Happy New Year
This year (in March) we will celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the formal establishment of the National Portrait Gallery. In the life of institutions, twenty years is not a long time. From the vantage point of middle age, twenty years certainly feels disturbingly brief. I suppose it all depends on how you take the measure of time. Twenty years ago the Art Gallery of South Australia didn’t have or use email. We managed perfectly well without it, but I can’t quite remember how. Quite often I yearn for those less frenetic and far less constantly distracting days. In that context, twenty years feels like an eternity. Anyhow, this has prompted me to think about the ebbing and flowing rhythms of time. I am also reminded that in the late 1970s, a friend of mine was taken to visit the widowed English grandmother of a university acquaintance of his somewhere in Shropshire. The acquaintance warned my friend beforehand that the old lady’s preferred conversational gambit u...