No apology, no backbone, not over yet

On the fallout from Creative Australia's decision to withdraw its Venice invitation to artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino

Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette at senate estimates

“I’m sorry if this decision is misunderstood by the sector," Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette told Senate Estimates. Hard to miss the the passive-aggressive construction, the managerial imprecision, the lack of actual remorse: I'm sorry if your feelings were hurt and you still don’t understand we made the right decision, arts sector.

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young had initially asked if Collette would like to apologise to the artist Khaled Sabsabi on behalf of Creative Australia for the trauma caused by the retraction of his invitation to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. She had then asked if Collette would resign. It was the only time in the Estimates session in which Collette showed passion or animation: when his own position was questioned.

Hanson-Young was right to ask. The performance at Estimates by Collette and board chair Robert Morgan was abysmal, and revealed just how poorly their agency had dealt with the situation from start to ... well, it's not even finished yet.

On February 13, after a hit piece in The Australian about Sabsabi and Senate questions by a junior Liberal senator, Collette had spoken to his chair and then to the arts minister Tony Burke. A board meeting was called for that evening. When Morgan agreed to the emergency board meeting, he hadn't even seen the controversial work in question (Thank You Very Much (2006) - the so-called "9/11 video"). That is, Morgan was relying on a brief verbal description of an 18-second video from 19 years ago. This was apparently enough for him to decide it was an emergency.

This is absurd, of course. The real issue wasn't the content of the video, it was News Corp pressure, the senate question, the political heat.

The hastily gathered board, who days earlier had been celebrating the Venice selection of this wonderful artist Sabsabi (whose work "brings people together in immersive and engaging experiences"), summarily and unanimously dropped him.

Asked why in Estimates, Collette fell back on the facile notion of social cohesion (which days earlier Sabsabi had apparently embodied). Considering the discovery of these older works, Collette said, the selection would be "divisive" and "mired in the worst kind of debate". Maintaining social cohesion is a national priority, he said, sounding like nothing so much as a politburo member. Collette also said that his organisation didn’t generally comb through artists’ full back-catalogues when making grant decisions, but obviously in this case they were happy to make an exception. Normally not a factor, it became the salient factor.

In an effort to quell the flaming binfire, he avoided criticising the artist or the artist's past work, saying "the impact of art does not reside with an artist’s intent. It resides in the way it is perceived by the public". But this was also a cop-out. It's no-one's fault, he was implying, we were all the victims of a bad circumstance, trying our best to avoid inevitable damage. "We cannot be blind to the very real risk that the choices we make can also have the potential to trigger divisive narratives.”

Trigger divisive narratives? This is a low bar. Artistic expression in this formulation has been reduced, in very practical terms, to this: if News Corp attack, it's unsupportable. This should alarm all artists (it largely has), and especially people of colour, young women, anyone who is outspoken or progressive, anyone who defends Palestinian rights, or transgender rights, or believes in climate action, the list goes on. This degree of political interference should also alarm other arts institutions and major donors, although they have been noticeably silent.

Perhaps Hanson-Young should have asked which subjects were acceptable to News Corp, and by extension to Creative Australia.

The works that apparently knocked Sabsabi out of contention were decades-old works. They have been subject to many and varied readings, like any decent art. According to Creative Australia logic, however, only one of these readings – the worst and most superficial kind – could be considered. Nasrallah! 9/11! It is traitorous to even think about them.

Can Creative Australia explain how any artist is able to make any work that could avoid being misread by bad-faith actors in 15 years' time?

I'd urge anyone to watch Thank You Very Much (2006), because it's absurd to imply that it's ... I don't even know, what were they objecting to? They never said. Just the vibe, I guess.

My reading, for what it's worth, is that the work is a comment on the immediacy of violence in the new media age, how visualised violence paves the way for more violence (irony!), how American president George W Bush traded on the endless repetitions of 9/11 horror to justify new US military incursions in the Middle East, how violence is cyclical. People will have other readings, because the work’s rapid, ragged energy is clearly intended to evoke varied visceral and discursive responses. Art is complex, who knew. Not the panicked Creative Australian board members.

It wasn't even clear whether this Sabsabi work was the focus of the board's fears. Maybe it was the "Nasrallah" piece, which had been sitting quietly in the MCA collection for years, featuring an image depicting the former leader of Hezbollah? At times Collette referred to the contentious "image" in the singular, other times to the "images". In future could Creative Australia please provide a catalogue of names of people who shall not be depicted for fear of undermining "social cohesion"? As Elon Musk and others made Nazi salutes – sorry, "awkward arm gestures" – to the global public, News Corp was digging back into an artist's 25-year catalogue to find anything that could be remotely described as controversial. And what did Creative Australia do? It supported News Corp. The Creative Australia board did exactly what News Corp wanted: it literally cancelled Sabsabi. An accurate description of the behaviour of which News hacks accuse everyone else. Do News Corp believe in free speech? Of course not. They believe in crushing people they don't like. And Muslim artistic works are worse than Nazi salutes now...

Creative Australia’s board didn't even do any due diligence.

"Do you think you should have got legal advice before you sacked the guy?" Hanson-Young asked.

“We didn’t have time,” Collette responded. What!? What was the rush? Only to hide from a patented News Corp bile campaign.

Nor did the board speak to Sabsabi to hear his perspective before its retraction. How is "social cohesion" or artistic expression served by such summary dismissal? This isn't a board wisely considering the matter. It’s a board overthrowing its carefully conceived selection process in a moment of knee-jerk cowardice.

Collette tried to argue that the original selection process was at fault – reminding Estimates that he had called a review of it.

The original process is not at fault here. The imputation behind this review is that the selection process was either unthinking and unaware of Sabsabi's past work (I doubt this is the case), or that the selection panel should not have selected him in the first place. Should they have known that News Corp or a Liberal Senator would dig out and maliciously interpret an 18-second video from 2006, and that Creative Australia would not stand up for the artist's freedom of expression? Did the selection panel's terms of reference guide them as such?

The irony is that News Corp had only written a single article about Sabsabi's selection, and only a single Liberal senator had asked about him. Creative Australia's surrender was mostly pre-emptive. The board embarked on a course of action that lead to multiple resignations (including a board member), mass disgust in the arts community, and the humiliation of an artist it has recently selected and championed.

Worse, somehow, was the signal communicated: that Creative Australia supports artistic expression until it becomes uncomfortable or News Corp weighs in. More accurately, that it won't support artistic expression, it will instead cave to political expedience (and call it social cohesion.) Creative Australia will waste thousands of dollars, months of artists' time and effort, months of staff and selection panellists' time – for what gain? Ummm, to avoid controversy? In short, it has been a total, unmitigated cock up.

The Australian pavilion at Venice will be a place of shame in 2026. No artists "worth their soul" would take up that gig now, as respected curator Liz-Ann Macgregor put it. Who would dare?

Creative Australia will still have to pay Sabsabi for at least some of his contract, not to mention any compensation for damages. It will then have to pay again for a new Australian representative, if anyone is foolish enough to accept the chalice.

In the meantime, Creative Australia isn't the only Australian cultural institutions to demonstrate it will drop or censor artists at the slightest whiff of pressure, especially if they involve people of colour. (A few months ago, the National Gallery of Australia requested that panels of an artwork literally be covered over with white cloth, because they depicted a Palestinian flag.)

It's not a weird kink or coincidence. It's a pattern. Senator Mehreen Faruqi was right to raise the sceptre of racism in relation to the Creative Australia decision.

There are serious values and principles at stake here, and important rights. Collette and Morgan should put their vanity aside, weigh up their responsibilities and their failings, and resign. By their own explanations, they were responsible for the process that selected Sabsabi and for then overriding that process. Their actions have created a rift at Creative Australia, and undermined free artistic expression – not to mention wasting precious taxpayer arts funding and undermining the reputation of Creative Australia.

As Ben Eltham wrote in Crikey, Collette "will continue to run Creative Australia, even while a review proceeds into the agency’s governance and decision-making. Once the review reports its findings, Collette will also be in charge of implementing any recommendations". The same board, whose unanimous complicity I find genuinely astonishing, will oversee it all.

On the Wednesday after Senate Estimates, Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino announced that they planned to show the work in Venice regardless of Creative Australia’s decision, raising the prospect that the work officially selected (then de-selected) by Creative Australia will be exhibited without official endorsement, while the official Australian pavilion sits empty. The team asked the board to explain how they reached its conclusion that their work posed an “unacceptable risk”. And following Collette’s lack of apology at Estimates, they pointedly asked for a public apology, to themselves and those who had been directly affected by Creative Australia’s decision.

Australian artists can’t trust such a capricious and fearful funding organisation. Artists, if you plan to apply for government support, you’re on notice: every artwork, every social media post, every interview and public statement is a political risk.

It's almost impossible to see how the reputation of this organisation can recover under the present chief executive and chair. Do us all a favour, gentlemen.