Blog
Fukushima: Art & Disaster
Saturday, March 15th, 2014 Blog,Disaster haunts the Japanese psyche. Think of the great fires that have swept up Tokyo, or the major earthquakes that have struck the country at unpredictable intervals. Think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and all the ways that nuclear energy has been portrayed in popular culture. This ranges from Tezuka Osamu’s popular cartoon hero, The Mighty […]
The Sins of the Director
Saturday, February 22nd, 2014 Blog,At this year’s Academy Awards presentation all the talk will be about Our Cate. Will her chances of taking out the Oscar for Best Actress be damaged by that open letter to the New York Times in which Dylan Farrow claimed to have been molested at age seven by her stepfather, Woody Allen? “What if […]
Esteban Bedoya
Saturday, January 11th, 2014 Blog,A couple of weeks ago I met the Paraguayan ambassador to Australia, Esteban Bedoya, after having read his short novel, The Apocalypse Acording to Benedict. It seems to be a minor Latin America tradition to have diplomats who are also writers. Octavio Paz was Mexican ambassador to India, while Pablo Neruda was Chile’s ambassador in […]
2013: The Best & Worst of the Visual Arts
Monday, January 6th, 2014 Art Essays, Blog,My best art experience of the year happened on the other side of the planet, in a retrospective celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Edvard Munch. The show, divided between the National Gallery and the Munch Museum in Olso, revealed an unrelenting intensity of vision. It featured the most complete collection of paintings […]
Martin Sharp 1942-2013
Thursday, December 5th, 2013 Blog,When the word Eternity was emblazoned on the Sydney Harbour Bridge for the turn of the new millennium, it served to remind Australians of the remarkable talents of Martin Sharp. This famous piece of graffiti was the trademark of the religious eccentric, Arthur Stace, who spent almost 30 years chalking it onto walls and streets, […]
Fiona Hall for Venice
Thursday, December 5th, 2013 Blog,For more than 20 years Fiona Hall has been the obvious, dead-set, undeniable first choice to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale. It is a testimony to the acumen of our arts bureaucracy that in 2015 she will become the first artist to occupy a newly-built pavilion. Any other country might have rushed her into […]
The Art of Mining
Friday, November 29th, 2013 Blog,Most of my travels are art-related – on the track of another Biennale or a major retrospective. Last month I undertook a very different trip, visiting Laos as a guest of the mining company, PanAust. There was an ostensible art excuse: PanAust had sponsored an artist’s residency for Peter Churcher, who came back with a […]
Bigger is Better
Friday, November 8th, 2013 Blog,David Hockney broke all previous attendance records at the Royal Academy of Arts last year, with his show A Bigger Picture. The RA tells us that 650,000 people crowded through those galleries to see a show largely devoted to landscapes of Yorkshire, the artist’s birthplace. It sounds hard to believe, until one sees David Hockney: A Bigger […]
Party time in London
Saturday, September 21st, 2013 Blog,For the long-anticipated show of Australian art at the Royal Academy the opening night was always going to be a joyous affair. The problem is that nobody looks at the art at an opening. Having already spent hours inspecting this exhibition I felt like a party pooper when people gushed: “Isn’t it wonderful!?” No, it’s […]
The Dance of Shiva
Saturday, July 13th, 2013 Blog,How truly ‘public’ are our public galleries? The recent scandal over the millions of dollars paid by the National Gallery of Australia to the crooked art dealer, Subash Kapoor, has demonstrated a complete lack of transparency in the way our flagship art institution spends the money it receives from taxpapers and wealthy donors. When James […]