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.
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