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

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...

Published December 1995

Kings of Kitsch: Big Things

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

Artrave

Published December 1995

Continuous History

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

Kitschoprenia

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

Made in WA: A Sculptor's Alternative Practice

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

Making and Breaking

Exhibition review Cross Fibre
Lia Gill Pam Lofts and NT women working with fibre
24 Hour Art Darwin, Northern Territory
18 August - 2 September 1995

Published December 1995

Kitschville - The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

...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

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

Kitsch or Kind: Representations of Aborigines in Popular Art

Much contemporary Aboriginal art functions in the inappropriate melding of two visual art traditions and is kitsch within the given meaning within the article.

Published December 1995

Ethereal Days

Exhibition review Defrosting Familiar Tales
Jo Crawford, Bev Hogg
Jam Factory Gallery
Adelaide South Australia
7 July - 27 August 1995

Published December 1995

Destiny Deacon: It's Been Ages Since We Last Marched

You can hear her on the radio and see her on the television and contemplate her in better State galleries. Pluralist par excellence, artist, writer and film-maker Destiny Deacon has been blazing away on visual and linguistic fronts since premiering 'Koori Rocks Gub Words' in 'Pitcha Mi Koori' (1990).

Published December 1995