Ghana’s Chale Wote festival’s main aim is to provide an alternative platform for the arts. It uses street arts to break creative boundaries and cultivate a wider audience for the arts in West Africa.
Individual artists continue to experience the brunt of arts funding cuts.
Shutterstock
In 1983, a groundbreaking inquiry into the economic circumstances of artists released a report containing a string of recommendations. Thirty three years on, the inquiry’s chair asks, what has changed?
It’s time to finally put art on the Olympic map, prove the sceptics wrong, and renew and advance some of the more tired aspects of the Games staging process.
The Dobell is a celebration of drawing. And the work in this year’s show, from Noel McKenna’s beautifully rendered drawings of dogs to Richard Lewer’s depictions of states of mind – is first rate.
The X-rays of the Australian Synchrotron reveal a remarkably clear picture of the woman’s face.
David Thurrowgood
It took cutting edge technology and a collaboration between the Australian Synchrotron and the CSIRO to reveal the mysterious hidden lady in Degas’s famous painting.
Worth a thousand words? Or $37 million.
Darren Ornitz/Reuters
Climate disaster films are an emerging genre that reflect people’s desire to cope with a changing planet through art. How will they affect public attitudes on climate change?
The Man in the Black Cravat, now by Lucian Freud.
BBC
This year’s Archibald Prize winner is a painting with great affection for its subject. Louise Hearman’s Barry was a surprise choice – but it deserves to find an ultimate home in the National Portrait Gallery.
Faith Kearns, University of California, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources
A scientist dips her toe into a new form of group-based performance art: devising new words to describe new feelings and phenomena of a rapidly changing world.
Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori began painting in her 80s, and over ten years created an extraordinary body of work. Her paintings are more like music and dance – depicting the stories of the Kaiadilt people for the first time.
Finding the art in science and investigating the science of art used to be common practise. At the turn of the 19th century the boundaries between academic disciplines hardened, but now new fields like neuroaesthetics are breaking down barriers.
How is Berlin’s landmark art show presenting our new preoccupations?
Courtesy 9th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art
Art events should encourage us to spark new thinking outside of our cloistered world, but Berlin risks being lost in technological navel gazing.
Degas and Manet’s stormy relationship is expressed in a portrait Degas painted of Manet and his wife, which has been slashed, presumably by Manet himself.
Detail of Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet (1868-69) Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
Edgar Degas’ relationship with Impressionism was to be a stormy one, but his encounter with Edouard Manet in 1862 was a turning-point in his career. Degas went on to paint a portrait of Manet and his wife - later slashed in mysterious circumstances.
Bruce Beresford’s expansive art collection grew from flea-markets.
Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956). Exodus (Study for a mural). Photo: Jenni Carter
Bruce Beresford can’t draw, but he has wept in an art gallery. A lifelong delight in a wide range of art – from paintings to opera – has influenced his craft from a young age.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne