Gabriella Coslovich

Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism   and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity. Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.

As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record ...

It was the late Robert Hughes who said that ‘apart from drugs, art is the biggest unregulated market in the world’. Journalist Gabriella Coslovich quotes him in her account of the 2016 Whiteley art fraud trial, repeating the line to one of the accused, art dealer Peter Stanley Gant, as he complains to Coslovich about the ramping ...