Art Column
Theatre of the World
Saturday, June 30th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,For many people museums are uncomfortably similar to mausoleums – repositories of dead animals, dead art, dead ideas. Even those of us who spend their lives in these institutions experience moments when everything feels too dull or predictable. At heart, museums are educational organisations, competing for attention with an ever-increasing range of distractions. But the […]
AGNSW: A new hang
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,A new hang of a gallery’s permanent collection was once a routine affair, but nowadays it has taken on the status of an event. This is partly because the rising costs of doing exhibitions combined with the dwindling budgets of public galleries have forced all institutions to draw more heavily on the works they already […]
Not the Way Home, Damaged
Saturday, June 16th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, International Art,In recent years there has been a spate of projects in which a group of artists are taken to some far-flung location and invited to respond to a new environment. The end result is a group exhibition that gathers together works made on the spot, and those created afterwards in the studio from memories, sketches […]
Down the Rabbit Hole
Saturday, June 9th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Chinese Art, International Art,Last year, according to The New York Times, 395 museums were built across China. As with most things in this vast, mysterious country, the statistics give only a superficial glimpse of the complexities involved. Firstly one might question the Chinese definition of “museum”, which may be a grandiose word for a lot of small-scale enterprises. […]
Masami Teraoka, Migration
Saturday, June 2nd, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,One of the strangest developments in the Sydney art scene is the sudden upsurge of galleries showing and selling high priced international art. This is surprising, given the fact that these are dismal times for retail and the art business is essentially retail with delusions of grandeur. There are only two explanations: either there are […]
Art Hong Kong 2012
Saturday, May 26th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays,Hong Kong is ideally located to take advantage an eastern economic boom that keeps defying western prophets of doom. Although it may sound scarcely believable, that defiant attitude is shared by leading western art dealers who have begun opening gigantic new spaces in a city long known as a cultural backwater. Those bad old days […]
Australian Symbolism
Saturday, May 19th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,There are moments in art history that are fascinating to contemplate but irredeemably minor. This pretty much sums up Australian Symbolism, which plays a supporting role to Impressionist landscape and those paintings of a broadly nationalist persuasion that dominated art in this country in the decades leading up to the First World War. Symbolism in […]
The Clock, Marking Time
Saturday, May 12th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays, Uncategorized,Switzerland gave us the cuckoo clock, and Swiss-American artist, Christian Marclay, has created the most preposterous time-piece in the history of art. The Clock is such a unique artifact it defies all but the most impressionistic responses. This is obvious from Zadie Smith’s essay in the brochure published for the work’s showing at the Museum […]
Janet Laurence
Saturday, May 5th, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art,There is a certain moral cachet that comes with the label “environmental artist”. Janet Laurence seems to be simultaneously attracted to the description and slightly embarrassed. She realises that any form of categorisation is a potential trap, but if one simply must wear a label, well “environmental artist” is among the more attractive options. It […]
Salon des Refusés
Saturday, April 28th, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art,In the brochure that accompanies this year’s Salon des Refusés at the S.H.Ervin Gallery, one reads that the show is “in the tradition of the renegade French Impressionists of the 1860s, who held a breakaway exhibition from the reactionary French Academy.” Leaving aside the fact that the term ‘Impressionism’ wasn’t used until the 1870s, this […]