Rembrandt Duits, School of Advanced Study, University of London
A painting is often like theatre. There are actors, who give expression to a narrative. They are distributed across a stage floor and positioned against a scenic backdrop. The artist is both the stage…
Often it is just one artwork that kindles the idea for an exhibition. Robert Dale’s extraordinary panorama of King George Sound, engraved by Robert Havell and published as A Descriptive Account of the…
It is nearly 50 years since Australian writer Elizabeth Harrower’s previous novel The Watch Tower appeared. Why, after producing four novels between 1957 and 1966, did she stop writing? Or at least stop…
The Tate Modern’s incredible new exhibition brings together more than 130 works by the French artist from public and private collections worldwide. It is a once in a lifetime show that focuses on Matisse’s…
The long-anticipated biblical epic, Noah, has been released to a tidal wave of reviews, comments and criticisms on the film’s “accuracy” in its adaptation of the flood narrative in Genesis. And granted…
This weekend, AMC’s Mad Men returns to TV screens for its final season, due to be shown in two halves, this year and next. In its six seasons to date the period drama has won plaudits for its writing and…
Rowan Moore says in his 2012 book Why We Build: Void counts for more than solid. The effort, skill and force of design and structure go into making pregnant emptiness a space in which things can happen…
I’m sitting here in my office, having made several false starts on this piece, and my phone has just buzzed. My five year old son – who an hour ago accompanied me to a packed screening of The Lego Movie…
SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for Game of Thrones season four, episode one. When we first met Charles Dance’s Tywin Lannister back in season one he was gutting a stag – a none-too-subtle…
What do you think of when Italian fashion is mentioned? Versace’s shiny, gold Medusa-head logo? Armani’s sleek, unstructured tailoring? Prada’s textural, ladylike sportswear? Or maybe Jeremy Scott’s recent…
Television has seen its fair share of characters on welfare with a penchant for flannelette shirts and tinnies of VB in recent years. We’ve seen an obese mother and daughter in Bogan Pride, Sunnydale’s…
Currently on display at Parliament House is an exhibition that we are told is the first of its kind. Entitled Place and Practice, it’s a showcase of works by artists based in regional and remote areas…
BBC One’s swaggering epic The Musketeers has concluded with much skulduggery and winning of honour. A second series has already been confirmed after the show opened spectacularly with a consolidated audience…
The recent television series The Art of Australia presented by Edmund Capon, and its counterpart Hannah Gadsby’s OZ, offered a blinkered view of Australian art practice that ended at the 129th meridian…
Love is a battlefield. While Pat Benatar might have made this line her own in the 1980s, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were also familiar with the trope. Analogies between wooing and hunting were…
Designers today are impatient for their work to expand into a larger world. They are testing their expertise in complex and non-traditional fields such as finance, conflict, health and disease; growing…
No one has ever claimed that the gods of theatre are fair. Musicals have flopped in London for any number of reasons: some were ahead of their times (the first production of Sweeney Todd), some were overpriced…
I have a golden rule, which is never to review a building unless I have been to it. Architecture is at heart about use and experience, and this simply cannot be conveyed through pictures, words and drawings…
The history of revolutionary cinema has been marked by a number of mercurial manifestos. Sergei Eisenstein, for example, believed in the brute potential of editing to activate the political senses. Fernando…
Oscar Wilde once wrote: “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” But W1A, the BBC’s new let’s-all-laugh-at-ourselves observational comedy, has shown art can be quickly left behind, following…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne