Brisbane is to get a super festival when the Brisbane Festival and the River Festival merge. About time, too. I don't think anybody actually knew what the River Festival was all about ...

A private $1.75 million bequest to the defunct Victorian State Opera has prompted a huge legal case, with allegations that Opera Australia has squandered $587million on lawyers' fees. The ripping read is here. Maybe somebody will turn it into an opera!

Congratulations to the winners of the Helpmann awards. Sadly, no Queensland productions among the winners' list, although Queensland Theatre Company artistic director Michael Gow won a writing gong for his play Toy Symphony, which made its debut at Sydney's Company B last year. (I'm sure there's a good reason why it didn't premiere in Brisbane, but I don't know what it is.) Queenslanders Leah Purcell and Russell Dykstra also won awards for work performed interstate. The full, Sydney and Melbourne-centric list is here.

Bayreuth Opera's production of Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg has been streamed online. Is this the future of opera? UK Telegraph writer Rupert Christiansen approves of the innovation, but notes:

But streamings and screenings must not be used as an excuse for the BBC to renege on its responsibility to broadcast opera on terrestrial as well as digital channels - nor can they ever be a substitute for the crackling excitement of attending a real live performance.

Are fast cars and classical music incompatible? Organisers of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music are reconsidering the timing of next year's event following an announcement that the V8 Supercar Festival will be happening in Townsville in July 2009. July has been classical music month in the northern Queensland city for the past 18 years and it seems extraordinary that another major event should try to muscle in on its turf. In a media release, festival boss Marg O'Donnell* says the V8 Supercar event will take up significant accommodation and marketing space in the four week lead up to the actual event, not to mention sponsorship dollars and infrastructure changes. "We understand it will take the city at least two weeks to recover from the event, this means we would have to reschedule our festival many weeks later than usual. This has serious ramifications regarding the availability of our artists; Winterschool students; rehearsal space costs, and even of our wonderful artistic director, Piers Lane."
* The actual release calls Ms O'Donnell the festival "chair", but I refuse to refer to a person as a piece of furniture.

An 11-year-old girl says she has no problem with the fact that a magazine published naked pictures of her taken by her mother when she was 6. Her father, an art critic, basically says those of us who object to this are philistines. Comments made by prime minister Kevin Rudd are, the father says, uninformed and damaging. I'm not going to labour the point, except to say that at 11 the girl is still too young to give informed consent and her parents have behaved appallingly by knowingly dragging her into this controversy. That the pictures were taken is one thing, that they allowed them to be published while the girl is still at a vulnerable age against the background of a volatile debate is inexcusable - whether the pictures are "art" or not.

Exploitation of children is back in the news:
Here* and here.
* Note this quote from photographer Polixeni Papapetrou: "We need to be clever enough to distinguish art from other types of images, otherwise we live in danger of eradicating any image of childhood in this culture for future generations to see." As I have said before, who decides what is art and what is porn? Answer: The self-proclaimed artists and their cronies, and woe betide anybody who dares challenge their judgment - especially when people like Art Monthly magazine editor Maurice O'Riordan (who, the article notes, "does not have children of his own" - what could they be getting at there?) thinks that publishing a naked picture of a child too young to give her consent is "restoring some dignity to the debate" about the work of photographer Bill Henson.
I'll probably be off the luvvies' guest list forever, but I am going to say that it's time for the child-protection authorities to look into all this. It's also time for the people in the arts community who do not approve of this, but are too scared to say what they think, to stand up and be counted.

Who decides what's art and what's not? More often than not, the market decides. Commercial art is worth not just what it costs to make, plus a margin for profit, but what people are willing to pay for it. "Greatness" in art is often decided by the consensus of an elite group of "experts" whose judgments we mere mortals challenge at our peril. Now I know very little about Bill Henson's work, but I note that the great and the good of the art world have come out in defence of his nude photographs of young people. I'm sure in their minds his work is art, not pornography. But art is also in the eye of the beholder. So if some people, like Bravehearts' Hetty Johnson, view Henson's work as porn - and, worse still, others get some sort of sexual thrill out of viewing it - then in a certain sense it is porn. And for all the debate about the work - there are too many articles to link to, just Google the artist's name - few, if any, of the commentators seem to realise that Henson was dealing with real, live people here. I defy anyone to tell me that a 12-year-old is capable of making an informed decision as to whether they really do want to be photographed in such a way. And that's why the law should protect them, and why Henson should find some models who are old enough to be emotionally, intellectually and psychological capable of giving consent.

I'm loath weigh in on controversy about Bill Henson's pictures of naked children, lest I (once again) am labelled a philistine. Yet this is far too important an issue on which to be silent. Quite simply, there is no justification - artistic or otherwise - for these pictures to be taken or to be displayed. End of story.

Queensland is reportedly the poor cousin when it comes to getting a fair shake of corporate sponsorship for the arts. Apparently Queensland gets just six percent of the national corporate sponsorship and donations dollar. It may be a result of the companies involved always looking to Sydney and Melbourne, where they are headquartered. But - and I'm playing devil's advocate here - could it also be that many Queensland arts companies aren't offering programs that appeal to corporate sponsors, or at the very least they are not "selling" their shows properly? Now I'm not saying that sponsors and donors should have artistic input, but many's the time I've seen somebody who has stumped up the cash to support a show looking totally perplexed afterwards.