When the Australian Financial Review is drawing up its next Arts Power list, Tony Albert deserves a prominent place. Given the current priorities of Australia’s leading arts institutions, it’s hard to think of any artist, apart from maybe Brook Andrew, who has shown himself to be a better exponent of ‘soft power’. Twenty years ago, Albert was largely unknown, but today he seems to be everywhere. The survey exhibition, Tony Albert: Not Souvenir, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is the crowning glory of this meteoric rise.

I doubt that any other Australian artist has been gifted a museum show of this magnitude at the age of 45. Indeed, I could reel off a list of celebrated artists who have lived and died without getting a sniff. What’s even more remarkable is that Albert has already had a “retrospective” at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2018, at the age of 33.

The catalogue that accompanies the MCA exhibition is a 400-page monster printed on hi-gloss paper, weighing almost three kilos (Yes, I weighed it). The sheer quantity of artwork it contains is astonishing, testifying to Albert’s inventiveness, and in later years, his extensive use of assistants.

Albert is currently a trustee of the Art Gallery of NSW, and part of the gallery’s Indigenous Advisory Board. Last year he acted as curator for the 5^th National Indigenous Art Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia. He was the inaugural Cartier Foundation fellow for the 2024 Biennale of Sydney. He’s on the City of Sydney Public Art Panel. He has been awarded a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and an honorary doctorate from Griffith University.

His work has been collected by all the major Australian art museums. He’s undertaken a staggering number of residencies and major commissions, including those giant-sized bullets in Sydney’s Hyde Park. The complete list of solo and group exhibitions in which he’s been involved over the past few years would be more than most artists manage in a lifetime. Last week, at the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair, Albert hosted the VIP program. He’s used his growing status to do a lot of good deeds for Indigenous causes.

You don’t get all this through being lucky. No-one could deny Tony’s talent, but it’s a more complicated matter to figure out what kind of talent he possesses.

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It’s rare for an art dealer to be given star billing in a museum exhibition but Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) was not just any art dealer - he was the man who took a bunch of scorned and despised outsiders and made them into the most popular art movement the world has ever seen. The first collectors of Impressionism may have been pilloried as fools and madmen, but every museum today knows that an Impressionist show is a guarantee of a mass audience. For the newly rich, a painting by Monet or Renoir is a supreme status symbol.

Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel, Art Dealer Among Artists, is a coup for Geelong Art Gallery, being the first time an Australian regional venue has staged a show of this magnitude. Previous touring exhibitions of French Impressionism have invariably been hosted by the bigger art museums, but this one, facilitated by Art Exhibitions Australia and French agency, APCA (Advising Curating Producing Art), will test whether large numbers of people are willing to leave the city for an art experience.

As Geelong is less than an hour by train from Melbourne’s CBD, it’s not a huge commitment. We should all hope the show is a hit, because this will send a message about the potential of regional galleries at a time when the NSW and Victorian governments are withdrawing support from these centres.

One of the reasons the exhibition is in Geelong rather than Melbourne is that its primary focus is not the famous first group of Impressionists, but the second generation. Although the show contains eight paintings by Monet, along with works by Renoir, Pissarro, Gauguin, Vuillard and Berthe Morisot, the real emphasis is on the work of five younger artists – Albert André, Georges d’Espagnat, Gustave Loiseau, Maxime Maufra and Henry Moret.

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All luxury brands aspire to the condition of art, but most artists would dread being identified as a luxury brand. It would, however, be a revealing exercise if we could strip away all the myths, stereotypes and preconceptions, and assess the art content of a brand such as Cartier, while asking whether some big-name artists are little more than brands.

Most people visiting the Cartier blockbuster at the National Gallery of Victoria will come away feeling awed by the skill, imagination and craftsmanship on display, let alone the thousands of precious gems that provide the raw material for this famous Maison.

As for the art purists, one might compare the smallest Cartier brooch with, say, a spot painting by English art star, Damien Hirst. Since 1988, Hirst has produced more than 1,400 spot paintings in a limitless series. Each consists of flat, evenly spaced dots of colour on a blank surface, with no colour being repeated. Every one of these pictures has been produced, factory-style, by assistants. The spot paintings sell for between US$100,000 – $500,000, with the record price being US$3.48 million (that’s roughly AUD $5 million).

Unless you are prepared to accept some tortuous intellectual rationale, these paintings are purely decorative. Their singular appeal is as a sign of wealth. If you can afford one of these soulless, mechanical products, you can show the world you have money to burn and are clued up on cutting-edge contemporary art.

What’s the difference with someone wearing a fabulous piece of Cartier jewellery for which they might have paid a similar price? It’s tempting to say the jewellery is a more honest purchase. It’s attractive, well-crafted, made from intrinsically valuable materials, and allows for a more individual sense of style. The spot painting is a bland artefact, a triumph of fashion over substance.

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When I wrote about the Sydney Biennale in March, I promised a second look. If it’s taken months this is because I’ve found it too depressing to consider much of the work in what has been the most highly politicised Biennale of all time. As the event enters its final week, I’m going to attempt a few reflections on what went wrong, and what survived this exercise in institutional self-harm.

The problems began with the appointment of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi of Sharjah as this year’s Artistic Director, and the anxieties it stirred up among Jewish patrons and sponsors. Although Hoor is an accomplished curator, with all the credentials to run a Biennale, it was her politics that caused the tremors. When there’s an expectation a director will push a controversial political platform, she needs to allay the suspicions of her detractors. As Hoor demonstrated with her selections for the Aichi Triennale last year, she is capable of mixing her politics with a range of other themes.

In Sydney that variety was harder to find. The political slant was relentless, and it didn’t make for a fascinating experience. Worst of all was the Biennale’s willingness to tolerate overt expressions of hatred by participants, from Feras Shaheen’s social media post identifying Jewish philanthropists as “Nazis”, to DJ Haram’s antisemitic rant on opening night. There should be no place for such grandstanding viciousness in the Biennale, but Shaheen was not even asked to take down his inflammatory post, which remains in place today.

As director, it was up to Hoor to deal with problems as they arose, but she chose to remain virtually invisible, declining to attend the media preview or make any personal statements. The lack of action could only function as an endorsement of the bad behaviour and would cast a pall over the entire exhibition.

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Every year, as the media issues a cavalcade of banal reports on the Archibald Prize, a progressive disenchantment settles on artists and other denizens of the art community. The gulf between the way the prize is presented to the public and the way it appears to those with a stake in the game is widening with each cycle, as criticism and commentary become further divorced from reality. In a milieu in which everything to do with the arts has to be “fun” and “nice”, while simultaneously being heavily politicised, it’s a depressing scenario for those who refuse to subscribe to these – often contradictory - requirements.

In this sense, Richard Lewer’s Archibald winner repays careful study. It’s an undeniably ‘nice’ painting of a charming, elderly Aboriginal lady, on a cheerful orange backdrop. Yet it’s also part of a PR offensive intended to restore legitimacy to the APY Artists Collective - subject of an extensive investigation, of which the findings have been buried by state and federal governments. In this way, an inoffensive, likeable painting becomes a tool for propaganda.

The cynicism that attends the Archibald and Wynne Prizes at the Art Gallery of NSW, leads to constant speculation that the good stuff will be found in the Salon des Refusés, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery. This expectation usually fails to ignite, as the Salon provides more of the same, but this year, we’re getting closer to the mark. As usual, there are a number of portraits one might view as inexplicable omissions from the Archibald, while the landscapes left out of the Wynne raise serious questions.

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Although the Archibald Prize grabs all the headlines, the Wynne Prize deserves our respect as Australia’s longest running art competition. The Archibald was first awarded in 1921, but the Wynne launched in 1897, thanks to a bequest of £1,000 from Irish-born businessman and pastoralist, Richard Wynne (c.1822-97). It turned out to be a good investment as the donor’s name would otherwise have vanished into the mists of history.

Wynne never saw the prize that bears his name, but he must have had a fair idea of the kind of work it would attract. The award is for “the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists completed during the preceding 12 months.”

Over the years many great paintings have won the Prize, including iconic works such as G.W. Lambert’s Across the Black Soil Plains (1899) and Hans Heysen’s Mystic Morn (1904). Looking over the list of winners, it’s a Who’s Who of important Australian artists, from Russell Drysdale and William Dobell to Fred Williams and William Robinson. Although the Prize is hypothetically awarded to a landscape painting or a “figure sculpture”, it’s rare for a sculptor to emerge as the winner.

The first signs that the Wynne was losing its way appeared in the 1990s, when abstract paintings that merely suggested landscape, began to feature prominently. The first Aboriginal paintings were equally controversial, partly because almost every one could be classed as a depiction of country while departing radically from the conventions of western landscape.

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When you meet the curator of an exhibition carrying a protective helmet and fluoro vest, it can only raise concerns about what you’re about to see. When that show is the Archibald Prize for portraiture, it’s tantamount to a red alert – although the curator, Beatrice Gralton, tried to assure me the protective gear related to another project altogether.

If it were that easy to be protected from the Archibald Prize, I’d race out and buy a helmet and a vest immediately. By now I’ve resigned myself to the idea that no barricade, no lucky charm, no vaccine can keep the annual scourge of the Archibald at bay. It comes along at the start of flu season and infects the entire nation. It’s at its most virulent within the first few days, before settling in for four weary months.

I’m going to concentrate on the portrait prize and leave the companion shows, the Wynne and Sulman for another day.

With the Archibald, it’s now traditional to say: “It’s the worst ever!”, but this is like saying “Lest we forget” on Anzac Day. It’s a timeless ritual, honoured by many.

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This piece was written for The Australian, but while it awaited space in the paper, the firm of Trump and Netanyahu decided it would be a great idea to bomb Iran. As a result, the story was put in the fridge, on the assumption that few people would be planning a trip to Saudi Arabia while hostilities persisted. As this poorly conceived war lingers on, the exhibition came and went. For the record, I’m posting the article here, without the paywall.

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On a warm night in Diriyah, the ancient capital of Saudi Arabia, the walls and buildings are reverberating to the booming, machine-gun delivery of Palestinian rapper, Shabjdeed. The music is deafening, drowning out any attempt at conversation. A group of foreign journalists is fleeing for cover, but the courtyard is crowded with glamorous young women dancing, tossing their long hair from side to side.

It’s the opening of the Third Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, held in the JAX district of Riyadh. Ten years ago, such a scene would have been unthinkable, unspeakable. From the 18^th century, Saudi Arabia has been ruled by Wahhabism – a strict, puritanical sect within Sunni Islam that rendered the Kingdom one of the most conservative places on earth. Not so long ago, visitors would have found Saudi women to be uniformly dressed in the black abaya – a long robe that covers the wearer completely, and the niqab, a veil that allows only the eyes to be seen. Dress codes were strictly enforced by the religious police.

Everything began to change in 2018 when Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) told US Sixty Minutes that clothing should be decent and respectful, but otherwise the choice would be “entirely left to women”. He followed up by disbanding the religious police in 2019, although this didn’t send Saudi women rushing to adopt the latest western styles. Today, one sees a mixture of looks, from the traditional black abaya and niqab, to different forms of headscarf, (the hijab), to the same kinds of skirts, pants and jackets one might find anywhere in the world.

Most of the young women dancing to the rap music were bare-headed, wearing long, robe-like dresses that looked stylish and expensive. Black is still the colour of choice but it’s not obligatory.

The Biennale is part of MBS’s Vision 2030 initiative, which aims to reduce Saudi Arabia’s dependence on oil revenue, diversify the economy, and make the country a venue for high level sporting and cultural events. The plan is to hold a biennale for contemporary art every second year in Riyadh, and an Islamic art biennale on alternate years in Jedda. With each new exhibition, the Saudis have grown more confident. Last year’s Second Islamic Biennale was an impressive, original exhibition, combining contemporary art with religious and historical artefacts, some of them more than a thousand years old.

The two previous Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennales were under the direction of western curators. The current one is the first to be headed by two Artistic Directors from the Arab world, Nora Razian and Sabi Ahmed. In a region in which contemporary galleries are largely funded by private money, both directors work for private art foundations. Razian is Head of Exhibitions at Art Jameel, Dubai and Jedda; Ahmed is projects Advisor for the Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai. They were assisted by four international curators.

It’s been apparent for a long time that the Middle East has become a major source of money and energy in the contemporary art market. The Art Basel group has just launched a new art fair in Qatar, competing with Art Dubai, which is holding its 19^th edition this month. Hoor Al Qasimi, the Artistic Director of this year’s Sydney Biennale, has hosted no fewer than 15 Sharjah Biennials. The big event of 2026 is set to be the opening of Frank Gehry’s long-awaited Guggenhem Abu Dhabi.

There are obstacles that stand in the way of this boom, the first being the political instability of the Middle East. The international art set are notably reluctant to visit places too close to a war zone, with the ongoing carnage in Gaza and more trouble in Iran acting as a discouragement. MBS is championed as a reformer by a grateful population, but many westerners cannot so easily forget the hardline policies of the past, or the 2018 assassination of journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. There’s also a practical problem in that most of the great works of art are already in museums, making it hard to put together outstanding permanent collections no matter how much cash is on the table.

Substantial loans from other world museums are one solution, but it’s contemporary art that offers a new way forward, with the Diriyah Biennale signifying Saudi Arabia’s aspirations to be the cultural leader of the region. Inevitably, this means embracing a field that prides itself on its critical approach to social, political and cultural issues.

In the Kingdom there are obvious constraints on the ‘freedom of speech’ which artists in Australia prize so highly. Any work which criticised the Royal Family or the government would be an unlikely starter. The Saudis have been reassessing their relationship with with Israeli in recent years, but there are no Israeli artists in the exhibition. Fortunately, although contemporary artists will always feel obliged to make political gestures, there are countless ways to do so in such an oblique manner no-one could possibly take offence.

This is implicit in the shows’s theme: In Interludes and Transitions. It suggests an indeterminate state, poised between past and future, tradition and progress, Europe and Africa, reflecting the balance MBS seeks to preserve in his Vision 2030.

The catalogue introduction is a small masterpiece of artspeak, packed with all the appropriate jargon and references, without a clear proposition in sight. It’s vaguely about “the movements, migrations, and transformations that have long connected the Arab region with the world.”

The show featured over 100 works by 68 artists from 37 countries, including Australia, represented by Yolgnu painter, Naminapu Maymuru-White; photographic artist, Alana Hunt; and Afghan emigré, Elyas Alavi. The selection was not what one has come to expect from these big international events, incorporating artists from the Philippines, Sudan, India, South America, South Africa, and all parts of the Arab world, with far less emphasis on Europe and the United States.

The Biennale was a rejection of the western hierarchies but also a continuation of the ‘decolonising’ approach that is changing the composition of these exhibitions. This year’s Biennale of Sydney has a similar mix of artists.

It’s an approach that often works better in theory than in practice. There were few highlights in this Biennale, with most works providing variations on wellworn themes. One show stealer was the installation, House of Eternity, by French artist, Théo Mercier. It consisted of monumental sculptures made from compacted sand, in which seemingly fossilised artefacts such as a car, ventilators and turbine wheels sat alongside ammonites and termite mounds. A meditation on the forces of time, the pieces were arranged in the manner of an archaelogical dig.

It was partly the grand scale of Mercier’s work that set it aside from many other exhibits. Among other standouts was a sound-based installation by Ecuadorian artist, Oscar Santillán, in which noises made by visitors triggered responses from the sculptures. There was a large, coloured abstraction by the renowned Lebanese artist, Etel Adnan, translated into a wall-sized ceramic mural, and a room full of giant, worm-like sculptures by Egyptian artist, Nour Mobarak, based on fungal networks, but referring to the Greek myth of Daphne who was transformed into a tree.

The Biennale was best appreciated when put in context with all the radical changes taking place in Saudi Arabia, and the eagerness with which the country is opening its doors to the rest of the world. It’s one of the rare good-news stories in the Middle East today.

Another major venue just around the corner, is the Saudi Arabian Museum of Contemporary Art, which was hosting a sprawling exhibition on the theme of marriage, titled One Night of a Lifetime. It featured almost 40 artists from the Arab world and elsewhere, exploring the rituals, ceremonies and psychology of marriage - in works ranging from large-scale installations to tiny, intimate objects. An unlikely topic for a contemporary art show, it made a space for itself somewhere between conceptualism and kitsch.

Along with the contemporary art and design galleries of the JAX district, Diriyah is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, with a history dating back to a time before the Middle Ages. The old fort and palace have been restored, and are now major tourist attractions, surrounded by state-of-the-art facilities.

Another UNESCO site is AlUla, an oasis in the northwestern desert, in which inscriptions in stone dating back to 644 CE, are juxtaposed with postmodern architecture and a spectacular sculpture park set amidst sand dunes and towering, craggy peaks. A 90-minute flight from Riyadh takes one across a seemingly endless expanse of grey sand the Bedouins would traverse on camel. One might never be as excited as those ancient travellers must have been to arrive at a place where palm trees flourish around springs of fresh water, but it’s still a revelation.

AlUla’s popularity is growing rapidly, with the expectation that by 2030, more than a million people will have visited the site. The tricky part is how to manage this influx, preserving the fragile natural environment and heritage material from the ravages of mass tourism. In this sense the isolation of the settlement is its saving grace, allowing the Saudis to regulate the flow of visitors. Climate is another safeguard, as few would wish to arrive from June to September when temperatures are routinely in the mid-40s.

AlUla has recently opened a new art museum, called Arduna (“Our Land”), with a high-profile loan exhibition from the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Until 15 April). One could see works by artists such as Picasso, Brancusi, Klee, Kandinsky, Dubuffet and Hockney, alongside pieces by Middle Eastern artists. Upon leaving the museum there was a banquet with hundreds of people. We finished the evening sitting under a huge starry sky, eating dates and listening to music.

This is the way Saudi Arabia is seeking to repair its forbidding reputation and transform itself into a user-friendly destination. For many, the Kingdom will always be an uncomfortable proposition, but in recent years the internal changes have been spectacular, generating feelings of optimism and ambition that permeate all levels of society. The popularity of MBS is not due to the fear of a tyrant, but because of the sweeping reforms he has brought about, and the positive impact they have had on the quality of everyday life. The traditions may be feudal, but the outlook is global.

This sense of being contained within an age-old culture, while looking to a brighter future, was the implict message of one of the works in the Biennale. In The Run, a single-channel video by Saudi artist, Ahaad Alamoudi, we watch a young woman in a long white robe running across a barren landscape. After 20 minutes she smashes through a screen on which another landscape is imprinted, pushing on into the desert. What she is running towards is NEOM, the site of MBS’s proposed city of the future, a cornerstone of the 2030 Vision program. Work is already far advanced on this science fiction metropolis, but we can’t tell whether Alamoudi is racing to embrace the vision or running straight past. The artist has told interviewers she has chosen to believe the dream, but like all humanity’s grandest schemes there’s a niggling element of doubt that can never be put to rest.

Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale: In Interludes and Transitions,

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 30 January - 2 May 2026

John McDonald flew to Saudi Arabia, courtesy of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale

According to independent curator, Gavin Wilson, the world is lurching toward “an environmental eclipse”. A lot of scientists and environmentalists would be ready to agree with him and provide the evidence. As for the rest of us, it’s perplexing where the debates about climate change now stand. In the United States, which exerts an overwhelming influence on the rest of the world, the Biden administration took a constructive stance on climate issues. Yet when the 2024 election campaign came around, the Democrats seemed terrified of mentioning the environment, treating it as a guaranteed vote loser.

In 2021, a large part of humanity was gripped by existential terror over the impact of global warming. By 2024, a populist countermovement had emerged, claiming the climate threat was vastly exaggerated: a piece of left-wing alarmism that would cost workers their jobs. Although the science remained the same it was the political rhetoric, fuelled by social media rabble-rousing, that was altering public opinion.

For governments supposedly committed to climate targets, the rational way to proceed would have been to double down on the argument that a transition from fossil fuels to renewables did not herald an employment crisis but a necessary transfer of jobs between industries, as a new, cleaner form of energy took centre stage. One can’t say the same about an AI revolution set to decimate the workforce with the complicity of corporate and political leaders. For those replaced by AI there is no fall-back.

Beyond economic logic, which calls for a gradual changeover to renewables to minimise the effects on employment and industry, there’s a moral argument. Even if it hurts the profits of major multinational corporations and forces governments to rethink their policies, isn’t it better – in an absolute sense - to phase out fuel sources that are polluting the environment, despoiling the planet for future generations, and causing endless global conflict, as we’ve seen with the fracas over the Strait of Hormuz?

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Ideally, I should have written about the 5^th National Indigenous Art Triennial months ago, but somehow the show kept slipping back in the queue. Whenever that happens there’s usually an underlying reason. After reading the catalogue I think I understand my hesitations.

The subtitle of this Triennial is After the Rain, which projects a message of new life and vitality. One thinks immediately of the parched earth of the Outback, where a shower of rain brings forth a sudden explosion of blossoms and wildflowers. I’ve seen this myself, and it’s a sight that raises everyone’s spirits.

This is the way guest curator and artist, Tony Albert, wants us to respond to the work he has selected. It’s a celebration of Indigenous creativity and resilience that encompasses artists young and old, from the Bush and the city. He shows us Aboriginal people as one big happy family, ready to embrace “Queer” identities, and urban ‘Blaks’ like himself, who turn up on country to sample life in the remote communities.

In this respect, Albert has been diligent. The catalogue, a remarkable piece of design by Aretha Brown, includes numerous photos of the curator visiting artists all over Australia. It also includes unctuous letters of invitation he sent in specially decorated envelopes, and extracts from a working journal filled with drawings, paintings, inscriptions and photos. The journal is a work of art, and the same might be said about the exhibition.

I’ve never seen a catalogue with so many photos of the curator, or such a personalised approach to the choice of artists. It’s not mere narcissism or self-promotion, it’s a deliberate strategy to create the impression this is not just another exhibition but a spiritual communion between artists united in their shared Indigenous identity, with Albert as the presiding guru.

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There’s no excuse for the scandals that have rocked this year’s Biennale of Sydney. It was always clear that the event was being held at a highly sensitive moment, when the world was dividing itself into hostile camps over the ongoing carnage in the Middle East. With previous Biennales I’ve written two pieces: one that decodes the theme and provides groundwork for the exhibition, a second that focuses on the art. This year I’ll continue that practice, although there’s more to be said about the nature of the show than the exhibitors.

Any discussion must begin with the appointment of Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi as Artistic Director. The choice was justified by Hoor’s status as one of the most influential figures in international contemporary art, but in all other respects it was an accident waiting to happen.

Hoor had already chosen her list of artists and participants for the Biennale when the massacre at Bondi sent the country into a state of shock, prompting an upsurge of collective grief and trauma. This was not a promising environment for a Biennale packed with artists who have taken an overtly hostile stance in relation to Israel or Zionism.

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Art, like fashion, is cyclical. Hang onto those bell bottom trousers and wide-lapel jackets, and they’ll eventually be cool again. Dust off those graffiti paintings from the late 1970s, and they’ll align nicely with today’s cutting-edge creations – because the “movement” doesn’t seem to have moved at all for the past 50 years. That was the chief impression I took away from Searchers: Graffiti + Contemporary Art, at the National Art School Gallery.

There are 39 contributors to this show, put together by Fiona Lowry and Katrina Cashman, nine of them local graffiti artists commissioned to paint new pieces directly onto the walls of the gallery. These artists - BAGL, BREAK, LAZY, MACH, POWER, RUM, SNAIL, SPICE and TAVEN – may be Australia’s star performers, but their work looks exactly like all the other labels one sees scrawled and smeared on city walls – although I’m sure the connoisseurs view it differently.

For a large proportion of the public, graffiti art is simply vandalism and visual pollution. Few people getting on a bus or train covered in spray-painted squiggles will pause to admire the artists’ efforts. Few will look at a huge ‘tag’ plastered on the wall of a building and feel that urban space is improved by this egocentric decoration. Indeed, many would probably favour the Japanese approach to graffiti, whereby taggers are given hefty fines and prison sentences.

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A few years ago, Artificial Intelligence belonged to the realm of science fiction. Today it is reshaping every aspect of our lives although it’s too soon to say for better or for worse. We anticipate that AI will solve the most daunting problems. It will cure diseases, find answers to the climate crisis, and supercharge our efforts to conquer space. Yet the merest glance at history, let alone the state of the world today, suggests one would have to be supremely optimistic to put faith in these utopian scenarios.

I daresay the odds favour the Terminator hypothesis, in which an all-powerful AI decides human beings are nothing but a blight on the planet and eliminates us as a form of pest control. Don’t be surprised if it starts with the National Party.

Cue ‘Discovery Channel’ voiceover: “But will the dream of AI turn into a nightmare?”

Given that more than 100 million people took up ChatGPT within its first month of release in 2023, Data Dreams: Art and AI, at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art is a timely exhibition, albeit the merest tip-of-the-iceberg. To do justice to the AI revolution and its implications any exhibition would need to be on a grand scale, requiring an impractically lengthy commitment from viewers.

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There may be good reasons for the incredibly sparse design of Ron Mueck: Encounter, at the Art Gallery of NSW but I’ve rarely seen a show with so much empty space. We are being asked to accept that Mueck’s detail-perfect, realist sculptures need large walls or entire rooms to themselves to allow us to savour their peculiar intensity.

It’s a plausible idea but the emptiness that surrounds each work is so exaggerated it becomes a distraction rather than a sympathetic mode of presentation. A cynic might argue this is what a gallery does when there’s not enough work to fill the space – in this instance, a mere 14 pieces in the new building the AGNSW likes to call Naala Badu. The Old Woman in Bed (2000/2002), from the AGNSW’s collection, is to be found in the old building (AKA. Naala Nura), sharing a gallery with a suite of Expressionist prints by Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945).

Mueck, born in Melbourne in 1958, but long resident in London, is not a prolific artist. Slow and fastidious in his methods, he cannot be expected to deliver a jam-packed exhibition. Nevertheless, Encounter is an awkward proposition as a paid blockbuster, because many visitors will hesitate to pay $35 to see 14 works in bare white rooms. I’m sorry to make this comparison again, but for $40, the National Gallery of Victoria delivers a massive collection of work by Vivienne Westwood and Rei Kawakubo, featuring the most dazzling exhibition design.

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One question every public art gallery should ask itself on a regular basis is: “What do audiences want?” Too often it seems curators and gallery directors are simply showing work they personally admire or consider ‘important’. If the public doesn’t respond with enthusiasm it only proves that further education is required to eliminate the naïve idea that one might go to a gallery for pleasure rather than moral improvement.

It’s a source of frustration that the public clings stubbornly to its preference for quaint, old-fashioned beauty, appreciating artists with the skill and visual intelligence to transport us out of the everyday mire into an ideal world in which we are at one with nature. This should be no surprise – such feelings are hard-wired into our brains. To prefer art that sends the right ‘messages’ requires a conscious effort to go against our instincts.

The climate crisis may have brought a new political urgency to our relationship with the environment, but I suspect the main reason we enjoy landscape painting is that it appeals to us on a deep, psychological level. A great landscape painter taps into a primal fascination with the natural world that harks back to prehistoric times. Such works make us feel part of something larger than ourselves, something that soothes our everyday anxieties.

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“Do not all charms fly/ At the mere touch of cold philosophy?” wrote Keats. What the poet thought of as “philosophy” we would call “science”, but the message was clear: the advance of scientific knowledge is unravelling all those suggestive mysteries of God and Nature. Keats was not alone in this view. William Blake expressed his contempt for Isaac Newton’s coldness, let alone those “dark, Satanic Mills” of industry. Wordsworth lamented: “Our meddling intellect/Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:- /We murder to dissect.” He would later claim that poetry was a “science of feelings.”

I thought of the Romantics’ argument with science when viewing Olafur Eliasson: Presence at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art. Eliasson’s work relies heavily on science and technology to achieve its effects, to the extent that his Berlin studio is more like a laboratory (he calls it “the Lab”) in which ideas are tested and workshopped with a large team of assistants. Yet Eliasson is also a latter-day Romantic, with a deep respect for nature that verges on the mystical.

Science may have outlived its use for God, but there is always a point at which our ability to explain the world reaches its limits. It’s here we find Eliasson’s explorations of natural phenomena such as rainbows, waterfalls, and the many aspects of light. Born in Denmark to Icelandic parents, the artist has spent his life travelling back and forth to Iceland, a process he claims has allowed him to see things in its unique landscape that permanent residents simply take for granted.

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“Fashion is not art,” Rei Kawakubo of Commes des Garçons told an interviewer in 2015. “The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.” Easy to say, but when Australia’s biggest and most successful art museum devotes its summer blockbuster to two revolutionary fashion designers, all definitions fail. From what we see in Westwood/Kawakubo, it would be easier to classify many of Kawakubo’s designs as ‘sculpture’, rather than items of clothing.

In the same interview she went on to say, “Clothes are only completed when somebody actually wears them,” which is right in line with so-called “contextual” theories of art - being the claim that something becomes art when exhibited in a context that identifies it as such. Duchamp’s porcelain urinal of 1917, Fountain, is the texbook example, because few would pause to admire its aesthetic values if encountered in a public lavatory.

By this definition, when clothes are exhibited on plinths and platforms in an art gallery, we can see them as “art”, but when they are being worn it’s much easier to call them “fashion”. If we need to resolve this dilemma we might do best to take our cue from Vivienne Westwood, who once said: “The only thing I really do believe in is culture.”

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Harrie Fasher announced her arrival as a force in Australian art in the 2017 Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi, with a large-scale work called The Last Charge. Eight life-sized horses made from rusty steel clustered on the ridge at Mark’s Park, in homage to the famous charge of the Light Horse at the Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. Seven horses galloped frantically into battle, one lay dead in their wake.

This piece, which should have been purchased for the Australian War Memorial, now resides in Adelong, as part of the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail. If you go looking for it, don’t expect something in a classical vein. Fasher’s horses are made from shards of metal welded together to create a stark and deathly impression. They conjure up thoughts of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse from The Book of Revelation, only there are no riders involved.

Fasher was an equestrian before she became an artist, only commencing studies at the National Art School in 2007, at the age of 30. The horse was a natural subject for her, but the scale and dynamism of The Last Charge was a testament to the strength of her artistic ambitions and superhuman reserves of energy.

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For more than 50 years Euan Macleod has been visiting the Haupapa Tasman Glacier in New Zealand’s South Island. Born in Christchurch, but resident in Sydney since 1981, Macleod is arguably the leading trans-Tasman artist of our time. Although his career has blossomed in Australia, he still draws sustenance from his birthplace, finding inspiration in a very different landscape.

Euan Macleod: Glacier, at the S.H. Ervin Gallery, is a survey that brings together paintings from 2009-24, reflecting the artist’s ongoing engagement with a location that can be harsh, rugged and forbidding, but also a place of great beauty. It’s inevitable that these works should be viewed as contemporary expressions of that quality we call “the sublime”, made famous by masters of the Romantic era such as Caspar David Friedrich and J.M.W. Turner.

The standard definition of the sublime was coined by Irish statesman and philosopher, Edmund Burke, in a treatise of 1756. The crucial aspect of Burke’s investigation is that he drew a line between the sublime and the beautiful, arguing we may take a keen sense of pleasure from scenes that inspire fear and terror. What was most important was to overcome the habitual indifference of everyday life. Burke tried to capture the paradox of taking pleasure in a frisson of terror, with coinages such as “delightful horror” – a term often used when critics try to explain the popular fascination with movies whose chief aim is to frighten the life out of us.

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Our Story: Aboriginal Chinese People in Australia at the National Museum of Australia, is an exhibition I’ve been aiming to write about for six months. So why has it taken so long? One answer is that there was always something urgent and short-term, whereas this event continues until the end of January. Another is that it is presented as a social history show with an art component, and this column is mostly art-focussed. A final, less excusable reason may be that the story of Aboriginal-Chinese people feels like a small part of the vast, sweeping, hotly contested history of this country.

Guest curator, Zhou Xiaoping, has set out to overturn that preconception, bringing together a team of artists and historians who reveal a much larger, more complex picture of Aboriginal-Chinese interaction than we might ever have suspected.

Zhou is a Chinese émigré artist with a longterm relationship with Aboriginal people and their art, who has lived and worked with artists such as Jimmy Pike and Johnny Bulun Bulun. He says he first became aware of the Chinese connection in 1989, when he met Jimmy Chi, the Aboriginal songwriter behind the musical, Bran Nue Dae. This was the start of a project that has gone on for decades, but intensified over the past couple of years, incorporating oral histories, archival research, and the contributions of visual artists.

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