Nest of Premonitions

Found as part of All Things Must Pass, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

I look at an awful lot of art and a lot of it is awful. I see sincere efforts by decent people that’s reasonable, and I keep what I actually hold precious about art to myself for the most part. I see my job as a writer about art to first and foremost celebrate that art exists at all, and to invite people to engage with it and to form their own opinions. I am from a background of privilege, which is also innately conservative, and I am deeply interested in what other people bring to a work of art and how that might change over time as culture changes. I have my approach and it serves me very well, as a way to be an arts writer in a colonial city sited on stolen land. I have my responsibilities and my motivations, my investment in community, and my understanding of commerce: people need to engage with capital in order to exist, and that’s far from ideal, but it’s the desert of the real. Art is problematic. Art gets compromised. Art is rarely pure. I know this. I look at an awful lot of art.

But I fall in love, sometimes, with works of art.