Читать книгу A Companion to Australian Art - Группа авторов - Страница 16

After much reflection and discussion with a number of professional colleagues, it was decided not to attempt a formal historical coverage of the contemporary period. As I noted in my 1997 book – and as is clear from the final chapters of Bernard Smith’s two histories of Australian art – it is impossible to deal with one’s contemporary period with anything like scholarly objectivity. One reason for this is sentimental, for significant personalities are still living but often elderly or frail; others are institutional and economic, for museums and funding bodies are determined to uphold the reputations of the artists and movements they have chosen to promote, and the art market is anxious to maintain prices and the value of their customers’ investments.

In the end I decided to discuss what seemed to me salient issues in the state of contemporary art myself, in the guise of a conclusion. Such a discussion makes no claim to historical comprehensiveness, but is simply an attempt to raise some of the questions that are deliberately ignored in the promotion of the contemporary art business. It will be up to a later historian to attempt a balanced assessment of the art of recent decades once the dust has settled and the publicists and spruikers have fallen silent.