Christopher Allen

CFPB Proposes to Ban Medical Debt From Credit Reports

Since the invention of printing and the development of printmaking techniques such as woodblock and engraving, followed later by etching and other methods, prints have always been loved by collectors and sophisticated art lovers.

The work of Lindy Lee has its merits, as I recognised in a positive review of her survey show at the MCA in November 2020; but it is also limited by the fact that she does not have a true sculptural practice.

It’s relatively slim pickings again in summer exhibitions in Australia, especially as the National Gallery of Victoria has come up with a very disappointing program, dominated by a survey – apparently ‘”curated especially for Australian audiences”, whatever that means – of one of the world’s most determinedly vacuous artists, Yayoi Kusama. For the first time I can recall, there is not a single exhibition in Melbourne that would warrant making a special trip over the summer months. Cats and dogs is said to be better than it sounds, but it runs until July next year.

The Museum of Contemporary Art presented what were probably the best contemporary art exhibitions in Australia in 2024, including Tacita Dean and Hiroshi Sugimoto, and yet it finished the year with a couple that are somewhat disappointing, one more so than the other. Equally unfortunate was the news that the MCA will be compelled by budget ­constraints to start charging for general entry. Whether this will really improve its financial position remains to be seen: will enough people be willing to pay to visit the permanent collection?

It says a lot about this year’s Asia-Pacific Triennial – the 11th in the series – that the most memorable work in the exhibition is a piece reprised from the inaugural APT in 1993. ­Shigeo Toya’s Wood III (1991-92) is one of the first things you see on entering the Queensland Art Gallery building, or at least the first serious thing you encounter. It takes the form of a collection of wooden posts that were once square-cut beams but have been ingeniously carved with a chainsaw into a bewildering variety of forms.

The University of Sydney has a number of historically important museums and collections, which many readers will probably recall in their original locations around the campus, especially the Nicholson Museum, the oldest collection of antiquities in Australia, established in 1857 with the generous endowment of the university’s second chancellor (then known as provost), Sir Charles Nicholson (1808-1903), and subsequently enriched by further gifts from Nicholson and others, as well as from works acquired through participation in new archaeological digs.

The Renaissance, as a wall label in Reimagining the Renaissance reminds us, began in Italy six centuries ago but its historiography has evolved across this time and especially from the second half of the 19th century, when it became an academic subject in the resurgent universities of western Europe and Britain. (Universities had relatively little intellectual traction in the Enlightenment and are perhaps losing ground again today except in the hard sciences.)

Review of: Cao Fei: My City is Yours, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, until April 14.