Artists and politicians never work well together for long.

It’s sad really, because beyond the obvious differences in the daily graft, they have a whole heap in common.

Both are capable of — indeed, often driven by pure ideals, the pursuit of which sometimes necessitates a dip in waters that are greasy and uninviting.

Both inhabit industries that are factionalised, booby-trapped, clannish. Irrigated with gossip and funny money, and runnels of influence invisible to the naked eye. Pockmarked with unorthodox folk ranging from geniuses down through visionaries and maddies to the lower sediment: chancers, grifters and vendors of the purest serpent oil.

Politicians and artists alike regularly find themselves at parties obliged to suck up to potential benefactors who work less hard than they do but are exponentially richer.

Both find that in order to do the job they want to do (Save the world! Explain the world! Try, with trembling fingertips, to articulate a nagging truth just outside humanity’s narrowing field of vision!) they also have to do the kind of jobs no-one wants to do, like fill out grant applications, or suck up to rich people they don’t like, or go through the distinctively unpleasant process of securing preselection with a major political party.

Both lines of work — at key flex points, and comedically-often this happens thanks to factors entirely outside an individual’s personal control — can either blast enjoyably into the stratosphere (Prizes! Sales! Hype! Cabinet appointment! Getting on the Mark Bouris podcast!) or fizzle into obscurity.

With politicians, as with artists, the ones you’ve heard of might be paid okay. But for every one of those, there’ll be 100 who did their dough and are now pursuing other options or working for free at local government level in their own time.

But the biggest similarity between art and politics is a much, much simpler one.

We’ve seen it demonstrated, in a shock and awe spectacle, over the past week, as creative independence met political imperative over the board table at the nation’s premier arts funding body, Creative Australia.

The outcome? A crunchy first-round victory to political imperative, of which more in a moment.

And what’s the similarity? It’s this: In both art and politics, a single image, even when viewed out of context, in fact especially when viewed out of context, can be powerful enough to turn the world upside down.

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A lot can change in nine days

Khaled Sabsabi, an established Australian artist of Lebanese birth, was named on February 7 by Creative Australia as the 43rd artist chosen to represent Australia at the prestigious Venice Biennale.

Accompanied by curator Michael Dagostino — a well-known and energetic advocate for the cultural life of western Sydney — Sabsabi was to be the first western Sydney artist picked as our national delegate to what is sometimes called the Olympics of the art world.

Sabsabi would be paid $100,000, and Dagostino $50,000, to create an artwork for the Australian pavilion, after a complex and demanding process in which five independent experts were empanelled to form a shortlist of six, then pick a successful candidate.

Sabsabi was announced, to warm and congratulatory comments from Creative Australia’s chairman Robert Morgan and its CEO Adrian Collette, on February 7.

Nine days later, in a late-night meeting, the Creative Australia board decided — unanimously, and unprecedentedly — to revoke the commission.

Viewed from space, this is a perplexing decision.

Sabsabi was — on February 13 — exactly the same artist as he had been on February 7. He’d not authored any interstitial controversies. He hadn’t chucked up in a cab and chewed out a white cop, or TikToked anything awful, or attended an awards ceremony clad in a bodystocking. His most memorable comment, post-announcement, was that he was “shocked” to be chosen at all.

“To tell you the truth, I have applied four times and I felt that, in this time and in this space, this wouldn’t happen because of who I am,” he said, somewhat prophetically as it turned out.

Two videos tell the story

What happened? Future historians might puzzle over this seismic shift in sentiment at the top of Australia’s foremost public arts funding body.

Unless they considered the striking video works that came on to the media market over a handful of the intervening days, created by amateurs but unmistakably capturing something raw and frightening about the world we now inhabit.

And complicating the worlds of both artists and politicians, for reasons beyond their control.

In the space of one week, there was grainy footage from an obscure live video chat platform in which two nurses, at work and in their scrubs, cheerfully discuss their wish to end the lives of Israeli patients.

CCTV footage of a young man in a Star of David cap, being towed around Middle Eastern eateries like a squid jag by a Daily Telegraph video team in an attempt to provoke and capture live acts of antisemitism.

And amongst it all, The Australian’s discovery and ventilation of a 2007 video work of Sabsabi’s, depicting the since-deceased Hezbollah figure Hassan Nasrallah, his head surrounded by rays of light.

On Thursday at 2.39pm, shadow arts minister Claire Chandler asked Penny Wong in the Senate: “With such appalling antisemitism in our country, why is the Albanese government allowing a person who highlights a terrorist leader in his artwork to represent Australia on the international stage at the Venice Biennale?”

Wong, the government’s leader in that place, replied that she “wasn’t aware” of the artwork.

“I agree with you that any glorification of the Hezbollah leader Nasrallah is inappropriate, and I’ve expressed those views previously, and I’ll certainly get further information for you,” she told Chandler.

Arts Minister Tony Burke, as soon as he left Question Time in the other chamber, called Creative Australia CEO Adrian Collette to ask about the work of Sabsabi’s that had been raised in the Senate.

“That particular work had not been raised with me in any of the briefs and was clearly more controversial than anything that had been,” Burke told 7.30’s Sarah Ferguson on Monday night.

“So, I was shocked when I saw that it was there and I rang Adrian to find out what had happened. At that point, he had already determined that they were going to have a board meeting that night.”

By 10pm, Sabsabi was Biennale history, removed by a unanimous vote of Creative Australia board members, one of whom — artist Lindy Lee — has since resigned.

Complexity and nuance

No one is talking. The board has commissioned an external review — not into its decisions, but into the artistic selection process, which was carried out by the five industry figures, who have expressed their joint annoyance not only at the decision, but at having learned of Creative Australia’s switcheroo via the media. The five unsuccessful artists have all called for Sabsabi’s reinstatement. None will accept the commission if Sabsabi can’t have it, which suggests Australia’s pavilion at Venice will remain empty. Pretty embarrassing, given that last year’s Australian entrant Archie Moore took out the event’s Golden Lion, making us — in sporting terms — the defending champions.

Burke insists that he did not issue any instruction to Collette. But there is approximately zero chance, of course, that Creative Australia’s emergency board meeting was unrelated to the reporting of the Nasrallah artwork or the indication in the Senate that the Coalition would be interpreting the choice of Sabsabi as some kind of endorsement of terrorism.

And with an election campaign a heartbeat away, and a culture war fully aflame, does a major arts funding body necessarily need to be told explicitly just how unhelpful it might be for a well-disposed government that has increased arts funding to be associated during a fraught campaign with an artist who once made a video where rays of light came out of a terrorist leader’s head?

One other similarity between art and politics is that both are spaces in which more than one thing can be true at once. Where complexity and nuance are everywhere.

Is it true that Jewish Australians feel like they are being conflated with Israel, and faced increasingly with symbols of hatred and intolerance that awaken all-too-familiar reminders of a past that is not very distant? Yes, that’s true.

Do artists of colour feel that their admission to institutions from which they have been historically excluded comes with the condition that they keep troublesome opinions to themselves? Yep, also true.

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Questions remain

Art is better at expressing these nuances. Better than Question Time, that’s for sure. And the translation to politics is rough. Sabsabi, for instance — a prolific worker who has made a significant body of work since the Nasrallah piece including the 2017 video installation “70,000 Veils”, which consisted of 10,000 images and took 10 years to complete — now stands defined by two lines of amateur art criticism in the Senate. Perhaps it’s not the clash between art and politics that’s the problem; it’s just that absolute scenes tend to ensue when they try to do each other’s jobs.

Sabsabi is an artist with political views. Obviously. He — and his curator Dagostino — were both supportive of 2022’s Sydney Festival artists’ boycott over the event’s financial support from the Israeli Embassy.

They are art practitioners, in other words, who have set limits around the expression of artistic freedom. That’s a political decision, and they are absolutely free to make it.

One of the teeming questions raised by the events of the past week is whether the discomfiture among Australian artists at this hot mess oozing from Creative Australia will translate into mass refusals to accept Creative Australia funding, or returning of grants, in the same way even very cash-strapped artists post-lockdown refused to accept coin from the Sydney Festival.

That would be an extremely significant outcome.

Other questions are more about process, for instance:

• Was Creative Australia unaware of its chosen artist’s political views when it enthusiastically endorsed him (bizarre, for any sentient administrator)?
• Or did it actively decide to register a vote of faith in its merit-based selection process and let art just be about art, only to fold like a deck of cards at the first whiff of what that would actually look like?
• Does the decision to call for an external review of the selection process amount to a concession that it was potentially flawed? Is this a self-protection measure? It certainly casts a shadow over the experts it recruited to review the applications, the individual responsible for the visual arts programme (who has since resigned) and of course the successful artist, his colleague and his planned project.

We don’t actually know what Sabsabi’s Biennale project was to be. It’s supposed to be a secret till the big reveal.

But the Nasrallah work has come roaring out of the archives to trump it all. The relentless primacy of image — its power, the shortcut it provides to human sentiment — is demonstrated beyond question.

Ironically, the whole affair is like an advertisement for why we need art. It’s just not exactly what the artist intended.