The business of "making money out of art" is once again under the spotlight.

Certainly, there is an unlovely underbelly to the commercial world of art. The same can be said of football, literature,cricket, medicine, mining exploration, irrigation, advertising, journalism, and a host of other human activities.

The business of making money, given the constructs of the world around us, is a necessity. Even those who "opt out " - the contemporaries of the "beat'" generation - are dependent for survival on the mechanisms of the commercial world. The dole, the pension, soup kitchens, refuges, are all supplied from the "overflow" of capitalism, a society which recognises in principle the obligation to provide for those in need. There are many less wealthy societies who do not provide these basics. Subsistence living was quite possible in former times and former societies, pre-settlement Australian Aboriginal society being a role model for that style of existence. In the modern world, as much as individuals may lament its passing, that mode of living is almost impossible to attain.We have overall lost the art of being genuinely self-sufficient.

The business of making lots of money is tied to all sorts of abstract wish-fulfilment which is rarely diagnosed for what it is. Individuals can move from perceiving themselves on the "receiving end" of what is dished out to them, to becoming "in control", and from being "in control" to being powerful and dominant, with others under their control. But what people do when they have reached that position is as variable as the means by which they attained it. Some develop political ambitions. Some become tyrants in their sphere of influence. Some squander on " high living". But many wealthy individuals and companies also give huge amounts of money to all sorts of causes and public programs. It is in fact an inbuilt expectation in the capitalist world that this will happen. The more abstract expectations, yearnings for human fulfilment, while often firing the quest for wealth, are much less tangible and much less easy to attain.In fact, the quest for wealth can frequently become so demanding and absorbing that there is no time or space left for identifying, defining or developing other directions.Thus the patron of the arts " buys" what is perceived as the fulfilment - the products of the artists world.

Much art has arisen out of struggle and poverty. But the concept of the necessity of poverty to produce good art is a nineteenth century construct which does not, on close examination, bear much relation to reality. Many fine artists, whose work endures as representing the pinnacle of their age, were comfortably employed, and sometimes financially successful in their own right. Visual artists Da Vinci and Raphael, composers Verdi and Rossini, writers Jane Austen and George Eliot exemplify the point.

The idea that artists "should not profit from human need and suffering" is missing the point entirely. Artists need recompense for their work in order to continue doing it.They have as much right as doctors, lawyers and undertakers ( who all earn their keep from human suffering) to have the means to pursue it. And if they do well, and they are of benign disposition, they are in a prime position to do good works as well as the next person.

Artists who achieve recognition are in general those who are able to express, with consummate skill in their chosen medium, the depth and subtlety of human experience as it is perceived in their age. An artist working from a desperately dislocated society will produce work markedly different from an artist in times of tranquillity. In our contemporary world torn by turmoil and dislocation, where the domination of the media makes it almost impossible not to be confronted by this on a daily basis, the world of the artist is often distressing, sometimes severely dislocated, and frequently fragmented. To depict the distress and suffering becomes part of the artists psyche; it is virtually inescapable.

The surge in popularity of Australian Aboriginal art has everything to do with the immense turmoil of Western society in the past one hundred years. Aboriginal artists, despite the genocide, despite the dislocation, despite the determined attempts to expunge language and culture from racial memory, are proving extraordinarily tough and resilient. And what they paint is the very thing that Westerners hunger for - a holistic view of existence, secure, unshakeable, a spiritual depth and calm certainty of spiritual relationships which cannot be fenced in, trampled on or taken away. And so Westerners will buy what they produce.

The immense dilemma for Aboriginal people, and for white Australians, is to reconcile current possibilities with immensely disparate views of the way the world, and relationships, should be. Aboriginal art is taking centre stage because its concepts, the history it depicts, are forcing Westerners to recognise the ugly underbelly of what has gone before; and to grieve for what is lost; and to rethink the future.

Far from being a cynical exploitative bonanza, this upsurge in Aboriginal art is a massive challenge to direction and commitment in the modern world. In any age we have historians, commentators, lawyers, despots asserting their point of view; but it is the artists whose work is the real rock on which any age is built or founders, and it is the art which speaks, the art which reverberates throughout the centuries.

Copyright, January 2008, Dindy Vaughan