Arts news

• The Ancient Discovery That Is Changing What We Know About Chinese History

  12-04-2016 23:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The texts show that some philosophers believed that rulers should also be chosen on merit, not birth—radically different from the hereditary dynasties that came to dominate Chinese history. The texts also show a world in which magic and divination, even in the supposedly secular world of Confucius, played a much larger part than has been realized. And instead of an age in which sages neatly espoused discrete schools of philosophy, we now see a more fluid, dynamic world of vigorously
  
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• This Man Has A Degree In Home Economics, And He’s Conquering The Performance Art World

  12-04-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In a railway station in St. Petersburg last year, backed by a full orchestra, [Ragnar] Kjartansson sang the words ‘Sorrow will conquer happiness,’ in Russian, for six hours. … [His] brand of performance art, in which Nordic gloom goes hand in hand with non-ironic humor, has made him one of the busiest artists on the planet.”
  
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• Picturing the Modern garden

  12-04-2016 23:00
  If you missed the hit exhibition Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse at the Cleveland Museum of Art, or have not secured sold-out tickets for its Royal Academy run (until 20 April), fear not. An eponymous film directed by David Bickerstaff, which opens 11 April in the UK and will be released internationally 24 May, looks closely at works in the show and examines how gardening influenced art from the 1860s to the early 20th century. The film also offers tours of some of the gardens paint
  
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• A forgotten Modernist, a female flâneur, the QE2 art school and much more in a special Glasgow International exhibition round-up

  12-04-2016 23:00
  
  It’s no secret that Glasgow has a great art scene, but this year’s Glasgow International—a heady, sprawling mix of 78 exhibitions by 220 local and international artists, established and unknown—has a particular energy. The festival is dominated by women but doesn't proclaim this and much of the work is about the city itself: the legacy of its past industries, its current colonisation by artists and what it now means to labour and to produce. Distinctions between the fest
  
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• Adam Pendleton at Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans

  12-04-2016 22:57 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• An Art App That Uses Facial Recognition Tech To Tell You Exactly What You’re Looking At

  12-04-2016 22:24 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The user takes a photo of an artwork with a mobile device. Within seconds, Magnus provides the name of the artist, gallery price, past dealer and auction prices of other works, and the artist’s exhibition history. The image can be shared via text, email, Instagram, Facebook and other social media, and saved in the user’s digital collection.”
  
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• The Worst Composer Hair Of All Time

  12-04-2016 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Behold and shudder.
  
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• We Analyzed 8,000 Hollywood Movie Scripts To See Gender Balance

  12-04-2016 21:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “We Googled our way to 8,000 screenplays and matched each character’s lines to an actor. From there, we compiled the number of words spoken by male and female characters across roughly 2,000 films, arguably the largest undertaking of script analysis, ever.”
  
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• Preview the 2016 Dallas Art Fair

  12-04-2016 21:22 via artnews.com
  The eighth edition of the Dallas Art Fair opens Friday, April 15, with a special gala preview on the evening of Thursday, April 14. The fair will bring together 97 exhibitors to the Texas city. Among the highlights are Michelle … Read More
  
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• Neurasthenia Wasn’t Just Some Bogus 19th-Century Ailment – In Fact Some Of Us Might Have It Right Now

  12-04-2016 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  We’d probably call it burnout.
  
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• Ad Exec: Three Ways Advertisers Have Gone Wrong (And Arts Orgs?)

  12-04-2016 20:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I’ve come to believe that most marketers target young people because they see everyone else doing it. And they assume that somewhere someone must know why we are doing this. The marketing industry has been spending too much time on another planet. We need to get back down to earth.”
  
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• The ‘For Dummies’ Guides At 25 (What Would We Do Without Them?)

  12-04-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The punch lines write themselves, but so do the checks. According to the publisher, 300 million books are in print, and the brand adds about 200 new titles a year. … Most importantly, a Dummies book assumes the reader is starting with zero knowledge on the topic. This is not a universal quality in the how-to world.”
  
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• New Dallas Architecture Sucks. But Why?

  12-04-2016 19:22 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “This bastardized visual language has become the de facto standard of Dallas residential architecture development. The explanation for its ever-increasing prevalence, however depressing, is fairly straightforward.”
  
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• Expert claims painting uncovered in a Toulouse attic is by Caravaggio

  12-04-2016 19:17
  
  Has a Caravaggio been found languishing in an attic in the southern French city of Toulouse? That’s what the Old Master painting expert Eric Turquin thinks of Judith Beheading Holofernes (1604-05), unveiled to the press today in Paris, 12 April. If authenticated, this would amount to the biggest Caravaggio discovery since 1991, when National Gallery of Ireland’s The Taking of Christ (around 1602) was attributed to the master.Judith Beheading Holofernes, which is known from historica
  
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• 'Lost Caravaggio' found in French attic causes rift in art world

  12-04-2016 18:54
  
  Painting valued at up to €120m found by accident believed by many to be work of Renaissance masterIt could turn out to be an Italian Renaissance masterpiece by one of history’s greatest painters; yet the mysterious 400-year-old canvas was only found by accident when the owners of a house near Toulouse went to fix a leak in the ceiling.The large, remarkably well-preserved canvas of the beheading of the general Holofernes by Judith, from the apocryphal Book of Judith, was painted betwee
  
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• Social Outcast? What Happens When You’re In To Classical Music

  12-04-2016 18:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The trouble with being interested in classical music is that people look at you funny. You might be sitting with friends talking about pop music, or what you’ve read or seen on television, and everyone’s on the same page. And then you say “Yeah, it reminds me of that Shostakovich quartet, that chord at the end” and there’s a chill in the room, and the mood is killed.”
  
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• Betty Tompkins’s Dinner Party

  12-04-2016 18:17 via artnews.com
  In a talk at the Flag Art Foundation in New York last week, artist Betty Tompkins, best known for her sexually explicit “Fuck Paintings,” revealed the very personal history behind one of her works.Tompkins’s talk with curator Alison Gingeras, which drew a … Read More
  
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• When Samuel Beckett Made A Buster Keaton Movie (Yes, Really)

  12-04-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “When [the] future Nobel laureate … made his one and only film in the mid-1960s, he structured it both as a chase film and as a homage to the earliest years of cinema. However, you won’t be surprised to learn that the resulting work, Film, is far more complex, strange and intellectual than its slapstick forebears.”
  
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• In Another World: Cao Fei on Her New Show at MoMA PS1

  12-04-2016 17:35 via artnews.com
  In Cao Fei’s 2007 video i.Mirror, the artist isn’t billed as the director. That credit goes instead to her Second Life avatar, China Tracy, who wears an armor-like suit and, in the video, wanders an entire virtual world that Cao … Read More
  
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• Judge: Led Zeppelin Must Stand Trial To Determine If They Stole Chords For “Stairway To Heaven”

  12-04-2016 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In a decision on Friday, US district judge Gary Klausner in Los Angeles said the song and the 1967 instrumental Taurus by the band Spirit were similar enough to let a jury decide whether Robert Plant and Jimmy Page were liable for copyright infringement.”
  
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• Conceptual Art in Britain review – a trainspotter's guide to complexity

  12-04-2016 17:01
  
  Tate Britain, London
  At its best, British conceptualism was a lively breath of fresh air. Suffocated here in vitrine after vitrine, its spirit has been stultified in this joyless surveyA stacked pyramid of oranges greets visitors to Tate Britain’s Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-79. Like a fraudulent promise of a good time, Roelof Louw’s Soul City lures you in with a bright and funky come-on. Even the title is snappy. Though dated 1967, the oranges are fresh, vitamin-packed and juicy.
  
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• Conceptual Art in Britain review – a trainspotter's guide

  12-04-2016 17:01
  
  Tate Britain, London
  At its best, British conceptualism was a breath of fresh air. Suffocated in vitrine after vitrine, that spirit has been stultified in this nerdy, joyless surveyA stacked pyramid of oranges greets visitors to Tate Britain’s Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-79. Like a fraudulent promise of a good time, Roelof Louw’s Soul City lures you in with a bright and funky come-on. Even the title is snappy. Though dated 1967, the oranges are fresh, vitamin-packed and juicy. You
  
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• London’s National Theatre Has Begun Producing Off-Broadway

  12-04-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “While the play had its world premiere at the National Theatre in London, in collaboration with Headlong, the creative team and cast wanted a future life for the show. When a West End or New York transfer didn’t come together, they tried another way.” NT exec Tim Levy explains how it happened (and might happen again).
  
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• Portrait horribilis: why it’s so hard to draw the Queen

  12-04-2016 16:44
  
  The awkward portrait on Australia’s new five-dollar bill is just the latest unflattering depiction of Elizabeth II. Artists are falling foul of the fine line between regal myth and obvious liesWhy has Australia put an unsmiling, awkward, unflattering portrait of the Queen on its new five-dollar bank note?It is tempting to see Her Majesty’s apparent displeasure as a reflection of the monarchy’s ambiguous standing in Australia, where republican sentiment – although on the w
  
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• Jackson Pollock – UK to get landmark show

  12-04-2016 16:44
  
  Royal Academy of Arts to draw together paintings of abstract expressionism’s leading light, including seminal works lent by Australia and the USTwo of Jackson Pollock’s most important and biggest works will be sent from Australia and the US to be united for the first and probably only time for a landmark London show on abstract expressionism.The Royal Academy of Arts is staging, in the autumn, the first overarching show in the UK on the pivotal American art movement since the Tate&rs
  
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• Jackson Pollock paintings to be united in London show

  12-04-2016 16:44
  
  Royal Academy of Arts brings together paintings of abstract expressionism’s leading light, including works lent by Australian and US galleriesTwo of Jackson Pollock’s most important and biggest works will be sent from Australia and the US to be united for the first and probably only time in a landmark London show on abstract expressionism.The Royal Academy of Arts will stage this autumn the first overarching show in the UK on the American art movement since a Tate exhibition in 1958.
  
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• Iran Releases Toronto Filmmaker From Prison

  12-04-2016 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Mostafa Azizi, 54, was released from an Iranian prison on Saturday after serving about one year of an eight-year sentence for charges of insulting the country’s leader and spreading propaganda against the state.”
  
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• London’s National Portrait Gallery to show the many faces of Pablo Picasso

  12-04-2016 16:12
  
  It’s a match made in heaven. The National Portrait Gallery in London and the Museu Picasso in Barcelona have combined their areas of expertise to co-organise a major exhibition on Picasso’s portraiture this autumn. Picasso Portraits (6 October 2016-5 February 2017) will present “the extraordinary range of styles Picasso employed across all media and from all periods of his career,” says Nicholas Cullinan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), in a statemen
  
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• Baghdad-based Ruya Foundation launches first online database for Iraqi artists

  12-04-2016 16:01
  
  While many contemporary Iraqi artists have fled their war-torn homeland, those who stayed have been largely cut off from an international audience of curators and collectors. Now the Baghdad-based Ruya Foundation is giving a platform to artists working in Iraq and the diaspora by launching the first online archive of their works.The Ruya Artist Database currently features 380 artists (220 of those are based in Iraq) working across all media, from video art to reinventions of traditional textile
  
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• Recreating Ancient Instruments – *Really* Ancient, Like The Carnyx

  12-04-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The European Music Archaeology Project (EMAP) “covers the Paleolithic Era to around A.D. 1000 and the Dark Ages. Calling on the skills of archaeologists, philologists, acousticians, metal workers and others, it has brought back to life instruments ranging from ancient bagpipes to 30,000-year-old vulture-bone flutes.” (includes sound clips)
  
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• Maybe They Can Handle the Truth: Hank Willis Thomas Will Take His Public Art Installation on a 50-State Tour

  12-04-2016 16:00 via artnews.com
  Hank Willis Thomas’s Truth Booth has been installed in diverse locations, from Collins Park in Miami to Bamyan, Afghanistan, as well as numerous places in between. (Most recently, the piece was on view at MetroTech Center in downtown Brooklyn.) The work is … Read More
  
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• ‘Fan Fiction’: Peter Schjeldahl On The Computer-Generated Rembrandt

  12-04-2016 15:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Like its literary equivalents, it mimics the effect of a particular creator’s art. Working backward from that point, it passes the creator’s intention – intelligence, emotion, soul – coming the other way. There’s no harm in it.”
  
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• Is Theater Criticism Too White? Here’s How To Change It

  12-04-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The keynote speech at this year’s American Theatre Critics Association conference in Philadelphia.
  
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• Are There Really Qualities In Black Music Or Art Or Lit That Only Black Critics Can Perceive?

  12-04-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Rick Moody suggested as much in a recent New York Times Book Review essay. George Packer – citing Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin – begs to differ. And what if we suggested the same about European art or music?
  
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• Orchestral Musician (Disgruntled) On ‘What I’m Really Thinking’

  12-04-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “We’re not all friends. The person on my right had an affair with the person on my left, and the ex sits close by. … Most people around me have had affairs, abuse alcohol or smoke. The working conditions are grueling enough that people develop coping mechanisms. It is a hugely toxic environment.”
  
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• Morning Links: Panama Papers Edition

  12-04-2016 14:50 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Calling His Bosses Liars, Johan Kobborg Rejects Offer To Stay On As Director Of Romania’s National Ballet Company

  12-04-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Last week, the interim director of the Bucharest National Opera who stripped Kobborg of his artistic director title was quickly replaced, and Romania’s culture minister worked out a deal with Kobborg to stay on, with title. But things haven’t exactly worked out.
  
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• Longtime New Yorker Cartoonist Killed In Car Crash

  12-04-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “He had a particular beat, as it were – the preppy world, the world of Ralph Lauren, the Protestant WASP establishment that was on their way out, holding on to their diminishing privileges.”
  
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• Bang On A Can Marathon, New York’s Favorite New Music Event, Is Now Homeless

  12-04-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “They need to find somewhere else to bang on their cans. [The popular 12-hour annual festival] will not be held this year in New York City because it has lost its space and presenting partner of the past decade, the Winter Garden at Brookfield Place in Lower Manhattan” (formerly the World Financial Center).
  
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• Stolen Edvard Munch Recovered After Seven Years

  12-04-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The lithograph, titled Historien, “shows an elderly bearded man speaking to a young boy and was valued at the time of its theft at 240,000 euros ($244,000).”
  
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• Skin deep: glimpse into the history of American tattoo design – in pictures

  12-04-2016 14:00
  
  Legendary tattoo artist Jonathan Shaw opened the first parlour in New York City after tattooing was decriminalized in the 1960s. And he owns the largest collection of vintage tattoo flashes in the world. These hand-drawn artworks are what customers would choose their design from, and are increasingly rare. The collection charts the evolution and history of tattooing in the US, and is published in a new book by powerHouse Books, Vintage Tattoo Flashes Continue reading...
  
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• Top European Art Award Cancelled After Two Of Five Finalists Withdraw

  12-04-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Said the awards committee, “The jury believes that the recent discussion has overshadowed the intentions of the award and could eventually comprise the nominated artists.” The chairman added, “It is the strong idea of the jury that the Vincent should be about art. But that was not the case any longer.”
  
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• Doin’ It All Night Long: London To Launch A Version Of Paris’s Nuits Blanches

  12-04-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “For one long rapturous night, artists will wrest Westminster from the clutches of politicians, creating art from dusk till dawn in public spaces and very private ones … Plenty is programmed, even for the sad suburbanites who have to catch the last tube home, including installation art, theatre, film and dance, and a giant exercise class.”
  
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• Armed police enforce partial demolition of Cairo art gallery

  12-04-2016 13:24
  
  City’s deputy governor had ordered demolition to be postponed pending assessment of why a section collapsedArmed police have enforced the partial demolition of one of Egypt’s most respected art galleries, heightening fears about its future after it was closed to the public in December.Around 30 riot police surrounded the main building of Townhouse gallery in central Cairo on Monday, evicting residents and ordering labourers to start destroying the interior, according to witnesses. Co
  
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• Update: Home of Cairo’s leading Townhouse Gallery demolished

  12-04-2016 12:51
  
  https://www.facebook.com/Mantiqtidowntown/?fref=ts  " />
  Update: On 9 April, three days after the Townhouse Gallery building partially collapsed, government authorities ordered the rest of the building to be demolished and ordered all residents to leave. The evacuation was halted on the morning of 10 April after a representative from The National Organization for Urban Harmony intervened and began procedures to investigate the space’s potential as a listed building. But despit
  
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• Art among the penguins: inaugural Antarctic Biennale to launch next year

  12-04-2016 12:26
  
  The first Antarctic Biennale—an exhibition of contemporary art in one of the most remote places on the planet—is due to launch next spring, the organisers say.
  Around 100 artists and scientists will travel for 12 days aboard the Akademik Ioffe ship, creating works that will be “temporarily installed and exhibited in different locations on the Antarctic continent”, according to a press statement. The ship will sail from the port of Ushuaia in Argentina to the Falkland Isl
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.11.16

  12-04-2016 09:39 via feedproxy.google.com
  Smithsonian London? “Not So Fast!” Says Secretary Skorton
  Notwithstanding the fact that its founding donor was British, the Smithsonian Institution’s proposed London outpost, conceived before the institution’s current head, David Skorton, came on board, is not necessarily a marriage made in museum heaven. … read more
  AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-04-11Monday Recommendation: Brooklyn Blowhards
  Jeff Lederer, Brooklyn Blowhards, (Little (i) Music) Lederer co
  
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• Islands and origami: Olafur Eliasson on his greatest hits – in pictures

  12-04-2016 08:00
  
  Supersized spheres, rainbow walkways and kaleidoscopic spaceships – the otherworldy designs of Olafur Eliasson dance between art and architecture, fusing light, colour and geometry in their real world environments Continue reading...
  
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• Apichatpong Weerasethakul: 'My country is run by superstition'

  12-04-2016 08:00
  
  Famous for lyrical movies featuring reincarnation and talking apes, the Thai director of Uncle Boonmee also has a political side – now he is taking on Thailand’s generals with a film about sleeping soldiers Apichatpong Weerasethakul has just stepped off a flight from Bangkok and, while he betrays no obvious signs of jetlag or exhaustion, apologises for any potential lethargy. He has come to Tate Modern for a three-day retrospective of his multifarious moving-image work – featur
  
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