Glutbusters

February 16, 2006

Where's The Beef?

The meat, as they say, is in the subtext.

Michael Leunig is angry that his work has been appropriated and entered in a competition to find the best Holocaust cartoons. He never intended for his work to be used in this way. How that is different to Leunig juxtaposing (someone else's) 50s-style photographs of blissfully happy couples with blank speech and thought balloons to comment on the emptiness of contemporary existence, I'm not sure. I can only imagine his frustration that once his work is published he is unable to dictate EXACTLY HOW IT MUST BE READ.

Still, he's upset. So upset that he wrote perhaps one of the most self-indulgent and condescending op-ed pieces I've read in a while. Modestly entitled "Amid the pain, God puts his hand on my shoulder". God is with him, apparently, as ibises flutter in gum trees and kettles boil in rural homesteads. How earthy. Yet spiritual. Us city folk with empty lives have no idea what we're missing out on. (ie Enlightenment you latte-sipping imbecile).

But the kicker was Michael Gawenda's slapdown piece today, where he has a crack at Leunig for playing the victim and neglecting to condem the "racist exercise" that is the cartoon competition and, amidst other things, suggests that Leunig, as the highest-paid cartoonist (or even journalist) in the country, should pretty much just get over it.

There's a fair bit of distaste bubbling away between the lines of Gawenda's piece. Dropping in the fact that Leunig is extraordinarily well-paid is a particularly dirty trick. It plants in the public mind the idea that Leunig gets paid an obscene amount of money, thus shouldn't whinge so much. And suggests that maybe Gawenda's not all that keen on Leunig? Or has clashed with him in the past? Or was bent over by him in contract negotiations?

I await Leunig's response. I love a media bitch-fight.

Filed under Media