Dog day afternoon
Animal welfare concerns have long plagued the greyhound racing industry, but in Victoria a campaign from covert investigators now has a parliamentarian leading the fightOctober 2011
Arts & Letters
Architecture masterpiece
Lindsay & Kerry Clare - ‘Gallery of Modern Art’, Queensland, 2006
Nowadays ‘masterpiece’ refers to a work of extraordinary artistic merit. But it once described a work by a craftsman made specifically to demonstrate mastery of (his) craft and so gain entry to a guild. This older meaning is appropriate to architecture, a practice lodged somewhere between fine arts and craft. The Gold Medal of the Australian Institute of Architects is a contemporary measure of mastery.
Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art, designed by 2010 Gold Medallists Lindsay and Kerry Clare (with James Jones), is a building readily available to the public. With its large overhanging roof, open verandahs and timber-batten screening, GoMA conveys a typical, familiar and regional expression of subtropical informality at a civic scale. It is a friendly, welcoming building, unexpectedly filled with natural light and with tactile surfaces that successfully deflate conventional expectations of the art gallery as an imposing institution. Here, grandeur and hauteur are exchanged for ideas of accessibility and the ordinary, refined and made beautiful and extraordinary.
—Haig Beck and Jackie Cooper
Mars attracts
Reviving the Viking mission’s experiments may yet find life as we know it on Mars, but the best outcome would be something truly alien
How to change a bad law
The campaign to repair the single parenting payment was a model of how research and advocacy can push government to face the cruel effects of a policy and change course
Kandinsky at AGNSW
The exhibition of the Russian painter’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW provides a fascinating view of 20th-century art’s leap from representation to abstraction
![Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981](https://www.themonthly.com.au/sites/default/files/styles/frontpage_small_2x/public/Sprague_1223_1140x700.jpg?itok=-odjcVyx "Emily Kam Kngwarray, Anmatyerr people, not titled [detail], 1981")
A clear view: Emily Kam Kngwarray at the NGA
A major exhibition of the late Anmatyerr desert painter is welcome, but the influence of the rapacious art market on Aboriginal art is inescapable
The rule of threes: NGV Triennial
The sprawling show’s exploration of technologies and pressing politics takes in artificial intelligence and deep-fake photojournalism
Animal form: Sigrid Nunez
The celebrated American author’s latest book, ‘The Vulnerables’, completes a loose trilogy of hybrid autobiographical and fictional novels
A house provided: Preserving public housing
The architectural practice proving that refurbishing public housing can be less expensive and disruptive than demolition for new projects
Visual art (two-dimensional) masterpiece
Brian Blanchflower - ‘Canopy LI (Scelsi I–IV)’, 2001
Jazz masterpiece
Ten Part Invention - ‘Unidentified Spaces’, 2001
Visual art (three-dimensional) masterpiece
Hany Armanious & Mary Teague - ‘Lines of Communication’, 2010
Classical music masterpiece
James Ledger - ‘Chronicles’, 2009Kandinsky at AGNSW
The exhibition of the Russian painter’s work at the Art Gallery of NSW provides a fascinating view of 20th-century art’s leap from representation to abstraction
The unsung career of Margret RoadKnight
Little-known outside the Melbourne folk scene for decades, singer Margret RoadKnight’s 60 years of music-making is celebrated in a new compilation
Beyond the Voice referendum
Looking towards the next 65,000 years
Guarding the power of the court in our democracy
The hidden forces agitating at highest levels to undermine judicial independence