Sign up for news updates
The Art of the Spanish Flu
August 4, 2020Anyone who thinks COVID-19 has claimed a huge number of lives should look at the Spanish flu of 1918-20. In Pale Rider (2017), a compelling history of that earlier pandemic, Laura Spinney writes: “Between the first case recorded on 4 March 1918, and the last sometime in March 1920, it killed 50-100 million, or between […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Wollongong Art: eX de Medici, Hana Orszulok, Pamela Griffith
July 28, 2020Earlier this year French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced a €7 billion support fund, largely intended to help small companies and independent artists. It’s a far cry from the $250 million Scott Morrison is sprinkling on the arts sector in Australia. To think of the arts in France is to think of the Opéra Garnier and […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
John R. Walker, Elisabeth Cummings, Ian Grant, Maria Kontis
July 18, 2020After months in lockdown memories of this season’s bushfire crisis have already begun to fade. People are so fixated on the moment, so ready to focus on present circumstances and forget past vexations, that the fires might have happened in ancient times rather than a mere six months ago. For our beloved Prime Minister that […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Tom Gleghorn
July 9, 2020Robert Hughes once explained his reasons for leaving Australia by saying that if he’d stayed he would have ended up as the world expert on Tom Gleghorn. It wasn’t a swipe at one particular artist so much as an airy dismissal of Australian provincialism, but it left me with a lingering impression of Gleghorn as […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Shadow catchers
July 2, 2020In Adelbert von Chamisso’s gothic tale, Peter Schlemihl, the hero sells his shadow to the devil in exchange for a purse perpetually filled with gold, but all the wealth in the world is not enough to compensate for the horror he inspires when his lack of a shadow is noticed. For “shadow” we might read […]
FEATURED
Sydney Morning Herald Column
August 11, 2020
Sydney Ball
For over a century each new artistic style or movement was viewed as a momentous historical breakthrough, but when everyone started doing it or buying it, the same stuff became mere “fashion”. As the pioneering sociologist, Georg Simmel, noted in 1895, with fashion, the moment of mass circulation spells the end of a particular look, […]
Sign up for news updates
Echo in the Canyon
August 7, 2020It may seem a big call to suggest that one day historians will mention Laurel Canyon in the late 1960s alongside Vienna fin-de-siècle, and the Paris of the 1930s, but Graham Nash has no doubts. It’s even more startling to bracket Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys with Mozart, but Tom Petty manages this feat […]
Film Reviews
The Burnt Orange Heresy
July 31, 2020In The Square (2017), Ruben Östlund’s wicked send-up of the contemporary art scene, Claes Bang was a self-serving curator who couldn’t take a trick. In The Burnt Orange Heresy, Bang is back, as a louche art critic playing a dangerous game. It’s not uncommon for actors to get type-cast as tough guys, criminals or cowboys, […]
Film Reviews
Babyteeth
July 24, 2020Last year I spent some time trawling back over the history of Australian cinema, a process with mixed outcomes. It was exhilarating to rediscover the way local movies have captured moments of national anxiety and brash self-confidence. On the other hand, the boldness of past efforts, particularly during the 1970s, casts a withering light on […]
Film Reviews
A White, White Day
July 18, 2020All nations are works in progress, but Iceland is a place in which even Nature is still experimenting. Volcanoes, glaciers, snow-topped mountains, chasms, hot springs, and a latitude that ensures whole days in summer when the sun never seems to set and days in winter when it barely shows its face. One imagines living in […]
The Murder of the Powerhouse Museum
June 26, 2020It’s not a museum. This is not a matter of opinion, it’s not a slander being spread by critics of the project. The proposed building in Parramatta the NSW government would like us to see as the home of a ‘relocated’ Powerhouse Museum will be nothing more than an entertainment venue stuffed with cafes and […]
Blog
Christo – His legacy in Australia
June 11, 2020Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia. The most important piece of avant-garde art ever made in this country, or the the work of a madman? Both views got plenty of traction at the end of October 1969, when Christo and his wife, Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009), undertook the monumental task of wrapping part […]
Blog
Frank Watters 1934 – 2020
May 28, 2020Frank Watters, who has died at the age of 86, was not only a pillar of the Sydney gallery scene for more than 50 years, he was a truly humane personality in a business that breeds sharks. Although he adored gossip and had a wicked wit, Frank held fast to his own standards. He was […]
Blog
Tales from the Woods
April 17, 2020From Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (1814) to Picasso’s Guernica (1937), to countless, politically correct projects by contemporary artists, the modern era has used art as a megaphone for speaking the truth to power. Yet it remains hard to think of a single instance when a work of so-called ‘political art’ has had any […]
John McDonald
For over thirty years he has been one of Australia’s best-known critics. He writes a weekly art column for the Sydney Morning Herald, a weekly film column for the Australian Financial Review, and contributes to a wide range of local and international publications.
Terror Nullius
March 8, 2019Satire invites us to become conspirators in a joke made at someone else’s expense. As the usual targets are figures of power and authority it’s reasonable to assume the invitation will be accepted. The satirist adopts the Robin Hood position – defending the powerless against the few who seek to impose their will upon the […]
Artist Profile
Signature Art Prize 2018
March 7, 2019This year, for the fourth iteration of the Prize, 15 finalists were chosen from a field of 113 artists spread throughout the Asia-Pacific and – for the first time – Singapore’s cultural efflorescence over the past decade has been a source of wonder even to the Singaporeans themselves, who are forever celebrating their own progress. […]
Artist Profile
The Tarnished Prizes
No nation on earth can match Australia’s enduring love of art prizes. It reflects our obsession with sport (which is something we can do as well as anybody), allied with the perennial Cultural Cringe (the sense that we suffer from a lack of Old Masters and ruined temples). The Cringe was named by A.A.Phillips in […]