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Andrew Sullivan
January 12, 2021All children seem to be mad about dinosaurs, many of us never outgrowing that fascination. Dinosaur exhibitions are among the best attended events at international museums, while there have been five films in the Jurassic Park franchise since 1990, with another in the pipeline. Anyone requiring a dinosaur hit over the holidays might consider a trip […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Paradise on Earth
December 22, 2020Marion Mahony Griffin has long stood in the shadow of her husband, Walter Burley Griffin, but nowadays the couple are viewed as a partnership, rather like Christo and Jeanne-Claude. In Paradise on Earth, the Museum of Sydney celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of a formidably talented woman. It’s ironic that the MoS has […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Peter Kingston: First Light
December 15, 2020Before seeing Peter Kingston: First Light at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, I was reminded that the late Giles Auty once compared ‘Kingo’ to Raoul Dufy (1877-1953). Although I would hesitate to endorse most of Giles’s observations about art and life, he may have been onto something. Although the Frenchman commands a place in the pantheon of […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Just Not Australian
December 8, 2020Just Not Australian made its debut at Artspace early last year but will be touring ten regional galleries in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia until October, 2022. I caught the show at the Wollongong Art Gallery where it may be seen over the holiday period. The longevity of the tour suggests this is […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial 2020
December 1, 2020Most children draw instinctively as a way of understanding and taking control of the world. If the great majority of us stop drawing at a certain age it’s not because we have attained a level of mastery. On the contrary, at around 9 or 10, so psychologists tell us, we become self-critical, feeling we don’t […]
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Film Reviews
January 15, 2021
Ammonite
An ammonite is a mollusc with a distinctive spiral shell that flourished in the Devonian period, (400 million years ago) and died out at the end of the Cretaceous, (roughly 66 million BCE). In biological terms that was a pretty good run. Homo sapiens will be lucky to survive for even a fraction of this […]
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Wonder Woman 1984
January 8, 2021No movie in 2017 was more overrated than Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman. It was as if critics and fans were responding to the film they’d hoped to see, rather than whatever ended up on screen. The movie’s one saving grace was the luminous Gal Gadot as the embodiment of everyone’s fantasy Amazon. The inevitable sequel, […]
Film Reviews
The Movies in 2021: Where are We Going?
December 25, 2020Looking to see what the new year has in store I consulted the on-line oracles and began to feel I’d been far too negative about 2020. Was it really so bad watching streaming services and old movies at home? The cinema screen will always offer a superior experience to the set in the lounge (let […]
Film Reviews
2020: The Year in Film
Until the coming of the pandemic the great tree of world cinema was flourishing, with fruit on every branch. It may not always have been high quality produce or in good taste, but it was plentiful. After a year of lockdowns in which theatres were closed for long periods and the Hollywood studios put almost […]
Film Reviews
Crock of Gold
December 19, 2020Shane MacGowan is a textbook case of someone who should be dead but somehow keeps rolling. In MacGowan’s case “rolling” is the right word because years of dedicated self-destruction have wrecked his sense of balance, confining him to a wheelchair. Now 62-years-old the former lead singer for the Pogues sits with his head tilted at […]
Alex Seton: Meet Me Under the Dome
January 15, 2021In The Ghost of Wombeyan Alex Seton has created a life-sized marble figure that lies prone on a slab beneath a heavy shroud. Should we see it as a body, or merely the impression of a body preserved in solid marble? Either way, the piece has a strong funereal connotation. The ‘ghost’ is a childhood […]
Blog
The Art Market in the Time of COVID
December 1, 2020A new Australian auction record for Brett Whiteley’s painting, Henri’s Armchair, puts the star on top of the Christmas tree for the local art market in a year when only doom and gloom were predicted. Indeed, one local auction supremo tells me that things have never been better. The plague year 2020 has seen a […]
Blog
Know My Name: A First Look
November 19, 2020If the phrase Know My Name makes you think of the theme song of a James Bond movie, you’re a prime candidate for the National Gallery of Australia’s new survey of Australian women artists, 1900 to the present. You might even draw a twinge of masculine panic from Chris Cornell’s lyric: The odds will betray […]
Blog
Streeton: A First Look
November 13, 2020When the title of a show is simply the artist’s surname it sends a message. If you don’t know who Streeton is, well… you should. It’s like saying “Picasso”, rather than “Pablo Picasso” or “Rembrandt” rather than “Rembrandt van Rijn”. The unattended surname signifies greatness. It’s a warning you’ll miss out on an essential Australian […]
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 […]
Journals
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. […]
Journals
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 […]