For Allen’s edification, and that of anyone else deluded by Murdoch propaganda, mounting any show of works borrowed from external collections, particularly if they come from overseas, comes with astronomical insurance costs. No way to defray those costs except for ticket sales pitched at mass appeal. And then there are the not inconsiderable costs of staff and technology required to design exhibition spaces and lighting that comply with the parameters set by conservators and curators, the costs of marketing the exhibition in ways that transcend narrow snobberies which might turn off a wider audience. I’m sure there are other costs I haven’t even thought of because I’m no exhibitions expert. On top of the usual running costs any gallery must absorb.
To show niche works like those of Vilhelm Hamershoi, cited by Allen as worthy but foolishly ignored by Australian galleries, would come with a very large cost and a disproportionately small audience. Perhaps if people like his bosses were more philanthropically inclined, instead of worshiping only naked greed, those costs could be met?
I do wonder how much of an ivory tower snob you have to be to be ignorant of these costs when critiquing Australian galleries for not mounting exhibitions of obscure European painters. Christopher Allen teaches art history and classical Greek and Latin. Economic realities don’t seem to penetrate those particular knowledge domains.
The other factor at play in Allen’s editorials (compare columns of 23 April, 30 April, and 3 May) is a marked variation in style and tone, both within each piece, and between them. That variation reminded me viscerally of the the reprinted lectures in the 1930s of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, where serious and densely-argued scholarship was topped and tailed by the then expected but crassly crude praise for the Nazi party, and especially the ridiculously fawning flattery for ‘Der Führer’, which was so exaggerated that it struck me as satire rather than sycophancy.
Just as with the Heidegger lectures, Christopher Allen’s columns change tone and diction exactly when it comes to grafting onto them the apparently mandatory Murdoch family propaganda. The crude and tiresomely repetitive condemnation of ‘progressive’ bourgeois tastes. The transparent loathing for proletarians, even if they are the same proles the Murdoch family has been trying to convert to its populist fascism political project for decades. The longing for a return to a rigid class structure in which the hoi polloi would know their place and not question the authority of the rich. And in more recent times, the insertion into every narrative of odious Zionist propaganda now apparently de rigueur for everyone working at News Corporation; you’d think the entire country had succumbed to antisemitism rather than legitimate opposition to genocidal barbarism.
Christopher Allen is getting on a bit, and writing for the Australian must be a bit of a sinecure for an old snob, propping up his retirement income. But a word in your shell-like, Mr Allen: a true snob would never cater to lowbrow propaganda of the kind peddled by the Murdochs. It cheapens you as a person, and robs you of authority in your own field, if it doesn’t also extinguish your soul as a human being.