In this moment when we face horizons and conflicts wider than ever before, we want our resources, the ways of strength. We look again to the human wish, its faiths, the means by which the imagination leads us to surpass ourselves. If there is a feeling that something has been lost, it may be because much has not yet been used, much is still to be found and begun....

Muriel Rukeyser, The Life of Poetry, 1949

Everyone agrees that this has been the most insipid election campaign in recent memory. (It’s telling when the most illuminating television commentary on the election campaign comes from a comedy program about advertising.) It's hard not to think that we’re watching contemporary democracy play out its reductio ad absurdum. Or, more likely, that the sham debate of democratic choice is the entertainment that diverts the masses, while the real business goes on in boardrooms and plush hotels hermetically sealed against public scrutiny.

Instead of policy, we have slogans: “Moving forward” (at least until mockery silenced the line); “Not a big Australia, a sustainable Australia”; “Stop the boats”. We have interchangeable cartoon figures – Rudd, Gillard, Abbott – whose only aim is to wrongfoot their opponents. We have scare campaigns from interest groups like the mining industry and trade unions. Where in all this is the sober discussion of actual issues that we face, as citizens of this planet? What does it all mean? Who can possibly care?

Between the lives people actually live and the glib phrases of campaigning politicians there is an abyss. Public language is so debased that its meaninglessness becomes the whole of its meaning, with political commentary reduced to an analysis of the gestures and tics of its impoverished rhetoric. But this is no accident: it's a deliberate strategy, in which language becomes a simulacrum of reality that bears no relationship at all to truth. Public language is about striking a series of generalised attitudes, teflon-coated against meaning, which can be changed at will with impunity. Politicians don't break promises: they make them in the full knowledge that everybody knows they won't be kept. Our public language is amnesiac, alienated, half-conscious, and it's designed to keep the electorate the same, diverted from real problems by a parade of concocted fears.

This made two events early this week deeply interesting. On successive nights, there were major public lectures delivered by significant arts figures. I can't helping feeling encouraged that there's the public space for these events, although thinking about them also makes me wonder about their potency in the wider discussions in our polity.

On Monday, photographer Bill Henson delivered the Melbourne Art Foundation 2010 Lecture, while on Tuesday, Edinburgh Festival artistic director Jonathan Mills gave the Wheeler Centre's inaugural State of the Arts lecture, which is planned to be an annual event. Both events were packed out and widely publicised; Henson's talk, in particular, was widely spruiked as the artist "speaking out" after his long public silence since the nationwide controversy that engulfed his work in 2008.

Henson and Mills represent very different sensibilities, yet what is most striking about these lectures is their common ground. Both strongly assert the centrality of art to human life, its crucial importance at the core of lived experience and knowledge, in the face of a society in which it is most often claimed that art is a luxury, a kind of optional add-on that is extrinsic to the serious business of reality. Both attacked the utilitarian mindset and language of politics, claiming that its very language constricts our human perceptions and possibilities, making us smaller than we are in a time when we need more than ever to reach beyond ourselves to cope with the challenges that constitute our future. And both called for art to be fundamentally integrated into the education of our children, as a matter of urgency: for their individual and for our social good.

I know they're both right: the achievements of civilisation - the definition of civilisation itself - is unimaginable without factoring art into the equation; what we are as human beings - our conception of the sacred, our longings, our intelligence, even our erotic being - has, for centuries, been conditioned and shaped by art. Yet I can't help wondering how much this message can be heard. I can't help fearing that our public discourse is too stunted, too frightened of the uncertainties and generosity art embodies, too spiritually deadened to even hear what they're saying.

Henson's description of art's "moral truth", the "dumbfounding" power that emerges from the struggle of its genesis, will chime with anyone who has experienced something of what he is saying. But what of those who have no idea of what he's talking about? Mills's urgent plea for a way of thinking that encompasses reason and feeling, which incorporates all the senses in a higher ratiocination that perhaps will help us to imagine a way through our challenging future, is sheer uncommon sense: but how can those ideas even begin to enter the utilitarian discourse that for our society represents the locus of real power?

In the course of a discussion which references a dizzying range of art, from Bellini to Ovid to Blake to Scorsese, Henson offers a privileged peep into his imaginative world. He discusses the demonology that has often attended discussions of art - the romantic idea that the artist is possessed, the untamed wildness that drive its truths - in defence of the "terrible beauty" that infuses both life and art. Art is, says Henson, the means by which we have made our civilisation, and the expression of our human history. And yet, when we experience its power, we step outside history.

He calls this experience "millennial slippage", the sudden breathtaking epiphany when we understand, through the work of an artist who died decades or centuries or millennia ago, a sense of its presence in our contemporary lives that illuminates both the art and ourselves. It's an experience Henson characterises as, most centrally, an evocation of tenderness or compassion, in which a simultaneous perception of the futility and potency of human endeavour makes us understand acutely our own mortality. And, contradictorily, in doing so, we access the realm of the divine.

This is central to Henson's idea of the moral truth of art, which is its simultaneous invitation into the worlds of the imagination and the real. Its risk exists in the eternal tension between its license, its Bacchanalian freedom, and its Apollonian discipline and form: the artist transforms what she perceives, and what we perceive, when we experience this art, transforms us. As Rilke said after seeing Michelangelo's David, art's message is that "You must change your life".

And this is what, says Henson, we can most profitably give our children. Instead of a "regime of pandemic fear", we should open for them the mysteries and beauty of art. "I think that this can give our children that tremendous gift: some glimpse into the world of the gods. What we have a moral duty to bequeath to our children is an apprehension of the spiritually radiant landscape of history, as art has illuminated it and given it truth."

Mills, on the other hand, opened with George Steiner's warning, in his 1971 book In Bluebeard's Castle, against the perils that attend the dominance of the technocratic mind. "Technical advances, superb in themselves, are operative in the ruin of primary living systems and ecologies," says Steiner, with a prescience that echoes ominously four decades later. "Our sense of historical motion is no longer linear, but as of a spiral. We can now conceive of a technocratic, hygienic utopia functioning in the void of human possibilities.”

Arguing against that void, Mills discusses the various ways in which we value human intelligence, referencing recent discoveries in neuroscience as models for a better understanding of culture. And he speaks from his experience as composer. "As an artist, my relationships are experiential rather than theoretical," he says. "I certainly share with scientists and philosophers a desire to make sense of my existence. It is just that my approach is poles apart. It is a fragile, highly intuitive process, in which sensory acuity and memory are subtly intertwined."

This process of intelligence, which Paul Carter calls "material thought", is not abstract: it relies on a sensory, immediate apprehension of the world. Following this thought leads Mills to anthropological studies of the Inuit people, or the Kaluli in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea, whose very survival depends on sound: in environments where the visual sense can be misleading or useless, hearing becomes crucial.

As contemporary urban citizens, these sensitivities are mainly lost to us. Mills suggests that it is only through art that we can expand our consciousness to access these other kinds of intelligence, and in so doing attain a wider and more profound understanding of the world in which we live. Intelligence is, he says, best understood as an "evolving entity", more plastic than we imagine, and its potential is barely accessed. And yet we have never had more need of it, in dealing with the challenges we face today - the problems of increasing and mobile population, environmental destruction, international instability.

Here Mills turns his attention to Australia, and to our increasing population in particular. As India and China become dominant economic forces, how is it that we have so little cultural engagement with them? As Australian society becomes more and more diverse, why do we know so little of the cultures that make up our population? He names culture as the means of finding common ground, of expanding mutual curiosity and understanding, and seeks to replace "multiculturalism" - a term predicated on "the strangeness of the Other", and suggests replacing it with "Cosmopolitanism". Here he quotes the sociologist Ulrich Beck: "Cosmopolitanism, then, absolutely does not mean uniformity or homogenisation. Individuals, groups, communities, political organisations, cultures and civilisations wish to and should remain diverse, perhaps even unique. But to put it metaphorically: the walls between them must be replaced by bridges."

This bridge, says Mills, is culture. It's through culture that we can find common ground, a reciprocal interest that can translate our differences into a dynamic and positive relationship. And yet, he says, "in preparing this lecture I read a number of official documents, as well as speeches, comments and interviews with a variety of government ministers, I struggled to find the slightest mention of culture."

Like Henson, Mills urges a closer relationship between the arts and education, which he sees as increasingly inadequate in preparing young people for the complex world in which they live. He imagines an education system rather different from what now exists. "Alas, where there might be potential for learning about the Mahabharata or understanding the subtleties of kun opera, or appreciating Shia religious ceremonies through exposure to a Taziyeh performance along side the symphonies of Beethoven or cantatas of Bach, we rely instead on a diet which is exclusively comprised of adolescent, self expressive rock eisteddfods. There is nothing wrong with fun and frivolity, unless it becomes an overwhelming controlling metaphor for absolutely everything that occurs in a classroom." Worse, "integrating and assimilating the work of schools and universities with that of professional ensembles is only the first step. It is sadly a step Australian governments have yet to take."

Henson's insistence on the crucially subjective experience of art, in uniting the individual with the wider spheres of history and contemporary society, and Mills's call for a conception of culture that creates a common ground out of which we can shape our differences as enriching and valuable, meet in an insistence on a different view of education. Both imagine a world of wider possibility inspired by curiosity rather than fear, a society in which the self sees itself in positive relationship to the other. And both see the key to this possibility as art.

So where do these ideas enter into Australian social discourse? Henson's lecture was mostly reported as an unapologetic speech that merely defended his right to photograph nude children. Mills's lecture fared rather better: it was run in full in the SMH and the Age printed an edited extract. Yet I don't know how these important assertions of meaning will resonate, how they can be translated meaningfully to those who most need to hear. I don't know how they will mitigate the wider hostility to art that exists in Australia, a hostility motivated by fear and ignorance, and fanned by the attack dogs and the plain apathy of both the right and the left. The very utilitarian language criticised by both Henson and Mills makes it impossible to communicate widely the substance of what they say.

Meanwhile, the election campaign runs on in its breathtaking banality, with not one hint anywhere that there might be other ways of speaking or thinking about the challenges that confront us all. Somewhere, in this seemingly unbridgeable gap, we're all being cheated.

Update: George Hunka responds on Superfluities Redux, in the context of the "Adornonian nightmare" of another argument about corporate sponsorship of the arts.

Bill Henson's lecture, The Light and the Dark and Shades of Grey, can be watched in full on Slow TV. Jonathan Mill's State of the Arts lecture is available for download (pdf) on the Wheeler Centre site.

Before I dive into the maelstrom of the Melbourne Festival, which opens tonight, I thought I'd briefly revisit the latest Henson fracas, which boiled over after extracts from David Marr's new book, The Henson Case, were published in the Fairfax Press last week. In a pattern that has become depressingly familiar, politicians scrambled over each other to find appropriate adjectives with which to express their disgust and revulsion and the msm hacks went thermonuclear, behaving exactly as if a known paedophile was permitted to enter a primary school and let loose among defenceless children. And yet any sober assessment of the facts shows there is absolutely no suggestion that Henson or the principal concerned behaved with anything less than propriety.

How is it that an internationally acclaimed photographer, who has been making his art for 35 years without a whisper of complaint from any of his collaborators, has become the local equivalent of Gary Glitter? The mere mention of Henson in some quarters now means "paedophile" and "kiddie porn". And yet - even under the glare of this hostile publicity - the images he makes have been passed by authorities as suitable for general viewing. At worst, PG. At the height of the first controversy, when you would have thought that, if there were any basis to the accusations made against him, aggrieved models would have been coming out of the woodwork, the only ones who went public did so to defend Henson's practice.

The new media frenzy has sparked an inquiry into the principal concerned, Sue Knight, who invited Henson to the school, St Kilda Park Primary School, last year to scout for models. While the principal concerned has been properly discreet, refusing to pre-empt the findings of an inquiry while projecting an air of quiet confidence that she breached no protocols, Premier John Brumby has had no such qualms, telling the media that she had behaved "inappropriately".

There is much talk about protecting the innocence of children and "community standards". There is endless discussion about how the "arts community" is "out of touch". The few politicians - both, sadly for those who believe in the Right/Left dichotomy, Liberal pollies - who have stood up for Henson have been howled down and mocked in what is a startling example of cynical political opportunism by Labor. But what of those at the centre of this toxic scandal?

The parents and school council at St Kilda Park Primary have come out aggressively in defence of their principal. Parents have complained that fighting through a media scrum to get their kids to school has been a far worse invasion of their privacy than any visit by Henson. The Grade 6 children sent a letter to the Age today defending their former principal. Industry professionals, from Olympians to Oscar-winning actors, have said again and again that scouting for talent in schools is standard practice which, even if it's news to almost everyone else, has been going on for years.

As with the models who defended Henson's ethics and behaviour, the evidence of those who might be said to be best informed about the issue seems to count for nothing. Henson photographs nudes, so he is abusing children. The equation is unshakeable. His reputation can therefore be dragged through the mud with impunity, even though there has never been a complaint of abuse against him, and even though the authorites concerned have - unambiguously and despite huge political and media pressure - agreed that he has never broken the law.

It's one of the most unpleasant and unjust spectacles I have witnessed for years, and is only the most public aspect of a general clamp-down on the arts, fuelled by an arts-hostile media. The arts do good scandal, as can be seen by the headlines generated by a hapless Fringe show this week, whose bad taste title hit the current affairs shows. The message is clear: the arts are offensive. The arts should not be allowed.

Perhaps what is most depressing is that those who argue in defence of Henson, myself included, have said from the beginning - despite constant claims to the contrary - that there is a need for public debate on the issues that have inflamed the Henson controversy. We have acknowledged the public anxiety and genuine concerns about child protection. Many of us have children of our own, and feel those same anxieties and concerns. We just think that debate ought to be based on facts, not hysterical supposition and the fevered imaginations of shockjocks.

Despite this, "Henson apologists" have been painted as people who support paedophilia and ride roughshot over the "rights of children", when we are simply pointing out that Henson has not, and has never had, a case to answer. Every investigation has found that he is innocent of the loathsome accusations made against him. The sober and fair-minded analysis of Marr's book has been overwhelmed by the media frenzy, when there has never been more need for it. What we have been watching is not a public debate, but a public lynching.

My copy of David Marr's new book, The Henson Case, arrived this morning, and I have just finished reading it. Extracts are printed in tomorrow's Good Weekend supplement in the Fairfax papers, and its publication will no doubt herald more debate around the issues of child protection, freedom of expression, art and Bill Henson.

One can hope for sensible debate in the midst of the heat. I always do. In the meantime, I recommend Marr's book for its clear, dispassionate analysis of how this great national uproar unfolded. It's mandatory reading for anyone who seeks to discern the facts amid the fuss.

Via Skepticlawyer, Ms TN this morning read some astoundingly crass comments by the Age's art crrritic, Robert Nelson, which were published in the print edition. Mr Nelson was, not so long ago, in the news defending photographer Bill Henson (and Nelson's own wife) against charges that they were child pornographers. And some of his comments sadly justified the average arts-hater's view that artists are chardonnay-addicted ponces who consider themselves superior to ordinary mortals.

At the time I thought Nelson's defences of Henson's art were odd, since comments he made in a 2005 review of Henson's work in fact sounded very similar to the criticisms made by those who wanted to ban it. He accused Henson of displaying "a vulgar relish in depicting naked, pouting youngsters" and said his "good landscape work is discredited when used as a backdrop for rehearsing the lubricious display of nubile or pre-pubescent children". Henson's work, he said, "is an aesthetic of spying, granting you an illicit glimpse, as in all pornographic genres, a teasing sexual spectacle with ocular impunity".

I don't agree with Nelson's analysis here, but that's beside the point. He's perfectly within his rights to think what he likes. But it made me wonder if his very public defence of Henson was a matter of protesting too much... Who knows? Who cares? There he was, out defending art's essential superiority to every other aspect of life, rather than its profound and vital investment in life itself, and making the rest of us look like noodles.

And last week he was at it again, this time attacking sport as "the antithesis" of art. One quote will do - as Skepticlawyer says, this man is impossible to parody:

The social role of sport is to provide an outlet for intelligent people to behave like brainless people. Everyone knows there’s no intrinsic point in shifting a leather ball from one post to another, no matter how energetic or invested the contest. Nothing is achieved outside the game; no one is wiser or can add a benefit to the world beyond the fury of the struggle.

Contrast this with the markedly brainy Roland Barthes' beautiful meditation, What Is Sport? Speaking of watching a soccer match, Barthes says:

To watch, here, is not only to live, to suffer, to hope, to understand but also, and especially, to say so - by voice, by gesture, by facial expression... in a word, it is to communicate. Ultimately man knows certain forces, certain conficts, joys and agonies: sport expresses them, liberates them, consumes them, without ever letting anything be destroyed.

All art, Nelson says with enviable certainty, has a "purpose behind the work". Untangling this one is a complex business beyond the range of this snark, but Ms TN suggests that Robert Nelson should, for a start, have a careful read of Susan Sontag's classic 1963 essay, Against Interpretation.

It certainly seems to me that Mr Nelson understands very little about either sport or art. The poets of ancient Greece, who thought both were essential celebrations of human possibility, would have found his attitude mystifying. Next on Nelson's reading list could be the Odes of Pindar. Pindar, who died in 442BC, is credited with inventing the Ode, a form of lyric poetry. And most of his Odes were in praise of athletes. The oldest was written to celebrate the victory of the runner Hippocleas in the double stadium race in 498BC. The final, written when Pindar was supposedly 72, was in praise of a wrestler, Aristomenes.

PS: Just to add a theatre spin... it's worth mentioning that Samuel Beckett is in Wisden. As a spin bowler.

It was good to see Bill Henson speaking publicly for the first time after the recent fracas and negotiating the inevitable media glare with dignity and grace. On Friday he opened the Picture Paradise exhibition at the National Art Gallery in Canberra and, to the disappointment of the press, merely made "a pointed intellectual defence of the role of his art and that of others in Australia", during which he made no direct references to the recent media hysteria surrounding his work.

Art, said Henson, "redeems us from a world of moralism and opinionation and claptrap. It stops us in our tracks as we are formulating the truths we think we believe in. It stops us and makes us wonder."

Indeed. Meanwhile, Art Monthly has exhumed the scandal with its cover image of what is, let's be honest, an inoffensive but unremarkable photograph of a naked girl, taken by her mother in circumstances which the child herself says vocally were not abusive. This unleashed an almost identical media replay of the Henson controversy, but this time with press conferences from the girl model and her family, including her father, art critic Robert Nelson, proving the truism that history enacts first as tragedy, then as farce.

This seems merely opportunistic, but check out Larvatus Prodeo before, like everyone else, rushing to judgment. And consider further Arts Minister Peter Garrett's comment that the issue was "needlessly provocative". Is our very own minister claiming that the arts must put their heads down now and work hard not to provoke anybody? And is the "arts community" agreeing with this?

Consider too this deeply ominous comment from PM Rudd: "Mr Rudd said he had ordered the Australia Council, which funds the magazine, to develop new protocols about using images of children, and any recipient that did not abide by them would have its funding axed." Even Howard didn't go (quite) that far. And are young people going to be banished from any kind of representation, out of the panicked fear that society is completely constituted of paedophiles? Why are we criminalising our children?

Welcome to the brave new world of soft censorship, peoples, which looks just like the old fashioned kind. I fear we are entering a deeply creepy time. At least under Howard the oppositional faultlines were clear...this time the social conservatives are marching under the banner of protecting the exploited. Oh, right, it's not that unfamiliar...

PS: I'm waiting for the outcry over Sigur Rós's video of their new single Gobbledigook, made in collaboration with New York photographer Ryan McGinley, which includes many disturbing portrayals of child porn. Or, alternatively, Edenic representations of youthful desire and freedom, which are probably, on reflection, even more disturbing to those who would prefer that such things did not exist.

PPS: ...and check out Corrie Perkin's excellent piece, The Rise of the Art Police, in today's Australian.

I know you must all be sick to death of the Henson debacle (I certainly am, and am looking forward to a break from Australia next week) but I feel obliged to update, I hope for the last time, since this case has signalled some warnings for all of us. I am a bit tired of those who keep casting this as a question of The Arts vs Everyone Else: no, it's a question of whether we want to live in a society where moral questions are rigidly applied in state law. As in, for example, theocracies ruled by Sharia law, or the extremities of the Taliban.

Western democracy balances individual and societal freedoms and, for the moment, there are places where the state, quite rightly, stops. As far as I'm concerned, its authority in questions of private morality should focus on the question of harm to others, and that harm should be actual and not perceived. It has yet to be proved to me that Henson's art has harmed anybody, although the kinds of distress these campaigners have caused Henson, his models and their families with their ugly accusations about child porn have, I have no doubt, caused a lot of damage. For all her supposed concerns about the rights of young people, Bravehearts campaigner Hetty Johnston hasn't shown a great deal of respect for the young models in Henson's photographs, and has certainly paid no attention to anything they have said in defence of Henson.

There are various responses to yesterday's dropping of charges against Henson. Hetty Johnston, whose complaints to police sparked the Roslyn Oxley9 raids, has announced her intentions to pursue her campaign against Henson. And, as comments posted here demonstrate, campaigners have decided that he's a menace to society and must be stopped, even over the dead body of democracy. As UK anti-porn activist Gregory Carlin said to the pro-life (homophobic, anti-Harry Potter) LifeSiteNews, "Material which is child pornography in Britain, is now considered child friendly viewing in Australia". Watch out.

Michael Leunig today claims that those who defend Henson do so "in chorus" (unlike, presumably, the brave individuals going with the flow of public outrage): "Some say his work is creepy pornography that culturally legitimises and fosters pedophilia, others hold the considered view that it's abusive and exploitative, while others defend it unreservedly in chorus, seeing any forceful questions or challenge about its essence as a sure sign of ignorance, repression and mindless resistance to change." He reflects many accusations recently made of the arts world, which reflect attitudinal prejudices rather more than what was actually argued; and of course there are many "considered" and thoughtful defences of Henson's work. And it's hard to think of a world more riven by disagreement than the arts.

But there we go: take heed, my friends, and think on. It is not the fault of artists that they are thought of in these ways so widely, since the arts are in general so badly discussed in the mainstream media, but it is up to artists to address the problem.

And finally, a word from Patrick McCaughey, whom many of you will remember as the flamboyant director of the NGV until he moved to the US, where he was a major defender of Robert Mapplethorpe. He has an interesting reflection in the Australian today, in which he talks with great good sense about the ethics and limits of art:

This morning comes the news that the DPP has told NSW police that they don't have a case to prosecute Bill Henson for obscenity or possession of child pornography, and Federal Police have said that they will not press ahead with charges over the Henson photographs in the NGA. Moreover, the Classification Board has given the image on the exhibition invitation - the one that sparked this whole farce - a rating of PG. Apparently, it's "not sexualised to any degree". You could knock me down with a feather.

Moreover, Kevin Rudd is - at last - saying publicly that his personal opinion has nothing to do with the decisions of legal authorities.

So that's that, then. I guess we can claim victory for common sense, although there's little to be triumphant about in the spectacle of the past weeks. But at least the police can now get on with chasing actual paedophiles.

Ms TN and others have had many requests from people who would also like to put their names to the The Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson. Those who would like to do so may go here. Please pass around the word to anyone who might be interested.

Given that (rather laughably, given the fuss) the Classification Board has rated the internet images of Henson's art as "G" or "very mild", prosecution seems very unlikely: but the wider concerns about freedom of expression remain. These are not concerns confined to the arts, as should be demonstrated by the closure of an exhibition about conditions in Hebron after a visit by anti-terror police.

The concerns expressed are about the rights of all of us to represent or debate realities that may offend sections of our community: a point that Guy Rundle seems to have missed in his off-the-mark commentary in the Age today. It's hard to see how the soberly argued Open Letter, which clearly condemns child abuse by anyone, places artists above the law; perhaps Rundle forgot to read it. Certainly, on the strength of some of the responses I've read, I suspect that some of our prominent commentators would fail English comprehension exercises at school.

Yesterday, in a move that reflects the present climate, the ABC reported that the AMA is campaigning for funding cuts to companies making plays and films that depict smoking. I've avoided the phrase "nanny state" (prominent on banners on Friday night, during protests against the 2am lock-out the State Government is introducing, supposedly to prevent street violence) but it's a bit irresistible. Presumably all of us are impressionable infants who can't make up our own minds about anything, and are also incapable of noticing what goes on in the world around us.

Further, many people seem to think that art is a branch of advertising that exists to "promote" certain types of behaviour or "messages". No, it's not: but that's a long argument I won't address here. I'm beginning to wonder if reality is the one thing that artists are not permitted to represent. Welcome to the Brave New World. And pass the soma.

Yesterday it was reported that police were investigating websites hosting Bill Henson's photographs. Aside from the grim humour of seeing Fairfax and News Ltd prosecuted for distributing pictures they have themselves been instrumental as characterising as pornographic, there is nothing very funny about this. (Better get your pictures of Michelangelo's David and Classical Greek statuary off-line quick - and make double sure that no photos of your kids playing in the bath are littering your hard drive).

What a gigantic waste of police time and public money.

I've held off from reproducing Henson's photographs myself because they are copyright images, but that seems a bit irrelevant now. One of the many odd aspects of the public fuss is that nobody seems to have mentioned that he also photographs male nudes. (And landscapes, trees, roads and urban wastelands). As always, it's the female body that requires custodianship and control. For a discussion of the wider political and social implications of this farce, and some other troubling examples of the censorship referred to in the Open Letter, see Richard Phillips' article here.

Daniel Schlusser pointed out last week that an illiterate idiot published in the Age was quoting William Blake in order to condemn Bill Henson. (Formerly Chief of Staff to Howard Federal Minister Kevin Andrews, Kevin Donnelly is also, ironically enough, author of a paper attacking contemporary education called "Dumbing Down"). It's almost Freudian: I can't think of a more apt poet for the defence. No one more fiercely defended the innocence of the body, nor more eloquently attacked the hypocrisy of the prurient:

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.


One could be excused for thinking this has been a bad week for art; but, exhausted as I am, I am inclined to think otherwise. It is a mistake to think that the loudest, most strident voices are the dominant ones. They are not. I have been scanning the media and the internet, and much more often I see thoughtfulness and reason, and disquiet at what has been happening here over the past week. Among the best responses I have read was a letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald from a former police superintendent, Alan Leek, which I'll reproduce in full here for its refreshingly sane perspective from someone who knows very well what child pornography and sexual abuse actually are. One of the aspects I most resent about this furore is, in fact, how it trivialises child sexual abuse:

With a foot in both camps, I have watched with interest as this sorry Bill Henson episode has unfolded. I am in a position, perhaps unique in this farce, of having been a member of the NSW Police Force for 34 years and, for the most part concurrently, proprietor of a commercial exhibiting gallery for more than 25 years.

I am gobsmacked and bitterly disappointed that a police force, which is far better than the one I joined all those years ago and far better educated, still fails to see when it has been ambushed by the pursed-lipped paragons of public morality; those zealots who can't separate nudity from sexuality and who rely on an obsequious police to do their bidding in glorious ignorance. Let's face it; most police would not know their Ansel Adams from their elbow.

Debate is one thing, criminal sanctions are another. Debate should be welcomed - criminal sanctions stifle any opportunity for debate.

Henson's art has nothing to do with exploitation or pedophilia, but enough has been said about that by those more qualified than I.

Not one of the pedophiles I arrested and prosecuted advertised their vile workings. They operated under the coward's cloak of darkness and familiarity. Not for them the arc lights of a legitimate gallery - more the deeper crevices of the internet or the well-thumbed pages of their sordid juvenilia and other paraphernalia.

That senior police fail to utilise their discretion to uphold the independence of a profession I still hold dear, setting themselves up again to be pilloried for ill-informed actions that must surely fail, is a bitter pill for me.

Having worked with scarce resources, I shake my head at the waste portrayed by television images of police seizing crates of artworks, and wonder to what better use their expertise might be applied. Child protection, perhaps?

Ill-informed comment and motherhood statements from political leaders that further cast the burden on police are regrettable.

To ensure that public disquiet is addressed in the future and that the police do not continue to undo their normally laudable work, perhaps those same political leaders might consider a mechanism where pious complaints can be referred to censorship arbiters.

In the meantime, I commend Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, for standing tall when others have lacked the backbone to do the same.

In my various command positions, I would not have sanctioned the actions being taken by police. I would also have no hesitation in exhibiting Henson's work.

In time, this whole inane episode will appear pretty dumb, but the damage to Henson and his subjects and lost opportunities for professional policing are inestimable.

Alan Leek (retired superintendent of police) Breewood Galleries, Richmond

Indeed.

Our Open Letter made the front pages of the Herald Sun, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age (the Australian gave it what perhaps was its real news value and ran it more modestly), and overseas was reported in the Guardian, the New York Times and by the BBC. I and other signatories were on talkbacks all over Australia, on PM, the ABC news and television. It has been misquoted, misrepresented and plain lied about. (I personally wish on Miranda Devine the task of getting the "lockstep" artistic community to agree about anything). It was also reported fairly in many instances, and published in full on the Age's site, so anyone who cares to do so can check what was actually said. The letter has been also been reproduced in OnLine Opinion, Real Time and on many blogs.

Those who are surprised by the venom some responses unleashed against the arts community should get out more. There is a real and abiding hatred of the arts and artists among a noisy minority of Australians, fuelled by perceptions that artists are lazy, rich bludgers who steal the tax-payers' money while lounging about decadently drinking absinthe and (almost certainly) molesting small children. Those who are not aware of this strand of the Australian conversation should be. The culture wars are by no means over. To undo this perception - one which, as we all know, bears no relation to reality - will take long, patient and calm work.

Those of us who care about the arts and freedom of expression should focus rather those on who are also speaking, if less stridently, more rationally and thoughtfully about this issue. Over the past couple of days, I have done a scan of blogs and media coverage, and it seems to me that these voices far outnumber those rushing to lynch Henson. I am not so sure that the "arts community" is as "out of touch" as some interested commentators claim.

Samples of the more interesting commentary, in blogs and other online publications, are below:

New Matilda
Sorrow at Sill's Bend
Discussion (and links to others) at Larvateus Prodeo
The Guardian
Home Page Daily
Superfluities
Sebastian Smee (The Australian)
Guy Beres
Sarsaparilla
Hyperidian Bannerman
Goals + Girls Blog
Cafe Philos
Not Too Much (interesting, a Christian view)
Pavlov's Cat

Interestingly too, given the Malthouse/Victorian Opera's recent production of Through the Looking Glass, Phillip Adams raises Lewis Carroll. And it's hard not to wonder how the upcoming Hayloft production of Franz Wedekind's Spring Awakening will go in its return season at Belvoir St in Sydney later this year.

And, for some comic relief:

Ampersand Duck
Aaron Timms in the SMH
Pauline Futeran

Finally, many people have asked to put their names to the Open Letter. We are now considering how best to facilitate this, and will let you all know as soon as it's decided. Meanwhile, normal programming will resume soon.

I know it's been quiet on the blog the past couple of days. However, it has not been quiet at home: I've been putting together an Open Letter in Support of Bill Henson from a number of the Creative Stream representatives at the Australia 2020 Summit. The letter has just gone out to media outlets, and runs as follows:

PRESS RELEASE: MAY 27, 2008

Open Letter in support of Bill Henson
From Creative Australia 2020 Summit representatives

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

As members of the Creative Stream of the Australia 2020 Summit, we wish to express our dismay at the police raid on Bill Henson’s recent Sydney exhibition, the allegations that he is a child pornographer, and the subsequent reports that he and others may be charged with obscenity.

The potential prosecution of one of our most respected artists is no way to build a Creative Australia, and does untold damage to our cultural reputation.

The public debate prompted by the Henson exhibition is welcome and important. We need to discuss the ethics of art and the issues that it raises. That is one of the things art is for: it is valuable because it gives rise to such debate and difference, because it raises difficult, sometimes unanswerable, questions about who we are, as individuals and as members of society. However, this on-going discussion, which is crucial to the healthy functioning of our democracy, cannot take place in a court of law.

We invite the Prime Minister, Mr Rudd, and the NSW Premier, Mr Iemma, to rethink their public comments about Mr Henson’s work. We understand that they were made in the context of deep community concern about the sexual exploitation of children. We understand and respect also that they have every right to their personal opinions. However, as political leaders they are influential in forming public opinion, and we believe their words should be well considered.

We also call on the Minister for Environment Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, to stand up for artists against a trend of encroaching censorship which has recently resulted in the closure of this and other exhibitions.

We wish to make absolutely clear that none of us endorses, in any way, the abuse of children. Mr Henson’s work has nothing to do with child pornography and, according to the judgment of some of the most respected curators and critics in the world, it is certainly art. We ask for the following points to be fairly considered:

1. Mr Henson is a highly distinguished artist. His work is held in all major Australian collections including the Art Gallery of NSW, Art Gallery of SA, Art Gallery of WA, National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia.

Among international collections, his work is held in the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Houston Museum of Fine Art; 21C Museum, Louisville; the Montreal Museum of Fine Art; Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the DG Bank Collection in Frankfurt and the Sammlung Volpinum and the Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna.

Major retrospectives of Mr Henson’s work at the Art Galleries of NSW and Victoria attracted more than 115,000 people, and produced not one complaint of obscenity. His work has also been studied widely in schools for many years.

2. Mr Henson has been photographing young models for more than 15 years. Until now, there has been no suggestion by any of his subjects or their families of any abusive practices. On the contrary, his models have strongly defended his practice and the feeling of safety generated in his process, and have expressed pride in his work.

We suggest that the media sensationalism and the criminalisation of laying charges against Mr Henson, his gallery and the parents of the young people depicted in his work, would be far more traumatic for the young people concerned than anything Mr Henson has done.

3. The work itself is not pornographic, even though it includes depictions of naked human beings. It is more justly seen in a tradition of the nude in art that stretches back to the ancient Greeks, and which includes painters such as Caravaggio and Michelangelo. Many of Henson’s controversial images are not in fact sexual at all. Others depict the sexuality of young people, but in ways that are fundamentally different from how naked bodies are depicted in pornography. The intention of the art is not to titillate or to gratify perverse sexual desires, but rather to make the viewer consider the fragility, beauty, mystery and inviolabilty of the human body.

In contrast, the defining essence of pornography is that it endorses, condones or encourages abusive sexual practice. We respectfully suggest that Henson’s work, even when it is disturbing, does nothing of the sort. I would personally argue that, in its respect for the autonomy of its subjects, the work is a counter-argument to the exploitation and commodification of young people in both commercial media and in pornographic images.

Many of us have children of our own. The sexual abuse and exploitation of children fills us all with abhorrence. But it is equally damaging to deny the obvious fact that adolescents are sexual beings. This very denial contributes to abusive behaviour, because it is part of the denial of the personhood of the young. In my opinion, Mr Henson’s work shows the delicacy of the transition from childhood to adulthood, its troubledness and its beauty, in ways which do not violate the essential innocence of his subjects. It can be confronting, but that does not mean that it is pornography.

Legal opinion is that if charges were laid against Mr Henson, he would be unlikely to be found guilty. The seizure of the photographs, and the possible prosecution of Mr Henson, the Rosyln Oxley9 Gallery or the parents of Henson’s subjects, takes up valuable police and court time that would be much better spent pursuing those who actually do abuse children.

4. Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the trial-by-media to which Mr Henson and his work has been subject over the past few days, is how his art has been diminished and corrupted. The allegations that he is making child pornography have done more to promote his work to possible paedophiles than any art gallery, where the work is seen in its proper, contemplative context. It is notable that the attacks on Mr Henson’s work have, almost without exception, come from those who are unfamiliar with the photographs, or who have seen them in mutilated or reduced images on the internet.

If an example is made of Bill Henson, one of Australia’s most prominent artists, it is hard to believe that those who have sought to bring these charges will stop with him. Rather, this action will encourage a repressive climate of hysterical condemnation, backed by the threat of prosecution.

We are already seeing troubling signs in the pre-emptive self-censorship of some galleries. This is not the hallmark of an open democracy nor of a decent and civilised society. We should remember that an important index of social freedom, in earlier times or in repressive regimes elsewhere in the world, is how artists and art are treated by the state.

We urge our political leaders to follow the example of Neville Wran, when in 1982 a similar outcry greeted paintings by Juan Davila. At that time, Mr Wran said: “I do not believe that art has anything to do with the vice squad”. With Mr Wran, we believe the proper place for debate is outside the courts of law.

Alison Croggon
Writer


Signatories:

Louise Adler, CEO & Publisher-in-Chief, Melbourne University Publishing
Geoffery Atherden, Writer
Neil Armfield, Artistic director, Belvoir St Theatre
Stephen Armstrong, Executive Producer, Malthouse Theatre
James Baker, Tax advisor and accountant
Geraldine Barlow, Curator
Larissa Behrendt, Professor of Law, University of Technology Sydney
Cate Blanchett, Actor
Daryl Buckley, Musician
Leticia Cacares, Theatre Director
Karen Casey, Visual Artist
Kate Champion, Choreographer, Artistic Director Force Majeure
Rachel Dixon, New media developer
Phoebe Dunn, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Commercial Galleries Association
Jo Dyer, Executive Producer, Sydney Theatre Company
Kristy Edmunds, Artistic Director, Melbourne International Festival of the Arts
Saul Eslake, Economist
Richard Gill, Artistic Director, Victorian Opera
Peter Goldsworthy, Writer
Marieke Hardy, Writer and broadcaster
Sam Haren, Artistic Director, The Border Project
Frank Howarth
Cathy Hunt, Creative consultant
Nicholas Jose, Writer
Andrew Kay, Producer
Ana Kokkinos, Film maker
Sandra Levy
Matthew Lutton, Theatre director
Nick Marchand, Artistic Director, Griffin Theatre
Sue Maslin, Producer, Film Art Doco Pty Ltd
Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, Director, Museum of Contemporary Art
Callum Morton, Visual Artist
Rosemary Myers, Artistic Director, Windmill Performing Arts
Rachel Healy, Director Performing Arts, Sydney Opera House
Liza Lim, Composer
Jan Minchin, Director, Tolarno Galleries
Helen O’Neil, Executive producer
Charles Parkinson, Artistic Director, Tasmanian Theatre Company
David Pledger, Theatre director
Marion Potts, Theatre Director
Katrina Sedgwick, Festival Director, Adelaide Film Festival
Mary Vallentine, Arts manager

Additional signatories:

The following support the appeal contained in this letter without necessarily endorsing the detailed argument:

John Coetzee, Novelist
Ramona Koval, Writer and broadcaster
Julianne Schultz, Writer

Update: The indefatigable Nick Pickard is logging (some of) the media reaction at Arts Journalist.

Update Friday: TN's round-up of reaction here.

Updates below

I am shocked and deeply disturbed to read this morning that photographer Bill Henson - one of Australia's most significant artists - is being investigated by police and threatened with prosecution. Sydney gallery Roslyn Oxley9, which is exhibiting his recent works, cancelled last night's planned opening, amid lurid accusations that Henson is purveying child porn.

It seems surreal: on Tuesday night, I was once again examining a giant, bright yellow poster that announces to the world at large: WANT LONGER LASTING SEX? It's a sight I find unambiguously offensive, but anyone with enough money can put it up where no one can miss it without fear of prosecution. I live in a world awash with advertising images of commodified and sexualised children or women whose bodies are routinely scalpeled and injected with toxins to meet some generically porned-up notion of feminine sexuality, a world where genuine child porn is something that people can access by simply tapping a keyboard.

And what raises the hue and cry? An artist of integrity and passion, whose sensitive and beautiful photographs of adolescents reveal the twilit zones of human liminality, vulnerability and feeling. An artist whose work, in its painful and intimate honesty, directly challenges the crass exploitation and commodification of young bodies by the mass media and porn industries. An artist whose work can, in any case, only offend those who bother to go to the galleries where they are exhibited. This work is, apparently, simply child porn, a form of sexual assault.Update 5: The statement from Roslyn Ozley9 Gallery

As it says in the News Ltd story:

Hetty Johnston, founder and executive director of Bravehearts, a child sexual assault action group, today called for Mr Henson and the gallery to be prosecuted over the images.

"It's child exploitation, it's criminal activity and it should be prosecuted, both the photographer Bill Henson ... but also the gallery because these are clearly images that are sexually exploiting young children," Ms Johnston said.

"They are clearly illegal child pornography images, it's not about art at all, it's a crime and I hope they are prosecuted."

What's pornographic is the pruriently censored images up on the News Ltd site, under the headline "Nude Children Exhibit Shut". The black blocks that conceal their bodies - and vandalise the artwork - demonstrate how shameful we believe the human body really is.

Update: More from Chris Boyd

Update 2: A busy day on the anti-art round: artwork by Kevin Rudd's nephew prompts "excessive censorship" by Melbourne City Council

Update 3: PM Rudd himself gets into the act, turns arts critic, condemns Henson's pictures as "revolting" and proves he ought to stick to his own areas of expertise.

Update 4: Police say they will charge Henson. And the senior curator of photography at the Art Gallery of NSW, Judy Annear, defends Henson's work and reputation. She says that he is becoming a "whipping boy" to deflect public anxieties about paedophilia and suggests that the police should be chasing real child abusers.