattering the lettering in red paint. Schwartz said Parr had breached her trust.

“I was sickened by the hate graffiti inscribed on the wall. However I in no way intervened nor censored Sunset Claws,” she said. “I have always acted in the interest of the artists ­represented by the gallery and this is the only time an artist has breached my principles of anti-racism.”

“Everything is art. Everything is politics,” said Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei. But what that means in a democracy, where institutions and artists in some cases are funded by the public purse, is a complex matter. What is the role of public galleries in commissioning and showing art that asks difficult questions of its audiences? Further, can (and should) cultural institutions simultaneously be defenders of creative freedom and strongholds of social justice?

Critic and former head of Australian art at the NGA John McDonald says the rise of cancel culture has complicated the nature of art institutions, which are suffering an identity crisis.

“Do art museums have to be quite so obsessed with making us into better people?” he says.

While there is a proud history of radical art in Australia, he says, there is a fine line between making work designed to ­offend and intended to challenge.

“It’s ridiculous to exhibit art simply to shock. But if a gallery director or curator genuinely believes in the importance of a controversial work, one would hope they had the courage of their convictions,” he says.

“If we believe it’s one of the functions of contemporary art to challenge conventions and complacently held beliefs, ­museums cannot avoid showing provocative works.”

McDonald says the new paradigm has also complicated criticism. “What makes matters so tricky today is the schizoid nature of a public culture that is by turns libertarian and puritanical,” McDonald says. “This means that every instance of censorship is loudly decried by press and public. It’s considered impossible to be mildly critical of any artist who happens to be Indigenous, gay, or even female.”

The Australian’s art critic Christopher Allen says programming at major institutions has suffered in recent decades as the role of directors has shifted from a focus on art scholarship to administration.

“Most of our major gallery directors are bureaucrats for the most part, and they have very little passion and even less ­vision for art,” he says. “The result is that they follow fashion slavishly, including political fashion, which currently is woke­ism in its various guises. But they would never take the risk of showing anything really dangerous today – anything that seems to question the sacred cows of transgender, Aboriginal or Islamic (culture).

“(Major galleries) essentially follow money and fashion, and woke kitsch is just a way of making that ugly reality more palatable, like spraying eau-de-cologne over a cesspit.”

University of Melbourne associate professor and former arts administrator Jo Caust, however, identifies a different ­explanation for the shift. The decline in government funding for public galleries in past decades has meant more private and commercial investment in cultural institutions, she says, while audience habits have changed amid the digital revolution.

Caust cites the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia’s recent decision to charge an entry fee. “Institutions face great pressure to increase visitation and to increase the earned income – be it though sponsorship or retail,” she says. “Galleries and museums are these days very much focused on earning income … so they necessarily are playing to a broader audience. Further, there is now a social expectation to cater to a more diverse audience, related to a recognition that Australia is not a monoculture. People are not just interested in high western European art.”

Caust says audience habits have changed, too, as technology has taken hold.

“Audiences perhaps are no longer (passive), in a sense. They want to be entertained and engaged.”

Artist and academic Julie Rrap says the real question is what radical art actually means.

“I think ‘radical’ is a pretty slippery term to use for art practice … (there is a difference between) provocation and perhaps what we might term radical art,” she says.

“In order to be radical, art needs to shift the dial … so it’s relative and contextual. I often put the question another way and ask what is ‘risk’ in art practice today?

As for politics informing art, Caust says it has “always been a political battleground”. 

That may be so, but would any major institution have the intestinal fortitude to re-program, say, a Piss Christ, the photograph of a small plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine? 

One art figure in Australia is better placed than most to ­answer that question. Art Gallery of South Australia director Jason Smith was a young curator at the NGV when the ­Serrano work was exhibited. 

“Oh, Piss Christ is so cancellable,” Smith says, smiling. “But I’d still program it. I mean, Serrano is a really interesting artist. It’s such a volatile image. But in context, a work like that requires intelligent frameworks. The question directors need to ask themselves is ‘Have you just stuck this piece in the middle of a wall, and allowed people encounter it without any context?’ That’s an abrogation of your responsibilities. 

“Establishing the context is everything, and I know that sounds boring and bureaucratic and epidemic, but it’s true.  We can’t call ourselves socially engaged education institutions if we don’t actually take that mandate seriously.”

In 1997, when the NGV programmed Serrano’s controversial artwork, it knew a storm was brewing, but could never have predicted the damage it would wreak.  Catholic leaders, led by archbishop George Pell sought a Supreme Court injunction to ban the work on the basis of blasphemous libel or indecency. Justice David Harper refused it. Protesters took matters into their own hands, and violence ensued. A patron attempted to remove the work, then two teenagers attacked it with a hammer. Citing concerns for the safety of staff and the public, then-NGV director Timothy Potts closed the exhibition. Supporters of the artist viewed the gallery’s action as censorship. 

The NGA courted controversy last year when director Nick Mitzevich revealed its most expensive commission, Lindy Lee’s $14 million sculpture Ouroboros. Allen, in these pages, described the 4m-high 3D steel infinity symbol as “an absurd sum to pay for a work of debatable value”. But that rebuke had nothing on the criticisms that continue to echo from the 1973 purchase of Blue Poles by NGA founding director James Mollison and then prime minister Gough Whitlam. The $1.3m purchase price ($13.7m in today’s money) was, then, a record for an American painting. Blue Poles is now reportedly estimated to be worth $500m. In 2017, Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson lobbied to cash it in, saying despite those figures: “It’ll only be worth something to taxpayers when we sell it.”

Ironically, artists themselves are often the ones lost in the arguments over controversial works. Sabsabi has kept a low profile over the ongoing Biennale controversy. Some of the work of one of the country’s best-known artists, Patricia Piccinini,  has variously been described as “ugly”, “degrading” and “offensive”. While she respects audiences’ right to interpret it any way they choose, she doesn’t always understand it.

Best known for her transgenic works, she is perhaps infamous for two giant mammalian hot air balloons, Skywhale and Skywhalepapa, owned by the NGA. Skywhale ignited public opinion – it was pejoratively nicknamed “Hindenboob” – when it launched in 2013.

“I don’t set out to (disgust) people,” Piccinini, who has represented Australia at the Venice Biennale, said in 2017.

“My creations are fairly benign in comparison to much in the natural world. I don’t understand why people find them disgusting because, actually, I try to make them as beautiful as possible.” 

Every major gallery has had its moment, but Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art courts artrage like no other. The self-described sex and death museum built in 2011 on the banks of the Derwent River by millionaire gambler David Walsh has almost single-handedly changed the face of tourism in Tasmania. Its annual visitations far exceeded expectations – climbing well over 1.35 million annually in its first few years of operation – as people flocked to the sprawling Nonda ­Katsalidis-designed bunker to witness some of the country’s edgiest art.

MONA’s list of controversial hits is as long as the Derwent itself: Cloaca Professional, a working “poo machine” that makes a synthesised bowel movement on the floor of the gallery; a famous wall of carved vulvae; the human statue – Tattooed Tim – commissioned to sit unmoving on a plinth for eight hours a day for eight months; Juan Davila’s The Arse End of the World, reimagining explorers Burke and Wills in their final days, the latter engaging in a sexual act with a kangaroo, the former, naked and with an erection, giving the finger to the viewer. MONA has always aimed to shock.

In 2013, Dark Mofo – the museum’s midwinter festival – was born, and things became edgier, with commissions including the burial for three days of 73-year-old Parr beneath Hobart’s main street  (there was public outcry over traffic concerns, not the artist’s safety); the placement of gargantuan illuminated inverted crosses – interpreted by many as a Satanic symbol (Christian groups called them “highly offensive”), and Austrian artist Hermann Nitsch’s 150.Action, a six-hour orgiastic live opera featuring 500 litres of bovine blood wherein disciples were mock-crucified against a freshly slain bull carcass. Protesters failed to shut it down; picketers attempted to block entry. Said one protester: “Sick bastards slaughtering animals and covering yourselves in blood … You’re a disgrace to ­humanity and an insult to true artists.” Outrage, said Walsh at the time, “is good for business”. 

Nothing was off limits. Until in 2021 Spanish artist Santiago Sierra was commissioned as Dark Mofo’s headline act. His work Union Flag called for Indigenous Tasmanians to donate their blood, which would fill a bucket into which the titular flag – a symbol of colonisation – would be submerged. Outrage was immediate and brutal. Indigenous groups suggested they had spilt enough blood, demanding the work be cancelled.

Initially, Walsh and then Dark Mofo director Leigh Carmichael refused to blink. Eventually, they cancelled the work; the festival very nearly suffered the same fate. MONA conceded, but in so doing moved closer to that place against which it had always rebelled: the mainstream.  Said Carmichael in the wake of the controversy in 2022: “I have been left wondering about where the place is in Australia that might program confronting works. If  not us, then who?” It’s a question that still resonates.

MONA, of course, is no stranger to near-death experiences.  One of its earliest controversies, My Beautiful Chair, re-created the experience of assisted dying in a household living room in a work developed by sculptor Greg Taylor and euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke. 

The artwork re-created the experience of Nitschke’s ­euthanasia device “Deliverance Machine”, legal in the Northern Territory from 1995 to 1997, using a computer interface to confirm an individual’s intent to die through a series of questions. Rather than administering a lethal injection, the artwork concludes with a screen displaying the message: “You are now dead.”

Art imitating death might sound like a portentous notion for the future of the sector, but surely the tumultuous political climate is fertile ground for new radical art?

McDonald isn’t so sure. “One is left wondering what would qualify nowadays as a confronting work of art. It would have to be something that cut against the grain of the prevailing political orthodoxies that have coalesced into a solid block of niceness,” he says. 

“There is an obvious role for works that satirise the saccharine delusions of current political thinking on the left, and the authoritarian postures of the right.

“In an age of extremes, a truly provocative work of art would challenge political cliches rather than reinforce them. 

“What we need is an injection of fearless, savage humour to restore some healthy controversy to the po-faced, ultra-cautious realm of contemporary art. 

“But don’t go holding your breath in anticipation.”