Walk into a regional gallery on a Saturday afternoon and pick up the room sheet. Count how many times the word ‘narrative’ appears. Then count ‘story’. Then ‘journey’. By the time you reach the third wall you’ll have a small pile of them, each doing the same quiet work: reassuring you that what you’re looking at has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That it means something the way a novel means something. That it can be summarised, paraphrased, and safely understood.
This isn’t a complaint about bad writing, though there’s plenty of that. It’s a question about what happens to art—and to the way we talk about art—when the demand for narrative becomes a condition of funding, exhibition, and review. When every artwork is expected to ‘tell a story’, what gets left out? What gets flattened? And whose interests does this storytelling imperative actually serve?
The word ‘narrative’ has had a strange career in Australian arts discourse. It arrived, as most jargon does, from somewhere else: literary theory in the 1970s and 80s, where it meant something specific about the structure of texts and the way readers make meaning. By the 1990s it had migrated into the social sciences, where ‘narrative inquiry’ became a respectable method for understanding human experience. Somewhere in the early 2000s it crossed into arts funding and criticism, and there it settled, like a couch someone left on the nature strip, gradually becoming part of the landscape.
Today you can’t apply for an Australia Council grant without demonstrating the ‘narrative arc’ of your project. You can’t write an exhibition catalogue essay without locating the artist’s ‘narrative journey’. You can’t review a show without noting whether the work ‘tells a story’—and if it doesn’t, that absence becomes the story itself. The pressure to narrativise has become so naturalised we barely notice it. But it’s worth noticing, because it’s not neutral. It’s a quiet form of cultural cringe, forcing Australian practice into a literary mode that doesn’t always fit the visual or sonic work being made.
Consider the Australia Council’s grant guidelines. For years the application form has asked artists to describe their project’s ‘narrative’—not its form, not its materials, not its duration or texture or colour, but its story. The assumption is that a project without a clear narrative is somehow incomplete, that it hasn’t yet justified its existence. This is a literary assumption, and it comes from a particular cultural tradition: the English novel, the well-made play, the three-act structure. It’s not a universal way of making meaning, and it’s certainly not the only way art works.
The Reuters Handbook of Journalism codifies a similar logic in the newsroom, where narrative structure is treated as a professional standard for accuracy and editorial judgment. That makes sense for journalism, which is in the business of explaining events. But art is not journalism. A painting by Helen Maudsley does not report on anything. It does not have a protagonist or a plot. It has colour, line, weight, and a particular way of holding light—specifically, the light that falls through a window in Melbourne’s inner north on a Tuesday afternoon. To ask that painting to ‘tell a story’ is to ask it to be something other than what it is.
Maudsley’s work is instructive here. Her paintings are abstract, but not in the heroic, mid-century sense. They’re quiet, built from small marks and careful adjustments, and they don’t announce themselves. They reward looking, but they don’t reward paraphrase. You can’t summarise a Maudsley painting the way you can summarise a film. You can describe what you see—a field of grey-green, a line of ochre, a patch of something that might be shadow or might be memory—but description is not narrative. Description is patient. Narrative is impatient. It wants to get somewhere.
John Nixon, the late Melbourne abstractionist, made work that was even more resistant to storytelling. His paintings, sculptures, and installations were exercises in formal clarity: circles, crosses, primary colours, found objects arranged with a kind of deadpan rigour. Nixon was interested in the history of modernism, in the legacy of Russian constructivism, in the material facts of paint on board. He was not interested in telling you a story. When curators tried to frame his work as a ‘journey’, they missed the point. The work wasn’t going anywhere. It was already there.
This is not to say that narrative is always the enemy. Some art does tell stories, and tells them well. Tracey Moffatt’s photographic series are built around implied narratives, fragments of film stills that suggest a larger drama. The work of the late Destiny Deacon used humour and performance to tell stories about race, gender, and colonial violence. But Moffatt and Deacon chose narrative as a strategy, not a requirement. The problem arises when narrative becomes the default expectation, the unexamined assumption behind every grant application and every catalogue essay.
The regional gallery context makes this pressure especially visible. When a small gallery in, say, Warrnambool or Mildura programs a solo show, the marketing language almost always frames it as a ‘journey’. The artist has been on a journey. The work represents a journey. The viewer is invited to go on a journey. This language is partly a concession to audiences who might feel intimidated by art, a way of saying: don’t worry, this will make sense, it will have a shape you recognise. But it’s also a concession to funders, who want to see evidence of development, progress, and outcomes. A journey implies all three. A painting that just sits there does not.
The irony is that some of the most powerful Australian art of the last fifty years has been resolutely non-narrative. Fred Williams’s landscapes don’t tell stories about the bush; they register its visual facts—the scatter of trees, the weight of earth, the particular green of a Lysterfield paddock after rain. Rosalie Gascoigne’s assemblages of road signs and soft-drink crates don’t narrate anything; they present the worn surfaces of rural Australia as a kind of found poetry. These artists trusted colour, texture, and arrangement to carry meaning. They didn’t need a plot.
So where did this storytelling imperative come from, and why has it taken such firm hold in Australian arts discourse? Part of the answer lies in the broader media environment. Research from the Pew Research Center on news habits and media shows that narrative framing has become increasingly central to how audiences engage with information. The decline in close following of local news—from 37% of Americans in 2016 to 21% in 2025—suggests a shift toward narrative-driven consumption, where people seek out stories that provide coherence and emotional resolution. The arts funding sector has absorbed this logic, demanding that artists provide the same kind of narrative coherence that news audiences have come to expect.
But there’s a specifically Australian dimension to this. The demand for narrative is also a demand for legibility—for art that can be explained to a minister, a board, or a philanthropic foundation in terms they understand. In a country where arts funding is perpetually precarious, where the Australia Council is regularly threatened with cuts and restructures, the pressure to justify art in narrative terms is immense. A story is easier to defend than a colour field. A journey is easier to measure than a silence.
This is where the cultural cringe re-enters, not as a loud anxiety about overseas approval, but as a quiet assumption that Australian art needs to explain itself. That it can’t just be. That it must always be about something, and that ‘aboutness’ must be translatable into words. The irony is that this assumption is itself a form of provincialism—a belief that the local can’t be trusted to speak for itself, that it needs the scaffolding of narrative to be taken seriously.
What would a non-narrative critical language look like? It would start by trusting the materials. It would describe what is actually there—the weight of a line, the temperature of a colour, the duration of a sound—without rushing to translate those things into meaning. It would allow that some art is about looking, not reading. It would admit that not every artwork has a message, and that the absence of a message is not a failure but a condition.
This kind of criticism already exists in pockets. The best writing about Australian sound art, for example, often avoids narrative entirely, focusing instead on texture, volume, and the physical experience of listening. The program notes for a concert by the Australian Art Orchestra rarely mention ‘journeys’; they talk about instrumentation, improvisation, and the acoustic properties of the room. This is criticism that trusts the ear as much as the eye, and it offers a model for how we might write about visual art differently.
The same principle applies to the way artists document their own work. When applying for grants, artists are often forced into narrative structures that don’t reflect their actual process. A painter might spend six months working on a single colour relationship, but the grant application demands a story about inspiration, development, and resolution. This is not just dishonest; it’s distorting. It trains artists to think of their work in literary terms, even when the work itself is stubbornly non-literary. There are other ways to organise creative work—an AI writing app that helps structure complex ideas without forcing a three-act arc suggests one alternative, a tool that respects the messiness of drafting rather than demanding a neat resolution.
The problem is not that stories are bad. Stories are one of the ways humans make sense of the world, and they have their place. The problem is that the demand for narrative has become a kind of gatekeeping, a way of deciding which art is legible and which is not. It privileges certain kinds of work—figurative, representational, explicitly thematic—over others. It makes abstraction seem like a refusal rather than a practice. It turns every exhibition into a book report.
And it’s not just visual art. Australian music criticism suffers from the same narrative compulsion. Album reviews routinely describe a record’s ‘arc’, as if every collection of songs must have a dramatic structure. But some of the best Australian albums of recent years—think of the Necks’ long-form improvisations, or the fragmented song-cycles of Laura Jean—resist narrative in favour of mood, texture, and duration. To judge them by their storytelling is to miss what they’re actually doing.
The same goes for dance, for experimental film, for installation art, for the kind of interdisciplinary work that happens in artist-run spaces in Footscray or Marrickville. These practices often operate in a zone where meaning is emergent, not stated—where the work unfolds in time and space without a clear beginning or end. To demand a narrative from them is to demand that they stop being what they are and become something else: a story, a lesson, a takeaway.
So what’s the alternative? It’s not to ban the word ‘narrative’ from arts writing, though a temporary moratorium might be refreshing. It’s to develop a critical vocabulary that can handle the non-narrative dimensions of art: colour, texture, scale, duration, silence, humour, boredom, pleasure. It’s to write about what art does, not just what it says. It’s to trust that a painting by Helen Maudsley or a sound work by Thembi Soddell can be meaningful without being summarisable.
This requires a different kind of attention, from critics, curators, and audiences alike. It requires sitting with a work long enough to notice what’s actually there, rather than rushing to fit it into a story. It requires admitting that some art is difficult, and that difficulty is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be experienced. It requires a criticism that is patient, descriptive, and willing to say: I don’t know what this means, but I know what it feels like.
The regional galleries that dot the Victorian countryside—in Castlemaine, in Benalla, in Hamilton—are often better at this than their city counterparts. They have smaller audiences, less pressure to generate headlines, and a closer relationship to the communities they serve. When the Castlemaine Art Museum hangs a show of local painters, the room sheet is more likely to mention the quality of the light than the artist’s ‘journey’. This is not because regional curators are more sophisticated; it’s because they’re closer to the work, and the work is closer to the place it was made. Narrative feels less necessary when the art is already embedded in a world you can see out the window.
The storytelling trap is not unique to Australia, but it takes a particular form here. It’s tied to the precarity of arts funding, the legacy of cultural cringe, and the dominance of literary models in a country that has always been more comfortable with words than with images. Breaking free of it doesn’t mean abandoning narrative altogether. It means recognising that narrative is one tool among many, and that some of the most powerful art made in this country has nothing to say and everything to show.
The next time you’re in a gallery, try this: read the room sheet, then ignore it. Stand in front of a painting and don’t ask what it means. Ask what it’s made of. Ask how it’s put together. Ask what it would sound like if it made a sound. Ask how long it took to make, and whether that time is visible in the work. These are not narrative questions, but they are critical questions. They take art seriously on its own terms, not as a story waiting to be told, but as a thing in the world, made by someone in a particular place, at a particular time, for reasons that may not be reducible to words.
That’s not a failure of criticism. That’s where criticism begins.