Arts & Letters: Art
SOCIETY
High Priest: David Walsh and Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art
Amanda Lohrey
The Moorilla estate is set on a peninsula of sandstone cliffs that juts out into the Derwent estuary on Hobart’s northern fringe. Framed to...
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CULTURE
Sydney Gets a Laneway: The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Drusilla Modjeska
Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art...
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CULTURE
Bodying Forth: Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois
Drusilla Modjeska
The bodies of old women are rarely celebrated in art, and representations of them are few. The faces of older women who’ve achieved status...
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CULTURE
Republic of Art: 'The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910–37'
Sebastian Smee
You can look at French art of the 1870s and momentarily forget about the Franco–Prussian War and the Paris Commune. You can study the...
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WORLD
Lessons in Unlearning: Peter Robb on Shaun Gladwell
Peter Robb
When the Olympic Games came to Sydney in 2000 I decided to rent a TV and watch some. Tweaking the rabbit’s ears – no time for an antenna –...
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CULTURE
The Faith of Images: 'Up Close'
Peter Conrad
Why, confronted by a camera, are we expected to smile? A face, as Carol Jerrems said, “tells the story of what a person is thinking”....
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SOCIETY
Primal Scenes: Tim Burton: The Exhibition
John Baxter
When I taught at an American college in the 1970s, my students asked if I’d mind finishing my afternoon lectures early: local TV was re-...
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Body of Work: Antony Gormley’s 'Firmament IV'
Robyn Davidson
Like all stereotypes, “stupid as a painter” – intended to cover visual artists of every persuasion – reveals itself as a truth via its...
More ...Artful Excess: The 17th Biennale of Sydney
Juliana Engberg
The marketing material for the seventeenth Biennale of Sydney displays a lusty engagement with the semiotics of font. Using the agitprop...
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The Alchemist: Alfred Stieglitz’s Lake George Years
Peter Conrad
Alfred Stieglitz was the kind of man that Australia, more’s the pity, has never had. Here prophets come from the desert, as AD Hope once...
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Neon Statements: Joseph Kosuth and Conceptual Art
Justin Clemens
At the beginning of the 1960s, the New York art scene was going wild. World War II had created the conditions for the city to become the...
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Waste-Makers
Juliana Engberg
The aesthetic of detritus is everywhere at the moment. It’s as if the rubbish bin of the twentieth century has finally been put out for...
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A Matter of Taste: The 53rd Venice Biennale
Sebastian Smee
Art that indulges anarchic impulses – even if the results are a little fatuous – is almost always preferable to art that...
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Credo
Bill Henson
Art tends to occur against our better judgment. At the most obvious level this happens when art creates scandal: think of the trials of...
More ...CULTURE
Mind / Body : Mike Parr’s Cartesian Corpse
Daniel Thomas
To know or not to know anything in advance about an artist's work? That is the question for art curators. They hope the artworks they...
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Southern Discomfort: Tasmania’s Art Scene
Juliana Engberg
I'm standing in the midst of crates and stacking shelves. The final scene of Citizen Kane comes to mind: when, at the end of his life, Kane...
More ...ENVIRONMENT
Children of the Revolutions: Sixteenth Biennale of Sydney
Juliana Engberg
As Wordsworth once wrote: "There's something in a flying horse / There's something in a huge balloon." And while there's no record of WW...
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The View from the Pavilions: The 2007 Venice Biennale
Juliana Engberg
You either love or loathe Venice. Some find its crumbling patina and limpid light romantic and restorative. Others feel only pneumonia...
More ...CULTURE
‘Australian Impressionism’, Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Justin Clemens
This is an impressive corporate exercise, bringing together more than 240 works from the heroic era of Australian art, from an...
More ...CULTURE
A Law That Cannot Be Enforced: The Politics of Art in Australia
Justin Clemens
Last year, in the mid-afternoon of 1 August, I snuck into the Melbourne Art Fair before it officially opened. I wanted to poke around, see...
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