When art becomes ideology: antisemitism, public funding and the loss of common cultural ground!

If you have read Henry's regular columns in The Australian, you already know the quality of his mind. An Officer of the Order of Australia, former senior official at the OECD, and adviser to governments and institutions, he has spent decades shaping public debate in Australia and abroad. His work reflects a deep concern for the institutions, freedoms and cultural traditions that sustain a liberal society, and his expertise reaches well beyond economics.

The contemporary art world, Henry Ergas argues, has undergone a profound transformation: aesthetic judgment has increasingly given way to ideological conformity. Drawing on his extensive experience in public policy and arts philanthropy, he contends that many publicly funded cultural institutions now reward political orthodoxy ahead of artistic excellence, creating an environment in which dissent carries professional costs and antisemitism can be excused or normalised when presented as anti-Zionism. He examines the rise of "artivism", the politicisation of arts funding, and the conversion of galleries, museums and festivals from shared civic spaces into arenas of political mobilisation.

What is at stake is far more than the integrity of the arts; it is the hard-won autonomy of the aesthetic sphere. The implications extend well beyond the arts themselves, for the question is whether cultural institutions can remain places where citizens of differing convictions encounter one another, or whether they deepen the ideological divisions that increasingly erode our common civic life. When institutions charged with promoting aesthetic values become enforcers of political orthodoxy, the arts no longer enlarge the public mind; they narrow it.

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