It is not hard to see why Banksy’s street art has captured global imagination and attention. With his satirical stencil work, he has been a fixture since the 1990s when he was first associated with a gang of underground graffiti artists in Bristol. By 2010 he was named by Time magazine in its list of…
Over the last decade, streaming services have changed the face of both television and movies. It hasn’t always been for the best; but occasionally the rise of streaming has provided some real benefits. One of those is that, in their never-ending quest for “content” (yeesh!), the streamers have given smaller films and TV shows the…
Australian author Liam Pieper has released a couple of fascinating and diverse works of fiction – The Toy Maker about a Holocaust survivor and their family, and Sweetness and Light set around an ashram in India. But he also has a career as a ghost writer a career he wrote about in the Guardian earlier…
What is art? That is one of the questions at the heart of Red. Another concerns pretension. American writer John Logan wrote Red about Russian-born painter Mark Rothko (25th September, 1903 – 25thFebruary, 1970), who migrated to the USA at the age of 10. The Broadway production won six Tony Awards in 2010, including Best Play. Rothko…
Art meets technology as famous paintings by Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt and many more, are projected on an enormous scale in the new 360-immersive experience, Monet in Paris. Monet in Paris is a multi-sensory experience celebrating Claude Monet and the world’s most renowned artists of…
Trailblazing indigenous artist and outspoken provocateur Richard Bell is arguably one of our most important artists whose work has been exhibited internationally. But he is also confrontational and unapologetic in his opinions about Australia’s treatment of its First Nations people, and he also bemoans the fact that traditional Aboriginal art work and paintings have now…
Art and crime have always been strange but frequent bedfellows. From the often-illegal activities of Caravaggio to the sensational art heists of the 20th Century, public fascination with both never seems to wane. And while art crime can be deadly serious, director Roger Michell gives it a comic twist in The Duke. Michell’s films tend…
One of the pieces of advice often given to those looking to write their first novel is “write what you know”. Surgeon, public servant and art lover Michael Levitt has taken this advice to heart in his first novel The Gallerist. The Gallerist features a former doctor turned art gallery owner and a sometimes dangerous…
Is it real or a fake? That was the $64,000 question … or, in the case of The Lost Leonardo, a lot more. The film examines the tale of Salvator Mundi, a painting that could be (but probably isn’t) the work of Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. Depending on the source, as few as 15…
Despite perceptions to the contrary, art and crime are never far apart. Dark deeds plagued Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi. The artist Walter Sickert has been accused (posthumously) of being Jack the Ripper. And the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre is one of many “crimes of the 20th Century”….
