Joanna Mendelssohn

This well-illustrated volume documents through its analysis of art exhibitions the massive rise of Australia’s art gallery attendances over a period of more than forty years. Before the late 1960s, only a few hundred thousand people visited Australian galleries each year ...

At the beginning of his new book, Terry Smith writes that one of the fundamental qualities ‘of the contemporary: [is] its contemporaneousness’. He writes of the contemporary, contemporaries, contemporaneity, contemporaneous, noncontemporaries, cotemporality, cotemporalities, and cotemporal. It is a kind of tautological word game that goes down well in academic conferenceville, which is where some of this book first appeared. The function is to distinguish art of the last two decades, called ‘contemporary’, as distinct from that of earlier periods, labelled ‘postmodern’ and ‘modern’.

Joanna Mendelssohn is best known as an art critic and historian. After the publication of an essay in The Griffith review entitled ‘Going Private’, Pluto Press commissioned her to write a piece for its Now Australia series. Similar to Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essays, but even more determinedly non-academic, the Pluto Press format is part of a publishing phenomenon and covers a range of political, intellectual and cultural views on public issues and debates. The authors are not necessarily experts in the area they write about, nor are their views always based on systematic, in-depth research.