Time to take our eye off the ball

By TIM WILSON*

With the America's Cup rout complete, it seems salutary - indeed patriotic - to suggest that this Waterloo might be beneficial. Why? It's a blood nose for sports nazis.

New Zealand has gorged large helpings of self-esteem from its prowess at marginal sports. These international triumphs, so conventional wisdom and sports administrators say, reflect well on us. When our sailors beat the world, we supposedly walk a little taller. Ditto when the All Blacks, Tall Blacks and Silver Ferns prevail.

But here's the rub. Should we lose ... oh God, it's too terrible to even contemplate.

After watching our much-heralded yachting machine heading for Davy Jones' locker not once but twice, and having heard the evasions, self-deception and glad-handing associated with the America's Cup regatta, I can't help wondering why we insist on assigning such weight to sporting events.

That other measures might play a part seems not only reasonable, but also necessary as a matter of national survival. One, surely, must be culture.

Put it another way. Is a Len Lye sculpture a match for a boat race, won or lost? Put it another, more contentious way. Is Janet Frame more interesting than Dean Barker?

I could fudge this by saying they're different entities, and of course, they are.

Sport's great attraction is its immediacy, its bellicosity.

Two teams go out before a large audience. One comes back waving their arms in the air, the other returns wishing to be garrotted by their underpants. Always, someone wins, someone else loses.

This quality allows for the instant rewards that jingoism and prejudice supply. One rarely hears of opera hooligans.

But culture - by this, I mean everything that isn't what is proclaimed to be popular culture - has another advantage over sport, in that you can't lose at it. History absorbs artistic failures readily; it's jampacked with bad paintings, half-assed musicians and dreary writers.

They form compost, the bad smells and vile emanations of which may nourish more successful organisms.

Here lies culture's greatest shackle. It's not instant. To return to the Len Lye comparison. What you see in a Len Lye work, such as One Flip and Two Twisters, is an artistic boat race, recalled.

A tradition is contemplated, past successes assayed and so on, all the jargon that art critics like to throw about, all of which means that someone studied a lot and decided, "This works, and that doesn't".

This brings me back to the question of Frame v Barker. It's not a fair fight, if only because a 20-something anyone can rarely compete - in terms of emotional depth and interest - with someone who has age and agency. Frame, too, has had a longer career.

But the comparison, if unfair, is helpful. Culture is superior to sport because it offers a more nuanced view of national identity, and the experience of being a New Zealander.

When you read about egg-and-chive sandwiches in an Owen Marshall short story, a resonance occurs, a recognition of familiarity and strangeness also, a glimpse of how exotic and quiet we are.

But I won't make this an argument in which culture bashes sport, and wins. Sporting victories invariably produce great thrills. It's the group experience, magnified. I do wonder about sports players, most of whom are in my experience without reflection, and prone to excesses of boasting or melancholy.

Of course, when one considers the catalogue of emotional self-absorption that makes up the private lives of many artists, there may be more common ground between the two disciplines than was thought.

You would have a hard time convincing most New Zealanders that this is so. We remain suspicious of culture (in part because we believe philistinism is somehow a demonstration of good manners). But we're cleverer than Australians and think more laterally than Americans.

We are right to long for a national identity based on international success. The alternative risks a kind of mental interbreeding, a risk that is constant.

Questions we should be asking are: What is culture? What does local culture mean? Why is that important?

These are continually being debated within the artistic community, but they need to be addressed in the mainstream, particularly if the mainstream is to have any defence against the massagings of fact that have taken place during the America's Cup campaign. I still cannot erase the television commentator's voice informing me, when the spinnaker pole broke, that Team New Zealand was in "a bit of trouble".

Conversely, culture isn't immune to this kind of hubris. I remember being told that the prices of Colin McCahon's paintings would soon increase rapidly. This expectation came, I suspect, from the A Question of Faith exhibition held last year at the Stedelijik Museum in Amsterdam. McCahon was to be recognised as the genius that he was ... in Europe.

So far as I can tell, McCahon's work has not undergone a speculative boom. The intention of the exhibition's organisers was not to pump prices for McCahons, but it was - at least in gossip - seen here as that. In New Zealand, there always has to be a pay dirt.

The same expectations have been voiced about The Lord of the Rings and the America's Cup. This win/film/exhibition will put us on the map. We'll count for something then.

Considering the reception of such grand projects, I'm reminded of another collection of large-fix solutions that are now discredited.

During the late 1970s, the National Government, or more precisely Robert Muldoon, almost bankrupted the nation by erecting a series of white elephants that would earn foreign currency and protect our fragile economy from the coming oil shocks.

It was called Think Big, but as Muldoon's prophecies were proved wrong, should have been relabelled "Think Harder".

New Zealand's size, our precariousness and our natural penchant for the gothic mode, make us susceptible to magic-bullet solutions, culturally, and economically. But the desire for the great defining all-purpose, contradiction-neutralising art-work, novel or boat race also contains something dank and adolescent.

Until we understand this, the search for the next Think Big will continue, with the attendant giddy highs when it is supposedly found and the savage, liver-chewing lows when it is lost.

* Tim Wilson is a New Zealand writer living in New York.

Further reading: nzherald.co.nz/americascup