Stereo Total ... pure pop thrills in high-culture surroundings. Photograph: PR
I've always been puzzled by the definition of art. Where does entertainment stop and art begin? Is it simply a matter of something declaring itself art? It's a fertile subject for debate. Funding is usually dependent upon a series of arbitrary judgments from a collection of arbitrary people, often calling themselves an "arts council" or whatever. Does that mean that anything without their support is, by definition, not art? I only ask because over the past couple of weeks in Brisbane I've seen two shows that fall either side of the divide, even though both took place in centres set aside for the celebration of art.
On Wednesday, I went to the Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts (the clue is in the name) to see the avant-garde Japanese noise artist Tojiko Noriko. Curator Lawrence English performs weekly miracles that go almost unnoticed, such as convincing150 people clutching pillows and cushions to sit on, to venture out on a cold night to view such demanding performances. London or New York would struggle to match these numbers for this sort of music.
Noriko did not disappoint: clutching a beaker of whiskey, she tapped hidden resonances with her voice and laptop - if you'd never heard this music before, she's superficially akin to a more esoteric Björk - sometimes laughing in embarrassment, and often coming across as quite sepulchral, with shadows swirling around her. This was ART, spelled out in capital letters. Indeed, one of Lawrence's great tricks is to have achieved the status where everything he creates, curates, releases and promotes is seen as ART - and people give it due respect. You can taste their reverence in the air, hear it in the hushed whispers. There's nothing wrong with that. I'm just intrigued as to why this should be.
Then, on Saturday, I went to the Galley of Modern Art (again, the clue is in the name) to watch a live performance from Kill Rock Stars recording artists Stereo Total - part of the museum's series of Up Late concerts that coincide with a Picasso exhibition. This was a rare treat: a swarm of pleated skirts and hair-slide sporting girls dancing frantically down the front, while onstage the male-female duo bounced their way through 30 years of disco-punk anthems.
There was nothing "pure" or "artistic" here: just pure pop thrills. Sometimes, you felt Stereo Total were attempting a bastardised Gainsbourg/Birkin dynamic - only he was dressed in horrendous PVC, screaming too energetically to be considered cool, boisterous like he belonged in the satirical German punk band Die Toten Hosen. And she was rocking the librarian look, only for real, scrabbling through notebooks for words, occasionally deigning to smile at her enthusiastic support. It's the sort of music the UK - for one - never would have tolerated a few years back, unless viewed through some sort of ironic prism. But it wasn't ironic. And, despite the surroundings, this clearly wasn't ART, just sheer entertainment.
But that's the thing I want to know. Who makes these definitions?
