Art Criticism

Australian art criticism is a toothless pander that may not even exist. At least that is what some of this country’s most prominent critics, past and present, think. Christopher Heathcote, for example, who was senior art critic for The Age during the early 1990s, believes that art criticism has ‘been shut down by vested, mainly institutional, interests’ and that the system rewards only the ‘most servile conformists’.¹ In his opinion: ‘Serve out your time brown-nosing the bureaucracy, and you too will land a cushy sinecure in some part of the museo-academic ziggurat.’