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 new capital of the world, and Americans were unapologetically seizing opportunity in every way they could. Not only had ‘Old Europe’ been...
Art
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Justin Clemens
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Art | Dec 2009 - Jan 2010 | Society & Culture
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Juliana Engberg
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Art | August 2009 | Society & Culture
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 collection – with the legs of the ubiquitous female mannequin sticking out, of course (some things never change). Bricolage is back and...
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Sebastian Smee
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July 2009 | Arts & Letters | Art | Society & Culture
Art that indulges anarchic impulses – even if the results are a little fatuous – is almost always preferable to art that signals its conformity to good taste. And yet making art is one thing. Choosing art is another. Directing a show as big and unwieldy as the...
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Bill Henson
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June 2009 | Art | Society & Culture
Art tends to occur against our better judgment. At the most obvious level this happens when art creates scandal: think of the trials of such works of literature as Madame Bovary and James Joyce's Ulysses and Nabokov's Lolita. That's the obvious...
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Daniel Thomas
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February 2009 | Art
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 launch into the public domain are charged with aesthetic force and will put non-specialist minds to work unaided. It's a win when...
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Juliana Engberg
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Dec 2008 - Jan 2009 | Art
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's accumulation of boxed artefacts is surveyed, like a vast metropolis, by the cinematic eye. But this is no noir movie,...
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Juliana Engberg
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August 2008 | Art
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 himself having flown among the clouds, he had a penchant for lofty things that hovered and gave new perspectives on...
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Juliana Engberg
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Art | July 2007
You either love or loathe Venice. Some find its crumbling patina and limpid light romantic and restorative. Others feel only pneumonia waiting to happen in its water-logged streets, blustery winds and leaking rooms. It is claustrophobic and culturally conservative. Men in...
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Justin Clemens
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Art | May 2007 | Noted
This is an impressive corporate exercise, bringing together more than 240 works from the heroic era of Australian art, from an unprecedented range of galleries and private collections. The stars are among the most celebrated painters in the nation's history: Tom Roberts,...
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Justin Clemens
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Art | March 2007
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 what was going on and visit friends who were working there. A couple of guards were stationed on the main door, but I wandered innocently...
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