A Polonial feast late on a Sunday ...

 

By the time the pond could get to a computer, prattling Polonius had already been disappeared from the extreme  far right section of the lizard Oz ...

The pond simply couldn't bear a situation where Polonius's prattle went missing from Sunday altogether ... so the pond dug deep into the lizard Oz's bowels - an untidy, unseemly mess - and rescued Polonius from digital oblivion.

While other reptiles focussed on election campaigning, or on Putin's mango-tinted lapdog busy doing his master's bidding and selling out Ukraine, Polonius knew exactly what was right for his endless sighing, moaning, and wringing of hands. 

When it comes to being a perpetually offended snowflake, is there a better reptile scribbler to be found hiding behind the arras?

Artists demand freedom of expression while cancelling others, It is unreasonable for the arts community to expect Australia’s contribution to the Venice Biennale to be an artist whose work about anti-Semitic terror groups al-Qa’ida and Hezbollah conveys the message ‘thank you’.

Ah, it's the freedumb for some and not for others routine, with this snap the opening reptile gambit ...Khaled Sabsabi's ‘You’ depicting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, 2007. Picture: MCA

The pond realises that most of its correspondents could compose the Polonial text in their sleep, and might well fall into a doze while reading it, but the pond remains loyal to the pleasures of terminal tedium.

No need for background, just plunge in:

It’s a familiar case of taxpayer-funded double standards. But first some background.
In February, a group of artists published a letter written to the chief executive, Adrian Collette, and the board of Creative Australia (formerly the Australia Council). CA has a staff of 150 and in the past financial year received $289m from the federal government.
All of the signatories have represented Australia at the Venice Biennale. They are protesting (“strongly”, of course) against CA’s decision to remove artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino “as the artistic team for the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026” and “urge” their reinstatement.
The open letter said CA’s decision to remove Sabsabi and Dagostino “signals a fundamental disregard for the role of artists in our society – especially by the very institution meant to defend them”.
This is a statement of the view held by many who belong to the left intelligentsia and self-identify as progressive – that artists possess a higher morality than the mere mortals in their midst.
This entitles them to be supported by the taxpayer irrespective of what they say or do.

The reptiles interrupted with a snap, The Venice Biennale, which featured a mural by Maurizio Cattelan outside Giudecca Women’s Prison in April 2024. Picture: AFP

The pond thought running First Dog as an interstitial might be amusing, a kind of point counter point (in full here):

So much better to have a cartoonist do the commentary, while the pond slumbers in deep existential ennui ...

Much of the controversy has been reported in this paper’s Margin Call column.
As Yoni Bashan argued recently, the problem arose because of the failure of CA to perform due diligence with respect to the applicants.

The pond has already covered the thoughts of Zionist-inclined Yoni, and so pressed on ...

At issue were two pieces by Sabsabi, the Australian artist of Lebanese descent who came to Australia in 1978 and settled with his family in western Sydney.
It was around the time that Malcolm Fraser’s Coalition government introduced what was called the “Lebanese concession”.
Those departing Lebanon were not refugees in the accepted sense of the term since they were not fleeing persecution but, rather, a civil conflict essentially between Lebanese Christians and Muslims.
Fraser’s scheme was abandoned not long after it was introduced. It was poorly implemented but indicated a generous spirit by the federal government at the time.
As the Encyclopaedia Britannica documents about the civil war that began in 1975, “Lebanon’s Muslims and leftists supported the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat) and sought more political power; its Christians, seeking to maintain their political dominance, opposed the PLO.”

Again the reptiles interrupted with a snap, Khaled Sabsabi with his works at Mosman Art Gallery in 2019.

Again the pond thought that another segment of First Dog interstitial might be helpful:

Polonius carried on with the tut-tutting and the cluck-clucking, as snowflakes yearning for only certain sorts of freedumb are wont to do ... well-suited to the cant and moralising humbug in which Polonius specialises ...

It appears that CA was not aware of Sabsabi’s work titled ‘Thank You Very Much’. It is a video showing scenes of al-Qa’ida’s attacks on New York’s World Trade Centre twin towers on 9/11 (September 11, 2001).
After the death and destruction of men and women of all faiths and none, US president George W. Bush is shown clapping his hands and saying, “Thank you very much”.
And in 2007 Sabsabi produced the video ‘You’. It depicted Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (1960-2024) reciting the words “O most honourable, pure and generous people, may God’s peace, mercy and blessings be upon you”.
These words were used by Nasrallah at the end of Hezbollah’s 2006 war with Israel that Hezbollah had initiated.
As Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art describes it, ‘You’ “plays on Western fears of cultural difference, which seem in counterpoint to Nasrallah’s salutations”. You get the picture.
Both ‘Thank You Very Much’ and ‘You’ were shown on Sky News’ The Media Show on February 21.
The left-wing-dominated artistic group is very protective of its own. But it’s understandable why CA decided to reassess its decision about Australia’s representative for the Venice Biennale. After all, CA is taxpayer funded and understandably wants to avoid reputational damage.
It is unreasonable for the Australian artistic community to expect that CA should have Australia’s contribution to the Venice Biennale represented by an artist whose past work about al-Qa’ida and Hezbollah is, at the very least, ambiguous. Especially in view of the rise of anti-Semitism in Western nations during recent times.

Then came another snap, Artist Ben Quilty has been among Sabsabi’s supporters. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

Alas, the pond had run out of First Dog samples ...

Well yes, the pond does know what it's like to be complicit in a genocide, it reads the reptiles in the lizard Oz regularly ... and it feels the reptile vibe ...

Naturally, it being Polonius prattling, the ABC would have to be dragged into the mess, as if the Zionist lobby hadn't already landed the ABC in a legal mess and over a million in legal fees, and Ida in a shit storm of her own making ...

Some ABC journalists have been busy giving soft interviews to Sabsabi’s supporters.

ABC Radio National Breakfast presenter Sally Sara interviewed artist Ben Quilty on February 20. He declared that Sabsabi “is collateral damage for this seething fury in the community at the moment which is totally out of control”. Whatever that might mean.
Then, on February 24, Sara spoke to artist Judy Watson. Sara pointed out that the controversy began “after a senator used question time to highlight some of Sabsabi’s previous work”.
The reference was to Liberal Party senator Claire Chandler.
Watson soon threw the switch to Hitler and referred to “the so-called degenerate art that Hitler and some of the Nazis opposed” in 1937. This is absolute tosh.
There is no evident mood to censor Sabsabi’s work. But there is opposition to the use of taxpayer funds to have the artist represent Australia at an important international festival.
It’s something that the mostly taxpayer-subsidised arts community appears not to understand.
And then there is the matter of double standards.

There's always a matter of double standards when it comes to Polonius, but strangely he never owns his own.

Instead the reptiles slipped in another snap, Archie Moore and Australian Pavilion curator Ellie Buttrose with ‘kith and kin’ at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Picture: Andrea Rossetti

A shame really, this is more the Polonial vibe ...

Now that's dinkum genuine art, of the kind that Polonius could get behind ...

As Margin Call has pointed out on February 11, Sabsabi was one of several artists who boycotted the 2022 Sydney Festival (well before Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7, 2023). He objected to the organisers accepting a $20,000 grant from Israel’s embassy in Australia to support an event produced by an Israeli choreographer. Really.
And there’s more. Sabsabi is one of 24,076 artists (so far) who have signed a petition calling for “the exclusion of Israel from the Venice Biennale”. It’s called the Art Not Genocide Alliance. The signatories condemn Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
But Sabsabi and his fellow comrades have nothing hostile to say about Hamas’s invasion of Israel on October 7 and the murders, rapes and kidnappings of Israelis that followed.
It’s still open for Australia to send another artist to Venice in 2026. But Sabsabi and his lot maintain that no Israeli artists (however left-wing) should make it to the Biennale then.
For too long artists have demanded a freedom of expression that they do not return to those they oppose.
It’s a bit like writers festivals in Australia and elsewhere that I frequently comment on. They are often taxpayer-funded stacks that exhibit tolerance to those who support them and intolerance to those who oppose them. Just like Sabsabi.
Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Ah those festivals that swirl like a bee in the old Polonial hive noggin, and strange that he has never anything hostile to say about ethnic cleansing or genocide, or the proposed displacement of millions, not to mention the terror campaign currently being conducted on the West Bank.

But that's Polonius, exhibiting his usual intolerance to anybody and anything that offends him - ethnic cleansing excepted, which can be pretty, pretty good ...

Never mind, might as well end with a Wilcox, which has been featured before by the pond, but which remains relevant to the matter and the scribbler at hand, and so worth a repeat ...