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Cate Blanchett's evil plan to rule the world
Joe Hildebrand, Sydney Daily Telegraph"We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere." - Cate Blanchett, Adelaide, 22 February 2002 IT'S time the authorities were told: Cate Blanchett must be stopped. Centuries from now, the survivors of the nuclear holocaust will look back on the star's keynote address to the Australian Performing Arts Market and say: "For the love of God, why didn't anybody do anything?" It's not like the warning signs weren't there. Blanchett's Adelaide speech presents only two real possibilities, being that Cate is either a) interminably pretentious; or b) incurably insane. The sad thing is that Blanchett's pointless, convoluted and overblown defence of the arts industry only succeeds in reinforcing the popular stereotype of it as a pompous collective of talentless windbags who constantly bray about how vital they are in an effort to distract attention from the fact that nobody else seems to like them.... ...Blanchett says she and her ilk have the power to "change countries, governments, history, gravity", observes that "we change people's lives, at the risk of our own" and also notes: "Our job is to change reality . . ." It appears that someone got to Cate's reality first. The address sounds less like a grant application and more like a Justice League of America mission statement. Interestingly, when not boasting of her and her colleagues' superhuman abilities, Blanchett is very strident that the arts industry should not have to justify itself economically because it operates on a deeper level: "We can justify ourselves with economic indicators and KPIs and graphs and acquittals but it just makes us look like any other industry, and we are not . . . the graph is proof and proof comes afterwards. Proof is important to science because scientists start with speculation and conjecture to arrive at reality. Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it." She then goes on to say that she doesn't hear the point made often enough that the arts are a great employer - before detailing her Sydney Theatre Company's staffing structure. This is no great crime, just an inherently contradictory set of statements that show - along with all the hackneyed grandiosity and vacuous motherhood statements - that no critical thought has gone into this statement, which is a shame for someone with such an enviable profile and platform. Rather it bears all the hallmarks of someone who knew that she was preaching to the choir and that by heaping ill-founded praise on her audience and making vague criticisms about capitalism or the system or whoever the enemy is supposed to be she will walk off the stage to easy applause. Sadly, for genuinely talented and struggling artists, any bureaucrats and economists and benefactors with a lick of sense will look at this speech and see little worth spending their money on. In the arts world described by Blanchett, they will find (to quote our favourite actress) "an infinity of nowhere". Posted by: Mike 2010-02-24 |
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