Know My Mound of Venus
The original schedule for the second iteration of the National Gallery of Australia’s ‘Know My Name’ was July 2021. In June, the weekend papers advertised the show. The NGA website has “Part Two 12 Jun 2021 … " Incorrect. The show runs from September, when work including by Norma Redpath, Eugenia Raskopoulos, Marian Tubbs and Helen Grace will have been installed. Fussy? No; this casually inaccurate announcement of dates is a symptom of a disturbing attitude: publicity is imperative, and content irrelevant. Prematurely announcing this second exhibition suggests that marketing at the NGA has overwhelmed the traditional concept of an exhibition as a product of scholarship, conceived as a whole.
The NGA is not an emporium. It is a
