Compiler

Peter Timms

Vicky West, Kelp armour, bull kelp and synthetic thread. In Tooloyn Koortakay in the Gallery of First Australian at the National Museum of Australia.

Big balls

If you ever doubted the cosy relationship between art and big business, consider The source, a thirty-two metre-high sculpture installed as the centrepiece of the new London Stock Exchange building. The sculpture features 800 moving balls, which travel up and down wires, spelling out the initials FTSE when it is switched on, then moving into random ‘dreamtime’ mode, before getting down to business by forming the FTSE 100 index closing price at the end of the day. The Guardian newspaper, in its breathless report of all this, forgot to mention the name of the artist. Perhaps just as well.

Two Twopennies is one too many

The National Museum of Australia has paid $13,200 for a boomerang said to have belonged to a man named Twopenny, one of the first Aboriginal men to play first-class cricket (in a match between Victoria and New South Wales in 1870). A Melbourne sports historian, Rex Harcourt, says there were two Twopennies and the museum has the wrong one.

Grants and fellowships

The Visual Arts/Craft Board has given $1.8 millon to 120 individual artists this year, which is more than double the number of individual grant recipients last year. The increase signals the inauguration of the $39 million Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, the government’s response to the Myer Report. Also announced last month were recipients of the VA/CB’s fellowships: Barbara Campbell, Susanne Ford, David Hansen and Catherine Kay each receive $80,000 over two years.