Category Archive: ART
Art Gallery of Western Australia Has a Problem
(Perth, November 2025) Western Australia’s art collection was once housed in the lovely Byzantine-style Jubilee Building but in the 1970s, it was moved to the present Bauhaus/Brutalist pile, having fewer windows than a casino, and designed by someone from the Public Works Department. The treasures within are even more depressing, although, in fairness, when we visited (the second time – we arrived on Tuesday, when it was not open), quite a number of the galleries were closed, for reasons unclear. There was virtually nothing on show that might hearken back to days when artists knew how to draw, but we’ll…
Continue Reading →Perth, Where is Thy Art?
(Perth, November 2025) TVC has banged on a fair bit about the horrendous state of statuary (among other things) and the alienation created by contemptuous elites. The plastic art offered by the otherwise very fair city of Perth, Western Australia, is, unfortunately, no exception. Consider Walter Pater as to the sculpture of Michelangelo: “And as his persons have something of the unwrought stone about them, so, as if to realise the expression by which the old Florentine records describe a sculptor – master of live stone – with him the very rocks seem to have life. They have but to…
Continue Reading →Amedeo Modigliani
(By Rita Kirkman) I frequently revisit artists who never fail to touch my heart with their unique talent for the creation of timeless beauty and their representations of the worlds in which they lived. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in 1884 to a French mother and a Jewish-Italian father. From the outset, he was plagued by chronic bad health which he endured for the rest of his short life. At age 7 he suffered from typhoid fever, and thereafter tuberculosis. He was very close to his mother. When he was 11, she noted in her diary: “The child’s character…
Continue Reading →More from the Post-Eternal Phase
"Plate pole prop" by Richard Serra - minimalism ad absurdum
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 17 November 2024 Modern Art is, to an alarmingly increasing degree, pure fraud. It operates on ruthless market principles, clothed in doubletalk, agitprop, and gobbledegook. It has largely abandoned aesthetics and no longer seeks, were it even able, to be evocative. We call it the “Post-Eternal Phase,” because its representative works leave the mind as soon as one turns away, and its work is complete as soon as the cheque is cashed. As Robert Hughes once memorably observed, the role of modern art is to hang on the wall and get more expensive (a gaffer-taped…
Continue Reading →René Magritte
It's raining men ("Golconde", 1953)
(New South Wales Art Gallery, 18 November 2024) René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was one of the leading Surrealists, along with Chirico, Meret Oppenheim, and (of course) Dali, who tried to represent the “elusive dream of a private person to which we hold no key.” Magritte’s entire oeuvre “is not copying reality but rather creating a new reality, much as we do in our dreams…painted with meticulous accuracy and exhibited with puzzling titles, [which] are memorable precisely because they are inexplicable.”* Magritte at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney is described by the curator as “an…
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