If there was ever an elephant in the room it’s the ABC’s new TV arts program, Art Works. Having watched the program on iview, and feeling completely astonished by its unique blend of intellectual vacuity and political correctness, I was interested to see what kind of responses it’s gathered in the media so far. The answer: after four weeks there is a lone, gushing review at The Conversation by Julian Meyrick, a professor of Creative Arts from Griffith University. That review has been reprinted a few times, most notably on a site called eminetra, where it gets hilariously garbled.
As it’s a simple matter to cut & paste an article I can’t understand how a piece of writing could be so comprehensively lost in translation (English into gobbledegook). The very first tortured sentence of the Meyrick review reads:
Critically discussing art in the contemporary era is like walking across a minefield blindfolded while juggling bowling balls and lugging an anvil.
The eminetra translation reads:
A critical discussion of contemporary art is like walking in a blindfolded minefield while juggling a bowling ball and pulling an anvil.
Meyrick writes:
Cleave to the moderate middle and you lose everything that makes art special (when it is special).
His interpreter writes:
Cleavage in the right middle loses everything that makes art special (in special cases)
And on and on. Host Namilla Benson gets a gender reassignation in the ‘translated’ article. Some of the other notable moments include (original first):
Jack Charles was a pottery teacher before becoming an actor, and Benson joins him while he sits at his wheel.
Which becomes:
Jack Charles was a pottery teacher before becoming an actor, and Benson joins him while he sits on his handle.
Earrings are mentioned:
Benson, now wearing earrings the size of unstrung tennis rackets.
This becomes:
Currently, I am wearing earrings that do not have a tennis racket.
The temptation is to quote the entire article, but I’ll settle for just one more bit – the ending. The original goes as follows:
I immediately called up my 17-year-old art student son and told him to watch it
The revised version reads:
I immediately called my 17-year-old art student’s son and told him to watch it.
Pardon me for dragging on with this, but I haven’t laughed so much in years. The joke takes a final twist when one sees, beneath the article, a big blue logo that reads:
This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.
Does Judith Neilson actually know where and how her money is being spent? First we had the bizarre episode of four out of five young writers hired as baby arts writers by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age (with Neilson funds) pulling out because they suddenly realised none of them were indigenous. Now Judith appears to be bankrolling a completely illiterate, unedited website that takes an article written in clear English and turns it into a comedic masterpiece of pidgin. I fail to see how any of this advances the quality of journalism in Australia.
It was a great idea and a fantastic benefaction to put money behind journalism but the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas needs to answer some serious questions about their programs. Such as: Who the hell decided to give someone money to post incomprehensible reprints of unremarkable puff pieces? It’s a story worthy of a serious piece of investigative journalism.
I’ll save any thoughts on Art Works for another occasion, although I feel a certain urgency because I suspect the program won’t be around for long. On the other hand, given the prevailing mentality at ABC Arts, if a program like this fails to win an audience the producers will probably argue it was just too good and innovative, and give it another couple of seasons. They might also complain about attacks from terrible conservative commentators but to back up such an argument they’d need more feedback than one friendly notice in The Conversation.
This week’s art column is back in Adelaide, for the Ramsay Art Award, which attracted 350 entries this year, in its third iteration. The Ramsay has very quickly become a big favourite with artists under 40, partly because it comes with a $100,000 first prize, but mostly because it puts one into a special club of ‘artists to watch’. The Art Gallery of South Australia was in an ecstatic mood last weekend, with huge attendances for their Clarice Beckett show and a very positive buzz surrounding the Ramsay.
The show, as always with these things, has its good points and bad points, but I gradually came around to the belief that this year’s winner, Kate Bohunnis, is destined for success. Cézanne always claimed that being a good artist was chiefly a matter of temperament, and this is precisely the quality one finds in Bohunnis.
Speaking of temperament, there can hardly be anyone, anywhere, to match Otto Rehhagel, the German coach that steered Greece through to an historic victory in the 2004 European Football Championships. I felt I had no choice this week but to review Christopher André Marks’s King Otto, a documentary that takes viewers on the long, emotional rollercoaster ride that sees the Greeks go from being the laughing stock of the soccer world to miraculous champions. There’s a lot more to this film that football. It’s a lesson for our times about what can be achieved if we start acting positively to solve real problems rather than wallowing in the mind-forged idiocies of identity politics.
As Archibald season has now begun once more, I’m including a blog on the Packing Room Prize, including some first impressions of the main attraction. It’s the 100th anniversary of the Archibald Prize and by now I feel I’ve seen more than my fair share.