One of the perpetual stories of the Sydney media is the vexing question of why Ken Done doesn’t get respect. It’s a story that comes around every few years and it always posits the same argument – here’s a guy who has made millions of dollars from his designs, had his paintings hung in the Sulman and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW, has his own gallery and everybody knows who he is, yet he don’t get no respect.
This year the story is the handiwork of Richard Zachariah, a clotheshorse who has turned his journalistic talents to the art world, and his Done article Hue & Cry appeared in the August 28-29, Weekend Australian Magazine.
We have often felt that Done has been given too hard a time in the art world. We don’t care much for his paintings and his t-shirts and bedspreads and doona covers are a thing of the past, but compared to a lot of other bad artists with their own brand name galleries, he’s not that bad. He can at least put some colours together and his compositions are pleasing. We know that’s faint praise but compared to Charles Billich, Done is a freakin’ genius. But Done’s big problem is that he wants to be taken seriously by the mainstream art world, he wants to be included in proper art reference books and he wants to be recognised for his achievements.
You feel bad for Done because every time a newspaper or magazine runs a story on the guy, they have to drag out that quip by Brett Whiteley who said he’d rather “have methadone than Ken Done” and there it is again in the third paragraph of the Zachariah story. Done must spew every time he reads it – perhaps if Whiteley had opted for Ken Done over methadone he’d be alive today. The irony, however, is never remarked on and Done should feel rightly aggrieved.
Zachariah is someone with only a passing, social knowledge of the art world and doesn’t do himself or his subject many favours. When trying to calculate what Done’s work is ‘worth’ he turns to Denis Savill “an acknowledged super-dealer”:
“Ken is a marvelous marketer and most of his success has been overseas where 90 per cent of his output is sold. I know his Paris show two years ago was a sellout. However, because Dones rarely come up for auction here and Ken has his own private gallery, it’s hard to value them.”
Ouch.
Another of Done complaint is that he’s not in the Encylopaedia of Australian Art:
“And there’s the question of Done’s no-show in The Encyclopaedia of Australian Art. There are 3000 entries in this rather weighty tome, but you won’t find Done. He’s officially been left out because, he says, he hasn’t won an art prize. Does any of this upset him? Damn right it does. “I was angry about not being included,” admits Done, adding ruefully that “I thought I would have crept in at around number 2999. I am a f..king Australian artist, after all – probably the best known one around.”
What Done doesn’t seem to understand, or cannot understand, is that the way to get into the big book of Australian art is to not care. Thirty years ago, Pro Hart was in exactly the same position as Done – his work was considered amateurish and embarrassing by the ‘trendies’ of the Australian art world. Did Hart care? Not a jot. He continued on with his work and a ‘fuck you’ attitude to the art world, set up his own gallery and sold a ton of work and his famous advert where he did a “painting” on carpet with tomato sauce and jelly helped along his popular image of an artist. Eventually, not even Hart’s far out, far right anti-world-Jewish-banking-conspiracy-theory politics could keep him from evetual recognition. Pro Hart is now respectable, his work is in all the collections and he’s in the big book of art. Done just has to shut up and let the art world come around to the idea that being undemanding and decorative isn’t a bad thing per se, just stop bloody whinging about it.
Zacharia, meanwhile, tried to make the case that Ken Done is so well-known that his name has entered the vernacular:
“[…] notwithstanding the critics, Done has found a place in the nation’s vernacular and psyche, if not its high culture. He is a recurring metaphor for the colour and movement of Australians at play. For example: “On a clear spring day the spectacle resembles a Ken Done painting” (Sarah Waters, The Sunday Telegraph); “Watching the sun strike Uluru … and turn it into a Ken Done red” (Craig McGregor, The Sydney Morning Herald). The Age‘s Jonathon Green described the water off Cairns as “like swimming through Ken Done”, while Susan Kurosawa, reviewing Doyle’s Hotel at Sydney’s Watsons Bay in The Australian, wrote: “It’s as if I have drifted inside a Ken Done painting.”
This is‘journalism by search engine’. Although Whiteley’s mean spirited remark has been the most retold Done quote, we have always preferred Anna Johnson’s quip “I can’t Ken Done it…” and hope that one day it’ll pass into wider usage.
