Sharon Verghis

Modern-day Medicis: behind the private art museum boom

Deep in the headquarters of fashion giant Louis Vuitton on Avenue Montaigne in Paris, Jean-Paul Claverie cuts a dapper picture of old-school elegance. He takes my hand and offers me a seat ...

Dance’s dark side under scrutiny

ON a quiet public holiday afternoon in Chiswick, in Sydney’s inner west, shop No 15-17, the headquarters of dance school The Next Step Performing Arts, presents a shuttered facade to the empty street. ...

Arts funding debate ponders colour of money from corporate sponsors

EARLY last month, London’s British Museum opened a new exhibitio, Vikings: Life and Legend, in the biggest show of its kind in 30 years. More than 50,000 visitors have so far flocked to the museum’s new Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery to view items ranging from fighting axes, amulets and dragon figureheads, to skeletons, old coins and an imposing 37m-long Viking timber warship. ...

MONA’s On the Origin of Art: David Walsh’s tale of four visions

“You can pretty much tell how often a male gorilla is being cuckolded by how big their testes are,” says David Walsh over the lunchtime hum from a corner of his museum’s restaurant. ...

Handle with Care

How do you transport three Egyptian mummies across international borders? With the appropriate paperwork governing the movement of human remains, four armed guards, and the utmost care, as Adam Worrall, an almost 30-year veteran in the complex business of transporting, handling and installing art, found out some years ago. ...

Sun, sand and Swan Lake at Hamilton Island

On a balmy Saturday night on Hamilton Island’s Pebble Beach, four Australian Ballet dancers whipped out virtuoso pas de deux from August Bournonville’s Flower Festival in Genzano, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake in front of a 150-strong black tie crowd. ...

The dream I dreamed

All they want is to put on a musical audiences will enjoy. But success can be so elusive
Max Bialystock: The two cardinal rules of producing. One: Never put your own money in the show.
Leo Bloom: And two?
Max Bialystock [yelling]: Never put your own money in the show! ...

Shore winner: David Handley on his Sculpture by the Sea

In the mid-1990s in Prague, David Handley was a self-described runaway from Sydney, eking out a living across a patchwork of jobs: the graveyard shift as a cook in a nightclub, selling Australian wines as an agent for Hardys and Southcorp, distributing Australian films, and generally, he says, “enjoying living in a period of historical change.” ...

Colouring-in book craze and the minefield of mindfulness

In a boardroom at the Art Gallery of NSW, Count Andreas Wilhelm von Faber-Castell casts a critical eye over a miniature kingdom of pencils. A rainbow army of brightly coloured sticks lies in orderly formation, next to trays of connector pens, pastels and graphite pencils. ...

‘Lost art’ lamented as drawing goes belly up

ON the eve of the Dobell Australian Drawing Biennial at the Art Gallery of NSW, artist and former National Art School director Bernard Ollis claims Australian art schools are “in crisis” and that drawing skills are in serious decline. ...