If Aquarium Gravel Is So Bad For You, How Come It Tastes So Good?

Cover of If Aquarium Gravel Is So Bad For You, How Come It Tastes So Good?
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Meet Lisa Walker in her workshop: VR in the museum
Feature
Justine Olsen and Prue Donald

Published 01 December 2018
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Eugenie Lee's Seeing is Believing: VR in pain management
Feature
Dylan DeLosAngeles

Published 01 December 2018
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Artificial imagination: Deepfakes from latent space
Feature
Sean Dockray

Published 01 December 2018
Axolotl
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Brenda Laurel's Placeholder: In dreams everybody flies their own way
Feature
Claire L. Evans

Published 01 December 2018
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The distributed virtual: Jill Scott's Eskin4 and other electronic environments
Feature
Rob La Frenais

Published 01 December 2018
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Against realism: The badly rendered potential of VR
Feature
Ian Haig

Published 01 December 2018
ACMI
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The virtuous politics of Alejandro Iñárritu's Carne y Arena
Feature
Vince Dziekan

Published 01 December 2018
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Metascape, memory and spacetime: The museum in VR
Feature
Andrew Yip

Published 01 December 2018

In the trading card world there are collectors, dealers, curators, critics, interested observers, and of course various magazines. Does this world sound familiar? Looks at the role of collecting...

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More from this Issue Full Issue Contents

The Taste Factor
Feature
Christopher Heathcote

When I was an art critic, I quickly grew to dislike the word 'taste'. It was a convenient tool used to dismiss reviews by people who didn't like what I had to say. Whenever I delivered a negative crit upon a widely revered artist, or a positive crit on a very minor figure, they complained that I was allowing my taste to undermine my professionalism.

Published December 1995
Image Bank
Feature
Juliette Peers

Collection of images with artists statements. Artists featured: Katanya Shanzy, Anne Graham, Geoffrey Seelander, Simon Duncan, Pierre Cavalan, Stefan Szonyi, Cliff Burt, Andrea McNamara, Karen Ferguson, Constanze Zikos, Jandee Amar Leddar, Leon Pericles, Meryn Jones, Annie Taylor, Ex de Medici and Ian Mowbray.

Published December 1995
Kitschoprenia
Feature
Robert Nelson

Our affection for kitsch is a benign form of aesthetic hypocrisy. My generation, give or take 15 years, adores kitsch. We want to have some badness; it's fun: you laugh both at your dismay for an object and your perplexity over the delight that it brings. In a broad cultural sense, my generation is kitschophilic; and this means, I suppose, not that we love the kitschy object with innocence but that we love the contempt which the kitschy object arouses.

Published December 1995
Pretty Baby
Feature
Juliette Peers

Collecting and making dolls grows in popularity in Australia, but members of Australia's arts industry are relatively under-represented in the ranks of doll collectors. Original dolls speak of the culture that produces them.

Published December 1995
Boys and Girls: Pierre et Gilles' Sydney Mardi Gras Poster
Feature
Leigh Raymond

Examines the 1995 poster for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. How appropriate though, at the moment when Mardi Gras had successfully commodified itself as a cultural event, that its key representation should be through international glamour product photography.

Published December 1995
When Is A Door Not A Door?
Feature
Stephanie Radok

Exhibition review Birds Have Fled
Angela Valamanesh
Univsersity of South Australia Art Museum
7 September - 2 October 1995

Published December 1995
Kitschville - The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras
Feature
Craig Judd

...But the Mardi Gras will always be a child of the seventies. Remember that mantra 'the personal is political'. In spite of the co-option and mainstreaming of Lesbian and Gay culture this wonderful spectacularly amateurish display (of difference) cannot help but be a politicised intervention.

Published December 1995
Mary MacKillop Kitsch
Feature
Anne Loxley

I confess to a feeling of great affection for Mary MacKillop (1842 - 1909), vernacular culture and kitsch, and great enthusiasm for the idea of an Australian Vatican - an extravagant museum which is also a major site of pilgrimage.

Published December 1995
Made in WA: A Sculptor's Alternative Practice
Feature
Robyn Taylor

Although well known in regional art histories, Western Australian sculptor Edward Kohler has a far wider importance. Economic survival led him to blend popular and high art long before it was standard practice. With the Piccadilly Theatre reliefs of 1938, the sheer exuberance and infectious quality of a positive (if unconscious) kitsch aesthetic entered professional Australian art 60 years ago: Hollywood meets Olympia.

Published December 1995
Continuous History
Review
Ray Spiteri

Exhibition review Djalki Wanga: The Land is My Foundation
50 years of Aboriginal Art from Yirrkala
Northeast Arnhem Land Northern Territory
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
Western Australia
July 9 - September 3 1995

Published December 1995
Kings of Kitsch: Big Things
Feature
John Cross

Big things have the power to make real the stuff of dreams. They have the power to make us stop at places we would never have dreamed of visiting. Grand kitsch is both art and beyond.

Published December 1995
The Other Big F-Word
Feature
Juliette Peers

Monash University Gallery presented Fashion, Decor, Interiors, curated by Natalie King 7 June - 15 July 1995, high-lighting aspects of advertising, mass production and architectural design through the work of Lyndal Walker, Tony Clark and Stephen Bram -- extracts from the exhibition catalogue.

Published December 1995
 
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