Welcome to GR Online, a series of short-form articles that take aim at the moving target of contemporary culture as it’s whisked along the guide rails of innovations in digital media, globalisation and late-stage capitalism.
A half-century of hatchet jobs
Authors and publishers worry that bad reviews kill sales. I’ve seen no evidence that this is the case, but plenty that bad reviews distress and demoralise their subjects. Many people who care about literature endow criticism, and especially negative reviews, with magical powers. They hold dear the fantasy that if critics did a better job, if they were braver soldiers, the profound structural problems that bedevil Australian literature – books rushed to press, low pay, policy indifference, plummeting reading rates, crisis in higher education, not to mention the racism and the classism – might somehow disappear. A cracking review ennobles its subject with attention and consideration, but I’ve never seen one earn an author a higher advance on their next book or buy them more time for revision, let alone shift the federal arts budget.
Resisting the ‘Content Mindset’
Artists’ dedication to their practice has long been glamourised as the ‘struggling artist’ trope, trivialising the mental and physical labour of creative work. Their flexibility has been co-opted into the ‘portfolio career’, normalising all professional engagements that lack secure tenure, not just creative roles. Their agility in working cross-discipline and cross-platform has vindicated the expedience of a ‘content-first’ approach. Their precariousness has been hyped as the ‘gig economy’, standardising working conditions that lack basic entitlements. Their intellectual property has been stolen to feed or ‘train’ generative AI programs, making IP theft widely acceptable. (You’ve got to hand it to the Content Mindset’s PR guys: rebranding industrial-scale IP theft as ‘training’ for ‘artificial intelligence’ is right up there with rebranding creationism as ‘intelligent design’.) Artists’ venturous thinking is widely dismissed as ‘fringe’, depoliticising its impact. Time and again, artists’ commitments to their ethics and responsibility to their communities have been co-opted as ‘culture war’ tools, dumbing down the public debate to reinforce hegemonies. And of course, their works have been belittled as mere ‘content’, undermining their expertise.
Negotiating cultural heritage
Understanding how culture is integrated into a sense of self is challenging. What do we even inherit from the cultures of our ancestors? We may be able to accept, quite readily, that we are shaped by our cultures in all kinds of conscious and unconscious ways – that we inherit traits, practices, beliefs and stories – but it’s impossible to determine precisely how cultural heritage impacts not just any given person but also the stories they tell (assuming these are different things) in the past and in the present. In one sense, all stories, at the level of both form and content, are embedded within cultures – but since cultures are unstable and change over time, what is it that a writer might inherit?
From the hills of Killea
She lived alone with five horses, five dogs, three cats, three geese and two ducks. She had escaped Manchester under Thatcher, gone off the grid in Tipperary and never returned. She said mass suicide was the only answer to climate catastrophe. She was the most interesting person I had ever met. Before dawn, I would write. By daybreak, I would find a pair of wellies and then muck out the stables, wheeling huge barrows of horseshit across her yard to a pile the size of a fire truck. There was little time to rest. The stove needed to be fed, constantly, with bricks of peat to keep the house warm. The horses needed to be given hay five times a day. The geese needed guarding from the foxes. I learnt to care for animals, to give them my attention.
The marketing is still crap
There are 3,700 people employed in publishing – a small industry, really – according to the surveys (via the Australian Publishers Association). Those interested people following current trends here and worldwide will know that mergers and acquisitions in the sector are a regular news item and, ultimately, make it harder for independent houses to maintain a presence in a boisterous market where it can be easier for bookshops to follow the dominant players and probably get some added benefits for doing so. Who knows how this market will fare a year on and how many Australian voices will be included. Right now, the unspoken reality is that advances to authors are spiralling downwards along with sales and, obviously, royalty payments. Fewer and fewer writers reach what they expected in financial and career-building stakes, even those making new books fairly and squarely in the mainstream… In the new etiquette of social media, each book apparently needs its own framework and journey, while authors, debut or veteran, are expected to muck in and do their own marketing and ‘brand building’ in the online marketplace. That’s what it looks like, anyway, to this observer. I am supposedly an insider but am perpetually perplexed by the fame stakes involved in becoming an author, as well as the claim that authors have viable careers.
Nobody panic
The desert of the real is now where most teens search for answers to life’s big questions: what is love? Who am I? What is truth? The images of reality we create hold messages about reality. Copies of copies of copies though they may be, they nonetheless have a material effect on our children’s thoughts, behaviours, opinions. Consumerism. Communism. Sexism. Cancelism. Nationalism. Anarchism. Stoicism. Humanism. Ideas about what we should live like, look like and love like, what it means to be a man or a woman, what it means to be an individual or part of a community, are all displayed on a screen in their pockets. The influence is profound, but not necessarily sinister if they are taught to interrogate what they consume.
Bypassing the gatekeepers
Once invisible, the Matildas are now everywhere, spanning worlds from football to high-end fashion. The questions we’re now grappling with are: What does it mean to go from no one watching to everyone watching? From too little to too much interest? (When fans are, for example, creating entire TikToks to unpack the complexities around teammates dating teammates.) And: When your brand is built on a direct-to-fan connection and now unsustainable accessibility, how do you manage those parasocial demands? Complicating this is the fact that fans follow players more than teams – the demand is more individualised, the load more concentrated.
Very online feelings
There was once a simpler time when influencers were mostly known for spurring within their audiences feelings of aspiration: the 1 per cent of fashion bloggers flaunted business-class flights to international fashion weeks while clad in mortgages’ worth of goods. They sold us repositories of taste and performances of modelling, role modelling and role playing by providing templates for mimicry through highly parasocial sales tactics. The aspirational internet seemed straightforward: buy these things and your quality of life will improve. But the commodification of everyday life carried more far-reaching implications.
It ain’t easy being twee
During my pre-teen years, I amassed a large collection of animal plushies and figurines. I loved collecting different species, different families and different genii. I didn’t just want a generic teddy bear, I wanted specific representations of the animal kingdom: grizzly bears, black bears, sun bears and so forth. (FYI: in earlier decades, it was hotly contested whether giant pandas were true bears or were closer to their raccoon relatives, so my panda plushie split its time between families.) My plushies were ‘decluttered’ when they were no longer ‘age appropriate’. I was expected to become a different kind of person – one who doesn’t think about plushies. One who can get by on utility, with no need for art, beauty or whimsy. One who can use their perspicacity for something sensible. It wasn’t to be.
Know thyself
We spoke to the genetic counsellor and the doctors. I had more than a 70 per cent risk of breast cancer and close to a 50 per cent risk of ovarian cancer in my lifetime. This would require vigilant surveillance, but with ovarian cancer there is no reliable screening method. It can already be advanced before it’s detected, which is what happened with my mother.
My mind kept taking me back to those sandy ruins and the Pythia. Those characters in mythology who tried to avoid their fate even when she had given them the answer. You can run but you can’t hide from destiny. Enter the acts of dramatic surgical intervention. Like a deus ex machina, but without the gods, just the science.
Culture warrior
Mishima’s use of science-fiction tropes to describe contemporary life alienated critics and readers in a way that his reactionary psychodramas did not. That the Mishima Incident was met with public horror does not obviate the fact that his literary overtures to Japan’s imperial past – replete with the veneration of death central to Bushido, and the taboo-ish trope of lovers’ suicide – were a hit with audiences. However eager the Japanese public might have been to forget World War II in its sincere commitment to postwar democracy, the past remains more legible than the future, let alone the present.
The accidental film school
The DVD format – the Digital Versatile Disc – was invented in 1995 and reached the peak of its popularity in Australia in the 2000s, before the rise of streaming platforms in the 2010s. During those salad days, Australian entertainment companies started producing and selling DVDs at a rapid rate, building a library of local and international films. The Melbourne-based company Madman Entertainment were competitive players... The extras on their DVDs – making-of documentaries, deleted scenes, audio commentaries – allowed producers to have an active role in the historicisation of film; audio commentaries typically featured directors and actors rewatching and reminiscing together. But companies like Madman (and Criterion in the US), which distributed ‘art-house’ cinema, were more likely to invite film theorists and historians to provide an analytical reading of the film as it played.
