Sweet celebration

There’s a moment each year, shortly after you’re presented with a birthday cake, when your job is to blow out the candles. The singing and shouting will shortly resume, you know that. But there’s a brief, indelible moment when things go dark, and you know for a fact that something’s over.

Sugar Spin: You, Me, Art and Everything, a sprawling show of 250 works at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA; until 17 April), is a tenth birthday celebration. It put me in the best of moods. It would be hard, in fact, to imagine a livelier introduction to the Australian art scene – or a more effective antidote to end-of-summer torpor. The show boasts, among other hits and occasional misses, a single gallery that is the most original and satisfying museum hang I’ve seen anywhere in many years.

But the exhibition is more than just a mood enhancer. It’s a...