Tag: politics
Dhaka Art Summit 2020
Thursday, February 13th, 2020 Sydney Morning Herald Column,If one can measure progress by the volume of pollution and traffic congestion, Dhaka must be one of the most progressive cities on earth. In the two years since my last visit the fallout from a boom economy means that everything seems to have grown grimier, more manic, more chaotic. At some stage the construction […]
A Hidden Life
Friday, February 7th, 2020 Film Reviews,Terrence Malick is the only Hollywood director to have translated a book by German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. I haven’t checked, but I’m fairly confident that Cecil B. DeMille or Steven Spielberg never felt the urge to dabble in the impenetrable utterances of the sage of Freiburg. Before he began making movies Malick lectured in philosophy. […]
Where’s My Roy Cohn?
Friday, December 6th, 2019 Film Reviews,On meeting Roy Cohn, we are told, “you knew you were in the presence of evil.” This statement occurs within the first few minutes. The rest of Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary adds support to the proposition. If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how American politics attained its current level of crazed amorality, Where’s My Roy Cohn? […]
Newsletter 314
Monday, November 25th, 2019 Newsletter,Sydney felt a bit like Beijing last week with grey smoke from the bushfires hanging in the air. The difference, so I’m told, is that the air quality in Beijing is a lot better nowadays as the government have quietly but prudently responded to growing public unrest. It takes a lot to rouse the Chinese […]
The Report
Friday, November 22nd, 2019 Film Reviews,One of the last-resort strategies being used by Fox News to undermine the Trump impeachment case is to complain that it’s too boring to watch witness after witness pile ignominy on the President. The point was suprisingly echoed by an NBC reporter who complained the proceedings lacked “pizzazz” – a word defined by the dictionary […]
Cornelia Parker
Friday, November 15th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,A good deal of contemporary art is wilfully opaque but the work of Cornelia Parker is distinguished by a consistent, lucid intelligence – which is not to say there aren’t plenty of puzzles. I’ve never been a fan of wall labels that explain a work but with the survey Rachel Kent has put together for […]
Steirischer Herbst 2019: Grand Hotel Abyss
Thursday, October 10th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Welcome to the Grand Hotel Abyss. The phrase was coined in 1933 by Marxist literary critic, György Lukacs, as a put-down of another group of Marxist intellectuals – the so-called Frankfurt School, whose ranks included luminaries such as Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas. Lukacs argued that the Frankfurt School practised a form of […]
David Goldblatt: Photography & Truth
Friday, August 9th, 2019 Blog,David Goldblatt will always be known as the photographer who exposed the evils of Apartheid to the world, but to characterise him as a ‘political’ artist is to diminish the breadth of his achievements. This is something Goldblatt has in common with all great photographers who have found their subjects in war, poverty, hatred and […]
Michael Armitage: The Promised Land
Thursday, July 4th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Michael Armitage as both an artist and a person is his immunity to cynicism. This is no mean feat in a world dominated by political immorality and self-interest in which voters seem to have lost the ability to tell right from wrong. Among artists the vogue is to produce […]
White Rabbit: Hot Blood
Thursday, June 13th, 2019 Sydney Morning Herald Column,When the Chinese Defence Minister recently told us the government had been “correct” in its response to the Tiananmen Square protests he said a lot about China today. For the past three decades the Party has kept silent about Tiananmen and obliged its citizens to follow suit. To suddenly come out and portray the massacre […]