Arts news

• Who Owns The Past? Our Museums Seem To Be Confused

  25-02-2016 23:43 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The encroachment of liberal guilt into curatorial decisions is undermining the traditional purpose of the museum; a secular institution in the service of historical inquiry. It risks transforming our great institutions into places where understanding the past is conditioned by present-day political and therapeutic criteria. And yet it should be the role of a museum to open up the past to everyone.”
  
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• Lara Downes: How To Make Music Matter

  25-02-2016 23:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Downes says the “chemistry” between performers, between performers and audiences, and between all people and music explains why — during social upheaval and at times of great joy and heroism — classical music is a natural anecdote or a means of celebratory expression. “People pull out Beethoven when world events happen and they just need something beautiful.”
  
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• Happy Poor People: What Kids Learn About Class From Hollywood

  25-02-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  A team of sociologists “took the 32 G-rated films that, as of January 1, 2014, had grossed more than $100 million, and that included a character who had a social class (Bambi, for example, did not), … and watched the films carefully to get a sense of which messages about class they communicated.”
  
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• The Buck Stopped Here: Joan Jonas sparkles at the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon gala

  25-02-2016 22:00
  
  There were formidable females in abundance to present the third Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon award to Joan Jonas. The veteran pioneer of performance, installation and video art, had flown in from her New York home especially for the occasion. Presiding over the spangly Swarovski-sponsored gala dinner—held in the magnificent 18th century setting of the Nicholas Hawksmoor-designed Christ Church Spitalfields—was the Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick. The award itself was handed over
  
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• Psychopathic, Narcissistic Machiavellians – What Makes Con Artists Tick

  25-02-2016 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “So wherein lies the truth: Is the con artist psychopath, narcissist, Machiavellian? A little bit of all? It is possible, it turns out, to possess all the tenets of the dark triad, and then some, and still not turn to con artistry.”
  
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• Looted Pissarro work to return to France after legal settlement

  25-02-2016 21:26
  
  A settlement has been reached in a restitution case brought against the University of Oklahoma by Léone Meyer in May 2013 over Camille Pissarro’s 1886 work La bergère rentrant des moutons (Shepherdess bringing in sheep). Meyer—whose entire birth family died in Auschwitz—now holds the full title to the piece, her lawyers announced yesterday, 24 February. The painting, part of a collection belonging to her adoptive parents, was seized in France by the Nazis in 1941
  
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• Looted Pissarro work to return to France

  25-02-2016 21:26
  
  A settlement has been reached in a restitution case brought against the University of Oklahoma by Léone Meyer in May 2013 over Camille Pissarro’s 1886 work La bergère rentrant des moutons (Shepherdess bringing in sheep). Meyer—whose entire birth family died in Auschwitz—now holds the full title to the piece, her lawyers announced yesterday, 24 February. The painting, part of a collection belonging to her adoptive parents, was seized in France by the Nazis in 1941
  
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• Bowdoin College Museum Commissions R. Luke DuBois Portrait of Civil Rights Activist DeRay McKesson

  25-02-2016 21:08 via artnews.com
  The Bowdoin College Museum of Art announced today that it has asked New York-based artist R. Luke DuBois to make a portrait of DeRay Mckesson, the Black Lives Matter activist (and Bowdoin alumnus) who is running to be mayor of Baltimore. The work will … Read More
  
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• Jean Royère, designer to royals, rolls into London

  25-02-2016 21:01
  
  In 1931, when 29-year-old Jean Royère left his cushy job in the import-export business to join the world of interior design, he took a risk that paid off. The self-taught Royère became one of the most recognised French avant-garde designers of the 20th century, working from the 1930s through the early 1970s and counting the Shah of Iran and King Hussein of Jordan among his clientele.Thursday evening, 25 February, the Galerie Patrick Seguin will open a show dedicated to the designe
  
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• Glowing Brick Wall Or Mountain Of Ice Cubes? Here’s What This Summer’s Serpentine Pavilion Will Look Like

  25-02-2016 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In the hands of … Bjarke Ingels and his firm BIG, it won’t be any old brick wall. It’s a wall that will be stretched open and hollowed out, its oversized fibreglass bricks stacked up to form a paraboloid enclosure that will taper high above the park, transforming from a bulging cave to a slender screen as it undulates across the lawn.”
  
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• How Would We Even Know If Our Machines Achieved Consciousness?

  25-02-2016 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What if artificial intelligence is so unfamiliar that we have a hard time recognising it? Could our machines have become self-aware without our even knowing it? The huge obstacle to addressing such questions is that no one is really sure what consciousness is, let alone whether we’d know it if we saw it.”
  
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• The Icons Issue

  25-02-2016 20:15 via artnews.com
  Five artists who have transformed the art world over the last 50 years Read More
  
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• ‘The Vacant and the Inhabited’ at Referência Galeria de Arte, Brasilia

  25-02-2016 20:08 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Where Do You Draw the Line Between Commercial and Literary Fiction?

  25-02-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  James Parker: “I draw it up the side of the Boston Public Library. I draw it through the middle of Stephen King’s wallet. I draw it right between the frontal lobes of every writer who ever lived.”
  Rivka Galchen: “Maybe Commercial Fiction is really great, or maybe it’s great the way a Dorito is great, but Commercial Fiction is in some way consonant with the market. … If, though, we didn’t have the term Literary to protect books of value that ¬aren&rs
  
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• Information overload: Whitechapel packs in 50 years of computer art

  25-02-2016 19:35
  
  Electronic Superhighway (2016-1966) at the Whitechapel Gallery traces the impact of computer and internet technologies on artists over the past 50 years. And much like the internet, it is a jam-packed, spam filled, free-for-all. Running in reverse chronological order, it includes works by 70 artists, fr om lo-fi 60s plotter drawings to Jacolby Satterwhite’s 2016 fantasy computer game sex video.The contemporary contingent (which reads like a who’s who of trendy young artists with Hit
  
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• Why Teens Have Stopped Reading Books

  25-02-2016 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another.”
  
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• Why Did “Jeopardy” Just Ban Canadians From Competing On The Show?

  25-02-2016 19:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Some suggest our digital privacy and anti-spam laws might be the cause, while others suggest that maybe we’re just smarter than Americans who don’t want to be upstaged by “moose-munching iceholes.”
  
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• This Composer Writes Classical Music To Subsidize Her Pop Songs

  25-02-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “There’s this assumption that there’s money in pop. No – my contemporary art music funds my burgeoning middle-aged pop sensation career! … It’s made me realise how much support and infrastructure there is for classical music.”
  
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• Restoration gives British Museum’s Amitabha Buddha a reason to smile

  25-02-2016 18:46
  
  The 1,400-year-old Amitabha Buddha, one of the star pieces of a landmark exhibition of Chinese art held at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in 1935 and a highlight of the British Museum’s collection for nearly eight decades, has undergone its first full conservation treatment in 25 years thanks to funds from Bank of America Merrill Lynch.
  
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• Why Composers Are Writing Music Across Styles

  25-02-2016 18:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Of course not everyone is writing “in the style of” or explicitly quoting other pieces, but the desire to build perceptible bridges between musical traditions is nearly universal.
  
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• Alberto Giacometti sculpture barred from leaving UK

  25-02-2016 18:02
  
  Culture minister blocks export of Femme, an influential work sold to a foreign buyer, in hope that a Briton will find £2m to buy itAn important Alberto Giacometti plaster sculpture which is considered a pivotal link between British and European modernism has been prevented from leaving the UK.Ed Vaizey, the culture minister, placed a temporary export bar on the almost abstract work, called Femme. Continue reading...
  
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• Watch The Alvin Ailey Company On PBS NewsHour

  25-02-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Robert Battle grew up in one of Miami’s poorest neighborhoods wearing metal braces on his legs but dreaming of dance. Thirty years later, he runs the renowned Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater – the very company that inspired him as a child. Battle joins Jeffrey Brown to discuss how dance can transform lives and his vision for the company’s future.”
  
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• The Shape-Shifter: How Lynda Benglis Left the Bayou and Messed With the Establishment

  25-02-2016 17:49 via artnews.com
  You notice her face first. This is odd, because she’s nude, her body bronzed and oiled, with one wiry arm holding a large double-sided dildo between her legs. Her eyes aren’t even in play; a pair of white sunglasses covers … Read More
  
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• Conrad Shawcross’s monumental sculpture arrives on time in St Pancras, London

  25-02-2016 17:43
  
  Conrad Shawcross’s Paradigm, a 14-metre-tall, 26-tonne stack of geometrically shaped weathered steel, forms an impressive addition to London’s streetscape. Unveiled today, 25 February, the monumental sculpture was inspired by the way scientific thinking often shifts radically as long-held theories are challenged, an appropriate idea for its setting in front of a huge new biomedical research centre that is nearing completion off the Euston Road.
  Shawcross’s colossal statue, his
  
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• Is HBO Faltering?

  25-02-2016 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “HBO is in a period of challenge. It hasn’t had a breakout drama hit since Game of Thrones launched in 2011, and in recent months, it has seen several troubled shows go expensively into and then out of production.”
  
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• Michael Raedecker, artist: 'You're in the studio every day and you want to keep things lively and interesting'

  25-02-2016 17:22
  
  Karen Wright meets the Dutch artist in Homerton, east London
  
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• Cincinnati Considers Robert Mapplethorpe, 25 Years After The Obscenity Trial

  25-02-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Even now, “the city has not fully recovered. … Some Cincinnatians see Mapplethorpe as a ‘liberating force’ that advanced the arts and tolerance in the city, while others view him as a kind of ‘blight’ that tainted Cincinnati’s reputation.”
  
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• West End Theatre Box Office Grew Slightly In 2015

  25-02-2016 16:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In total, there were 14.7 million attendees to West End theatres, roughly the same as in the slightly longer period counted in 2014.”
  
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• Ruin Porn: Artist Moves Wrecked Detroit House To Europe

  25-02-2016 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The arguments around ruin porn have intensified as artists, particularly photographers, have flooded into Detroit while city champions struggle to counter negative publicity without overselling the nascent renaissance.”
  
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• Marianne Boesky Gallery Now Reps Dashiell Manley

  25-02-2016 16:00 via artnews.com
  New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery announced that it now represents Los Angeles–based artist Dashiell Manley, who was first featured at the gallery in a 2015 group show titled “Weird Science.” Manley’s work, including paintings from his Various sources (quiet satires) series … Read More
  
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• Kanye West, Donald Trump, And Martin Luther King (There’s More In Common Than You’d Think)

  25-02-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Despite a career-long alignment to both Jesus and God, neither is actually what Kanye truly seems to be aiming for. Nor is the perfect Martin Luther King of legend. … [And] if you peel back a layer, Trump and Kanye actually share a lot, at least as public characters, starting with many rhetorical gestures, a truly messianic sense of purpose, and an amazing conviction that one’s ego is itself a kind of messianic purpose.”
  
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• ‘Theatre Has Been The Last Bastion Of Segregation,’ Says Playwright Lynn Nottage

  25-02-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “You see plays by African American playwrights, by-and-large, have majority Asian or African American cast and are produced either on smaller stages or produced in theatres that are specifically geared towards work by people of colour.”
  
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• The Chilling Effect Of The Disappeared Hong Kong Booksellers

  25-02-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Some publishers and authors have lost confidence in Hong Kong’s autonomy and left the territory. Others, like Bao Pu, the founder of the New Century Press, had little confidence to lose.”
  
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• ‘The Shining’ Is Becoming An Opera

  25-02-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  First of all, composer Paul Moravec and librettist Mark Campbell are basing their work on Stephen King’s novel rather than Stanley Kubrick’s film, so there will be no “Here’s Johnny!” moment (a Kubrick invention). (We’d rather know what they’re doing with “red rum.”)
  
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• There’s Another Play That Has Audience Members Literally Fainting

  25-02-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Five people have fainted watching the graphic scenes of torture, rape and violence in the National Theatre’s latest production while 40 walked out in the show’s first week.”
  
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• Morning Links: Art UK Edition

  25-02-2016 14:43 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Dance Directors Share Their Biggest Audition Pet Peeves

  25-02-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Joffrey Ballet’s Ashley Wheater, Nederlands Dans Theater’s Paul Lightfoot, and Broadway casting director Rachel Hoffman offer some suggestions for what not to do.
  
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• Brexit? Britain has already voted to stay. Just look in its galleries

  25-02-2016 14:23
  
  Boris Johnson is wrong – we cannot claim to love European culture if we leave the EU. Some of the greatest artists ever to work in Britain were migrants from the continent, so when will the Stay camp start playing the culture card?Boris Johnson is no philistine. He has written about the ancient world and eloquently protested the destruction of Palmyra. In his recent declaration of British independence in the Telegraph, he evidently wanted to make it clear that leaving the EU implies no dis
  
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• Straightened-Out Croissants And The Decline Of Civilization

  25-02-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Adam Gopnik considers the British supermarket chain Tesco’s decision to stop making its croissants curved. “Adding an arbitrary national shape to an established one to attempt an entirely English croissant, [some] future scholar will argue, is an affirmation of refusing to be one with Europe. (The crescent, moreover, is the sign of the Islamic empire, and some damp, suspicious kinds will see meaning in that, too.)”
  
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• Virginia Symphony And Opera Are $380K Behind In Their Rent

  25-02-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Two of the region’s major arts organizations, the Virginia Opera and the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, owe the city of Norfolk a combined $380,000 for unpaid rent and event fees.”
  
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• Racial and gender inequality come under scrutiny in the art world

  25-02-2016 13:46
  
  As the #OscarsSoWhite firestorm engulfs Hollywood, the British art world has also sparked criticism recently for its worsening lack of diversity. According to the Office for National Statistics, only 7% of artists in Britain are people of colour.
   
  But a new study launched this week by Arts Council England (ACE) aims to address these inequalities by asking artists to share their experiences of living and working in England and the impact of socio-economic factors such as education, social
  
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• Pres. Obama Nominates First African-American, First Woman Librarian Of Congress

  25-02-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  If confirmed by the Senate, she’ll also be only the second person in the position to have made a career as a librarian.
  
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• This Man Has Been Building A Cathedral By Hand For 55 Years

  25-02-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Twelve miles north of Madrid in Mejorada del Campo, a 90-year-old man is working to finish his life’s work: a grand cathedral. It is a cathedral with no trained architect, no government approval and no benediction from the Catholic Church. It is either the work of a madman or that of a prophet.”
  
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• Greenland's glaciers through an artist's eyes - in pictures

  25-02-2016 13:00
  
  In September 2015, artist Mariele Neudecker and photographer Klaus Thymann embarked on a joint project to detail the glaciers of Narsarsuaq, south-west Greenland. The collaboration is part of a mission by UK charity Project Pressure to record the world’s vanishing and receding glaciers using art as inspiration Continue reading...
  
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• Artists 'steal' Queen Nefertiti bust by secretly scanning and releasing 3D printing data online

  25-02-2016 12:51
  
  The artists were protesting Western museums' ownership of foreign artefacts
  
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• Artist residency programme takes to the high seas

  25-02-2016 12:27
  
  One of the most unusual, and intrepid, artist residency programmes will launch this spring: on board a series of commercial cargo ships. Seven artists selected for the first Container Artist Residency project will spend up to six weeks on the oceangoing vessels, travelling along an international shipping route of their choice. Studio space, accommodation and production funding are all provided as part of the residency package.The aim, according to a project statement, is to “forge new con
  
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• All of UK’s publicly owned art to go online

  25-02-2016 11:50
  
  A project that has recorded and photographed more than 200,000 paintings in the UK is to widen its scope in a unique project that will produce a public database of millions of works of art. The Public Catalogue Foundation, now renamed Art UK, will eventually include on its website (artuk.org) images and details of 100,000 sculptures and millions of works on paper in public collections.
  Cataloguing the UK’s oil paintings took ten years, at a cost of £6m. It has resulted in 87 volumes
  
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• Full Marks: Mark Wallinger's ID runs rampant in his new show

  25-02-2016 09:00
  
  His hands invading Michelangelo, the roundabout where he learned to drive, his own shadow nipping out for a stroll … Adrian Searle finds traces of Mark Wallinger everywhere in his new show IDMark Wallinger is everywhere in his latest exhibition, even when he’s not there. His shadow walks up Shaftesbury Avenue. He circles a roundabout as the seasons turn. He plays God and Adam and makes a fist of Michelangelo. He squirms and gestures blackly across 17 full-bodied canvases. He’s
  
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• Jordi Ruiz Cirera's best photograph: we'll take your house and your gran's

  25-02-2016 08:00
  
  ‘When the Spanish property bubble burst, the banks evicted people and took their homes. This one hadn’t even been finished’I wanted to do something on the economic crisis in Spain so I went to Murcia, in the south east, because it was one of the parts worst affected – especially by the property bubble. The idea was that construction would bring jobs, people, and money through tourism. Everyone was crazy about the building industry. Money was easily lent, land was cheap.Th
  
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