Latest news with #MichaelDagostino
The Guardian
06-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
After the Sabsabi debacle, Creative Australia must learn to embrace controversy
After months of angst and uproar in the arts, the decision has finally been reconfirmed: Khaled Sabsabi and Michael Dagostino will represent Australia at the Venice Biennale in 2026. An independent report, which was initially only tasked with reviewing the selection process and not the board's decision to rescind the appointment, has identified the 'missteps' of that decision and the board has had the courage to respond accordingly. There will be some detractors but I have no doubt that when the work is unveiled next year, all the preconceived fears will be laid to rest. The question now is: how can Creative Australia rebuild confidence in its role in supporting the visual arts? The report raises some red flags with regard to the selection process for future Venice Biennales – for example, among all the well-intentioned recommendations about risk management, it says the future selection process will need take into account what 'could be so polarising and divisive as to have a material impact on the ability of Creative Australia to discharge effectively its statutory functions'. This phrase is troubling. As a museum director of many years experience, I am well aware of how hard it is to predict what will stir up controversy. And what is genuine community concern, as opposed to media beat-up? People may be surprised to learn that complaints about content in artworks are rare and usually driven by those who have not seen the work. Creative Australia will have to demonstrate that prejudging what might cause offence does not lead to the bland and the boring. The report also references the tensions between artistic freedom and Creative Australia's responsibility towards the wider community. I do not believe that there needs to be such a distinction. We should have a funding body that supports artists to make work that is critical and demanding as well as organisations that make the bridge between this work and a wider public, who do have an appetite for contemporary art. The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, where I was once director, became the most visited museum of contemporary art in the world, while putting artists and artistic excellence at its core. But there is more to be done in the immediate aftermath of this debacle. What we need is strong leadership from Creative Australia in relation to the visual arts. Why does this matter? It matters because in the age of artificial intelligence, creativity will be a driving force of the future. AI relies on human creativity and educational experts have identified creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and empathy as the skills and qualities that employers of the future will be seeking. These are the very skills that working with art and artists can contribute to society. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning We also need support for galleries as we face the challenges of a society dominated by social media. Over a decade ago I sat on a panel discussing the impact of new technology on the arts and a panellist announced that, in future, art would be online and galleries redundant. We would all sit at home viewing art through ever more sophisticated gadgets. It has not happened. Social media instead can drive audiences to galleries – there is a strong desire for a shared, real experience to combat the world of the virtual. Why do visitors still flock to see works of art such as the Mona Lisa? Online representations are not enough – audiences want the power of the real, often a shared experience. Galleries in Australia and around the world can attest to this interest, especially from young people. Galleries can and still should be safe places for the discussion of difficult issues through the work of artists. There is now an opportunity for Creative Australia to take the lead and review the ecology of the visual arts across the country and to overcome the perception that it is an agency for the performing arts. We have seen a renewed focus on literature and music, so why not visual arts? It has been more than 20 years since the Australia Council's Myer inquiry into contemporary visual arts and craft, which focused on the organisations it funded, not the whole sector; I have long thought that our regional galleries, for example, play a vital role in engaging audiences with new work. A new strategic framework for the visual arts, with a commitment to respecting peer review in selection processes, could transform Creative Australia's relationship with the sector and restore confidence. What Australia needs is a visionary federal agency that works closely with all levels of government and other funders, respected for its commitment to artists. Instead of shying away from controversy, a strong agency would embrace it and work to engage the public. Art does matter – if it didn't, why all the recent outrage? Elizabeth Ann Macgregor is a curator and art historian and was the director of MCA Australia until 2021.
ABC News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Why did Creative Australia backflip on Venice Biennale decision?
Unanswered questions remain after Creative Australia backflipped on a decision to dump renowned Lebanese Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino as Australia's representatives at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
The Age
04-07-2025
- Politics
- The Age
He got sacked for 'questionable' and 'ambiguous' art. Those descriptors show he is the man for the job
The idea that an artwork should not be 'divisive' is an extraordinary one, an anti-creative concept which, if you follow it to its natural conclusion, leads us inexorably to the end-point of propaganda. And yet anxiety over possible divisiveness seems to have been the guiding emotional principle applied by the board of Creative Australia, the government's main arts body, when it abruptly sacked Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino as Australia's representatives at the prestigious Venice Biennale next year. The board, which this week reinstated the duo in a spectacular backflip, originally said it acted to avoid the erosion of public support for Australia's artistic community that might ensue from a 'prolonged and divisive debate'. It is assumed that a prolonged and divisive debate about an artwork is a bad thing, but it doesn't have to be. To be fair, the board's anxieties were well-founded. Loading It was February 2025 and a caravan full of explosives had been discovered in north-west Sydney. This incident was quickly labelled an anti-Jewish terror plot but was later revealed to be a 'criminal con job'. The Peter Dutton-led Coalition was hammering the Albanese government (then behind in the polls) for being soft on antisemitism. Horrific pictures of burnt and maimed Gazan children aired on television nightly. Jewish-Australians were encountering antisemitism in their day-to-day lives. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces were demonstrating on the streets and clashing in arts organisations. Sabsabi, stridently pro-Palestine Lebanese-Australian, had made clear his view on Israel when he decided to boycott the 2022 Sydney Festival because it took $20,000 in funding from the Israeli Embassy. His boycott was well before the horror of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis, a day of rape, torture, kidnapping and slaughter from which more and more horror has unspooled.
Sydney Morning Herald
04-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
He got sacked for 'questionable' and 'ambiguous' art. Those descriptors show he is the man for the job
The idea that an artwork should not be 'divisive' is an extraordinary one, an anti-creative concept which, if you follow it to its natural conclusion, leads us inexorably to the end-point of propaganda. And yet anxiety over possible divisiveness seems to have been the guiding emotional principle applied by the board of Creative Australia, the government's main arts body, when it abruptly sacked Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi and his curator Michael Dagostino as Australia's representatives at the prestigious Venice Biennale next year. The board, which this week reinstated the duo in a spectacular backflip, originally said it acted to avoid the erosion of public support for Australia's artistic community that might ensue from a 'prolonged and divisive debate'. It is assumed that a prolonged and divisive debate about an artwork is a bad thing, but it doesn't have to be. To be fair, the board's anxieties were well-founded. Loading It was February 2025 and a caravan full of explosives had been discovered in north-west Sydney. This incident was quickly labelled an anti-Jewish terror plot but was later revealed to be a 'criminal con job'. The Peter Dutton-led Coalition was hammering the Albanese government (then behind in the polls) for being soft on antisemitism. Horrific pictures of burnt and maimed Gazan children aired on television nightly. Jewish-Australians were encountering antisemitism in their day-to-day lives. Pro-Palestine and pro-Israel forces were demonstrating on the streets and clashing in arts organisations. Sabsabi, stridently pro-Palestine Lebanese-Australian, had made clear his view on Israel when he decided to boycott the 2022 Sydney Festival because it took $20,000 in funding from the Israeli Embassy. His boycott was well before the horror of the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas on innocent Israelis, a day of rape, torture, kidnapping and slaughter from which more and more horror has unspooled.
ABC News
04-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Unanswered questions in wake of Creative Australia's backflip on Venice Biennale artist Khaled Sabsabi
And so we return to where we began almost six months ago. Following an external review and months of outrage in the arts community, the artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino are once again Australia's representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale, after Creative Australia's latest backflip. The February decision to remove the pair — a week after their Biennale selection was celebrated — led to Creative Australia resignations, damaged the funding body's relationship with the arts sector, and sullied the public reputation of an artist. Sabsabi and Dagostino said in a statement that having their Biennale selection reinstated "offers a sense of resolution and allows us to move forward with optimism and hope after a period of significant personal and collective hardship". And while acting Creative Australia chair Wesley Enoch praised the board's "very big heart" for engaging in a review of the decision to scrap Sabsabi "with integrity and thoughtfulness and mov[ing] forward", the impacts of the month-long arts scandal will not immediately be forgotten. Nor does Sabsabi's reinstatement mean that the many questions surrounding his Biennale saga are now answered. "The [external] review, for all the detail, does not actually clarify the decision-to-cancel process," Adelaide Writers Week director and senior arts commentator Louise Adler says. "What we do know is that the decision to cancel [Sabsabi and Dagostino] was a reaction to political pressure." After concerns were raised in February in parliament by senator Claire Chandler and in The Australian newspaper about two of Sabsabi's earlier artworks, Creative Australia's board scheduled an emergency meeting and came to a unanimous decision to withdraw the Venice Biennale commission. At a later Senate Estimates, when senator Sarah Hanson-Young asked Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette why legal advice had not been sought prior to the decision being made, it led to the following exchange: Adrian Collette — We didn't have time. Sarah Hanson-Young — You didn't have time? AC — No, we didn't have time. SHY — According to who? AC — According to us. We had to make that decision very quickly. Esther Anatolitis, the editor of Meanjin and former executive director of the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA), says it's still unclear why that was the case. "The issue really is, what was the hurry? And why did they perceive that as a crisis, when all that happened was that there was one critical and factually incorrect attack on the work which, as Blackhall and Pearl's report says, was capable of being defended by Creative Australia." Instead, the board's decision to drop Sabsabi sparked a massive backlash from the arts community, and a review was commissioned to examine the process, but not the merit, of the decisions that were made. The review's report states that Creative Australia was not "appropriately prepared" for "what, inevitably, was going to be a controversial decision". The report notes that the process of selecting Sabsabi and Dagostino was generally the same as it had been for 2024's representative, Archie Moore, who won the Golden Lion for his work at the Biennale. But "the external social and political context, particularly in late January-early February 2025, was profoundly different." It wasn't Sabsabi's proposal for the Biennale that was contentious, though. Instead, the report notes: "The source of potential controversy was seen to lie in the fact of selecting any artist with heritage connected to the Middle East at a time when conflict in that region was so emotive and polarising." Adler says it beggars belief that this climate was not sufficiently considered by Creative Australia. "There's not an arts organisation in the country that hasn't had to provide their increasingly risk-averse boards with risk assessments. "If Creative Australia was blindsided by the complexities of inviting Sabsabi, it suggests either a worrying level of naivety or a political judgement that a Brown artist from the western suburbs will tick a whole lot of boxes. Creative Australia's actions don't exist in a vacuum. A court found this month that the ABC had unfairly terminated Antoinette Lattouf because of her political opinion. Justice Darryl Rangiah found external pressure from "pro-Israel lobbyists" had played a role in the ABC's decision. The ABC's new managing director, Hugh Marks, has since conceded the ABC acted out of turn. Anatolitis argues that the Lattouf matter is "a parallel example of a privileged bypassing of a normal rigorous complaints procedure … knowing that it would fail … in order to achieve the outcome that the vexatious complainants intended". Adler also draws a link between the two events. "As with the suppression of the names of the "Lawyers for Israel" who campaigned for Lattouf's sacking, those who briefed Senator Chandler will probably never be outed." Adler says. Shortly after Creative Australia announced it had dropped Sabsabi, Monash University decided to postpone an exhibition curated by Stolon Press at their gallery, MUMA, featuring artwork by Sabsabi. "There's no question that Creative Australia's decision to cancel the invitation to Michael and to Khaled influenced Monash's decision to postpone the Stolon Press exhibition," Rebecca Coates, the director of MUMA, says. "We were dealing with a very singular interpretation of two still images from a very complex moving image artwork that were being used … as a means of progressing an argument. In May, Monash University also backflipped on its decision to "indefinitely postpone" its exhibition featuring Sabsabi, and in June the exhibition opened. Coates believes that has had an influence on the national arts funding body. "I think Monash's decision to subsequently proceed with the Stolon Press exhibition, which included Khaled's contribution as a collaborator, was inevitably part of the context in which Creative Australia decided to proceed with Khaled and Michael's representation at Venice," she says. Many within the arts have celebrated Sabsabi and Dagostino's reinstatement. However, opposition to the selection remains. Julian Leeser, shadow minister for the arts, told ABC Radio National Breakfast: "I think Creative Australia's made the wrong decision. The representative of Australia on the world stage should reflect our values and to reinstate this artist as our representative at Biennale and to give them taxpayers' funds I think flies in the face of those values. "Creative Australia has responsibilities to the taxpayer and the broader Australian community. I believe those issues continue to remain and that I believe Creative Australia should not have unmade their decision that they previously made to withdraw Mr Sabsabi from this exhibition at this time," he said. Coates interprets the decision differently; she see it as "a signal of renewal, growth and connectedness and, I believe, a shared future". "Some of these issues are coming up at such a rapid pace that the systems that were relevant to us even two years ago are no longer fit for purpose. And we, as a sector, have to be engaged in much more rigorous conversations around the messaging, the risk assessment, and how we go forward." For his part, Sabsabi told Nine newspapers in April: "I'm an artist, not a politician. "And my work for over 35 years is about finding ways to converse through complexity." He may now be in a position to hold that conversation a little more freely.
