Full article at the link ... https://spectator.com.au/2021/05/roll-o ... nd-mozart/The woke elites have no time for the classics.
No other occasion in Australia best exemplifies the hyper-politicisation of the arts than the annual Australia Council for the Arts awards. This year, the recipients, though no doubt highly talented in their particular fields, ticked so many diversity and inclusion boxes that the Council might as well be done with it and call them the Annual Woke Awards.
The Lifetime Achievement in Literature, for example, went to writer and human rights advocate Arnold Zable, whose work is underpinned by the ‘rights and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers’. The recipient of the music award was William Barton, didgeridoo player, ‘proud kalkaduunga man’ and ‘distinguished artist of extraordinary musicality’. Over in Emerging and Experimental Art, Cat Jones, who ‘deals with concepts of sexual and gender politics, human and inter-species empathy, anthropomorphism, and science’ pocketed her $25,000 prize money.
The Visual Arts category was won by Vivienne Binn OAM, who was one of the ‘first artists in Australia to critically engage with feminism’. The Community Arts and Cultural Development award was picked up by Marianne Wobcke, a ‘Girrimay woman from North Queensland who was born on Wakka Wakka land’ and ‘third generation of Stolen Generation women’. Marianne, who is a trained nurse and midwife, has developed a practice called ‘Perinatal Dreaming’ which ensures that ‘all birth practices are culturally safe, using art as a tool for empowerment and expression’.
Last but not least, the Kirk Robson Award for Community Arts and Cultural Development went to Mama Alto who is a ‘jazz singer, cabaret artiste and gender transcendent diva’. According to her bio., Mama Alto ‘is a transgender and queer person of colour who works with the radical potential of storytelling’. Her stage show, Queerly Beloved, ‘was designed to heal some of the trauma that had been caused by the marriage equality postal survey’.
This list of winners proves beyond a shadow of doubt that the sole purpose of the arts in Australia is as a means to a political end. The pursuit of beauty for beauty’s sake has long been considered anachronistic. The elevation of the human spirit, the desire to aspire to something greater than ourselves, has been replaced with self-indulgent and predictably woke ideology masquerading as the arts, which is ultimately unappealing to mainstream Australians. This means that artists, musicians and performers can only achieve acceptability if they belong to a group, preferably representing a protected minority. Those creatives who choose not to play the social justice, intersectionality and identity politics game simply not do not get a look in.
Meanwhile, the Australia Council continues to maintain the fiction that it is committed to making the arts accessible to all Australians. But the reality is that this inner-city cabal is not interested in what the rest of the country would like to see performed on stage or displayed in galleries. It is no surprise, therefore, that there has been a decline in the percentage of Australians who support government funding of the arts. Yet, Australians are still being asked to dig deep into their pockets. The Coalition government has just promised the sector an extra $135 million. Last year, it spent a massive $2.5 billion on arts funding at a time when Australia had fallen into its first recession in 30 years and thousands of small businesses were going under.
That's almost $4 billion we fund/waste annually between the disingenuous ABC and this tosh for the woke. Paul Fletcher needs to be run out of town.
