Australian Galleries opened in Melbourne in June 1956. One year later, Andy Warhol established Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. Warhol’s art of making money became an art form in itself, with the artist elaborating that ‘good business is the best art’. Gallerists Anne and Tam Purves would have agreed. This husband-and-wife team took selling art seriously and introduced a professionalism unlike anything that had existed in Melbourne. Their new modern enterprise occupied a converted front section of their Derby Street paper-pattern factory in the working-class suburb of Collingwood. While the couple had no experience in art dealership or gallery management, they were confident that the arts were ready for something different. Anne, accomplished in commercial design, had considerable artistic aspirations, while Tam merely transferred his well-established business acumen across the factory threshold into their smart new premises. As with any business venture, timing was important, and they capitalised on the leverage that the 1956 Olympic Games brought to Melbourne.

In Conformity: The power of social influences, the renowned constitutional scholar Cass R. Sunstein acknowledges that social conformity can provide the glue to bind a society together. As he makes clear, there are many particular norms – legal or moral – that we would do well to follow for the sake of the common good. At the same time, he argues, conformity can facilitate atrocities, destroy creativity, drive out nuance, conceal valuable information, and crush free-thinking individuals.

On such an account, conformity often leads to mistakes. Within a process of discussion and deliberation, a propensity to conform to majority thinking is more a vice than a virtue. If we hide our beliefs and preferences when they vary from the mainstream, we keep our critical insights and positive ideas out of consideration. Conformists accrue standing in the group, or at least escape criticism, but they weaken the group’s deliberations. Conversely, honest dissenters may be punished for their trouble, but they offer information that may assist a good outcome. Thus, it is not necessarily conformists who are socially concerned and responsible, and it is not necessarily dissenters who are antisocial and selfish. In many situations, the exact opposite is true.

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the centenary in 2019 of the Bauhaus – naturally more pronounced in Germany – it is gratifying to see such a fine Australian publication dealing with the international influence of this short-lived, revolutionary art and design teaching institute. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond – written by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist, and Isabel Wünsche – explores the Bauhaus and its influence in Australia.

Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925 (Mies van der Rohe became director in 1930), and thence to Berlin in 1932. A year later the Nazis shut it down. It had lasted for just fourteen years, and some of the instantly recognisable designs – notably the Bauhaus building itself, the flat-topped residential architecture by Gropius, and the tubular steel furniture by Marcel Breuer – were designed over an even shorter period (1925–28). In addition to those already mentioned, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy are just some of famous artists connected with the Bauhaus.

Below Deck is a stunning literary novel. This is a poetic work that can be read aloud just as easily as it can be read in silence. Sophie Hardcastle wrote Below Deck in 2018 when she was a Provost’s Scholar in English Literature at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. As she reveals in the acknowledgments, she read a draft aloud to her professor, an experience that no doubt consolidated the flow of her prose.

Oli, the protagonist, is a sailor and an artist. Her synaesthesia means that she hears sounds and feels emotions in colour. Hardcastle’s lyrical command of language enables the reader to experience Oli’s world in vivid colour too. Oli is a twenty-something woman whose world is damaged by men – her father, her boyfriend, the all-male crew. The sense of maleness is omnipresent in the novel – how they behave, what they assume, the way they judge others. Their presence leeches the very colour from Oli’s world. But Below Deck is more nuanced than simply pitting maleness against femaleness. There are compassionate men, including the irrepressible Mac and the everyman Hugo.

At its heart – and there is heart to this novel, indeed more than most – Below Deck explores what it is to be female. This is a work for anyone who has felt the sting of misogyny or the consequences of assault. Oli lives those experiences, questions them, crumbles under their weight, and rebuilds herself. All the while, Hardcastle’s lightness of touch means that none of this is didactic. Oli simply is.

The novel is replete with symbolism but can also be brutally frank at times. This is, after all, a work that opens with ‘at sea, no one can hear you scream’. Oli travels to the Southern Ocean, an experience that allows her to begin to recover. This healing is accompanied by a burst of creativity; she begins to see the world in colours she has never experienced before. (Hardcastle was an artist-in-residence in Antarctica in 2017, an experience that doubtless informed the novel.)

This is Hardcastle’s first novel, although she has previously published her memoir of mental illness, Running Like China (2015), and the Young Adult novel Breathing Under Water (2016).