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?
1.126
Amala Groom: Cosmic Body of remembrance
Feature
Hannah Donnelly

Published 01 June 2019
1.128
imagineNATIVE at 20
Feature
Pauline Clague in conversation with Jason Ryle

Published 01 June 2019
1.128
Sydney Elders: Continuing Aboriginal Stories

State Library of NSW

Feature
Jonathan Jones

Published 01 June 2019
UTS
1.126
Speaking back to colonial collections: Building living to Aboriginal archives
Feature
Kirsten Thorpe

Published 01 June 2019
1.122
Unravelling the past: Barbed wire and campfire learnings
Feature
Ali Cobby Eckermann

Published 01 June 2019
1.108
Dark Emu: Thank the Earth
Feature
Bruce Pascoe

Published 01 June 2019
Art Nocturne
1.126
Deaths in custody: We've got to give it everything
Feature
Lorena Allum

Published 01 June 2019
1.12
Indigenous storytelling: Deconstructing the archetype
Feature
Pauline Clague

Published 01 June 2019

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

A Dual Aesthetic
Review
Judith McGrath

Exhibition Review Patmos Series Paintings
Jules Sher
Perth Galleries
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Mary MacKillop Kitsch
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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.

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Inflecting the Museum
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Barry Craig

Exhibition review Litteraria
Simryn Gill and Robert MacPherson
Artists in residence at the South Australian Museum
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Kitschoprenia
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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
Boys and Girls: Pierre et Gilles' Sydney Mardi Gras Poster
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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
Bigs R Us
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Paul Ryan

Australians have a natural thirst for objects of grand scale, however ridiculous their theme or location or context. From big sandfly, big axe to big oyster and beyond, we are the big desert island that experiences big wets and big dries, little wonder someone made a Big Tap to remind us...we are big drinkers.

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Actions Louder Than Words
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Anthony Cahalan

Exhibition review Beep 'n' Click
Entrepot Gallery Tasmanian School of Art
Hobart Tasmania
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Published December 1995
Not Afraid of Flying: Fairies and Femocrats
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Anita Calloway

Are gossamer wings set to supplant shoulder pads as signifiers of feminist power? Shopping malls in middle class suburbs are now sprouting fairy shops where, for only a few dollars, little girls and grown-up ones too, can sprout fairy wings that temporarily release them from the masculine world around them.

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Museum of Shopping
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Clare Martin

Kitsch is a kind of creole. It quotes and mixes references from quite unrelated sources, dresses in wildly unsuitable materials, then tries to insinuate itself using childhood wiles.

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
When Is A Door Not A Door?
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Stephanie Radok

Exhibition review Birds Have Fled
Angela Valamanesh
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7 September - 2 October 1995

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Wer ist Unschuldig?
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Juliette Peers

This issue of Artlink meanders (with kitschy loucheness rather than formalist stringency) around 'taste' bad and good, the workings of taste and various permutations of cultural expression in present day Australia. Kitsch is scrutinised.

Published December 1995
 
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