:: Wog Blog ::
:: WHAT AM I THINKING ABOUT? ::
:: Friday 18 April 2008 ::
I Really Appreciated Being Appreciated
[NOTE: Link is to The Australian's page for the Summit. Bound to be something on there in due course about this arts bullshit.]
That is the 2020 ideas Summit arts stream introduced by the retarded Cate Blanchett. She is such a honey to look at and such an egomaniac with no idea how stupid she is it is...how you say...sad.
Cate could not resist a pissy anti-Bush remark in her opening blather, and told the story of meeting US President Bill Clinton and him telling her about how much he likes arts. She said, and I quote: I really appreciated being appreciated".
See it?
It is all about her. Love me, I am actor. Love them, they are actors, Love us, we are actors. The Arts:Centre of life in Australia.
Seriously, lady.
Gi. Fa.
Here is the vision of 2020 in Oz viz "the arts" groud:
In 2020 artists will all make a living doing whatever they do, they'll have support in the form of mandated spaces to presumably make and display their art and administrators to take care of the office-type stuff needed to support their endeavours, and everyone who is not an artist will appreciate what the artists are doing.
Seriously.
You see it? The wish?
No competition in the arts. No actual appeal to audiences. Just compulsory arts funding and compulsory arts appreciation. What a fucking a vision of hell - kill yourselves if this country ever looks like such a fascist bloddy hellhole. I say 'fascist' cos it is an integral part of the Oz character to know a "wanker" when you see one, and to call him out on it.
And what the arts luvvies want is to outlaw ever being called or even thought of as wankers, even though that is exactly what the vast bulk of them are.
Oz has a "tall poppy syndrome" by which we happily engage in harping against and criticing folks who do well in their chosen fields, whether locally or heading overseas. But the thing to understand about the "tall poppy syndrome" is that the accent there was never on the "tall", that is "succesful". It is not about slamming someone for succeeding. The accent was on the "poppy". That is, the precious egomaniac. There is a big diff.
To my mind Cate Blanchett, who is very successful in her field, is a wanker and a bit of "tall poppy" criticism is warranted. When she went to Cronulla to call for "peace", when there was no war, she was behaving like a wanker. Had to have a camera on her. Had to save the wogs from the 'war'. When she wrote that arts needs to be the centre of Oz life, she was thinking like a wanker.
She is a "poppy".
Oz is not continental Europe where art truly is the centre of life.
Oz is big skies and future and youth (and I do not mean people, we got plenty of oldies and more to come. I mean no hangovers of history like in Italy where you cannot move a metre without encountering some serious history, all of it well-documented and most of it in need of preservation, so much so that every step taken by Italians is heavier than most cos of the weight of all that collective past that each of them, old or young, just lives with day to day) and it is now free of all that wankery.
I do not want to envision an Oz in 2020 or anytime in the future where the word "wanker" is not an intertal part of our national language. It is what makes us so outstanding at a whole bunch of stuff that we do, that we do not take ourselves seriously, but we do take what we get up to very seriously indeed.
Call it ANZAC spirit. Call it whatever.
But the one sector of Oz that persistently lets us down is the one whose members almost uniformly lack ANZAC spirit. The arts sector is replete with whining wankers always asking for more money and rarely delivering anything audiences actually want to see. Sad sacks of shit who create left-wing (uniformly, there is no right-wing or even libertarian arts community; there's just left and lefter) rubbish desired by hardly anybody outside of mates, family and rusted on critics who self-censor out of some misguided philosophy that crap art should be celebrated so long as it is crap Oz art.
That is just the opening for this arts 'discussion' at 2020.
Milo, give me strength.
:: WB 8:55 pm [link+] ::
