Last month in Melbourne i joined a panel at the State Library of Victoria speaking out about the current internet filter proposal. Also on the panel was the parliament’s best and most consistent filter opponent Scott Ludlam, Greens Senator for Western Australia, professional provocateur Catherine Deveny, and Colin Jacobs who is the Chair of Electronic Frontiers Australia. Rather belatedly I’m getting around to posting the audio of the event now.

My contribution focused on the some of the sheer stupidities inherent in this current proposal. The audio of my talk is here.

You can also listen to the other speakers at the forum’s web site.

My upload picture funciton is busted, so here is a video.

CAN YOU make a reality TV show about art? Does the template make visual arts exciting, or do we really get to watch paint dry?

The team behind the American cable series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist thinks they’ve found the way. The show, which premiered on cable network Bravo last week, follows the format of successful reality franchises such as MasterChef, Next Top Model, and The Apprentice. But the aim this time is not to unearth models, fashion designers or corporate bastards but artists.

So how does it work?

For my sins, my firewall-leaping technological proficiency and the irresistible enthusiasm of my editor, I managed to track down a copy of the first episode. Ostensibly Work of Art: The Next Great Artist has 14 competitors chasing $100,000 (never mentioned without the tagline that the loot is provided by “Prismacolor: life uninhibited”) and a prestigious solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. Each week they’re asked to create a new work in an unfeasibly short time to be judged by a cast of prestigious critics and collectors. Sound familiar?

As with any reality show, it’s more about the human drama than the notional subject matter. As you’d expect the “who’s the better artist” package comes bundled with the usual reality TV add-ons. It’s got carefully constructed and often implausibly physically attractive characters, weird artificial weekly challenges, fast-paced editing, immunity challenges, evictions and all the artists living in the same big house.

Much of the pre-publicity around the series hinges on the fact that the show is produced by the production company of Sarah Jessica Parker, pictured. In the first episode, she makes a gratuitous, distracting (and totally unsurprising) “surprise” visit and leaves the cast with an underwhelming inspirational speech.

The first week saw the contestants challenged to make a portrait of a fellow contestant, after they’re paired up. It’s a nice set-up for a balanced combination of insight into contestants’ creative process and an opportunity for a little bitchiness.

Obviously, we’re meant to take sides here. One contestant, Nao, has been selectively edited to be the bitch from central casting. She is a university lecturer, clearly more established than most others, with such a strong sense of her own position that she offers the others gratuitous advice on their work. Attractive eccentric man-boy Miles responds by painting her as a corpse (evoking the tradition of “death portraiture”) though presumably because Miles is such a nice guy, all the producers resist the urge to read too much into this.

Another contestant, Jamie Lynn, informs us all that she is “not just a ditzy Christian blonde Barbie wannabe person — I’m an artist” and in doing so comprehensively undermines her own argument. I took an instant liking to Erik, the guy who has been living in his truck and admits at the beginning that he’s been an artist “for about six hours”. Unfortunately, it showed instantly in his work.

So does the show work? Well, sort of. It’s not the next MasterChef, but it could be a strong staple for cable TV for at least a few series. It’s mostly mindless fun.

I won’t be seeking out the next episode but I will watch for its arrival in Australia.

Call it the benefit of low expectations, but it provides a little more insight into the creative process and artists’ technique than I had expected, and I hope this element will get more air time as the cast is culled and the introductions are dropped.

But really, it’s about television and entertainment, not art. Just as Australian Idol offers bugger-all resemblance to the way in which musicians outside reality TV land make it to the top, Work of Art is only peripherally about creativity. It’s entertaining enough, but by the end, I strongly suspected one of the artists was evicted for reasons of casting as much as creative critique.

Of course, away from reality TV land, art is not really a competition in the conventional sense at all.

It’s a wonderful, subjective, complex chaos of contradictory expectations and contested goals.

But that makes for lousy television.

Only in retrospect, and often long after the work is made, is there any consensus about what “winning” as a “great artist” actually means at all.

It’s something i may get around to writing about myself in the near future, but in the mean time, here’s an open letter from John:

Open letter to the Government

Re: Cooper Report recommendation and its unintended consequences

I will never forget the day in 1990 when an art collector (then a partner in a leading law firm) dropped by my studio. He cheerfully told me that he had just bought a very good Colin McCahon painting at auction at one of the many forced sales of art collections by failed corporations. He had paid less for this painting by a famous dead artist than the typical asking price for a successful artist under 40 years of age. The next five years were economically disastrous  for living artists and gallerists aged between 30 and 40; many did not survive as practitioners. The legacy of those years is still evident today; there is a gap in the demographic of practising artists and gallerists aged 45 to 55 years of age.

The Cooper Report’s proposed forced sale of numerous art collections from SMSFs is destructive folly. The economic and community benefits that would justify this retrospective and draconian directive are very unclear. Artworks mostly have life spans measured in many decades, if not centuries. If these collections must be sold, why not over twenty or thirty years? What is the hurry? The measure is particularly likely to cause irreparable harm to the next generation of indigenous artists.

The mandated liquidation of existing collections will be at individually born cost, not only in terms of reduced superannuation benefits for those facing retirement but also sellers fees (minimum 10%), commissions paid to agents and so on. Or If the works are transferred to some sort of approved  ‘management’ there will be new, additional management costs. The retrospective nature of the directive makes the payment of these costs a Duty:  a hypothecated tax.

This recommendation flies in the face of the government’s commitment to and investment in the indigenous visual arts sector, particularly the art centres. The loss of confidence in the art market as a result of the uncertainty surrounding the report is already being felt. Artists’ incomes – especially for those artists who depend on the sale of their artworks for their incomes – are already being impacted upon.

Over the past few years government policy affecting the visual arts has, far too often, been shaped by advice and recommendations given by persons whose authority to speak about the realities of the sector are based solely in a lack of curiosity.

As reported in The Australian newspaper, Cooper review panelist Meg Heffron was quoted as saying that “the panel did not take the art sectors concerns into consideration because its task was to review the superannuation industry and not all the industries around it”. On the contrary, it is definitely the task of government to take the concerns of the whole community into consideration. I urge you to reconsider this uninformed and harmful recommendation as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

John R Walker

Artist

Later this week, various venues around Fitzroy will host an “anti-gentrification festival” hosted by the “radical craft group” Craft Cartel. Their aim, as they describe it, is to celebrate their presence in the city before they are driven out by what they describe as “crazy living costs”. They’ve even got hold of the stinky, sticky carpet from the much-loved, mourned, dead and soon-to-be resurrected Tote and are making exhibitions, fashion parades and souvenirs from it to raise money for local charities.

It’s easy to criticise this kind of approach. It seems a little naive. It’s certainly neither the first nor the last time that artists in Melbourne and other major Australian cities have complained of being forced out of their stomping grounds by yuppies, developers, nimby regulations, and rising property prices.

It’s certainly difficult to imagine just how this keep-Fitzroy-feisty fest will turn back such an overwhelming tide.

On one level, these kinds of reactions to the changing dynamic over our inner cities are little more than youthful nostalgia. Zoom out a decade or two and the places where artists and creative communities live and meet are always evolving not just because of demographic and economic forces, but from the changing tastes and expectations of artists and audiences themselves.

As much as I’d personally love to see the significant and seminal places of my own formative years preserved, declaring my own once-sacred sites probably won’t help. At its worst, it just invites us to swap a living city for a theme park and dynamic venues for atrophied museums.

But for all the easy pot-shots there is a genuine question here. It’s not merely about how we save any particular place, but how we preserve the ability to make creative places for the next generation. Against the backdrop of much larger forces — the rising speculative value of property prices, the growing (and sensible) policy pressures to move more people into the inner-city suburbs and the encroachment of ever-greater regulation of space — how do we ensure that creative communities still get a look-in?

These are real, live issues and not just for radical crafters. Many artists are constantly fleeing further and further out. Their very presence seems to invite rising property prices. Property investment seminars tell investors to follow the creatives. They seek out cheap space, make it dynamic and interesting and in doing so, they attract the interest of punters, speculators and developers, who, in turn, begin to price them out to the next suburb.

Look over the past few decades as the dynamics have moved from Carlton to Fitzroy to Collingwood, Brunswick, Northcote and beyond.

Against these forces, the way we plan for and support the arts are often inadequate. The way that governments have traditionally made space for the artists — through commissioning buildings and creating cultural infrastructure — has only ever been a fraction of a much greater sum of cultural activity. Then there are all the studios, rehearsal spaces, formal and informal arts infrastructure that artists create and recreate. It’s getting more difficult to find, make and shape these spaces by artists, community groups or others who don’t have much money and don’t expect to earn very much. So much of what we now take for granted in our cultural and community lives was planted and nurtured in cheap space.

The real question is not how do we save a particular place or “nostalgise” a particular suburb at a particular time but how do we ensure that the dynamic continues? How do we keep making and creating new places and spaces for artists to live and work?

There’s no single solution. Inevitably, the near future involves artists moving further afield in search of the underutilised spaces. It must also involve governments setting rules and regulations and offering incentives that encourage creative seeds to be planted and spaces to be used creatively.

Of course, if history, the rest of the world and gravity are anything to go by, this long boom of property prices won’t last forever either. In a dynamic city at some point, inevitably, the booms bust and the cycles begin again.

The exhibition — brought to us by the Victorian Major Events Company, Museum Victoria, Michael Gudinski’s Frontier Events and Premier Exhibitions USA — is one of many new corporate for-profit museum shows that walk a very fine line between museum exhibition and theme park. While great for attendance figures, they can raise some complex ethical questions for our public institutions.

Titanic is not alone. Now or recently touring the world, you will find another show from the same company featuring plasticised human bodies, two Tutankhamun exhibitions, a Princess Diana experience and so many Leonardo Da Vinci shows I’ve lost track of them.

All are the product of companies — in partnerships with everyone from cable TV networks, deceased estates, rock promoters, museums, and established collectors — which live and die by their ability to pull a crowd and the money that goes with it.

I have no doubt the Titanic exhibition will do that. It is a compelling experience. The combination of objects collected from the seabed, historical photographs, recreated elements of the ship and the personal narratives of passengers has a powerful impact. I was holding back tears at the personal stories behind a tragedy that has too easily become a cliche.

For museum attendances, it’s a positive. It is great to see that a museum can be both engaging and informative. It is great to see that a show such as Titanic can attract to a museum an audience inspired by a blockbuster movie.

A visitors’ book full of comments about Jack Dawson (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) indicates where the interest is coming from.

Yet the Titanic show in particular raises a deeper question about striking the balance between integrity and marketing, particularly when presented in public institutions. The commercialisation of the tragedy is a little uncomfortable — the sheer volume of tie-in marketing, souvenirs, and paid photo opportunities is designed to wring the last dollar out of the unwary Titanophile. But there are also some genuine concerns for the integrity of the show and the museum itself.

In packaging up the story of the Titanic, it appears as though the last crucial piece had gone missing somewhere. While the exhibition lauds the efforts of the company RMS Titanic (a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions USA) to collect and preserve relics of the ship, the history of those actions is controversial.

Back in 1985, when Robert Ballard’s team originally found the wreck, they consciously chose not to disturb nor claim salvage rights. They urged all nations to protect the integrity of the site and to leave it undisturbed as a memorial. Only later did RMS Titanic step in and claim those salvage rights — a claim that was the subject of much controversy but was later upheld in court.

One Titanic survivor, Eva Hart, went so far as to accuse the company of “insensitivity and greed”, calling its officers “fortune hunters, vultures, pirates”. This last chapter in the Titanic story doesn’t rate much of a mention anywhere in the exhibition.

I don’t know if I share Robert Ballard’s and Eva Hart’s view about the salvaging. It’s a complex matter and there are plenty of precedents on both sides. What concerns me is the missing chapter. I would expect — at the very least — that the Melbourne museum would engage with and acknowledge that complexity. Every curator I’ve met is mindful of how artefacts come into their possession, and yet there’s no sign of that here. Unchallenged, self-justifying explanations about its “conservation program” are to be expected from a promotions and event company, but is less than I expect from a serious museum.

Blockbuster shows may bring huge numbers of tourists to Victoria and through our big institutions but would sit much more comfortably if there was not a niggling concern that we are stretching our integrity to accommodate them.

The “are video games art?” debate has been simmering off and on for as long as I can remember but it has roared to life recently. Last month, American film critic Roger Ebert poured fuel on the fire in an article suggesting that video games “can never be art”. Australian film critic Lynden Barber ran some of the same arguments here. Tens of thousands of blog posts, comments, articles and accusations later – including quite a few in The Age’s own Screen Play blog – and it would be fair to say that there hasn’t been a lot of movement between the opposing camps.

I’m no objective observer on this one. I believe that video games are a significant, under-explored and under-appreciated cultural form. I grew up with video games. I love playing them both to mindlessly kill time and because I find them uniquely compelling. Six years ago my love of, and frustration with, video games led me to co-found Free Play, an annual independent video games festival and conference in Melbourne. The 2010 event will be at the State Library in August.

But I’m no unabashed apologist either. Structurally, computer games are an unimaginative industry. More often than not they fall well short of their creative potential and many people who love computer games will freely admit that. Free Play came in part from the passions of people whose creative ambitions were constantly thwarted by the commercial imperatives of their employers and was aimed in part to try to foster the same kind of independent sector for games that had long driven innovation in cinema.

Today’s computer games have a lot in common with early cinema. They draw on many creative traditions to create a new one. They can incorporate narrative, architecture, acting, drama, animation, choreography, music, pictures, text and cinema itself and fuse them to create something that can be powerful and experiential or – as I will admit is often the case – superficial and dumb.

So why might cinema be an art form and not games? Both Ebert and Barber rely largely on a quite technical line. A “game” by definition, they argue, is inherently based on rules and competition. Games and art are therefore irreconcilable. The argument to me ignores precedents such as dance – which has both competitive and artistic forms – and the reality of many computer games today that aren’t competitive games in the traditional sense at all.

This isn’t just a semantic debate though. It comes at a time when the Australian game community is political and active. Whether games are art or not is a question with powerful political consequences in a country unique in the world for having no R18+ rating for games.

Games are the only creative form – the only art form perhaps – where creators are banned from making works specifically for adults or dealing with exclusively adult themes. Given the average computer game player is about my age it should be no surprise that the government is being lobbied hard by gamers advocating a change of law.

But do I think games are art? Frankly I’m not sure it’s the right question.

Making games is a skilled craft.I’ve seen games that are as thought-provoking, beautiful, powerful and intriguing as any other cultural form but I wouldn’t suggest that all games are artworks.

It is the talent, tradition, motivations and the consequences of painting for example that defines whether it’s art or not, otherwise every house painter and signwriter would be queueing up outside the Australia Council.

I suspect the debate is largely generational. Games have already made their way into galleries, orchestras play their soundtracks, and their characters are familiar parts of many lives.

To paraphrase Max Planck, the games as art argument won’t triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.

To be honest much of the reaction to the Sam Leach’s winning of the Wynne prize has flat out confused me. It’s not that I don’t understand the debate. I got that Leech’s work Proposal for landscaped cosmos was inspired by – perhaps questionably copied from — a Dutch work that may not have been appropriately acknowledged. I got that there was a legitimate question as to whether Leach’s work met the prize’s terms as a depiction of an “Australian” landscape. What surprised me is that it has suddenly become fair game to call art on whether it is truly “original” or not.

It’s about time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a child of appropriation, sampling, collage and pastiche. It doesn’t bother me that artists such as Sam Leach and thousands of others are out there appropriating a range of different contexts to make works. In a world where we are bombarded with uninvited images, fragments, sounds and sights, and where there are layers upon layers of cultural memory and reference points, it is to be expected that artists will seek to reference and use it.

The test for me is whether an artist brings together those elements to make a work that is substantially unique – that they add weight and not just volume to our cultural heritage. If so, then the full gamut of human experience and endeavour is fair game as source material as far as I’m concerned.

It’s not a new thing. Culture has morphed, evolved, cannibalised itself, built and bent on its own traditions going back well before the advent of modern technology or the infuriating academic postmodernism I was subjected to at university.

However, I am concerned about originality. Artists that appeal to me aspire to do that, and I find myself agreeing with those who argue that we’ve institutionalised lazy adaptation and elevated them to the highest echelons of our cultural priorities and hierarchies.

But the visual arts are hardly the worst culprit. The occasional art prize pales compared with the well-funded cover bands that make up the bulk of our national arts expenditure. When was the last time we criticised an orchestra or an opera company for simply busting out thinly veiled adaptations and unoriginal work? What if people realise that the much-heralded arrival of Waiting for Godot is actually a copy of a work that’s been around for ages?.

The sad fact is that the arts wallow in unoriginality all the time. It is only strange this time we are criticising it rather than purely rewarding it. In the performing arts it has become a structural problem that has become self-fulfilling. Original work is pushed to the bottom of the pile. The strongest criterion about whether a work is likely to be funded, promoted, discussed or endorsed is almost always how familiar it is. Work that is safe, marketable and predictable is nurtured for precisely that reason.

Not only is the underlying source material more refined but productions are better resourced. For every person involved in producing new works there are probably a hundred more involved in and reproducing, administering and marketing old ones.

I’ve worked almost exclusively with artists creating new works. It isn’t easy. It is a messy process. There’s a lot of trial and error involved.

Originality inherently fails more often than it succeeds. It involves risk both financial and professional and in a politically sensitive art funding environment risk of failure, controversy, and anything that may generate an unpredictable headline is almost always problematic.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Artists persist in creating new works despite the odds and there are many admirable companies, festivals and awards that remain truly committed to celebrating them. Now that we apparently are being invited to put originality at the centre of the discussion about what we want to promote in the arts, perhaps we are being encouraged to value them.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t just me — there were 20 or so others — mostly directors and managers of the nation’s major arts companies, organisations and cultural institutions – and we found ourselves engaged in some healthy and occasionally robust debate about the nation’s arts policy and cultural direction.

It’s probably fair to say that Kevin Rudd hasn’t exactly endeared himself to the arts community in his first term. His knee-jerk description of Bill Henson’s work as “revolting”, the perception that he rarely, if ever, attends arts events, and just a general sense that he lacks the requisite amount of love and nurturing have conspired to create the perception that the PM is a little disengaged. No doubt the dinner was as much an attempt at bridge-building as of policy discussion.

While I can’t say I’d given it a lot of thought, before and after last week’s dinner, I’ve been constantly reminded just how many artists and arts workers are either confused, confronted or curious about what the PM’s attitudes towards the arts actually are. Whether the PM personally “gives a shit” — as several of my Facebook friends have put it — is one question that many in the arts want answered.

So, based entirely on the insight of a single superficial dinner conversation: does the PM love the arts as much as the arts apparently want him to? Frankly, probably not. There’s no doubt he isn’t passionate about the arts in the generic, big picture Keatingesque sense – or even the Kennett one for that matter. Equally, though, it would be unfair to imagine that he is as ignorant and disconnected as his critics might assume.

Like most Australians, the PM can engage enthusiastically and genuinely about his own formative cultural interests, his influences, shows he has seen and the influence of arts and culture in the life of his kids. There was no indication that it was a singular obsession the luvvies might long for, though.

I’m really not sure that’s a bad thing. Whether the PM personally loves the arts or not is hardly the point. Each time our dinner discussion turned away from tough questions of directions, strategies and priorities and towards the nebulous questions of how much or how little Australians — PM implicitly included — appreciate the arts, I found it just a little uncomfortable and frustrating.

In few other areas of life is there so much concern about being loved and appreciated and so little for the mechanics and practicalities of good policy. Confronted with politics and policy, it is too easy for the Australian arts community to look longingly at the status of artists in Europe (or Venezuela and Cuba — as some dinner guests perhaps rather problematically suggested to the PM) and too little at the policy choices, opportunity costs, and considerations that need to inform the decisions that governments make in managing limited resources.

Do I want a prime minister who loves the arts? Yes, ideally, but I would swap him tomorrow for one who will think about and respond thoughtfully to the serious and difficult questions facing an Australia that wants to foster creativity in the 21st century.

Do I want the nation to value the arts? Yes, but not in a generic sense. I want the nation to be a place where culture is given every opportunity to be created and contested and not merely immaculately presented and appreciatively consumed.

I lived for years in New South Wales under Bob Carr — a premier and arts minister whose love of literature and high-minded cultural pursuits were well known. He was a terrible minister.

As other states engaged in the process of robust and comprehensive policy development and institution building, the NSW premier’s very proximity seemed to thwart and discourage it outside his own narrow bands of interest.

It is not simply about love, it is not even particularly about more money. Serious debates about cultural processes and priorities fail if “love” and “value” are little more than excuses to engage the rhetorical autopilot.

Whether this PM is interested in or is capable of becoming interested in those questions, I still don’t know. As for what the PM made of the fine upstanding folks of the arts community? Now that’s an interesting question.

Fact: people will work free in the arts. They do it to develop skills and contacts, because they like the idea of the glitz and excitement, or simply because they believe that being involved in culture and creativity is about something more important than maximising the amount of money they earn. Throw in the proliferation of arts courses — some of questionable quality — that require their students to do real-life internships and placements and there are plenty of potential volunteers out there, even if they don’t really want to lick envelopes for no pay.

Put it down to lack of funding, but I’m not sure. Some of the best-funded organisations have the most volunteers, and there’s very little guarantee that more money wouldn’t simply pay some people more rather than paying those who are content enough to work without. It’s a strange reversal of the law of supply and demand where more people want to do jobs than there is stuff to do, and more passionate ideas than the there is money to pay for them.

Like most, I can speak from experience about working for nothing. Many of the best things I’ve done haven’t paid me or have barely paid me. I wouldn’t change it for the world. To this day, my paid gigs cross-subsidise all manner of things that cost me money to do. I’ve worked as and with unpaid volunteers and been responsible for co-ordinating and working with many interns, exchanges and placements. It’s hard to define a comfortable rule of thumb about where passion ends and exploitation begins.

Once you get away from away from the kind of “we’re all in this together” low-budget projects I cut my teeth on, the reality is that the arts are full of huge inequities. So many large arts organisations have huge disparities in payment between staff and interns and even between salaried administrators and unpaid or barely paid artists that it has become almost unremarkable.

So are you exploited if you volunteer to get a start in the arts industry? Asking around this week, virtually everyone I know had started out as an intern or a volunteer. Many of their now paid colleagues were people who had come to the organisation via a volunteer route. I was also reminded, quite rightly, that it is not a one-way street. A lot of interns actually take up a lot of effort and produce very little — you can waste a lot of time getting people to work for you free.

So where exactly is the right balance? I do believe that arts organisations have a responsibility to ensure that people are rewarded for their effort.

That’s not necessarily about money or a job for life, but it’s about respect, a genuine opportunity to learn something, meet interesting people and growing from the experience. It’s about ensuring there are opportunities to progress either within or on from the project. It’s not just about free tickets and T-shirts.

Equally, internships can’t be all fun either. The administrative side can feel little more than a series of crappy tasks that — if executed competently and in the right order — add up somehow to something really interesting. Crap tasks are inevitable, but there’s no excuse for treating internships as punishment and designing them to remind the poor sods that they are at the bottom of the food chain, that they need to serve their time, and that they need to suffer for their art(s administration).

I do think there’s a better option. Exploit yourself. Those of you with time on your hands, desperate for experience and keen to volunteer should consider doing it for yourselves. If you’re going to be unpaid, why not work on your own projects? Creating your own shows, gigs, festivals, and events is as reliable a career path into the arts, if not more, as hanging around waiting for a lowly paid admin gig. You get to learn the full spectrum of skills by making the full spectrum of mistakes. You get to see up close the consequences of your decisions both right and wrong. There is no better grounding for a career in the arts or anywhere else.

IN A world where shock – or at least pretending-to-be-shocked-while-actually-promoting-the-thing-in-question – has become a PR staple and a paint-by-numbers marketing tool, is it even possible to be shocked by art any more? Is there any point in artists trying to be shocking? Is there any real difference between the shock value of provocative art and the day-to-day scandals to which we’ve almost become immune?

It’s easy to forget how accustomed we are to being “shocked and outraged”. We seek it out. Visit any newspaper website on a slow news day and be amazed at how many of the “most viewed” items are tales of torrid affairs, sordid murders, depravity, incest, paedophilia, and more.

It is also true that we are becoming a much more fractured society. One group’s shock is another’s ho-hum. Society as a whole has become more permissive, or at least more cynical, yet there are equally those who remain genuinely shocked at that transformation.

It is the easiest charade and the laziest journalism in the world to confect an outrage by simply placing work A in front of reactionary, socially conservative group B, whip up a few headlines and pretend you are having a debate that the 90 per cent of people in the middle might actually care about. Everyone wins – free PR, righteous outrage.

Against this background of constant shock and confected outrage, it isn’t easy to work out what is and isn’t shocking in art any more. The art world can be a very poor barometer of it.

The line between what is yawn-inspiring within the boundaries of the art world and what might whip up a furore outside can seem almost random at times. The art community itself can be shocked.

The Bill Henson case is an obvious example. Australians are very concerned about the sexualisation of children. As the once-hidden world of paedophilia has become more frankly acknowledged, the public saw the artwork differently.

The shock was partially but not purely a beat-up. A genuine debate seemingly came from almost nowhere. In hindsight, the lack of controversy over Henson’s entire body of work in the previous two decades is a testament to changing values. The ABC dug out old TV specials that everyone had seemingly missed, the then-opposition leader admitted to owning a Henson or two (though not one of the questionable ones), while galleries around the country suddenly reported angry letters demanding the removal of works that had been hanging without incident or reaction for many years.

Real shocks – like the public response to the Henson debate – are ones that come from a genuine clash of values. The most shocking things have some sort of uncomfortable underlying truth or question to them. So little is hidden these days, it’s hard for most artists courting controversy to claim they are bringing things out into the light.

For the art world, that the public was discovering something “hidden” that they had always seen in plain sight made it extremely difficult to process the debate.

Should artists strive to shock? Probably not, but that’s not to say that artists should be afraid of it either. I’ve met many artists – mostly bad ones – who enjoy cultivating controversy. They are probably no different from shock-jocks and self-seeking celebrities.

Yet I’ve experienced art from documentary photography to heart-wrenching literature, and compelling cinema that can shock through simply representing the reality of a familiar and brutal world.

When every second comedian is busting out a bunch of swear words, every second show has a provocative title, and every PR person is pushing their clients as outrageous, it can take an artist’s insight to burst through our cynicism and ensure we are shocked occasionally. Offended is easy, cynical is constant, but shocked is pretty darn hard.