1. Bishop applies an outdated framework to a contemporary practice
Bishop critiques Armstrong as though the conceptual and postmodern revolutions never occurred. His interpretive framework predates:
conceptualism
appropriation art
détournement
remix culture
post-medium theory
post-object and post-studio practice
In other words, he judges Daubism using tools that were already antiquated before Armstrong even began working. His critique reveals not a flaw in the art, but a critical vocabulary frozen in a much earlier era.
2. Bishop mistakes conceptual transformation for “copying”
At the core of Bishop’s misreading is a fundamental confusion between appropriation and derivation.
Armstrong’s practice is aligned with a lineage that includes Duchamp, Asger Jorn, Sherrie Levine, Sophie Calle, Enrico Baj, and Rauschenberg — a lineage in which intervention, reframing, and repurposing are central strategies.
Rather than recognise this, Bishop collapses the entire conceptual framework into the childish category of “copying.”
This is a category error so severe that it invalidates his entire argument.
To mistake Armstrong’s daubist reconstruction for copying is to reveal an inability to see past the surface of any artwork.
3. Bishop’s response is moral panic disguised as criticism
Much of Bishop’s discomfort stems from old anxieties surrounding:
the sanctity of the “original painting”
fear of tampering with tradition
the perceived danger of contemporary re-authorship
These anxieties are not critical insights; they are symptoms of a nostalgic worldview in which artistic meaning is fixed, stable, and protected from intervention.
Daubism, by contrast, exposes precisely the instability Bishop fears.
His critique reads not as analysis, but as a protective emotional reaction against contemporary art’s ability to challenge cultural memory.
4. Bishop erases the intellectual lineage to protect his argument from collapse
For Bishop’s critique to stand, he must ignore the existence of:
the readymade
appropriation discourse
postmodern authorship debates
the entire field of institutional critique
By refusing to acknowledge this lineage, Bishop creates a false vacuum in which Armstrong’s work can be mischaracterised.
This selective amnesia is not a critical strategy — it is a defensive manoeuvre to avoid engaging with the conceptual sophistication of Daubism.
5. Bishop’s reading is superficial because he lacks the tools to interpret complexity
Daubism operates through conceptual layering, narrative collision, material contradiction, humour, temporal disruption and re-authoring.
Bishop reduces all of this to “defacement.”
This reduction is not a judgement on Armstrong — it is an admission of Bishop’s own critical limitations.
He cannot read the languages in which Daubism speaks, so he declares the work unintelligible. The failure is his, not the artwork’s.
6. Bishop refuses to let Daubism define its own principles
Daubism sets its own parameters:
the use of original paintings
the daub as a conceptual mark
the inherited landscape as material
authorship as a dynamic, shared, unstable concept
Bishop rejects these premises outright, choosing instead to apply a rigid, conservative standard that Daubism was explicitly designed to critique.
This is equivalent to reviewing an avant-garde novel by criticising it for not following rhyme schemes.
7. Bishop’s critique ultimately reveals more about Bishop than about Armstrong
His argument inadvertently discloses:
his discomfort with contemporary theory
his fear of artistic hybridity
his reliance on outdated hierarchies
his inability to navigate non-traditional authorship
Daubism exposes these weaknesses.
The work expands beyond the boundaries Bishop tries to contain it in.
Far from undermining Armstrong’s practice, Bishop’s critique demonstrates precisely why that practice is necessary: it challenges a critical establishment still clinging to yesterday’s certainties.
Conclusion
Tony Bishop’s critique of Driller Jet Armstrong is not a critique in any meaningful sense. It is the residue of an outdated critical apparatus attempting to grapple with a contemporary movement that exceeds its reach.
His assessment is:
historically uninformed
theoretically inadequate
conceptually confused
emotionally reactive
and critically obsolete
In attempting to diminish Daubism, Bishop inadvertently confirms its relevance.
His failure to read the work is not evidence of the work’s weakness, but of Daubism’s ability to outpace a critic anchored in the past.
Rebuttal to Catherine Waters’s Critique of Daubism
Catherine Waters’s description of Daubism as a “moral rights abuse of the highest order” is not a critical position but a category error, rooted in a misunderstanding of both the practice and the legal–ethical frameworks she invokes. Her statement, while rhetorically dramatic, collapses under informed analysis.
1. Waters presumes that every altered painting is a “work of art” in the legal sense — Daubism does not
Daubism operates only on original paintings acquired legitimately, typically abandoned, orphaned, donated, discarded, unsigned, or made by unknown or amateur painters who never claimed ongoing artistic control.
Legally and ethically, “moral rights” apply to the identifiable creator of a work.
Waters’s accusation relies on the false assumption that Armstrong is mutilating:
museum works
significant heritage objects
identifiable artists’ intellectual property
He is not.
Daubism intervenes in works that have already exited the sphere of authorship and entered the realm of cultural detritus— precisely the material that Duchamp, Jorn, Levine, Calle, and others use as conceptual ground.
Her argument applies a legal category where it is not operative.
2. Waters frames Daubism as “defacement,” ignoring that Daubism is a form of creation, not destruction
Waters assumes a zero-sum logic: that adding to a painting must diminish it.
Contemporary art has spent a century disproving that assumption.
Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning
Asger Jorn’s Modifications
Sherrie Levine’s re-photographic interventions
Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural cuts
Banksy’s public-space overwrites
All demonstrate that alteration can generate meaning, not erase it.
Daubism is a transformative act, producing a new work through critical dialogue with the old.
To call this “mutilation” is to cling to a 19th-century essentialism long abandoned by serious art criticism.
3. Waters positions herself as defending artists, but erases the conceptual artist entirely
Ironically, in condemning Daubism as moral rights abuse, Waters:
affirms the rights of the unknown amateur painter
while denying the rights of the contemporary artist creating the new work
Armstrong becomes invisible in her argument.
His authorship, labour, conceptual framework, and artistic agency are rendered nonexistent.
Her critique attempts to protect the dead maker of the background while erasing the living maker of the artwork in front of her.
This is not advocacy — it is critical blindness.
4. Waters ignores the international art-historical lineage that makes Daubism legible
Her claim can only stand if one ignores:
Duchamp’s attack on originality
Jorn’s overwriting of flea-market paintings
Situationism
Feminist re-authorship practices
Postmodern appropriation
The contemporary remix condition
Daubism is not an aberration — it is a continuation of these movements.
Waters’s refusal to acknowledge the lineage is not neutrality; it is an attempt to judge a contemporary practice using criteria that expired decades ago.
A critique built on historical amnesia is not a critique.
It is simply uninformed.
5. Waters confuses sentimental attachment with ethical principle
To call Daubism a “moral rights abuse of the highest order” is to escalate preference into ethics.
What Waters actually articulates is:
discomfort with seeing images altered
attachment to the notion of painterly sanctity
anxiety around destabilised authorship
nostalgia for intact surfaces
These are emotional positions, not ethical ones.
They do not constitute a moral argument.
Aesthetic sentiment is not moral rights.
6. Waters misidentifies the object of harm: Daubism harms no artist, but exposes a system
No original artist is injured or misrepresented by Daubism.
Instead, the only thing “mutilated” is:
the myth of artistic purity
the fiction of fixed meaning
the fantasy of sovereign authorship
the unexamined nostalgia embedded in Australian landscape painting
If Daubism wounds anything, it is the ideological comfort Waters wishes to preserve.
Her critique reveals not a violation, but an exposure.
Conclusion
Catherine Waters’s accusation is rhetorically strong but intellectually weak. It relies on:
legal misunderstanding
historical erasure
conceptual collapse
emotional argument disguised as ethics
Daubism is not a moral rights abuse.
It is a critical re-authorship, entirely aligned with a century of contemporary artistic strategies.
Far from “defacement,” Daubism is a generative methodology that produces meaning precisely by intervening in the inherited images Waters insists must remain untouched. Her critique tells us nothing about Daubism — and everything about the boundaries Daubism was created to confront.
Rebuttal to David Dridan’s Attack on Daubism (1994)
for publication, exhibition wall text, or website use
David Dridan’s condemnation of Daubism in The Advertiser (June 27, 1994) reads today not as a principled defence of art, but as a revealing moment when a conservative landscape painter felt the ground shift beneath him and panicked. His statements expose more about his anxieties than they ever did about the practice he attempted to dismiss.
1. Dridan mistakes artistic insecurity for moral principle
Dridan frames his outrage as a defence of “honour” and “reputation,” but the subtext is unmistakable:
he feared his own work — and the nostalgic Australian landscape tradition he represented — could be rendered irrelevant by contemporary critique.
His insistence that only he may touch his own paintings exposes a fragile belief in artistic ownership as permanent, sacred and unchallengeable.
Contemporary art has long moved past such paternalistic protectionism.
2. He misunderstands Daubism as vandalism, proving he does not understand the artwork at all
Dridan collapses the distance between illegal street graffiti and conceptual intervention on privately owned paintings.
Daubism is entirely lawful, ethically considered, and art-historically grounded.
His horror at the practice arises not from moral clarity but from a failure to recognise:
the Duchampian collapse of the “original”
Jorn’s Modifications
postmodern appropriation
the remix condition of the late 20th century
He condemns Daubism because he has no conceptual vocabulary to understand it.
3. Dridan was wrong on the facts: moral rights do NOT apply to abandoned, amateur, or orphaned works
The article reveals fundamental confusion about the law.
Dridan warns about “tampering” with another person’s art while ignoring that:
the landscapes Daubism intervenes upon are legally purchased
most are unsigned, abandoned, or orphaned works
no identifiable artist’s honour is harmed
the resulting works are wholly new artistic creations
Dridan invokes laws that do not apply, and his outrage depends on this misunderstanding.
4. His defence of the Australian landscape tradition is thinly disguised gatekeeping
Dridan’s generation treated the eucalyptus-scrub landscape as sacred territory — a genre preserved in amber by nostalgia rather than critical thought.
Daubism challenges that unexamined reverence.
Dridan’s statement that “people who would like a bit of fun with my works should keep their hands off” is not a moral position — it is defensive gatekeeping against the evolution of Australian art beyond the provincialism he inhabited.
5. He portrays tradition as fragile, revealing its brittleness
In Dridan’s worldview, the Australian landscape painting is so delicate that a critical gesture — a daub, an overwrite, a conceptual intervention — can destroy it.
But art that cannot survive critique is not strong; it is already hollow.
Daubism exposed that hollowness, and Dridan reacted accordingly.
6. His appeal to authority relies on sentimentality, not argument
The article leans heavily on references to Drysdale, Heysen, and “mateship,” attempting to cloak his discomfort in the aura of great Australian painters.
But none of those figures ever appointed Dridan their guardian — nor would they have endorsed stagnation over artistic evolution.
His criticism rests not on theory, rigor, or understanding, but nostalgia and name-dropping.
7. History has already shown Dridan to be on the losing side of the argument
Thirty years on, Dridan’s comments feel like the last gasp of a fading school of thought.
Meanwhile, Daubism continues:
to evolve
to be collected
to be exhibited
to be written about
to generate critical engagement
to speak directly to 21st-century culture
The movement he dismissed as “tampering” has had a longer conceptual life than the very style he sought to protect.
Conclusion: Dridan condemned Daubism because it cracked open the myth he depended on
Dridan’s attack does not reveal a flaw in Daubism.
It reveals the fragility of an older Australian art ideology — one threatened by any practice that questions authorship, tradition, and the colonial image of “the bush.”
His critique was never about protecting art.
It was about protecting a worldview that Daubism had already left behind.
Rebuttal to Stradwick and Dridan (1991)
Michael Stradwick’s criticism reads like the reflex of someone terrified that contemporary art might require him to think. His claim that Daubism hides behind “deep meaning and art jargon” only reveals his unfamiliarity with both. It’s the standard defence of the threatened traditionalist: when confronted with an idea he cannot grasp, he declares the idea illegitimate. His dismissal is not analysis — it is fear masquerading as clarity.
His accusation that Driller is “passing off” another artist’s work ignores the obvious: Daubism openly foregrounds its source material, transforming it through visible intervention. Stradwick criticises the practice using vocabulary he doesn’t understand, hoping rhetorical fog will hide the hollowness of his argument. It doesn’t.
Dridan’s letter beside it is worse — a moralising sermon built on a fundamental misunderstanding of art history, authorship, and the contemporary condition. He invokes “the soul of another” as though paintings were sacred relics rather than cultural objects that have always been reinterpreted, repurposed, and challenged by artists who push the form forward. His outrage centres not on ethics but on the shock of encountering a practice that destabilises the complacent assumptions he depends on.
Both critics ultimately reveal the same anxiety: Daubism exposed how fragile their attachment to traditional Australian landscape painting truly was. Neither could answer the work with thought, so they answered with indignation. And indignation ages badly. History has already moved on; their protests remain only as artefacts of resistance to change — not to protect art, but to protect their own comfort.
Rebuttal to Margot Osborne (1991)
Margot Osborne’s critique hinges on a simple but fatal misconception: she assumes that the value of an image is fixed, inviolable, and determined by a consensus that never actually existed. Her horror at Armstrong “taking a lot on himself” exposes the real engine of her argument — not ethics, but discomfort with an artist who refuses to ask permission to rethink the familiar.
Osborne inadvertently admits that Bannon’s landscape was “not a timeless masterpiece,” but then insists it must nevertheless remain untouched, as though mediocrity deserves preservation simply because it arrived first. This is not a defence of art; it is a defence of inertia.
She presents Armstrong’s decision to intervene as arrogance, yet every significant shift in art history — from Duchamp to Rauschenberg to Jorn — was made by artists who refused to treat inherited images as sacred objects. Osborne faulted Armstrong not because he broke a rule, but because he understood the rules were imaginary.
Her claim that “it is hard to see his act in anything but negative terms” reflects only the limits of her own perspective. Daubism forced a confrontation with authorship, originality, and the afterlife of images. Osborne’s response was to retreat to the safety of disapproval rather than engage with the work’s conceptual force.
In the end, Osborne’s critique reveals less about Armstrong’s art than about the fragility of a critical framework unable to recognise transformation as a legitimate act. Her resistance is not an argument — it is an admission of discomfort in the face of artistic evolution.