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Keating, a rusted-on luvvie, leaves a legacy
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Guy Rundle’s extraordinarily robust assault on Paul Keating’s cultural cred was irritating and thrilling by turns. Irritating because of his doctrinaire dismissal of Keating’s ideas on creativity as being what you’d expect from a self-taught arts tragic who never had Guy’s formal grounding in the humanities. And thrilling because he spoke so much truth about how Keating allowed an odd combination of hard-nosed economic philosophy and personal aesthetic taste to dictate his government’s approach to arts patronage. First the irritating bits — tut tut, Paul, for being an uppity Westy who had to earn a crust as a clerk at the Sydney County Council instead of submitting to the rigours of life on campus where you would have had drummed into you Adorno’s dictum about “no lyric poetry after Auschwitz”. Give us a break, Guy. Reminding us that there were orchestras in the death camps in order to condemn Keating’s alleged “uncritical celebration of high culture” is as preposterous (although nowhere near as obscene) as Keating comparing Geoffrey Tozer’s death to the bombing of Dresden. Yep, we get the point that loving beauty doesn’t make you a beautiful person and that evil people can like beauty, too, but does that mean we should shun all beautiful things? Just because the Nazis were a bunch of sickoes who used fine music as a form of torture, why should we stop enjoying the works of great composers? Where would that leave all those Jewish fans of Wagner (Holocaust survivors and descendants among them) who travel the world to witness performances of the avowed anti-Semite’s Ring cycle? I don’t like Charles Saatchi and the rest of the monied crowd in the art market but should I stop liking contemporary art? While Keating is certainly a rusted-on arts luvvie, do we really know that his embrace of so-called high culture is without reservation? Keating being as stridently opinionated as he is, it’s almost guaranteed that he has intense likes and dislikes when it comes to classical music and anything else that would go under the banner of high culture. And what is this high culture thing anyway? In 15 years of arts reporting, I’ve only ever known it to be used as a term of derision by people who have an axe to grind about traditional forms of art. When it comes to “ridiculous false dichotomies” that really takes the biscuit. But Rundle is absolutely spot on in bringing attention to “the sort of world that Keating had done so much to create, a world of marketised outcomes and benchmarks”. The economic rationalism that Keating imposed on the nation as a whole was also at the core of his Creative Nation arts policy, unveiled in 1994, although much of the arts community lacked the political nouse to see it. To steal a favourite Keating turn of phrase, most people in the arts allowed themselves to be duchessed well and truly. Crikey reader Jack Robertson, writing on the website in response to Rundle’s piece, gave an eye-watering but astute account of how Keating’s seduction of the creative crowd continued a Labor tradition dating back to Whitlam’s It’s Time campaign. “Lick arty bum and reap the re-broadcast returns over generations, across media, into all demographics. And really, artists, so fragile, so needy, so isolated, are about the easiest lot of all to hustle politically, they’re so desperate to buy into the soft whispered, back-room power play bulldust, the feeling of being part of a grown-up, real world adventure.” And they were made to feel grown up because, under Creative Nation, what had long been referred to as the arts community rebranded as the “creative industries”. As I remember saying at the time, the danger of a Labor government calling you an industry is that a Liberal government will treat you like one. But the arts didn’t have to wait for a change of government. As Deakin University academics Dr Katya Johanson and Hilary Glow have noted, the Creative Nation document was explicit in emphasising “the importance of the arts sector understanding the industrial context within which it must operate in a climate of reduced government expenditure. Instead of relying on the state purse, the arts must now increasingly look to private sponsorship, audience development, linkages with broadcasting technologies, and international marketing strategies.” Creative Nation was also about picking winners. Let’s not forget the dreaded Major Organisations Board, better known by its unfortunate but appropriate acronym, the MOB. Companies lucky enough to be backed by the MOB were given the security of triennial funding while the rest had to live with the uncertainty of going cap in hand every year. While there were some very odd and controversial exceptions to the rule, most arts companies were granted MOB funding simply because they were big, and bigness tended to mean traditional, which just happened to reflect the tastes of a certain French clock-collecting Mahler-loving political patron. By guaranteeing the major companies a large chunk of the Australia Council’s budget, Creative Nation undermined the system of peer assessment, which had long been the model for federal arts funding. That wouldn’t have upset Paul Keating; he’s been quoted as describing peer assessment as “a form of peer group pass-the-parcel”. While there were muffled complaints about Creative Nation at the time, the arts sector (nee community) was, in the main, effusive in its praise and gratitude. And in the decade and a half since there hasn’t been much serious reflection about Keating’s legacy. Perhaps it’s not surprising arts folk have such fond memories of Keating given what came after him. Leaving aside his old-fashioned tastes and regrettable tendency to anoint winners, at least Keating wanted to be seen as an impresario of culture, whereas John Howard, the maestro of the dog whistle, allowed his colleagues to demonise the arts as elitist. However, there were some prominent voices in the arts prepared to challenge the pro-Keating consensus. Speaking in 2002. the late Donald Horne, who chaired the Australia Council in the late ’80s, described Creative Nation as “a mishmash of glitz and technocracy”. But, hell, what’s Horne’s opinion worth in the (Rundle) scheme of things? Like Keating, everything the degreeless Horne knew about culture, he taught himself. |
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15 Comments
May we know the name of the author of the above bilge? And thanks for the useless information that Donald Horne did not have a university education.
Surely the whole point of Paul Keating was that he did know the difference between a Molière and a Michaelangelo. That he knows the difference between Herbert von Karajan and the kid with musical aspirations at the local high school.
The Labor Party, once it gets into power, tends to produce top notch PMs. The names Curtin, Whitlam, Keating and possibly Rudd are to be proud of.
The only Liberal PM to do any good was Harold Holt. He saved the Australian Ballet Company from going down the gurgler. In Menzies we had a banal man who was constantly on his knees worshipping the foreign royals, in John Grey Gorton we had a PM who was paralytic with drink, on one memorable occasion he even vomited over the passengers in the first class section of an aeroplane. Then we had the awesomely ordinary, halitosis-ridden, socks and sandals wearing, John Howard. A man who left the Liberals high and dry after screwing the electorate for eleven years.
Paul Keating may have had his faults but it leaves him crossing the finishing-line when all his detractors are still in the starting stalls.
“Just because the Nazis were a bunch of sickoes who used fine music as a form of torture, why should we stop enjoying the works of great composers?
Where would that leave all those Jewish fans of Wagner (Holocaust survivors and descendants among them) who travel the world to witness performances of the avowed anti-Semite’s Ring cycle?”
I rather think you’ve missed the point here. Of course we can still enjoy the work of great composers. One can even still enjoy the music of Wagner, while recognising his anti-semitism.
What we can no longer hold to is a certain naive humanist idea of cultural progress. Pre World War II Germany was probably the most culturally sophisticated nation in Europe. This sophistication did nothing to prevent Germany from engaging in acts of the most appalling barbarity.
Venise, for goodness sake. The writer is Stephen Feneley - some glitch has vanished his name. If you had read Guy’s essay you would see that the point about Donald Horne is pertinent. Anyway, Stephen does not say Donald didn’t have an education, he said he was “degreeless”. I could go on…
Caffeine Addict: Pre WWII Germany-especially Berlin-was also one of the most degenerate societies in the world. As soon as the Nazis and Adolf Hitler got into power the depravity altered shape a little bit but it continued to exist.
Finally it resulted in what the world was to know as the Holocaust. Why should cultural sophistication become degenerate barbarity? But it did. Strange.
DIANA GRIBBLE: And my exact words were “And thanks for the useless information that Donald Horne did not have a ‘university’ education. You may be the publisher of Crikey Ms Gribble, but I wouldn’t want you as a proof-reader.
BTW: Guy Rundle is one of my favourite writers. If you do not believe me go to my tweet bio. It was written a few months ago.
In tghe reat mission to write as much as possible before the deadline hits (giving the ‘editor’ no time to, well, edit) Rundle often garbles his own logic. Eg here’s what he says about why Tozer shouldn’t have been given a grant
‘The truth is that Tozer may have had a happier and more fulfilled life as a repetiteur or pro pianist than as a genius, better off in the pit than on the pedestal.’
An interesting assumption about how imperfection should be rewarded. Then he has another go:
‘There’s a deeper irony here as well — Tozer couldn’t function in the sort of world that Keating had done so much to create, a world of marketised outcomes and benchmarks, indicators and bottom lines.’
Precisely we he was given a grant instead of being dropped in the pit.
Oh yes, and never bring the Nazis into anything
Sorry for the tedious typos: should have been
In the great mission etc etc
Caffeineadditct, like Guy Rundle, feels it necessary to give me a dose of Philosophy 101 to dissuade me from a view I’ve never held. And I’m not sure its fair to say that Keating has an unqualified commitment to a “certain naive humanist idea of cultural progress”.
Knowing Keating, it’s probably a lot simpler than that - he simply likes music by various great (and mostly dead) composers and wants the rest of the community to share his passion. If he had a naive faith in cultural progress, his taste in music would be more up to date and he’d be a big fan of installation art and so on but, instead, he’s an unabashed old-fashioned guy and not one of those up-to-the-minute fashion creeps who infest the contemporary art world.
What is this tendency in cultural debate in Australia to create straw men and to resort to off-the-shelf theory to make a point?
Just because someone believes, as Keating obviously does, that an appreciation of art is worth fostering in the broader community, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have an unerring faith in art’s ability to improve all people, or that an appreciation of art is in and of itself a means of making the world a more civil or less brutal place.
There are many other reasons for putting art on the public policy agenda - pure pleasure, intellectual sitmulation, provocation, economic spin-off (although that’s the least of my priorities and, regrettably, too high up in the priorities of the state).
You don’t need reminders of the death camps to know that abominable people can be into art; just go to the Melbourne art fair.
If I allowed my interest in art to be tainted by my opinion of people who share my interest, I would have run screaming for the exits long ago.
I am going on with this only because it would have amused D R Horne to find a discussion of the education of young Donald in Crikey. In fact he was a notorious Sydney University student and editor of Honi Soit, but he never graduated. Hence Stephen Feneley’s carefully chosen “degreeless”.
Wasn’t the point of Guy’s column that the kind of rewards that Keating put into place assumed that Great Art is created by Promethean figures in attics? It’s a view shared by a depressingly large proportion of the supposedly culturally educated - particularly in the media. I have found that in interviews about genuinely collaborative work that the notion of multiple ‘authors’ just does not compute. There is always an attempt to dig out a principal artist or a leader. Yet it’s actually quite hard (at least in the performing arts) to find young artists who don’t think that working alone is a bit sad. And these aren’t Stephen’s ‘up-to-the-minute fashion creeps’ but everyone from the rarified My Darling Patricia physical theatre group to the creators of the Saw movie ‘franchise’. Guy’s argument - in my interpretation of its Baroque involutions - was that the power of Keating’s personal taste has left a kind of residue that has prevented cultural policy from catching up with reality.
Stephen: “Just because someone believes, as Keating obviously does, that an appreciation of art is worth fostering in the broader community, it doesn’t necessarily mean they have an unerring faith in art’s ability to improve all people, or that an appreciation of art is in and of itself a means of making the world a more civil or less brutal place.”
Exactly. That’s the answer to Guy’s repeated mush that death camp towns had fine orchestras and “No lyric poetry after Auschwitz”. That’s what you should have said in the article, and it’s what I meant by “Ethics and aesthetics do not depend on each other; one can utilize the other without compromising it. One of the few differences between the Bolsheviks and the Nazis was that the Nazis had better taste.”
Good art helps make life worth living. Like good food, it does this indiscriminately for monsters, angels, and everyone in between.
Tom: “Wasn’t the point of Guy’s column that the kind of rewards that Keating put into place assumed that Great Art is created by Promethean figures in attics?”
No, that was Jack Robertson’s point in his comments. (And I would love it if Jack could write some feature pieces for Crikey.) Guy’s main point was that great works of art shouldn’t just stand alone like a single monumentally beautiful tree in a parkland, they’re of limited use unless a garden can be nourished into growing up around them.
Di Gribble: You’re right – “degreeless” was carefully chosen. I’m all too aware of Horne’s time at Sydney Uni, just as I’m also aware of how chuffed the good professor was to have risen so high in the academy without any letters (other than the four honorary doctorates) to his name.
Reading about the lives of Horne and all the others who cut their teeth at Honi Soit was a major preoccupation of mine as a baby reporter toiling away, in the late ‘70s, on the Sydney Daily Tele (but one of Horne’s old stomping grounds). Having gone into journalism almost straight from school - after a brief but misguided stint at the Ensemble Theatre acting school under Hayes Gordon - delving into the lives of famous Sydney Uni alumni, particularly those who had anything to do with Honi Soit or the uni review served as both an inspiration and a reminder to interrupt the journalism career to get, at the very least, a BA to my name.
Regrettably, career opportunities and the need to eat kept getting in the way, although I did write and teach a post-grad broadcast stream at University of Technology in ’95 as well as deliver occasional guest lectures at various institutions over the years.
While I’m sure Horne did learn some things at uni, as he attests in the Education of Young Donald, his prodigious appetite for ideas could never have been satisfied by the prescriptive morsels to be found on an undergrad reading list.
Tom Gutteridge took exception to my reference to “up-to-te-minute fashion creeps”. Sorry, I should have been more explicit - I was not referring to artists here but, instead, the art-world hangers on: some but by no means all curators, critics, jobbing arts journos, and a particularly odious kind of moneyed art collector who is all too easily led by the aforementioned creeps of the curatorium and arty 4th estate.
Sweet piece, Stephen, and thank you for the generous cameo. So lovely when the grown-ups come out to play on such a fundemental matter, arts subsidy and how best to manage it. One of the difficulties in getting it right in this joint has always been the ‘conspiracy of genteel prudence’ among our artists: incredible how few willing to speak about this stuff bluntly.
As I said on the Rundle thread, I’ve been interested in the book PIR debate for some time - I oppose them on cutural grounds - and, as here, the question of arts subsidy more generally is what really lies at its core. Both, I think, concern the relationship between cultural producers and cultural consumers - artists and their audiences - and whether the self-ghettoizing cultural seperatism often embraced by the former - especially those attracted to a simplistic version of Keating’s ‘genius’ perspective - is good for either (not to mention the, um, work!).
If you’re at all interested in reading a longish essay of mine, nominally in support of the removal of PIR’s but more broadly advocating an end to contrived exceptionalism everywhere, I’ve posted it here.
Thanks again for the brief walk-on. Appreciated. (As was your wry scepticism 15-odd years ago).
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