Arts news

• Why “Safe” Spaces Are Antithetical To Good Ideas

  17-03-2016 23:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It is always tempting to say that this is not a good time for ideas. Though people hold them or dismiss them, promote them or disparage them, ideas often seem unstable. Often we think we are debating an idea only to discover that it no longer means what we thought it meant. We proclaim our affection for equality, autonomy, liberation, authenticity only to find that the meanings of those words and the concepts they name have changed into something unrecognizable.”
  
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• ‘Dead Mammals Have Never Been So Mesmerizing’: A Badger Made Into A Theremin

  17-03-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “If you never in your lifetime imagined that you’d see a man in a bowtie and tailcoat playing Rachmaninov on a badger, well, now you have. You’re welcome.” (video)
  
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• Romania Wants To Buy Its Most Famous Sculpture (And Wants To Crowdfund Part Of The Cost)

  17-03-2016 22:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Culture Minister Vlad Alexandrescu said Thursday the government will pay 5 million euros ($5.65 million) of the 11 million-euro price for “Wisdom of the Earth.” It will ask the public to donate the rest.”
  
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• St Michael the Archangel takes flight

  17-03-2016 22:06
  
  The 19th-century statue of the Archangel St Michael was helicoptered from its perch, 156m above the abbey Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy, on 15 March so it could be restored. The €450,000 project is part of a larger €7m programme financed by France’s Centre des Monuments Nationaux to preserve the island abbey-fortress, which has been a Unesco World Heritage Site since 1979. Since 2013, repairs have also been made to the roof and the stained-glass windows of the Medieval abbey.The
  
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• Yo-Yo Ma – Music Happens Between The Notes

  17-03-2016 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Krista Tippett: “In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries. He’d like to rename classical music just ‘music’ – born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality.” (audio plus transcript)
  
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• Top shows during Art Basel in Hong Kong

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  When the sprawling aisles of Art Basel in Hong Kong become too much, there’s plenty more art to see around the city. Here’s our guide to the must-see exhibitions. 
  M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art, ArtisTree, until 4 April
  This exhibition features around 80 paintings, sculptures, installations and videos by artists from the Chinese mainland, assembled by the renowned art collector Uli Sigg. The works represent a small sample of the 1,510 pieces acqui
  
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• Top shows during Art Basel Hong Kong

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  When the sprawling aisles of Art Basel Hong Kong become too much, there’s plenty more art to see around the city. Here’s our guide to the must-see exhibitions. 
  M+ Sigg Collection: Four Decades of Chinese Contemporary Art, ArtisTree, until 4 April
  This exhibition features around 80 paintings, sculptures, installations and videos by artists from the Chinese mainland, assembled by the renowned art collector Uli Sigg. The works represent a small sample of the 1,510 pieces acquired
  
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• The many facets of Isaac Mizrahi: Victoria Stapley-Brown on the designer's Jewish Museum survey

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  “One of the big questions still is what to put in museums,” the designer Isaac Mizrahi said in conversation with Lynn Yaeger, a contributing editor at Vogue, at a preview of his retrospective at the Jewish Museum in New York (Isaac Mizrahi: an Unruly History). “What needs to go in museums is what is not boring”—and boring Mizrahi certainly is not.The Brooklyn-born designer is known primarily for his work in fashion, although he says his current focus is on the perf
  
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• The human spirit and condition without tears: David Anfam on the Rothko family

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  When Yale University Press published the catalogue raisonné of Mark Rothko’s canvases in 1998, it heralded how the publishing house would subsequently corner the scholarly market in books on the artist. Among the titles that followed was The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art (2004), a fascinating if frustrating newly discovered manuscript written by Rothko around 1940-41. The artist’s son, Christopher Rothko, edited the volume, and has now followed it with Mark Roth
  
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• The Buck Stopped Here: thumbs up for Shrigley and let’s have the lights back on top of the Hayward

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  Much admiration for the mordant humour of David Shrigley’s latest drawings and paintings, which went on show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery last night (18 March)—his ninth show with the gallery. Keen anticipation was also expressed amongst the private view crowd for Shrigley’s giant 10m-high bronze thumb, which will be gracing the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square later this year.This perkily suggestive monument provided the springboard for a robust debate that then carried o
  
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• Political paganism: how the Lord of Rimini developed his own brand of Christianity

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  “This little ass walking on two legs, wiser in his judgment than all mortals, nevertheless argues that there is no God.” It is difficult to imagine these words coming fr om a pope, yet this is the phrase Pope Pius II (1405-64) used to describe Sigismondo Malatesta (1417-68), the lord of Rimini, who is the subject of Anthony D’Elia’s Pagan Virtue in a Christian World.D’Elia begins with a pivotal moment in Sigismondo’s life: his reverse-canonisation on 27 April
  
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• National Gallery of Art lands $30m grant from Mellon Foundation

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, one of the country’s most prominent and distinguished museums, announced today that it has received a $30m “endowment challenge grant” from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in celebration of the museum's 75th anniversary.
  The museum said in a statement that the money will go towards digital programmes and collaborations, education and outreach, conservation and conservation science and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual A
  
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• Dubai digest: news from the Gulf

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  Global Art ForumThe tenth edition of the Global Art Forum, the acclaimed talks programme that accompanies Art Dubai, launched on 16 March (until 18 March). This year’s theme, The Future Was, focuses on how cultural figures such as artists and writers have envisaged and shaped the future. The maverick Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli took part in the first debate, jousting verbally with the Italian curator Germano Celant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the co-director of London’s Serpentine
  
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• Countdown to Art Basel in Hong Kong

  17-03-2016 22:00
  
  The Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima’s Time Waterfall is due to transform Hong Kong’s tallest skyscraper, the 118-storey ICC tower in Kowloon, each night next week during Art Basel in Hong Kong. The illuminated numerals that will cascade down the building “express the ethos of living in the present”, according to a press statement, which seems apt for the city’s most hectic art week of the year.   While speculation continues over the effects on the art world of
  
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• A light that shines on past and present

  17-03-2016 22:00
  Rather than languish in a vault, works by Jan van Eyck, Rembrandt van Rijn and Titian will similarly be seen anew at the Met Breuer. In a new setting, by necessity of context, works by these cherished Old Masters will have a different meaning. The juxtapositions may not establish historically meaningful connections—it is hard to say before seeing the show—but they will generate provocative ideas and new points of view. It is precisely those ideas that can nourish historical investiga
  
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• A conversation with the founder of the Dubai arts hub Alserkal Avenue

  17-03-2016 22:00
  On the occasion of Art Dubai 2016, our correspondent speaks with Abdelmonem bin Eisa Alserkal, the founder of the Dubai arts hub Alserkal Avenue.
  
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• Call to action at the heart of sixth Marrakech Biennale

  17-03-2016 21:35
  
  In almost every tour and talk at the sixth Marrakech Biennale, its curator Reem Fadda used the terms ‘decolonisation’ and ‘living art’. Through them, she poses difficult questions about the failure of nations in a post-colonial era, a global migrant crisis, the unequal distribution of wealth, terrorism and even a US presidential election that corroborates how racism still festers. Living art, as opposed to contemporary art, “demands action; it means it is for the l
  
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• The Dancer Who Fought Lyme Disease To Dance Again

  17-03-2016 21:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “There was a tingling sensation moving up my arm and into the neck and ear that affected my balance. But I still thought it could be some kind of whiplash or concussion-related thing.”
  
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• Sarah Suzuki Named Curator of Drawings and Prints at MoMA

  17-03-2016 21:16 via artnews.com
  The Museum of Modern Art announced today that Sarah Suzuki will now be the museum’s curator of drawings and prints. Since 2010, Suzuki has been an associate curator in her department, and now she’ll be working under Christophe Cherix, the … Read More
  
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• Martin Charnin Is Still Directing ‘Annie’, Four Decades After Its Premiere

  17-03-2016 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The fun of it for me is that every time I do it, I learn something new about it, and in theory every production that precedes the one I’m doing makes the one I’m doing the beneficiary of the stuff that I’ve learned. So it keeps growing, it keeps changing.” (includes memories of being in the original West Side Story)
  
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• ‘Feminists to Feministas: Women of Color in Prints and Posters’ at GLBT History Museum, San Francisco

  17-03-2016 20:57 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Protesting The Museum To Make It Moral

  17-03-2016 20:49 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “That museums are now targets says something about their newly perceived status. Once considered standoffish, genteel and politically marginal, they are now viewed as being emblematically engaged players within the power network of global capitalism. And some are seen as using that status badly.”
  
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• How Diversity Makes Our Music Better

  17-03-2016 20:24 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The diversity of styles and traditions across the world’s music offers rich possibilities. Tremendous precedent can be found all over music history.”
  
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• Stranger in Moscow: Rashid Johnson on His Largest Work To Date, Opening at Russia’s Garage Museum

  17-03-2016 20:02 via artnews.com
  When I arrived at Rashid Johnson’s studio in Bushwick last month, the artist had lost one of those fancy step-counting bracelets. He was trying to track his walks, and how many calories they killed. He had just bought it the … Read More
  
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• ‘She Was Less Like A Recluse, More Like A Bomb Going Off’ – The Real Emily Dickinson

  17-03-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “She was promiscuous in her own fashion, deceiving everyone around her with the sly masks she wore. She was faithful to no one but her dog. Her white dress was one more bit of camouflage, to safeguard the witchery of her craft. … Cotton Mather would have burned her for a witch.”
  
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• Problematic: When Critics Impose Their Own Cultural Biases On Theatre

  17-03-2016 19:38 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “There is no singular Latina/o experience, nor is there a litmus test that identifies a person as Latina/o. Our cultural community has a vast spectrum of experiences which span from recent immigrants to those who have been in the US for multiple generations.”
  
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• Top Ten UK Attractions Last Year Were All In London (Despite Big Drop In Tate Attendance)

  17-03-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Visitor numbers at Tate Modern fell by more than 1 million in 2015 to 4.7 million – the lowest since 2005. The steep decline represents a 19% fall compared with the previous year. It reverses attendance figures for 2014, when Tate Modern’s visitor numbers grew by 1 million to reach a record-breaking 5.8 million, due in part to the success of the exhibition ‘Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs’.
  
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• Pati Hill at Arcadia University Art Gallery

  17-03-2016 19:11 via artnews.com
  Through April 24 Read More
  
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• Poet Released From Prison After Royal Pardon

  17-03-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A Qatari poet jailed for 15 years for reciting verses that praised the 2011 uprising in Tunisia and criticised his own country’s ruling family has been freed after receiving a royal pardon.” Muhammad Ibn al-Dheeb al-Ajami’s release “came days before Qatar hosts two international press freedom conferences.”
  
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• British Museum’s collection to go under the microscope

  17-03-2016 18:51
  
  The British Museum announced today the launch of a stand-alone department for scientific research, thanks to support from the Wellcome Trust. Formerly part of the London institution’s conservation department, its separation signals the museum’s intention to grow this area so that more of its cutting-edge research into its permanent collection can be shared with the public through online initiatives and exhibitions, like the 2014-15 show Ancient Lives, New Discoveries, which used int
  
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• Study: People Who Speak More Than One Language Are More Intuitive

  17-03-2016 18:43 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others: They have to think about who speaks which language to whom, who understands which content, and the times and places in which different languages are spoken.”
  
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• How This Guy Stole A Rare Strad Violin Is Simple. But WHY He Stole It (And Got Away With It Is Another Question Altogether)

  17-03-2016 18:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The crime defies logic. The young violinist, with so much ahead of him, brazenly acts while the master mingles in the next room. He leaves town under a cloud of suspicion. And even as he squanders his career, he refuses to reveal his secret. This delicate, hand-crafted masterpiece of wood and gut strings is his to possess, to play, to imprison.”
  
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• Phillips scotches speculation of market retreat from Asia with senior Hong Kong appointment

  17-03-2016 18:30
  
  Signalling an expansion into the Asian market, where recent speculation has been of a cooling off, Phillips announced on 16 March that it has appointed Jonathan Crockett as its head of 20th-century and contemporary art and deputy chairman, Asia. The announcement comes less than two weeks after Bonhams’ surprise cull in Hong Kong, which saw eight people fired, including the firm’s deputy chairman, Asia, Magnus Renfrew.
  Crockett, who starts his job on 9 May, will be based in Hong Kong
  
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• No junk mail please: the man who popped YBA art in the postbox

  17-03-2016 18:26
  
  Matthew Higgs’ visionary Imprint 93 was snail mail’s artistic swansong and helped to deliver a new generation of artists from Chris Ofili to Martin CreedMartin Creed Work 88 is today considered a modern masterpiece. Collectors covet it and any museum would be proud to display it. However, when Creed posted it to Tate director Nicholas Serota and about 150 other art-world folk in 1995, this radical sculpture was not so reverently received. Work 88 is, after all, essentially (entirely)
  
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• C’Mon People, Toughen Up! Art Is SUPPOSED To Challenge You

  17-03-2016 18:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Never apologise for art. Art entertains and delights. It also shocks us into awareness. It shows us aspects of life we may prefer to turn away from. If you are seriously sensitive, enquire ahead.”
  
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• Should We Be Afraid Of Intelligent Computers?

  17-03-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Yes, the defeat of a world-champion Go player by Google’s DeepMind computer was impressive, as was Watson’s triumph over Ken Jennings at Jeopardy!. Yet we’re still far from anything like HAL.
  
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• Egypt announces ‘discovery of the century’ hidden behind King Tut’s tomb

  17-03-2016 17:56
  
  In a crowded press conference in Cairo on Thursday, Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities announced the discovery of what are probably two chambers behind the walls of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in Luxor. Although officials were unable to give any specific details of what lies hidden beyond, radar scans have revealed the possible presence of door lintels and of metallic and organic items, which increases the likelihood of preserved grave goods. Mamdouh Eldamaty, Egypt’s head of antiqui
  
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• Anj Smith, artist: 'I get through a brush a day. By the end of the day they are knackered'

  17-03-2016 17:47
  
  Karen Wright meets the artist in her studio in Finsbury Park
  
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• ‘When Perverted Looking Becomes a Home’: How the Indefatigable Writer Wayne Koestenbaum Became a Painter

  17-03-2016 17:39 via artnews.com
  Wayne Koestenbaum’s studio is packed, floor-to-ceiling, with paintings. There are paintings lining the baseboards and bubble-wrapped canvases populating two industrial shelving units. Stacks of drawings are arrayed on worktables and stashed underneath them.You’d be forgiven for thinking he’s hoarding his … Read More
  
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• Rare Francis Bacon self-portrait up for sale for first time

  17-03-2016 17:15
  
  Sotheby’s will auction Two Studies for a Self-Portrait, which has only been exhibited twice before, in New York in MayA rare and unusually positive self-portrait by Francis Bacon, an artist better known for the many demons that haunted him throughout his life, is coming to the market for the first time.The auction house Sotheby’s said Two Studies for a Self-Portrait (1970) was the finest of all Bacon’s self-portraits and would be sold in New York on 11 May with an estimate of $
  
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• Russia’s Deputy Culture Minister Arrested, Charged With Embezzlement

  17-03-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Russia’s deputy culture minister Grigory Pirumov has been detained on embezzlement charges, Russian state media reported on 15 March. Earlier in the day, the Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that several high-ranking culture ministry officials and businessmen were under investigation for allegedly ’embezzling state funds allocated for restoration work on cultural heritage sites’.”
  
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• Blu v Bologna: new shades of grey in the street art debate

  17-03-2016 16:28
  
  Taking a stand against a city that scrubs off graffiti but celebrates street art in galleries, Blu has painted over their own murals – self-sabotage or victory?The street artist Blu has transformed the walls of Rome, Berlin, Los Angeles and beyond, but it’s Bologna in particular where Blu’s work presented an active political view within the city’s historic urban landscape.Related: Broccoli in Brockley: sand sculptor in 'fat cat' gentrification protestRelated: Why we paint
  
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• There’s Finally An Artist At The Helm Of L.A. Music Center

  17-03-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In an hour’s conversation, she” – Rachel Moore, a retired ABT corps member – “tirelessly emphasized that the business of the Music Center was art. Budgets were barely mentioned, and when they were it was with a skilled performer’s roll of her eyes and an engaging laugh. Instead, Moore avidly presented her broad artistic vision for a performing arts center that desperately needs one.”
  
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• New York City Allocates $2 Million To Promote Diversity Backstage

  17-03-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Guidelines are being sent out to more than 1,000 arts groups and individuals in the five boroughs of New York, seeking applicants for the funds … Specifically, the grants are being offered to provide training for production and technical personnel.”
  
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• Francis Alÿs films children’s games in refugee camps in northern Iraq

  17-03-2016 14:43
  
  The artist Francis Alÿs is exploring the idea of a film about children playing in the refugee camps he visited in northern Iraq at the end of February. The Belgian-born, Mexico City-based artist was on his first research trip to the region, where he filmed and took photographs of children playing games such as marbles and hopscotch in Camp Kabarto and Camp Shariya.Kabarto is home to 5,000 families, mainly from the Yazidi sect, who were forced to flee when Islamic State attacked Sinjar in 2
  
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• How They Found The Music Circuit In Our Brains

  17-03-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “[Researchers] played a total of 165 commonly heard natural sounds to ten subjects willing to be rolled into an fMRI machine to listen to the piped-in sounds. The sounds included a man speaking, a songbird, a car horn, a flushing toilet, and a dog barking. None sparked the same population of neurons as music.” (includes video)
  
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• Building Next Door To Bosch’s Original Studio Collapses, Shortly Before Bosch 500 Show Begins

  17-03-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A medieval building that was supposed to serve as the canvas for Bosch by Night, a lightshow commissioned as part of the year-long celebrations to mark the quincentenary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death, collapsed on 27 February – days before the project’s launch in the artist’s hometown of Den Bosch in The Netherlands.”
  
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• Sergei Filin Isn’t Leaving The Bolshoi Ballet After All

  17-03-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Sergei Filin has finally confirmed that he will be staying at the Bolshoi Ballet, after his contract as artistic director expires in two weeks’ time, heading a new choreographers workshop, as proposed by the theatre’s chief Vladimir Urin last July.”
  
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• Critics’ Poll Names Top 30 LGBT Films Of All Time

  17-03-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Perhaps predictably, only two of the top ten come from before 1990 (and one of those was 1985); the top two were released in the last five years. Yet the oldest movie on the list goes all the way back to Weimar-era Germany.
  
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