One of the most interesting commentators on Aboriginal art—Nicolas Rothwell in The Australian—published two contrasting articles in August/September; one damning Darwin’s National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA), the other hailing Desert Mob, the desert community art centre’s annual show at Alice Springs.
In fact, the August invective hit out at three targets in one—the Awards themselves, the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) which stages them, and the wider Indigenous art market. His negatives included good winners from a thin field, ‘pomp and rhetorical triumphalism’ in the speechifying, and a poor turn-out of collectors and dealers. Rothwell also asked whether an Indigenous-only award is today outmoded, thirty years after the NATSIAAs were created. But his key point was the selection of too much repetitious and familiar work from artists who are encouraged to churn out market-friendly images rather than innovate—surely a reflection on both the Award’s judges, who do not know the scene well enough, and the art co-ordinators who place a higher priority on turnover than culture, rather than on the artists.
Yet it was the innovation of a second and third generation of artists which excited Rothwell at the marketplace which is Desert Mob. He discovered the ‘mystery of artistic transmission’ being captured by ‘the masters and their strikingly assured descendants’ from dynamic art centres in the APY (Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands, some of whom also appeared in Darwin. The teeming walls of this uncurated, three hundred-work event seem to have fired the writer to a virtual Calliope of dramatic writing, despite which he was able to distinguish between ‘what has permanence and what is passing fashion in the Aboriginal art