Two things spring to mind reading ?Storm in a Tikka? (ArtsProfessional, issue 45, p5).
First, if Sarah Blomfield?s advice to others potentially facing controversy over the staging of a ?cutting edge? visual arts event is not to get pushed in a corner and not to lose your cool, how is it then that Andre Stitt?s ?White Trash Curry Kick? was cancelled?
(Bizarrely Blomfield, quoted in Art Monthly, suggests that as a result of the media interest, ?the fact that it is not going ahead is not important, it has already existed in the public arena?). This logic certainly sets an interesting precedent.
Secondly, articles of this nature, which adopt the moral high ground about the media?s hostility towards controversial arts events, rarely offer opinions or address the work in question. Andre Stitt is no stranger to controversy and his oeuvre is predicated on unsettling conventional values. Fair enough. He is a prolific performance artist who has made some powerful and socially engaging works, but he has also, in my opinion, produced the occasional turkey. I have only a cursory knowledge of the thinking behind WTCK but on the face of it, this would appear to be one.
Sometimes, rather than just adopting liberal bemusement in the face of a reactionary media onslaught, it would be refreshing to see arts commentators pursuing a more rounded and less partisan discussion about the nature of the work in question, perhaps even speculating if there are in fact any grounds for the mainstream press to vent its spleen. Of course the popular press will stop at nothing to rubbish the arts (particularly contemporary visual arts), and totally misconstrue the facts, but I think we also have to be grown up and circumspect enough to recognise that events like WTCK, however seriously conceived, will inevitably provide welcome ammunition to a cynical and predatory media.