Monthly Archives: April 2006

Kate Moss and the death of British art

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I’m not an art nut and I’ll freely confess that I’d not even heard of some of the artists he mentions, but Jonathan Jones’ recent column in The Guardian is an engrossing read.

It’s about celebrity, (post)-modernity, the decline of the intellectual in favour of the bourgeois, and Kate Moss. As Jones says in his opening sentence, “a really bad artist can say something about the times in a way that often eludes genius.”

The decline is intellectual. [Lucian] Freud and [Marc] Quinn have abandoned any critical distance from their subjects. They are no longer serious artists looking from their sombre studios at the spectacle of fame, at once fascinated and enraged by the banal delights of Vanity Fair. They are famous themselves, too involved in the banality to realise it is banal.

…

Quinn’s portrait of Moss is the kind of monstrosity that, if it were exhibited in Tate Britain as 150-year-old period puce, would give us a good laugh at the bad taste of the Victorian bourgeoisie before modernism came along to clear the cobwebs. But hang on – oh no! – this time we are the conservative public who mistake worthy content for worthwhile form.

From the desk of

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P1030744

I’ve been a bit slack on the blogging front, I know. But that’s because I’m Busy, busy, busy! So busy, in fact, that I’d already been at my desk for an hour before this wandered past my front yard at 7 a.m. today…

First it was the penguins…

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…now the ducks have gone gay:

In the middle of mating season, a couple of male ducks returned to a park in southern Sweden, for the third consecutive year, ignoring the siren calls of all the lady ducks around them.

Far from the torments of bird flu and temptations of the opposite sex, the two common shelducks appear only to have eyes for each other – in a sort of ducky gay marriage.

On policies with numbers in the title

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So Australia is to start selling uranium to China, following the signing of an iron-clad agreement in which China promised to only use our uranium for peaceful purposes, like powering factories that dump toxic chemicals into rivers, building tanks to enforce Chinese rule over Tibet, or run electric chairs to help keep up with the 10,000 criminal executions the country performs each year.

Clearly a win-win situation for Australia, which has uranium coming out the hoo-ha, and a major coup for John Howard and the companies which dig the stuff out of the ground. Howard reckons this deal will make Australia the largest exporter of yellowcake in the world. Oi, oi, oi.

Naturally, this flies directly in the face of one of the Labor Party’s longest-standing policies – the ‘three mines’ policy – that there should be no expansion of the existing three uranium mines at Ranger, Narbalek and Roxby Downs.

Yellow Cake

And – shock – the leader of said Labor Party, Kim Beazley, has commended the government on it’s deal with China, and pretty much tossed the three mines policy out with the proverbial bathwater. As history continues to demonstrate, Beazley seems to believe that the best way to win government is to look exactly like the incumbent government, only more confused and with less ticker.

Australia is also about to start shipping uranium to Taiwan, which is interesting – Taiwan is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (because it isn’t internationally recognised as a sovereign state). Australia has said it won’t sell uranium to countries which haven’t signed the NNPT, but it turns out there’s a handy loophole, by which we sell the uranium to our friend and ally the USA, and they flog it off however they see fit. No doubt this is a development that India (a non-signatory to the NNPT) will be watching keenly.

So we’re selling uranium to China, and to China’s “renegade province” simultaneously. We’re told it’s OK to give China the stuff, because they crossed their heart and promised not to use it for anything naughty. It’s also OK for us to sell it to the Taiwanese, because … well, because the Americans say it is.

The Three Mines policy may soon be history, but what about the One China policy?

Illustration: Bill Leak, from today’s Australian

In the music, we find our truths

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Joe.My.God has been “live blogging” (with a few days’ delay) the Black Party which took place last weekend in New York. It’s an odd idea, trying to convey the energy, spirit and sensory smorgasbord that is a large gay dance party, but as always Joe’s writing is engaging and often insightful.

I was particularly struck by this passage, which resonated pretty strongly with my own experience as someone who’s spent the occasional night in the thrall of a DJ, a darkened room, and a few thousand friends:

10.10 AM … We are survivors, all of us, a fact underscored, amplified, by the 20, 25, 30-year old tunes being played, each song removing us to a place and time back when we danced with The Lost. In the music, we find our truths, we find our souls, we find ourselves, we find The Lost. It’s not uncommon to notice someone dancing with tears rolling down his face. Still, he dances. He dances in memory, in tribute. He dances with his hands up to heaven, channeling love, channeling spirit.

Nicely put.

Inquiry into same-sex discrimination begins

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The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission inquiry into discrimination against same-sex couples has begun in Sydney.

THEY are barred from using the Medicare safety net, getting concessions on prescription drugs, and being given tax breaks, government superannuation, veterans entitle ments, workers compensation and judicial pensions.

Despite more than a decade of law reforms, same-sex couples are denied many of the entitlements that heterosexuals take for granted, says the president of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, John von Doussa, QC.

The SMH story goes on to relate the story of Edward Young, who told the inquiry that, despite being with his partner for 38 years, he was denied a veteran’s pension when his partner passed away.

The inquiry web site has a discussion paper, terms of reference and a guide to making a submission. Anyone in Australia can lodge a submission, they can be sent via email and they can be confidential if you prefer.

Meanwhile, in Canberra, Anglican and Catholic bishops have called on the ACT government to scrap its plan to formalise same-sex unions, arguing that “it was right to remove discrimination against homosexuals, but the laws went a step too far,” AAP reports.

The bishops are arguing that the ACT should scale its plans back to something similar to the Tasmanian model:

“While the desire to remove discrimination and provide legal protection to same sex relationships is thoroughly commendable, we believe a registration system such as exists in Tasmania would guarantee that objective,” the bishops said.

“We believe this proposal actually threatens and compromises the traditional Christian view of marriage between a man and a woman.

As Rodney Croome has pointed out, the religious lobby is now arguing in favour of a model it vehemently opposed in Tasmania in 2003, presumably as it represents the least-worst option from their point of view.

They can see the writing on the wall: there will be a form of same-sex partner recognition in the ACT, so their strategy now is to limit its effects and ensure that discrimination against same-sex couples continues, at least in some form. The bishops should either butt out of politics altogether or examine their consciences as to why it is they are making such a stand in favour of hatred and discrimination. Otherwise they’re set to discover something that chess players know: queens are much more powerful than bishops (sorry).

(In related news, the Tasmanian domestic partnership registry has so far attracted 63 couples, according to this Hobart Mercury report.)

Howard: ‘I’m not the Anti-homosexual’

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Gay-friendly Prime Minister John Howard has told The Australian that his opposition to same-sex relationship recognition doesn’t mean he’s anti-gay.

In response to Jon Stanhope’s comment that the government plan to block the ACT same-sex union legislation means “there is no place in Howard’s Australia for homosexuals”…

“That’s wrong. This is not an anti-homosexual gesture,” Mr Howard said, adding that it was intended to preserve the “special and traditional place of marriage as a heterosexual union for life of a man and a woman in Australian society”.

Mr Howard said there was scope to remove discrimination against gay couples, but not to equate a gay union with a traditional marriage.

Mr Stanhope said that if Mr Howard’s opposition to his law was not driven by homophobia, he should act to remove discrimination against homosexuals from commonwealth legislation.

Stanhope’s right. Howard should put up or shut up. An opportunity exists for the Howard government to act decisively, earn the faith of queer Australians, and put the same-sex marriage issue off the agenda, at least for a few years.

If Howard announced an immediate plan to wipe the federal slate clean and remove all remaining discriminatory provisions from federal law – in superannuation, taxation, veteran’s affairs, Medicare and so on – this would satisfy the vast majority of gay men and lesbians in this country. Same-sex marriage would be off the agenda for the foreseeable future, and Howard would be hailed as a hero by both the queer community and by religious groups eager to ‘preserve the sanctity of marriage’.

But he won’t do that, will he? Instead he’ll feign offence at being called anti-gay, insist he’s got nothing against us, and allow federal law to continue to discriminate arbitrarily against gay and lesbian Australians.

As the editorial in today’s Age points out, in a secular society like Australia, it’s one thing for politicians to hold Christian beliefs personally, but “it is another matter to impose these through the law on everyone else.”

Many more politicians simply lack the courage to say that personal religious beliefs should not stop Australian law from more closely reflecting contemporary norms. Prime Minister John Howard and Premier Steve Bracks have both blocked recent backbench moves to introduce laws that would recognise same-sex partnerships to ensure they receive fairer legal and bureaucratic treatment. It is rank hypocrisy for political leaders to denounce discrimination against Australians on the basis of sexuality and gender when they refuse to amend and even defend laws that do just that.

Buggery in the news

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Seems you can hardly open a newspaper in this part of the world these days without being confronted by the sight of grown men fucking like dogs. First the Indonesians were doing it:

Two-Dingo

Now the Australians are getting into the action:

No-Offence-Intended-1

Much is being made of the portrayal of the leaders of Australia and Indonesia (and an anonymous West Papuan) as rutting dogs, but isn’t there a fait whiff of homophobia about these ‘toons? The depiction of homosexual sexual activity is deliberately intended to offend; the implication is that gays are unclean, despised creatures.

Rakyat Merdeka (People’s Freedom) is, we’re told by media reports, an “Islamic-leaning” newspaper, so I guess we have to take their insult with a grain of salt (and, in any case, it could be argued that the Indonesia artist has quite clearly drawn Howard and Downer as dogs, while Bill Leak’s figures have nothing canine about them).

I’m sanguine about this – these are cartoons, after all, and it’s the nature of that business to lampoon and, sometimes, offend. But I wonder why no-one else seems to have noticed that Rakyat Merdeka‘s rutting dogs have been subtly transformed into sodomites in The Australian‘s far-from-subtle response.