Art has officially jumped the shark with Mount Gambier Council’s sculpture splurge | Caleb Bank

A small number of self-important, poncey ideologues have taken control of the arts and are trying to destroy our will to live one work at a time, writes Caleb Bond.

Where has all the good art gone?

Sometimes I look around and wonder where it all went wrong.

Am I out of touch or is it the rest of the world?

The answer, I suspect, is neither – most people seem to agree that art has gone to the dogs.

It’s just that a small number of self-important, poncey ideologues have taken control of the arts and are trying to destroy our will to live one work at a time.

Regular readers will know this is not my first such complaint but my ire was raised again last week when Mount Gambier Council decided to drop $136,250 on a blue sculpture that supposedly resembles a megafauna marsupial that would have roamed around the place thousands of years ago.

Might I suggest, based on the design for this sculpture, that the extinction of that animal was good for humanity.

It looks like a morose, fat old man – a cross between an aardvark and Quasimodo with a beer gut.

Surely this has to be a joke?

The proposed concept of the "bold and ambitious" piece designed to give Mount Gambier its own "iconic" artwork in the city's CBD. Picture: City of Mount Gambier/Huna Studios

The proposed concept of the "bold and ambitious" piece designed to give Mount Gambier its own "iconic" artwork in the city's CBD. Picture: City of Mount Gambier/Huna Studios

But it is so typical of much public art – it has some obscure meaning evident only to those whose brains have been moulded into mush by other whacko arty-farty types and is completely devoid of beauty.

Nevertheless, I had nearly let that go until I woke up on Thursday morning and read that the Western Australian Museum had acquired the vandalism of a great painting as though it were a piece of art itself.

“Art” has truly jumped the shark.

You may remember last year when Frederick McCubbin’s Down on His Luck – which depicts a sad swagman and has hung in the Art Gallery of Western Australia for 128 years – was spray painted with the Woodside Energy logo to protest the company’s operations in the Pilbara.

Artist Joana Partyka and Ballardong Noongar man Desmond Blurton protesting against Woodside’s Burrup Hub by spraypainting the company’s logo on the famous piece in the Art Gallery of WA last year.

The painting itself was thankfully unharmed as it was covered by perspex and the vandal activist was fined $2000 and ordered to pay $5000 in damages to the art gallery.

But the museum has now acquired the vandalised perspex because it is supposedly a piece of Australian history.

WA Museum chief executive Alec Coles said that “the museum documents the issues and events that affect our society” and “amongst its collections it has items from protests over many years, covering Aboriginal land rights, environmental protests, women’s rights, LBGTQI+ rights and many other issues”.

So the vandalism of a great piece of Australian art is now on the same level as women’s suffrage and the fight to decriminalise homosexuality?

You have to be kidding me.

This and the Mt Gambier sculpture have vandalism in common – of our public monies and spaces.

You are welcome to create weird stuff in your own time but why must the rest of us pay for it?

Originally published as Art has officially jumped the shark with Mount Gambier Council’s sculpture splurge | Caleb Bank