Artrave

• Allan Myers, a Melbourne QC, has given the National Gallery of Victoria a cool $6 million towards purchasing Asian art, both historical and contemporary, as part of its new $10m Asian Art Acquisition Fund, topped up by a cluster of other patrons and benefactors. This endowment should bring the Asian art holdings of the NGV up to scratch with its rivals in Brisbane and Sydney.

More from this Issue

On sunsets

A voyage across sunsets in recent Australian art from Jim Thalassoudis to Anne Zahalka, Tim Storrier to Philip Hanson. While at the outset Ted Snell quotes with approval Oscar Wilde's statement that 'nobody of any real culture ever talks nowadays about the beauty of sunsets' he goes on to show the enduring and meaningful presence of the sunset in both paintings and photography. Thus he demonstrates that art involving repossession and reinvention can, in spite of having to deal with accusations of kitsch, parochialism and provincialism, turn old themes into pure gold, both actual and emotional.

Ted Snell

Papunya Painting: out of the desert

Curator: Vivien Johnson National Museum of Australia 28 November 2007 3 February 2008

Stephanie Radok

Karl Wiebke

Karl Wiebke has been making art for thirty years. Margaret Moore selectively reviews his oeuvre and concludes that though 'Beauty as an ideal is not a platform for his practice it is a consequence. His works are profoundly and atmospherically evocative of mood, weather, or nature like a bed of lichen or a sense of saturation. He has adopted a programmatic approach to his practice, setting schema and working toward attainment. That schema might incorporate an obligation of time, of mark-making, of palette or the allowance for interventions other than by his hand.

Margaret Moore

Letting Go: Lee Salomone

Prospect Gallery 2 - 23 March 2008

Lauren Sutter

In response to conversations with a therapist as a narrative device: Martin Smith

Ryan Renshaw Gallery April 22 - May 10, 2008

Ben Eltham

Robin Best

Robin Bests ceramics reflect her attention to the importance of location. Her forms are classical, meditative and reflective, and has ranged from marine forms to works decorated by Ernabella artist Nyukuna Baker. Her most recent body of work undertaken during and after a number of residencies in China reflects the complexity of the cultural, commercial and political history of China. Her snuff bottles are a picture gallery of images related to trade, culture and commerce, while others contain designs taken from each of the countries that blue and white porcelain passed through on its way from China to Europe via India and the Middle East.

Stephen Bowers

The romantic spirit

In 2007 Jennifer A. McMahon, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Adelaide, published a book called Aesthetics and material beauty: aesthetics naturalized. (See book review by Michael Newall, this issue of Artlink.) In the late 1970s McMahon was an art student looking for truth. Her move to philosophy to find truth makes use of Kant's doctrine of aesthetic ideas and argues that our perceptual and cognitive orientation to the world is reaffirmed through finding forms that seem to draw us to them for their own sake. When this occurs it unleashes ideas like immortality, infinity and freedom for which there are no perceptual counterparts. She argues that Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but what constitutes the eye of the beholder is determined by culture.

Jennifer A. McMahon

Editorial

Margot Osborne

Liminal

Curator: Colin Langridge Thomas Bachler, Andrew Dewhurst, Richard Giblett, David Martin, Todd McMillan, Ali Sanderson, Richard Wastell Carnegie Gallery, Hobart March 6 April 13 2008

Yvette Watt

Now that I am a man I can go to war: Angela Lynkushka

Monash Gallery of Art 29 February - 27 April 2008

Ulanda Blair

Australian Beauty

Beauty is problematic for contemporary art theory at least in part because it affords a pleasurable, life-affirming, yet ineffable experience. Yet Margot Osborne finds many examples to show that it has never really gone away. As Peter Schjeldahl observed in 1996: Beauty will be what it has always been and, despite everything, is now in furtive and inarticulate ways: an irrepressible, anarchic, healing human response without which life is a mistake.' Osborne writes: Embodiment, the synthesis of sensibility, skill and material form, is at the heart of beauty...The perception of beauty is an integrative sensual and cerebral experience, dissolving dualities of mind/body and repudiating outmoded art form hierarchies.

Margot Osborne

Handle with care

Curator: Felicity Fenner Art Gallery of South Australia 1 March - 4 May 2008

John Neylon

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