Friday 29th of March 2024

excellence is in the eye of the beholder...

style

of portraits, posterity and posterioris...

 

A portrait is a picture in which there is something wrong with the mouth.

                  Eugene Speicher (American artist)

 

Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend.

                  John S Sargent

 

Millais once confessed that the only thing he enjoyed about portrait-painting was putting the high-lights on the boots of his subjects.

                  James Agate (Ego)

 

A Liar !

A Mock !

Villainy !

A Sly Dog !

Nonsense !

O Poverty !

A Fine Jumble !

Infernal ! Falsehood !

Abundance of Stupidity !

Damned Fool ! (etc. etc. )

          William Blake about an English CON artist... who was a plagiarist...

William Blake also added about this CON artist:

This Man Was Hire to Depress Art. This is the opinion of Will Blake...

 

How one can see the present in this old mirror... 

           Gus Leonisky 2015

from the hilarious to the bizarrely vulgar...

 

Protests against a $105m budget cut to the top arts funding body, Australia Council, were held around the nation on Friday.

Hundreds of artists and arts sector workers held dance actions in the major capitals and regional towns such as Lismore and Bathurst.

An online petition has attracted over 7,000 signatories, including writers Thomas Keneally, Alexis Wright, Christos Tsiolkas and JM Coetzee.

Much of the anger was directed toward the arts minister, George Brandis, who earlier this month announced as part of the new budget $105m in funds over four years, usually reserved for the Australia Council were to be reallocated to a new national program for excellence.

The council’s new budget for the coming year will be $184.5m, a shortfall of $23m.

City of Sydney’s culture manager Rachel Healey questioned why “a whole new tier of government arts funding” was being created, in an address to roughly 100 people at a Sydney action in Hyde Park.

“What’s rational about creating a myriad of new hoops for artists to jump through, more mountains of submissions for committees to cast their bleary eyes over? And this from the government that is the scourge of red tape!”

Australia Council has a peer-review system in awarding grants to applicants. It is currently unclear how the new body to be established by Brandis will distribute funds, with a guideline for applicants to be published in the coming weeks.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/may/22/dance-rallies-held-across-australia-protest-105m-cut-to-arts-funding-body

 

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Created in 1994 as a spoof of that more serious competition, the Bald Archy Prize provides artists of all styles and standards with a genuine opportunity, ranging from the hilarious to the bizarrely vulgar, to create portrait paintings of humour, dark satire, light comedy or caricature.Winning subjects over the years have included Kerry Packer, Amanda Vanstone, Edmund Capon, Shane Warne, Dame Edna Everage, John Howard and Pauline Hanson, Robbie and Gai Waterhouse, Rupert Murdoch, Jeff Kennett, Cardinal George Pell, Tony Abbott, and Ian Thorpe.
see more: http://www.baldarchy.com.au/

the brandis' spoof continues to hurt artists...

 

Darwin arts organisations are reeling after being told their funding has been suspended under the new Abbott Government Federal arts grant scheme, with one warning of an exodus of artists and writers from the NT.

The previous model for federal arts funding was through the Australia Council, which has lost $105 million, around 15 per cent of its budget.

In defending the changes, Federal Minister for the Arts George Brandis said arts funding "has until now been limited almost exclusively to projects favoured by the Australia Council".

Funding would be administered under the National Program of Excellence in Arts (NPEA), which Mr Brandis said would "make funding available to a wider range of arts companies and arts practitioners, while at the same time respecting the preferences and tastes of Australia's audiences".

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-05-28/nt-arts-groups-uncertain-future-after-federal-funding-cuts/6503586

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Ahem... The funding was dished out by The Australia Council for the Arts... Ahem... This is the purpose of The Australia Council for Arts, to dish out moneys to the arts... Ahem... But our accountant in residence, Senator Brandis, does not like some of the arts, so he decided to create his own dishing out...

Yes, as Herbert J Muller wrote:

Few have heard of Fra Luca Parioli, the inventor of double entry book-keeping; but he has probably had more influence on human life than has Dante or Michelangelo.


The NPEA seems to be a way to fund more middle-class shows for the rich conservative bored housewives on the north shore...