This paper was delivered at the conference ‘Contemporary outsider art; the global context’, University of Melbourne, 24 October 2014. Along with many other speakers, I was responding to the suggestion that outsider art is now ‘in’. Late in the twentieth century, Arthur C Danto spoke of the ‘selective enfranchising’ of outsider artists. 1 Such mainstreaming […]
It’s hard to avoid surrendering to the economy of the ‘take-away’ when reflecting on a presentation. What’s it all boil down to? Can you give it to me in a nutshell? So I want to begin with Branden Joseph’s method, not the punchlines. Joseph approached Kim Gordon as he does most everything; as an archaeologist […]
After heading up the Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) for twenty years, Doug Hall has more, and juicier, war stories than any other museum director in the country. Arriving in Brisbane in the twilight years of the Bjelke-Petersen National Party government, Hall described his political masters as pastoralists (read, ‘rednecks’) soon to take starring roles in a succession of […]
A podcast of a remarkable presentation by Bissera Pentcheva, associate professor of art and art history, Stanford University, delivered at the ‘Ways of seeing Byzantium’ symposium (18 October 2013) is available from the National Gallery of Art (Washington DC). Pentcheva draws together theology, aesthetics, architecture and chanted psalms in a study of the combination of mirroring, […]