Paul Sheehan, ‘Cultural whinge gets the gallery director’s Irish up’, The Sydney Morning Herald, 03.06.99
“This is about envy and revenge, nothing more.”
With these words, the young Irishman who holds the most important position in Australian art, Dr Brian Kennedy, director of the National Gallery of Australia, entered an ideological war that has been building ever since his appointment two years ago.
The catalyst for his anger is an attempt by a group of art scholars, dealers and artists to prevent the appointment of the former art critic of The Sydney Morning Herald, John McDonald, to the powerful position of head of Australian Art at the gallery.
The group is writing to the chairman of the gallery’s council of trustees, the media magnate Kerry Stokes, urging the overturning of the appointment.
“This is a spontaneous protest by a broad group of the art community,” the spokesman for the group, Brad Buckley, Associate Professor at the Sydney College of the Arts, said yesterday. “We ask if it is possible for him to be in a leadership position in a culture where he has been so divisive...
“He [McDonald] looks back into the nineteenth century, he’s looking backwards. He has a very Anglophied view of how art should be valued...
“He didn’t fulfil most of the gallery’s own criteria for the position, that he have a higher degree in the field and extensive curatorial experience...this [protest] is also linked to a broader cultural malaise in Australia. We are importing all these people to be heads of our cultural institutions.”
Dr Kennedy described these arguments as “an unfortunate outburst of provincialism”.
“The first exhibition John does, this group is going to murder him, while the public will love it. Wait and see. It’s as predictable as that.
“It’s terribly disappointing that some people feel it necessary to raise the bar even higher for him before he even has put his feet under the desk.”
There is no chance that the appointment will be overturned.
“Dr Kennedy has the very strong confidence of the minister,” Mr Terry O’Connor, spokesman for the Minister for Communications, Senator Alston, said yesterday. “He has demonstrated an enormous amount of ability. He has made the gallery more vibrant, lively and relevant.”
Dr Kennedy also has the support of Mr Stokes and a famous former chairman, Mr Gough Whitlam.
The leaders of the dissenting group, which is said to number about 200, include Rex Butler of the University of Queensland, the former director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (and frequent McDonald target) Bernice Murphy, Robert Owen of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and gallery owners Anna Schwartz and Nick Tsoutos.
Leading gallery owners contacted by the Herald backed the McDonald appointment. Frank Watters: “It’s a blast of fresh air. There seems to be a creeping control of art by careerists and ideologues. This is a challenge to their power.”
Stuart Purves: “I’m 100 per cent behind his appointment. He knows Australian art very well. He brings a freshness and a broad point of view, and you can have a discourse with him.”
Rex Irwin: “Museums have been buying too much contemporary crap and if this appointment puts a break on that cycle it will be a good thing ... Brian Kennedy has been surprisingly forthright and done incredibly sensible things ... his appointment of John McDonald is slightly out of left field.”
The Kennedy-McDonald team signals the creation of the most outspoken lightning rod in Australian art in generations. Both are 38 and unafraid of controversy and fiercely lucid.
McDonald was appointed the Herald’s chief art critic in 1986, aged 25, and became the pre-eminent art critic in the country.
Dr Kennedy was deputy director of the National Gallery of Ireland when appointed two years ago. His arrival has prompted the departure of some 40 staff, some by natural attrition and others who have been encouraged out the door by Dr Kennedy.
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