Category: Visual Arts
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Windows on the world
Translation, writes one of its outstanding practitioners, “helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight.” The words are Edith Grossman’s, from her 2010 book Why…
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Art Lovers the book
My book Art Lovers has just arrived from the printers, and it looks terrific! It’s the 60-year history of the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales – six decades of social and cultural change. I’ve loved working on it. It will be launched by the Governor of NSW, Professor Marie Bashir AC, during a…
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Our man at the Drill Hall
My good friend Terence Maloon, who curated some of the finest exhibitions of recent years at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, has just been appointed director of the Drill Hall gallery at the Australian National University. He has been welcomed in the Canberra Times with a perceptive interview by Ron Cerabona. In discussing…
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A discovery in Bangkok
The Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, opened only four years ago by the municipal authorities, is a spacious modern nine-storey Guggenheim-style building. Its aims are to exhibit contemporary art, provide a meeting place for artists and hold community cultural events. When so many of Asia’s great galleries still appear to have little connection with their…
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Surrealism on Andros
How come the island of Andros in the Aegean Sea is host to some of Greece’s best exhibitions of modern art? The answer lies in both the island’s long cultural history and its maritime prowess. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) at Hora, the main town, is funded by the Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation,…
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Where Theseus sailed
One of the first Greek myths to made a deep impression on me as a child was the story of Theseus and the Minotaur. Theseus, son of King Aegeus, left Athens to defeat the Cretan monster and secure the supremacy of his home state. He succeeded with the help of Ariadne, princess of Crete, who…
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Ex-Defence Minister threatens to tell all
As noted in previous despatches, Greece’s vast over-spending on arms was one of the compelling reasons for its debt crisis as well as the corrosive spread of corruption among the political classes. We have been receiving a daily diet of reports on the impending trial of former Defence Minister Akis Tsochalzopoulos, a senior member of…
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Connecting with the past
There are moments when you suddenly connect with an aspect of history you’d never grasped before. Athens this weekend has given us one such moment after another. The Acropolis is such a familiar image that we think we know it. To see it in reality, with the painstaking restoration of the Parthenon proceeding and the…
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Where Zorba danced
Near Stoupa in the Mani where we go to swim there’s a beach named Kalogria, which in Greek means “nun”. Local legend has it that almost 1,000 years ago, a novice from the nearby nunnery fell in love with a prince. When the church would not release her from her vows so that she could…
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The day they stormed the Bastille
From the window of our little hotel in the Marais I look down into the fire station. The fire brigade are a fine bunch of fit-looking young Frenchmen. Before the weekend, in between callouts, they spent hours climbing up fire-truck ladders in fetchingly tight t-shirts and running shorts, to put up tricolor bunting. I was…