Archibald Prize Winner 2005 John Olsen has won the Archibald Prize for portraiture in Sydney, Australia this year. The artist had criticized the Archibald previously, calling it a chook raffle.
Olsen's "Self portrait Janus faced" was announced to be the winner at lunch time today. Edmund Capon of the Art Gallery of NSW said the judges were debating the winner right up till the end. Nicholas Harding's portrait of Australian artist Robert Dickerson "Bob's daily swim" was said to be one of the other works that judges were favoring.   ¶ 7:30 PM 1 comments

  Beck's Futures 2005 Art critic Jonathan Jones of the Guardian newspaper idiocy of Beck's Futures art prize in the United Kingdom. The Beck's Futures and the Turner prize seem to have worked out how to get publicity, which is fine for art in the short term. People will tire of controversy for controversy's sake. The Archibald prize in Sydney is announced in a couple days too..
This prize can only be a satire on the idiocy of art
"Beck's Futures, I have come to realize, is a satire on the emptiness of prizes and the idiocy of art.
The award may be worth £26,666 to Christina Mackie but in itself it is a valueless trinket. It will not change her career or secure her fame, because the Beck's has proved it has no intellectual integrity and no judgment. This year's winner confirms that the prize conceived as a rival to the Turner is a clumsy Frankenstein mistake which should be allowed to die in a dark corner."
Guardian   ¶ 1:26 AM 0 comments

  The Archibald Prize Entries close today for the Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney Australia. Artists have been marching in all this week with their chook raffle entries under their arm, hoping that the art gods will shine down on them with a $35,000 first prize and plenty of media attention.
The Archibald Prize is Australia's most popular and talked about art prize. It's the prize that draws the largest crowds and attracts those that wouldn't usually enter an art gallery. It's also the prize that the mainstream media in Australia picks up every year.
The Archibald was started in 1921 and is awarded to the best portrait of a distinguished person in the arts, sciences or politics and must be painted from life.
The media love the prize as there seems to be a scandal or disagreement nearly every year. It started with William Dobell winning the award in 1943 with a portrait of Joshua Smith. Other contestants accused it to be a caricature and took Dobell to court to appeal the decision. Sanity eventually prevailed and it was considered a portrait.
Since the Dobell scandal there has been controversy after controversy, which is great for publicity. If there were no scandals at the Archibald it would quickly lose its appeal to the media as it is really just another art prize, and art prizes with no edge get no television time.
The Archibald Prize is held at the same time as the Wynne and Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the 29th of April and opens to the public on the 30th.   ¶ 10:31 PM 13 comments

  Rubbish Art Given Away - Tomoko Takahashi An installation of 7,600 pieces of junk has been given away at the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, UK. Japanese born artist Tomoko Takahashi spent three days installing the work, titled "My Playstation". The curator of the gallery said Takahashi was "really interested in how with rules comes order, and how you break out of order, and the relationship between order and disorder."
On the last day of the exhibition visitors were given raffle tickets and lined up to collect their piece of junk, which included old sewing machines, old computers and stuffed birds.
Not only does it attract a lot of publicity and attention, but they got out of having to clean the mess up when the exhibition finished by getting visitors to take it away. guardian   ¶ 5:23 AM 0 comments

  7,200 Year Old Sex Scene Archaeologists have found what could possibly be the oldest depiction of porn in the world. The 8cm high clay figurine of the lower part of a male figure (nicknamed Adonis von Zschernitz) was recently found in Germany. A month later a female figure was also found in the same area. When archaeologists put the 7,200 year old statues together, they came up with this conclusion..
"There are two ways of looking at this. The first is that they were doing a ritual dance, but the other possibility is that the man and woman were copulating and that he was standing behind her. The copulation option is far more likely, and would make this the oldest representation ever of a pornographic scene." guardian   ¶ 5:03 PM 0 comments