It is fair to say that the commercial enterprise of art---market, lobbyists, public relations, people, art institutions etc has a lot of influence over art criticism and reviewing in general. You cannot bite the hand that feeds you too much. What then is the state of play in art criticism in Australia?

Bad, says Luke Morgan, in his excellent article, Australian Art Criticism and Its Discontents" published in the Australian Book Review. He gives a very bleak account of the current state of play in art criticism and reviewing in Australia:

In the end, then, we are left with a field that might be described as follows. Over there is a group of strait-laced conformists, assiduously bowing and scraping before the big art institutions ---the 'museo-academic ziggurat'--- until they are finally admitted into the coveted inner sanctums. Elsewhere is another group, easily identifiable and eagerly initiating and maintaining conversations with anyone who will listen. Then there are the artist-critics, whom some of the others show signs of admiring, but who usually live in the US. In the foreground, a group of policemen can be spotted, waving their truncheons and barking out their verdicts. Further back, a few figures can just be made out behind a wall, too absorbed in their private affairs to pay attention to the policemen or anyone else for that matter, except perhaps the artist-critics. If you look hard enough, you can sometimes see a handful of stragglers, who periodically venture out, drink in hand, to fool around with darts, some of which hit their mark. Comparatively thick on the ground are the shady proxies of the market in their silvery suits, all of whom keep portraits of themselves in locked rooms that they are careful never to enter. Far less in evidence are the indigenous critics. Finally, best dressed and most glamorous of all, presiding over the terrain as a whole, even during their regular absences overseas, are the curators of contemporary art.

Morgan asks: 'are there any signs of are any signs at all of health in Australian art criticism today?

He draws attention to two relatively new ventures that may suggest more effective models for criticism as a less compromised pursuit ---the Sydney based the art life and the Melbourne based unMagazine Since the latter has closed after three years of toil and become an archive, that leaves us with the art life as an effective model of art criticism. It breaks new ground with its 'informal mixture of criticism, reviews, news, gossip and commentary on what it might describe as the ‘antics’ of art world figures, including some of the critics canvassed for this essay, all in a self-deprecating, witty and ironic style.'

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