John Cage is often folded into conversations about minimalism or reduction, as though his relevance to visual art lies primarily in restraint. This misses the real force of his practice. Cage was not interested in making less. He was interested in risking more. More uncertainty, more vulnerability, more encounters with what could not be planned in advance.

At the core of Cage’s thinking is a profound challenge to the ego’s role in creativity. Not the ego as personality, but the ego as decision-maker, curator, editor, and judge. Cage understood that much of what passes for artistic mastery is simply the repeated reinforcement of what the artist already knows how to do well.

For visual artists, this is where Cage becomes truly instructive.

Walk into a bottle shop and you are confronted by a peculiar contradiction. Wine is one of the most sensorial, expressive, and culturally loaded products we consume, yet its labels are among the most visually timid. Row after row repeats the same visual grammar: muted palettes, formal serif type, crests, medals, references to lineage and land. It is not tradition that dominates these shelves, but repetition.

What is missing is not marketing sophistication. It is art.

The contemporary demonisation of Pablo Picasso has crystallised around one central charge: his treatment of women. Biographies catalogue emotional cruelty, power imbalances, abandonment, manipulation, and psychological harm. Former partners are reframed not merely as muses but as victims of a patriarchal tyrant whose personal life is now read as inseparable from the violence of his art. In some cultural and academic circles, this reassessment has tipped into something stronger than critique. Picasso has been quietly, and sometimes explicitly, cancelled.

Exhibitions are recontextualised with warnings. His name is spoken with apology. Students are encouraged to approach his work with suspicion rather than curiosity. In certain spaces, admiration itself is treated as a moral failure.

This is not simply a long-overdue feminist reckoning. It is part of a broader cultural shift in which moral judgement becomes the dominant mode of interpretation. And that shift carries serious consequences.

Fashion has always borrowed the language of art, but at its most powerful moments, it has done more than borrow. It has collaborated.

Long before fashion became optimised for speed and scale, it moved in dialogue with painters, sculptors, and visual thinkers. Artists brought friction. Designers brought form. Together, they created moments that still reverberate culturally decades later.

Today, as fashion reckons with overproduction, sameness, and creative fatigue, that relationship matters more than ever.

Australian Abstract by Amber Creswell Bell feels like a quiet turning point in Australian art. It gathers together artists who work with colour, shape, rhythm and intuition rather than recognisable scenes. In doing so, it makes a persuasive case that abstraction, while still relatively young in Australia, has finally come into its own.

Somewhere along the line, the art world decided that suffering is a credential. Pain became a passport. The more wounded the artist, the more “authentic” their work was assumed to be. Biography eclipsed substance, and a strange cultural hunger emerged: we do not merely want art, we want the artist’s exposed nerve, framed neatly for consumption.

Somewhere in the journey from childhood to adulthood, play quietly disappears. It is exiled to early years and relegated to frivolity, as though curiosity has an expiry date and wonder is something we must grow out of. Yet every significant artistic rupture in history — from Dada to Fluxus to the chance operations of Cage — emerged not from solemnity, but from a willingness to play.

There is a quiet paradox in contemporary painting. The colour most artists reach for without thinking is often the one responsible for flattening the life out of their work. Titanium white, the dependable studio staple, behaves like a tyrant disguised as a neutral. It brightens everything yet drains nuance. It promises clarity yet smothers subtlety. And it leaves behind that unmistakable chalky veil that sits on the surface like frost rather than light.

Australian artists are taught to be grateful. Grateful for a group show, grateful for exposure, grateful for the chance to enter a prize, grateful for the thinnest slice of institutional approval. Gratefulness has become a kind of soft discipline, something that keeps artists quiet and compliant while the gallery system creaks under the weight of its own limitations. In a country that prides itself on invention and grit, the art world remains strangely timid.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, something happens to the imagination. We stop playing. We start managing.

Bills, routines, work deadlines, parenting… life becomes a list. The adult brain becomes a well-trained manager: efficient, organised, and practical. But somewhere along the way, it forgets how to wander, to take risks, to play, to experiment, to try new things, to make strange connections. These are the very things that creativity depends on.

There is a popular myth that creativity is chaos. That it arrives in flashes of inspiration, unpredictable and wild. But anyone who has spent serious time in the studio knows that real creativity lives in structure. It is not chaos at all. It is a system that the artist builds, refines, and returns to until it begins to generate its own rhythm.

Every great artist has, in their own way, invented a methodical system. A personal architecture through which creativity flows.

Australia has a problem; an addiction, really. An addiction to art prizes. Every year, artists line up for judgment like contestants in a talent show, submitting their work to the same narrow gatekeepers, hoping this time they’ll be picked. The Archibald, the Wynne, the Ramsay - glittering symbols of validation that promise prestige but often deliver something else entirely: dependency.

It’s pick me culture dressed up as cultural celebration. A system that whispers to artists: you’ll matter when someone important says you do. And that message seeps deep. It erodes confidence, reshapes ambition, and teaches a dangerous lesson - that art is only legitimate if it’s sanctioned.

True creativity isn’t a lightning bolt of inspiration - it’s a slow-burning fire built from curiosity, courage, and persistence. It’s the art of trying, failing, and trying again until something unexpected takes shape. In an age that rewards perfection and predictability, creativity remains one of the few places where risk is still sacred.

Creativity begins where certainty ends. It’s not a formula or a gift. It’s a way of engaging with the world that invites surprise. The most powerful ideas rarely arrive fully formed; they reveal themselves through play, persistence, and a kind of joyful risk-taking.

In an age of relentless motion, where screens glow and attention flickers - the simple act of making art feels almost radical. To pick up a brush, to draw a line, to simply sit still long enough for colour and thought to converge - this is resistance. It’s a quiet revolt of the soul against a culture of acceleration and alienation.

Art has always been a mirror, but in modern life, it’s also a sanctuary. The studio becomes a place where the noise recedes. Where the self, scattered across notifications and expectations, gathers again. The process of making is not only about producing something beautiful - it’s about recovering something human.