Art Column
Sydney Contemporary 2017
Friday, September 15th, 2017 Art Column,It was both pleasing and wryly amusing to learn that sales at this year’s Sydney Contemporary Art Fair topped $16 million. For a commercial gallery sector feeling unloved and unvisited this figure represents a resounding endorsement. Nevertheless, before breaking out the champagne it’s worth putting that achievement into perspective with a glance at Day One […]
Jenny Watson
Friday, September 8th, 2017 Art Column,One imagines teachers at the Julian Ashton Art School sending their pupils across the road to the Museum of Contemporary Art, to see Jenny Watson: The Fabric of Fantasy. For the traditionally-minded it’s an object lesson in how not to make art. If there are any cynics among those students, they might say: “…nevertheless, it […]
Hokusai
Friday, September 1st, 2017 Art Column,If ever an image deserved to be called “iconic” it is The great wave off Kanagawa (1830-34), by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Everyone knows this famous print of two boats menaced by a monstrous surge of water that reaches out like a hungry predator with a hundred talons. This was exactly the way the picture struck […]
Art Stage Jakarta 2017
Friday, August 25th, 2017 Art Column,Two moments from the week of Art Stage Jakarta 2017 will stay lodged in my mind: the would-be ‘glittering occasion’ of the inaugural Indonesian Art Award, and a performance by Melati Suryodarmo in which she spent three hours in a blank cubicle, grunting, groaning and spitting ink at the walls. Indonesian art today lies somewhere […]
The Public Body.02
Friday, August 18th, 2017 Art Column,Our age is one of unprecedented permissiveness and militant puritanism. Pornography of every description is available at the click of a keyboard, small children are sexualised in a manner that would have been inconceivable to our grandparents’ generation. Yet Newton’s third law applies in psychology as well as science: for every action, there is an […]
Defying Empire
Wednesday, August 9th, 2017 Art Column,During the Howard years we were constantly hearing about the Culture Wars – a term borrowed from the United States, pertaining to the battle between conservative and liberal values. In Australia the conflict became fixated on whether this continent had been taken by force from its original inhabitants, and what reparations were due. It was […]
Salon des Refusés 2017
Thursday, August 3rd, 2017 Art Column,Every year I nurture a dim fantasy of a Salon des Refusés bristling with masterpieces rejected from the Archibald and Wynne Prizes by the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW. Every year I relinquish this thought almost as soon as I step into the S.H.Ervin Gallery. The Refusés was a great idea when it […]
The 2017 Archibald Prize
Friday, July 28th, 2017 Art Column,By the usual Archibald Prize standards 2017 is a low key year. There are plenty of neat, correct entries, a touch of quirkiness, a bit of thick impasto, but nothing to get the pulse racing with delight or indignation. Unless, perhaps, you’re a lunatic right-winger who starts to foam at the mouth at the merest […]
Mad Love
Saturday, July 22nd, 2017 Art Column,Although we live in a world in which the ugliest forms of nationalism seem to be making a comeback there is one partial antidote: cultural exchange. As we become progressively more familiar with the art, music, film, fashion and cuisine of another country, the fear and suspicion of the Other is diminished. Japan, for instance, […]
Ray Hughes: Africa
Saturday, July 15th, 2017 Art Column,There is still some dispute about the importance of Jean-Hubert Martin’s 1989 exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Magiciens de la terre, which laid down an historic challenge to the Eurocentrism of western art museums. For former art dealer, Ray Hughes, there is no dispute whatsoever. It was a game-changer. Hughes acquired his first African artefacts […]