Sydney's major art museum falls behind rivals

Sydney

THE honey-coloured neoclassical facade of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney's premier art museum, projects an orderly calm amid the surrounding bucolic parkland. But for all its outward serenity, a general anxiety pervades the institution - a sense of urgency, insecurity and of big things hanging in the balance.

Four years after an ambitious expansion was proposed - an attempt to give Sydney an art museum to match its status as the most affluent and populous city in Australia - it still has not gotten off the ground. The delay has been damaging for the institution, and for Sydney itself.