Letter to the editor: I have withdrawn from the arts community because of its vaccine mandate silence

Letter to the editor: I have withdrawn from the arts community because of its vaccine mandate silence

by | Feb 20, 2022 | Opinion | 0 comments

Dear Editor,

I was recently contacted by a local businessperson seeking my input in an arts project. I had to decline.

No disrespect to small business operators in this climate. I admire self starters and entrepreneurs, and know that these mandates have been imposed on the community from above. But since the vaccine mandates I have lost all interest in the arts, I have lost all interest in venue socialising.

I don’t go out to restaurants or bars and clubs or anywhere – art galleries or art spaces included – where I am required to show my vaccination status.

As a high income no-kids professional, I would spend on average $500 a week on entertainment and now I don’t. I had set aside $10,000 a year to “invest” in artists, especially Darwin artists, whose work I admire by purchasing and/or commissioning work and/or organising, promoting or contributing to the expenses for exhibition openings. But now I don’t.

I have withdrawn from an arts community that has not exhaled a whimper of dissatisfaction over government non-responses to the pandemic and not a squeak of concern about the mandates.

I stay home. I socialise with family or friends, in parks, on verandas or in suburban back yards where our vaccination status doesn’t matter.

Given the local arts community flaccidity in accepting this state of affairs, I see art as dead, or at least existing in a fog of whimsical superficiality. As a consequence I can’t find the motivation I need to compel myself into arts projects or spaces any more, listen to arts types trifling with identity-politics narcissistic-navel-gazing-in-the-pool-of-endless-relativity anymore.

I don’t have the fortitude to politely accept trifling nonsense, it’s all bullshit in the face of government overreach and arrogant unaccountability.

I have withdrawn.

I’m happiest to stay at home and cook for my old mum and post food pics instead.

I wish all small business well. Like I said, I admire anyone who takes a risk, and especially in this climate. But I just don’t think the historical turn towards uber-arbitrary-medico-governmentality-without a hint of transparency or art-historical criticality suits my type anymore.

Koulla Roussos

Darwin


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