Ken Gelder, in responding Peter Craven at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, makes the following remarks in Overland about cultural conservatism in the literary culture:

Peter still believes wholeheartedly in Matthew Arnold’s view of the ‘best’ in civilised culture and Leavis’ view of the canon, both of which he earnestly invoked in his talk at the Sydney Writers’ Festival (along with a few Australian Arnoldians, like Vincent Buckley and Chris Wallace-Crabbe). He believes in the ‘classics’ and is sure they make us better people. Because of this, he is constantly backward-looking, forever hauling up a short list of great writers we should all still be attending to but sadly no longer seem to be. He is what we used to call a ‘vertical’ or monogamous reader: burrowing down through a thin tunnel of great books, invoking them in the reviews he writes, returning to them without respite.

However, this cultural conservatism in the literary culture is pervasive and informs culture in general and so a visual culture. There have been attempts by those working in the Anglo-European modernist tradition to construct a canon of Australian photographers that represent the best in Australian visual culture.

This cultural conservatism can be interpreted as an aesthetics of social conduct, or ‘culture’ that functions as the very unconscious structure of our life that contains the unruly and directs the life of passion and sensation into approved forms of feeling and action. As Brian Musgrove observes in Overland:

The aesthetic reconstructs emotion, redirects it into established forms that seem reasonably right. Crucially too the aesthetic activates the nebulous concepts of sentiment, sympathy and affinity: a sophisticated political etiquette, an ethos of sensibility which attempts to fuse our felt identity with the powers that rule us, regardless of what those powers might actually be doing.