The other issue to note is that they have recovered approx 5,500 artifacts, two-hundred odd are in *this* exhibition. The remainder are in other duplicates of this exhibition. During the early part of the Melbourne run, there were 3 other versions of this exhibition running simultaneously. (Las Vegas, Ohio, Connecticut, and Dublin, San Juan and Louisville closed in the weeks/months just prior to it opening here).

I don’t mind a bit of razzle-dazzle, and replicas/recreations are a vital part of contemporary interpretive technique, but once things start become somewhat cookie-cutter…

Melbourne Winter Masterpieces is a large-scale marketing exercise to attract mass audiences to experience the imported work of artists with mass commercial appeal, or long dead, or indeed both.

Commit that level of marketing spend on the richness and diversity of our independent arts, and what we’d see instead is a transformation in people’s perceptions and understanding of contemporary Australian art and culture from the Victorian standpoint. As well as investing in the sustainability of real working communities, current artistic practice and cultural development.

With Titanic, we have public money fuelling the global circulation of the manufactured spectacle – an uncomfortable one at that. Why does the Melbourne Museum need to participate in this, and then present that spectacle as nothing but? It doesn’t make any sense – and nor will I be visiting to understand it for myself; I can’t conscionably fork out the ticket price to fuel that economy any further.