General Art Essays
Culture in the Age of Howard
Wednesday, May 26th, 2004 General Art Essays,Culture is not an exclusive game played by artists and their admirers, it is an ongoing conversation within and between communities. It is a meeting place for different arguments and perspectives, an arena in which large and small problems are ventilated. When we speak of ‘cultural progress’, we assume that some resolution or compromise has […]
Modern Painting in 15 Easy Pieces: The past 100 years
Friday, August 15th, 2003 General Art Essays, International Art,All definitions of modern art are bound to end in failure, but that has not prevented artists and writers from making the attempt. In fact, one might see the entire twentieth century as an unbroken sequence of definitions and re-definitions, with each movement taking its cue from an earlier one, but striving to surpass and […]
Art & Politics
Wednesday, January 15th, 2003 Art Column, General Art Essays,There was a period of about a decade, starting from the early-to-mid 1980s, when every major art event had to be accompanied by an extensive series of forums. These talk-fests were often boring, and always inconclusive. Some participants gave the impression of having done no preparation whatsoever, others had written papers of impenetrable, theoretical complexity. […]
Photography as Art
Monday, December 31st, 2001 General Art Essays,“Photography is the art of comparison,” says the garrulous, omniscient narrator in Murray Bail’s novel, Eucalyptus, who sounds suspiciously like the author. “Anyone can take a photograph. The ‘art’ has already been composed by the subject itself, even when it’s a brick wall – really, the word ‘art’ here is an amazing pretension, since it […]
From Bondi to Broken Hill
Friday, May 1st, 1998 General Art Essays,It was in the middle of a London winter that I first became aware of the great, abiding seductiveness of Sydney. The occasion was a trip to the movies on one of those typically grey days when a little watery sunshine appears at about 10 o’clock and is gone by half-past three. The air was […]