Merilyn Fairskye will be joining the 2010 Arts Conference as a plenary speaker. Saturday, 24 July she will present her work, ‘Fieldwork – Chernobyl’. After her plenary she will also be available for an informal Q&A, or Garden Session.

Merilyn Fairskye is an artist and academic whose work is exhibited in art galleries, public spaces, electronic arts and film festivals within Australia and internationally and is represented in numerous Australian and international public collections. She has undertaken artist residencies in the USA, Italy, France and Australia and has been the recipient of many Australia Council and Australian Film Commission grants, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship. From 2007-2009 she was Associate Dean, Research at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney. She is currently on sabbatical and on her return will teach in the Photomedia Studio at SCA. More…

As a curator and art historian, Djon Mundine will be joining the 2010 Arts Conference as a plenary speaker, Thursday, 22 July. For more on his plenary session and the day’s program, please download the conference draft program.

Djon Mundine is a curator and art historian, originally from the Northern Rivers area of NSW. He is currently Indigenous Curator, Contemporary Art at Campbelltown Arts Centre. Mundine is well known as the concept curator of the permanent Aboriginal Memorial installation at the National Gallery of Australia and was awarded an OAM in 1993. Previous positions have included: Senior Curator, Gallery of Aboriginal Australia, National Museum of Australia, Senior Curator of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Programs, MCA, and Art Adviser for the Ramingining Community of Central Arnhem Land. More…

Conference Tour – Pre-Conference Biennale Tour – Wednesday, 21 July 2010 – 10:30 AM – 3:30 PM (10:30-15:30)

On Wednesday, 21 July, we have organized a Pre-Conference Day Tour of the 17th Biennale of Sydney with Dr. Caleb Kelly from the University of Sydney, Sydney College of the Arts, including visits to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Pier 2/3 and Cockatoo Island.

Conference Dinner – Friday, 23 July 2010 – 6:15 PM (18:15)

The conference dinner will be held in the Auditorium at Sydney College of the Arts, providing a perfect setting to dine with friends and colleagues.

Join us for a three course sit-down meal, including entree, main dish, dessert, wine, beer and beverages, as well as all taxes and gratuity.

Prior to the conference dinner, we welcome you to join us for our featured Book Launch–BRUCE BARBER: WORK 1970-2008, edited by Blair French and Stephen Cleland. The launch will begin just after the conclusion of the day’s sessions at 5:15 PM (17:15). The dinner will then begin in the Auditorium at 6:15 PM (18:15).

For more information and to reserve your place on the pre-conference tour and/or at the conference dinner, please see the conference Activities and Extras.

The 2010 Arts Conference, held at Sydney College of the Arts, University of Sydney, will feature special exhibitions from proppaNOW Aboriginal Artists Collective and Shanghai based artist Wang Tiande. Conference participants are invited to attend the Artists’ Reception and Exhibition Opening after the conference on Thursday, 22 July from 5:00-7:00 PM.

Additionally, prior to the conference dinner on Friday, 23 July, participants are invited to our featured book launch, BRUCE BARBER: WORK 1970-2008, edited by Blair French and Stephen Cleland.

Please visit the Arts Conference Program webpage for further information on the 2010 Special Program Events and Exhibitions.

From Kate Taylor from The New York Times…

Paul Barman thinks his is a great idea for a business: personalized, hip-hop versions of the traditional Jewish wedding contract, known as the ketubah, that he writes and sings.

He calls them Audioketubah and, at $1,500, they come in the form of handwritten scrolls and CDs, perfect gifts for a couple who cannot stomach another set of stemware.

Juan Hinojosa makes collages from found materials like Metrocards and food wrappers, and clothing tags that he filches from high-end stores. He often brings an attractive female friend along to distract the staff while he snips off the labels, though he said he has never actually taken anything of value.

On five Saturdays this month and next, Mr. Barman, Mr. Hinojosa and 54 other artists are attending a class paid for by the City of New York that is intended to help them turn their creative works into money. More…

Vermeer’s Masterpiece: The Milkmaid
September 10 to November 29, 2009
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, 212-879-5500

From Bill Berkson at artcritical.com…

Vermeer’s painting of a maidservant pouring milk, on loan to the Met from the Rijksmuseum is a work of extraordinary fullness in every respect. This feeling of uncanny amplitude is partly the result of how in the way Vermeer made his own sunlight coursing through a window  (a “cool graced light,” in Frank’s O’Hara’s phrase, if ever there was one) acts on bits of earthly surface, affording a kind of extreme visibility to each thing exposed in its path. Light in Vermeer is such a fact of aesthetic experience, so intrinsic to everyone’s appreciation of his art, that it may have blinded us to a great deal else that shows up in the pictures.

Neither signed nor dated, on a near-square canvas nearly a foot and a half in either dimension, the picture, for all its grandeur, seems a hinge work of Vermeer’s early maturity. Better known nowadays as The Milkmaid, it’s an anomaly within his output generally, its worked-up surface and culinary subject matter stated comparatively coarsely, a less delicate image overall than the preternatural refinements soon to come. The Met curator and scholar of Dutch art Walter Liedtke places it historically in the company of other paintings, some of them, like the Cavalier and Young Woman in the Frick, in similarly compact formats done around 1657-58, when Vermeer was in his mid-twenties. More…

From Arthur C. Danto at The New York Times…

In a comment on Arthur C. Danto’s post, “Sitting With Marina,” a reader, TM Shier, wrote: “This article is a disappointment. It is descriptive, not explanatory. It answers none of the really interesting questions raised.” Those questions, as posed by the reader, and Mr. Danto’s answers, are below:

Q. Is performance art really art at all?

A. We must determine what art is or how it is defined before answering this question. The oldest theory of art in the West is to be found in Plato, in Book X of “The Republic.” There, Socrates defines art as imitation. He then declares that it is very easy to get perfect imitations — by means of mirrors. His intent is to show that art belongs to the domain of reflections, shadows, illusions, dreams. He proceeds to map the universe in terms of three degrees of reality. The highest reality is found in the domain of what he calls “ideas,” the forms of things. Ideas are grasped by the mind. The next degree of reality is possessed by ordinary objects, the kind carpenters make. The artist only know how ordinary objects look, as rendered in painting or drawings. The carpenter’s knowledge is higher than the artist’s: his beds, for example, hold the sleeping body or, more strenuously, bodies locked in love. The highest knowledge is possessed by those who grasp the idea of the bed, understanding how it supports the body. The lowest knowledge, if it is knowledge at all, is the artist’s ability to draw pictures of beds. They only show appearances. More…

(Image: Scott Rudd, designboom)

From the Telegraph’s Martin Herbert…

One aspect of Chuck Close’s life inevitably overshadows all others. In 1988, two decades into a scintillating career as a painter of what Christopher Finch calls “ruthlessly detailed – some would say pitiless – supersized portraits”, the American artist suffered a collapsed spinal artery, paralysing him from the shoulders down. And yet, having agonisingly won back some movement and attached a paintbrush to his hand via a splint, Close was soon painting again. Three years later, he was as successful as ever. It helped that shortly before what he calls “The Event”, he’d developed a method of assembling imagery from tiny loops and lozenges of colour arranged in a grid, and although quadriplegic he could still do that: “as if the artist, while healthy, had anticipated a need,” Finch writes. Yet it surely helped more that Close is a world-class survivor.

As Finch’s detailed biography makes clear, the artist received matchless grounding in earlier years. Close grew up with neuromuscular disorders that made it difficult for him to walk straight or raise his arms, plus severe astigmatism, dyslexia and attendant learning difficulties, and – the disadvantage that was probably the making of him – prosopagnosia, the inability to recognise faces, which made him obsessed with the mechanics of their depiction. More…