Blog
What sort of director does the AGNSW need?
Saturday, January 21st, 2012 Blog,As a man walked down the aisle towards his bride-to-be, the best man whispered to him: “You are making the biggest mistake of your life.” Within a few months those words had rung true. Is it too late to stop the Art Gallery of NSW making the same mistake? When Edmund Capon announced last August […]
Peter Crayford
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011 Blog, Film Reviews,For 26 years Peter Crayford wrote the weekly film column for the Australian Financial Revew, an appointment he missed on only a handful of occasions. His consistency and the quality of his work become even more remarkable when one understands the circumstances of his life. When early on Sunday morning, Peter gave up his long, […]
Hypokulturemia in the Hypo-Kulturstiftung
Friday, November 18th, 2011 Art Essays, Blog, International Art,In Munich last week I began to feel I was suffering from Stendhal Syndrome. It’s been twenty years since I was in this city, but I had vivid memories of those two great museums, the Alte Pinakothek and Neue Pinakothek. Now those galleries have been joined by the Pinakothek der Moderne and the Brandhorst Museum, […]
Art and Seoul
Thursday, October 20th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog, International Art,Regular readers must be starting to wonder in what part of the world they’ll find themselves from week to week. I’m starting to wonder myself. Recently I was in Seoul for the 10th Korean International Art Fair, today I’m on a plane coming back from Shanghai. Without wanting to sound glib, the very fact that […]
Lost: 1 x heart, last seen: San Francisco, CA.
Monday, September 12th, 2011 Blog,There must be some secret genetic affinity between Americans and Far North Queenslanders. Queensland is the only other place I’ve found where people are so willing to talk to total strangers, asking the most intrusive questions and giving back a volume of personal information beyond the bounds of all curiosity. And how did “shit” became […]
Tonsorial philosophy
Friday, August 26th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art, Blog,My barber is a philosopher. By this, I don’t mean to compare him to those hairdressers who style themselves “creative artists working in the medium of hair”. Dimitri Kokinelis, barber of Gardeners Road, Rosebery, is a genuine thinker who devotes his time between haircuts to pondering questions of truth, wisdom, justice and nature. He has […]
The last days of the Caponian empire
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,What a deathly year it has been for artists! In quick succession we have lost Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and now John Hoyland. The latter was especially disturbing, as I had just contributed a catalogue essay to his exhibition with Charles Nodrum in Melbourne. Logically there is nothing surprising about someone dying at a ripe […]
Goodbye Margaret, hello Brisbane
Sunday, July 31st, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,There are a number of phone calls that I dread, although they are inevitable. One arrived last Wednesday when the SMH Arts Editor, Clare Morgan, rang to tell me that Margaret Olley had died. Margaret has been a fixture on the Australian art scene since the 1940s, and it would be difficult to think of […]
Struggling Artists
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,A reader, Glenn Stelzer, has emailed me to suggest that his brother, Bevan, is an artist worthy of attention. He says, quite rightly, that there are a lot of talented but “struggling” artists who never get their time in the sun. A painter, Edwin Smith, has written to alert me to his exhibition with Bruce […]
War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication
Friday, July 8th, 2011 Blog,War Posters: Weapons of Mass Communication By James Aulich, Thames & Hudson/Imperial War Museum Paperback, 256 pp. $49.95 Everybody knows the classic war posters. Uncle Sam points at the viewer, announcing “I Want YOU for U.S. Army”. It’s not subtle, it’s not even original. In a poster by the British artist, Alfred Leete, issued in […]