“Ladies and Gentlemen, Distinguished guests, Friends, Associates, and last, or first on the evolutionary tree, the artists themselves.

And here to uphold the eternal fight in Australian art, not the light, not the movements, not the cohorts, the cliques and the schisms, but the eternal battle in art as it is in Australia between the wowsers, (insert Puritans) and the cavaliers. We are all cavaliers. And this building the embodiment of the roaring nineties, the boisterous bohemianism of a booming society and culture.

It’s such a privilege to be here. And my craven thanks to Clive Sinclair for offering me the chance to open up this wonderful show. For all of us here represent what is the most fundamental part of art practice, the art of celebration and having fun. To indulge fully in one’s a singular passion and to celebrate that passion. Amongst friends.

Perhaps I thought Clive many have asked me to open the show because he thought I might know a thing or two about art. I studied art way back in the 70’s and 80’s art criticism at Melbourne University.

At a time when University was entirely free. When the student Union held great Parties and the University was alive to the pulse of infinite possibilities and wonder. Wonder of the potential to find ourselves amongst an undergraduate haze of alcohol, tobacco, bands and myriad unsuccessful romantic catastrophes.

I learnt there that art criticism unleashed can kill the nucleus of art itself. Worse than firing squads or lethal injection.

And make the practise of art interpretation itself a morbid funeral parade; to what Kingsley Amis once described as, and I quote; ‘To put a half light upon a funeral parade of non problems’. That was how I interpreted art criticism, to indulge as a putative Robert Hughes in knowing everything about type, form, ‘ism’s’ and yet know nothing about the passion of making art itself.

Recently I went to this years Art Fair and learnt once again that academically pure and acceptable art synthesised through an intellectual, ethical and political prism was akin to necrosis of the soul. That art being so leached of humanity with its constant insistence on questioning orthodoxies, the charade of earnest interrogation and the preoccupation with being eternally burdened by guilt. As a sort of unsubstantiated original sin. In which the public were admonished for being ignorant though they ironically through their taxes pay for the excoriating indulgence. A bland accretion for coercive conditioning. In which skill, practise, technique and mastery that may take decades to accomplish are thrown aside in finding a state or federally funded sinecure. As a reward to bowing to group-think.

Wowsers at work.

I have illustrious forebears who’ve both exhibited and been presidential in this space. Perhaps I might offer some glimmer of wisdom to impart. I can only say after four generations of art making we are still poor, yet that hasn’t diminished our ardour. Cos making money from art is superfluous.

These twenty artists. Such wonder.

What do I see.

A tradition steeped in history and can feel the physical presented of Clarice Beckett, Violet Teague, McGuiness, Meldrum, Frater, Rolf Harris. It’s an unending procession of the great and the grace in showing. It’s an esteemed group that has outlasted any numerically designated group of creatives; the Dave Clark Five, the Fab Four, the musketeers, stooges and the pre Raphaelites, the Bloomsbury and the funny little groups whom we might describe out in the Alsatia of the suburbs. Those little colonies where once a spark burnt brightly before it was stifled by the very force that created it, suburbia, and the oppressive force of wowserism. For this building represents a riposte to wowserism,

You are a rare breed.

In the race to digital conformity you are the makers,

You are the flame that keeps us inspired

You are the custodians of humanity,

And beyond that you gather here in this place, and to paraphrase Napoleon at the Battle of the Pyramids, ‘centuries, look down upon you’.

You are not crushed, you are not excoriated and, you are not rendered eviscerated by the grim gate keepers, freed form the the taint of being accepted for whatever reason to represent ‘us ‘ at Venice or a writers festival where you can indulge in self reprobation and indulgence as an art form.

You are here united in this singular passion,

To express, fill the room with love, and amongst friends to gather in a bond of love laughter and the incredible lightness of being an artist.

And ultimately, if I may insert a word that is verboten in official art commentary, you espouse the elixir of, and I’m going to use this word to its fullest effect;

You bring us all together and unite us under the great arc, the great dome, the great penumbra of……FUN!

And the best thing, the fun, the exuberance you express for us IS FELT BY ALL OF US“.