A little slow this week, mainly because no topic suggested itself with sufficient force to get me started. It really is remarkable how all the steam has gone out of politics now that the Morrison government has been evicted. Judging by the talent on the Opposition benches, and the kind of stuff they’ve been saying – trying to blame Labor for the countless disasters that have been fermenting over the past decade – things should stay respectable for a long time to come. When you have people like Lib senator Hollie Hughes complaining that kids at school are being force fed “John Keynes” rather than Adam Smith by Marxist teachers, you can can sample the quality of intellect. It’s staggering to thnk this crowd was running the country up until a few weeks ago. Really stupid people are fundamentally incurious because they believe they already know it all.
Looking back on the Libs’ legacy brings me to an interview in The Age this week, with new Arts Minister, Tony Burke, who lamented years of Coalition appointments to boards of cultural instititions and general neglect of the sector. It’s not news that the Libs treat such board appointments as thank-yous to political allies, donors, retired pollies, and so on. The end result is a series of boardrooms stuffed with self-serving types who know little about an institution. With the first glimmerings of knowledge they consider themselves to be experts. Labor has also been guilty of handing its mates such jobs in the past, but if the Minister is serious he’ll tidy up these haphazard appointments.
Burke also complained about the leaks in the roof of the National Gallery of Australia, and the way the Australian film industry has been turned into a workshop for foreign productions. The NGA roof is part of an ongoing maintenance saga that will never end, with a building that is widely despised, but adored by a few. Director, Nick Mitzevich, has made serious efforts to fix the roof and the windows, for which he deserves applause. It’s Nick’s taste for dubious, mega-expensive acquisitions that needs a little counselling.
As for the film industry, the most intractable issue is the quality of Australian movies. We make about 25-30 films per year, which is too few for a nation of this size, but only a handful of them ever make it to the cinema. Audiences have got to the point where the very idea that a film is Australian is enough to put them off. The solution is not to plunge ever deeper into politically correct, socially engaged themes: that’s part of the problem. We need to be able to tell all kinds of stories in a more effective fashion, and we need directors who are cinema-literate in the manner of the French New Wave directors. I’m not expecting we unearth a Truffaut or a Godard, but there must be a lot of raw talent that would benefit from a greater sense of movie history.
There was a rumour that Labor would have a Ministry of Culture rather than a Ministry for the Arts, and I’m sorry that never eventuated. “Culture” has a more serious, grass-roots significance, whereas “the Arts” can be frivolous. Labor should not be frightened of the more portentous word. We all dabble in the arts according to our tastes, but culture is something in which everyone has a stake, simply through their membership of a community.
Don’t be timid, Tony, Australian culture requires more repair work than the NGA’s roof!
The art column this week looks at Colin Lanceley: Earthly Delights, at the National Art School Gallery. This is an overdue survey of the work of an original, influential artist who should be better remembered. I know I say this all the time, but the Art Gallery of NSW needs to take better custodianship of local artists and their legacies, rather than leaving everything to venues such as the NAS or the S.H.Ervin Gallery. Lanceley’s vibrant, joyous work may seem out-of-step with the miserabilist tendencies of the present day, but that’s all the more reason for giving it some space.
The movie being reviewed is Lost Illusions, Xavier Giannoli’s surprisingly successful adaptation of one of Balzac’s greatest novels. A book so packed with plots, subplots, authorial interventions, asides, aphorisms and displays of encyclopaedic knowledge, should defeat any director or scriptwriter, but Giannoli makes a better fist of the task than I would have believed possible. Maybe we should ask him to take a look at the Australian film industry.