At Christmas each year ArtWranglers awards its honorary degrees: the Master of Vitriol and the Master of Mystification. Judging by this weekend’s review columns, for our senior arts writers the Christmas break can’t come fast enough. Christopher Allen had a miserable trip to Brisbane to review Optimism, at the QAG/GoMA, and it shows. John McDonald had a case of EOE (Early Onset Envy) in his review of the National Portrait Gallery, and spent far too many valuable words commenting on the Director Andrew Sayers’ appearance and manner. Could it be that John has just published his own HAA (History of Australian Art) and he’s nervous about the inevitable comparisons with Andrew’s? And Nicolas Rothwell spins a yarn worthy of AUSTRALIA about ghostly figures in the Aboriginal Art World, but pictures his subject, large as life, on the cover of the Weekend Australian Review. So much for conventional sensitivities about photographs of deceased Indigenous Australians… The Rothwell has been heading in this direction for some time now, but this time clearly he himself has passed over to the other side, to “the higher reaches of desert religion: to death, transformation and the shimmer of creation stories reaching into the realm of today’s life.” Actually for his Broome “gallerist” (there’s that word again!) Emily Rohr, Christmas has come twice: this is the second feature article in a week that Rothwell has published about her gallery and her artists. Money can’t buy such coverage, unless there’s something deeper going on. So alas, there will only be Endeavour Awards this year…

PS. Want a second opinion on the MCA? In her best Top Gear mode, read Elizabeth Farrelly in the SMH…