Rob McDougall is a 25 year old Melbourne man who contacted us last week to say that he’d just won Cher’s keys to Adelaide and would we like to interview him about it. We said of course we would like to interview him about it and sent through some questions. What follows is a brief account of why he bid on the keys in the first place, why he has no intention of paying for them, and why he’ll probably get away with it (semantic loopholes!).
When did you first become aware that Cher was selling the keys to Adelaide and what were your initial thoughts? I first became aware of the ebay sale after seeing it on Pedestrian.tv. I decided to bid on the key because I found the whole thing, and its publicity – that being the commodification of an illustrious national honour on eBay and its denigration to a piffling ‘memento’ by an international celebrity – to be utterly absurd, and thus I felt it required, on my part, an equally absurd response — in the words of Francis Alys, ‘a beau geste, at once futile and heroic’. Concurrently, I felt as if I had the support of the people of Adelaide. I’m being told that I am now ‘a bit of a local hero’ by a local journalist there, and so I feel I assumed correctly. Added to this, I felt my bidding on it would act as a conceptual intervention, in an artistic sense. So many issues are raised here that I think are worth examining, and the insulting of the integrity of a city by an American celebrity, and the issues of US-Australian hegemonic cultural relations that this evokes, is only one of them.
After all is said and done about the disgraceful and disrespectful behaviour of flogging such an illustrious honour on an internet auction, we might want to think about the nature of the revulsion we feel. Why is it, for instance, that Cher is granted a key to the city – which is supposed to symbolize the granting of freedom for the recipient to come and go as they please as a trusted friend of the city — but representatives of the Kaurna and Ramindjeri people, the traditional owners of the land, aren’t? Both peoples are currently laying claim to ownership to the land stretching from Cape Jervis to Port Broughton, which includes the entire Adelaide metropolitan area, but this claim is ongoing and has been relatively silenced. Added to that, the South Australian government has rejected outright a claim of sovereignty over the Marble Hill ruins and the Warriparinga Living Kaurna Cultural Centre in Marion, lands which these people have occupied for tens of thousands of years. It is worth noting that while we express our disgust at being belittled and insulted by an international celebrity, perhaps our claims of legitimacy and integrity are also ill-advised and perhaps hypocritical. It is for this reason that I knew pulling a stunt like this would inevitably be of interest.
Why did you bid on the keys at all and did you have any intention of buying them? Are you kidding me? As for now, all I will say is that my refusal to pay is a result of Cher’s monosyllabic ‘tweet’ which condemned the sale and also expressed mystification as to how or why it ended up on eBay. I have stated to ‘Linda’ of authentic_cher, Cher’s office’s eBay account that I cannot purchase something which the seller is not wanting to sell, and that I require either to speak to Cher personally or for her to come out and publicly state she wishes to sell it. I think we can all agree I have placed ‘Linda’, and Cher, in an interestingly tight corner. I received a call from eBay asking if I was to pay or not, but the woman on the phone thanked me when I insisted I would handle the matter by speaking to ‘Linda’ myself, and that was it. I sent the demand two days ago, but woke up this morning to find my eBay account had been suspended for 30 days or until I ‘resolve’ the matter. I can’t see how they could expect me to pay when the apparent seller – Cher herself – has condemned the sale and has expressed a desire to retract it. Time will tell.
Are you a fan of Cher? She’s pretty divine. I think we can all appreciate that not only is ‘Believe’ an amazing, incredible track – it was the first ever use of Antares Technology’s Auto-Tune, which is now such a staple in our world. Plus she was awesome when she was on Beavis and Butthead, and I remember liking ‘Moonstruck’. I like her a lot better than Kim Kardashian, a fellow offspring of a survivor of the Armenian Genocide – except unlike Kardashian, Cher has never opened up about it, nor made any attempts to publicize it as an ongoing issue. What gives, Cher?
Do you feel bad for denying someone else the chance to own the keys? No. I’d come across as aggressive and nasty if I answered that question. I don’t feel for my unlucky fellow bidders, sadly.
