The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Picador, $20) What are you even up to, Auckland. 2 Eleanor Oliphant … Read more
A conversation between editors about what made an impression in New Zealand visual arts in 2019. We unpack the highs and lows, and the exhibitions both naughty and nice. Warning: includes light interference from Elf on a Shelf. After six months of The Spinoff Art, co-editors Megan Dunn and Mark Amery pause for pavlova and … Read more
Curator and art writer Justin Paton on the process of writing McCahon Country, homesickness, and uncontemporary art. Plus his top tips for art writers. Justin Paton is the author of the award-winning How to Look at a Painting. A book so popular it inspired a TV series of the same title, which Paton also presented. … Read more
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 We Are Here: An Atlas of Aotearoa by Chris McDowall & Tim Denee (Massey University Press, $70) Superlative superlative superlative. … Read more
The paintings of Colin McCahon convey dissonance and uncertainty, writes Shannon Te Ao. So what does this say about us? And why are we maintaining this Pākehā male narrative at the expense of more inclusive representation? Ka pōraruraru ahau. I am troubled. Colin McCahon would have turned 100 on August the 1st. If you keep … Read more
To mark the centenary of Colin McCahon’s birth, a weekend of events in August included a bus ride to experience ‘McCahon’s Auckland’ and an ‘open home’ at the McCahon House Museum. Paula Morris takes the trip. Buckle up. The first bus to Titirangi leaves at nine AM on Saturday and there’s a certain giggly excitement … Read more
Anthony Byrt reviews an impeccably researched but somewhat tortured biography of Theo Schoon – only possibly a great New Zealand artist, almost certainly an anti-Semitic, misogynist, pretentious, belly-aching bitch. Art history is a brutal discipline, which feeds off the corpses of nearly-rans: the artists and dealers and curators and muses and rivals who make up an … Read more