Artless Australia
Colonial Australia cannot produce art. It has never known art, because it has never had culture to begin with. Culture is the necessary material for creating a work of art, something developed from a collective striving toward achievement, and Australia has never strove toward anything, much less achieved anything. Before the colonials Australia had cultural value, an immense one that was widespread, one in which art had been created. But now we are stuck in a cultural vacuum, Australia is a cultural poverty.
The nation thrives well in post-modern, capitalist systems because it does not need to possess culture to thrive in it. Australians produce objects, that much is certain, but the "art" is made offshore, when the intellectuals who do possess a culture imprint aesthetic value into the Australian product. There have been successful Australian artists but no great ones. A successful artist is one paraded by an economy, a market, and dropped at a moments notice, a great one sticks in the collective conscious long after they are gone. The colonial Americans were able to cultivate a culture of their own, and for their efforts they have reaped the benefits. While the American William James captured the minds of the Europeans, they never once thought of an Australian, and I cannot even give a named example, there has never been a great Australian.
The wealthy Australians gather in concerts, listen to symphonies of the far-away europe, in much the same way Marco Polo attended Chinese Opera. But Marco understood his detachment from such a culture, whereas the Australian, half-witted, fights to believe they are part Swiss, part French, part German. Many fool themselves into believing such things, but just as reading of caterpillars does not turn you into one, the Australian's desperate scurrying for distant cultures does not make them any more "cultured". The Australian condition is to be terminally uncultured, and furthermore under-achieving. The young Australians of today turn to the Internet to calm their nerves, thinking their exposure equates to something greater, but they do not share the cultural embeddedness that netizens from China, India, or Saudi do.
The Australian, having been raised in neoliberal capitalism, wishes to be "great", and such a system wishes it too, for all "greatness" is production. But this is not a viable reality for the Australian. To have become an Australian is to have resigned the ability to achieve. The Australian does not possess the cultural currency necessary for greatness, and this was once a point of pride, for early colonies relished in their un-culture. But not all colonies remain stunted, and the Australian represents a developmental disorder, one it cannot so much as diagnose, for it lacks the culture to do so. As we cannot expect roses to grow in deserts, so too can we not expect the Australian to produce art. Roses need water...
It is a miracle that Australians could even achieve mediocrity, when they have been set up for the abysmal. But this mediocrity is the limit, the glass ceiling from which they look towards the towering giants of those cultured peoples. If a solution is to be posited at all, it is to allow the very idea of the Australian to wither away, to allow it to die, and let better, more developed cultures take its place. In the global economy of thought Australia has nothing to offer, and it is a straightforward thing to allow such a frail thing to shrivel up, on its own accord. The only cultural value that has blessed the Australian have been from the various cultural imports from Asia, and one would hope that in the future there will be Indians, French, Africans, but no Australians. Only then may art blossom.