Alison Croggon's weblog

For the record

I lost my cool yesterday and wrote to Andrew Bolt, the Herald Sun columnist at large who has been pursuing a disgraceful campaign against the arts (see the blog entry Artist, Wanker, Traitor, written on June 15). My email, quoting the parts of one of Bolt's columns which I found particularly incendiary, is below:

Bolt said: What is the point of art like this? Of art without an audience? Why should we support an arts culture that is so irrelevant, or artists who barely care?

I hope I don't say this because I'm a barbarian.

I know I don't feel like one. I own thousands of lovely books, worked for an opera company, subscribe to literary magazines and have cupboards of CDs. I may be dull or thick, but I suspect if our artists can't speak to me, they can't speak to many others, either.

Frankly, too few seem even to want to try. It's as if pleasing the public – as did Shakespeare, Dickens and Verdi – is beneath them.

Dear Andrew

I am one of those artists supported - as Les Murray says - in order to be paid now what otherwise posterity will owe me, and feel, however futile it might be, that this needs to be at least answered.

I'm afraid you are not nearly as interesting as a barbarian, who after all, respected their own cultures. If you believe that the art that lasts begins by pleasing its audience, you are simply ignorant. Ibsen, Mozart, Puccini and Eliot garnered such scorn as yours from the pundits of their days. Milton, the avante gard of his day, never sold more than 3000 books * in his lifetime. On the other hand, I own a few books by best selling poets of the 19th century. In their time they were the audience pleasers - these poets sold in their hundreds of thousands - but no one reads their work today, because it's boring beyond belief. The fact is that great art always emerges out of a culture in which there is all sorts of art, from sheerly bad to mediocre to good to excellent, and the healithier and more active this culture is, the better the chance there is of the good work emerging. It is also an uncomfortable fact that no one knows what work will last; though conservative critics have always had a bad strike rate. Patronage has always been necessary, because artists are among the worst paid and hardest working members of our community. Reviews of the arts sector have in fact shown that the Australian tax payer gets very good value for money out of the arts dollar. But I see you take great care to elide this fact, in your gross libel against some of the people in this community who really do care about what is happening to it, and are concerned about more than their own comfort.

I am sorry you are carrying on such a biased, ill-informed and intellectually dishonest campaign against the arts. But you can't have your cake and eat it: if you are a cultured person, then you would understand and be interested in what the arts actually are, and what they offer beyond being merely consumable items (sales, or the lack of them, are no test of quality). You would understand that a culture which values its artists and is interested in what they have to say and offer is a culture which is streets ahead in its intellectual capital. It is not surprising that you should be attempting to silence artists, since art is often the focal point of dissent: but if you wish to silence artists, you should come clean and stop pretending that you care about culture.

If you are really concerned about waste of the tax payer's dollar, I wonder that you aren't questioning the $10 million Mr Howard cost the taxpayer in travel expenses, airfares, outrageously luxurious hotels &c last year. I await your column on that with interest.

Yours faithfully

Alison Croggon

Mr Bolt answered me this morning:

What a rude, ill-informed and illogical letter.

"Ibsen, Mozart, Puccini and Eliot garnered such scorn as yours from the pundits of their days" - untrue. Monumentally untrue, in fact, given all were acknowledged superstars for at least some portion of their lives, having managed to find their audience. This is a surprisingly ignorant remark from someone who claims an interest in the arts.

"I am one of those artists supported - as Les Murray says - in order to be paid now what otherwise posterity will owe me" - And if posterity decides it owes you nothing after all, will we get a refund? In fact, you are paid now not what posterity will one day reckon to be your deserts, by what a small group of bureaucrats and like-minded arts professionals today want you to have, using as a piggybank the money of people who - if left to decide for themselves in the comfort of their local bookshop - would give you next to nothing. Which is probably closer to your true worth than your own estimation of the matter.

"It is not surprising that you should be attempting to silence artists". - What a stupid - or dishonest - thing to say. Someone who, as you know, buys as many books and CDs as I do is not silencing artists at all, but contributing more than most to ensure they have enough money to keep producing. My argument - if you followed it with honesty and intelligence - is that artists tend now to show a disdain for their audience that makes art dangerously irrelevant and remote. This is in part due to the financial decoupling of an artist from their potential audience by giving bureaucrats and an artistic cabal the power to decide which artist is rewarded for their work, and which must starve. I want the funding arrangements changed so that consumers can make these judgments themselves. Far from shutting up artists, my aim is to ensure that artists gain an audience and an influence they do not have now. Your allegation therefore is the exact opposite of the truth. If you had more sales, you might have the courage to acknowledge this.


Andrew Bolt

Predictable, eh? I don't know why I do this. Anyway, I wrote back:

No ruder than your columns, and in fact better informed.

At 9:11 AM +1000 21/7/03, Bolt, Andrew wrote:
"Ibsen, Mozart, Puccini and Eliot garnered such scorn as yours from the pundits of their days" - untrue. Monumentally untrue, in fact, given all were acknowledged superstars for at least some portion of their lives, having managed to find their audience. This is a surprisingly ignorant remark from someone who claims an interest in the arts.

They were all very small audiences. The artists you get upset about have small audiences as well. That is how it happens: new art always has a small audience, unless it is frankly commercial. Some art, a small minority, which is commercial might also have artistic worth: but a significant proportion of the most important art begins tiny. Most art which has artistic worth will only appeal to a small minority in its time, because it is breaking new ground and challenging the tastes of its day. That's why it's good a generation later. You seem to make no acknowledgement of this fact, and I can only assume it's because you don't know it.

How do you determine what is a "proper" audience? One of your objections to Rabbit Proof Fence (a film about which I have no opinion, not having seen it, and not having a desire to see it) is that it has an audience, both here and worldwide. You only want some art to have an audience, the art with which you agree. That is why I say you wish to silence the arts.

Mozart only wrote for a tiny aristocratic elite. I can send you endless quotes of the critics who damned Ibsen, Puccini, Eliot et al. "Artists tend now to show a disdain for their audience that makes art dangerously irrelevant and remote" is one of the accusations levelled at Eliot. Ibsen was called an "open sewer". And so on.

At 9:11 AM +1000 21/7/03, Bolt, Andrew wrote:
And if posterity decides it owes you nothing after all, will we get a refund? In fact, you are paid now not what posterity will one day reckon to be your deserts, by what a small group of bureaucrats and like-minded arts professionals today want you to have, using as a piggybank the money of people who - if left to decide for themselves in the comfort of their local bookshop - would give you next to nothing. Which is probably closer to your true worth than your own estimation of the matter.

I am not typical because I write across a range of genres and, as it happens, my work sells fine. I do not apply for funding, however, to help with my more commercial work: I figure it doesn't need support. But the other work, the work which seems to me of perhaps more lasting cultural value, I do ask for support for, because I face incredible difficulties achieving it otherwise. I actually think it is wrong to ask the Australia Council to support art which will find support otherwise; I don't think that is why it's there. If I tried to live on the earnings I make even as a "successful" poet I would be starving. So, you reckon that even though I am contributing through my hard work, and even if my work is acknowledged as valuable, I should be in that position? Or perhaps you simply think there should be no poems at all. That's a fairly widespread idea, but it is not an idea held by anyone who values culture.

The fact is that the Australia Council is not perfect. But your arguments are not accurate. If you thought that the arts needed to be more courageous, and needed to make themselves relevant to the wider world, you would be campaigning for more money, rather than less. You might campaign for a funding system like they have in France, where culture is in fact valued, and an increase from the current pathetic amount to, say, 1 per cent of the GDP. Then we might get something really interesting happening here. I think much of the culture here is cowardly and conventional, and therefore won't contribute to the wider community of culture. What you're doing is ensuring that it won't. You need deep soil to nurture a culture.

At 9:11 AM +1000 21/7/03, Bolt, Andrew wrote:
Far from shutting up artists, my aim is to ensure that artists gain an audience and an influence they do not have now. Your allegation therefore is the exact opposite of the truth. If you had more sales, you might have the courage to acknowledge this.

No, by misrepresenting what arts funding is, you wish to shut down the possibilities of the arts. You focus on some isolated targets and generalise them to mean all of the arts. You fail to acknowledge how necessary it is for the arts to be supported, because your only criterion seems to be commercial and popular success (since you dismiss with scorn the audience they in fact do get), while drawing on a canon of artists who were never commercial successes in their day and who often themselves depended on patronage. That is quite simply bad faith.

Alison Croggon

Well, I can't claim literary merit or original thought in stating the obvious: in arguments like these one tends to enter at the level of the interlocutor. But it makes me mad that Bolt wants to claim intellectual honesty and the mantle of Culture while exercising the worst kind of philistinism and spin.

* Note: I can't find my source for this figure, which was drawn from memory and may well be inaccurate. It's always better not to write in a temper. A better example would have been Coleridge and Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads, with its first print run of 500 copies, which became subsequently one of the most influential books of poetry ever published.