Venice 2015
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011Send Neil and Fiona Pardington to represent New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. That is all.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Send Neil and Fiona Pardington to represent New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale. That is all.
200 Years of Heinrich von Kleist – Why He Still Matters
Sunday, October 16th, 2011This year 2011 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Heinrich von Kleist, one of the great German writers of the nineteenth century. You can read his biography here but what I really want to concentrate on is his relevance now – relevance that few Romantic writers can be ...
This delightful and unexpected outburst occurs in the Epilogue of Robert Hughes new book Rome. Te Papa take note:
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011“Painting and sculpture are silent arts, and deserve silence (not phoney reverence, just quiet) from those who look at them. Let it be inscribed on the portals of the world’s museums: What you will see in here is not meant to be a social experience. Shut up and use your ...
WHY TALL POPPY SYNDROME IS A GOOD THING SOMETIMES
Wednesday, August 24th, 2011According to the Roman author Livy, writing about five centuries later, King Tarquin the Arrogant and his son Sextus Tarquinius (whom Classicists and Shakespeare scholars will recall would grow up to rape Lucretia, triggering the overthrow of Etruscan rule and the foundation of the Roman Republic) were one day wandering ...
Is Tintin gay?
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011Every time I read a movie magazine Peter Jackson seems to be raping my childhood. Lord of the Rings was bad enough, and The Hobbit will be worse – but not Tintin, please leave me that much. It was bad enough finding out that Tintin’s Belgian creator Herge might have been ...
John Reynolds, This is an intervention because we care…
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011Being an art critic, like smoking, is a slow form of suicide. Maybe it’s more like being a cop in Mexico – they give you a uniform and a gun, but you have to sort your wages out for yourself. Anyway, Saturday night, unable to face another morrow of Haricots ...
The latest from CoCA
Tuesday, June 7th, 2011When Christchurch was a very young city, a bunch of artists and like-minded folk got together to encourage and support art making and exhibition in this place. They established the CSA and held their first exhibition 130 years ago. That same organisation still wants to encourage and support the ...
Alphaville: Krautrock Valhalla
Monday, June 6th, 2011Long before I read Goethe, Rilke, Schiller and Mann; long before I saw a Caspar David Friedrich or Anselm Kiefer painting; and with far more impact on my wee tortured soul than Bach and Beethoven combined (I draw the line at Wagner, it’s like being gang raped by an orchestra), ...
TWO POEMS FROM THE FRENCH OF LECONTE DE LISLE
Sunday, May 29th, 2011THE ALBATROSS In the vast span of Capricorn at the pole The wind bellows, roars, whistles, rattles and howls, And leaps across the Atlantic's furious White slime. It dashes and scrapes The wan water that it chases and dissipates into mist; It bites, rips, tears and slices the clouds Into convulsive fragments where sudden flashes bleed; It ...
WHY WEIWEI? CONTEMPORARY CHINESE ART IN THE INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT
Saturday, April 30th, 2011An elegant, poised, and handsome young man, well versed in canons and histories, everyone calls him a teacher, or addresses him as a scholar, but he fails to obtain an official position, and he does not know how to farm. He wears only a shabby gown in winter, totally ruined by books. - Han Shan, Tang Dynasty, (Trns ...
