Tag: celebrity
Dream Scenario & Ferrari
Sunday, January 7th, 2024 Film Reviews,Another year, another burst of films released in time for the awards season. To cover the field expeditiously I’m going to look at two of them: Kristoffer Borgli’s engaging indie, Dream Scenario, and Michael Mann’s bio-pic, Ferrari, which – surprisingly enough – is also an independent production. Dream Scenario may have the smaller budget, but […]
Robert Wilson: Moving Portraits
Tuesday, July 19th, 2022 Art Column,Germany’s all-time literary giant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, once suggested to Caspar David Friedrich he should paint landscapes that systematically depicted each type of cloud identified in a famous treatise. Friedrich, by all accounts, was horrified at the suggestion. Being atttracted by the freedom and mutability of clouds, he resisted the idea of placing them […]
Flattery & Kitsch
Tuesday, September 14th, 2021 Art Column,“Only art and science can raise men to the level of gods,” wrote Ludwig van Beethoven, in a typically grand pronouncement. For music lovers of the late 19thcentury there was no greater Divinity than Beethoven himself. Wagner may have had a cult following, but Beethoven (1770-1827) was the centre of a full-blown religion. One true […]
Diana: Back in Bronze
Saturday, July 17th, 2021 Blog,If the British Royal Family wished to underline their status as an antiquated institution, out of touch with the present day, they could hardly do better than commission a larger-than-life-size bronze statue of Diana, Princess of Wales. The bronze monument of The Great Man (and occasionally, Woman) is a throwback to Victorian times which implicitly […]
Archibald Prize 2016
Friday, July 15th, 2016 Art Column,For a severe case of cultural vertigo try spending three weeks in the museums of Europe gazing at portraits by Rembrandt, Rubens and Beckmann, before hurrying back to Sydney for… the Archibald Prize! If travel broadens the mind it’s a positive disadvantage when it comes to appreciating the charms of this great Australian institution. Faced […]
Marilyn at MAMA
Friday, February 19th, 2016 Art Column,“Men grow cold as girls grow old, and we all lose our charms in the end…” sang Marilyn Monroe in Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend. Yet Marilyn would never lose her charms, cheating old age by dying at the age of 36, fixing her image forever as the glamorous blonde starlet we see in […]
Andy Warhol – Ai Weiwei
Thursday, January 7th, 2016 Art Column,There are ideas for exhibitions that make luminous sense – once somebody has announced them. Andy Warhol – Ai Weiwei at the National Gallery of Victoria set off bells and whistles in my head when curator, Max Delaney, told me about it last year. It’s such an obvious match it seems remarkable someone in Europe […]
Paths to Stardom:
Saturday, February 14th, 2015 Blog,Birdman, the new film by Alejandro González Inárritu, tells us everything we need to know about the ever-changing path to stardom. Riggan, played by Michael Keaton, is an actor who has become famous for playing a comic book superhero, but craves the prestige and ‘authenticity’ conferred by the Broadway stage. In the twilight of his […]
Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
Saturday, December 21st, 2013 Film Reviews,It has been a whopping nine years since Will Ferrell starred in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004). This is an eternity compared to the speed with which Hollywood usually serves up sequels, although the delay may simply be due to the huge volume of film and TV work the hyperactive Ferrell has undertaken […]
Lucian Freud 1922 – 2011
Sunday, July 31st, 2011 Art Column, International Art,With the passing of Lucian Freud, British art has lost not only one of its great painters, but a legendary conversationalist. Perhaps it was a skill acquired while staring at people for hours in the studio, deciding whether or not to put a microscopic dab of paint on the end of a nose. Freud’s anecdotes, […]