NEW DIRECTION

🔴🟠🟡🟢🔵🟣⚫️ NEW DIRECTION Ed. No. 207

- REMEMBERING WHEN ARTISTS HAD SOMETHING TO SAY

ARE ARTISTS SAYING ANYTHING ANYMORE

OR ARE WE JUST ANOTHER BARNACLE

ON THE LUMBERING WHALE OF THE BODY POLITIC?

Detail from "Remembrance Day (Flanders Poppies)" (2014)

(Originally inspired by Gardening Writer Cheryl Maddocks)

Artist: Neville Williams / ©️Arts Law Australia

Size: 60cm H x 120cm W x 4cm D

Media: Acrylic, collage on (2) co-joined stretched canvas's unframed
PRIVATE COLLECTION

To read a synopsis of this artwork

and see more work by this artist go to:-

NevilleWilliamsArt

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THE FOLLOWING COMMENTARY WAS SUPPLIED

TO THE OPINION EDITOR OF THE SYDNEY MORNING HERALD ON 20 SEPT. 2026

Recently I applied for an arts grant and couldn’t help but feel that the very real focus was on the skill of completing the application with the creative aspect relegated to something ancillary in the process of making art…Where is the art that actually makes a difference, connects with people and can move us?

Perhaps I'm being ungenerous. Of course a painting of flowers can really light someone's life. A statement like Picasso's 'Guernica' can punch you with its impact. It's true that a song like the Beatles "Yesterday" can move us or a theatre piece such as that experienced by many with the original Australian cast production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" might leave you blown away. Occasionally a television series such as "Broadchurch" might make an impression on us. And then too you can find the right book providing wonderful insight into a story or character.

But of late things are becoming bland, empty, soulless even excessively violent.

My experience of streaming services such as NETFLIX or YouTube can have you spending a lot of time digging through the dross to find a gem of a statement.

Artists used to be bohemian uncluttered individuals free of many of the distractions of a world that constantly wants more. It’s a greedy, needy world now and artists are not exempt from the lure of the world’s baubles and the artificial light of a myriad of distractions.

The trade off is a kind of flattened experience.

How clever we thought we were when we took on very seriously the pursuit of material wealth and the cult of celebrity and achievement making this our priority. Consumers become the consumed in the great race of life with unmanageable desires leading to unfulfilled emptiness.

Influencers carp at themselves spewing platitudes of self praise. Sales, marketing and retail dominate. A world of meme's says nothing and does nothing for individuals except confirm vacuousness. To be seen for being seen is a bit sad.

What a set of bad choices this is all proving to become.

We've now addicted ourselves to the idea that 'out there' is the only place we will find anything worth having. So much so that we've forgotten ourselves or where we need to look to find a satisfying answer.

The falling of art as a medium to carry a message has relegated creativity to a 'business model' and the product is all too often treated as the disposable decorative.

What do artists actually have to say anyway?

Who even wants to listen to those who might have something of substance to express?

We're too busy with our own busyness.

Do we need to be shaken to our very foundations to be woken?

The storm roils. The standards fall.

The grasping need becomes stifling sucking away the oxygen.

The patience to be humble relegated to a novel quirk.

I wish I could say it more poetically but verse falls on deaf ears in a fools paradise. We are taking our civilisation towards the edge of a cliff. A bit melodramatic you say. Not really.

We can all feel it if we’re honest with ourselves…but are we?

Artists have fallen victim to this like the rest of our unhappy world. When the artists get into a place where it is all too hard then we really do have a civilisation in crisis. Currently artists should be out front or centre stage helping to move us forward with commentary encouraging us to face ourselves, each other and our greater world. But we go cap in hand to some willing institutions or entrepreneurs to compete for the scraps that this world deigns appropriate for outliers.

And we wonder why we get the likes and whim of people like Donald Trump in charge!

We put them there because they reflect the surface values of what we imagine we want and want to believe they can deliver to us. And rather than accepting the responsibility to progress our own internal fulfilment these false idols seem to be the chosen ones to decimate the impenetrable cages we have all had a hand in manufacturing around our lives.

Does the fire of our own disconnect need to burn itself out before this vapid impenetrable world is prepared to build a new standard?

Our Country might need to start looking out in case a gusto for whaling season makes a comeback.

No, I’m not angry just amazed that we can all be so benign and impotent*.

* I am not judging but I am seeing a truth manifest. It is an artist's job to hold up a mirror. - N.

STOP, LOOK AND LEAP. - Neville Williams