How good is Australian arts journalism and how good was the Melbourne Festival? Noel Turnbull and Michaela Boland go for it in a minor skirmish for Crikey’s Las Vegas division – we’ll happily host your fight.

What’s wrong with the arts?

By Noel Turnbull
Author of the Miscellany column in Crikey

An AFR reporter, Michaela Boland, included a dismissive comment about the Melbourne Festival in a feature a week or so ago. While Miscellany has an obvious interest in the matter as Festival President, it illustrates a problem with the arts in Australia – the standard of arts criticism and arts journalism.

Ms Boland hadn’t apparently been to the Festival, hadn’t talked to the Festival and based it all on the fact that she didn’t have box office figures. The Festival yet again, by the way, exceeded box office targets and most of the performances sold out.

While she’s obviously welcome to have an opinion one would have hoped that a one line dismissal might have been at least partly based on fact and research.

It reminded Miscellany of another well-known Australian arts reporter. In an email exchange about opera it became clear to Miscellany that the reporter was unaware of Harry Kessler’s role in – and the controversy about – Huge von Hofmannstahl’s Der Rosenkavalier. Now that information might be arcane for non-arts people but it’s staggering that someone writing about opera didn’t know it.

Australia has some good critics – John Slavin of The Age is probably our stand-out in terms of knowledge, intelligence and sensibility – but day after day you see sloppy and poorly-informed arts criticism. In arts journalism we see too much anonymous gossip – sadly fed by people in the arts themselves – instead of critical, newsworthy engagement.

Michaela Boland responds to Miscellany

Noel Turnbull wrote on Crikey:

An AFR reporter, Michaela Boland, included a dismissive comment about the Melbourne Festival in a feature a week or so ago. While Miscellany has an obvious interest in the matter as Festival President, it illustrates a problem with the arts in Australia – the standard of arts criticism and arts journalism.

Ms Boland hadn’t apparently been to the Festival, hadn’t talked to the Festival and based it all on the fact that she didn’t have box office figures. The Festival yet again, by the way, exceeded box office targets and most of the performances sold out.

While she’s obviously welcome to have an opinion one would have hoped that a one line dismissal might have been at least partly based on fact and research.

To which Boland responds:

Noel Turnbull’s nine line missive about the standard of arts criticism and journalism published yesterday.

My ”dismissive comment” in the AFR of Jan 7 that so irked the Melbourne Festival president, Turnbull, was: ”The program of the Melbourne International Arts Festival in October 2004 failed to generate broad excitement”.

Hardly dismissive, hardly contentious. Correct, I didn’t attend the Festival last year because the program ”failed to generate broad excitement”. Having lived in Melbourne for 30 years, I have a fair sense of MIAF programs and of what many of my friends and colleagues had to think of that particular program.

I did speak to the Festival spokesperson who failed to release any box office figures and still has yet to do so. But as a ‘sloppy and poorly-informed’ journo, I’ll just take the Festival President at his word that it ”exceeded box office targets and most of the performances sold out.”

Yet again, a harried and cagey arts administrator/figure has a go at the media for their questioning their performance. Kind of like the cries that the media was to blame for Australian film’s disastrous 2004.

The fact remains a large swag of the arts community has no idea how to engage their news, ideas or achievements to the media and the broader community. A criticism you couldn’t level at, for instance, Brett Sheehy’s Sydney Festival, which has copped some varied criticism but powers on ahead with a vibrant, engaging leader.

Invariably, arts festivals throughout Australia are ”exceeding box office targets” and throwing up the ‘sold out’ signs. And any talk of Festival deficits is decried as debilitating or negative.

Perhaps we can partake in some ‘critical, newsworthy engagement’ when you release your figures. It’s been three months, Mr Turnbull.

A reply from Noel Turnbull

By Noel Turnbull

I write the Miscellany column for Crikey as an individual and my views are not necessarily those of any organisation with which I am, or have been, associated.

For the record though, in response to Ms Boland, the Festival’s figures are published in its annual report. The Festival Board has not been in the habit of announcing financial results by media briefing and leaks but follows a more conservative corporate governance practice. However, in the interests of keeping the market fully informed, it can be confirmed that the three years in which Robyn Archer has been AD, and Mary-Ellen King has been GM, budget has been exceeded in every year with surpluses resulting in the Festival now meeting Nugent guidelines for reserves.

By the way (1) I am not an arts administrator, nor have ever been one. I am a non-executive director who does much the same in for-profit and not-for-profit roles. Whether I am harried or cagey, as Ms Boland suggests, is a question which only those who have knowledge of me, or who have observed me, would be able to judge. If neither, as with Ms Boland, they might justifiably be regarded as being sloppy and ill-informed in making the judgment.

By the way (2) I think Brett Sheehy is a wonderful AD – along with all the other Australian ADs – but why on earth does Ms Boland need to act like a cheer-leader for him in her response to me? None of Brett, the arts or the media require cheer-leading from journalists.

By the way (3), as a Miscellany columnist, may I thank Ms Boland for her response and its confirmation of my comments about the quality of some arts journalism. No doubt she will further confirm my view by totally missing the point and demanding that it all be resolved by me providing one number – box office take – from our total results. In response I will suggest she wait for our annual report, and until after our various funding acquittals, and mention that a more significant fact is that her judgment of the Festival was made without attending it; and, that this non-attendance was based on her, and some of her circle of friends’, “impressions” of the program.

… and yet another example of the sterility of much arts journalism and arts talk will unfold.