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River on the Brink
October 3, 2019When your Prime-Minister is admiring a McDonalds in Ohio while other world leaders are attending a United Nations summit on climate change, it gives a pretty clear indication of the importance this government assigns to environmental policy. The PM likes to present himself as a real Aussie bloke and his solution to global warming could […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects
September 26, 2019Scientists have disproved the old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice, and John Kaldor has confirmed their findings. In 2009 the Art Gallery of NSW hosted the exhibition 40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects. Today the AGNSW’s major exhibition is Making Art Public: 50 Years of Kaldor Public Art Projects. The story […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Savanhdary Vongpoothorn: All That Arises
September 19, 2019How dreary Australian culture would be if it wasn’t for refugees. In every generation since the Second World War there have been significant artists who came to this country because of conflict or persecution in their homelands. This is worth remembering at a time in which xenophobia and insularity are making a comeback, aided by […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Sydney Contemporary Art Fair 2019
September 12, 2019Ask any art dealer and they’ll tell you the market has gone flat, as collectors brace themselves for a Trump-led recession. Ordinarily this should put a cloud over an event such as the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, now in its sixth iteration, but the atmosphere and sentiment is absurdly up-beat. When I visited Carriageworks last […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Nusra Latif Qureshi & Adam Chang
September 5, 2019Before moving to Melbourne in 2001 at the age of 27, Nusra Latif Quereshi was trained as musaviripainter in her birthplace, Lahore. The term refers to a type of Islamic and Indian miniature painting that requires a high degree of skill and patience. Before moving to Australia in 1997, aged 37, Adam Chang studied painting […]
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Sydney Morning Herald Column
October 10, 2019
Steirischer Herbst 2019: Grand Hotel Abyss
Welcome to the Grand Hotel Abyss. The phrase was coined in 1933 by Marxist literary critic, György Lukacs, as a put-down of another group of Marxist intellectuals – the so-called Frankfurt School, whose ranks included luminaries such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Lukacs argued that the Frankfurt School practised a form of […]
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Judy
If Joker has put Joaquin Phoenix firmly in line for an Oscar, Judy has done the same for Renée Zellweger. Like so many Hollywood bio pics the film charts the decline that inevitably follows fame and fortune. We focus on the tumultuous final year of Judy Garland’s life, although the story is punctuated by flashbacks […]
Film Reviews
Joker
October 3, 2019Long before it was released Todd Phillips’s Joker was shaping as the most controversial film this year in the United States. The big sticking point is the portrayal of the famous super villain as a sad, mentally-disturbed loser driven to breaking point by a series of unhappy breaks that would have shredded Job’s fortitude. Arthur […]
Film Reviews
Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
September 26, 2019Guillermo del Toro may not have planted his considerable bulk in the director’s chair for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, but his fingerprints are everywhere. The film is a collection of classic horror scenarios with an undercurrent of social history. It’s scary but not-too-scary, a few gruesome moments but no buckets of gore. […]
Film Reviews
Ad Astra
September 19, 2019In James Gray’s movies characters seem to act as if they were in a novel, indulging in an inordinate amount of self-reflection. It may, therefore, have been inevitable that the director would eventually set a film in space where there is no limit to introspective opportunities. Ad Astra (Latin for “to the stars”) introduces us to […]
Destination NSW vs. Yoko Ono
August 22, 2019Not many Australian bureaucrats would qualify as art experts but apparently this is no impediment to making pronouncements. And so we have Sandra Chipchase, the Chief Executive of Destination NSW, telling Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art that Yoko Ono is “a well-known celebrity” but not much of an artist. It’s a perfect example of that […]
Blog
How the Yolngu Do It
August 16, 2019One hot August night in Darwin, every year, all the tribes gather on the lawn of the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, for the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards. Most of those tribes are overwhelmingly white: the dedicated collectors of Aboriginal art, the curators and gallery directors, the art […]
Blog
David Goldblatt: Photography & Truth
August 9, 2019David Goldblatt will always be known as the photographer who exposed the evils of Apartheid to the world, but to characterise him as a ‘political’ artist is to diminish the breadth of his achievements. This is something Goldblatt has in common with all great photographers who have found their subjects in war, poverty, hatred and […]
Blog
Danie Mellor
August 3, 2019NATSIAA may not be the most mellifluous of acronyms but it generates an incredible amount of excitement, as finalist Danie Mellor can attest. In 2009 Mellor won the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award, which is held every year at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, in Darwin. It’s good […]
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 […]