The Conversation

How an underwater sculpture trail plays a role in the health – and beauty – of the Great Barrier Reef

The widespread demise of coral reefs due to climate change is now a certainty. But what role does art have in our future for coral reefs?

As Julia Gutman’s maverick collage wins the Archibald prize, the award is truly in the hands of a new generation

Julia Gutman’s Archibald-winning portrait of the singer Montaigne and Zaachariaha Fielding’s winning entry, Inma, in the Wynne Prize have more in common than their youth – although it is worth noting they both represent a new generation of artists, a changing of the guard at the Art Gallery of NSW’s annual series of art prizes.

‘An activist masquerading as an artist’: we should all be talking about Richard Bell

A new documentary from Larissa Behrendt, You Can Go Now, highlights the life, work and activism of Richard Bell: a self-described “activist masquerading as an artist”.

Clothes women wanted to wear: a new exhibition explores how Carla Zampatti saw her designs as a tracker of feminism

The late Carla Zampatti is celebrated in a splendid retrospective Zampatti Powerhouse at the Powerhouse Museum.

May budget to boost cultural and historical institutions with $535m four-year injection

Next month’s budget will provide $535.3 million extra over four years for nine major cultural and historical institutions.

‘Arts are meant to be at the heart of our life’: what the new national cultural policy could mean for Australia – if it all comes together

It’s finally been launched. A new cultural policy for Australia. After years (actually decades) of neglect, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese launched a new national cultural policy, Revive.

‘I want people to be afraid of the women I dress’: the celebrated – and often controversial – designs of Alexander McQueen

Lee Alexander McQueen was born in 1968, so he was young in the 1980s, absorbing all the flashes of art, design and culture in which postmodernism flourished.

Three Impressionist paintings that give an insight into the complicated history of breastfeeding in the 19th century

The history of breastfeeding reveals uncomfortable truths about women, work and money. An unlikely place where the history of nursing is clearly visible is in Impressionist paintings.

‘Beautiful and terrifying’: how artist Richard Mosse brings us the vast, significant and urgent story of the Amazon’s destruction

The Amazon is reaching a tipping point. Once a proportion of the rainforest is lost, it will no longer be able to hold the necessary moisture to create the rainfall to sustain itself. Massive dieback will occur with a devastating release of carbon into the atmosphere with a major global impact on climate change.

How does one make an artwork about this? One that possesses a dazzling beauty and, at the same time, has the ability to stop you in your tracks and shock you into action?

10 months and hundreds of subjects: how I took portrait photography to the streets of Parramatta

For the past ten months, I have photographed hundreds of people in the Western Sydney suburb of Parramatta for a portrait project called Being Together: Parramatta Yearbook.

D Harding and Kate Harding: two artists exploring connections between mother and child, and the culture that forged them

D and Kate Harding are descendants of the Bidjara, Ghungalu and Garingbal peoples, and have strong continuous connections to the internationally significant heritage site of Carnarvon Gorge in central Queensland.

Male artists dominate galleries. Our research explored if it’s because ‘women don’t paint very well’ – or just discrimination

We wanted to know: is work by women generally valued differently to work by men because it is of a lower artistic quality, or is it just discrimination?