THE POSSIBILITY OF ILLUMINATION: Censorship & Institutional Ideology
Essay by
Scott Lawrie
No. 6–06/03 (v1.3) Written February/March 2025
“A Palestinian, an Israeli, and a Curator walk into a bar and the barman says, ‘Oh look! A Press Release for Documenta”
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INTRODUCTION
I study fascist art. I read anti-egalitarian dark philosophy. I enjoy the work of artists who are abominable wrecks as human beings. I try to understand all kinds of neo-con, alt-right, anti-queer ideologies. I don’t particularly identify with any of it. But it’s essential to me that I can approximate what the world looks like outside of my gallery walls and the comfort of books, unencumbered by personal values or inherited beliefs.
I like stuff that’s difficult because it allows me to understand more about the increasingly disorienting times we’re living in (Nazi salutes at a Presidential inauguration?). Best of all, my understanding of nuance and complexity has increased; I’ve probably become more forgiving, of myself and others. I’m reasonably well-read and robust enough to be able to engage with discourse rather than fear it, and I try not to adopt readymade ideologies to blindly follow meta narratives. The art world is vast, encompassing a multitude of forms and ideas, but its highest function is the transformation of metaphysical knowledge through direct human experience.
The idea of finding “truth” in art is as ancient as the cave paintings, first brought to life with fire and psychedelics to introduce magic and spectacle for developing brains. Ever since, theories of critique – from the dialectics of Hegel to the rhizomic chaos of Deleuze – have inspired many artistic, philosophical and intellectual journeys in the pursuit of understanding what it means to be alive.
I often exhibit work to challenge my own deterministic position, allowing others to poke sticks at it to see if my thinking holds. I’ll write experimental essays on an artist’s work, shifting the contexts and ‘meaning’, occasionally to their disagreement. But the point is, we roll with it. All the artists I choose to work with know this; they don’t ‘cancel’ me because we diverge in our thinking. There’s an assumed understanding that our practices rip into the very fabric of assumed knowledge to force new contradictions and modes of engagement. There are no conclusions to this mode of working, only more questions. At a fundamental level, despite any differences, we remain rock-solid in our belief that the inherent truth of an artwork must be witnessed as the artist intended.
Inspired by Althusser’s essay ‘Ideology and Ideological Stare Apparatuses’, this essay explores the inherent contradictions within the institutional ideologies of the art industry, focusing on the controversy surrounding the censoring of Creative Australia’s proposed 2026 Venice Biennale showcase of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi.
It raises an interesting question; can art function as a conduit for freedom of expression when institutional priorities take precedence over artistic intent?
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Creative Australia’s choice of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale was bold. Unanimously approved for the Aussie Pavilion – defending champs after Archie Moor’s impressive, if somewhat over-hyped, win –the prospect of a differing perspective of the Israel/Palestine conflict was keenly anticipated.
Shortly after the announcement, The Australian published what can only be regarded as a hack job by Yoni Bashan and Nick Evans – an all-too-predictable takedown designed to manufacture outrage. Leaning on the exhausting tactic of weaponising accusations of anti-Semitism and racism, the article framed Sabsabi’s selection as a scandal. With a blind spot a mile wide, the writers feigned moral concern, warning that supporting such an artist might bring Creative Australia into disrepute and unsettle the taxpayers. The article barely masked its insinuations of “terrorist sympathy”, but offered no substantive critique of the work itself – only a calculated effort to shut it down.
The older works in question consisted of a video with images from 9/11, and another containing a deity-type image of recently assassinated Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah. This was enough to upset shadow arts minister Claire Chandler, who – upholding the Australian parliament’s painfully embarrassing tradition of criticising the arts from an intellectual void – questioned Senate Leader Penny Wong in parliament thus, "With such appalling antisemitism in our country, why is the Albanese government allowing a person who highlights a terrorist leader in his artwork to represent Australia on the international stage at the Venice Biennale?”
Tony Burke, Australia’s Minister for the Arts, wasn’t prepared for the firestorm. Within six hours of Chandler’s remarks, Creative Australia convened, reversed its support, and pulled the project for reasons (still) unknown. Details of the internal discussions remain scarce, but the fallout was immediate – including resignations from its Board and staff, and a furious backlash from the art world.
The antisemitism allegations have zero merit. The real issue is artistic freedom versus the institutional mechanisms that determine which art is permissible for us to see. Shocking as it may seem, though, the institutional reaction from Creative Australia is not at all surprising.
Writing for the ABC, Annabel Crabb summed up the complexity of the situation thus, “Is it true that Jewish Australians feel like they are being conflated with Israel, and faced increasingly with symbols of hatred and intolerance that awaken all-too-familiar reminders of a past that is not very distant? Yes, that's true. Do artists of colour feel that their admission to institutions from which they have been historically excluded comes with the condition that they keep troublesome opinions to themselves? Yep, also true.”
Putting aside the fact that Sabsabi’s practice would appear to fill all the criteria for inclusion in the Venice Biennale given it’s a valid and tenacious enquiry into a globally relevant issue –the unintended exposure of the institutional position of Creative Australia is jarring. The problematic dissonance between policy propaganda and freedom of artistic expression – a process of intellectual lobotomisation which rarely ends well – gives us a glimpse into the real operating practices of the art industrial complex, where such institutions still play a fundamental role. To gain some sense of the implications, it’s worth looking back to the historical foundations of the institutions themselves – and here I’d include museums and galleries, and all national funding bodies for the arts including Creative Australia.
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On the face of it, both Australia and its neighbour New Zealand foster two of the world’s most dynamic and vibrant art scenes, a tour de force of clashing cultures and energetic enthusiasm, all supported by vibrant public and commercial galleries and artist-run spaces. Within this ecosystem (aka ‘the art world’) art institutions (any part of ‘the art industry’) play a central, if inherited, role in the legitimisation of art. But where did the idea of the art institution come from, and historically speaking, what was its function?
The concept an art institution feels like a fixed, long-established concept today. But in truth it evolved over centuries, shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. Historically, Western art institutions can usually be traced all the way back to royal and religious collections, with wealthy private patrons (some of whom were… interesting individuals) having a very influential role from the beginning.
Over time, academies and museums were established to preserve and showcase these artworks and objects, many of which contained the spoils of war common to all imperial ambitions. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly in Europe with its growing wealth centred around positions of power, these institutions flourished. Art museums (often designed to looked like Temples) were seen as the epitome of Enlightenment ideals –impressive spaces where knowledge, beauty, and cultural legitimacy were made accessible to the public, or at least, to those deemed worthy of such access. However, they also functioned as gatekeepers, reinforcing hierarchies of power and defining artistic canons that often excluded non-European traditions. This is especially pertinent for colonised countries such as Australia and New Zealand, where, despite the good intentions of the time, early art institutions like the National Gallery of Victoria (1861) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales (1871) also functioned as sites of colonial expansion – introducing hierarchical values via deeply entwined, yet irrevocably alien, colonial narratives. Across the Tasman Sea, the Auckland Art Gallery (1888) reflected a similar ethos, initially focusing on British and European art, while sidelining everything else within a colonial taxonomy framed as quaint curiosities for the tourist market.
By the mid-20th century, both countries saw increasing efforts to recognise and incorporate Indigenous artistic traditions. The emergence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in Australian institutions, and Māori art in New Zealand’s, marked a gradual – and still rightly contested – shift toward a more uniquely interesting mash-up between the competing forces of decolonisation, cultural sovereignty and established convention.
More recently, institutions around the world have faced scrutiny over their ties to private and corporate interests, funding structures, and their role in maintaining or disrupting the status quo. In response, contemporary artists and grassroots initiatives (and perhaps even gallery practices such as mine) have increasingly challenged traditional institutional hierarchies, advocating for more inclusive – and critical – engagement with art and its multitude of histories. While the fundamental role of an art institution as a place to experience art remains essential, its underlying mechanisms – how it operates, who it serves, and what power structures it upholds – deserve closer examination.
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Institutionalism remains a foundational pillar of the art industry, but it cannot truly place the artist at the forefront. What you see and experience in any major museum, institution, or art fair, is the product of deeply embedded hierarchical ideologies that simultaneously elevate and restrict the artist’s role. Benefactors, sponsors, politicians, strategic partners, funding bodies, careerists, galleries, and dealers vastly outnumber the relatively small number of artists they claim to support.. Despite being the art industrial complex’s supposed raison d'être, almost all artists remain sidelined and untouched by the gluey myopic nepotism the sector is known for.
As the broader art world meanders through the glitter filled uncanny-valley of post-modernism and into an epoch defined by the commodification of art against the promise of rapidly accelerated futures, the search for truth, muddied by entrenched ideological positions, has become increasingly problematic. The aims of culture-shaping policies such as Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI), for example, are worthy of deeper examination here.
DEI celebrates surface level diversity over structural transformation. There’s a strong emphasis on promoting women, the Global South, trans and queer artists, and other marginalised (but ultimately always eventually commodified) individuals and groups. On the face of it, this is a good thing. Many of these voices deserve to be heard by an art world long stuck in its ways. But now, cheap DEI package deals offer the art industry a way to adopt the performative optics of neo–liberalism without having to really change much, structurally speaking, at all.
For a decade at least, this ideological position enjoyed widespread public buy-in. But at some point over the last couple of years, we hit saturation point. Even well-meaning eyes began rolling, quietly but consistently, as audiences were confronted with yet another uninspiring, tokenistic tick-box exhibition. It became clear it was never really about the work but the representation of identity itself that mattered – an extraordinary social phenomenon born from the psychological projections of atomised individuals, blanketed under a layer of post-Colonial institutional atonement. Identity itself became the art, not as a means of exploration, but as a fixed, unquestionable premise. As a result, art’s function became narrower, gradually sanitised and suffocated, until it could only suck the oxygen from the spaces where it was shown. Audiences became alienated. Critique became almost impossible. And with this lack of criticality, not least the questionable quality of work (a dirty term among populists such as Jerry Salz), many in the art world are pondering whether they’ll see anything controversial, bold or shocking in a gallery ever again.
But hang on (checks notes) didn’t Sabsabi fulfil all the DEI criteria of this iron-clad ideological position that’s been sold to us since, well, forever? A marginalised artist, working on contemporary issues, exploring the necropolitical terror and genocide that has taken place across the Middle East. Check. Check. Check. Setting aside the fact that this is exactly where art should be right now, it’s tempting to pull aside the thin veil of hypocrisy to see if there are somewhat more sinister forces at play here.
However you dress it up, Sabsabi’s art was censored because someone couldn't cope with the idea of their worldview being questioned. Nor did they want to afford the rest of us a chance to think about it intellectually in order to arrive at a more critically interesting place. By censoring the show, it’s now clear that institutional ideologies such as DEI may as well be dead in the water. We all recognise the difference between art and advertising.
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Art’s relevance issue cannot be fixed by institutional policies, precisely because they are too fixed. And something needs to change for art to take its rightful place in the front lines of culture again. With the meandering ebb and flow of geopolitics now viciously shaken by the force of hurricane-strength destabilisation globally, artists themselves should decide – either we embrace the radical reinvention of the relevance and importance of art, or we do nothing and collectively barrel towards irrelevance. Either way, it’s now clear that the institutions of the art industrial complex can’t save us.
Art world debates can feel like distant alien planets – they are so far removed from earth’s grinding real-world crises. No artwork can ever capture the unimaginable trauma of searching for the body of a loved one beneath tonnes of rubble, or a terrified child held hostage in darkness. So it’s understandable that art today is often framed as a space of comfort, spectacle, and escape. But this is not the time for art to retreat. At its best, it remains one of the last true portals for engagement – where difference can be confronted, challenged, argued over, and explored, leaving us individually and collectively more enriched, more than divided. Art can still be our catalyst for reckoning.
Censorship is not merely a blunt, cynical tool deployed by all political persuasions – it is the nuclear option; the last possible choice. It is a fundamental restriction on our individual freedoms, not least our capacity to learn and think critically. It is the intentional removal of the capacity to understand. And it should – just like it’s dim witted cancel culture sibling – be resisted vociferously. It has no place in art.
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With institutions at an ideological crossroads, the real question now is: what purpose do they serve? Are they vehicles for liberation and artistic autonomy, or instruments of cultural containment? If they are to remain relevant, can they abandon rigid ideological positions while embracing transparency, contradiction, and true artistic freedom?
A genuine institutional shift would mean dismantling performative ideological frameworks in favour of radical openness. True diversity is not about token representation but about tolerating ideological discomfort. Institutions must foster spaces where art can be dangerous again – where risk, confrontation, and genuine dialogue are not only permitted but encouraged. This demands a radical restructuring of hierarchy, placing artists at the centre of their own decision making.
If institutions continue to function as mechanisms of control rather than liberation, they may well render themselves obsolete, reduced to repositories of spectacle. And in an age where the window displays of Louis Vuitton look more creatively ambitious than the efforts in the local gallery, this is no understatement.
Institutions must take on a far more aggressive advocacy role for artists, revolutionising accessibility to make art relevant to new generations of digital natives. They should surrender spaces for young artists on short residencies, transform into hubs of intellectual rigour, embrace the working classes, open libraries filled with dangerous ideas, offer up spaces where challenging discourse thrives alongside grassroots community engagement, experiment with gaming labs and digital laboratories, and – here’s an idea – make visible entire rooms of banned and troublesome work.
We cannot censor our way out of the darkness.
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AFTERWORD
There’s a small painting in a corner of one of my favourite institutions, the National Gallery of Scotland. I always pop in to look at when I’m passing. It’s an oil on copper work by the Flemish artist Paul Bril (1554-1626) titled Fantastic Landscape, painted in 1598. I first encountered it when I was about 15, and over the years it’s become a familiar friend. I know this place; the winding paths, the rock forms, distant mountains, and a cast of characters moving through an idealised terrain. A utopian dream, Bril’s landscape also functions as a liminal space, where the familiar and the unknown can coexist inside a golden-hour sandbox for the imagination. I’ve returned to this painting more times than I can count. To this day, this tiny portal continues to takes me to new places; beckoning me in, making mischief with my senses, and firing the imagination with the possibility of illumination all these years later.
Paul Brig, 'Fantastic Landscape’, oil on copper, 1598. National Galleries of Scotland.
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NOTES
Hezbollah was designated a terrorist organisation by the Australian Government in 2003.
Kevin Rudd’s response to internationally-renowned photographer Bill Henson’s show at Roslyn Oxley in Sydney in 2008 still makes me cringe all these years later. Rudd, PM at the time, called Henson’s work ‘absolutely revolting’ and without artistic merit, despite having never seen the offending images. (Which turned out to be partially clothed older teenagers. As if dick pics had never been invented!)
I consider government funding bodies for the arts like Creative Australia institutionalised.
Annabel Crabb, ABC web article, 19 Feb 2025. www.abc.net.au/news/2025-02-19/creative-australia-venice-biennale-khaled-sabsabi/104952110
It’s worth repeating here that in 2023 alone, the art industry machine was estimated to have sold around $65 billion USD worth of art, yet most artists remain economically and structurally marginalised.
After all, if you deploy the tools of censorship elsewhere in the name of virtue signalling, you’re hardly in a position to complain when that same apparatus is turned against you. Rather than engaging in rigorous debate, for too long, too many people in the art world have opted to shame and exile those they disagree with, rather than engage in more substantive intellectual debate. The show ‘The Confessions’ held at Silo6 at Auckland Waterfront in 2022 was a catalyst for exploring this specific phenomenon.
Witness just how quickly these policies have been dropped instantly by the same companies and organisations who, for a decade up until only a few weeks ago, were wrapping themselves and their employees up in colourful Pride flags. The scorched-earth razing of such policies in America’s current neo–con, Christo–fascist regime has been frighteningly fast.
FURTHER READING
ALTHUSSER, Louis. Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Verso 2014.
ZIZEK, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, Verso 1989.
Images are copyright of the artist/lenders. This essay forms a part of my gallery practice research. As such the views of the gallery practice are my own, not those of the artists I work with. Sign up to the mailing list on the website below.