Two major shows are finishing up shortly, at their only venues in Australia. William Kentridge, ACMI, Melbourne Why, why did I wait so long to see Kentridge at ACMI? Partly it seemed to be on for ages; partly I wasn’t sure I liked his work, d’oh. The show is gobsmackingly tremendous; K and I spent [...]
Rightho — this is something I should have done a couple of weeks back. It’s a heads up for a (free) talk I’m giving on book cover design, specifically on the Text Classics series, Australian classics, rather than from o/s. You can see the thirty covers here, and hopefully you’ll have seen them (yellow: Aussie [...]
It’s not like someone running into a burning house to save a child — a super hero is relatively invulnerable, so it’s no skin off her nose to do it. And if there is no chancing personal pain, how to be heroic? Wait up! Let’s rewind that. We ignored Luke Buckmaster‘s warning about The Avengers [...]
Don’t know about you, but I find most writing about art not very helpful, sometimes, actively unhelpful. That’s writing like art reviews, rather than a monograph, say. The writers want their reviews to be little bits of polished writing, art in themselves. This is by Dan Rule in the Age, a writer for whose writing [...]
What would the marketing department of the “venerable” auction house, Leonard Joel, est. 1919, say? Own a piece of outlaw history! What they did say was: ‘This sale of street art is the first time such a collection has come to public auction in Australia.’ (On view from today and on the block this Sunday [...]
February 22, 2012 – 10:57 am
A couple of days ago, I picked up a bargain from a bin outside one of those slowly disappearing, or slowly mushrooming, second-hand paper-book stores. It was The Best of Petty, ‘a collection of satirical cartoons from The Australian by Bruce Petty’ published in 1968 … that’s um, oh em gee, 44 years ago. It [...]
February 6, 2012 – 9:02 am
The room housing La Jaconde, Leonardo’s alter ego, and we crowds who flock to proximity with celebrity. I confess, she looks much less alluring than when I saw her a long time ago. Too well lit, too banally displayed, too hermetically sealed in her glass coffin.
February 1, 2012 – 8:43 am
Observations and not very high ku from the streets of Paris 1. NoDa 1.1) On January 30, we found that “probably the most famous image in French Gothic art” was obscured by a huge, bebaubled Christmas tree, now shabby after months of weather. The church fathers collaborating with tourism authorities. 1.2) The sun explodes through the rose window, darkly, [...]
December 13, 2011 – 10:43 am
This Christmas, be very nice to yourself or someone you want to impress. Here is my limited edition hand-coloured linocut portrait of David Malouf, which appears on the cover of the latest Australian Book Review (Dec 11 – Jan 12). I should’ve started flogging this earlier except that I quite forgot — the post-holiday cascading [...]
November 30, 2011 – 11:01 am
What with Syria and Cairo and Congo and Euro, and my motto, or maybe credo, has to come from that Neil Finn line: In the paper today tales of war and of waste / But you turn right over to the T.V. page. Mentioning fashion inevitably makes proper, serious folk get itchy and anxious; so [...]
