The NGV’s summer exhibition is curated to create a dialogue between Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol, and this conversation operates on multiple levels on a variety of themes, and across time and space.
The marketing of Australian art largely remains a provincial exercise within a global art environment.
Image: Sydney Contemporary Art Fair, 2015. AAP Image/NEWZULU/THINKING MEDIA
Despite rhetoric positioning Australia as a clever and creative country, its artists, particularly in the visual arts, are doing it tough, and things are progressing from bad to worse. Why is that?
A standard trope suggests this is a war between art and commerce – it isn’t.
EPA/ Facundo Arrizabalaga
Many voices have united in claiming the toy giant Lego is censoring the provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. There are so many things wrong with those arguments it’s hard to know where to begin.
Infrastruktur, Nicole Wermers, 2015 at Tramway in Glasgow.
Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Bondi’s highly popular Sculpture by the Sea has set up shop in Denmark – and the Aarhus event has proved to be an astonishing and very different success to its predecessor.
Thousands of people will throng Sydney’s streets for Vivid 2015, which opens this weekend.
Vivid Sydney draws larger crowds each year and when it opens this weekend, the streets will be packed. Are events like Vivid Sydney and Paris’ Nuit Blanche artistically valuable – or just a lot of fun?
A major retrospective of the work of On Kawara is on display at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. On Kawara, JUN 10 1975. From I Got Up, 1968–79. Stamped ink on postcard, 3 ½ x 5 ½ inches (8.9x4 cm). Collection of Keiji and Sawako Usami.
Guggenheim
Japanese artist On Kawara worked closely with the Guggenheim Museum on a major retrospective of his work – the fact he died just before it opened lends even greater poignancy to his art.
What mechanisms separate the art pantheon of Australia from the also-rans?
AAP Image/Sergio Dionisio
There are about 30,000 professional practicing visual artists in Australia today (see note). By professional, I mean exhibiting regularly in recognised commercial or public galleries and represented in…
Paul McCarthy, the granddaddy of shock conceptual art, has gone and done it again. In a globally reported move, part-installation and part promotional-stunt to mark the imminent opening of Paris’s Foire…
Styles vary, but an interest in listening as a creative act is central.
Ars Electronica
Liquid Architecture 2014 will take place in various locations in Australia and Singapore from tomorrow to October 11. And, as Australia’s largest sonic arts festival, it raises an obvious question: what…
Installation view from Stan Hopewell: God is Love, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, 2013.
Courtesy of Nic Montagu
In Talking Point, the Australia Council’s recently published “snapshot” of the Australian contemporary visual arts in 2014, it was surprising to find only one reference to the country’s 42 university based…
Yingmei Duan is performing Happy Yingmei at this year’s Sydney Biennale. It’s a sign feminist performance art is thriving.
AGNSW
Until the end of the 2014 Biennale of Sydney in June, Chinese performance artist Yingmei Duan will live in a small forest built inside the Art Gallery of NSW. Visitors – as they have since the start of…
Audiences are invited to hop aboard Callum Morton’s Google Ghost Train as part of this year’s Biennale of Sydney.
AAP Image/Quentin Jones
Over its 41-year history the recipe for a successful Biennale of Sydney has remained remarkably consistent. There are three ingredients and all three need to work in harmony for the exhibition to properly…
This is the contemporary art exhibition we’ve been waiting for. Works by Ben Quilty and Alex Seton at the 2014 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art.
Art Gallery of South Australia
This is the exhibition we have been waiting for. This is contemporary art as it was meant to be – warning that we are experiencing the dark night of the national soul. The country that once thought of…
Analogue TV may be on the way out – but it’s been an involving medium for artists.
Tele Visions/Lucy Parakhina
2013 will be remembered as the year analogue television was switched off in Australia. The curators of Tele Visions are celebrating the final days of analogue TV with a set of new and historically significant…
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne