I followed the fortunes of what used to be known as the Melbourne Festival until it was struck off the city’s cultural calendar a few years back. If I half-close my eyes I remember when a tram parade heralded in its first version Spoleto Festival Melbourne, The Festival of the Three Worlds, directed by Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti. I’ve followed its reinventions and the different, and often indifferent, directions of artistic directors across the 34 years of its operation. Along the way it was accused of being everything under the sun – too middle class, a plaything for the rich and powerful – you name it. And I’ve watched as friendly state governments have repeatedly tipped in bucket loads of cash to bail out directorial visions.

The demolition job on the Melbourne Festival was in the sights of this state government for some time. Tucked away inside Victoria’s first-ever creative arts strategy (2016-20) was the announcement of an independent Victorian Festival review to take a ‘fresh look at the role and delivery of Victoria’s festivals’. The review, launched by the Victorian Arts Minister, was symbolically pictured against the backdrop of Sidney Nolan’s image of Ned Kelly pointing his weapon at the assembled audience. Regardless of the outcome, the festival was dead the moment the review started.

No rational observer would have argued with the need for some re-calibration at Melbourne Festival. However, its replacement with Rising stuck a dagger into the heart of the concept of a festival as a showcase for the arts as the highest expression of culture. I won’t use the unfashionable word ‘elite’; however, the notion of a festival that presents the pinnacles of theatre, dance, music, and visual arts; the most difficult, the most challenging from around the globe for a discernible arts public – is now dead. That’s in a city that prides itself as the cultural capital of Australia.

It’s all been replaced by Rising, an event connected symbolically and metaphorically to the lunar calendar, and a ‘festival aspiring to be a cultural leader in diversity and inclusion’. In other words, Melbourne’s major cultural festival is the vanguard of the Premier and his acolytes’ crusade to prescribe the cultural agenda. If you peeked down the wormhole, a portal on the initial Rising website, you got some clues. Down to a section called, Essential art and the new world order, produced by Rising’s artistic associate Kimberley Moulton.

I quote:

‘As we come to understand and control Covid, at least in Australia, we continue to battle the enduring disease of racism in society. A pill of denial has been swallowed by powerful factions across the world who, in a collapsing world, refuse to quell the rise of white supremacy and disastrous climate change. People of Colour and First Nations peoples are feeling the full force of this toxic fire fuelled by greed, power and narcissistic charlatans masquerading as leaders.’

If that didn’t take your fancy, you could have looked at In plain sight. This project is about incarceration founded by Canadian artist Cassils and an American artist rafa esparaza, whose recent work:

‘…involved the self-identifying brown and queer artist chiselling himself out of a concrete column in front of the White House. And Cassils, a transgender person, uses their own body as a sculptural material by employing performance and bodybuilding to challenge visual gender stereotypes.’

The initial Rising website describes itself as a ‘call to arms’, and a few years down the track from the last iteration of the Melbourne Festival, it’s clear the call to arms is more about ideology and politics than about cultural values. Or is that the same thing now in Victoria?

Apologists will argue that Rising is a vital realignment to keep Victoria’s self-conscious moniker of ‘Australia’s cultural capital’ flying high. But it’s not about culture – it’s about ideology and the numbers. The combined might of Visit Victoria and Creative Victoria are intent on proving business cases for increased overnight stays and ‘upticks’ in economic activity. As with many cultural events and institutions, the numbers game is now a prime measure of artistic worth.

Bella D’Abrera wrote about the humble kazoo and Melbourne’s attempt to break the record for the most people playing it at the one-time equals cultural highlight. But, lucky for her, she wasn’t there for what was billed as a highlight of the arts program – a two-hour performance called Tanz by a naked group of dancers from Switzerland. This ‘highlight’ took the cake for cheap sensationalism. Audience members were shown the art of vaginal inspection (from behind), group masturbation, rats in the birth canal etc in what I feel is a derivative, tacky, and tasteless exhibition of the lowest common denominator.

And if Tanz didn’t make your blood boil then you could have gone to see Euphoria in the grand edifice of state power, the Melbourne Town Hall. A multi-screen event, it stars Cate Blanchett as a tigress roaming empty supermarkets at the end of the world. I was lectured to by a group of dope-smoking NYC youths for 15 minutes and realised that Euphoria felt more like a front for a didactic dirge bemoaning the state of the world and existing power structures.

Rising, the collective groupthink of government and administrators, set my cultural antenna on edge from its first iteration in May 2021. The destruction of the former Melbourne Festival, in the name of ideology and populism, has now been firmly cemented into Melbourne’s cultural landscape.