A song will long outlive a sermon in human memory - it's true. A poem, a saying, a line of a great play, a great philosophic thought, anything that reveals the spark of humanity.
Politics very rarely lights the darkness. Athenian democracy shone a light so bright that the Greeks dined on it until the 21st Century. Talk about degustation!
Civilizations are built on songs, stories, murals, pottery, paintings - why exactly do you think we cling to these? Identity. Otherwise, why don't we just have a big clean up and just throw all this clutter out?
Perhaps we should turn the Queensland Art Gallery into a train station? Let us make the State Library into a creche and gym for the aspirational public servants who have tenure. And, just to be fair, let us excise the Queensland Museum from Queensland, Australia, and turn it into a refugee prison. That will remind us that we are a tiny part of a bigger world.
Human beings cling to the relics of their history - and build their stories upon these histories because it creates an order, an identity, a place to belong. It's called culture.
When I wrote for the state newspaper on the arts, I had to on occasion write a story questioning the value of the arts - usually in response to a similar story on another media outlet. There would be this outcry about profligate governments wasting public monies on "art" that no one ever watched, visited or heard.
And you know, they do have a point. I came to this conclusion on Saturday as I listened to a talk at The Edge (State Library).
Horst Hortner gave a free lecture called Converging Realities, kind of on the intersection between art and science. He founded a venture called Ars Electronica - and it is astounding in many ways.
For one, the centre is 75 percent funded by the City of Linz and 25 percent funded by surrounding regional governments. Secondly, Ars Electronica's artworks tour the world to acclaim.
I was gobsmacked as Hortner ran through examples of new media art created for clients such as SAP, Seimens, Nokia. You think classical ballet, or classical music is passe? Think again!
Using multiple cameras, something like 70 microphones, a live orchestra, a live dancer and computer-generated real-time images slapped on a large screen, they turn The Rite of Spring on its head. (Just as Nijinki and Stravinsky did in their own times.)
Watch it... and try to keep your mouth closed.
They created a portrait of a business flow for SAP using flowing ones and zeros, computer-generated creatures and a river of water that traveled up to a visitor's centre in a lift with you.
So the question the talk left in my brain was: "How come Australia can't produce something similar for all the millions spent by the Australia Council, all the state arts and film bodies. Why?" I know that artists and companies dream of it. The Boy From Oz? Sir Robert Helpmann? Nick Cave? But government didn't have the insight to identify the "IT" factor. These artists and producers went out and made their dreams come true.
Tim Winton, Peter Carey, J.M.Coetzee are some of the writers who have won the Queensland Literary Award over the years. Our new Premier scrapped the $244,475 awards today. I have to say, I don't agree with his decision. It's a paltry sum to give writers something to hope for. He spent $3.2B on the Clem 7 tunnel which Brisbane people refuse to patronize. Is that taxpayers' money well spent?
The Renaissance followed The Dark Ages. The Enlightenment followed despotism.
I guess we have to wait a little longer for an Australian renaissance. The inability to pick the "IT" factor doesn't mean you can't fund "it" when it doesn't yet have caps.
I wish I wrote down how many people Ars Electronica employs ...
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