Now, 64 years later, he\u2019s lambasting the current Trustees for \u201cthe worst decision I\u2019ve ever seen\u201d in awarding the $100,000 prize to up-and-coming Mitch Cairns for his portrait of partner and fellow artist Agatha Gothe-Snape.<\/p>\n
The portrait prize is always judged by the Trustees, so as a former member of that august body Olsen has been part of the judging panel himself. He says this year\u2019s winner is “entirely surface, the drawing is just not there\u201d. He has gone so far as to call it \u201ca disgrace\u201d.<\/p>\n
Current Trustee Ben Quilty has fired back, calling Olsen \u201cungracious\u201d for his comments.<\/p>\n
Sydney Morning Herald <\/em>critic John McDonald, never one to pass up an opportunity to berate the Trustees when he thinks they\u2019re wrong, had picked the Cairns entry as the likely winner the week before the announcement. He wrote that it paid homage to a long list of modernists, and while it did not attempt to be a likeness, \u201cthe work retains a sense of intimacy\u201d.<\/p>\n Jun Chen and Ray Hughes at Friday’s announcement<\/p><\/div>\n Who\u2019s right? I have yet to see the exhibition myself, so I can only hope that the real thing is better than what comes across in reproduction \u2013 a pinch from Matisse, a pinch from Picasso and a touch of yoga, thrown together under the banner of conceptualism.<\/p>\n Mitch Cairns is considered a rising star of the art world, and as McDonald points out, in recent years \u201cthe Trustees find it hard to resist the allure of young talent\u201d.<\/p>\n Jun Chen\u2019s fine portrait of legendary art dealer Ray Hughes was runner-up and joins the long list of good works that haven\u2019t won. One I\u2019ll always remember was Bill Leak\u2019s magnificent 2001 portrait Robert Hughes: Nothing if not critical. <\/em>After it was passed over by the trustees, Bill stopped entering and went deeper into the murky world of The Australian<\/em>\u2019s cartoon page. It was our loss.<\/p>\n (Along with Jun Chen, Ray Hughes was in attendance at the official announcement, in a wheelchair and a characteristically colourful suit, described by Damien Minton as \u201cwatermelon\u201d but by his friend Roger Law as looking like something out of Guantanamo. Hughes may no longer be active as a gallerist but he\u2019s still a player: his brilliant African art discoveries have been on show for the past month at Trinity Grammar.)<\/p>\n Just two of the AGNSW Trustees are artists: Quilty and Khadim Ali. The majority are drawn from the upper echelons of the business world these days. One could be forgiven for thinking that their choices are sometimes influenced by whether or not they like the subject. That\u2019s the same criterion generally employed by the worthy gentlemen of the Packing Room Prize. Perish the thought.<\/p>\n Bill Leak ‘Robert Hughes: Nothing if not critical’ 2001<\/p><\/div>\n I don\u2019t suppose the Trustees and management of the Gallery will really mind what\u2019s said by John Olsen, or by Tim Storrier, another former Trustee who has weighed in saying that decisions like this year\u2019s could \u201cirreparably\u201d damage the prestige of the prizes. The Archibald has long been a circus, and controversy is good publicity for it.<\/p>\n In fact the AGNSW has come to rely hugely on the Archibald, and its accompanying Wynne and Sulman art prizes, in order to boost visitor numbers which have otherwise languished in recent years.<\/p>\n The exhibition has long attracted a host of once-a-year visitors, who might not come to the Gallery for anything else. But at least when Edmund Capon was director, the Archie was never the be-all and end-all of the exhibition program; and it was a lot more fun. One year Barry Humphries opened proceedings with an affectionate but hilarious \u2018Ode to the Archibald\u2019. It was always a time of goodwill.<\/p>\n Edmund Capon talking about art<\/p><\/div>\n That made it special to be a member of the Art Gallery Society. For years there was a members\u2019 party the night before the announcement \u2013 it was the hot ticket of the season, and we ran a sweepstake where members could second-guess the Trustees. We were also immensely proud of the role of the volunteer bodies founded by the Society. The Volunteer Guides not only had to learn very rapidly about the exhibits in all three prizes; they put on a lunch for the exhibiting finalists, the Gallery\u2019s largest gathering of practising artists all year. In addition, the Society\u2019s Kids Club gave rise to the Young Archie, the competition for school-age children which is now such a huge success.<\/p>\n That sense of community began to dissipate under the new regime of director Michael Brand and his exorbitantly-paid executives. Three years ago, while I was still executive director of the Society, the Archibald was moved from its habitual autumn slot to winter, part of a move to maximise both visitor numbers and revenue from commercial venue hire. It all came to be about numbers. Already Society members had lost the time-honoured eve-of-announcement slot for their party; corporate relations took precedence. Now it became harder to book any evening events for members during the whole run of the exhibition. Commercial venue hire, we were told, had to be given priority. For many of us, the event began to pall.<\/p>\n It was John Olsen who said in 2003, during celebrations of the Art Gallery Society\u2019s 50th<\/sup> anniversary, that the membership organisation had \u201cmade the Gallery a friendlier place\u201d. The new management appeared to be less appreciative.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s an edge to the comments from the Gallery\u2019s old guard about this year\u2019s prize, it may not be solely about the merits of the chosen work. Fuelling the discontent is genuine concern at the loss of goodwill that accompanies the relentless push to corporatise the institution, and frustration at the current focus on the ambitious Sydney Modern building plan at the expense of the art. It\u2019s all connected.<\/p>\n Voices of sanity in the arts<\/strong><\/p>\n Earlier this month Richard Watts, deputy editor of the website ArtsHub, published a key article under the heading \u201cFreeing the arts from the yoke of neoliberalism\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n Interviewing artists, arts professionals and academics, he concludes that in \u201ca market-driven world of winners and losers\u201d neoliberalism is having a drastic impact on the arts, prioritising ticket sales, visitor numbers and profits over creativity.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a significant contribution to the discussion.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Sydney Morning Herald reviews Culture Heist<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n A propos<\/em>: from the latest review of my book, published in the SMH<\/em> Spectrum section on July 22:<\/p>\n \u201cWhite, former head of the Art Gallery Society, Art Gallery of NSW, is forthright and measured in her assessment of the effect of decades of neo-liberalism on the arts\u2026 She documents what most in the arts have observed with increasing dismay \u2013 a world characterised by the rise of philistine commercialism and the decline of art: art institutions and artists being judged by profits.\u201d\u00a0Read in full.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By JUDITH WHITE Artist John Olsen first came to public prominence back in 1953, as a leader of art students protesting against the conservative Archibald Prize choices of the Art Gallery of New South Wales Board of Trustees. That’s him on the left of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12492,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12491"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12499,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12491\/revisions\/12499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cultureheist.com.au\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/ray-jun-chen.jpg\")
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Painting by numbers<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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