A Modest Member of Parliament [Bert Kelly], “What if the whole country is swindled?,” The Australian Financial Review, October 10, 1975, p. 3.

I don’t want this to get around, but I often have a secret feeling that I am being taken for a ride by the experts on modern art.

Untold amounts of money can be spent on almost anything and as long as the creators look untidy and call it art, then I’m clay in their hands because I’m afraid to be critical.

And if simple folk like Fred and I feel that Blue Poles is incomprehensible to us and looks like the memorable masterpiece that we trod out on the woolshed floor one Christmas when we were a bit tiddly, then I’m too nervous to say so, fearing that the artistic world would sneer and say in lofty disdain, “What else can you expect from such plebian people? They are ignorant of art.”

And if the avant-garde find a bit of welding that has turned out badly and call it a sculptural triumph, it takes a lot of courage for a modest member to speak up bravely and say it really looks to him like a lot of nonsense.

And particularly is this so if you find other similar heaps of iron spread around the public parks, carrying tablets saying that they were presented to the city by notable people.

So in the still of the night I sometimes have a sacrilegious feeling that the whole business is perhaps part of a great confidence trick.

You remember the fable of the emperor’s clothes, how a group of clever but crooked tailors were paid great sums of money to sew the emperor a grand new costume.

But they only pretended to do so. And eventually when the procession moved off down the street with the emperor wearing nothing at all, everyone was so frightened of exposing their ignorance, so afraid of looking foolish, that they all admired the emperor’s imaginary clothes.

But a four-year-old child who hadn’t yet learnt embarrassment, yelled out at the top of his voice, “Look, the emperor’s absolutely naked.”

Then suddenly all the people who had been too ashamed and embarrassed to admit that the emperor had really looked naked to them also, all shouted together, “Look, the king is utterly without clothes.”

And everyone laughed except the emperor who suddenly realised that the clever tailors had swindled him.

So sometimes I wake up twitching with anxiety.

“What if the whole country is being swindled,” I ask Mavis with pitiful urgency?

“What if all the nonsense that artistic people talk is just part of a great racket? Perhaps they paint these silly shapes and awful blobs of colour just because they can’t draw and paint.

“And they can sell them to us because we are afraid to say that it really looks like nonsense to us.”

And once I start to think like that, my imagination bolts away with me.

I imagine clever people meeting in some back street and throwing paint around and deciding what to call the masterpiece and asking who will be simple enough to pay good money for it.

“Let’s charge the silly sods $50,000,” I can almost hear them say.

“If we only charge $5 people wouldn’t buy it. But if we ask $50,000 some sucker will be silly enough.”

Mavis bursts into tears when I talk such heresy. For years she has tried to foster the idea that I have a finer side to me.

“He’s not as simple as he sounds,” I’ve heard her telling her friends. “He may look stupid and stolid but he has a fine artistic nature hidden there, deep down.”

But my suspicion that we are all being diddled has been strengthened by the report by the Auditor-General.

Evidently he, too, is beginning to wonder about the emperor’s clothes. He pointed out in his annual report that the Australian Council (it used to be the Australian Arts Council) spent last year $24,151 on working lunches.

That represents a lot of lunches and is far more than was spent by big and important departments such as Foreign Affairs and Overseas Trade, who surely would be expected, for their country’s good, to be spending large sums on working lunches for diplomatic and trade purposes.

“Why on earth should such a small show as the Australian Council spend $24,151 on working lunches,” I asked myself?

Then me nasty suspicious mind started working. Perhaps it’s all part of the racket I thought. Perhaps they know if they splash the money and champagne around their clients will be too embarrassed to say anything about the emperor not wearing any clothes.

Being raped by the artistic gentry is bad enough, but the thought of feeding them while they are doing it makes me mad.