Dialectics at Work

From Tony Stephens ‘Conquerors today, vanquished tomorrow’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 05-06.01.02

The American empire of today may be, at least in part, an empire of the mind. It is also an empire of corporate, Coca-Cola hegemony, of CNN, Sex and the City TV culture. It may be a virtual empire, but it’s nonetheless an empire. And many argue that Australia is part of it.

It is hard to imagine the American empire falling but fall it will, unless it defies all of history’s precedents. Morris Berman says in a new book, The Twilight of American Culture: “There is simply no exception to the rule that all civilisations eventually fall apart, and we are not going to beat the odds, or outflank the historical record.”

Berman, an American cultural historian and social critic, says his country’s “comparisons with Rome are quite startling: the late empire saw extremes of rich and poor, and the disappearance of the middle class, the costs of bureaucracy and defence pushed it towards bankruptcy; literacy and Greek learning melted away into a kind of New Age thinking…”.

Berman’s book, published in the United States before September 11, has not be released in Australia. The book argues that factors within American society will bring about its disintegration. Berman has returned recently to the subject, writing in The Guardian that the events of September 11 provided another parallel with the Roman Empire - the factor of external barbarism.

The Goths began pressing against the border of the Roman Empire from the late third century and scored a decisive victory at Adrianople in AD 378. Siege and potential invasion became facts of Roman life after 378. Alaric, the Visigoth leader, invaded Italy in 401 and captured Rome in 410. The Vandals sacked the city in 455 and barbarian mercenaries made the Germanic chieftain Odoacer king of the western empire in 476.

“America, too, now has barbarians at the gates,” Berman says. He sees other similarities - even in one photograph of the shell of the World Trade Centre resembling pictures of the Roman Colosseum. He says the Romans had no understanding of their attackers or their values.

“Similarly, America views Islamic terrorism as completely irrational; there is no understanding of the political context of this activity, a context of American military attack on, or crippling economic sanctions against, a host of Arab nations - with unilateral support for Israel constituting the central, running sore.”

Instead, the enemy is characterised as ‘jealous of our way of life’, ‘hateful of freedom’ and so on. Hence President Bush, no less than the Islamic terrorists, uses the language of religious war: we are on a ‘crusade’; the military operation was initially called ‘Infinite Justice’; and the enemy is ‘evil itself’.

“Along with this is the belief that the Pax Romana/Americana is the only ‘reasonable’ way to live. In the American case, we have a military and economic empire that views the world as one big happy market, and believes that everybody needs to come on board. We - global corporate consumerism - are the future, ‘progress’. If the ‘barbarians’ fail to share this vision, they are ‘medieval’; if they resist, ‘evil’.” 

Berman says his book is “for oddballs, for men and women who experience themselves as expatriates within their own country. It is a guidebook of sorts, to the 21st century and beyond”.

Guide Berman seems to rely to some extent on Oswald Spengler, a gloomy prophet who wrote The Decline of the West after World War I. He develops Spengler’s view that every civilisation has its twilight period.

Berman lists four factors present when a civilisation collapses: accelerating social and economic inequality; declining returns on investments in organisational solutions to socio-economic problems; rapidly falling levels of literacy and critical understanding; the emptying out of culture, a kind of spiritual death.

On the dumbing down of America, he quotes a Time magazine poll showing that nearly 70 per cent believed in the existence of angels, another poll revealing that 50 per cent believed in the presence of UFOs and space aliens on Earth, and a US Department of Education survey in 1995 saying that 60 per cent of students had no idea how the US came into existence. Berman says that the US ranks 49th out of 158 United Nations countries on a literacy table. About 60 per cent of adults have never read a book of any kind.

Berman can be glib, with a broad-brush approach leading to sweeping statements based on limited evidence. He also heavily qualifies his theory, sometimes tortuously, regarding a descent into barbarism as “certainly possible, and may even occur to some degree toward the end of the 21st century, perhaps for a short period of time; but the general outlook, it seems to me, is one of slow, rather than sudden, disintegration, for this country seems to be very good at crisis management”.

He says that the dissolution of corporate hegemony is at least 40 years away. What’s more, it might not be a collapse but more of a transformation, even if the United States is a cultural shambles,” an empire wilderness”. If the 20th century was the American century, the 21st would still be the Americanised century.

Then there might be the dawn of a new American culture. This could happen provided the good bits are saved, like the good bits of the Roman Empire were saved during the Dark Ages to re-emerge in the Renaissance.

Berman goes on: “The phrase ‘twilight of American culture’ implies an eventual dawn, and at some point we are going to emerge from our contemporary twilight and future darkness, if only because no historical configuration is the end of history.”

The Battle for Art

As we have seen, negation had to be replaced by positive integrating factors once the removal of the “offending element” from the social arena had made negation pointless. ...

“The battle for art” was by no means a National Socialist invention. The slogan and the issue had been of central concern in German cultural life for decades. But the National Socialists were the first to make this battle for art a focal point of political conflict and to define an individual’s position in it as evidence of his approval or rejection of National Socialist political goals and principles. This issue became a touchstone for determining who were the friends and who the foes of the Third Reich.

Paul Schultze-Naumburg expressed precisely this view in 1932 in his book Kampf um die Kunst (The Battle for Art): “A life-and-death struggle is taking place in art, just as it is in the realm of politics. And the battle for art has to be fought with the same seriousness and determination as the battle for political power.”

This statement, which at first glance seems exaggerated and, indeed, absurd in view of the actual importance of art in the overall social structure, assumes reality only if art and art criticism are used as weapons in a political struggle.

From Berthold Hinz, Art in the Third Reich, Trans., Robert and Rita Kimber, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1974, 45

* * *

Malcolm Bradbury, ‘Spooks in the Culture’, The Weekend Australian 21-22.08.99

In her new book Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granata), Frances Stonor Saunders tells the fascinating story of the vast postwar Kultur-kampf, the Cold War conflict over cultural values and ideologies amid which several literary and cultural generations grew up. It pulled in books and magazines, congresses and concerts, artists and writers, political visions of economic growth and social progress. And it dawned when the US, the one outright victor from World War II, suddenly found itself a superpower, found it had somehow entered history.

Needing a culture to match, it stared over the wire at Russia (which had pursued intellectual politics since Catherine the Great) and sought worldwide intellectual admiration and support. As the Cold War froze and ideologies divided, the US government poured huge resources into a cultural propaganda campaign. It was covert. As Saunders explains: “A central feature of this program was to advance the claim it did not exist.”

Yet there was nothing covert about the overall enterprise; the decision to revive flattened Europe and develop democratic institutions through the enormous program of aid - economic, political and cultural - has shaped it to this day and explains its federalism and its Americanised shopping-mall culture.

So came the Marshall Plan, the “special relationship”, the Atlantic Alliance, the denazification in Germany and Austria, the long-term presence of US troops and bases. There was also the Fulbright program, the US Information Agency, the Amerikanhausen all over Germany, promoting jazz, movies and Saul Bellow, and the growth of an academic subject that was new even to Americans: American studies.

The program was aided by the defection of many western intellectuals who had been red in the 1930s. Alienation began with the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet pact; by the late 40s, Marxism was the god that had failed.

In cultural warfare, the US seemed at first to have small resources. “What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, gramophone music and Hollywood?” asked Adolf Hitler. Many European intellectuals felt a similar cultural distaste for the land of chewing gum and Mickey Mouse.

Hence the Kulturkampf, which Saunders traces back to Berlin in the time of denazification and to three key figures. Michael Josselin and Nicholas Nabokov (Vladimir’s musician cousin), both emigres, were with the US military command and working on denazification and cultural policy in the psychological warfare division. Then another soldier, Melvin Lasky, urged on the US government a policy designed to win over the often passionately anti-American European intelligentsia. The magazine Monat was established and the culture war began.

In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was founded: in its early days it resembled the clubby, patrician, pipe-smoking, senior common room spirit of the wartime intelligence community. It had excellent contacts with the NCL (non-communist Left), the “new liberals” and the emigres who, having fled the Europe of Hitler and Stalin, had become a powerful force in the US.

This book shows in splendid detail how CIA policy went everywhere. Awash with funds, the CIA turned into the covert Maecenas, the new crypto-patron of an age when the old private patrons had disappeared. Artists, writers, intellectuals, seminars, concerts and magazines were supported by “foundations”. It was the age of get-me-a-grant-while-you’re-up. Scholarships, travel grants and exchange schemes shipped European intellectuals across the Atlantic for their graduate education.

Meanwhile, US writers, plays, books, concerts and art exhibitions came in profusion to Europe. A key instrument was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, administered by a band of leading European intellectuals. It circulated ideas, ran congresses, aided magazines. In Britain, it published Encounter, the leading intellectual and cultural review of the day, and simply indispensable. By various labyrinthine means, the CCF and much else had CIA funding.

The charge is that organisations celebrating “cultural freedom” were steered by the US arm of espionage, that writers who were attacking the trahison des clercs were themselves traitors, that a systematic attempt was made to intrude on intellectual independence. The injection of money into US intellectual reviews by the Ford Foundation and much else is traceable to the CIA.

In 1967, the edifice effectively collapsed. The Camelot court mood, as a result of which American intellectuals had rallied to John F. Kennedy, was gone. The Vietnam War brought wide-spread protest, the intelligentsia was increasingly at odds with government and nation. When Ramparts magazine blew the story, it opened an era of intellectual guilt and embarrassment, and a suspicion of much in modern intellectual life.

As Saunders says, much of western intellectual life and many individual figures were compromised. Yet the situation was filled, as she notes, with strange ironies. Saunders asks: Who paid the piper? But how does the piper call the tune if you don’t know who the piper really is?

Many intellectuals and artists went to the US on the Fulbright program, contributed to the lively and intelligent literary magazines, attended conferences, concerts and exhibitions sponsored by various unusual foundations. In many cases, it is quite possible to argue that the CiA innocently financed much radical, indeed anti-American, opinion as well as a whole new experimental era of the arts. For writers, John Updike’s Bech books best capture the atmosphere: the radical, unreliable American writer wanders a divided Europe on cultural tours, a CIA spook on one side, a Communist Party apparatchik on the other, looking for truth, love, literature, decency, the smell of independence and freedom, and maybe just a little irony.

Another irony is more obvious. American spooks could have had little idea of the strength of the culture they were out to promote. Yet they were sponsoring an American Risorgimento. This was the great age of American writing, music and art - the age of Arthur Miller, Bellow, Updike, Norman Mailer, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Jasper Johns. The culture was worth selling and it was not innocent: subversive, self-critical ironic, ambiguous, it caught the uneasy corruption rather than the innocent wonder of the American age. The CIA was, so to speak, the promoter of postmodernism, the investor of a new culture.

The last irony is grimmer. What began as part of a high-cultural Americanisation of Europe turned into the commercial globalisation of Europe and the larger world. America Americanised itself as a vast franchise or global corporation, to which all Europe became party. The oddest truth is that the age of cultural and counter-cultural politics was one when literature was serious, tense, politically charged, morally dangerous and mattered. Now it doesn’t: we live in the age of the logo and the corporate sponsor.

How compromised was postwar US and European culture? Certainly there were those who enjoyed walking in the shadows with the devil while they seemed to be walking in the sun. There were the amazingly innocent and the bitterly deceived. Saunders’s book overestimates the degree of compliance and conformism, and often suspects motives that were not impure. Throughout, the US continued to be an intensely self-critical society, challenging its own conformities, dismayed by its own lonely crowds. Those who worked with government agencies often passionately challenged McCarthyism and defended liberals.

Yet Saunders is right. This reality is a crucial story, about the dangerous, compromising energies and manipulation of an entire and a recent age.

Art and Ideology

Laurence Zuckerman, ‘Book tells how commie-hating CIA became a patron of the arts’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 1.4.00

George Orwell’s Animal Farm has a chilling finale in which the farm animals look back and forth at the tyrannical pigs and the human farmers and find it “impossible to say which is which”.

That ending was altered in the 1955 animated version, which removed the humans. Another example of Hollywood butchering great literature? Yes, but in this case the film’s secret producer was the Central Intelligence Agency.

The CIA, it seems, was worried that the public might be too influenced by Orwell’s pox-on-both-their-houses critique of the capitalist humans and communist pigs. So after his death in 1950, agents were dispatched (by none other than E. Howard Hunt, later of Watergate fame) to buy the film rights to Animal Farm from his widow to make its message more overtly anti-communist.

Rewriting the end of Animal Farm is just one example of the often absurd lengths to which the CIA went, as recounted in a new book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (The New Press) by Frances Stonor Saunders, a British journalist.

Much of what Saunders writes about, including the CIA’s covert sponsorship of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom and the British opinion magazine Encounter, was exposed in the late 60s, generating a wave of indignation.

But by combing through archives and unpublished manuscripts and interviewing several of the principal actors, Saunders has uncovered many new details and gives the most comprehensive account yet of the period between 1947 and 1967.

This picture of the CIA’s secret war of ideas has cameo appearances by scores of intellectual celebrities like the critic Lionel Trilling, the poets Ted Hughes and Derek Walcott and the novelists James Michener and Mary McCarthy, all of whom directly or indirectly benefited from the CIA’s largesse.

Travelling first class all the way, the CIA sponsored art exhibitions, conferences, concerts and magazines to press its larger anti-Soviet agenda.

Saunders provides ample evidence, for example, that the editors at Encounter and other agency-sponsored magazines were directed not to publish articles directly critical of Washington’s foreign policy.

She also shows how the CIA bankrolled some of the earliest exhibits of abstract expressionist painting outside the United States to counter the socialist realism being advanced by Moscow.

In one memorable episode, the British Foreign Office subsidised the distribution of 50,000 copies of Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler’s anti-communist classic. But the French Communist Party ordered its operatives to buy up every copy of the book, giving Koestler a windfall in royalties.

The agency also changed the ending of the film version of Orwell’s 1984. 

In the book, the protagonist, Winston Smith, is entirely defeated by the nightmarish totalitarian regime. At the end, Orwell writes, Winston realised that “He loved Big Brother”.

In the film, Winston and his lover, Julia, are gunned down after Winston defiantly shouts: “Down with Big Brother!”

Such changes came from the agency’s obsession with snuffing out a notion then popular among many European intellectuals: that East and West were morally equivalent.

But instead of illustrating the differences between the two systems by taking the high road, the agency justified its covert activities by referring to the unethical tactics of the Soviets.

Some of the participants, like Arthur Schlesinger, who knew about some of the CIA’s cultural activities, argue that the agency’s role was benign, even necessary.

Compared with the coups the CIA sponsored, he said, its support of the arts was some of its best work.

“It enabled people to publish what they already believed,” he said. “It didn’t change anyone’s course of action or thought.”

The New York Times

Noted in Memory Lane

Peter Cochrane ‘Gallery head attacks bullies of avant-garde’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 28.10.99

The National Gallery of Australia’s new head of Australian art, former Herald critic Mr John McDonald, fired a fresh broadside at the contemporary art scene last night in his first major public address.

Giving his inaugural public lecture at the NGA, to an audience that included gallery trustees, Mr McDonald painted a picture of a community where the avant-garde had become the establishment and “in which conformity is the ruling passion”.

Mr McDonald took up his position as head of Australian art on September 6, after the NGA weathered an outcry from some sections of the contemporary art world, angered in part by the appointment of “a journalist” with “a record of consistent confrontation and divisive abuse”.

Presenting an historical overview of the rise of modernism last night, Mr McDonald said its legacy was that “the maintenance of the entire, vast machinery of contemporary art is dependent on the sense of an adversary, because it is condemned to the pretence of perpetual revolution. Those artists and curators who are best able to maintain this pretence are those who rise to the top of the heap.

“Although it is a ferocious-looking beast, the avant-garde enterprise tends to dissolve at the first drop of humour, satire or self-doubt. This is the reason why so much cutting-edge art is so utterly lacking in wit, so obsessed with spelling out its credentials and pedigree, devoid of any sense of its own pretentiousness, and - despite the many frantic nods in the direction of spiritual and political goals - completely self-contained.”

Since an avant-garde required an adversary, it was a fertile breeding ground for paranoid and totalitarian attitudes, Mr McDonald said.

“An artist announces that he is subverting oppressive social norms and all those who find the work uninteresting automatically become oppressors.”

It was an avant-garde which measured its success by its “failure to convince an audience”, he said.

“Indeed, the smaller the audience for avant-garde art, the more successful it may be judged. In this respect, one can only see Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art as an outstanding success, in the way it managed to alienate a large audience and leave itself a million dollars in the red.”

Another Walk Down Memory Lane

Paul Sheehan, ‘Art in replying to a critic’s critic’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 07.06.99

The acerbic pen of art critic John McDonald has exposed an ideological divide in the art world - and a deep vein of personal attack - since his surprising appointment to the important position of head of Australian art at  the National Gallery of Australia.

The attacks on Mr McDonald include the serious accusation of plagiarism.

In his farewell piece as the Herald’s chief art critic last Thursday, he wrote: “There is a well-known critic who has specialised in telling people that my work is all ‘plagiarism’, although she is unable to cite any evidence in support. These comments, which she has wisely refrained from immortalising in print, have been intended to inflict maximum damage. So far as I can see, the motivation is nothing more than petty jealousy.”

The critic is Joanna Mendelssohn.

Since Mr McDonald brought the issue into the open, two judges of the Pascall Prize for criticism - the forum where Ms Mendelssohn, a former Pascall winner, made her accusation - confirm that Mr McDonald was blackballed by Ms Mendelssohn as a plagiarist.

“It was the most outrageous thing I’ve ever come across,” said Bruce Elder, a former Pascall winner and cultural commentator for the Herald and the ABC.

“For two years in a row, Joanna Mendelssohn, without a scrap of evidence, alleged that John McDonald had plagiarised work. It was the most appalling example of personal vendetta I’ve ever come across.”

When contacted by the Herald last week, Ms Mendelssohn responded: “It appears that one of the judges is quite happy to give his gloss on confidential discussions. He came into the discussions with a very strong agenda.”

She said she complained about Mr McDonald in a letter written to the Herald in August 1998.

The letter states: “Curiously enough, Mr McDonald understood me well enough when he later rephrased some of my observations...but as he does not credit me as a source, those of your readers not fortunate to read Art Monthly will be left with the impression that these are Mr McDonald’s own original insights.”

Last week, she added: “If you have to churn out 2,000 words, week after week, as John did, there is a tendency to rely on exhibition catalogues.”

Mr McDonald took strong exception to all this.

The Herald asked Ms Mendelssohn last week to provide samples of alleged plagiarism.

She did not do so.

* * *

Paul Sheehan, '15 sign NGA petition’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23.06.99

The din of disapproval in sections of the art world over the appointment of Herald art critic John McDonald to the National Gallery of Australia has become a more discreet murmur.

A letter has arrived at the National Gallery in time for today’s council meeting, protesting McDonald’s appointment as head of Australian art. The letter was signed by 15 art scholars, gallery owners and artists.

The protest letter calls on the gallery council to reassess McDonald’s appointment on the grounds that he did not meet the academic criteria required for the job and had an essentially reactionary approach to contemporary art.

The group which prepared the letter was co-ordinated by Brad Buckley, associate professor at Sydney College of the Arts.

The group realises its protest cannot overturn the appointment. National Gallery director, Dr Brian Kennedy, has enthusiastically backed the selection of McDonald and described the protest as “provincialism”.

The chairman of the National Gallery’s council, media proprietor Kerry Stokes, told the Herald McDonald was “the outstanding applicant” and characterised the public attacks as “the unfortunate, petty and political side of the art world”.

Also offsetting the protest has been a flow of letters to the NGA supporting McDonald. Kennedy said he had received “dozens” of positive letters.

McDonald, who often lampooned Australia’s avant-garde art movement - which is heavily represented in the protest against him - takes up the job in September.

Ye shall know them by their ad hominems. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?

From Bernice Murphy, ‘A critic’s contempt for the contemporary’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 04.06.99

Herald art critic John McDonald has indulged in trivialising antics, rather than meeting the challenge of his ‘portfolio’, argues former Museum of Contemporary Art director Bernice Murphy.

(McDonald) has seemed, at times, to change his whole stance and character when confronted by those great artists of the past, to abandon his narrow-minded, self-indulgent persona and to become a fully reflexive personality as a critic. 

...He seems either incapable or determinedly unwilling to apply the obvious efforts required to make the connections between some of the most ambitious work going on in the world of art around him, and its specific, precisely calibrated engagements with the most ambitious works of the past.

This fatal disconnection of sympathies is at the heart of McDonald’s tragically destructive betrayal of public responsibility, and his inability to reach his own full potential as a critic. Instead of illuminating connections, the whole enterprise of his writing collapses into a sort of appallingly self-indulgent schizophrenia. 

...His farewell performance this week - its rancour and mean-spiritedness, its self-congratulation, its level of energetic, harrying contempt for contemporary art, curators, artists and even fellow critics - gives ample demonstration of the cause for concern.

...My response to this discussion by McDonald of his self-serving persona is that he is betraying his public responsibilities and indulging in trivialising antics rather than attending to the challenge of the portfolio.

The constant obtrusion of this artificially inflated persona inhibits the public’s possibility of accessing the commentary, of learning what is happening across the many sites and scenes of contemporary art. ...

Instead of an energetic curiosity to open out to a variety of important activities that are occurring around him, McDonald has found it more convenient to retreat into a self-limiting ghetto of “famous hater”, and to shut down the engines on a lot that the public deserves to hear about. ...

Finally, caricature of others, the self-conscious pursuit of opportunities to set up destructive skirmishes with particular favoured targets for mockery, has led in more recent years to an eventual collapsing into pitiful self-caricature of McDonald’s role as senior art critic for the Herald.

 I give as a key example and case study for my view of his excesses recently, the extraordinary half-page indulgence of the “dream-piece” (The Parr Horizon, October 25, 1997) on the Art Gallery of NSW having been taken over by Mike Parr as director, with the conjectured complicity of head curator Tony Bond in Edmund Capon’s absence.

I put the view that this highly contrived full-space piece, especially prepared for prime-time Saturday reading, was in many ways exactly what McDonald professes to despise about the art world and writing on contemporary art. It was narrow and privatised. It was privileged and arcane in all its reference points.

This was an extended piece exclusively for those “in the know” about some deeply destructive engagements that had occurred, about quite substantive issues of value and judgement, in which McDonald had shown determination to pursue hostilities towards certain personalities and issues to an extent that was seen by many as having become a vendetta. This was really just another bout.

However, this infamous article was incomprehensible to a broader, non-specialist public, which could glean nothing of use or value from such a spiteful spoof. It was a wanton display of paranoid fantasy doing a day-job as art criticism. It was a waste of opportunity and an astonishing abuse of public position. Would a writer on economics have been allowed to get away with such indulgence of personal spleen in lieu of public analysis? I doubt it.

This revealed how out-of-hand things can become when a critic such as McDonald regularly has at his command a huge spread of space in a major newspaper with which to wage personal battles, indulging a restless ego and its narcissistic desires for notoriety.

An alternative required charter, I believe, for a newspaper critic should be to strenuously observe public trust, bring an intelligence and vigorous curiosity to a great range of issues, and build a broad position of serious commentary and regard. There is not a lot of space in our press for commentary on contemporary art. The scope seems to be tightening for discussion of what is seeking space to grow in an exploratory sense or be limit-testing in our culture.

What I mean is not the space of mere expressive indulgence (as caricatured as the space of contemporary art by McDonald), but the intellectually attuned and knowing space of cognitive questioning, conjecture and speculative insight. This is a precious space for any society that seeks to be reflexive, generous and to nourish its creative capacities.

It is this space - a space of expectation and public faith - that McDonald has so assiduously abused over many years that a gathering of forces has occurred at least to register a profound concern about his potential to abuse the trust implicit in the role of departmental head of Australian art in one of our most valued and important national institutions.

The National Gallery’s decision to embrace this personality and this history has inevitably caused a profound dismay among those who fear a concerted attempt to cut off Australian art from its larger aspirations for openness and engagement with ideas.

The consequences could be to give a nationally high-profiled voice to an agenda of radical containment. Australian art’s discussion could become artificially constrained, interrupting its fluent interchange with a range of comparable artists and aspirations internationally. There is a fear of turning the clock back 20 or 30 years, of wiping out a generation of enterprise.

Such apprehensions have coalesced into a belief that it is time to say something publicly of the depth of concern that such a move has aroused. It colours the program of revision and re-visioning that the National Gallery has embarked upon - and this one appointment could become such a potent signifier of such an instrumentally re-gearing shift that it proves to be damaging across many fronts other than Australian art itself.

* * *

The Herald’s Editorial from the same day: ‘Art storm’

The appointment of the former art critic of the Herald, Mr John McDonald, as head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia has upset some people. One is Mr Brad Buckley, an associate professor at the Sydney College of the Arts, who speaks of “a spontaneous protest by a broad group of the art community” against Mr McDonald’s appointment. There are others. But the protests are their own best refutation. Far from making a case for shutting Mr McDonald out, they show why Mr McDonald’s appointment should be welcomed by all who care for the future of Australian art.

Mr Buckley says those seeking to overturn Mr McDonald’s appointment question whether he should be in a “leadership position in a culture where he has been so divisive”. Yet what some see as divisive, others will see as courageously independent, a quality Mr McDonald has amply displayed as a critic and one which will serve him well in his new job. Mr Buckley says Mr McDonald “looks back into the 19th century...[and] has a very Anglophile view of how art should be valued”. Such things are easily said. But in this case it amounts to no more than a feeble attack on Mr McDonald’s honesty and directness, his ability to argue intelligibly. As a critic he has steadily insisted that a painting or other work, to be good, should be more than just new and different. He defends works that have taken time, skill and labour or are in a traditional style. And, most pertinent to his new job, he has criticised curators whose contempt for the public has allowed them to persist in presenting work that few people want to pay to see.

One of the silliest attacks on Mr McDonald is that he doesn’t have, in Mr Buckley’s words, “a higher degree in the field and extensive curatorial experience”. Mr McDonald had a good answer to that in his reflections on 16 years as a critic published in the Herald yesterday: “In criticism, as in art, the stayers will not be those with the nicest diplomas, but those who have something to say.”

Perhaps the worst thing wrong with the Australian art world is the mutually self-promoting alliances between mediocre talent, uncritical critics and some of more (sic) crassly commercial galleries. The NGA cannot change all of that. But the appointment two years ago of the new director, Dr Brian Kennedy, and his appointment in turn of Mr McDonald, is a breath of fresh air. If it helps excellence shine through the dross that always rises to the surface, but is not always swept aside, Australian art will be well served.

On Criticism, Pretence, Stupidity and Toadying in the Australian Visual Arts

John McDonald, ‘An art critic’s retrospective’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 03.06.99

Reflecting on 16 years as a critic, the new head of Australian art at the National Gallery fires a parting shot at painters with bloated egos and curators without taste.

The critic: a cold fish? a flamboyant dilettante? a failed artist looking for revenge on the world? a whore of public opinion? a misfit? an opportunist? There are as many cliches as there are critics, and none of them sums up the full complexity of the profession. A critic leads his or her life in the open, drawing no line between private opinion and public pronouncement. It can be a glamorous occupation but also an endurance test.

After spending most of my working life as a professional art critic, I am moving on to become Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia. Yet it would be a shame to lay aside the critic’s rod without undertaking a modest retrospective of 16 years in the trade. This will necessarily be more personal in tone than the average art column, if only because the authorial “voice” in that column is a kind of invention that is refined over a long period. One creates a character who strides onto a stage, week after week, for the benefit of regular readers who feel they recognise him as a  trusted friend or a reliable villain. Either way, one tries to avoid being predictable while remaining philosophically consistent. One strives to be honest but not “ruthlessly” honest, since most of the poor or disappointing shows are best left alone. There is little point in attacking a struggling artist in the mainstream press, although there should be no mercy for those artists, curators and institutions that patronise the public intelligence with their dull but vainglorious activities.

Before I go too far, it must be noted that criticism is highly vulnerable to negative stereotypes. Think of George Sanders playing the theatre critic, Addison de Witt, in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s film All About Eve. “I have lived in the theatre as a Trappist monk lives in his faith,” he pronounces.” In it I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and a commentator. I am essential to the theatre - as ants to a picnic, as the boll weevil to a cotton field.” A cynical, self-styled powerbroker, de Witt barely distinguishes between the people around him and the characters he encounters in a play. As a critic, he stands outside the stream of life, coldly assessing his subjects in terms of good or bad form.

Consider, too, Wilfred Sheed’s novel The Critic, the story of another successful critic whose “corrosive  talent” makes him incapable of normal human relationships. Entrapped by his calling, he finds life less tractable than art. It is hardly an original concept, but the book is a valuable anthology of received ideas about critics. Mostly very mean ideas - as though this story is a novelist’s revenge on his reviewers. If only Sheed had been lucky enough to be born in Australia, where the words ”an acclaimed new Australian novel” have the ring of tautology. Every new Australian novel seems to be acclaimed, signifying a widespread failure of critical nerve.

It is far too easy to believe the cliches about “destructive” critics because the worst critics dispense only praise, presenting their readers with a cosy, sanitised view of culture. It is a vision of a world shaped by arts bureaucrats and publicists, in which every worthy artist - be he or she ever so young, so poor, so racially or sexually oppressed - creates a masterpiece.

Perhaps the ultimate extension of this attitude is North Korea, where literature is produced industrially in praise of the head of state. So long as the work flatters the leader, it cannot fail to be accepted. In laid-back Australia, it is more a matter of pushing the right buttons to capture the fashionable sensations and political preoccupations of the moment. Even though government subsidies have reduced the financial risks of publishing new novelists, there remains the heartening possibility of failure. Artistic failure cannot be alleviated by injections of cash, and it is the critic’s responsibility to judge the success or failure of a work of art, clearly stating the reason for each judgement.

In the field of visual arts criticism, it is rare indeed for a critic to accept the responsibility of judgement. A large number of so-called reviews are nothing but press releases that have spent a few minutes in the microwave. When the critic does speak his or her mind, it may have little to do with the exhibition he or she is supposedly reviewing. Occasionally, it seems that an elaborate literary edifice has been constructed for the specific purpose of saying nothing. There is even a form of review which is a coded job application: “Please recognise my loyal support for your exhibition, and consider me for a curatorship, a publication, etc.” How may exhibitions are described as “major”, “important”, “significant”, even when the critic goes on to express a few guarded doubts? Hardly anyone will stick his or her neck out with an unfashionable opinion, although the opinion may be read between the lines by those in the know. In other words, while writers may harbour well-defined opinions, they are often reluctant to express them. I will resist the temptation of naming individuals, since I am trying to identify syndromes rather than scapegoats.

It is not always possible to talk in generalities when I consider some of the appalling behaviour I have witnessed from my fellow critics, On one occasion I found myself booked to speak at a forum with a writer who had routinely insulted my work at various interstate conferences to which I had not been invited. As soon as I mentioned his writing, he got up and ran out of the room, declaring it was all a set-up! In fact, he strode into the toilets, imagining it was the back door, and had to reappear some minutes later. He made his ultimate escape by passing through the ranks of an audience who jeered and booed.

There is another well-known critic who has specialised in telling people that my work is all “plagiarism”, although she is unable to cite any evidence in support. These comments, which she has wisely refrained from immortalising in print, have been intended to inflict maximum damage. So far as I can see, the motivation is nothing more than petty jealousy.

One might say that such bizarre or despicable actions are functions of human nature, not the critical profession. Yet critics have a special responsibility to tell the truth, and should always be prepared to stand up for their opinions. In this regard, I was struck by a recent article by the London Evening Standards’s outspoken critic, Brian Sewell, who claimed: “Throughout the two decades of my life as an art critic, I have thought others of the ilk feeble, compliant, ignorant and embarrassingly uncertain. We need fresh blood.”

Sewell was talking about the British art critics, but his comments apply equally well to Australia - especially to that legion of part-time critics who write appreciative drivel for art magazines and exhibition catalogues. As for the “fresh blood”, in all my years in newspapers hardly anyone ever sent me some of their published work, asked for an opinion and expressed a desire to become a critic. The exception is Sebastian Smee, and he is now writing regular art columns for the Herald. The dearth of would-be critics has not been helped by a growing number of courses offering to teach art criticism as a specialised subject, with the prize going to the Victorian College of the Arts for proposing a Graduate Diploma in Art Criticism. I suspect that the result of such a diploma would be to put critics on the same level of abject conformity that characterises curators of contemporary art. Those with diplomas would see it as a personal insult when someone less “qualified” was preferred for a regular critics’ job. But credentials are useless without the nous to back them up, and I’m not convinced this can be taught.

I suspect that good art critics are shaped by temperament, experience, wit and intuition, not by academic degrees. It also helps to have a mentor and Terence Maloon played that role for me, even though he may disown my opinions nowadays. Critics are not that different from artists, who may learn little at art school but go on to develop highly original vision. On the other hand, there are legions of professional young artists churned out by the colleges who last but a year or two in the  game before seeking more gainful employment. In criticism, as in art, the stayers will not be those with the nicest diplomas, but those who have something to say.

If art schools want to produce critics, their best option is to provide a well-rounded history and theory course that gives the student a sense of artistic tradition and encourages the growth of lateral  thinking. Roger Scruton once marvelled at those Logical Positivists who entertain “no views whatsoever” on aesthetics, politics, morality or religion, yet still call themselves philosophers. It is just as puzzling how some art writers may have only the most glancing acquaintance with literature, music, history, science or philosophy, and imagine they have a mastery of their subject.

Naturally, it is much easier to sustain this illusion if one mixes only with a small, agreeable peer group, disdaining the uncouth advances of the general public. I have always found such cliqueish snobbery, as practised by certain sections of the art world, to be profoundly distasteful. Surely a critic should have nothing to do with these smug bores, but a lot of writers are apparently terrorised by the prospect of being barred from some ultra-chic club. False seriousness is met with meek submission, not the contempt it deserves. Bloated egos are allowed to keep inflating until they reach zeppelin-like proportions and sometimes suffer similar fates.

I share a birthday with Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote The Emperor’s New Clothes - a tale that was invoked with incalculable frequency whenever members of the general public wrote to me about their experiences of contemporary art. In many cases it is hard to contradict these views, but the great danger is that the viewer becomes equally cynical about each and every latter-day art work. He or she will simply stop looking at such works, will case visiting exhibitions and giving artists the benefit of the doubt. If public museums refuse to think critically about contemporary art, their audiences will do the job for them and withdraw their support. This is precisely what has happened with Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which now faces a financial blowout of more than $1 million.

It often happens that the critic acts as a surrogate conscience for institutions that refuse to believe they could ever be less than perfect. If attendances decline, the museum authorities presume - with a wistful sigh - that members of the public are merely philistines who do not appreciate the riches that have been set before them. LIke disciples of some far-fetched religious cult, they look forward to the day when the masses will see the light and come flocking through their doors, seeking instruction. In the meantime, It is only proper that their noble efforts be supported with constant injections of taxpayers’ money. This high-handed attitude has even been rampant at the MCA, an institution which has had to raise 95 per cent of its own funds. Indeed, it beggars belief that a museum which is far more dependent on public support than any of its peers can be so contemptuous of public taste.

The critic should not turn a blind eye to such abuses, or be intimidated into providing support for hopeless causes. Looking back over my career, I realise how important it has been to adopt an adversarial role in the face of art-world complacency. Even though damning reviews were relatively scarce, they are always better remembered than positive ones - despite the fact that they made absolutely no impact on the elite, arrogant attitudes that were my primary target.

This makes me feel that if I had to state a critical credo, it would be hard to go past the lines from Virgil that Sigmund Freud placed on the title page of The Interpretation of Dreams: “Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo” (“If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will raise hell”). More prosaically, there is a line by Kingsley Amis: “If you can’t annoy anyone, there is little point in writing.”

Those who were most annoyed by my efforts, if angry letters are any indication, were the curators of contemporary art exhibitions who received uncomplimentary reviews. Even more galling for them was the fact that most of these letters were never published - giving rise to the claim that the newspaper was trying to “protect” its dastardly critic. The truth is that few of these invectives were actually printable - being longwinded, libellous and devoid of arguments. There were times when I suggested such letters should be printed (since they indicted their authors so effectively), and even sent some to James Baker in Brisbane to publish in his Museum of Contemporary Art newsletter. But the writer’s mangling of the language was too much for most editors and sub-editors. I remember showing a furious letter from an eminent professor of fine arts to one of the Herald subs. She read it in silence, wrote 2/10 at the bottom of the page, and handed it back.

Whatever sins may be attributed to newspaper critics, they are models of clarity compared with most of the writers who contribute essays to contemporary art catalogues. All too often, the essayist is also the curator of the exhibition, and the garbled nature of the prose reflects an arbitrary selection of works.

While there are some excellent curators in Australia, they tend to work in fields such as prints and drawings, Aboriginal art, decorative arts and oriental art. In a specialised subject, a conscientious curator is able to develop his or her knowledge and expertise to good effect. On the other hand, in the domain of contemporary art, it is a free-for-all, since there are - almost by definition - few historical standpoints by which quality can be judged, and few incentives to make those judgements. The frenetic, ever-changing nature of the work induces curators to veer between wildly incompatible extremes. If they could be said to have any taste at all, it is heavily influenced by social opportunities - the visits to chic galleries, international art fests, glitzy survey shows, and so on. Too often they seem to feel that the ugliest, stupidest, most incompetent work must necessarily be the best - if only because it challenges so many tenets of conventional taste.

The words “good” and “bad” do not exist in these curators’ aesthetic vocabulary; instead, they say “radical” and “conservative”. Naturally, whatever is “radical” is considered extremely important while more “conservative” work cannot be tolerated for a second. At its most ridiculous, this creates a willingness to value the worst installations more highly than any traditional style of painting or sculpture. The abiding wish is that art must be new and different, but the result is a smothering uniformity as every curator (around the world, it must be said) buys almost identical work. Newness itself is rarely more than skin-deep, since a large percentage of contemporary pieces are nothing more than recycled versions of works that were made in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. A thin icing of irony or “criticality” passes for originality, if only because originality per se is tacitly considered impossible.

There are curators of contemporary art who speak in strings of cliches and buzzwords. They parrot the pompous, pseudo-theoretical platitudes that some artists use to characterise their own work. They will interpret 20 years of imaginative sterility as a mark of integrity, and abhor an artist who takes a simple pleasure in painting the landscape. Self-conscious kitsch is greeted as high art, and anything that has taken time, skill and labour is dismissed as craft. If one says, “Surely the public don’t want to see stuff like this?”, they will reply: “I think your underestimating the public, John.” In their minds, the public secretly wants to be just like them. 

When one points out that a catalogue essay is badly written, confused, full of jargon and pretentious references of dubious relevance (I am still trying to fathom what Dionysius the Areopagite tells us about Brazilian neo-concrete art), this is seen as proof of the critic’s anti-intellectual bias. The case is never developed, and not only because such essays are impossible to defend. I have come to believe that some essayists feel that a piece of writing can only be of genuine intellectual value if it is incomprehensible - even to the writer. If it is easily readable, it will be called “populist”. On the other hand, there are essayists who confuse their institutional power - as Grand Poobah in some museum - with their intellectual authority. But a job is bestowed on someone, while intellectual respect must be earned. It is exactly the same for those artists who believe they are so important that their work must always be given preferential treatment. Vanity puts an impregnable barrier between these self-appointed gurus and the every-day world. To support their illusions they may draw on a pool of willing sycophants who are too lazy, stupid or shallow to develop their own opinions, and too timid to contradict an art-world bigwig.

In the face of such institutionalised mediocrity, the critic must be a fearless sceptic. Yet most critics are little better than fellow travellers. The much-maligned Giles Auty, who seems to be the art world’s idea of a free kick, is at least an oppositional voice who does not subscribe to the long list of imaginary items that  “can’t be said”. This form of self-censorship is depressingly common, and it robs the critic of his or her credibility. A critic who feels that prestigious exhibitions cannot be freely criticised will be more likely to attack small-scale shows at less fashionable venues. At its worst, I have seen critics who will genuflect to a dreary installation by some avant-garde superstar, then use the razor on an aspiring artist in a commercial gallery.

Now, in taking up a museum job in Canberra, I hear people saying how important it is to enter such a post from outside the institutions. “Beware the public service mentality!” is the constant catchcry. But if the National Gallery of Australia had wanted a career bureaucrat, it would never have offered the job to a critic. I know that curators and gallery administrators have their own lists of things that “can’t be said”, and not simply because of public service confidentiality clauses.

Yet working at the National Gallery is not like joining ASIO or the foreign service, since it is part of the museum’s responsibilities to provide leadership and stimulate debate. The NGA must be a place where all shades of opinion can be freely expressed and evaluated. It must put a premium on being able to communicate and co-operate with State and regional galleries, and with international museums.

However, this does not mean that every convention and every reputation should meet with unquestioning acceptance. In this, I hope that a critical approach has a relevance that outlives art criticism.