Art festival spend comes under question

QUESTIONS are being raised about the direction of the latest Biennale of Sydney art festival and why millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money is being spent on a “pagan Gaiworshipping festival of woke”.

The 23rd Biennale, called rivus, focuses on “non-human entities as living ancestral beings with a right to life”, climate and “hydro-feminism”.

The arts festival will include portraits of climate activists made of grass, “queer ecologies”, “river Horror”, “fish philosophy”, “multi-species justice” and “hydro-feminism”.

Some artists will campaign against dams.

Organisers say “animals, plants, mountains and bodies of water have been granted legal personhood” – but the Institute of Public Affairs thinktank called this “nonsense”.

And a noted arts professor says “self-indulgent” woke art has taken over subsidised arts but won’t be regarded as “great art” nor have lasting value.

Many artists will be focused on extinction, climate warming, planting virtual trees, recycling and running weaving and sustainable classes.

The festival even includes a collective trying to make the North Sea into a legal entity.

IPA Foundations of Western

Civilisation Program director Dr Bella d’Abrera said the program was “activism masquerading as art”.

“This year’s program reveals that the organisers of the Sydney Biennale are not even remotely interested in arts or culture,” she said.

“They are political activists animated solely by their obsession with cultural engineering, social justice and climate change.”