Good News for the Gong

Arts Minister Frank Sartor's dulcet tones drew a crowd at Wollongong Town Hall yesterday, but his audience was only interested in the colour of his money.

Mr Sartor promised to help restore the town hall to its former glory with a $2 million cash grant.

Wollongong City Council matched the commitment, raising its refurbishment budget from $1.6 million to $2 million.

Standing in front of the historic grand organ, Mr Sartor said it made financial sense to reopen the town hall and refurbish it.

The machinations behind the money started more than a year ago when the Australian Chamber Orchestra's artistic director Richard Tognetti warned Mr Sartor that if nothing was done, the wrecking ball would come in.

Mr Tognetti, who grew up in Wollongong, has led efforts to rescue and restore the town hall, which was earmarked for demolition before the council's sacking.

It's a sign of the weight given to his opinion that his comments appeared alongside Mr Sartor's in the government press release yesterday.

Read more (Illawarra Mercury)

The Good News

"Wollongong's administrators have come to the rescue of the town hall with a $1.6 million package aimed at saving the ageing building from almost certain destruction.

The move constitutes a complete turnaround in Wollongong City Council's position on the town hall after it voted to demolish the building in December last year."

Read more.

A Modest Proposal for Wollongong

Fig 1. Edouard Manet, The Execution of Maximilian

[Marcus Westbury] also looks at how we rank our cultural priorities. The multimillion-dollar upgrade to the Regional Arts Centre in his home town of Newcastle prompts him to question the value of arts institutions and ask whether we can buy art by building iconic centres such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao. The Sydney Morning Herald 15/10/07

While some arts commentators question the usefulness of institutions for the display, performance and “consumption” of art, the ACO is rather attached to those places as it’s good to have a roof over one's head when performing. The Wollongong Council has once again postponed a decision on whether to demolish the Wollongong Town Hall, until recently the ACO’s Wollongong performance venue.

But perhaps the Wollongong Council shouldn’t wait much longer to get rid of Town Hall? Destroying it would be a progressive - even Boulezian - move: as we all now know, the art of the future is to be found in the graffiti-daubed streets or on the rubble of demolished civic theaters and Town Halls rather than concert halls and boring museums.

Compared to the visual and aural splendours of Grand Theft Auto IV, orchestral concerts aren’t much chop, are they? And why bother with fly-weight “painters” like Manet (Fig. 1) when there’s mordant political commentary on the walls of Hosier Lane, Melbourne (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Detail, Hosier Lane Graffito c. 2007

Nuance, depth and originality of thought are, like, so 19th Century.

We predict that once it gets rid of its tired institutions, Wollongong will be the art capital of Australia.

M. Croche