Beware the the blockbuster clickbait

And yet this week's news that the best-known of his several paintings of sunflowers is coming to Canberra has somehow failed to thrill me. I love great art but doubt very much that I will bother to sally forth to see this painting during its sojourn here during the National Gallery of Australia's just-announced blocksmashing exhibition Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London. The extravaganza will decorate the NGA from 3 November 2020 to 14 March 2021.

Mischievously, politically, the NGA has timed the show to open on presidential election day in the USA so that there will be a joint celebration of the finest of arts and of an end to the nightmare (it is only a dream, isn't it, Readers?) of the Trump presidency.

When and if I boycott Botticelli to Van Gogh it will be because there is something about the contrived display of celebrity paintings (paintings like this Sunflowers, almost, after the Mona Lisa, the most recognisable of all artworks) that unnerves, that makes the sensitive gallery-goer feel a little used, played, exploited.

Going out to see celebrity paintings feels, to me, a slightly tawdry activity not unlike the utterly tawdry excursion of going out to see visiting human celebrities like, say, the Kardashians or, worse still, celebrity royals like Kate and Will and Harry and Meghan all of them only famous for being famous.

Just as I would not cross the road to see Harry and Meghan (not that those two snobs are ever likely to be on the other side of a street in my working-class suburb where the average house is only a fraction of the size of our royal families' children's dolls houses) I'm not sure I want to go across the city to take an NGA celebrity bait.

But even as I write that I can see that this is not one of my best analogies. I rather pride myself on my analogies and can see that this one is flawed because going out to see something wondrous, like a Van Gogh painting, is not the same as going out to see unremarkable snob-mediocrities like Kate, Will, Harry and Meghan.

So my resistance to going to see Sunflowers at the NGA must be more nuanced than that, and have something else to do with unease at great paintings being used as blockbuster clickbait (here I am imagining the virtual clicking of the artful NGA's busy virtual turnstiles).

Then, too, I rather like to have one-on-one pilgrimages to and interviews with the works of art I love. Just last weekend I was able to (palely) loiter with beloved works at the Art Gallery of NSW. But I know that, such is the way with patron-magnetising blockbusters, it will be impossible for Sunflowers and this columnist to have any time alone together at the teeming Botticelli to Van Gogh.

Madding throngs of bogans with weaponised elbows will jostle me aside so that they can have their 7.5 seconds (for bogan gallery-goers have teeny attention spans) in front of Sunflowers and so tick it off their blockbuster-visit bucket list.

Of all of Almighty God's many unattractive qualities perhaps the worst is His filthy temper.

Israel Folau is surely right when he says that the present fires are God's punishment of Australia for embracing same-sex marriage and for Australia's various other wicked trespasses.

But how typical of God that, in His exceeding great tantrum, he is using His fires to hurt and terrify absolutely everyone in the fires' paths irrespective of whether or not those folk supported or opposed same-sex marriage.

Innocent victims include, too, the hundreds of koalas and other creatures (surely none of them with so much as a point of view about same-sex marriage) killed by the fires. The collateral damage when the God of Israel Folau and of Scott Morrison (and of all Christian believers who are earnest about what the Bible says) loses his hair-trigger temper is always catastrophic. There is never any granulation when God comes to the end of His tether. He smites everyone and everything.

As someone who lives in a generally amoral city and who knows his Bible well I am always worrying that, one day, God will do to Canberra what, as reliably reported in Genesis, He did to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, destroying them and all of their citizens, the perverse and the pure, with fire and brimstone. (For a glimpse of what it was like Google Lucas van Leyden's dramatic painting Lot and his Daughters (1521) a painting I really would cross the road to look at.) And eerily, worryingly, Canberra, just like Sodom and Gomorrah, is a city on a plain. Cities on plains do rather stick out and may somehow be especially prone to moral decay.

And so in these Folauesque, Bible-literalist times I shuddered when in recent days there was open reporting in The Canberra Times (with pictures) of the ACT chief minister's marriage to a man. Horror! Might it not have been safer, for all Canberrans and our city, if we had kept this out of the press and so had left our tantrum-prone God ignorant of Canberra and its wayward ways?