My upload picture funciton is busted, so here is a video.

CAN YOU make a reality TV show about art? Does the template make visual arts exciting, or do we really get to watch paint dry?

The team behind the American cable series Work of Art: The Next Great Artist thinks they’ve found the way. The show, which premiered on cable network Bravo last week, follows the format of successful reality franchises such as MasterChef, Next Top Model, and The Apprentice. But the aim this time is not to unearth models, fashion designers or corporate bastards but artists.

So how does it work?

For my sins, my firewall-leaping technological proficiency and the irresistible enthusiasm of my editor, I managed to track down a copy of the first episode. Ostensibly Work of Art: The Next Great Artist has 14 competitors chasing $100,000 (never mentioned without the tagline that the loot is provided by “Prismacolor: life uninhibited”) and a prestigious solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. Each week they’re asked to create a new work in an unfeasibly short time to be judged by a cast of prestigious critics and collectors. Sound familiar?

As with any reality show, it’s more about the human drama than the notional subject matter. As you’d expect the “who’s the better artist” package comes bundled with the usual reality TV add-ons. It’s got carefully constructed and often implausibly physically attractive characters, weird artificial weekly challenges, fast-paced editing, immunity challenges, evictions and all the artists living in the same big house.

Much of the pre-publicity around the series hinges on the fact that the show is produced by the production company of Sarah Jessica Parker, pictured. In the first episode, she makes a gratuitous, distracting (and totally unsurprising) “surprise” visit and leaves the cast with an underwhelming inspirational speech.

The first week saw the contestants challenged to make a portrait of a fellow contestant, after they’re paired up. It’s a nice set-up for a balanced combination of insight into contestants’ creative process and an opportunity for a little bitchiness.

Obviously, we’re meant to take sides here. One contestant, Nao, has been selectively edited to be the bitch from central casting. She is a university lecturer, clearly more established than most others, with such a strong sense of her own position that she offers the others gratuitous advice on their work. Attractive eccentric man-boy Miles responds by painting her as a corpse (evoking the tradition of “death portraiture”) though presumably because Miles is such a nice guy, all the producers resist the urge to read too much into this.

Another contestant, Jamie Lynn, informs us all that she is “not just a ditzy Christian blonde Barbie wannabe person — I’m an artist” and in doing so comprehensively undermines her own argument. I took an instant liking to Erik, the guy who has been living in his truck and admits at the beginning that he’s been an artist “for about six hours”. Unfortunately, it showed instantly in his work.

So does the show work? Well, sort of. It’s not the next MasterChef, but it could be a strong staple for cable TV for at least a few series. It’s mostly mindless fun.

I won’t be seeking out the next episode but I will watch for its arrival in Australia.

Call it the benefit of low expectations, but it provides a little more insight into the creative process and artists’ technique than I had expected, and I hope this element will get more air time as the cast is culled and the introductions are dropped.

But really, it’s about television and entertainment, not art. Just as Australian Idol offers bugger-all resemblance to the way in which musicians outside reality TV land make it to the top, Work of Art is only peripherally about creativity. It’s entertaining enough, but by the end, I strongly suspected one of the artists was evicted for reasons of casting as much as creative critique.

Of course, away from reality TV land, art is not really a competition in the conventional sense at all.

It’s a wonderful, subjective, complex chaos of contradictory expectations and contested goals.

But that makes for lousy television.

Only in retrospect, and often long after the work is made, is there any consensus about what “winning” as a “great artist” actually means at all.

The exhibition — brought to us by the Victorian Major Events Company, Museum Victoria, Michael Gudinski’s Frontier Events and Premier Exhibitions USA — is one of many new corporate for-profit museum shows that walk a very fine line between museum exhibition and theme park. While great for attendance figures, they can raise some complex ethical questions for our public institutions.

Titanic is not alone. Now or recently touring the world, you will find another show from the same company featuring plasticised human bodies, two Tutankhamun exhibitions, a Princess Diana experience and so many Leonardo Da Vinci shows I’ve lost track of them.

All are the product of companies — in partnerships with everyone from cable TV networks, deceased estates, rock promoters, museums, and established collectors — which live and die by their ability to pull a crowd and the money that goes with it.

I have no doubt the Titanic exhibition will do that. It is a compelling experience. The combination of objects collected from the seabed, historical photographs, recreated elements of the ship and the personal narratives of passengers has a powerful impact. I was holding back tears at the personal stories behind a tragedy that has too easily become a cliche.

For museum attendances, it’s a positive. It is great to see that a museum can be both engaging and informative. It is great to see that a show such as Titanic can attract to a museum an audience inspired by a blockbuster movie.

A visitors’ book full of comments about Jack Dawson (aka Leonardo DiCaprio) indicates where the interest is coming from.

Yet the Titanic show in particular raises a deeper question about striking the balance between integrity and marketing, particularly when presented in public institutions. The commercialisation of the tragedy is a little uncomfortable — the sheer volume of tie-in marketing, souvenirs, and paid photo opportunities is designed to wring the last dollar out of the unwary Titanophile. But there are also some genuine concerns for the integrity of the show and the museum itself.

In packaging up the story of the Titanic, it appears as though the last crucial piece had gone missing somewhere. While the exhibition lauds the efforts of the company RMS Titanic (a subsidiary of Premier Exhibitions USA) to collect and preserve relics of the ship, the history of those actions is controversial.

Back in 1985, when Robert Ballard’s team originally found the wreck, they consciously chose not to disturb nor claim salvage rights. They urged all nations to protect the integrity of the site and to leave it undisturbed as a memorial. Only later did RMS Titanic step in and claim those salvage rights — a claim that was the subject of much controversy but was later upheld in court.

One Titanic survivor, Eva Hart, went so far as to accuse the company of “insensitivity and greed”, calling its officers “fortune hunters, vultures, pirates”. This last chapter in the Titanic story doesn’t rate much of a mention anywhere in the exhibition.

I don’t know if I share Robert Ballard’s and Eva Hart’s view about the salvaging. It’s a complex matter and there are plenty of precedents on both sides. What concerns me is the missing chapter. I would expect — at the very least — that the Melbourne museum would engage with and acknowledge that complexity. Every curator I’ve met is mindful of how artefacts come into their possession, and yet there’s no sign of that here. Unchallenged, self-justifying explanations about its “conservation program” are to be expected from a promotions and event company, but is less than I expect from a serious museum.

Blockbuster shows may bring huge numbers of tourists to Victoria and through our big institutions but would sit much more comfortably if there was not a niggling concern that we are stretching our integrity to accommodate them.

The “are video games art?” debate has been simmering off and on for as long as I can remember but it has roared to life recently. Last month, American film critic Roger Ebert poured fuel on the fire in an article suggesting that video games “can never be art”. Australian film critic Lynden Barber ran some of the same arguments here. Tens of thousands of blog posts, comments, articles and accusations later – including quite a few in The Age’s own Screen Play blog – and it would be fair to say that there hasn’t been a lot of movement between the opposing camps.

I’m no objective observer on this one. I believe that video games are a significant, under-explored and under-appreciated cultural form. I grew up with video games. I love playing them both to mindlessly kill time and because I find them uniquely compelling. Six years ago my love of, and frustration with, video games led me to co-found Free Play, an annual independent video games festival and conference in Melbourne. The 2010 event will be at the State Library in August.

But I’m no unabashed apologist either. Structurally, computer games are an unimaginative industry. More often than not they fall well short of their creative potential and many people who love computer games will freely admit that. Free Play came in part from the passions of people whose creative ambitions were constantly thwarted by the commercial imperatives of their employers and was aimed in part to try to foster the same kind of independent sector for games that had long driven innovation in cinema.

Today’s computer games have a lot in common with early cinema. They draw on many creative traditions to create a new one. They can incorporate narrative, architecture, acting, drama, animation, choreography, music, pictures, text and cinema itself and fuse them to create something that can be powerful and experiential or – as I will admit is often the case – superficial and dumb.

So why might cinema be an art form and not games? Both Ebert and Barber rely largely on a quite technical line. A “game” by definition, they argue, is inherently based on rules and competition. Games and art are therefore irreconcilable. The argument to me ignores precedents such as dance – which has both competitive and artistic forms – and the reality of many computer games today that aren’t competitive games in the traditional sense at all.

This isn’t just a semantic debate though. It comes at a time when the Australian game community is political and active. Whether games are art or not is a question with powerful political consequences in a country unique in the world for having no R18+ rating for games.

Games are the only creative form – the only art form perhaps – where creators are banned from making works specifically for adults or dealing with exclusively adult themes. Given the average computer game player is about my age it should be no surprise that the government is being lobbied hard by gamers advocating a change of law.

But do I think games are art? Frankly I’m not sure it’s the right question.

Making games is a skilled craft.I’ve seen games that are as thought-provoking, beautiful, powerful and intriguing as any other cultural form but I wouldn’t suggest that all games are artworks.

It is the talent, tradition, motivations and the consequences of painting for example that defines whether it’s art or not, otherwise every house painter and signwriter would be queueing up outside the Australia Council.

I suspect the debate is largely generational. Games have already made their way into galleries, orchestras play their soundtracks, and their characters are familiar parts of many lives.

To paraphrase Max Planck, the games as art argument won’t triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.

To be honest much of the reaction to the Sam Leach’s winning of the Wynne prize has flat out confused me. It’s not that I don’t understand the debate. I got that Leech’s work Proposal for landscaped cosmos was inspired by – perhaps questionably copied from — a Dutch work that may not have been appropriately acknowledged. I got that there was a legitimate question as to whether Leach’s work met the prize’s terms as a depiction of an “Australian” landscape. What surprised me is that it has suddenly become fair game to call art on whether it is truly “original” or not.

It’s about time.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a child of appropriation, sampling, collage and pastiche. It doesn’t bother me that artists such as Sam Leach and thousands of others are out there appropriating a range of different contexts to make works. In a world where we are bombarded with uninvited images, fragments, sounds and sights, and where there are layers upon layers of cultural memory and reference points, it is to be expected that artists will seek to reference and use it.

The test for me is whether an artist brings together those elements to make a work that is substantially unique – that they add weight and not just volume to our cultural heritage. If so, then the full gamut of human experience and endeavour is fair game as source material as far as I’m concerned.

It’s not a new thing. Culture has morphed, evolved, cannibalised itself, built and bent on its own traditions going back well before the advent of modern technology or the infuriating academic postmodernism I was subjected to at university.

However, I am concerned about originality. Artists that appeal to me aspire to do that, and I find myself agreeing with those who argue that we’ve institutionalised lazy adaptation and elevated them to the highest echelons of our cultural priorities and hierarchies.

But the visual arts are hardly the worst culprit. The occasional art prize pales compared with the well-funded cover bands that make up the bulk of our national arts expenditure. When was the last time we criticised an orchestra or an opera company for simply busting out thinly veiled adaptations and unoriginal work? What if people realise that the much-heralded arrival of Waiting for Godot is actually a copy of a work that’s been around for ages?.

The sad fact is that the arts wallow in unoriginality all the time. It is only strange this time we are criticising it rather than purely rewarding it. In the performing arts it has become a structural problem that has become self-fulfilling. Original work is pushed to the bottom of the pile. The strongest criterion about whether a work is likely to be funded, promoted, discussed or endorsed is almost always how familiar it is. Work that is safe, marketable and predictable is nurtured for precisely that reason.

Not only is the underlying source material more refined but productions are better resourced. For every person involved in producing new works there are probably a hundred more involved in and reproducing, administering and marketing old ones.

I’ve worked almost exclusively with artists creating new works. It isn’t easy. It is a messy process. There’s a lot of trial and error involved.

Originality inherently fails more often than it succeeds. It involves risk both financial and professional and in a politically sensitive art funding environment risk of failure, controversy, and anything that may generate an unpredictable headline is almost always problematic.

Fortunately, all is not lost. Artists persist in creating new works despite the odds and there are many admirable companies, festivals and awards that remain truly committed to celebrating them. Now that we apparently are being invited to put originality at the centre of the discussion about what we want to promote in the arts, perhaps we are being encouraged to value them.

Strictly speaking it wasn’t just me — there were 20 or so others — mostly directors and managers of the nation’s major arts companies, organisations and cultural institutions – and we found ourselves engaged in some healthy and occasionally robust debate about the nation’s arts policy and cultural direction.

It’s probably fair to say that Kevin Rudd hasn’t exactly endeared himself to the arts community in his first term. His knee-jerk description of Bill Henson’s work as “revolting”, the perception that he rarely, if ever, attends arts events, and just a general sense that he lacks the requisite amount of love and nurturing have conspired to create the perception that the PM is a little disengaged. No doubt the dinner was as much an attempt at bridge-building as of policy discussion.

While I can’t say I’d given it a lot of thought, before and after last week’s dinner, I’ve been constantly reminded just how many artists and arts workers are either confused, confronted or curious about what the PM’s attitudes towards the arts actually are. Whether the PM personally “gives a shit” — as several of my Facebook friends have put it — is one question that many in the arts want answered.

So, based entirely on the insight of a single superficial dinner conversation: does the PM love the arts as much as the arts apparently want him to? Frankly, probably not. There’s no doubt he isn’t passionate about the arts in the generic, big picture Keatingesque sense – or even the Kennett one for that matter. Equally, though, it would be unfair to imagine that he is as ignorant and disconnected as his critics might assume.

Like most Australians, the PM can engage enthusiastically and genuinely about his own formative cultural interests, his influences, shows he has seen and the influence of arts and culture in the life of his kids. There was no indication that it was a singular obsession the luvvies might long for, though.

I’m really not sure that’s a bad thing. Whether the PM personally loves the arts or not is hardly the point. Each time our dinner discussion turned away from tough questions of directions, strategies and priorities and towards the nebulous questions of how much or how little Australians — PM implicitly included — appreciate the arts, I found it just a little uncomfortable and frustrating.

In few other areas of life is there so much concern about being loved and appreciated and so little for the mechanics and practicalities of good policy. Confronted with politics and policy, it is too easy for the Australian arts community to look longingly at the status of artists in Europe (or Venezuela and Cuba — as some dinner guests perhaps rather problematically suggested to the PM) and too little at the policy choices, opportunity costs, and considerations that need to inform the decisions that governments make in managing limited resources.

Do I want a prime minister who loves the arts? Yes, ideally, but I would swap him tomorrow for one who will think about and respond thoughtfully to the serious and difficult questions facing an Australia that wants to foster creativity in the 21st century.

Do I want the nation to value the arts? Yes, but not in a generic sense. I want the nation to be a place where culture is given every opportunity to be created and contested and not merely immaculately presented and appreciatively consumed.

I lived for years in New South Wales under Bob Carr — a premier and arts minister whose love of literature and high-minded cultural pursuits were well known. He was a terrible minister.

As other states engaged in the process of robust and comprehensive policy development and institution building, the NSW premier’s very proximity seemed to thwart and discourage it outside his own narrow bands of interest.

It is not simply about love, it is not even particularly about more money. Serious debates about cultural processes and priorities fail if “love” and “value” are little more than excuses to engage the rhetorical autopilot.

Whether this PM is interested in or is capable of becoming interested in those questions, I still don’t know. As for what the PM made of the fine upstanding folks of the arts community? Now that’s an interesting question.

Fact: people will work free in the arts. They do it to develop skills and contacts, because they like the idea of the glitz and excitement, or simply because they believe that being involved in culture and creativity is about something more important than maximising the amount of money they earn. Throw in the proliferation of arts courses — some of questionable quality — that require their students to do real-life internships and placements and there are plenty of potential volunteers out there, even if they don’t really want to lick envelopes for no pay.

Put it down to lack of funding, but I’m not sure. Some of the best-funded organisations have the most volunteers, and there’s very little guarantee that more money wouldn’t simply pay some people more rather than paying those who are content enough to work without. It’s a strange reversal of the law of supply and demand where more people want to do jobs than there is stuff to do, and more passionate ideas than the there is money to pay for them.

Like most, I can speak from experience about working for nothing. Many of the best things I’ve done haven’t paid me or have barely paid me. I wouldn’t change it for the world. To this day, my paid gigs cross-subsidise all manner of things that cost me money to do. I’ve worked as and with unpaid volunteers and been responsible for co-ordinating and working with many interns, exchanges and placements. It’s hard to define a comfortable rule of thumb about where passion ends and exploitation begins.

Once you get away from away from the kind of “we’re all in this together” low-budget projects I cut my teeth on, the reality is that the arts are full of huge inequities. So many large arts organisations have huge disparities in payment between staff and interns and even between salaried administrators and unpaid or barely paid artists that it has become almost unremarkable.

So are you exploited if you volunteer to get a start in the arts industry? Asking around this week, virtually everyone I know had started out as an intern or a volunteer. Many of their now paid colleagues were people who had come to the organisation via a volunteer route. I was also reminded, quite rightly, that it is not a one-way street. A lot of interns actually take up a lot of effort and produce very little — you can waste a lot of time getting people to work for you free.

So where exactly is the right balance? I do believe that arts organisations have a responsibility to ensure that people are rewarded for their effort.

That’s not necessarily about money or a job for life, but it’s about respect, a genuine opportunity to learn something, meet interesting people and growing from the experience. It’s about ensuring there are opportunities to progress either within or on from the project. It’s not just about free tickets and T-shirts.

Equally, internships can’t be all fun either. The administrative side can feel little more than a series of crappy tasks that — if executed competently and in the right order — add up somehow to something really interesting. Crap tasks are inevitable, but there’s no excuse for treating internships as punishment and designing them to remind the poor sods that they are at the bottom of the food chain, that they need to serve their time, and that they need to suffer for their art(s administration).

I do think there’s a better option. Exploit yourself. Those of you with time on your hands, desperate for experience and keen to volunteer should consider doing it for yourselves. If you’re going to be unpaid, why not work on your own projects? Creating your own shows, gigs, festivals, and events is as reliable a career path into the arts, if not more, as hanging around waiting for a lowly paid admin gig. You get to learn the full spectrum of skills by making the full spectrum of mistakes. You get to see up close the consequences of your decisions both right and wrong. There is no better grounding for a career in the arts or anywhere else.

IN A world where shock – or at least pretending-to-be-shocked-while-actually-promoting-the-thing-in-question – has become a PR staple and a paint-by-numbers marketing tool, is it even possible to be shocked by art any more? Is there any point in artists trying to be shocking? Is there any real difference between the shock value of provocative art and the day-to-day scandals to which we’ve almost become immune?

It’s easy to forget how accustomed we are to being “shocked and outraged”. We seek it out. Visit any newspaper website on a slow news day and be amazed at how many of the “most viewed” items are tales of torrid affairs, sordid murders, depravity, incest, paedophilia, and more.

It is also true that we are becoming a much more fractured society. One group’s shock is another’s ho-hum. Society as a whole has become more permissive, or at least more cynical, yet there are equally those who remain genuinely shocked at that transformation.

It is the easiest charade and the laziest journalism in the world to confect an outrage by simply placing work A in front of reactionary, socially conservative group B, whip up a few headlines and pretend you are having a debate that the 90 per cent of people in the middle might actually care about. Everyone wins – free PR, righteous outrage.

Against this background of constant shock and confected outrage, it isn’t easy to work out what is and isn’t shocking in art any more. The art world can be a very poor barometer of it.

The line between what is yawn-inspiring within the boundaries of the art world and what might whip up a furore outside can seem almost random at times. The art community itself can be shocked.

The Bill Henson case is an obvious example. Australians are very concerned about the sexualisation of children. As the once-hidden world of paedophilia has become more frankly acknowledged, the public saw the artwork differently.

The shock was partially but not purely a beat-up. A genuine debate seemingly came from almost nowhere. In hindsight, the lack of controversy over Henson’s entire body of work in the previous two decades is a testament to changing values. The ABC dug out old TV specials that everyone had seemingly missed, the then-opposition leader admitted to owning a Henson or two (though not one of the questionable ones), while galleries around the country suddenly reported angry letters demanding the removal of works that had been hanging without incident or reaction for many years.

Real shocks – like the public response to the Henson debate – are ones that come from a genuine clash of values. The most shocking things have some sort of uncomfortable underlying truth or question to them. So little is hidden these days, it’s hard for most artists courting controversy to claim they are bringing things out into the light.

For the art world, that the public was discovering something “hidden” that they had always seen in plain sight made it extremely difficult to process the debate.

Should artists strive to shock? Probably not, but that’s not to say that artists should be afraid of it either. I’ve met many artists – mostly bad ones – who enjoy cultivating controversy. They are probably no different from shock-jocks and self-seeking celebrities.

Yet I’ve experienced art from documentary photography to heart-wrenching literature, and compelling cinema that can shock through simply representing the reality of a familiar and brutal world.

When every second comedian is busting out a bunch of swear words, every second show has a provocative title, and every PR person is pushing their clients as outrageous, it can take an artist’s insight to burst through our cynicism and ensure we are shocked occasionally. Offended is easy, cynical is constant, but shocked is pretty darn hard.

I BOUGHT a guy a beer last week. No, I’m not so cheap that that is remarkable. What is remarkable, though, is that the guy I bought a beer for is a writer and theatre-maker who lives in Chicago and I’ve never met him. The little transaction demonstrated one of the many ways that artists are finding to make a living from their work.

The beer was for a blogger who had written a smart, thought-provoking post about the parallels between the current challenges facing the music industry and the decline and rebirth of theatre as major cultural force in his home town. At the bottom was a button that suggested if I liked the piece I should “buy me a beer” using PayPal. It seemed like a fair transaction to me and he now has a few dollars that were once mine.

How to make an income and be an artist or creative person is one of the great mysteries of the universe. You can work more broadly in the arts, I guess. Plenty of artists have drifted into arts administration, sitting galleries, working front of house, becoming an art teacher, doing lighting and video for concerts or lugging around and installing exhibitions and PA systems. There are plenty of paid jobs in the arts industry even if there is bugger all money for actual artists.

Or you can go corporate, where there is also a demand for creative skills. A quick survey of my friends reveals novelists turned to corporate PR writers, ghost writers who’ve penned “autobiographies” for celebrities who never read them, illustrators for hire, and video makers whose skills have been effectively applied to “tasteful soft porn”. In a world where plenty of artists are often being commissioned by the commercial sector only an ardent purist can tell you where art stops and design begins. The artist as shoe designer, interior decorator, or even cool consultant is strangely in demand.

Or you can go it alone and make your own work. More recently though, there has been an explosion of self-starting creative micro- industries halfway between day job and pocket money. The blogger in Chicago is just one of hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people — some professional artists and some not — who are deriving an income from putting their ideas and their creative skills out there.

Musicians are taking a lot of the lead in this regard. Traditional sources of revenue and investment are drying up as record companies rush to protect their bottom line. It’s forcing the middle out of the music industry: the mega acts still make a fortune, and those in the mediocre middle are being squeezed out, but a whole stack of people with small but passionate fan bases have discovered there’s a useful amount of money to be made from $2 downloads. It is a crisis for the music industry, but it’s a whole new series of opportunities for a lot of musicians. They’ve found they can even get their fans to invest in the creation of a new record before they make it and a much greater capacity to self-promote live tours.

Those who make beautiful images can now put them on things. Micro-manufacturing and niche distribution mean that some artists are now in the business of making everything from iPhone cases to tea towels and can sell them to a global audience. New companies — entire industries — have been set up around the idea of mass-customisation. Want to design a T-shirt, get it manufactured, and quickly reap the profits? Easy. What about designing, printing and distributing your own book? Nothing to stop you. Making short films, online soaps or special-interest film or video? There are audiences and a bit of income for that, too.

The norm for artists — or at least the stereotypes — used to be much more bureaucratic. Get a job, get the occasional grant, hope to get a good agent or major company gig and hope to turn your practice into your steady job one day. That’s not how the art world works these days — probably because it’s not how the world works any more.

Taking the initiative to create your own work, build your own audiences, and make opportunities is a more common path to success. For better or for worse, the larger trend is that creative life is becoming more entrepreneurial.

WHAT is the value of politics in art? Does political art work and should art be political?

Debates about the role of politics in art come around regularly. There is nothing like a contentious political debate to get the arts out of their ghetto and into the news section. It certainly gets professionally outraged commentators rabid – particularly when even a tenuous connection with government funding can be established. But does political art actually work?

I have to start with an admission. I’m definitely drawn towards artists with a healthy desire to comment on and respond to the world around them. I like artists who treat the art world like there is something at stake and not merely something for sale. Part of this is high-minded political aspirations for art and part of it is that I just like shit-stirrers, provocateurs, ratbags and troublemakers and am pleased to encourage them wherever possible.

Looking back, I’d like to think that the role that artists have played on issues such as war, refugees, and climate change over the last decade has had some impact. The cumulative effect of all those plays, books, street art and exhibitions must have contributed to our changing political climate.

Yet for every successful piece of political art, there is a lot of wreckage. There are a lot that fail or even set their causes back. Artists, along with all political campaigners, can forget that works that are preachy, dogmatic, and predictable are more likely to reinforce views than to change them.

The biggest problem with political art is that it only preaches to the converted. Those stereotypes about the insular, righteous nature of the art world can be jarringly real at times. Plenty of political art is met by nothing more than a wall of furious agreement. Sometimes that’s by accident, sometimes by design but work that aspires to nothing more than to reinforce the prejudices of a safe and comfortable crowd is little more than an indulgence.

Another danger is the peculiar immunising effect of art itself. At its worst, the whole formal arts system can immunise audiences against political ideas. The rigid frame of “Art” can take potentially powerful acts of subversion, dissent and rebellion out of context and turn them into hollow symbols of subversion, dissent and rebellion. Art can defang symbols. It’s unfortunate when the most powerful thing about an exhibition is the rhetoric of the catalogue essay.

But probably the biggest barrier to political art in these times of tabloid frenzies and confected hysteria is the sidetrack problem. How often has a work attempting to provoke a complicated debate merely created ground to rehash an easy one? How often does the formulaic “should our taxes be paying for this” non-discussion of outrage, action and overreaction arise when a discussion about actual issues is ignored? Not that it isn’t a genuine question, but everyone immediately assumes a predictable position and proceeds to go through the motions. The underlying issue in the work struggles to be heard.

Political artists need to think a little more about how their work might be received. Within the formal institutional context, works with a strong question, an illuminating insight, or a healthy and humorous juxtaposition often play better than those with a powerful polemic. Insight proves more effective than ideology.

Work that is directly provocative can work but it struggles in the gallery. Overt political acts and interventions work better on the street, on the web, in the media — wherever people react directly — rather than asking themselves whether this is art or not. I’ve always liked artists such as Sydney’s Deborah Kelly, whose work puts her views on everything from street posters to searchlights.

Yet the most powerful political works are simply honest to their creator’s experience. Indigenous artists have done much for the cause of reconciliation and bridging the gap in understanding between their lives and those of the wider Australian society. At times this has rightly been political and confrontational, at others it has simply illuminated and made tangible a culture and life experience.

The honesty of an experience expressed through song, through image, through film, through theatre or dance can be the most powerful political message of all.

PUBLIC art could learn a lesson or two from street art. Seriously.

Melbourne is a fantastically textured city. It was one of the reasons I first fell in love with the place. While Sydney is all about the big picture and gets better looking the further you zoom out, Melbourne is the opposite.

Melbourne’s postcard shots are underwhelming but zoom in and every detail seems textured, worked on and refined. Every inch of the place is contested and cared for. This city’s public spaces are full of creations and provocations from public art to architecture and beautifully detailed shop fronts and randomly fascinating laneways that bring the city to life. Some of them are formal, some informal, some accidental and some are even illegal.

Yet sometimes I fear that Melbourne’s formal public art actually misses the point of the organic qualities that make the city interesting.

You only need to look to Docklands to see how wrong you can get it.

The idea that public art should be grand and permanent rather than organic and evolutionary is one of the curses of the place. Compulsory developer contributions and other schemes have encouraged what they describe as striking, large-scale works. From cows up trees to giant sculptures, it’s seemingly all big, fixed, enduring stuff but feels alienating and soulless a lot of the time. It’s not that the individual works are individually bad but, collectively, Docklands still lacks the organic texture that makes Melbourne Melbourne.

How can public art be more capable of subtlety, ambiguity, impermanence? The process that takes sculptures and puts up a giant, overt sign that says this is public art often works against them.

I prefer the idea that public art is a dialogue — that works are put out there on trial. A work’s longevity is better determined by the public’s embrace than the project manager’s engineering.

At least as important is not the fixed objects that artists leave behind but the way that artists and creative people are encouraged or discouraged from using the city. A city as a space of spontaneous, casual, constant creativity is at least as important as commissioned monuments and it’s a complex thing to regulate.

For examples, look at Melbourne’s street art.

Street art culture can serve as a useful model for more formal public art. It constantly reinvents itself. Most graffiti and street art is very temporary and tenuous — it doesn’t last long and generally doesn’t deserve to. Most of it is crap, generic and forgettable. Yet some works stand the test of time through deference to the artist and the work by other street artists, out of luck, or simply because the public can’t bring themselves to remove it.

The short-term cycle is messy and random, but anything that stands the test of time generally has some quality or sentiment to it or develops it from its familiarity.

Sentiment for public spaces evolves and isn’t created. Sometimes it is the most unlikely things that are warmly embraced. It’s hard to think of two more emotive symbols of Melbourne than the Nylex clock or Richmond’s Skipping Girl — both are anachronistic advertising but genuinely much loved. They do show that if you leave something long enough, people may come to value it. But planners might be better served if they remove works (or threaten to take them away) for long enough that people decide they want them back.

To be fair, we don’t get it wrong all the time.

The City of Melbourne created short-term laneway commissions, such as the stairway to nowhere, that embrace the fleeting and temporary.

It is not without risk. Protecting our laneways’ cultural vibrancy with formal art programs might be as useful as promoting street art by covering it in Plexiglas. Public art is important. Living in cities that don’t suck, where everything hasn’t been sold off to the highest bidder and reduced to the most expenditure efficient formula is important. But it’s up to us all to influence and evaluate the art around us and not simply leave it to developers and council committees to set it in stone for the ages.