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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It’s been ten years since the Art Gallery of South Australia came up with Tarnanthi, a survey of contemporary Indigenous art that has been second only to the annual Telstra Awards week in Darwin when it comes to taking the temperature of this diverse and vital field. Like Darwin in August, Tarnanthi is presented as a festival, with an accompanying art fair and other events.

The word, in the local Kaurna language means: “to rise, come forth, spring up or appear,” and I’d argue that the most exciting part of this event has always been the sense of discovery, as one meets with new artists and new forms of expression. Although there is a lingering fear of decline as older artists pass away, Tarnanthi has demonstrated time and again, that Indigenous art has incredible powers of self-renewal. As a social event, it has provided a rallying point for people from many remote parts of the country to meet up and see what the other mobs are doing.

I wasn’t present at the party this year, which I’m assured was as bouyant as ever, but the show has taken a very different turn. Too Deadly: Ten Years of Tarnathi is a survey of work drawn from seven previous iterations held at one-to-two-year intervals since 2015. Naturally, the gallery is putting a positive spin on this, presenting the show as a celebration of a decade’s achievements. Along with the central component at the AGSA there are a range of exhibitions and events spread around Adelaide and the regions, and even a couple of documentaries screened at the Adelaide Film Festival. I caught the debut of The Colleano Heart, which told the amazing story of an Indigenous family who became worldwide superstars of the circus, while concealing their true identities.

With more than 200 items on display there’s every appearance of activity, but the lack of new work is concerning. Ten years is too short a time to be celebrating your achievements with a “greatest hits” compilation; too brief a period to provide an historical perspective or wallow in nostalgia. It’s also an inexpensive way of doing a show by relying heavily on pieces acquired for the permanent collection.

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When Khaled Sabsabi was selected to represent Australia in next year’s Venice Biennale, and subsequently dumped, there was a nationwide epidemic of hanky wringing. “What will we do? The pavilion will be left empty! No artist will ever agree to step up and take on the role!”

Well, Creative Australia apparently didn’t try very hard to find a replacement, preferring to restore Sabsabi to the post, totally reversing its opinion of the controversial works that had brought about his disqualification, while issuing abject apologies. Had they looked a little harder, they would have found plenty of artists outside the charmed circle of friends and colleagues who would have had a go.

To sample what’s survey, The Scales, you won’t have to travel to Venice, but to the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in Katoomba. It’s a relatively compact show, in which the works are either extremely large or small. They are also obliquely autobiographical. Although what doesn’t like to give everything away at first glance, there’s nothing especially cryptic about his imagery. The ambiguities are intended to enhance the experience of the work, not to obfuscate meaning.

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A major event can’t run for 28 years without a few ups and downs, but 2025 has been an especially difficult time for Sculpture by the Sea (SXS). Since its inception in 1997, this famous, annual sculpture fest has attracted more than 400,000 visitors every year to the coastal walk between Bondi and Tamarama. This makes it not only one of Sydney’s biggest tourist attractions, but a major drawcard for those who live in this city.

This year’s SXS has an air of dejection I’ve never previously encountered. The problems began when the show allegedly came within a whisker of cancellation, after SXS founding director, David Handley, announced a $200,000 shortfall in the budget, subsequently made up by injections of cash from private donors and the NRMA. To make matters worse, rockfalls on the headlands have prompted Waverley Council to close off a crucial section of the walkway in front of Marks Park, including the circular platfom that usually plays host to a standout work. Another blow has been Typhoon Matmo which delayed the arrival of a significant group of works from Japan (now installed!).

Prior to the arrival of the Japanese pieces, the exhibition was down from the usual 100 works to something in the mid-80s. It not only felt smaller, it felt lacklustre, as if sculptures had been arranged with less care and thought than in previous years – or maybe just with greater haste. The one bright spark was the awarding of the major prize to James Rogers for Siren’s Song, an elegant abstract work in which strands of metal allude to the rise and fall of the nearby waves.

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Last week, Uber gallery, Hauser & Wirth, posted a 90% decline in profits for its London outlet – a startling result for a dealer with 18 branches, from Manhattan to Menorca. In the years before Brexit, London was considered a happy hunting ground for art dealers, but an economy limping out of recession has dampened everyone’s enthusiasm. When the former centre of empire is burning, spare a thought for our near neighbour, Indonesia, the fourth most populous country on the planet, widely viewed as an “emerging” market economy.

After the fall of the Soeharto regime in 1998, Indonesia’s ‘Era Reformasi’ went into overdrive, with new innovations and opportunities in the business sector finding an echo in the contemporary art arena. My previous visit to Indonesia was prior to the pandemic, a time of energy and optimism. A generation of brilliant artists were seeing their works included in international exhibitions and acquired by leading museums. If China was producing the most exciting and ambitious art in the world, Indonesia was well positioned to be the next wave.

What was most striking was the tremendous sense of comradeship that existed between artists, and their close ties to a small group of wealthy collectors who purchased most of the art and provided funds for special projects.

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Last year, Sheikha Hoor Al Qasimi, topped Art Review’s Power 100 list of the most influential people in the contemporary art world. Does it matter? A brutally honest list would have put art dealer, Larry Gagosian, in the Number One slot, with gallerists such David Zwirner and Jay Jopling, close behind. The contemporary artworld clings to the fiction that it’s not simply about money - it’s about social justice, decolonising the museum, saving the planet, giving a voice to the voiceless, making room for a spiritual dimension amid the ravages of capitalism.

All these topics have been explored by Al Qasimi in her role as the Head of the Sharjah Art Foundation and Biennial. She has also helmed a succession of large international surveys, including the Lahore Biennale of 2020, and now, the Sixth Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, one of the most important contemporary art exhibitions in Asia. Next year, she will act as director of the 25^th Biennale of Sydney.

For Al Qasimi (b.1980), power and controversy are closely connected. As the daughter of the Emir of Sharjah, Sultan Muhammed Al Qasimi, she enjoys a creative freedom few citizens in the Emirates can match. In a state with a dubious human rights record, where the Emir’s word is law, Princess Hoor organises exhibitions with striking social justice themes.

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Having finally got around to reading Julie Cotter’s biography of Portia Geach, I’ve come away with a new respect for this indomitable personality whose name adorns Australia’s most popular portrait prize for women. Miss Portia Geach (1873-1959) was not only an artist, but a feminist, a philanthropist, and a tireless campaigner on behalf of the Australian housewife. Cotter’s book is subtitled: Portrait of an Activist.

One of Geach’s early claims to fame was a 300-mile ride through the Gippsland countryside, wearing a pair of specially designed “bloomers”. In rejecting the cumbersome long dresses that made riding a chore for women, she created a “mild sensation” and struck a blow for more practical attire. As founder and leading light of the Progressive Housewives’ Association she copped some flak for being a wealthy, unmarried woman who could not hope to understand the day-to-day life of the average housewife – but this did nothing to detract from her fervour.

Geach was a lifelong advocate for causes that riled her political and cultural passions, in a way that puts our own complacency to shame. We need her back to fight the good fight against predatory corporations such as the big grocers, or governments determined to trash our cultural institutions. She would have come in handy at the Art Gallery of NSW last week, as they tried and failed to stave off brutal staff cuts.

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At the age of 90, Janet Dawson can look back on one of the most unusual careers in Australian art. Singled out as a star of the future, she went a long way to fulfilling her early promise before retreating to the countryside and embracing a very different set of values. During these years of self-imposed exile in the Bush, she maintained a shadowy presence within the commercial galleries, having a solo exhibition every year or two, apart from a nine-year gap from 1989 to 1998. Even during this quiet period, she was the subject of a drawing survey at the National Gallery of Australia.

A disturbing number of artists of this generation seem to have vanished from curatorial memory, but Dawson has never been forgotten. Having worked in the most cutting-edge forms of abstraction in the 1960s and 70s, she went on to make unfashionable paintings and drawings in a realistic manner – landscapes, still lifes and portraits. In a late series she reconciled the abstract and the figurative in evocative studies of the sky.

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With hundreds of others, I stood at the entrance of the Sydney Contemporary Art Fair last Wednesday, at the conclusion of the VIP preview, watching the rain pour down in torrents. Were the angry Gods passing judgement on this year’s offerings? We can go a long time without rain in Sydney, but when it arrives, it comes down like a tsunami.

This city is like the grasshopper in Aesop’s fable, utterly devoted to its pleasures, never imagining the good times won’t go on forever. In our complacent way, we hardly notice what the weather bureau tells us: that we’ve had a record year for rainfall, and there’s more on the way. The day of the SCAF preview was declared the wettest September day since 1879!

Perhaps the bonhomie is finally starting to fade. The rain may have a depressing effect on attendances at the fair, but it also feels like a metaphor for an atmosphere of gloom settling over the state’s cultural landscape, creating unease in both the public and private sectors.

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