When I was a kid way back in the dim, dark 1960s, I collected radio Top 40 charts obsessively. What struck me then – and still strikes me now (yes, I kept the charts) – was the sheer diversity of songs…
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Arts + Culture – Articles, Analysis, Comment
Displaying 5151 - 5175 of 5197 articles
Typography is all around us. Fonts are on every document and website we read but also within the ephemera of our lives: on the toothpaste we use, newspapers we read, bus tickets we swipe and the streets…
Remember when airline travel was all about glamorous hostesses, dashing pilots and the stylish, well-behaved jet-set class? No, I don’t either. But it’s a rose-tinted view of the past Virgin Australia…
Why doesn’t Australia get culture? What is it about culture that defeats our perception to the point where, like an unwelcome magic trick, it vanishes as an object of collective concern? For a country…
Australian TV drama expenditure has increased by 27% in the last year, according to a Screen Australia report released today, accounting for 50% of the A$752 million spent on big and small screen drama…
Beyond: Two Souls isn’t a film. It isn’t a game. The interactive adventure game, released by French developers Quantic Dream for Sony’s Playstation 3, is a melding of the two. Using sophisticated motion-capture…
Dear robots: you have an image problem. Typically cast as either as vicious killing machines, cutesy pets or house slaves, robots are usually depicted in Western media as either something to be feared…
“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” These aren’t lines from Nineteen Eighty-Four but the words of Eric Schmidt, Google’s notoriously…
Cinema’s relationship to gravity is a fascinating one. At the time of its birth, in 1895, cinema was seen as a revolutionary machine that didn’t simply defy gravity through moving pictures seemingly suspended…
There was a moment of silence in the courtyard of the College of Fine Arts when the winner of this year’s Blake Prize was announced last week. The A$25,000 prize is awarded annually for a work of religious…
Back in the 70s, when I was writing a book called Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940 people were often bemused by my research. A book devoted to women artists? Pretty short book, huh? I mean, there were…
Earlier this year, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott announced Australia’s public broadcaster would begin a search “to find creative ways to deliver news to children and teenagers”. In the announcement…
Virtually any kid who picks up a bucket of LEGO bricks will start by making a house, usually in mismatched, rainbow colours, maybe featuring a few of the little plastic minifig people. It seems almost…
Joel Sartore has been an explorer and photographer for National Geographic for 20 years. He captures the drama and beauty of wild animals from all corners of the earth, some of which you see here. But…
Max Dupain and Frank Hinder are among the many significant artists who contributed decisively to Australia’s modernist tradition. Less well known, however, is that they both worked for Australia’s military…
When Australian artist Lionel Lindsay wrote Addled Art, his polemic against modernism, he found one aspect of the new brash art world worth valuing. The way some artists had liberated colour was so enticing…
A column of light shines from Hobart’s Queen’s Domain, where Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda’s Spectra reaches up to the looming clouds, visible across the city. The normally empty streets are crowded, the…
MATHS AND SCIENCE EDUCATION: We’ve asked our authors about the state of maths and science education in Australia and its future direction. In our final instalment, Benjamin Miller and Fiona White examine…
Next year, senior students in Victoria will be able to study a graphic novel, The Complete Maus, as part of the prescribed English curriculum. As a literary and artistic form, graphic novels combine the…
When visitors come to the Turner from the Tate exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, the experience is to travel through time and space to early 19th century Britain. It was a time of social…
The contemporary art critic cannot say with certainty whether something is good or bad. What good criticism does today is to help the public “see” the artwork. It does not explain and close down meaning…
As the curtains rise on the National Gallery of Victoria’s (NGV) latest blockbuster, Monet’s Garden, it is a good time to reflect on a connection between this acclaimed modernist painter and the art world…
One of my favourite paintings in the Art Gallery of New South Wales is Emanuel Phillips Fox’s Art Students. It’s particularly notable because all the Melbourne Art School students pictured are women. In…
It was the 1960s when a curator – who shall remain nameless – was ordered to hang Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira’s work in his gallery. He hung the painting next to the ladies toilet with a vase of…
UPDATE: Del Kathryn Barton has won the 2013 Archibald Prize for her portrait of Hugo Weaving. This is the second time Barton has won the prize, her last winner was in 2008. The only other woman to win…