A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “Fred puts his sole into new ‘Blue Poles’,” The Australian Financial Review, December 21, 1973, p. 3.

Fred has been wearing his cunning look lately so I know he has been cooking up something.

When we meet he still grizzles about the rust in his wheat and what the Government is doing to him and so on.

But every now and again he has been asking quite off-beat questions, in an off-hand way, about the Government’s interest in cultural matters.

For a while I thought he was considering breaking into print and probing to see if the Government would be likely to give him a literary grant.

But then he started to delve into the Government’s interest in art — particularly he has been sniffing around the Blue Poles painting.

He wanted me to verify whether this great work of art had really been executed by an artist with his feet and was it true that he was a little tiddly at the time? And did the Government really pay $1.3 million for it?

I told him that I understood that the Government did indeed pay this sum but I doubted whether the method of the execution of the painting was quite accurate.

He received this information with studied indifference and I forgot the matter.

But the other morning I called at Fred’s home and his wife said that he was down at the woolshed; she didn’t know what he was doing there but she had a feeling that he was up to something.

So I went quietly to the woolshed and peered in and Fred indeed was up to something.

He had nailed a great piece of tarpaulin to the floor on which he emptied several tins of paint of various colours.

And there he was, with a bottle of whisky in one hand, morosely plodding out a picture for the nation.

Whisky helps
He was a bit embarrassed when he saw me. He said that he had hoped it would be a surprise for Mr Whitlam.

“But now you are here, you might as well make yourself useful for once,” he growled.

“Take your shoes and socks off, roll your trousers up and get stuck into it.”

And get stuck into it indeed I did, or nearly so.

It is surprising how sticky paint is to walk on and how it squirms between your toes.

It is really hard to pick up your feet, and that’s where the whisky helps.

So round and round we went and it is certainly a satisfying feeling.

At least you can see where you’ve been, which is more than most politicians can say.

Fred masterminded the whole business and was most fussy about what he called “Working out the headlands.” There was no skimping anything.

“You’ve got to put your soul into it,” he urged. I replied I was putting both soles into it.

We put in a steady three hours plodding round and round and the picture was coming up nicely. But you had to keep going.

All the time the paint was getting stickier and it became even harder to pick the feet up and the whisky was running low.

It became clear that we had to disengage soon or we would be stuck there forever.

I certainly didn’t want to become an integral part of a work of art and be handed down to posterity.

And Fred said that he didn’t want me to either, because he thought I would spoil its value.

So with infinite care we worked ourselves clear. Fred fortunately had kerosene handy and eventually we got the paint off our legs.

Then we had some more whisky and sat down to admire our footwork.

The longer we watched it the more certain we were that we had created something really notable.

As the paint hardened the details came into sharper relief, the colours become deeper and so on.

Fred kept the flies off while I went home for more whisky.

By the time the sun was low in the sky the whole masterpiece was fairly glowing and Fred was doing sums in his head about its value.

He pointed out that it was bigger than Blue Poles so it would certainly be worth more.

“I’ll let it go for $2 million but not a cent less,” he said as we finished the last of the whisky.

“It’s your job to see that I get the money and proper recognition. It’s all my idea. You only did a bit of the foot work.

“You see Gough and tell him he could use it for his next year’s Christmas cards. That’ll fetch him.”

So we went home, treading on air.

But when we inspected it in the morning, Mavis sniffed and said that she thought it looked pretty ordinary.

But perhaps Gough will buy it.

I’m sure he’d be the first to admit that he’s a man of vision.

***
Appendix for Economics.org.au readers:

George Jean Nathan Mocks the Moral Arguments for Government Funding of the Arts

George Jean Nathan (1882-1958) was one of the great theatre critics. Here are some brief selections from his writings mocking the same moral arguments that are today used to justify government funding of the Arts.

1.
George Jean Nathan, Materia Critica (New York: Knopf, 1924), p. 60.

If the combined aim and object of art lies in the stirring of the emotions, and is praiseworthy, why should the similar aim and object of the vices be regarded as meretricious? If the Madonnas of Raphael, Holbein, Murillo and Da Vinci are commendable in that they stir the imagination to the contentments of faith, why are not the whiskeys of Dewar, Macdonald, Haig and Macdougal commendable for the same reason? If a Bach fogue is praised for stimulating the mind, why not a Corona Corona? If the senses are commendably excited by Balzac and Zola, why shouldn’t they be excited, and equally commendably, by means that may be described as being somewhat less literary?

2.
George Jean Nathan, The Autobiography of an Attitude (New York: Knopf, 1925), p. 138.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of a clergyman in a bawdy-house. This is perhaps why the argument for morals in art is considered by its numerous sponsors to be so credible.

3.
And George Jean Nathan’s House of Satan (New York: Knopf, 1926) begins:

It has always been the mission of the theatre to reduce, in so far as it lay within its power, the manners and morals of the community. Obviously, I do not speak of the debased, uncivilized theatre, but of the theatre that is artistically on the highest and finest level. …

When I speak of the theatre as a corrupter of morals, it is of course as a synonym for drama. And when I speak of drama, I speak at the same time of most of the other arts, for the accomplishment, if perhaps not always the intention, of all art is the lowering of human virtue, in the commonly accepted sense of the word, and the conversion of men from metaphysical and emotional Methodism to metaphysical and emotional Paganism. To believe the contrary, to believe that great art is an inspirer of virtue, is to be so vealy as to believe that Tristan makes its auditor feel like St. Francis of Assisi, that Byron and Swinburne conjure up Sunday-school memories, that the Venus of Cnidus makes one think of entering a monastery, and that Lysistrata is the most eloquent argument for continence ever written. Only the fly-blown and ignorant, however, longer suffer any delusions about the purposes of art. Such mammals hit upon a few obvious kindergarten exceptions to the general and seek to build their case upon them. Unacquainted with nine-tenths of the world’s best music, literature, painting, sculpture, poetry and drama, they imagine that all art has the same effect upon the human spirit as Chopin’s E flat major nocturne or the slow movement of his B flat minor sonata, Botticelli’s Madonna and Child, and Romeo and Juliet. Yet if art were what these imbeciles imagine, it would have died from the cosmos hundreds of years ago. It has been kept alive by man’s unregenerate sinfulness alone. Its greatest patron saints, the men who with power and gold and favor have encouraged and assisted its craftsmen, have almost without exception been the more dissolute kings and emperors, lechers and millionaire crooks, fleshpot fanciers and followers of Pan. And its greatest lovers and stoutest champions have ever been the men who most truly appreciated that under its pretense of divine origin there curled a red and forked tail.

Art ennobles? Then tell me what, precisely, is the ennobling nature of — and how, precisely, one is made to feel Corpsbruder to the angels by — Macbeth, Rembrandt’s portrait of his sister, Madame Bovary or Richard Strauss’ Salomé. The simple truth, of course, is that, aside from a purely critical gratification, Macbeth exalts the cultured and intelligent man just about as much as a modern Edinburgh bathtub, that the chief thought that enters the man’s mind when he gazes upon the Rembrandt portrait is that it would be charming to give the old boy’s sister a hug, and that Flaubert and Strauss induce in the reader and auditor much less an overwhelming desire to lead a better and nobler life than a worse and more lamentably agreeable one.

Encore
4.
George Jean Nathan, The World in Falseface (New York: Knopf, 1923), p. 273.

They talk of the immorality of jazz; such music, they say, is vicious, lecherous, demoralizing. Noise is never vicious, lecherous, demoralizing. The greatest of all aphrodisiacs is a sustained dead silence.