Art Column
Wilderness
Saturday, April 17th, 2010 Art Column,Looking at Wilderness, a new survey of contemporary painting, at the Art Gallery of NSW, I had the familiar suspicion that the artists had been chosen before the title. The procedure goes something like this: 1. Select a group of artists who seem to be cool enough to appeal to your peer group. 2. Think […]
Dennis Hopper & the New Hollywood
Saturday, April 10th, 2010 Art Column,When Dennis Hopper read the script of David Lynch’s 1986 film, Blue Velvet, he is reputed to have called the director and said: “You have to let me play Frank Booth because I am Frank Booth.” Nobody who has seen Blue Velvet could ever forget Hopper’s performance: a blue-eyed psychopath puffing pure oxygen from a […]
Salon des Refuses, Wynne & Sulman Prize
Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 Art Column,Nothing could make this year’s Archibald Prize exhibition look good, although the Salon des Refusés at the S.H.Ervin Gallery makes it more understandable. After examining those works rejected from the official hang one may feel a twinge of sympathy for the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW who had to work their way through […]
Sam Leach wins Archibald
Saturday, March 27th, 2010 Art Column,A good winner in poor year: that seemed to be the consensus view of Sam Leach’s victory in this year’s Archibald. The Trustees sprang the ultimate surprise by picking the best entry. To give Leach the Wynne Prize as well was an extravagant gesture. I’m feeling a little smug at having picked the winner last […]
Archibald Prize 2010
Saturday, March 27th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,No form of human activity nowadays comes without the possibility of therapy. Tiger Woods had to call in the specialists over his sex addiction, Michael Clarke has seen a psychologist to get his mind off his personal problems and back onto cricket. When Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generation, counselling services were reputedly made […]
Art Month 2010
Saturday, March 20th, 2010 Art Column,Over a decade ago the well-known Sydney art dealer, Ray Hughes, held a show of sculptured, painted coffins from Ghana made in the shape of a car, a crayfish, a spring onion, and so on. The exhibition attracted unprecedented publicity for a commercial gallery, with reports on TV and radio, and articles in the newspapers […]
Tom Bass Sculpture by the Sea
Saturday, March 13th, 2010 Art Column,Last week the Australia Council revealed the startling statistic that “over 16 million Australians are actively participating in the arts.” According to a recent survey, 22 percent of the population is engaged in making art or craft, while 900,000 people are writing poems. At this point, you may be wondering why our public sphere does […]
Utamaro
Saturday, March 6th, 2010 Art Column,Those dismayed by Senator Conroy’s heavy-handed attempts to censor the internet might spare a thought for Japanese publishers of the late eighteenth century completely at the mercy of an imperial regime that imposed bans and restrictions at will. This is what happened in 1790 when a new Chief Councillor set out to correct the “decadent” […]
Ron Mueck
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 Art Column,There is no place in the upper echelons of contemporary art for a reasonable person: to be a success one has to be an extremist. There are artists whose work is so sloppy it might have been thrown together the day before an opening, and those with an obsessive eye for detail. Many curators and […]
Lawrence Daws
Saturday, February 20th, 2010 Art Column,Lawrence Daws had an “early” retrospective at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 1966, when he was thirty-nine years old. This seems remarkable when one learns that Daws, who born in Adelaide, had his first solo exhibition in 1954. Was he considered such a prodigy that twelve years’ work was enough for a show […]