An Identity Crisis for Art Education?

Examines recent reports by the Department of Employment, Education, Training and Youth Affairs [DEETYA] and Strand 1998 'Research in the Creative Arts'. Should our retort be 'If you don't know much about art I don't care what you like.' ?

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The Traditional and the New - Artists and Teachers Please Note

Explanation of the benefits to the artist and the environment of working with photopolymer plates (solar plates) in printmaking.

Dianne Longley

The Artist and the Critic

Fortunately not all critics are so urgently in need of friends that they write hymns of praise after every long lunch. Some even relish being labelled 'ungrateful'. I would argue that the only critic worth reading is an ungrateful critic. Looks at the role of visual art criticism in the newspaper columns of the daily press.

Joanna Mendelssohn

One Pole Too Many? Learning to Speak the Language of a Successful Australian Arts Practitioner

Discusses the exhibition 'Diaphanous' at Span Galleries curated by Kirsten Rann, deconstructing and challenging the notion of multicultural artist.

Juliette Peers

The Good the Bad and the GST

The role of the arts within the Federal Coalition portfolio. Proposed new tax arrangements suggest a contraction in support for new innovative work in favour of much more conservative, market driven high end focussed practice, and a drop overall in arts activity.

Tamara Winikoff

How the Tail Now Wags the Dog

One would have to be a marketing executive, or just extremely sanguine, to see much that is good in the current system for funding teaching and research in our universities. This is not to claim that the Dawkins reforms replaced something wonderful or fair. But we now have a system that is actively promoting mediocrity ona a national, even international scale. Let me explain, for the uninitiated how it works.

Rodney Crackers

Forget the White Gloves: Plug-ins Rule OK ANAT National School for New Media Curation

ANAT Australian Network for Art and Technology devised its 1999 National School, me.d.ia.te, to assist curators and arts workers in gaining a technical and theoretical understanding of new media art exhibition practice. It aimed to provide a 'world's best practice' model.

Adele Hann

New Geographies of Knowledge

Explores the relationship between art making in the city and the regional areas. How much do curatorial strategies or templates order and determine what we see in State galleries and large exhibitions? Looks at the exhibition 'Palimpsest #2' to raise questions of curatorial control or whether it should continue without such controls.

Stephanie Radok

Thin Red Pocket Lining: A Note on the Value of University Art Schools

As it rushes headlong towards the stock exchange, lining its tattered pockets by devilishly offering students the educational stock of the deepest desire, university art schools shed its role under modernity of defining and transmitting cultural value. Mammon replaces machismo in the squeezing of art. And yet....?

Ian North

Blak Beauty and Images from the Sea

Exhibition reviews Blak Beauty February 6- May 2 1999 Curated by Brook Andrew Images from the Sea December 5 1998- June 27 1999 Djamu Gallery: Australian Museum at Customs House, Sydney NSW

Ilaria Vanni

Polemic: Practice Makes Perfect: Art Museums, Audiences and the Future.

Examines how galleries, art spaces and arts infrastructure might evolve over the next 25 years to accommodate changes in interaction between artists and audiences. Focus is on the State Galleries and how we might present the multiplicity of view points from the last 30 + years. Resource issues are explored.

Trevor Smith

A Country Practice...

The Northern Rivers Region of NSW has more practising artists per head of population than any other region of Australia. Issues such as surviving as a country artist, traditional art practice, commercial considerations, prescribed political and gender issues are raised. Critiques the project 'Beyond the Basin' funded by the NSW Ministry for the Arts and its resultant exhibition 'A Country Practice'.

Peter Wynn-Moylan

Deschooling Art

Education is the second most depressing non-subject in the entire catalogue of non-subjects, beginning with the Aardvark as Social Construct and ending with The Flagant Signifier in Finno-Ugric Zyrian,

Donald Brook

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