A student once likened me to a cheerleader for the arts, commenting upon my enthusiasm I suppose in the crit and classroom spheres. That was a few years ago and perhaps some of my mojo—so to speak—has been lost since that time, but I am finding that some of the so-called battles waged against, between, and among the arts have been awfully tiresome recently, and almost make me want to live in a cave. I recently posted on the Seven Sharp no-brain faux-journalistic attack on Bill Culbert’s work for example. And around the same time news came that my colleague Mark Amery’s arts coverage in the Dominion Post was slashed. It’s not an especially good look for the news source for NZ’s purported “cultural capital.” It was thus heartening at least that the paper printed a lively piece countering many of the recent “anti-art” claims by curator and current head of Massey’s School of Art Heather Galbraith. In the essay, Galbraith calls attention to such actual facts as: “In the last election year Creative New Zealand held a survey that showed 85 per cent of people engaged with the arts either by attending or being actively involved in the previous 12 months.” Thus belying in part the ridiculous pseudo-controversies of late which lend the uninformed perception that New Zealanders do not care about art and culture. Heather continues, “the ‘is it art’ or ‘contemporary art is rubbish’ arguments are all too common. Surely we have a maturity to ask more interesting and in-depth questions of our art, artists and audiences?” And with shrinking arts coverage there will be fewer public platforms to ask such significant questions, as Amery points out in a piece recently posted online at The Big Idea site: “at the very time the media are increasingly treating visual art as irrelevant, artists are increasingly creating work that draws many threaded inspiration from the world around it, is increasingly engaging in extending the social and documentary. There’s never been a better time for the press to start to explore these connections.” Meanwhile, back in my batcave, I was relishing re-reading Oscar Wilde’s comments on art from the preface to his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: “All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”
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