Lebanese-Australian Western Sydney artist Khaled Sabsabi. (Supplied: Anna Kucera)
It started with a burst of exuberance in late January two years ago: a move to shake up, modernise and expand the reach of federal government support for the arts.
Gathered at the iconic Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda (home to the filming of the long-running quiz show RocKwiz) two contemporary Australian music tragics — in the form of prime minister Anthony Albanese and arts minister Tony Burke — gathered bands, musicians, opera singers, actors and writers to launch Creative Australia, as the backbone of Labor's cultural policy called Revive.
The new body was a re-purposed Australia Council, a body that dated back to the 1960s to distribute grants to the arts sector in some organised way.
Arts funding is always controversial and, apart from individual decisions, the tendency of the Australia Council to fund the established over the experimental, and the big companies over the small, had been an ongoing area of frustration.
"Old" art forms like opera, ballet and big theatre companies did well.
The broader remit of the reimagined body — and particularly its focus on contemporary music — was supposed to help change that.
Creative Australia is structured as an umbrella organisation. It houses a number of subsidiary groups, including Music Australia, to support Australia's burgeoning and often incredibly successful music industry.
Writing Australia and First Nations Arts are organisations in the process of getting onto their feet.
Credibility slashed
But that exuberance of January 2023 has now shrunk into a traumatised arts sector and an organisation which, on any measure, looks compromised, possibly fatally, by its decision to first award — then withdraw — the selection of artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the Australia Pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
The decision was taken in the interests of "social cohesion" after two works by Sabsabi, almost two decades ago, came to the attention of Creative Australia.
How the decision to dump Khaled Sabsabi unfolded
Photo shows A man standing in front of a blue painting smiles gently
One of those works featured Hassan Nasrallah, the now dead head of Hezbollah, now listed as a terror organisation, but which was not at the time the work was created in 2007.
And to be clear, the proposal for the Biennale was for an artwork "that hopes to build empathy and connection between all people".
"Creative Australia is an advocate for freedom of artistic expression and is not an adjudicator on the interpretation of art," the Creative Australia board said in a statement on February 14 after it had overturned the original decision
"However, the board believes a prolonged and divisive debate about the 2026 selection outcome poses an unacceptable risk to public support for Australia's artistic community and could undermine our goal of bringing Australians together through art and creativity."
It is not at all clear it has succeeded in its goal by its actions.
Chairman Robert Morgan revealed to the Senate this week that the risk the board saw was mostly to the organisation itself.
"We realised this could be a significant risk, an untenable risk to the organisation," he said.
"I think we also recognised that it would conflate immediately into something in the mainstream community of Australia, [that could] damage the social licence that this organisation has."
It is hard to see how Creative Australia rebuilds credibility for its funding allocation process when suggestions of ministerial interference, board discord and management backflips over such a crucial decision swirl around it.
This is particularly so in the heat of a looming election campaign and a possible change of government.
"I have felt very strongly the concern that the artistic community has about this decision," chief executive Adrian Collette conceded to the Senate this week.
"I think we have got a huge job of work to do to restore their confidence in our ability to make independent, expert-informed, arms-length decisions."
Creative Australia chief executive Adrian Collette told Senate estimates he felt "very strongly" the artistic community's concern. Â (ABC Arts: Teresa Tan)
Shifting sands for art
The story of the controversy contains all the most depressing aspects of what passes for a national conversation these days: opportunistic politics; media-generated controversy; panicked decision making and very confused stories about how decisions were made and who had intervened in them.
This week we had the spectacle of Creative Australia's chairman and chief executive officer paraded in the town square stocks that Senate estimates have become — without necessarily finding out everything we are entitled to know about how this situation unfolded.
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Photo shows Politics journalist Brett Worthington on a black backgournd
And, of course, there is going to be at least one "review" to see what happened. Now we just have to wait for the "learnings" which will no doubt emerge from it.
The Biennale controversy, more than anything else, reflects the shifting relationships between arts, government funding, philanthropic supporters and public expectations that has been underway for a couple of decades, but which has now become particularly fraught amid the conflict in the Middle East.
We aren't just having arguments about the artistic merit of works like Blue Poles, but about tolerance for artists to express political opinions, or to be judged by the way their works are interpreted in the political landscape.
In this case, we aren't talking about artists standing up and holding a protest in the here and now but what an artist might have created 20 years ago, in works which many participants in the 'debate' haven't seen.
We are on the eve of the federal election however, and it seems all is fair game, or an issue to be shut down.
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Board governenceÂ
Creative Australia's predecessor, the Australia Council, only became responsible for deciding on the national Biennale entry in 2019.
Prior to that, a "prominent person" — usually a major philanthropist — was nominated as the national 'Commissioner' who would liaise with the organising body in Venice, chair a council that would make the selection decision and raise funds to support the exhibition.
The Australia Council/Creative Australia provided administrative and practical help.
The change to making the Australia Council the "Commissioner", meant the process had to conform with the way other funding decisions was made. Inevitably, the change had to mean the decision becoming more clearly one seen as within the purview of government.
The Council appointed an independent assessment panel of artists and art specialists to make the artist selection but at some point along the way it appears the selection process changed from being a decision of the expert peers to one finally made by Creative Australia management.
The Creative Australia Board's role is not supposed to be one involving overturning decisions but, in the true governance role of boards, to only do so if they think there has been a flaw in the process or the decision may have been illegal.
Senate estimates was told that there was no legal advice taken when the board met hours after a question about Khaled Sabsabi was asked in the Senate by the shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler. (Supplied)
Senate estimates was told this week that there was no legal advice taken when the board met in emergency session, hours after a question about Sabsabi was asked in the Senate by the shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler, and after Minister Burke rang Creative Australia.
It is easy to see what has happened over Australia's Venice Biennale exhibition in purely political terms: a political attack, and a defensive reflex.
But perhaps the bigger point here is that, as we seem to be observing almost every day in the United States at present, the politics is finding the flaws in the institutions which are supposed to be at arm's length from politics and leaving them weakened and unable to do the job for which they were established.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.