This is the Streisand Effect, a phenomenon named after Barbra Streisand’s 2003 legal attempt to suppress aerial images of her Malibu home, which instead made them iconic. It’s the cultural equivalent of pushing something under the rug only to trip over the lump. The more you try to suppress, the more attention you generate.
When Creative Australia removed Khaled Sabsabi from the 2026 Venice Biennale, they likely hoped to avoid controversy. But in trying to sidestep the war on Gaza and southern Lebanon, they only intensified the spotlight. Sabsabi’s proposed work centred on co-existence and empathy, not ideology.
His removal wasn’t about the content of his work, but of an ambient fear: that platforming an Arab-Australian voice shaped by these regions might be seen as taking sides.
Sabsabi is no stranger to complexity. His practice has always been about multiplicity, diasporic experience, and spiritual presence. To frame his work as anything but an invitation to nuanced co-existence is not a mistake; it’s a deliberate misreading. A politicised one. And it’s had consequences. Since the Venice debacle, Sabsabi has also lost a major exhibition at MUMA. According to his gallerist, Josh Milani, unless Creative Australia moves to reinstate him, ‘his career is finished.’
That might sound dramatic, perhaps even strategic hyperbole, but the danger is real. While removing Sabsabi from the Venice ticket drew attention to the issues he was addressing, it also led to the cancellation of key institutional exhibitions, which are vital for independent artists. Moreover, the fallout, including staff resignations, senate estimate inquiries, and negative media coverage, has arguably produced the very outcome Creative Australia claimed to want to avoid: a decline in public support for the arts.
This moment now acts as a litmus test: who among our cultural institutions will step up and platform Sabsabi’s work and the challenges that flow from it? Which of them are willing to ‘risk’ being the site of complexity, the site of discomfort, the site of dialogue?
This is not just about Sabsabi. It’s about the institutional malaise that grows when managerialism replaces creative and critical inquiry.
In trying to avoid the political, they become an arm of the political machine – enforcing sanitised, normative narratives, and failing the diverse publics they purport to serve. Risk-averse institutions risk becoming dangerous actors.
When institutions suppress artistic inquiry, particularly the kind that grapples with geopolitics, injustice, or the messiness of human experience, they reduce their own legitimacy as sites of democratic, engaged, truthful, creative, and sustainable inquiry.1 They also reveal the fragility of the artist under the weight of institutional risk-management.
As Louise Adler writes in The Australian Financial Review, the uneasy relationship between donors and cultural institutions makes it difficult to know ‘who’s feeding whom, and who’s biting the hand.’ The threat here isn’t just about funding; it’s about values, integrity, and what we understand art to be in the first place.
Art opens space/s for complexity, contradiction, and radical possibility. And yet, we’re seeing a slow, pervasive, and bureaucratic creep towards insidious forms of risk-aversion. It’s everywhere: in the ethics applications that turn postgraduate research into insurance fodder; in the institutional silence surrounding genocide; in the withdrawal of support for artists who challenge the status quo.
Meanwhile, in the world of big business, risk is not just tolerated – it’s lionised. Elon Musk is throwing billions of public money into his Mars fantasies while simultaneously shutting down departments that provide basic social benefit, hyping memecoins like DOGE and propping up an increasingly erratic presidency that’s tanking the global economy. We are witnessing a hyper-accelerated form of ‘dick culture,’ where phallic ambition masquerades as vision, and yet somehow this is the kind of ‘risk-taking’ that’s bankrolled, platformed, and mythologised.
So how do we square this? Why are we so afraid of investing in radically new ways of seeing, being, and doing economy, politics, and sociality, when we’re clearly prepared to bet the planet on billionaire vanity projects?
Why is a peaceful, contemplative artwork by a Lebanese-Australian artist seen as ‘too risky,’ while speculative space colonisation and fossil-fuel acceleration are paraded as progress? This contradiction lies at the heart of our current crisis of institutional and cultural imagination.
We must advocate for artistic methodologies as essential, not ornamental, to the functioning of cultural and academic institutions. This includes welcoming uncomfortable truths, practicing open and agonistic dialogue, and accepting that to be creative is to be in tension with control. Institutions must be willing to ‘die a little.’ That is: they must take the hits, sustain the bruises, and risk their own reputations in service of something greater. Otherwise, they will drift into the banal and the oppressive.
The Sabsabi affair is more than a case study in censorship – it’s a crucible for every artist, arts worker, and cultural leader. Will we continue to let managerial fear eclipse the possibility of artistic courage? Or will we commit to the risk of radical, heterotopian thinking-doing?
The question, as always, is not whether risk is present. The question is: who bears it?
- Connell, R. (2022) The good university: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change. author Raewyn Conell. S.l.: Bloomsbury academic.
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Dario Vacirca is an artist, researcher, and curator/producer working across cultural strategy and public programming. With a PhD in Creative Arts from Deakin University, Dario’s work explores transformational aesthetics, institutional critique, and performative activism. He has led major cultural campaigns, directed festivals, and contributed to academic and community arts projects nationally and internationally.
Main image: Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman, California Coastal Records Project, www.californiacoastline.org. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. This original picture has been digitally altered by the author.