Australia’s Arts Institutions Are Not Worth Saving

Adelaide Writer’s Week Deserves to Die

The dipshittery churns on. Adelaide Writers’ Week has just announced their decision to drop Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah from their lineup for purely racist reasons. I’ll copy and paste their statement in full because it is just so breathtakingly stupid, that no quip or pun or gag I could muster can really make it seem worse than it already is:

Every writer worth their salt is now calling for a boycott. AWW has made the same fatal mistake Bendigo made, and let a handful of Zionist sooks and bullies dictate the terms of what is acceptable public discourse in this bleakly backwards backwater. Over the coming weeks (days?), we are going to watch this festival self-cannibalise for no real reason other than to save the feelings of people who’ve been all but jacking off to dead children for two and a half years. So it goes.

My thing is: let it die. The mediocrity of the festival’s lineup doesn’t just underscore its political cowardice, it announces it. Panels with Jacinda Arden, Sarah Ferguson, The Mushroom Tapes (if you are into this you are not ensouled, sorry), David fucking Speers, and more Annabel Crabb than a Kitchen Warehouse stocktake sale…who is it for, and who needs it? It’s as far from my ideas about “writing” as a soul can possibly stray.

Like all of the major writer’s festivals in this country, AWW caters to an idealised midwit, in audience and artist both. This is why you can have a major panel describing middlebrow slop puker Trent Dalton as “A Living National Treasure”. These festivals ask: what if the Saturday Quiz came to life and cornered you at a party to talk about the 73rd anniversary of The Dismissal for two hours? What if Waleed Aly had a children’s book about Milton Friedman? What if we cloned Annabel Crabb and made one clone bake the other into a giant pavlova?

Who’s asking for that? Who needs it? Who wants it? How does this drek keep perpetuating itself? Do we have to wait for everyone over 45 in this country to die before the arts can get good and interesting again? It’s seeming more and more likely.

Every major arts festival in Australia is a place where art goes to die. Gaza has worked like lemon juice dripped over invisible ink to reveal every arts manager and administrator’s and festival board’s internal mantra: “I BELIEVE IN NOTHING BUT A PLEASANT CHAT.”

The reign of terror of the Gormantariat must be brought to an end, and if habitual dick-tripping and self-combustion is the thing to do it, so be it. These “cultural spaces” are as empty and vacuous and useless as, well, David Speers, and if we are ever going to be a country that hones in on creating serious works of literature, film, theatre, fine art, dance — whatever — then we best do away with them as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

These spaces have spent the past decade or so inoculating themselves from criticism by offering up ‘diverse’ artists to a baying upper-middle-class mob as a means of smoothing over their terminal undaring. What they’ve always demanded is a sort of Uncle Tom performance — a measured and acceptable cheekiness, that’s radicalness is confined to the categorizable toe-tag of your demarcated otherness.

Abdel-Fattah has again made the idiotic mistake of having a clear and practiced moral compass in a nation whose arts community finds that as confronting as they do condescending. There is a reason Annabel Crabb is the mascot for these things: what’s desired is a sort of equivocating state of intellectual edging. They want to apply the Mormon soaking method to thought and imagination. Anything more than that ruins the bedsheets, and sends these people into a tizzy.

For years, these festivals have worked as fronts and grifts for all parties involved. Authors are there to sell themselves and their books, the organisers are there to sell themselves and cement the need for their existence in Oz art’s top heavy ecosystem, and the audiences are there to sell themselves to themselves as someone who is able to stand up at a Q&A and deliver a comment so beautiful it will heal all wounds in the world. It is a bukaki party of the doomed, and most regular people refuse a nibble of the biscuit for good reason.

This is a hokey, creaky, decrepit old system of graft that only works for established hustlers, most of whom already have steady employment with the ABC. It is no wonder that these things can not adapt to the borderline abstract horror of ultra-modernity that is Gaza: these leaking old war ships are turning into full cannon fire and splintering like cheap balsa wood toys on a sea of blood. They are not built for the very thing they’re here to peddle: debate/thought/imagination/art. They buckle under the solid reality of real ideas. They sink. They explode. Do you really want to keep paddling around in the bilgewater of their cracked hulls? Yes? Well, ask yourself why.

If you want to spin some gold from this turdic yarn, then try to reframe this breaking point as opportunity. Perhaps one of us with guts will come into wealth somehow (is Gina single?), or perhaps we can get our ever-underemployed asses off our Lacanian shrink’s ergonomic chaise lounge and organise something that is self-perpetuating and better (not me, I’m too lazy and stupid and venal and a hypocrite to boot). This snap could be the thing that sweeps two generations of deep-seeded mediocrity away for good, but who knows, these people burrow in like ticks and seem to have the nuclear shelf-life of radroaches. I can not believe something is truly better in Australian letters (nvm the rest) while things like this persist as is.

If you can take comfort in anything it’s that Zionists — like all fascists — are incapable of creating any art at all, and their ideas dry up and blacken as quickly as the blood they love to spill. That drives them mad, and it’s incurable. Let them wallow, it’s all they’ve got!