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Keywords: Iconoclasm

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    The problem of new nihilism

    • Joel Hodge
    • 05 October 2021
    55 Comments

    Does life have meaning? Or, as the new nihilists suggest, is life meaningless? A new book, The Sunny Nihilist, by writer and journalist, Wendy Syfret, puts the case for nihilism as an antidote to the obsessive search for meaning and purpose that many modern people experience.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Miles Davis drama diminishes domestic abuse

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 17 June 2016

    In one scene, as Taylor and Davis argue, the dialogue comes down and the score comes up; her voice is literally taken from her. When Davis then physically assaults her, the message is clear: his music and his violence are notches on the same spectrum. This conflation of creativity with destructiveness is a typical error of mainstream biopics about great artists who were not nice people. Yet applied in the context of spousal abuse it is not only specious but ethically dubious, even dangerous.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Bob Ellis the gifted troublemaker

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 05 April 2016
    7 Comments

    Ellis' work is a prime example of the notion advanced by the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre: that committed literature, and the act of writing, are political and ethical acts. Even in a film script, one can ponder social political change. Always of the left, but never formally the structured party man of faction and following, the dishevelled, sometimes wild Ellis proved contrarian even to Labor stalwarts. There were never pious reflections, or unqualified praises.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Mannix, master conjurer in the cause of the underdog

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 26 March 2015
    15 Comments

    Daniel Mannix, who was Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne 1917-63, knew how to control an audience and shift the perception of events. He argued fiercely against conscription in the 1917 Referendum, and railed against the exploitation of struggling workers. On finishing his new biography, I imagined a meeting between him and Pope Francis, both masters of public symbols with a disdain for church clericalism and sanctimonious speech.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    A brief history of not drawing Muhammad

    • Philip Harvey
    • 18 February 2015
    10 Comments

    Why ban an image of Muhammad? Why is he an image-free zone? The answer is not primarily political or artistic but theological. The clue is in a statute of a meeting of bishops called the Second Council of Nicea. This may seem obscure and unimportant, but the bishops weren't obscure and the issue was whether or not humans can make an image of God. The outcome was decisive in the history of world art.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Iconoclasts' challenge to turn the other cheek

    • Michael Mullins & James Massola
    • 18 September 2006
    7 Comments

    When the Jesuits' founder St Ignatius Loyola was on the road riding with a Moor in 1522, the Moor argued that the Virgin Mary was no longer a virgin after Christ was born. The recent former soldier Ignatius wanted to kill the Moor on the spot.

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