Asks Supernaut (aka dancer Frances D'Ath) of the so-called "controversy" around the Melbourne Festival.

Slagging match of the week goes to Melbourne Festival vs. The Media, wherein Robin Usher tries to sound a rhetorical question and get us all wondering, "Hey, yeah, maybe the Melbourne festival has lost its touch".

Is this lame journalism trying to find an angle to cut down contemporary arts in Melbourne and put the big companies - Oz Ballet, Opera and Melbourne Symphony back in their rightful place as the upholders of culture?

Supernaut isn't a great fan of Edmunds - and says why - but looks with even more disfavour on the - well, shall we say one-sided? - mugging of Edmunds that's currently taking place in our august daily journals. And in articulating with scalpel precision the place of "debate" in mainstream media, she proves herself a mistress of snark:

"Robin Usher's extra-lame controversy-mongering and reductionist bottom-line dollar-dollar-bills-y'all art-as-finance in The Age is just puerile and asinine," lisps our fearless Naut, her voice sweet and low (an excellent thing in a woman). "...When the critical and intellectual position of the arts in mainstream Australia is represented by people like Robin Usher and Andrew Bolt, why should such debates take place where these pseudo-critics get a paycheck for mentally feeble drooling?"

Quite. Here we save our spittle for better things.