Cirrus@Austlit

'Barry Humphries loved telling a story concerning a visit he and the painter David Hockney made to an art exhibition held at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1991. What drew them there was a reconstruction of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition the Nazis had assembled in Munich in 1937 to help validate and promote their racial ideology. The crude argument it promoted was that the distorted forms typical of much modern art of the time somehow demonstrated the corrupting influence of the artists (often Jewish) who had painted them.' (Introduction)

'Anyone looking for evidence of just how devastating the COVID-19 pandemic has been to Australia’s performing arts industry need look no further than its flagship company, Opera Australia.' 

'Just as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for being long ago overshadowed by those iconic sails, and by the internal compromises that mired its construction. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, for instance, presents physical and technical hindrances to opera production that the recent renovations can only partially redress.'   (Publication summary)

'Governments at all levels allocate around $6 billion a year to arts and culture in Australia, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. While this is a low figure compared to the budget outlays of other wealthy nations, public support for arts funding here is, if anything, in decline.' (Introduction)