Chris Knowles and Maggie Fooke, One View (1985)
“Colonisation of the landscape has perhaps been afforded its widest expression (and reached its widest audience) in the area of filmmaking,” the Larrakia artist, curator, and anthropologist Gary Lee claimed in his 1997 essay, titled lying about the landscape.
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Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
As Melbourne’s art institutions blur the line between art and design, a corporate logic of spectacle, lifestyle, and marketability takes hold. Is the NGV’s embrace of design a progressive expansion—or just kitsch in highbrow drag? And if public museums have abandoned art, who’s left to protect it?
