We imagine artists as pure beings, in some ways above the forces of the market or the capitalistic imperatives of our society. Those who seek to make money from art are sell outs. By contrast, true artists, the theory goes,…
If we are lucky in our lives, we come across artists who are always paying attention, whose vibrant paintings bring to life the world in a way we have never seen before. They see the everyday; the objects, food and…
The first time I knew something was wrong was at the end of law school. It was the final examination before graduation and I walked by two people in conversation outside of the examination hall. The one said to the…
If you watch one film about technology this year, make it this one. The Social Dilemma (Netflix) features almost every tech insider turned outsider. There’s Tristan Harris, Google’s former chief design ethicist who famously dissented over the company’s attention/addiction business…
I’ve spent most of my adult life chasing a kind of certainty : the belief that people are susceptible to beauty, emotion and compassion. I want to believe that even the most callous, cruel and indifferent people in the world…
It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This is the opening statement of Mark Fisher’s book, Capitalist Realism. It’s a phrase often attributed to the philosophers Slavoj Zizek and Fredric Jameson. Zizek points…
For the last few months, I’ve been working on a hobby project to recreate, loosely speaking, the suburb of Glebe in Sydney in 3D. The original idea was to capture the essence of the suburb without necessarily making a one-to-one…
In 1985, Neil Postman wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it, he warned that unless we changed course, our society would be controlled by the technology we thought would free us. Our very desire would be our…
In the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway visited the galleries of Paris to see the works of Paul Cezanne, a painter who had an incredible impression on him. He later said of these visits: I was learning something from the painting of…
Avatar: The Last Airbender was a mid-2000s children’s TV show chronicling the journey of Aang, a young superhero aiming to master control of the four elements. Set in a pseudo-Asian mythological world, Avatar leant heavily on eastern philosophy, drawing on…