Once again, some small but loud sections of the Adelaide community are showing little understanding of art and its crucial role in public life.

Fresh from trashing photographer Bill Henson on the basis of spurious assumptions about his work, The Sunday Mail has conscripted Opposition Leader Steven Marshall to its campaign against a newly commissioned opera.

The opera, production of which is still years hence, will be based on Adelaide writer Stephen Orr’s acclaimed novel Time’s Long Ruin, which itself is based on the disappearance of the Beaumont children – a tragedy that has been the subject of thousands of column inches of speculative reporting in the Adelaide media over the past four decades.

Marshall, who hasn’t yet summoned the will to announce a substantive policy on the arts, quickly spotted the low-hanging fruit and grasped it, describing the $100,000 Arts SA grant to State Opera and its co-producer as a demonstration of the government’s poor priorities. In one blow, he showed himself to be peculiarly unaware of the manner in which arts grants are administered, and struck fear into the local arts community about what they can expect from a Marshall government.

Singing from the same hymnsheet, Sunday Mail editor David Penberthy, fresh from his successful attack on Henson, says the very idea of the work is offensive and calls it out as an “excruciating wankfest”.

He is particularly contemptuous of the fact that it is an opera.

“The idea of setting this tragedy to music is so frivolous as to be insulting,” he writes. “Indeed, why not go one step further and just make it a musical? We could all sing along.”

I await his next column about the outrage that is The Sound of Music – a musical about Nazi-occupied Austria. I expect to see him picketing the next sing-along screening at the Capri.

Bizarrely, Penberthy is cool with film versions of real-life tragedies. Snowtown, about the bodies in the barrels case, was “brilliant and important”.

How does Penberthy know that the opera won’t also be “brilliant and important”?

As with the pre-emptive strike on Henson, the arbiters of taste are slamming a piece of art that they have not seen; indeed, the work has not yet been created.

To gain some clues about how the work might turn out, it would have been easy enough to research Orr’s book, or even read it.

The book has been acclaimed for its responsible treatment of the difficult subject matter. It is a fictionalised account, with names, the setting and countless other details changed.

An inquiring mind could easily find some of Orr’s thoughts about the crucial issue of child protection in this piece he wrote for InDaily this year. Exploitative? Not in the least. Compassionate and deeply insightful? Most certainly.

Then there’s the opera’s artistic director, Timothy Sexton, a man whose career in the arts is well-known to be founded on decency, intelligence and taste. The most cursory knowledge of the arts in Adelaide would tell you this.

And what of this particular art form? Opera, for those who don’t know, is a beautiful, centuries-old art form that has tackled stories of tragedy with great effect from the very beginning.

Penberthy must have missed the acclaimed opera Dead Man Walking, which had its debut in Adelaide in 2003. It told the true story of a criminal who is executed for his crimes in Louisiana. Audiences were moved. One critic noted that the production avoided the sensationalism that marred the film of the same name.

But there is something more important being contested here than whether a Murdoch editor thinks opera is wanky or not.

The issue is the importance of art and the work of artists, and their treatment by those who seek to de-fund and de-value their contributions.

These critics fail to recognise the absolutely central role of serious art in addressing and exposing dark and troubling issues.

Artists play a role in this sphere that journalists and politicians rarely achieve (some, like former Murdoch journalist Caroline Overington, use their reporting experience to produce a piece of art, which arguably endures for longer, reaches more readers and touches them in ways that their news articles cannot).

How deep would be our understanding of the Holocaust without novels such as Primo Levi’s If This is a Man, or Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark; how much less profound our understanding of Cambodia’s disastrous years under Pol Pot without The Killing Fields, or the bloody mess of the Vietnam War without Full Metal Jacket?

Indeed, it is no surprise that dictatorial regimes often seek to silence, first, the artists, because they understand the power of art to expose, to challenge, to subvert.

Pablo Picasso, probably the most important visual artist in history, said that “art is a lie that makes us realise truth”.

Before this quote is dismissed as a “wank” from a bloke who should have just stuck with pretty landscapes that people, you know, actually want to hang on their wall, let’s consider for a moment one of Picasso’s most famous paintings.

In April 1937, the German Luftwaffe bombed the Basque town of Guernica at the request of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, with horrific effect.

It wasn’t the most deadly attack of the Spanish civil war but Picasso – outraged by the terrible loss of life – captured the chaos and fear for all time in one enormous abstracted work. It looked nothing like the literal reality of the scene in Guernica’s destroyed streets – but it spoke a deep and enduring truth.

It caused a sensation at the time, drawing attention to the bloodbath happening in Spain. Today, people are still drawn to the painting where they remember the tragedy of Guernica. Without this work would any of us remember this otherwise obscure town and what once went on there? Without this work, how many of us would still be moved by the suffering of the people on that day so long ago?

Real flesh and blood people died in Guernica – sons, daughters, mothers and fathers. Would anyone accuse Picasso of trivialising this tragedy? Did anyone demand Picasso ask permission of the victims’ families?

It is desperately unfair to accuse State Opera of a lack of taste and assume that no good can come of their work. Of course, any ambitious work of art involves some risk and this project may fail. On the other hand, it could turn out to be a significant and important work.Why not reserve judgment until it has been produced?

The premature debate raises an additional troubling question: does it suit a particular political and media agenda to paint lovers of fine art to be wankers and toffs, and the Government as out of touch with “ordinary” people? That’s a rhetorical question.

Meanwhile, our airwaves and bandwidth are clogged with vacuous and genuinely exploitative “reality” nonsense, an endless stream of meaningless soft-core celebrity porn and dehumanisingly violent entertainments.

The mainstream media, which once was a sober explainer of world events, now feeds us a relentless diet of news reports about the latest tragedy-du-jour – murders, fires, earthquakes, rapes, bashings, you name it; it’s all fleeting fodder for the rolling 24-hour news cycle. Sometimes, some might say often,  these reports are decontextualised, ephemeral, unenlightening – disturbing events rise and disappear without explanation or deeper examination. And, then, occasionally, it seems some media organisations are prepared to do just about anything to deliver this stream of gruesome info-tainment to us in ever more prurient ways.

If there is an “excruciating wankfest” going on in our culture, the contribution by serious artists is but a tiny tickle compared to the orgiastic output of some mainstream media companies.

Which leaves me with this question: if serious artists don’t explain and seriously explore the dark and troubling events of our time, who will?