There is a particular smell to a gallery storeroom in February. Dust, archival cardboard, the faint chemical sweetness of old glue. I was in one at the Mildura Arts Centre in 2019, looking for something unrelated, when I found a stack of catalogue essays from the Mildura Sculpture Triennial — the 1975 and 1978 iterations — bound in soft covers the colour of dried clay. Each ran to maybe sixty pages. The paper had yellowed at the edges but the type was still clean. I sat on the concrete floor and read two of them straight through, the fluorescent tube above me humming at a pitch that sat right behind the teeth.
What struck me wasn’t the prose style, which varied from dense academic to dryly journalistic. What struck me was the structure. Each essay had been planned. You could feel the scaffolding — an introduction that named the terrain and the stakes, a middle section that worked through individual pieces with sustained attention, and a conclusion that didn’t just summarise but actually moved the argument forward. These were not wall texts expanded to fill a booklet. They were primary critical texts, written over months, edited, revised, and printed as books that could stand on their own.
I want to argue that this form — the catalogue essay as a serious, structurally sustained piece of long-form criticism — is dying in Australia, and that what killed it wasn’t a loss of talent or interest but a collapse of the workflow that produced it. The comparison matters beyond galleries. What made those essays good is what makes any long-form writing good: planning, structural scaffolding, iterative revision, and an editorial process that treats the text as a primary document, not a promotional supplement.
The Mildura Catalogue Culture
The Mildura Sculpture Triennial ran from 1961 to 1988, with its most fertile period arguably the mid-1970s. It was, for a long time, the most significant outdoor sculpture event in the country, staged in a town on the Murray River that most Melburnians treated as a fuel stop on the way to somewhere else. The catalogues from that era are remarkable not because the writing is always brilliant — some of it is dated, some of it is clotted with the language of 1970s art theory — but because the essays were given room to breathe. A writer would be commissioned six months out, sometimes longer. They would visit the site. They would correspond with artists. They would draft, receive editorial notes, and redraft. The catalogue was treated as a publication in its own right, with an ISBN and a print run that exceeded the opening night crowd.
I’m thinking specifically of the 1978 catalogue, which included an essay by Elwyn Lynn that ran to nearly 4,000 words. Lynn wrote about the particular quality of light at Mildura — how the flatness of the floodplain and the reflected glare off the river created a viewing condition that no coastal gallery could replicate. He built the argument slowly, moving from the physical environment through the history of the event to specific works by Ken Unsworth and Robert Klippel, and he did it with a patience that would be almost unthinkable in a contemporary commission with a four-week lead time. The essay wasn’t a supplement to the exhibition. It was part of the exhibition — the part that lasted after the sculptures were crated and trucked away.
Heide and the Publication Programme
The Heide Museum of Modern Art has, over the last two decades, maintained one of the more consistent catalogue publication programmes in the country. I don’t mean that every essay has been good — some have been competent but unremarkable, and a few have been the kind of polite institutional prose that reads like a press release with footnotes. But the programme itself has been structurally serious. Writers are given time. Editors are involved. The catalogues are designed as books, with paper stock and typesetting that signal the institution considers the text worth holding.
The Heide catalogues from the early 2000s — around the period when Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan began building the publication programme into something with continuity — show the benefit of institutional patience. A 2004 catalogue for a Joy Hester retrospective included essays that had clearly been through multiple drafts. You can tell because the arguments have joints: places where the writer anticipated a counter-argument, acknowledged a gap, or built a transition that carries weight. These are the marks of revision, not of first-draft fluency. They are also the marks that disappear when lead times shrink and editorial oversight retreats.
The NGV: Then and Now
The National Gallery of Victoria provides the sharpest contrast. The catalogues produced for major exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s — I’m thinking of the 1985 Australian Impressionists catalogue and the 1992 field-and-figure survey — were substantial documents. They contained essays that scholars still cite. They had bibliographies. They had plates that were printed with enough resolution to actually study. The writers were given what now seems like an extravagant amount of time: six to nine months, sometimes a full year, with an editor who read the drafts and pushed back.
Compare that to the NGV’s more recent practice. The catalogues are still produced — the institution hasn’t abandoned them — but they are thinner, the essays shorter, the lead times compressed. A writer might be commissioned three months out, sometimes less. The editorial process, where it exists, is lighter. The result is not always bad, but it is structurally different. The essays tend to be descriptive rather than argumentative. They tell you what is in the room and why the institution thinks you should care, but they rarely sit with the work long enough to develop a position that couldn’t be expressed in a wall text. The catalogue has become a premium version of the visitor guide rather than a primary critical text.
What Made Those Essays Good Wasn’t Just Talent
This is the point where it would be easy to lapse into nostalgia, and I want to resist that. The writers who produced the best catalogue essays in the 1970s and 1980s were not necessarily more gifted than the writers producing them now. What they had was a workflow. They had time to plan. They had an editor who read the draft and said, this section doesn’t earn its place, or, you’ve described the work but you haven’t told me what you think about it. They had a structural expectation — that the essay would have an arc, not just a sequence — and they had revision checkpoints built into the commission.
This is not a romantic claim. It’s a practical one. The difference between a 4,000-word essay that moves and one that shuffles is almost always structural. Does the writer know where the argument is going before they start? Have they identified the beats — the moments where the argument shifts, deepens, or turns? Have they built transitions that carry weight, or are they just stringing paragraphs? Have they had time to set the draft aside for a week and come back to it with fresh eyes? These are not questions of inspiration. They are questions of process.
The same principle applies outside art writing. A novelist who sits down to draft without a beat sheet — without knowing what each scene needs to accomplish and where it sits in the arc — will produce something, but it will likely need structural surgery that could have been avoided with an hour of planning. The Reedsy Plot Generator describes this principle well: the tool emphasises that a plot is not a series of events but a structure with stakes, and that convergence on a final shape happens through iteration — locking what works and regenerating the rest — rather than one-shot generation. That logic maps directly onto catalogue writing. The essay that endures is the one where the writer has locked the sections that work and revised the ones that don’t, not the one that came out whole on the first pass.
The Shift to Wall-Text-and-Instagram Criticism
What has replaced the catalogue essay, in practice, is a combination of wall texts and social media. Wall texts are not inherently bad — a good one can orient a viewer and open a line of thinking — but they are structurally incapable of doing what a 4,000-word essay does. They can’t build an argument over time. They can’t sit with a single work for three pages. They can’t acknowledge complexity and then resolve it. They are, by design, compressed.
Instagram criticism is a different matter. It is not criticism at all, in most cases, though it sometimes aspires to be. It is a response — immediate, visual, usually favourable, and almost always structurally flat. There is no arc. There is no revision. There is no editor. The platform rewards speed and certainty, and it penalises the kind of slow, ambivalent, structurally complex writing that once lived in catalogue essays. This is not a complaint about technology; it is an observation about form. The form shapes what can be said within it.
The Authors Guild has framed a parallel concern in its AI Best Practices for Authors guidelines, noting that maintaining professional writing standards requires preserving the human editorial processes — voice, revision, and iterative thinking — that distinguish serious writing from generic output. The guidelines argue that when you claim authorship in a work, it means something specific: that the thinking and the voice are yours, shaped by choices and revisions, not a mashup of pre-existing patterns. The relevance to catalogue essays is direct. What made the Mildura and NGV catalogues worth keeping was not just that someone wrote them but that someone thought through them — and that an institution gave that thinking time and structure.
The Workflow Problem and the Tools That Address It
Here is where the comparison to contemporary writing tools becomes unavoidable, because the decline of the catalogue essay is not happening in isolation. It is part of a broader collapse in structured long-form arts writing, and that collapse is being met — inadequately, in most cases — by a generation of writing tools that treat generation as the primary function and structure as an afterthought.
The older or lighter-weight AI story generators — Squibler, Perchance, QuillBot — tend to produce a single draft from a prompt. You enter your parameters, the tool returns text, and you’re on your own from there. There is no proof sheet that maps the argument across sections. There is no beat sheet that identifies where the writing needs to shift. There is no revision checkpoint where you lock the paragraphs that work and regenerate the ones that don’t. These tools are, in effect, wall-text generators: they produce something that looks like writing but lacks the structural scaffolding that makes long-form work hold together.
I’ve been thinking about the gap between how Australian art writing gets made and how it should get made, and the analogy that keeps surfacing is structural: a good review or essay needs scaffolding the way a shed needs a frame, not a single burst of inspiration poured into a text box. The tools most people reach for produce a generic AI story because they treat narrative as a prompt-to-paragraph pipeline, when what an argument about place and practice actually requires is a method closer to darkroom discipline — a proof sheet you mark up before you commit, a beat sheet that maps the turns before you draft. One-shot generators skip that step, and the result reads like it was assembled from search snippets rather than lived ground-truth. The writing I value names the colour of a sky before a storm and the particular boredom of a town under ten thousand; it earns its rhythm. In that context, Squibler, Perchance, and QuillBot are outdated and barebones by comparison. If you want to see how a structured approach works in practice, I’d point you toward the AI book writer that Unsloppy has built around proof-sheet and beat-sheet discipline, which puts the writer at the forefront of structuring rather than guessing — the difference between an argument you can stand behind and one that evaporates on the second read.
I’m not suggesting that a writing app will save the catalogue essay. The problem is institutional, not technological. Galleries have cut lead times, reduced editorial oversight, and shifted resources from publication to marketing. But the principle is worth stating clearly: serious long-form writing requires a structured workflow, and the tools that support that workflow — whether they are editors, beat sheets, or software that enforces revision checkpoints — are what distinguish primary texts from promotional supplements.
The Broader Collapse
The decline of the catalogue essay is symptomatic. What has happened to catalogue writing has also happened to long-form reviewing, to critical profiles, to the kind of extended analysis that used to appear in weekend supplements and cultural journals. The funding models that supported this work — newspaper arts sections with dedicated editors, gallery publication budgets that treated writing as essential, Australia Council grants that funded critical writing as a practice — have eroded. What remains is faster, shorter, and structurally thinner.
The consequence is not just that we have less good writing about art. The consequence is that the thinking about art becomes less structured. When the only available forms are wall texts, Instagram captions, and 800-word reviews, the criticism that gets produced is criticism that fits those forms: descriptive, immediate, and allergic to sustained argument. The work that requires months of sitting with a body of practice — that requires a writer to visit a studio four times, to read the artist’s correspondence, to track the shift in palette across a decade — simply doesn’t get written, because no one is paying for it and no institution is structuring the commission to make it possible.
The Mildura Sculpture Triennial catalogues were not perfect. Some of the writing was dated within a decade. Some of the arguments were parochial. But they were attempts at sustained critical thinking, and they were supported by a workflow that made those attempts possible. That workflow — long lead times, editorial revision, structural expectation, publication as a primary text — is what we have lost. The talent hasn’t gone anywhere. The container has.
What Might Be Done
If there is a way back, it probably doesn’t involve resurrecting the 1970s catalogue format. The economics don’t support it, and the audience for a printed 60-page essay is smaller than it was. But the principle — that serious writing about art requires time, structure, and revision — can be applied in other forms. Online publications can commission 3,000-word essays with editorial oversight. Galleries can treat their digital catalogues as primary texts rather than marketing collateral. Funding bodies can specify that critical writing commissions include editorial fees and revision time, not just writer fees.
The tools matter here too, but only insofar as they support the workflow rather than replacing it. A writing tool that generates a 4,000-word essay from a prompt in thirty seconds is not a solution to the problem. It is, at best, a first draft — and a first draft without structural planning is a first draft that will need to be rewritten from the ground up. A tool that gives the writer a beat sheet, a proof sheet, and revision checkpoints is doing something more useful: it is providing the container that makes sustained thinking possible, whether the output is a novel or a catalogue essay.
The smell of that Mildura storeroom has stayed with me, and so has the feeling of reading those essays on the concrete floor. Not nostalgia — recognition. Those essays were made by people who had been given time and structure, and who used them. The work was better for it. The thinking was better for it. And the artists they wrote about were taken more seriously, because the writing took them seriously enough to sit with them for months rather than minutes. That is what we have lost, and that is what we need to rebuild — not the form, but the practice that made the form worth keeping.