Tag: political art
Hoda Afshar
Monday, November 6th, 2023 Art Column,For an artist to see their work on the walls of a museum today, it may not be sufficient to have talent. Hoda Afshar – whose mid-career survey, A Curve is a Broken Line, has miraculously materialised at the Art Gallery of NSW in a year which has been a desert for exhibitions – shows […]
Michael Zavros & eX de Medici
Tuesday, July 25th, 2023 Art Column,Post-pandemic, the art museums are finding international blockbusters prohibitively expensive and loans hard to secure. For some, the only solution has been to fall back on the permanent collection, but in Brisbane, the Gallery of Modern Art has been more proactive. Dual mid-career surveys of Michael Zavros and eX de Medici are distinguished by the […]
Richard Mosse: Broken Spectre
Tuesday, October 18th, 2022 Art Column,It may seem remarkable that anyone would view their short-term profits as more important than the survival of humankind, but this is the simple reason we’re losing the battle against Global Warming. The complex reason is slightly trickier. In the words of British philosopher, Timothy Morton, the warming of the planet is a “hyperobject” – […]
Vivienne Binns: On and through the surface
Thursday, September 22nd, 2022 Art Column,For one reason or another, it’s taken me a long time to get around to Vivienne Binns: On and Through the Surface, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, but it’s an exhibition that reveals a lot about the way a reputation is built. Nowadays Binns (b.1940) is virtually a national living treasure, but she has […]
Richard Bell: You Can Go Now
Tuesday, October 19th, 2021 Art Column,There was a time when every contemporary artist claimed their work was “subversive”, as if a boring painting or video might bring down global capitalism. Paradoxically, this feat was to be accomplished by selling works to museums and wealthy collectors for high prices, enabling the rebellious artist to enjoy all the benefits of a system […]
Art and Sport
Tuesday, August 17th, 2021 Art Column,After the Tokyo Olympics the boredom of the lockdown is set to move onto a whole new plane. Even without spectators the Olympics has confirmed its status as the world’s supreme global spectacle, with the power to keep millions of people glued to the box day after day. What do we do now that it’s […]
Just Not Australian
Tuesday, December 8th, 2020 Art Column,Just Not Australian made its debut at Artspace early last year but will be touring ten regional galleries in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia until October, 2022. I caught the show at the Wollongong Art Gallery where it may be seen over the holiday period. The longevity of the tour suggests this is […]
Wollongong Art: eX de Medici, Hana Orszulok, Pamela Griffith
Tuesday, July 28th, 2020 Art Column,Earlier this year French President, Emmanuel Macron, announced a €7 billion support fund, largely intended to help small companies and independent artists. It’s a far cry from the $250 million Scott Morrison is sprinkling on the arts sector in Australia. To think of the arts in France is to think of the Opéra Garnier and […]
Art and Propaganda
Thursday, May 21st, 2020 Art Column,“All art is propaganda…” wrote George Orwell. “On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.” He was talking about Charles Dickens, but I thought of this line when watching the new Netflix series, Hollywood, which sets out to overturn the racist and homophobic attitudes of the movie business in the late 1940s. As “art” […]
Tales from the Woods
Friday, April 17th, 2020 Blog,From Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 (1814) to Picasso’s Guernica (1937), to countless, politically correct projects by contemporary artists, the modern era has used art as a megaphone for speaking the truth to power. Yet it remains hard to think of a single instance when a work of so-called ‘political art’ has had any […]