Esther Anatolitis

ANATOLITIS-Esther-Photo-by-Maja-Baska-web

Esther Anatolitis is the editor of Meanjin, honorary associate professor at RMIT School of Art and a member of the National Gallery of Australia Governing Council. She is the author of Place, Practice, Politics (2021) and editor of the anthology Essays that Changed Australia: Meanjin 1940 to today (2023). Her latest book, When Australia Became a Republic, will be published later this year. 

Photograph credit: Maja Baska

Articles

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.

The stories we don’t tell

MemoirEVERY MORNING I would press my nose against the glass and try to imagine what this place could be. A bare room with white walls and beautifully polished floorboards in a shopfront next to a laundry and a bus stop....

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