Gang-gang. At the NGA dear old Tom Roberts eclipsed nice young Simon Baker

Sometimes my great age (I am a Methuselah of 70) shows and it showed one day before Christmas when I came back to the newsroom from a for-me perplexing event at the National Gallery of Australia.

There had been a media preview/launch of the Gallery's grand Tom Roberts exhibition and the event had somehow been quite dominated by an attractive young man called Simon Baker. I did not know him from a bar of Sunlight Soap. But at the event everyone else did know him. They milled around him excitedly like moths attracted to a flame or like Liberal parliamentarians attracted to a barrel of entitlements. Venerable Tom Roberts himself, though palpably there in spirit in the room, was utterly overshadowed by this celebrity whippersnapper.

Returning, perplexed, to the newsroom I asked some of my fresh-faced young colleagues: "Have you guys heard of someone called Simon Baker?"

Everyone had heard of him and there was polite wonder in the eyes of some that I hadn't heard of him. It emerges that he is the Australian star of the popular US-made TV series The Mentalist. This has made him a celebrity and so has seen him appointed as the National Gallery's "ambassador".

The NGA, for all that an oldie like me couldn't at first fathom why Baker was there in the limelight for the launch of an exhibition of paintings, obviously has its finger on the pulse of our times. Baker's celebrity ambassadorship worked like a charm at this launch, and then again that evening at the glittering official, PM-attended launch.

At both events he excited people whose pulses might not otherwise have been quickened at all by just rooms of paintings. Subsequent media coverage of the media event dwelled on Baker's presence there (this columnist-reporter, too, reported a brace of his celebrity banalities). Some published press photographs of the occasion showed him standing in front of and somewhat obscuring (because he was far more important) one of Roberts' best-known masterpieces, Shearing the Rams.

Earlier, arriving for the media event, methought that here were rooms of famous, painted, framed celebrities in the forms of Roberts' celebrity paintings.

For when you love Australia and love its Impressionist paintings, lots of the works on show at Tom Roberts feel as huge and iconic as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. On merit perhaps each profound, timeless Roberts masterpiece ought to dwarf, in celebrity, a nice young Aussie actor who has done well for himself in the US.

Crossing the threshhold of the exhibition, still unaware of Simon Baker's existence let alone of his presence there as celebrity-in-chief, I gave a little whoop of bliss and bounced up to dear old Bailed Up. Some of us, oldies, have been ogling it for decades.

It was much criticised when first daubed and exhibited. Critics felt that when tackling a bailing-up subject a painter should pack it with some action, some rearing horses and blazing gang and police blunderbusses. Instead it is a very calm painting. The bailing up has been effected, no one has been hurt, horses and people have become laconic. One bushranger is flirting with a female passenger. She is finding him rather personable and is thinking of asking if she can join his gang instead of going home to her dreary husband.

You can smell the bush in Bailed Up, and the artist has made the scene so palpably hot and sunny that you may feel you need your sun cream. It is a painting one could look at a thousand times and always find something new in it. But perhaps this is true too of every episode of The Mentalist.

Ever since that NGA occasion, with Tom Roberts outcelebritied by Simon Baker, I have been taking straw polls among my fellow Australians. It emerges that there are lots of people who have never heard of Tom Roberts but hardly anyone who hasn't heard of Simon Baker. Is it only because I am an oldie (the only one in the newsroom), that this seems strange, and sad? It seems as odd and unAustralian as never hearing of and learning to love Don Bradman. But then today's young(ish) folk barely know Don Bradman either, though his name rings a bell. Mischievously I tell them, with a straight face, that he was our first openly gay prime minister (from 1948-1953). Trusting me (for I am a journalist), they believe every word.

One symptom of the ambassador's omnipresence at the media launch was that, with the teeming throng there hanging on his every word in a post-launch Q&A, the paintings were ignored. Beetling between them, every now and then I would pass by the throng and hear Baker saying things of great banality (including some unkind cliches about Canberra) that seemed of enormous interest to his audience.

This is the essence of our culture of celebrity, that once someone is famous for being famous everything they say and do is thought fascinating and newsworthy. How clever of the NGA to sense this, and to know that even though Simon Baker knows nothing about art, he is ideal for today's NGA PR purposes. Perhaps, when his celebrity ambassadorship expires, the NGA will next hire the Kardashians (the columnist wrote, pretending, so as to appear up to date, to know what a Kardashian is).