Arts news

• Artist Darja Bajagic Alleges Censorship of Work Featuring Swastika and References to Nazism

  31-05-2016 23:27 via artnews.com
  New York–based artist Darja Bajagić is no stranger to controversy, which is perhaps only natural. Her work includes images of women performing in pornography sourced from the Internet. The threat of violence is more than implied in her art—blood from … Read More
  
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• William Hamilton’s prize possession

  31-05-2016 23:00
  In the winter of 1778, a monkey named Jack entertained distinguished English visitors to Naples by picking up a magnifying glass and “very gravely” examining the tiny figures on ancient Greek and Roman carved gems and cameos. Jack’s owner, Sir William Hamilton, the English ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples, had trained him to look at antiquities “by way of laughing at antiquarians”—as a parody of over-serious connoisseurs and collectors of ancient art.If Ja
  
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• ‘What is Art For?’ an investigation, 12 May 2016

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Organised by The Art Newspaper at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, this is the third investigation of the purpose of art. The first was at the British Museum, London, the second in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, and the fourth in the Vatican.Introduction and summing-up
  Glenn D. Lowry is the director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.The prosecutor
  Kate D. Levin is principal at Bloomberg Cultural Assets Management. Previously, she served as commissioner of the New York City Dep
  
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• Nicholas Serota looks beyond Tate Modern

  31-05-2016 23:00
  
  The Tate is one of the best-known museum brands in the world, but Nicholas Serota has firmly ruled out any Guggenheim- or Louvre-style Tates abroad, or a Pompidou-style pop-up, as long as he remains director of the institution. Speaking shortly before the opening of Tate Modern’s much-anticipated extension on 17 June, Serota spelled out a vision that is deeply internationalist but firmly rooted in the traditions of British public service. He also confirmed that, contrary to speculation th
  
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• Newly discovered James Ensor painting makes €1m at Vienna auction

  31-05-2016 23:00
  
  A previously unknown painting by the Belgian artist James Ensor was the star lot in Dorotheum’s Modern art auction in Vienna on 31 May. Baptême de masques (1925-30), which is based on a contemporary photograph featuring the artist, vaulted over its high estimate of €500,000 selling for just over €1m (including buyer’s premium).
  The work’s masquerade theme was a favourite of Ensor, whose family ran a souvenir and curiosity shop in the Belgian fishing village of
  
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• Marvin Gaye Chetwynd: What's Going On

  31-05-2016 23:00
  There may be a proliferation of performance across the art world but the bawdy, tumultuous and often hilariously free-form extravaganzas of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd are in a league of their own. These carnivalesque events can involve gangs of participants, elaborate wonky home-made costumes and props, and an eclectic range of sources from Hieronymus Bosch and Rabelais to Meatloaf and Conan the Barbarian. They resulted in Chetwynd (known back then as Spartacus rather than Marvin Gaye) being the firs
  
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• Lina Lazaar on ‘What is Art for?’

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Founder of Jeddah Art Week, Lina Lazaar responds to the question 'What is Art for?'.In response to the first Islamist massacre last year in Tunis, Lazaar mounted a major exhibition there entitled All the World is a Mosque, featuring conceptual works by Arab artists addressing the perversion of Islam by Isil and other forces.
  
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• James Davis on ‘What is Art For?’

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Partner Manager at Google Cultural Institute and previously a curator at Tate, London, James Davis puts forward his response to the question: 'What is Art for?' at the Museum of Modern Art New York, May 12 2016.
  
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• J. Tomilson (“Tom”) Hill III on ‘What is Art for?’

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Posing his counter to the question, J. Tomilson (“Tom”) Hill III is president and chief executive of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management, a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and a member of the board of directors of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is a collector of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes and of contemporary art.
  
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• How the Spanish Republic saved the Prado’s masterpieces

  31-05-2016 23:00
  July marks the 80th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War. The conflict, which lasted until late March 1939, pitched the forces of General Franco and his allies from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy against the elected government of the Second Republic and its anti-fascist supporters. The struggle included the bombing of civilian targets made infamous by Picasso’s Guernica and the burning of church buildings such as Vich Cathedral, which housed precious murals created by Jos&eac
  
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• Glenn D. Lowry on ‘What is Art for?’

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Glenn D. Lowry sums up the investigation into the purpose of art.
  
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• Get your tickets for Grayson Perry’s UK tour

  31-05-2016 23:00
  
  Good news for fans of Grayson Perry: the transvestite, Turner Prize-winning ceramicist is going on a UK theatre tour later this year. In the five-date tour, entitled Typical Man in a Dress, Perry will bring his own inimitable brand of humour and candour to subjects such as modern masculinity (why do men, for instance, try to overtake all other cyclists when going up big hills?). It takes in Sheffield, Bristol, Salford and Glasgow, with a night at the London Palladium on 3 November.
  
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• Eric Kandel on ‘What is Art for?’

  31-05-2016 23:00
  The third investigation into 'What is Art for?' at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 12 May 2016.Presenting his case as part of the investigation, Eric Kandel was awarded a Nobel Prize in 2000 for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. His book Reductionism in Art and Brain Sciences: Bridging the Two Cultures, on the processes of the brain and Abstract Expressionism, is about to be published.
  
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• Atmosphere, thought and feeling: on Giorgione and his contemporaries

  31-05-2016 23:00
  
  Before the pace of change accelerated in the 20th century, there was probably no 30-year period in European history that witnessed so profound a transformation of received opinion as did the years 1490-1520. In these decades the New World was discovered; Copernicus first challenged the geocentric view of the universe; seminal works came from the pens of Machiavelli, More and Erasmus; Luther launched what came to be known as the Reformation; and, in the arts, there was the burst of creativity th
  
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• Art Basel 2016

  31-05-2016 23:00
  Our daily papers from Art Basel, including news, analysis, interviews and live reporting from the fair
  
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• Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Names Daniel H. Sallick Board Chair

  31-05-2016 22:28 via artnews.com
  The Washington Post reports today that the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has appointed Washington-based businessman and art collector Daniel H. Sallick as board chairman. Sallick will be replacing Peggy Burnet, who has stepped down as chairwoman but will continue to … Read More
  
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• ‘Excitement: An Exhibition by Rudi Fuchs’ at Stedelijk, Amsterdam

  31-05-2016 20:16 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Summertime Bruce: Watermill Center’s Summer Benefit Will Feature Bruce High Quality Foundation

  31-05-2016 19:33 via artnews.com
  The summer benefit at the Watermill Center, Robert Wilson’s “performance laboratory” inside an old Western Union research facility in Watermill, New York, is always one of the stranger evenings on the gala circuit. Serving as both a black tie dinner … Read More
  
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• Many Ways to Dream: Around Los Angeles

  31-05-2016 19:31 via artnews.com
  On shows at REDCAT, Joan, Cherry and Martin, Sad, Farago, CES, Team, Gagosian, and the Hammer Museum Read More
  
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• Digital Arts Magazine Triple Canopy to Move from Greenpoint to Chinatown

  31-05-2016 16:57 via artnews.com
  The nonprofit digital arts magazine Triple Canopy will relocate its New York headquarters this fall to Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. The new space will be located at 264 Canal Street, between Broadway and Lafayette Street. They will be vacating their current … Read More
  
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• Shrigley goes Public on both sides of the Pond

  31-05-2016 16:45
  
  The mischievous British artist David Shrigley will be making his presence felt in both London and New York this autumn, with major public art commissions on both sides of the Atlantic. In September, New Yorkers will encounter Shrigley's 17-foot-tall granite Public Art Fund sculpture, entitled Memorial, at the Doris C. Freedman Plaza in Central Park (a shopping list will be engraved on the surface—sausages, carrots and milk, and possibly “cleaning stuff” will be inscribed
  
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• This Magic Moment: Ugo Rondinone Places Seven Mountains in the Desert Outside Las Vegas

  31-05-2016 16:36 via artnews.com
  A few weeks ago, the artist Ugo Rondinone was slowly leading me around a room in his Harlem studio, showing me miniature architectural mockups for the shows he is doing this year—in Miami, Rome, Berlin, Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Nîmes, … Read More
  
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• Walter De Maria review – land art pioneer's work comes to ground

  31-05-2016 16:14
  
  Gagosian, London
  De Maria’s art is electrifying outside, but inside this show, his untouchable steel sculptures and uninspiring statements fail to tingle the spineA founding figure of what has become known as land art, Walter De Maria is best known for his 1977 Lightning Field, the one mile-by-one kilometre field of steel poles driven into the ground in a remote part of New Mexico. Each pole in the grid is a slightly different length, to accommodate for the unevenness of the land, but thei
  
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• Morning Links: Berlin Biennale Edition

  31-05-2016 13:55 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the world Read More
  
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• Prado opens landmark Bosch exhibition amid attribution controversy

  31-05-2016 12:13
  
  Bosch fever is now moving on to Madrid, where the most comprehensive exhibition ever held on the Dutch master opens today (31 May). Twenty-four works by Hieronymus Bosch (around 1450-1516) are on display—seven more than were at the Noordbrabants Museum in s’Hertogenbosch earlier this year. Probably never again will so many of his paintings be brought together.
  An intense rivalry has developed between the Dutch and Spanish venues which mounted exhibitions to mark the 500th anniversar
  
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• Bhupen Khakhar review – Mumbai's answer to Beryl Cook

  31-05-2016 08:30
  
  Tate Modern, London
  Why is Tate Modern exhibiting an old-fashioned, second-rate artist whose paintings recall the kind of British painters it would never let through its doors?What makes painting modern? Is it abstraction, or depicting the modern world, or a mixture of the two? Painting as a medium should have died out long ago according to some definitions of modern art, and yet people keep at it. What is it that can still give these daubs relevance? Tate has the answer and it is a surprise. On
  
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• Frontier Imaginaries: evolving, touring art show explores global politics and Australian history

  31-05-2016 07:02
  
  Part of an global curatorial project that heads to Palestine next, the Brisbane iteration is sprawling and high in concept, rewarding time and an open mindThere are actually places known as “the frontier”. Travelling in Mexico and Central America in the early 1990s I memorised the question “donde estan los autobus para la frontera?” ­to help me find the bus that went to the border. Once there, I was struck by the tentative nature of civilisation in these often dispute
  
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