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Ultra Unreal
August 9, 2022Things have been quiet at the Museum of Contemporary Art this year, but Ultra Unreal aims at a reboot. It’s an exhibition that pushes beyond the contemporary, drawing us into virtual realms, both futuristic and animistic. These imaginary worlds have been created by new technology and populated with supernatural beings. It all sounds breathlessly exciting. […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
The Hadley’s Art Prize 2022 & MONA
August 2, 2022Unlike Errol Flynn and Douglas Mawson, I’d never stayed at Hadley’s Orient Hotel in Hobart – until it hosted an art prize. Established in 1834, Hadley’s is one of the oldest hotels in Australia, and it trades lavishly on its historical connections. There are plenty of hotels that are more up-to-date and luxurious, but not […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
White Rabbit: I Loved You
July 26, 2022Anybody who has seen the Marriage Market in Shanghai’s People Park will never imagine the Chinese as a nation of desperate romantics. Every weekend the Market is swarming with parents eager secure an advantageous match for their son or daughter. One gets the impression that marriage is primarily an economic transaction, with love being a […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Robert Wilson: Moving Portraits
July 19, 2022Germany’s all-time literary giant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once suggested to Caspar David Friedrich he should paint landscapes that systematically depicted each type of cloud identified in a famous treatise. Friedrich, by all accounts, was horrified at the suggestion. Being atttracted by the freedom and mutability of clouds, he resisted the idea of placing them […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Colin Lanceley: Earthly Delights
July 5, 2022For more than a thousand years the west was obsessed with the classical culture of Greece and Rome. In the cyber-age of today when all knowledge is available on the mobile phone, we can barely remember the cultural achievements of the past twenty years. This is partly because those who have been entrusted to preserve […]
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Film Reviews
August 12, 2022
Nope
Jordan Peel has enjoyed a meteoric rise from the margins to the mainstream in the space of only three features. Peel’s debut effort, Get Out (2017), had all the hallmarks of a cult classic. An off-beat zombie movie with a political subtext, it gave a dark, satirical twist to those racial anxieties that have divided […]
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Full Time & Juniper
August 6, 2022If you’ve been to Paris and not experienced a demonstration or strike, you’ve missed one of the quintessentially French cultural experiences. Perhaps it’s a legacy of the Revolution, but Parisians have never been shy about taking their grievances to the streets. It’s tremendously stirring for those doing the marching and chanting, but a pain for […]
Film Reviews
The Forgiven
July 29, 2022No-one is ever really “forgiven” in a film scripted and directed by John Michael McDonagh, or his brother, Martin. Like the Coens or Jim Jarmusch, the McDonaghs specialise in overturning the cinema’s age-old storytelling conventions. In a James Bond movie, for instance, a large part of the audience’s pleasure comes from watching the same predictable […]
Film Reviews
Official Competition
July 23, 2022Hubris, which comes from Greek tragedy, means “excessive pride or self-confidence”. Official Competition begins with a grand display of hubris, as a billionaire businessman commissions a movie as a monument to himself. It won’t be just any old flick but an instant cinema classic intended to win prestigious awards and stand the test of time. […]
Film Reviews
Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song
July 16, 2022Hallelujah, the Hebrew word of praise for the Lord, is all over the Old Testament. How strange, but how very typical of our contemporary neediness and confusion, that Leonard Cohen’s song of that name should have become a secular pop anthem for our times. Daniel Geller and Dayna Golding’s innovative documentary, Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A […]
The Archibald Prize 2022: Blak Douglas is the winner
May 14, 2022Politics is never far away from the Archibald prize, but it’s often that nebulous strain called “art politics”. This year, with the winner being announced in the middle of a federal election campaign, it was always going to be hard to keep attention focused on the aesthetics. Blak Douglas (AKA. Adam Hill), proved to be […]
Blog
Peter Powditch: Remarks at a Memorial Exhibition
May 13, 2022I feel like a bit of a fraud opening Peter Powditch’s memoral show, when so many other people in this room knew him a lot better than I did. – I didn’t ‘get’ Peter’s work at all when I first encountered it and didn’t meet him until some time after I’d first written – rather […]
Blog
The Archibald Prize 2022: A First Look
May 9, 2022It was predictable that after last year’s orgiastic celebrations of the Archibald Prize’s hundredth birthday, the following year would bring the hangover. But it’s not worth complaining about the quality of the 2022 exhibition, as the Archibald is never better than mediocre, with a few standouts. The dominant aspect of this year’s selection is a […]
Blog
Ken Whisson 1927 – 2022
May 6, 2022Ken Whisson was one of the great originals of Australian art. Had he ever become a household name he would have felt something was wrong. Whisson had no desire to live or paint in a conventional way. Like Giacometti, even when he began to sell work for higher prices he continued to live like a […]
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.
Whiteley: the Opera
June 18, 2021Ever since John Adams gave us Nixon in China in 1987, the possibilities for opera have been limitless. Unlike the Greek tragedians who were obliged to set every play in a mythical age of Gods and heroes, contemporary composers have drawn subjects from the news cycle, and from the tawdry lives of latter-day celebrities. Elena […]
Journals
Patrick Hall
A popular way of praising an Australian artist is to proclaim that his or work should be better known overseas. It’s ironic that Hobart-based artist, Patrick Hall, is probably better known overseas than he is on the other side of Bass Strait. Steven Joyce of Despard Gallery has shown Hall’s work at the renowned Chicago […]
Journals
It All Started with a Stale Sandwich
This year is the 50th anniversary of the Kaldor Public Art Projects, a testament to the persistence of a Hungarian migrant who needed to share his obsession with an entire city, if not a country. The birthday celebrations will continue to spread the Kaldor gospel via an unorthodox retrospective at the Art Gallery of New […]