Are Universities ‘Letting Australian Art Down’?: ‘First Class’ Aspirations or Second Wave Cultural Cringe?

Recent indications suggest that art education in Australian universities may be undergoing a second wave or, it might be suggested, perpetual cultural cringe. Within a higher education environment dictated by stringent ERA metrics, the imperatives of student-centred, demand-driven economics, and savage course rationalisations in university art schools, ‘world class-ness’ assumes a newly heightened significance. Increasingly,’ international’ standards are geographically equated with ‘overseas’ – or anything non-Australian, just as long as ‘outputs’ happen in or emanate from the northern hemisphere. Since ’it is widely recognised that auditing regimes change the activities they seek to measure’ (Cooper & Poletti, 2011), art research conducted, published, and/or exhibited in this country may well diminish in volume as well as status and confidence in the near future. The effects of this culture of audit on Australian art practice and its histories, not to mention local and/or national small scale publishing, do not augur well for the learning choices available to students and wider audiences, many of whom are already adopting ersatz US accents. In exploring some of these recent developments in the shadow of 1970s debates on provincialism, this paper asks a number of questions: Does this phenomenon represent ‘just another colonial system… dominated by Western ethos’ (Babaii, 2010)? How can Australian and wider contemporary art history/theory curricula expand notions of ‘international’ and the contemporary to offer regional and ‘southern’ alternatives to entrenched Euramerican paradigms?