The National 2021 Presents New Australian Art
The collaborative exhibition spans three venues and showcases 39 artists.
By Terry Christodoulou
Mon, Nov 16, 2020 6:02am
3 min
3 min
In the third edition of a six-year initiative presented in 2017 and 2019, the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), Carriageworks and The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA) has announced The National 2021: New Australian Art.
The collaborative exhibition sees four curators bring together 39 exhibiting artists, collectives and collaboratives while connecting three of Sydney’s key cultural precincts.
The exhibition will display new and commissioned works by leading contemporary artists from around the country – including those in remote communities such as Aṉangu Pitjant-jatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY Lands), Yirrkala in north-east Arnhem Land, Zendah Kes (Torres Strait Islands), and Belyuen, on the north-west coast of the Northern Territory.
A combination of emerging, mid-career and established artists will represent overlapping themes of environment, planetary responsibility, global uncertainty, our relationship to country, collaboration and inter-generational learning across a diverse range of media including painting, photography, film, sculpture, textiles, installations and performance.
Co-curators Matt Cox and Erin Vink, of AGNSW, are presenting 14 artist projects with a view to frame art’s potential to heal and care for the natural and social ecosystems.
“The National 2021 at AGNSW will examine different modes of care: how it engenders our relationships with each other, how we navigate these relationships, and in turn the relationships we have with sentient Country,” says Cox and Vink.
Photo: Zan Wimberley
Elsewhere, Carriageworks will bring together over 40 artists to produce 13 projects – responding to the key issues of our time – emphasising sociality, collaborative enquiry and works that speak to history and experiences of place.
“The artists are connected across generations and brought together by a spirit of collaboration,” says curator Abigail Moncrieff. “With an attention to the present moment, many of the works consider responsibility and lived experience through psychological and intuitive responses, alongside some of the most urgent and activist voices from around Australia.”
Further, thirteen artists consider diverse approaches to the environment, storytelling and inter-generational learning through their works in The National 2021 at the MCA.
“Unseen physical forces – wind, gases, emissions – power some works, while others transform plant matter, kangaroo teeth, echidna quills and plastic waste into powerful statements,” says MCA chief curator Rachel Kent.
The National 2021: New Australian Art runs from 26 March – 5 September 2021 at AGNSW; 26 March – 20 June 2021 at Carriageworks and 26 March – 22-August 2021 at MCA. Entry is free at the three institutions.
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Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.
By Adam Levine
Thu, Aug 13, 2026 3 min
3 min
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”
That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.
spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”
That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”
Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”
The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.
But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.
The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.
There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.
Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.
Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.
