John McDonald

Looking at this year’s dismal selection for the Wynne Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW, I couldn’t help thinking that the most average landscape by William Robinson, who won the prize in 1990 and 1996, would have murdered everything else in the room. More

Enrique Martínez Celaya is an overachiever by any standard. An American artist of Cuban extraction, he has been feted and praised as only the United States can fete and praise. More

Words such as “delightful” do not play much of a role in this column, but if ever there were an occasion for such a lapse, it would be Art, Love & Life: Ethel Carrick & E. Phillips Fox, at the Queensland Art Gallery. The Foxes were a successful partnership, both as man and wife, and … More

Q: When is a film not a film? A: When it’s a work of contemporary art. Of all the current crop of Chinese artists who have become stars of the Biennale circuit, Yang Fudong (b.1971) is one of the most difficult to categorise. Having studied painting at the Academy of Art in Hangzhou, he has … More

It’s appropriate the Archibald Prize should coincide with Easter, because the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW have repented of their sins of last year and asked to be forgiven. Not in so many words, of course. They have simply chosen a better, more credible exhibition and tried to put the horrors of 2010 … More

Most artists would be delighted to find a TV news crew at their exhibition, but last week in Melbourne a Channel Ten reporter and her entourage were not allowed to film the first night of Bill Henson’s new show at Tolarno Galleries. Because television reporters apparently have a God-given right to go anywhere, the indignation … More

In 1975 the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, hosted the exhibition: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. It is still talked about as one of the most influential shows of the modern era, with an index of its significance being that second-hand copies of the original catalogue now change hands for … More

As a second Art Month winds towards a conclusion, it’s still not clear that this initiative is winning new audiences for the visual arts. For 2010’s first-ever Art Month the program was even more packed, but the season that followed was a mortifying experience for most of the commercial galleries. It seems that all the … More

Photographic Portraits of Fairfield by Danny Huynh Multiculturalism isn’t folk dancing, it’s the stoning of adulterers. Anthony Daniels. ‘Multiculturalism’ is one of the most contested terms in our modern liberal democracy. For some commentators it represents a sentimental dream of folk dances, national costumes and ethnic cuisine. Others see it as a mask for religious … More

In his grotesque installation, My We (2011), Filipino artist, Louie Cordero looks at a spate of violent murders perpetrated on people who sing Frank Sinatra’s My Way in Manilla’s karaoke bars. This is certainly the best story of the 2011 Singapore Biennale, and one with a sly message for the hosts. In a country recognised … More