Politics art bill on you

SHOULD ratepayers be forced to foot the bill for political sloganeering that has little to do with us or our region?

That is the question at the heart of recriminations over the Geelong After Dark event projecting anti-Adani propaganda onto the columns of City Hall. First of all: What is Adani? It is an Indian multinational company which wants to create a massive coal mine in Central Queensland about 2000km north of here.

What does it have to do with Geelong? We’re not sure exactly except it is an issue that excites Greens supporters (who ironically tend to congregate not on the land but in the innercities) and they tend to regard it as totemic.

Anti-Adani arguments tend to run along environmental lines and pro-Adani arguments along economic and jobcreation lines.

Why has an arts festival partly funded by your rates and partly funded by your taxes been given approval by your representatives to make a political point on this issue? That is anyone’s guess.

The council’s head arts bureaucrat, perhaps optimistically, made comparisons to political artists Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.

We don’t claim to be experts on art but we would make the point Picasso and Warhol were technically brilliant, sometimes subtle, artists who were recognised in their lifetimes.

Projecting a skull and crossbones onto City Hall alongside references to Adani doesn’t seem particularly clever, thought-provoking or aesthetic.

It seems like self-indulgent activism which will interest a select few.

Is it even art? Or is it just political propaganda hijacking an arts budget? And what do our municipal leaders think of this being projected onto their workplace with our funds?

You be the judge based on the comments and noncomments in today’s story.

But it seems that many who have sought public life don’t have a view at all.

The silence is deafening.