I did want to talk about one comment which really goes to the heart of the bigger issues around Henson’s art and his professional practice – and which when viewed from a long term perspective, I think explains more of what’s going on than the framing of the previous debate in terms of “freedom of speech”. Alison Croggon, who organised the petition to Kevin Rudd about Bill Henson’s images some time ago when they were seized by police from the Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery in Paddington, had this to say:

Alison Croggon, who organised an open letter supporting Henson from cultural delegates to the 2020 Summit, said the controversy also exposed distrust of the arts community.

“The thing that shocked me most of all about the debate was the perception that artists were above the law or were asking for special exemptions, but that was never the case,” she said. “There is a responsibility in the artistic community to address that.”

It has, of course, been addressed to some extent with the development of guidelines for artists working with minors by the Australia Council, after a request from Arts Minister Peter Garrett. But that, of course, is not as salacious a topic for the media than a beatup about putative pervs in schoolyards. Nevertheless, the disjunction between “the arts community” and publics who aren’t necessarily normally aware of its norms and practices is at the centre of all this. I didn’t know, for instance, that all manner of cultural and media industries folk seek permission regularly to utilise schools for casting, which has been the defence of Henson’s actions offered – see for example, this article in The Age by Peter Craven. A while back, my interest piqued by the whole Henson furore, I read American cultural historian Michael Kammen’s Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture.

Kammen was initially prompted to write by the fierce culture wars over art in the United States in the 1980s and the 1990s – revolving around artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe. But he ended up tracing disputes and controversies over all manner of public art – including memorials and edifices (his interest was also piqued by the argy bargy over Maya Lin’s design for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC) – right to the beginnings of the Republic. The book is really a fascinating read, and I’d recommend it highly, but for our present purposes, what intrigued me was that he showed that the circles in which these disputes were conducted steadily widened over time – from within the “art world” or in regional or provincial newspapers to national disputes roping in politicians, all manner of media and cultural figures and discussed and disseminated widely over a national and sometimes international mediascape. He discusses this in terms of “democratisation” (and also refers to the lessons from public sculpture and mural commissions from as far back as the depression era). Put simply, at least potentially, the scope for public debate over art is much wider than when it was relatively confined to a much smaller circle of local worthies, patrons, and those within an art world or worlds.

Needless to say, that doesn’t imply that the quality of the discussion gets any better. But, then, if you go back to some of the nineteenth century controversies over, say, nudity in painting or expressionism, you don’t find a particularly learned and civil debate taking place either.

In his 1982 classic, Art Worlds, the distinguished sociologist Howard S. Becker mapped the reach and composition of the social networks which supported the creation of art. One of his insights, and I don’t know of any empirical mapping work done in Australia but I’m sure the results would be similar, was that the audience for many canonical or high cultural forms was composed to a very significant degree of those who’d been trained at some level in that form. Avant garde drama off Broadway, for instance, often played to audiences composed of as much as 40% of drama students and former drama students. Being close to the centre of these circles gave such aficionados something of a gatekeeper position, in a complementary way to the role of critics, gallery and museum directors, funding bodies, patrons and so on. If we stick with the image of concentric circles, as you get farther out towards the edge, the less the norms and codes particular to a form are known by those who might come into occasional contact with it.

Putting these two insights together seems to me to do something to back up Croggon’s comment and to explain why “the arts community” are often on the defensive in these culture wars – there’s a presumption made, which is just wrong, that others share their understanding of what constitutes normal or ethical practice, and perhaps also a presumption that others are equipped with the dispositions and learned capacities to appreciate particular forms of art (which I hasten to add, is an empirical observation and not a value judgement).

It seems to me that the democratisation of art wars is here to stay. Perhaps the challenge for the arts community lies in working towards the democratisation of art outside the sphere of occasional controversy. That’s easier said than done, of course.