Arts news

• Mr. Obama’s Tango Partner: I wasn’t Supposed To Ask Him To Dance

  01-04-2016 23:20 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Godoy said jokingly that the president asked her repeatedly during the dance “When does this end?” but relaxed when he saw his wife enjoying herself as she simultaneously tangoed with Godoy’s partner. “When he saw Michelle, he said, ‘Okay, I’ll keep going.’”
  
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• Robert Motherwell at 100: Gregory Gilbert reflects on the artist’s centenary

  01-04-2016 23:00
  
  Motherwell’s Elegies in particular have political dimension, which has yet to be fully studied. They are a direct reference to the destruction of the Spanish Republic by Francisco Franco’s fascist regime, which was supported by the policies of the US government during the Cold War. Through Meyer Schapiro, Motherwell met political figures affiliated with Partisan Review, who actively supported the cause of the Spanish Republicans. Moreover, from the 1960s through the 1980s, Motherwel
  
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• Artist Sues Brazilian Protesters Over Giant Rubber Ducky

  01-04-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Versions of the same giant inflatable rubber duck designed by Florentijn Hofman have travelled the world since 2007, calling in Japan, New Zealand and Brazil, among many other countries. The version that has appeared in protests in Brazil closely resembles Mr Hofman’s, although it has crosses for eyes.”
  
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• Violist Sues Royal Opera House For Damage To His Hearing

  01-04-2016 21:59 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In court documents seen by the BBC, Goldscheider claims that in 2012 his hearing was “irreversibly damaged” during rehearsals of Richard Wagner’s thunderous Die Walkure “from brass instruments placed immediately behind him” in the famous “pit” at the Royal Opera House.
  
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• Daniel Turner at Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles

  01-04-2016 21:52 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• National Jazz Museum In Harlem Lands In A New Home

  01-04-2016 21:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For the last 15 years, it has operated out of a modest fourth-floor space in East Harlem, while developing big plans for a permanent home.
  
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• Sekhemka to leave the UK as export licence deadline passes

  01-04-2016 21:07
  
  A plan to save Sekhemka, and share it between Egypt and Britain, has failed. The deadline for a UK export licence deferral has passed and no matching offer was received, probably because it proved impossible to raise the necessary funds. The statue of the scribe (BC 2400-2300) will therefore now go abroad.Sekhemka was controversially sold off by Northampton Museum at Christie’s in July 2014 for £15.8m—a record price for an Egyptian antiquity at auction. The anonymous foreign b
  
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• Qatar Wants To Be An International Arts Destination. But…

  01-04-2016 21:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The country which has the highest per capita income in the world is treating its migrant labourers in conditions described by the Guardian newspaper as “modern-day slavery”. It is persecuting political dissenters and it put its greatest poet in prison and then only released him to avoid embarrassment when the attention of the international art world was briefly focused on the country. Qatar is importing so much from the West: architects, artists, scientists, universities, and
  
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• E-Flux Is at Work on a Café and Bar in Brooklyn

  01-04-2016 20:53 via artnews.com
  The multitasking, tricky-to-define curatorial platform and publishing outfit e-flux is making moves to enter a new field—the hospitality industry—with plans to open a café and bar in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood.The group, whose headquarters is on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has … Read More
  
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• Blind, 90-year-old son of Holocaust victims sues to find his family’s art

  01-04-2016 20:28
  
  David Toren, the 90-year-old blind son of Holocaust victims, is suing the Berlin auction house Villa Grisebach in the US to track down paintings from his family’s art collection that were sold there in the past 20 years. One of those paintings was consigned by the daughter of Hildebrand Gurlitt, a dealer who worked with the Nazi regime.
   
  Toren is a retired lawyer in New York whose entire family was killed in Poland, during the Second World War. A young David—then named Klaus G
  
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• Seven Iconic Zaha Hadid Buildings

  01-04-2016 20:20 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Early on, Ms. Hadid earned a reputation for her audacious plans — even though her designs went unbuilt for many years.
  
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• L.A. Habitat: Mary Weatherford

  01-04-2016 20:03 via artnews.com
  L.A. Habitat is a weekly series that visits with 16 artists in their workspaces around the city. This week’s studio: Mary Weatherford; Cypress Park, Los Angeles. “Los Angeles is on fire,” Mary Weatherford said, lounging in the outdoor space behind her Cypress Park studio. … Read More
  
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• The Weird And Wonderful Stave Churches Of Norway

  01-04-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Stave churches are wooden houses of worship that combine the austere, peaked architecture of Christianity with the Nordic designs and motifs of a Viking great hall. … Using the same woodworking prowess that made the Vikings such adept shipbuilders, traditional stave churches were often built using nothing more that expertly crafted joints and joins, with no nails or glue.”
  
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• Another High-Level Sotheby’s Departure – Longtime Head Of Contemporary Art Leaving

  01-04-2016 19:52 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Since CEO Tad Smith announced voluntary layoffs in November, more than 80 staffers have left, including David Norman, vice chairman of Sotheby’s Americas, and Henry Wyndham, chairman of Sotheby’s Europe.
  
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• Distracted? It’s Nothing New (They Were Talking About This In The 1700s)

  01-04-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The first time inattention emerged as a social threat was in 18th-century Europe, during the Enlightenment, just as logic and science were pushing against religion and myth. The Oxford English Dictionary cites a 1710 entry from Tatler as its first reference to this word, coupling inattention with indolence; both are represented as moral vices of serious public concern.”
  
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• Livestock In Opera: A Brief History

  01-04-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The sheep currently thrilling New York audiences in Louis Andriessen’s De Materie are by no means the first farm animals to triumph on the lyric stage.
  
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• The Landscape Painter Degas Might Have Been: Theodore Reff on an Unseen Side of the Impressionist, in 1976

  01-04-2016 18:42 via artnews.com
  Many visitors to the Museum of Modern Art’s show “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” will probably come for the French Impressionist’s paintings of ballet dancers, but they’ll also get a look at a less-known aspect of Degas’s work: his landscapes. For … Read More
  
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• Sandra Vásquez de la Horra at David Nolan Gallery

  01-04-2016 17:46 via artnews.com
  “Crossroads,” Sandra Vásquez de la Horra’s show at David Nolan Gallery in Chelsea, is as intimate and unsettling as anyone familiar with the work of this Chilean-born, Berlin-based artist might expect.Playful and diabolic, Vásquez de la Horra’s style merges personal … Read More
  
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• What Makes A Play Great? And Why Don’t We Revive More Great Plays?

  01-04-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Michael Feingold: “I had better try to explain what I mean by greatness. It isn’t simply a matter of choosing a big ponderous theme, and spouting a lot of abstractions that will make academics write learned articles about your work. Nor is it a matter of an old play’s having survived long enough to become a ‘classic,’ a term we use far too loosely.”
  
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• When We Do Revive Great Plays, Should The Stagings Deconstruct Them?

  01-04-2016 16:59 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Michael Feingold: “One problem that New York has always had with greatness is that our mainstream theater is a commercial theater, and what’s great does not always make money: Sometimes, especially when it comes in a new form, the disruption it causes actively drives the pleasure-seeking, affluent crowds away.”
  
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• Farewell, Zaha Hadid and Google goes gaga for Deep Dream – the week in art

  01-04-2016 16:23
  
  An architectural legend is lost, Bruce Munro lights up Uluru and what Palmyra looks like after its recapture – all in your weekly art dispatchDutch Flowers
  The Dutch Republic in the 17th century took flowers seriously – so seriously it was gripped by tulip-mania. The flower-growing obsessions of the age still shape the look of Holland today. In art, flowers offered a perfect subject for the realist artists from an age when the microscope was pioneered. Paintings by Ambrosius Bosschae
  
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• Starting New Libraries In The Villages Of Afghanistan

  01-04-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The problem is that so much of the effort has focused on the cities. We have to start from the village. If this library was in the city, we would have 100 visitors a day. But to me, the five visitors in the village are more important than the 100 in the city.”
  
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• Magnificence Out Of Mud: Longwood Gardens, Halfway Through A Major Renovation

  01-04-2016 15:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “‘It’s not too often that you get to see Versailles being built,’ Paul B. Redman, Longwood’s executive director, said as he took it all in from a high terrace in front of the Longwood Conservatory. ‘It will be a very Parisian park.'”
  
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• Big Gender Gap In Pay At UK’s Top Theatre Companies

  01-04-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Among high earners – with salaries of more than £60,000 – male executives earn an average of £114,000 compared with £85,000 for their female counterparts. Findings also show that artistic and executive directors at top publicly funded theatres earn a median salary of £75,000.”
  
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• Imre Kertész, Nobel-Winning Author, Dead At 86

  01-04-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “As a Jew persecuted by the Nazis, and then a writer living under repressive Hungarian communist rule, Kertész endured some of the most acute suffering of the 20th century and wrote about it in both direct and delicate prose.”
  
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• Morning Links: Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada Edition

  01-04-2016 15:02 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Kate Tempest: ‘It’s difficult to look at words as pegs to hang a plot from’

  01-04-2016 15:00
  
  She has written poetry, plays and an album – but the greatest challenge has been her new novelAt the beginning of an idea, there is the feeling that it could go anywhere, but it usually wants to be expressed in a particular way. I am interested in people who speak many languages; I always ask friends or acquaintances who do, if there is a moment when a thought is pure thought, before they decide in which language to express it. The answer, so far, is always no – that depending o
  
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• Five New American Operas Telling American Stories

  01-04-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Anew crop of commissions for U.S. opera houses are focusing on the home front, adapting works that are distinctly American in scope and are set in the country.” Commenters offer a few more candidates. (includes video clips)
  
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• Why Does The Met Opera Keep Rehiring Famous, Lackluster Stage Directors?

  01-04-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  David McVicar. Bartlett Sher. Mary Zimmerman. Richard Eyre. Each of them, argues James Jorden, began their work at the Met with one (more or less) good production and then followed with productions that ranged from dull to disastrous. Why does Peter Gelb continue to engage them?
  
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• Pretentiousness – What If It’s Really Authenticity That Someone Else Doesn’t Like?

  01-04-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Authenticity is overrated – give me a perfectly struck pose. (That may be what authenticity is, anyway.) But everyone has things that set them off, and whatever we dislike we might choose to call pretentious. It’s not a stable category of behavior, really, so much as a versatile put-down, meaning, ‘I don’t like what you’re trying to do, and besides, you’re not pulling it off.'”
  
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• ‘He’s Now A Classic’ – Holland Cotter On Why Robert Mapplethorpe Still Matters

  01-04-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “An artist once reviled as a pariah and embraced as a martyr has been thoroughly absorbed into mainstream. He’s now a classic, with auction prices to match. The question is, how does the work, cleaned of the grit of controversy, hold up?”
  
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• It’s True: Art By Narcissists Really Does Fetch More At Auction

  01-04-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A new study confirms your suspicions that in the art world, delusional self-regard pays off: researchers found that work by narcissistic artists is likely to sell for more money at auction than work by their humbler counterparts.”
  
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• House of wax: macabre figures on show in New York museum – in pictures

  01-04-2016 14:00
  
  Gruesome wax figures from a 19th century German collection called Castan’s Panopticum are on display for the first time in the US at the Morbid Anatomy Museum in New York. House of Wax features anatomical figures, death masks and other macabre items and runs until 30 May Continue reading...
  
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• Galileo Was Totally Overrated

  01-04-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In the popular presentations of the history of science, he is portrayed as a one-man revolution, an intellectual superhero who dragged science kicking and screaming into the modern era. … The descriptions sound too good to be true – and they are.”
  
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• How Did April Fool’s Day Get Started?

  01-04-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Ah, April. A month of cherry blossoms and light cardigans, birds twittering and taxes being filed. And, of course, peak harvest season for Switzerland’s world-famous spaghetti crop, which, thanks to an exceptionally mild winter, was experiencing a bumper year in 1957.”
  
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• Less is more in Paul Strand's American dream

  01-04-2016 13:08
  
  Has there been a more violent white picket fence in the history of American photography? White Fence, Port Kent, New York (1916) is one of the first images you encounter in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s exemplary show on the US photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976). The depth of field has been flattened turning the two buildings in the background into rectangles, while that white picket fence cuts across the picture frame like a set of train tracks laying claim to the Wild West.
  It is a
  
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• Tracey Emin to adopt triplets

  01-04-2016 12:34
  
  After marrying a stone in the south of France last summer, a source close to the UK artist Tracey Emin says she is now making plans to expand her family further by adopting a beautiful pile of triplets from the scenic coastal town of Margate, wh ere she grew up. "None of this is set in stone yet," Emin says of the adoption, but she adds that her French partner is being very supportive. "He’s my rock.”
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.31.16

  01-04-2016 10:20 via feedproxy.google.com
  Perfect Pairings: Frick Draws on Van Dyck’s Drawings to Illuminate His Portrait Paintings
  It takes not only brains but also curatorial brawn (which powerful institutions are in the best position to exert) to wrest seldom loaned choice works from discerning, possessive lenders. One of the many joys … read more
  AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-03-31Producer’s April: George Martin, Sam Phillips
  Jerry Lee Lewis’s mother to her son: “You and Elvis are good, son &
  
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• Beyond Freud and fetish art: Allen Jones in New York

  01-04-2016 05:07
  
  The British artist Allen Jones is best known for the fetishist fibreglass sculptures he created in the late 1960s, which transformed women into household furniture, namely Hatstand (1969), Table (1969) and Chair (1969). Accusations of misogyny based on these early works have dogged Jones throughout his career. In 1978, the sculptures were shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London and feminist protestors set off stink bombs at the exhibition. In 1986, a demonstrator poured pain
  
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• Untitled(she revealed her itinerary, neck and right ear)

  01-04-2016 04:07 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  b drops her price to eighty dollars. it was 100 which was cheap. the cheaper b sells herself the more i think i can do whatever i want to her.b is selling her body to get an operation. she has very high blood pressure. she  has to get it under control before she can have the operation. i don’t think she needs one. she feels she doesn’t want to live without one. i thought i liked her because i gave her money. now i don’t know anymore. i give her more than she wants. for the
  
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• Berlinde De Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth, New York

  01-04-2016 00:01 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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