Tag: International Art
White Rabbit – Double Take
Saturday, September 22nd, 2012 Art Column,Ever since Deng Xiaoping plunged China into the era of reforms in the late 1970s, with the legendary words: “To get rich is glorious”, the nation’s leaders have spent a great deal of time resolving – or ignoring – contradictions. Karl Marx himself would have had difficulty explaining the paradox of a communist country with […]
Portrait of Spain
Saturday, July 28th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,Over the years one grows wary of the claims made for so-called ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. Each new show is the biggest, the best, the first, the most important. It is, therefore, a pleasure to see an exhibition that lives up to its pre-publicity. None of the 100 works borrowed for Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the […]
18th Biennale of Sydney
Saturday, July 14th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,One of the most striking images in the 18th Biennale of Sydney is that of Japanese artist Sachiko Abe, dressed in bridal white, sitting in a small brick building in Cockatoo Island, cutting paper. Visitors are asked to remain silent, so the only sound is the noise made by Abe’s scissors as she trims sheets […]
Portrait of Spain (a preview)
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,For a visitor to the Museo del Prado in Madrid one moment stays fixed in the memory: entering the central gallery to be confronted by Diego Velasquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas (1665). The most dramatic way of approaching the painting is to see it framed by a doorway from the other side of the room. There […]
18th Biennale of Sydney
Saturday, July 7th, 2012 Aboriginal Art, Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,“Between belief in Nature and belief in politics, one has to choose,” writes French sociologist, Bruno Latour, in the stand-out essay in this year’s Biennale catalogue. We have a perfect demonstration of this principle in the hysterical debate about a carbon price. While Nature is forever, politics is an exercise in short-term, strategic thinking that […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]