Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale 2018
Friday, August 17th, 2018 Art Column,It’s often said that the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale could only happen in Japan. In terms of sheer scale it is the largest contemporary exhibition in the world, spread across 760 square kms of the mountainous regions of Niigata prefecture. This year is the seventh incarnation of a project intended to help revitalise an area that […]
BlacKKKlansman
Friday, August 17th, 2018 Film Reviews,“There are certain values we feel to be absolute,” wrote Aldous Huxley, in an essay of 1932. “Truth is one of them. We have an immediate conviction of its high, its supreme importance.” Not any more we don’t. Not in a world of alternative facts, in which inconvenient words and deeds are written off as […]
John Russell: Australia's French Impressionist
Friday, August 10th, 2018 Art Column,If Australian art history were a jigsaw puzzle John Russell would be the piece that doesn’t quite fit. It’s now commonplace to talk of “Australian Impressionists” but Russell is the only artist who genuinely matches the description. Everybody else, from Streeton and Roberts to McCubbin and Fox, pursued a version of Impressionism that owed a […]
On Chesil Beach
Friday, August 10th, 2018 Film Reviews,Ian McEwan has complained about the difficulty of writing screenplays, and may have even sworn he’d never do it again. Nevertheless, here he is, adapting his own slender novel of 2007, On Chesil Beach. The book is not one of his best, being largely a sketch that revolves around a single, terrible night that changes […]
Li Huayi: Fantasies on Paper and Enchantments in Gold
Thursday, August 2nd, 2018 Blog,Fantasies on Paper and Enchantments in Gold is a title that western audiences might view ironically, as a deliberately florid, over-the-top tease. For this we may thank an artist such as Jeff Koons, who has blurred the line between kitsch and fine art so successfully it’s no longer possible to draw the sharp distinctions that […]
The Wife
Thursday, August 2nd, 2018 Film Reviews,What becomes of that comfortable old cliché: “Behind every great man there’s a great woman” in the #MeToo era? Surely it was always a euphemistic way of saying: “Behind every self-important male there’s a self-effacing female.” Nowadays to be politically correct we might have to say: “Behind every great LGBTQIA there’s a great LGBTQIA” – […]
The Journey of Time
Thursday, August 2nd, 2018 Art Column,When James Abbott McNeill Whistler defended himself in court by saying that a dashed-off oil sketch represented the knowledge he had “gained in the work of a lifetime” he gave every lazy artist an excuse to feel important, and unwittingly established battle lines between art and craft. Nowadays it’s broadly accepted that one may create […]
John Mawurndjul: I Am the Old and the New
Friday, July 27th, 2018 Art Column,This year’s best exhibition title is: John Mawurndjul: I Am the Old and the New. A landmark retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the show demonstrates the paradox of bark painting: as one of the oldest forms of artistic expression and something completely new. This was inconceivable to the organisers of the Cologne Art […]
Whitney
Friday, July 27th, 2018 Film Reviews,Whitney Houston’s story is horribly familiar – which doesn’t make it any less compelling. We’ve been to a very similar place with Amy (2015), Asif Kapadia’s documentary about doomed pop star, Amy Winehouse. We’ve been there with Whitney herself only last year, with Whitney: Can I Be Me, a documentary by Nick Broomfield and Rudi […]
MoMA at NGV
Monday, July 23rd, 2018 Art Column,Museums have an historical mission to preserve a cultural legacy and bring it before the public. It’s a goal shared by all such insititutions, big or small, but there are huge disparities between the leading international museums and their aspirational counterparts. For the art of the 20th century the Museum of Modern Art in New […]
