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Daniel Thomas has been a powerful voice in the Australian art world for more than fifty years. His ideas and opinions have shaped the attitudes of several generations of curators and visual art writers. His writings, which include fifty-eight contributions to Art & Australia, beginning with an essay in vol. 1, no. 1, May 1963, provide an extraordinary resource for understanding the development of Australian art, as do his numerous articles in other art magazines and publications, and his fifteen books...

Dinah Dysart: Daniel, in 1988 you wrote in Art & Australia: 'with the passing of time... often the off-centre works of art turn out to have been the best'. Do you still agree?

Daniel Thomas: Yes. Talent spotting can also be skewed by an artist's personality. The charming artists might turn out to be less lasting than the retiring or silent ones. Bea Maddock or Robert MacPherson might be better than Brett Whiteley. Also, when some artists make very individual work but don't have strong engagement with the pressing concerns of the day their art might fall off the radar...

DD: You have been quoted as saying that you can't understand curators today who do not engage with their local contemporary art.

DT: There are some art historians who become art museum curators and remain specialised in, say, classical antiquity or medieval manuscripts or renaissance sculpture and never look at or think about the contemporary art of their own culture or their own particular region. You have to connect present-day audiences to the particular kinds of art that you happen to look after, so unless you also engage with present-day art and culture you are poorly equipped to interpret your classical, medieval or renaissance collections...

 DD: One of your most interesting articles in Art & Australia, 'The Margins Strike Back', coinciding with the 1988 bicentenary, discussed Australian art of the previous two decades. What are your responses to the art of the last two decades - and also to contemporary art today?

DT: Australia had changed, chiefly because of improved communications, the global village thing. The Bicentennial was a nice moment to remind ourselves that our high-art practitioners could take on the world, just as culture-cringeless rock musicians had done from the 1970s onwards. Foreign critics and curators were passing through of their own accord. They didn't have to be subsidised by the Australia Council. Today, twenty years later, many young Australian artists move to and fro across the world, with dealers in Berlin, London or New York. Perhaps there are no real margins or peripheries in the world today, but Australia was quicker than some places outside Europe and North America to join the world. Our art-making subcultures now seem wonderfully exuberant and well supported. As to what now gets made here, it might be too much a matter of world art that can be easily understood by European or American audiences...

DD: If you were interviewing for a collection curator today what would be the qualities that you would be looking for?

DT: First is judgment. Test whether they had actually looked round the museum and ask 'What do you think is the best work of art on display here?' And after that, almost a trick question: 'And what was your favourite work of art?' The first question tests judgment, the second tests whether they are aware that personal taste (genetically or socially formed personal taste) could sometimes cloud their judgment. Collection curators know they must distance themselves from their personal taste... p&t;

DD: What big ideas do you have for the future of the visual arts in this country?

DT: I agree with the 2020 Summit idea of mentoring a stronger presence of art into all education systems. I would also say please think about how to handle new media. My generation loves the materiality of works of art - the paintcraft, the touch, the tactility. Such things lead us to uniquely individual temperaments, either very different from or else reassuringly similar to the individual viewer's. Experience of otherness, differences, uncertainties, wonders, transformations, is the essential art experience. We are electrified by Rembrandt's touch as well as by the aesthetic form of his images and their powerful emotions. Digital imagery lacks materiality and I regard that as a huge loss. All past cultures have prized materiality and aesthetic form, often more than the subject matter of art; whereas subject matter, whether edifying or entertaining, seems to be the chief concern of present-day digital art... And if you can't beat them join them, by ensuring that the collection-display spaces in art museums these days always have moving-image digital art available. Its presence now and then in temporary exhibitions is not enough. Screen images, preferably at least the size of the human body, should be found all day, every day alongside paintings and sculptures by Rembrandt or Fred Williams or Brancusi or Robert Klippel. Only then will old media like oil painting or stone carving or blacksmithing begin to receive attention from young people focused on shrunken digital images inside their laptops...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2009 issue.