Bagging Aboriginal art

In the wake of a 2007 Senate inquiry into the shoddy ‘carpetbagging’ practices that work to rip off remote Aboriginal artists, one would think that the ethical alternative of remote art centres would be looking good. Yet, in the mainstream media at least, the centres find themselves more embattled, and the journalist whose work sparked the enquiry, The Australian’s Nicolas Rothwell, has changed his mind about the centres’ place in the greater Aboriginal art industry. After supporting the work of art centre co-ordinators across the deserts and Top End of the country for many years, Rothwell’s writing now holds art centres responsible for a deterioration in the quality of Aboriginal art. The reason for this shift appears to have less to do with Aboriginal art than its changing political context. In ‘The Intellectual Class Should Support the Intervention’ (The Australian, 2007), Rothwell complains about welfarism and the chattering leftist class. It was also in 2007 that Rothwell shifted his long-standing support for art centres. His writing had always been a touchstone of positive news in a newspaper otherwise dedicated to constructing the most troubling representations of Aboriginal people. And this style of reviewing has continued, with Rothwell contributing valuable accounts of artists’ work in remote Australia. However, Rothwell has also begun to pen another kind of position, coincident with the government’s own. My argument here is that this position has spilled into his writings on the work of Aboriginal artists themselves, in a worrying conflation of the politics of the moment with opinion about the quality of art from remote communities.