How a minor poet made a major historical error

Ben Lerner’s ‘The Hatred of Poetry’ brings together questions of art and politics

Clive James’ ‘Sentenced to Life’ and Les Murray’s ‘Waiting for the Past’

‘Contemporary jewellery’ doesn’t simply mean jewellery that’s being made now. It’s also the name of a major international movement, beginning in the mid 1970s, in which jewellers started to experiment with the inherited limitations …

Joseph Kosuth and conceptual art

Thomas Pynchon is one of the most extraordinary novelists writing today. This isn’t due to his genius alone, though there’s no doubting his encyclopaedic knowledge, literary range and sheer inventiveness. It’s also due to sheer luck, to Pynchon …

Born into poverty, sickness and vagabondage, Edgar Allan Poe was doomed from the beginning. His parents were actors, a déclassé profession at the time, and both were consumptive. His alcoholic and incompetent father abandoned the family a few years …

Chris McAuliffe’s governing image for Linda Marrinon’s career is that of Voltaire’s Candide, tending carefully to the garden despite the vicissitudes of the world. Beginning in the early 1980s with hilariously understated anti-aesthetic canvases …

In a world overburdened by museums and monuments, by the claims of the past and the injunction to protect and save, what should we preserve? Everything! Transience has assumed real value in contemporary art. Instead of the object, the event becomes primary: …

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: …

The politics of art in Australia

‘Juan Davila’

‘Being and Event’ By Alain Badiou, trans. Oliver Feltham

NGV International, to 24 September

The 2006 Biennale of Sydney: ‘Zones of Contact’