KEY POINTS:
After several years playing Father Christmas, art commentator Hamish Keith is ready to pass the jolly red suit on to someone else, and he has somebody in mind.
Speaking at his Auckland home on Franklin Rd, known for its street display of Christmas lights and the hordes of visitors they attract, Keith says a new resident has moved in to the street and the duty may be his.
"It might be Bill Ralston's turn, he doesn't know it yet," Keith says.
While Keith may have retired from one role, he still has plenty of passion for what he calls the convenient half-truths New Zealanders have been told about their art and culture.
Keith, who has just returned from four months in Berlin where his wife, costume designer Ngila Dickson, was working on a Clive Owen movie, is promoting his latest venture, arts documentary The Big Picture and accompanying book.
The series, which started last week, screens at the unsociable time of 10.25pm on Sundays.
"It's just part and parcel of under-valuing our art, our history and our culture."
Keith, 71, says he has spent all of his adult and teenage years worrying and struggling with the concept that "what we were and what we said we were were two different things".
The book is an effort to redress that, he says.
"It was a series of convenient half-truths which New Zealanders were told and obliged to swallow about their origins and about the inhabitants of the country," he says.
The rot began to set in in the 19th century when in 1907 "the country elected a farming Government and it was convenient for them to smudge the realities of NZ life".
"It was convenient for them to see Maori as a declining race, consigned to the past, to present Maori art as from the past, hunter gatherer, now gone.
"The sad thing about it was that spin was assisted by the museums who should have been looking after it."
Keith would like to see New Zealand facing up to some of this country's fundamental untruths and being honest with itself.
"You have convenience of half-truths like biculturalism - what could that possibly mean?
"Does that mean pre-contact, all Maori were the same? Maori aren't the same to this day, there are enormous variations in their customs and views."
While the art was a true reflection of what was going on in our culture the presentation of it, or how it wasn't presented, wasn't, he says.
"These smooth half-truths are still going on about New Zealanders: all our inventiveness comes from number eight fencing wire, that we're distant, isolated - all of that is wrong.
New Zealand is an exciting, innovative country, which has done remarkable things over a long period of time, he says.
"In some strange way we've been taught to ignore that, ignore the realities of our history."
"I would love to be able to sit down and figure out how that happened."
If Keith can't figure it out, it would be hard to imagine who could.
He abandoned a career as an artist after completing a diploma at the Canterbury School of Fine Art in 1956, deciding to focus on being a curator.
He worked at the Auckland City Art Gallery from 1958 to 1970 and co-wrote the first history of New Zealand art, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting in 1969.
Culture is a very complicated and enriching thing and Keith would like to see the country enriched, if the people who were in charge of its image stopped telling lies, he says.
"New Zealand is not divided up into a bunch of indigenous people who belong to the past and brave little battlers who are struggling away in back-country towns.
"It's crap, someone tell the film commission - oh, I didn't say that!"
The highlights of researching the series included having access to art and places like the rock shelters, first-hand accounts of the art that he knew about but had not seen.
The book and series is Keith's attempt to give all New Zealanders a similar kind of access into their art, culture and history.
"Isn't it exciting we've run out of any sport that we can possibly be world champions in?
"Does this mean sport will be relegated to 10.25 on a Sunday night and art will get the 6.45pm slot on all the news bulletins? I don't think so."
* The Big Picture is available now and the television series screens on Sunday on One at 10.25pm.
- NZPA
