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Style and bounce

Examining the history of AGNSW
by
March 2022, no. 440

The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales by Steven Miller

Art Gallery of New South Wales, $65 hb, 295 pp

Style and bounce

Examining the history of AGNSW
by
March 2022, no. 440
US President Lyndon B. Johnson surrounded by security personnel arriving at the New South Wales Art Gallery on a visit to Sydney, 22 October 1966 (photograph: John Mulligan, National Library of Australia)
US President Lyndon B. Johnson surrounded by security personnel arriving at the New South Wales Art Gallery on a visit to Sydney, 22 October 1966 (photograph: John Mulligan, National Library of Australia)

The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality. The art museum is being transformed from a locus of the national, the classificatory, the educational and the aesthetic to a platform or vehicle for personal and political positioning. More recently, conventional programming has been overturned by the impact of Covid closures and restructuring, while the climate crisis looms threateningly over everything.

David Hansen reviews 'The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales' by Steven Miller

The Exhibitionists: A history of Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales

by Steven Miller

Art Gallery of New South Wales, $65 hb, 295 pp

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