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November 7, 2007
I've just stumbled onto Emmy Hennings Fangirl. Emmy appeared on the panel at This is not Art 2007 that was framed as an investigation of critical writing/reviewing in Australia--- meaning a project of undoing and unsettling? One that refers to art or music that provokes, threatens, engages or discomfits its audience as art or music.
Other panelists included Gail Priest, an associate editor of realtime magazine, and Jon Dale, a writer at Dusted Magazine. The debate, from what I can gather from the October post was about 'Australian' as both geography and nationality in culture---eg., as in Australian music or Australian photography---and locality as place.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, mural, Adelaide CBD, 2007
No mention of culture and class---given the conservative enframing of class as class envy, hatred and resentment- or of cultural conservatism---given the enframing of Leavisite high culture, dislike of pop culture and middle brow conservative critics being far more in touch with ‘reality’ than anyone involved in Theory. Shouldn't any project of undoing and unsettling address culture and class?
Class, these days under state Labor governments, is expressed as a 'concern' for the 'socially excluded' coupled with the strong fist of law and order. Class is marked by absence in relation to race or gender, even though neo-liberal Australia is a class society, and many working class people, including those who have been to university, bear the psychic wounds of class.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, skatepark, Adelaide CBD, 2007
We are also surrounded by the consumption of false images of freedom, music’s appeal to the unconscious and to the sedimented historical class content behind personal taste, and a consumption of nostalgic motifs completely devoid of true historical consciousness.
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Gary,
anti-intellectualism is the predominant mentality of the middle brow cultural critics in the Old Media.