Adelaide and the elusive palace of dreams

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To be fair, Adelaide’s weather in early March is glorious. It’s the time of year when everyone is out and about, and the ideal moment for public pleasures on a big scale. The more, the better, agreed?

But in what has become a classic example of gilded excess, the soon-to-be-annual Adelaide Festival of the Arts has, in recent years, become hostage to a growing cabal of competing paid entertainments (Fringe, Womadelaide, and the Garden of Unearthly Delights), with the controversial addition this year of the laughably mismatched Clipsal 500, an extremely loud motor car race.

Advocates of this chaotic ‘mad March’ enthuse at its critical mass. To the chagrin of many, however, the politically driven cavalcade of bread and circuses, all of it compressed into an overlapping two-week cycle, has threatened to trash the brand.

Once upon a time Adelaide’s Festival of the Arts was the nation’s pre-eminent cultural event, and renowned for this internationally. But the other states woke up and long ago invented their own. In Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney they also grasped the concept that a dynamic arts sector lured tourists, lifted civic pride and was a universally recognised code for economic strength. So, unlike South Australia, they invested broadly in modern cultural infrastructure (and in particular instances, such as with Brisbane’s GoMA [Gallery of Modern Art] and Melbourne’s Federation Square, did so very ambitiously), and they then turned on the lights with Major Events funding to proclaim their capital cities as ‘must attend’ destinations.

Some say that successive South Australian governments have willfully resisted the vision thing, preferring to scatter handfuls of grain (plus a little gravy here and there) to an overlarge and relatively unchanging... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Installation view ‘12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide featuring Tim Silver, Untitled (object) (Cedar Timbermate Woodfiller), 2011-12. Archival ink on archival paper. Photography Jamie North and Untitled (object), 2011-12. Cedar Timbermate Woodfiller. Courtesy the artist and Breenspace, Sydney.

Stephen Bram, Art Gallery of South Australia, north wing, basement, 2012. Installation view ‘12th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art’, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Painted plasterboard, steel and radiate pine framework, fluorescent lighting. Courtesy of the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne and Sydney. Supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.