The beleaguered CEO of Creative Australia, Adrian Collette, has quashed rumours that emerged overnight that he and the chair of the body’s board, Robert Morgan, had resigned.
“There is a rumour circulating on social media that Robert Morgan and I have resigned,” said his email to all staff of the government arts funding organisation, sent just after 8.30am on Friday.
“I would like to confirm to you that this is not the case.”
Since Collette and Morgan’s appearance at a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night, calls for their resignations have mounted from artists, arts administrators, curators and academics.
A letter by senior arts practitioners, administrators and academics to the federal arts minister, Tony Burke, has been drafted, demanding the pair’s sacking on grounds alleging failed governance, based on evidence that was given in parliament on Tuesday.
Estimates heard that after an emergency meeting on the night of 13 February, the board voted to withdraw a contract for artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino to represent Australia at the 2026 Venice Biennale, without giving either the opportunity to address the board.
Questioning revealed that prior to awarding the Biennale contract to Sabsabi, neither the chief executive nor the board were aware of a work by him titled Thank You Very Much, despite that work being publicly available on the artists’s website.
It has been suggested in parliament and by some sections of the media that the 2006 work, featuring images of the 9/11 attacks and a press conference appearance by US president George W Bush where he uttered the words of the work’s title, that the artist was, without any allowance for nuance or ambiguity, endorsing the 2001 attacks in New York – claims strongly disputed by art experts who have publicly discussed the work, and disputed by the artist himself.
Collette told the hearing the decision to cancel the commission was made in the interests of “social cohesion” and to have continued with the contract would have had the “potential to trigger divisive narratives”.
He admitted the possibility that the Australian Pavilion could remain empty at next year’s prestigious international event, and conceded there would be a cost – yet to be calculated – to the public purse for Creative Australia’s decision to cancel the contract just six days after publicly announcing Sabsabi and Dagostino’s appointments.
On Wednesday, the Greens called on Burke to ask for Collette’s resignation, and to sack the entire Creative Australia board, with senator Sarah Hanson-Young saying their positions had become untenable.
“They failed to do due diligence, they’ve failed at good governance, and they’ve failed to look after the artists,” she said.
Burke, who has consistently maintained he played no part in Creative Australia’s decision to cancel the contract – but has confirmed he made a phone call to Collette about three hours before the board met – responded to the Greens’ call for the resignations on Wednesday by defending Creative Australia and praising the work it did “connecting artists to audiences” – without addressing the Guardian’s queries about the role Creative Australia had played in disconnecting an artist from a global audience at next year’s Venice Biennale.
“We cannot let conflicts around the world result in a never ending path of artists being cancelled from the right and the left,” Burke said in a statement to the Guardian.
The Guardian has sought further comment from Burke’s office.
