Newsletter
Newsletter 509
Monday, September 18th, 2023 Newsletter,I’m back in Sydney after two successive trips, to Europe and South Korea, feeling as if I’m still finding my feet. People are either travellers or stay-at-homes. To be a traveller you’ve got to be more interested in new experiences than creature comforts, as it’s almost impossible to avoid the long drawn-out waits in airport […]
Newsletter 508
Monday, September 11th, 2023 Newsletter,It’s been all about art fairs this week. To begin, I had the annual nail-biter with Sydney Contemporary – having to (p)review the show while it was still being set up, because of the weekly newspaper deadlines. To add a degree of difficulty I was due to get on a plane to Seoul on Tuesday […]
Newsletter 507
Monday, September 4th, 2023 Newsletter,Apologies for the lateness of this week’s posting. I’ve just got off a plane from Europe where I’ve been in and out of artists’ studios in Paris, Basel and Berlin, squeezing in as many museum exhibitions as possible. Sounds great, huh? Well yes, but there’s always a pay-off, mainly in the form of a long […]
Newsletter 506
Monday, August 28th, 2023 Newsletter,Roughly six weeks ago I found myself sitting next to Sam Kerr in the Qantas lounge in Brisbane. The Womens World Cup was still about a month away, but anticipation was high. Every ten minutes someone would ask the poor girl if they could take a selfie with her. Showing superhuman patience she agreed to […]
Newsletter 505
Monday, August 21st, 2023 Newsletter,Nothing in the recent New Yorker profile of art dealer, Larry Gagosian, came as a big surprise, but I was still left reeling after reading it. The feeling, to put a name to it, was one whereby all your worst suspicions have been confirmed in one hit. Gagosian, as writer Patrick Radden Keefe informs us, […]
Newsletter 504
Monday, August 14th, 2023 Newsletter,In a recent essay for Tablet Magazine, William Deresiewicz made a few mordant observations on our contemporary cultural condition. “Art is boring now… because we are boring. Art is woke because we are woke… ‘Diversity’ becomes a cloak for uniformity. The same thing – the same kitsch pop songs, middlebrow fiction, wish-fulfillment streaming fare, agitprop […]
Newsletter 503
Monday, August 7th, 2023 Newsletter,When I worked at the National Gallery of Australia over 20 years ago, there was a long-running issue with the air conditioning. The system had begun spitting black gunk on people and works of art through a vent, and there was a growing suspicion of a cancer cluster. I was told the root of the […]
Newsletter 502
Monday, July 31st, 2023 Newsletter,There is a suggestion this week that the dreadful, wasteful, vandalistic, unpopular makeover of Powerhouse Ultimo – previously known as the Powerhouse Museum – is finally being rethought. Considering that these plans were going to cost the new Labor government more than $500 million, and deliver an institution with half as much exhibition space, in […]
Newsletter 501
Monday, July 24th, 2023 Newsletter,This week seems to be Barbie Week, with the whole world transformed into Barbie Land. As you’ll find, if and when you see the movie, every day in Barbie Land is a perfect day, so it’s gotta be a big improvement on our usual lot. In Barbie Land, if I’m to believe Margot Robbie and […]
Newsletter 500
Monday, July 17th, 2023 Newsletter,How bad was Robodebt? The more one reads about this unhappy exercise in public policy, the worse it sounds. I know it’s got nothing to do with my core topics of art and cinema, but the story is so awful, I can’t let it go. There’s something evil about a program based on false assumptions […]