Arts news

• The false Gods of Dada: on Dada Presentism by Maria Stavrinaki

  12-05-2016 23:00
  
  In the final chapter of the art historian Maria Stavrinaki's new book, Dada Presentism, she imagines the origin of Dada as an immaculate conception. "Who, in fact, did invent Dada?" she asks. "Everyone and no one." Amidst the devastation of the First World War, with Enlightenment optimism in ruin, Dada arrived as a miraculous redeemer. Stavrinaki echoes the German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck, who wrote in his 1920 history of the movement that "Dada came over the Dadaists without their knowing i
  
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• Tepid Impressionist and Modern sale at Christie’s concludes New York auction week

  12-05-2016 23:00
  A Claude Monet water lily work from 1919 led last night’s average Impressionist and Modern sale at Christie’s, where the hammer total of $121.9m fell short of the estimated $138.3m to $203.4m it was meant to take in. But just seven of the 51 lots on offer failed to find buyers resulting in a healthy sell-through rate of 86 percent.The figure is especially robust for the category, which is considered harder to sell than more trendy contemporary art (Sotheby’s Impressionist and
  
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• More royalty required: on the al-Sabah Collection

  12-05-2016 23:00
  
  The al-Sabah Collection is noted for its glittering historic jewels and objets d’art from India and the wider Islamic world. Assembled by Kuwait’s former prime minister, Sheikh Nasser Sabah, together with Sheikha Hussah Sabah, his wife and founder of the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah collection (1983) and Dar Al Funoon gallery (1992), it might come as a surprise to know they were also concerned with the arts of the book and painting. Seventh in the Thames and Hudson series showcasing a
  
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• Jeff Koons steams back into London, having KO’d two Brits three decades earlier

  12-05-2016 23:00
  
  For all its pristine surfaces and seemingly dispassionate objectivity, it seems that even from early-on, the work of all-American post-Popster Jeff Koons—which makes up the second show at Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery—has packed a powerful punch this side of the Atlantic. Jeff Koons: Now (18 May–16 October) is the UK’s most comprehensive Koons exhibition to date, with all the works—spanning more than three decades—taken from Hirst’s extens
  
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• National Association for Music Education Removes CEO After Comments About Diversity

  12-05-2016 22:22 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “After a thorough review process, the National Executive Board of the National Association for Music Education (NAfME) and Michael Butera have agreed that he will not be returning to the association. We wish him well and thank him for his service to our purpose and mission.”
  
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• Slover Linett Audience Research – Vice President

  12-05-2016 21:56 via feedproxy.google.com
  We’re seeking a brilliant, creative, and energetic cultural leader to become a vice president in our Chicago office. You must have significant experience in the arts, the museum field, and/or cultural philanthropy as well as a passion for connecting culture to communities through social research.
  Vice President (new posting May 2016)Slover Linett Audience Research—a national social research & consulting firm for the nonprofit cultural sector
  ABOUT USSlover Linett Audience Researc
  
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• Why Hasn’t The Teaching Of Philosophy In American Colleges Diversified Beyond European History?

  12-05-2016 21:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Given the importance of non-European traditions in both the history of world philosophy and in the contemporary world, and given the increasing numbers of students in our colleges and universities from non-European backgrounds, this is astonishing. No other humanities discipline demonstrates this systematic neglect of most of the civilizations in its domain.”
  
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• Reinventing LA: Architecture Critic Chronicles The Transition Of A Great American City

  12-05-2016 20:39 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In a range of ways, a city that was deeply privatized in the postwar years, that was organized largely around the single-family house and the car and the freeway, is trying to rediscover and reanimate its public realm.”
  
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• So Confusing: Japanese Artist Convicted Of Obscenity For Sharing Data For Her Art But Not For The Art Itself

  12-05-2016 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “According to the AP, a court ruled yesterday that Igarashi, who goes by “Rokudenashiko” (“good-for-nothing girl”), is guilty of obscenity for sharing the data but not for exhibiting her physical objects since they qualify as art under Japanese law.”
  
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• Study: We Process What We Read Differently Depending On Whether It’s In Print Or On A Tablet

  12-05-2016 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It finds we remember concrete details better if we’ve read a work on a laptop or tablet. However, we grasp the larger inferences of a story more thoroughly if we’ve read it in print.”
  
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• Tate Britain Announces Four Turner Prize Nominees

  12-05-2016 19:15 via artnews.com
  Tate Britain announced four nominees for the annual Turner Prize today: Michael Dean, Anthea Hamilton, Helen Marten, and Josephine Pryde. The prize, reserved for artists under the age of 50 who either live in Britain or are of British descent, … Read More
  
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• Using Shadow Puppets To Recreate A Medieval Persian Epic

  12-05-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Iranian-American graphic artist Hamid Rahmanian has combined computer generated background with the centuries-old techniques of shadow puppetry – common in the medieval Near East but since lost – to perform an adaptation of a Romeo-and-Juliet-style episode from the Shahnameh.
  
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• Canadian School Boy Appears To Have Discovered Lost Ancient Mayan City

  12-05-2016 18:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Studying 22 different constellations, William found that they matched the location of 117 Mayan cities scattered throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. When he applied his theory to a 23rd constellation, he found that two of the stars already had cities linked to them but that the third star was unmatched.”
  
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• A Lost Mayan City Discovered By Teen? Probably Not

  12-05-2016 18:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The square in the CSA’s satellite images is probably an abandoned field, and another spot may be a small dry lake or clearing in the jungle, says archaeologist Ivan Šprajc. Moreover, experts are skeptical of the claim that the Maya built their cities according to constellations. They did indeed have constellations, but there is no complete canonical list of them, so the theory is hard to test.”
  
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• Dominique Lévy Adds Pat Steir to Its Roster, Plans September Show in London

  12-05-2016 18:00 via artnews.com
  In the midst of an auction week marked by huge sales for work by Cy Twombly and Agnes Martin in New York, Dominique Lévy Gallery announced that it now represents Pat Steir, the painter whose abstractions have, over the past … Read More
  
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• A New Academic Journal On Animal Feeling Could Change A Lot – About The Field And The Rest Of Us

  12-05-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “This one, taking advantage of open access and the efficiencies of web-based publishing, threatens to be a massive success. The first issues have been devoted to fish pain (Do they have it? How can we know for sure?) as well as other important topics such as that of animal mourning.”
  
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• Actors Theatre Of Louisville Gets A New Director

  12-05-2016 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Kevin Moore replaces Jennifer Bielstein who stepped down in March 2016 after 10 years at Actors Theatre to take the position of Managing Director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
  
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• Pilar Tompkins Rivas Named Director of Vincent Price Art Museum in Los Angeles

  12-05-2016 17:22 via artnews.com
  East Los Angeles College announced today that Pilar Tompkins—the former coordinator of curatorial initiatives at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—has been hired as director of the college’s Vincent Price Art Museum. She starts her new job May 17.Tompkins has worked … Read More
  
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• Anton Chekhov, Experimental Post-Modernist

  12-05-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Aside from stories that he was writing in a more traditional form, Chekhov’s young, experimental pen wrote stories in the form of census reports, statistical surveys, diary excerpts, stories in the form of lists of mathematical problems, lonely hearts advertisements, mini-plays – he even wrote a one-page love story in the form of a legal deposition, with a place in the upper left-hand corner of the page for a government stamp.”
  
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• Being slippery and perplexing is not enough, it's time to reinvent the Turner Prize

  12-05-2016 16:45
  
  Karen Wright remains a fierce defender of painting and its central role in art
  
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• Antiques Roadshow's jug gaffe vexed me – if only it had been the UK show

  12-05-2016 16:39
  
  The US spinoff’s mistaken valuation shows up what’s wrong with the BBC flagship. Where once the Beeb encouraged art for its own sake, here profit is kingI have to confess to sheer delight at the mistake made by a hapless Antiques Roadshow “expert”. Examining a comically primitivist pot brought in for valuation on the popular and venerable television show, appraiser Stephen L Fletcher got quite excited. He identified it as a daring early modernist work from the 19th centur
  
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• Eviction Of Small Detroit Arts Center Suggests City’s Rising Fortunes

  12-05-2016 16:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The plight of the Carr Center — the public face of the 25-year-old Arts League of Michigan — is a multilayered story whose meaning shifts depending on perspective. From one angle it looks like a tale of gentrification: A small cultural organization that moved into the neighborhood when property values were low can no longer afford to stay amid escalating prices in a downtown on the make. From a more global perch, the longstanding financial challenges facing the Carr Center, in
  
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• Seventeen paintings stolen from Verona museum retrieved in Ukraine

  12-05-2016 16:26
  
  Police in Ukraine have retrieved the 17 Old Master paintings stolen from the Museo di Castelvecchio in Verona last November and will soon return them to the museum, the Italian culture ministry announced yesterday, 11 May. The Italian culture minister Dario Franceschini said in a statement that the recovery closes the investigation coordinated by Italy’s Carabinieri unit for art crime in Ukraine and Moldova.
  The works were found wrapped in plastic bags and hidden in shrubbery on Turunchuk
  
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• Ad for LGBTQ Show With Photo by Trans Artist Cassils Is Banned by German Rail, Then Allowed

  12-05-2016 16:16 via artnews.com
  Days before the opening of a traveling exhibition on the history of homosexual and queer identity, the show’s promotional poster has stirred quite a bit of controversy in Germany. The exhibition, “Homosexuality_ies,” which is traveling from two Berlin museums to the LWL-Museum … Read More
  
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• Picasso And The Making Of ‘Guernica’

  12-05-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “As the most ardent promoter of Spain’s pavilion [for the Paris World’s fair], [Juan] Larrea … realized that the obliteration of Guernica would provide the artist with the very subject he had been seeking. When Picasso claimed to have no idea what a bombed town looked like, Larrea replied, ‘like a bull in a china shop, run amok.'”
  
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• A Couple Of Times Critics Sittin’ Around And Talkin’ Broadway

  12-05-2016 15:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The theater critics for The New York Times, Ben Brantley and Charles Isherwood, along with the theater editor, Scott Heller, recently compared notes on the year that was, and what it might mean for Broadway’s future.”
  
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• Isao Tomita, 84, Pioneer Of Music For Moog Synthesizer

  12-05-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The weirdest thing about Tomita’s electronic music is that it almost never happened. … He was uninterested in the military marches that he heard on the radio as a young child. His attitude toward music changed when the war ended and his family’s radio started picking up broadcasts from the occupying American forces. Suddenly, jazz, Latin, classical and a host of other exotic genres rushed in to his living room.”
  
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• ‘Art Derives From Everything in Life’: A Talk with Nathaniel Mary Quinn

  12-05-2016 15:30 via artnews.com
  Bill Powers: Do you consider your paintings to be portraits? Nathaniel Mary Quinn: In many respects a portrait is an attempt to duplicate a visual physicality. I’m trying to bring to the surface what I feel; it’s more of a … Read More
  
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• Five Young Egyptians Arrested For Facebook Videos Making Fun Of President

  12-05-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The young men, all between 19 and 21 and members of a satirical group called Awlad al-Shawarea (“Children of the Streets”), “have been accused of ‘inciting anti-government protests’ and ‘insulting state institutions.'”
  
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• Amazon Already Runs Its Own Version Of Netflix; Now It’s Starting Its Own YouTube

  12-05-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “With the launch of Amazon Video Direct, open to any video creator, the e-commerce giant will compete head-to-head with Google’s YouTube for video-ad dollars and views as well as other big Internet video distributors like Facebook and Vimeo.”
  
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• Would Yannick Really Be The Right Person To Lead The Metropolitan Opera?

  12-05-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Zachary Woolfe: “From its next music director, the Met should want a personal, passionate vision for the repertory as much as an exciting persona and technical chops. … But for better or (I think) worse, he would not arrive at the Met with an agenda, particularly in modern and contemporary music. … Mr. Nézet-Séguin would doubtless give us memorable takes on Otello. Is that enough?”
  
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• Cellists – They’re A Bunch Of Damn Troublemakers

  12-05-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Indeed, if any instrumentalist was going to be involved in a wild international money-laundering scheme, it was probably going to be a cellist. The instrument has a long history of association with rowdy activists, sultry libertines, genre iconoclasts, and all manner of rebellious spirits.”
  
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• Morning Links: Yale Center for British Art Edition

  12-05-2016 14:21 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• A Cheeky Shortlist For 2016 Turner Prize

  12-05-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “This year’s artists include one who made an 18ft sculpture of a man’s bare buttocks, another obsessed by corrugated shop window shutters, another whose sculptures are described as ‘slippery and elusive’ and a fourth who allowed thrilled visitors to ride around the gallery on a choo-choo train.”
  
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• Beautiful beaches around the world – in pictures

  12-05-2016 14:13
  
  Soaring high over beaches from Cape Town to Sydney, photographer Gray Malin has captured the world’s most popular spots – seen from doorless helicopters Continue reading...
  
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• Artist François Morellet Dead At 90

  12-05-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Industrially-produced neon tubes served as Morellet’s material of choice for six decades, but his sculptures and light installations have only gained commercial and international recognition relatively recently.”
  
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• Behind The Scenes At Liam Scarlett’s Controversial New Ballet Of ‘Frankenstein’

  12-05-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In the rehearsal room, ominous props clutter the floor’s perimeter: an alarmingly incomplete cadaver lies on a table; Georgian-era surgical equipment is strewn here and there; the odd body part sits pickled in a jar.”
  
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• He Danced His Way Out Of A South African Township, And Now He’s Helping Others To Do The Same

  12-05-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Dane Hurst, a star of the British contemporary company Rambert, bought the sprung dance floor from the company’s old studio when it moved, shipped it home to Port Elizabeth, and asked an architect to design a dance studio made out of shipping containers – where he’ll be teaching other young people from his home township professional-level dance skills.
  
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• Turner prize 2016 shortlist features buttocks sculpture and choo-choo train

  12-05-2016 13:20
  
  Anthea Hamilton, Michael Dean, Helen Marten and Josephine Pryde earn place on shortlistIt sparks excitement and joy in some, bemusement and fury in others and this year’s most coveted prize in British contemporary art – the 2016 Turner prize – is unlikely to buck the trend.This year’s artists include the creator of an 18ft sculpture of a man’s bare buttocks, another obsessed by corrugated shop window shutters, another whose sculptures are described as “slipper
  
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• Bristol, Ghana, Jamaica and back: my trip around the Atlantic slave triangle

  12-05-2016 13:04
  
  She’s made hair weaves from family photos and dresses out of cake. Now Selina Thompson has criss-crossed the Atlantic ocean on a freight ship to bash a giant rock of salt to bits – and it’s all inspired by her grandmaBending over the sink in her cramped, windowless cabin, halfway across the giant watery grave of the Atlantic, Selina Thompson washes her bras with cold, soapy hands. Months later, bending over a giant block of salt in the Arnolfini Gallery on the banks of Bristol&
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.11.16

  12-05-2016 10:55 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Contemporary Confidence” Game: Brett Gorvy Tells How Christie’s Got it Done
  The headline for my last post was: Christie’s Gets It Done. At the press preview for last night’s confidence-restoring contemporary sale, Brett Gorvy, Christie’s chairman of Post-War and Contemporary art, told me how he had … read more
  AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-05-11Competition Lives! My Storify on Sotheby’s Creditable Contemporary Sale
  After its rocky night
  
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• Beyond buttocks: this Turner prize shortlist is cheeky and smart

  12-05-2016 10:50
  
  There’s no singing, no painting and not a video in sight. But we do have choo-choos, a live ant farm – and plenty of puzzles and gamesThis is a good and in some ways unexpected Turner prize shortlist. I have been expecting Helen Marten to appear for a couple of years – unless, as artists sometimes have, she declined to show until now. Last year was Assemble’s moment, and their inclusion heightened a debate about collective and socially engaged art that was worth having.Re
  
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• Turner Prize 2016: Bare buttocks and a model train dominate sculpture-heavy shortlist

  12-05-2016 10:24
  
  This year's overall winner will be announced in December
  
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• Frozen 2: Is the world ready for a gay Disney princess?

  12-05-2016 09:56
  
  People are hopeful, but Disney hasn't always kept pace with the times
  
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• Tune in, freak out: take Latin mass with Stanley Kubrick and 114 radios

  12-05-2016 09:00
  
  They put Nick Cave in therapy and Ziggy Stardust in an art gallery. Now Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard have persuaded Jarvis Cocker and Beth Orton to help their choir of radios play doom-laden music from The ShiningIain Forsyth and Jane Pollard don’t make things easy for themselves. “You do know this is not going to work,” Nick Cave incanted daily on the set of their fictionalised documentary about the singer, 20,000 Days on Earth. The film won multiple awards, of course, but Ca
  
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• Auctionata and Paddle8 Will Merge, Marking a Shift in the Online Art Market

  12-05-2016 06:32 via artnews.com
  Signaling that the once-scrappy online art market is maturing, two of the field’s most prominent start-ups, Auctionata and Paddle8, have announced that they will merge. The deal between the two online auctioneers creates a newly formed company that will lay claim to 793,000 registered … Read More
  
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• Sotheby’s Rebounds With $242.2 M. Contemporary Auction, Anchored by Big Sales of Twombly, Bacon

  12-05-2016 05:18 via artnews.com
  After a bleak Impressionist and modern sale Monday night, where a lack of bidding led to a dismal sell-through rate of 66 percent, Sotheby’s silenced both critics of the house and art-market doomsayers with a tight and lively $242.2 million contemporary evening auction Wednesday, … Read More
  
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• New York’s New Museum Plans Ambitious Expansion

  12-05-2016 00:49 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “At a time when the Whitney Museum of American Art has opened a sleek new building and the Museum of Modern Art is also expanding, having just announced a $100 million gift from a single donor, David Geffen, the New Museum’s initiative might seem almost modest. But for an institution that began in 1977 in a single room and now has an annual operating budget of only $13 million (MoMA’s budget is $147 million a year), the campaign is a turning point, the largest fund-raising effo
  
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• A First Look At Washington DC’s New National African American Museum

  12-05-2016 00:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Museum officials on Tuesday offered a sneak peek at the 400,000-square-foot museum, the 19th of the Smithsonian Institution, that’s next to the Washington Monument. President Obama is expected to cut the ribbon on the dramatic space, which features layers of galleries focused on slavery, segregation and the civil rights movement as well as music, entertainment, sports and politics.”
  
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• Gay hotspot Fire Island comes to life—in Camden

  12-05-2016 00:23
  
  The Draf space (David Roberts Art Foundation) in Camden, north London, goes gay over the next three weeks (14-28 May) with a special installation in the venue’s studio focused on the (in)famous New York gay resort, Fire Island. The installation, How To Survive a Flood @Gaybar, is the inspired idea of the artist duo Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, who are documenting and recreating historic gay bar spaces, capturing key moments in queer history. Video and audio works (and a ba
  
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