Arts news

• Jean-Michel Basquiat at Nahmad Contemporary

  09-06-2016 23:37 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Norman Foster’s Plan For Drones To Connect Africa

  09-06-2016 23:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The pilot droneport program will launch later this year in Rwanda, the mountainous, landlocked East African country nicknamed “Land of a Thousand Hills.” Three droneports, to be completed by 2020, will allow the drone network to send supplies to 44 percent of the country.”
  
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• Wolfgang Tillmans’ opening is dominated by movements and departures: possible and definite, international and local

  09-06-2016 23:00
  
  As the EU referendum looms later this month, the current issue of The Art Newspaper confirms that this country’s leading contemporary artists are overwhelmingly in favour of Britain remaining within the European Union. And no one more so than Wolfgang Tillmans, who from the start has led the art world campaign against Brexit. The artist has made a series of 26 posters outlining why he believes Britain should stay in the EU, which are available to all.  
  Certainly the remain message w
  
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• Weak market should bring out the best, says Art Basel director

  09-06-2016 23:00
  
  The 47th edition of Art Basel, squeezed between a low-volume auction season in New York and another slim series expected in London in June, opens in a very different market environment to last year. The organisers believe this can work in favour of the art on show at its 284 galleries. “In a market where there are more questions, dealers are very conscious that they have to bring their A-game,” says Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel.
  Exhibitors, who may expect a crowd with mo
  
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• Russian art sales continue to tumble

  09-06-2016 23:00
  
  Fine art and decorative art at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, MacDougalls’s and Bonhams brought in a combined total of £16.4m, a new low since the £17.2m in December last year, according to figures from the online platform Russian Art and Culture.The London sales of Russian fine and decorative art have been in decline since 2011, when they hit a high of around £30m. The Crimean invasion of 2014, subsequent economic sanctions, the fall in oil prices and the collapse of
  
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• Out from the sun and into the fire station

  09-06-2016 23:00
  A former fire station will host part of Under the Same Sun: Art from Latin America Today, a Guggenheim-organised show that travels to the South London Gallery (10 June-4 September). The building, which is now an annexe of the gallery, will house work by around seven of the 20 artists in the show, including Tania Bruguera and Minerva Cuevas. It will later undergo a 5m conversion. The show includes a performance by Amalia Pica in nearby Peckham. The artist Federico Herrero also plans to work with
  
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• Misty Copeland’s Not The Only Ballerina Fighting The Good Fight For Diversity

  09-06-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It wasn’t until later in her ballet career that Lia Cirio began to suspect that people had their doubts that a half-Filipino ballerina could be a Clara or Sleeping Beauty. While the Boston Ballet employs 69 dancers of 20 different nationalities, she still sees the need to prove herself on stage with each performance.”
  
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• Loose language: on Liam Gillick's Industry and Intelligence

  09-06-2016 23:00
  
  "There is no way to draw a logical conclusion about the political, moral, or ethical stance of the artist by attempting to resolve their rhetoric with what appears to have been produced."
  This statement, which comes 15 pages into the artist Liam Gillick's new book, Industry and Intelligence, is his attempt to describe why writing by contemporary artists is often pointless. And so it is also a perfect criticism of his book. Around 30 pages later, he offers another bit of self-analysis when he la
  
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• It's all work—and some play—as Manifesta opens in Zurich

  09-06-2016 23:00
  For the first time since its inaugural edition in 1996, Manifesta is being organised by an artist. The roving biennial, which occupies a different European city in each iteration, comes to Zurich this year under the direction of the German artist Christian Jankowski.
  The 100-day event, titled What People Do For Money: Some Joint Ventures, presents a historical exhibition along with new projects by 30 international artists who are creating work in direct dialogue with the citizens of Switzerland
  
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• Back to the beginning with Stuart Davis

  09-06-2016 23:00
  Harry Cooper: "This pair shows so much about Davis’s development from somebody in the 1920s who was very involved with American subject matter and even political references. The word “Smith” in House and Street refers to Al Smith, who ran for president. But then in The Mellow Pad—and they’re exactly the same size, which is also significant—he overwrites this with a riot of shapes and colours. The Mellow Pad was a struggle. It took him six years. He wasn&rsquo
  
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• “Cultural Catastrophe”: A Paris Museum That Flooded

  09-06-2016 22:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Closed for the past four years due to ongoing renovations, the Musée Girodet was set to reopen next year but will have to push back that date due to the flood, which Montargis Mayor Jean-Pierre Door described as a “cultural catastrophe.” The museum’s building sits at the center of a narrow strip of land bordered by the Loing river and a canal, but during the renovations most of its collection has been stored off-site, even closer to the water, in
  
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• How The Hawaiian Language Is Coming Back From Near-Death

  09-06-2016 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “[There’s now a network of] public language-immersion schools where subjects are taught in Hawaiian until about fifth grade, at which point English is gradually introduced. Designed to revive the fading language, these institutions began spreading across the state three decades ago, resulting in what many consider the most successful revival of an indigenous language in North America.”
  
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• Artist Tries To Burn Down HQ Of Russia’s Secret Service And Says It’s “Art”

  09-06-2016 21:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Petr Pavlensky told the crowd that they are living in a society controlled through “uninterrupted terror”, that surveillance in Russia is on the rise but that people’s own fear is making them prisoners. That was the stark message the artist wanted to send when he conceived “Threat” and selected the headquarters of Russia’s powerful security service, the FSB, as his canvas – or target.
  
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• Norwich’s trojan horse laden with art

  09-06-2016 21:25
  
  What better way to sneak contemporary art into a city than with the help of a few horses? To celebrate the first visit of the British Art Show (24 June to 4 September) to East Anglia, six horses will parade through Norwich on 18 June to deliver the crated works to the two participating venues: Norwich University of the Arts and Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery. The horses, which have been chosen from across East Anglia, will be led by a Suffolk gelding named Trojan. The
  
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• How Technology Is Shaking Up Classical Music

  09-06-2016 21:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What changes does the new digital technology reflect or enable? Conversations with some of classical music’s most passionate advocates of the gadgets and with developers like forScore and Tonara that write applications for them reveal a number of developments. The traditional top-down structure of teaching has been shaken loose. “
  
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• Byron’s Friends Destroyed His Memoir. What Were They Hiding?

  09-06-2016 20:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Byron’s memoirs – which might have finally provided the “truth” about his life – were destroyed soon after his death. The story goes that three of his closest friends (his publisher, John Murray; his fellow celebrity poet, Thomas Moore; and his companion since his Cambridge days, John Cam Hobhouse), together with lawyers representing Byron’s half-sister and his widow, decided that the manuscript was so scandalous, so unsuitable for public consumption, t
  
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• Canadians Do Not Actually Say ‘Aboot’

  09-06-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What they do say is actually much weirder.”
  
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• Short Circuit: Sam Lewitt Turns Up the Heat at the Swiss Institute

  09-06-2016 19:58 via artnews.com
  A few years ago Sam Lewitt discovered the address for a high-speed data-trading facility in Mahwah, New Jersey. Having found what he called an “open secret,” Lewitt went to the facility and brought his camera with him. Euronext, a company … Read More
  
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• How Charity Auctions Take Advantage Of Artists

  09-06-2016 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The seismographic range of institutions, causes, and charities staging sales creates a constant barrage for artists. “It’s a side business keeping up with all the auctions,” said Simmons, who gave away 16 works last year. “It takes an amazing amount of, for lack of a better word, administrative time. It’s very hard to keep it all going.” Artist Marilyn Minter said she receives requests for donations every week. Rob Pruitt fields about 20 solicitations a year.
  
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• How Disgust Led To Civilization As We Know It

  09-06-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “We might owe disgust a great debt for our manners, morals and religion - and ultimately our laws, politics and government, as the latter three can be built only on the former. Evolution got the ball rolling by making our ancestors revolted by parasites and any behaviour that exposed them to infection; then culture took over and transformed people into super-cooperators willing to abide by shared codes of conduct.”
  
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• Ann Prior obituary

  09-06-2016 18:56
  
  My friend Ann Prior, who has died aged 66 of cancer, was driven to live a simple and impressively resourceful life. She was a cook, author, artist and adventurer. She was fiercely independent and cared deeply about the destructive impact of humans on the environment, long before it arrived in the national consciousness.Ann shunned any employment that might lead to her feeling trapped, and allowed her desire to live near the sea to influence the ways in which she made her living. She inherited he
  
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• Historical Friction: Nicole Eisenman at the New Museum and Anton Kern, New York

  09-06-2016 18:55 via artnews.com
  Through June 26; through June 25 Read More
  
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• Saved by the Bell: Accepting Patronage Award, Maria Bell Defends Deitch’s MOCA Legacy

  09-06-2016 18:46 via artnews.com
  And Klaus Biesenbach discusses the Berlin Biennale, PS1’s 40th anniversary Read More
  
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• How Shakespeare Grappled With The Issues And Why He Still Resonates

  09-06-2016 18:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Even though our values have evolved in crucial areas beyond those of Shakespeare’s era, we can talk back to the plays because they talk back to themselves. Whether it’s sexism in “The Taming of the Shrew,” racism in “Othello,” anti-Semitism in “The Merchant of Venice” or colonialism in “The Tempest,” it is hard to find a point of view that Shakespeare hasn’t already anticipated and embodied.
  
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• You Can’t Have Free Will Without Regret

  09-06-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “This is the very essence of regret – we can only regret things we think we have control over.If we had no choice, no agency, if we were but tossed about on the tides of fate, there’d be nothing to regret. And so, regret ends up being the emotional price we pay for free will.”
  
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• The (Real) Abuse And (Real) Psychopath Onstage (And No One Said Anything)

  09-06-2016 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The reason Killer Joe felt so vicious and so real was because it was. All of it: the choking, the bruises, the deep-throating of a chicken leg, the body slam into the refrigerator, Cox’s groping of Wellin through her dress as Joe attempts to seduce Dottie, Cox’s semi-erection at the beginning of Act II after Joe succeeds. “It was real,” says Darcy McGill, the costume designer, “because there was a psychopath onstage.”
  
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• Instagram paint-mixing videos get to the heart of our love for the sloppy stuff

  09-06-2016 17:10
  
  Some see the online craze for stirring pots of colourful gunk as worse than watching paint dry. But it just goes to show the physical freshness of pigmentI like paintings. Sure I do. I actually like all paintings, even bad ones. And when it comes to good ones, I don’t differentiate between figurative and abstract, old and new. I can get as lost in the chance patterns of Gerhard Richter’s abstracts as I can in a Rubens landscape. Now I come to think of it, perhaps it isn’t paint
  
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• Which Shows Get Binge-Watched The Most? Netflix Investigates

  09-06-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Using what it calls the “binge scale” – with “shows to savor” on one end and “shows to devour” on the other – Netflix “said viewers typically binged on thrillers such as Breaking Bad and The Killing, but were more likely to take their time over the more political narratives of House of Cards or Homeland.”
  
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• Should children be welcomed at art galleries?

  09-06-2016 16:31
  
  After a few mishaps in which over-excited children have destroyed art exhibits around the world, Matilda Battersby asks whether there's a place for youngsters at galleries
  
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• How Deborah Rutter Keeps The Kennedy Center, And Its Relationship With Its Resident Companies, Running Smoothly

  09-06-2016 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I am involved but not a micromanager. There is no chance that I could be. I am deeply involved but fully delegate to people who have the responsibility … I am not a coercer or a dictator but if I feel strongly about something I will advocate for it.”
  
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• The Man Who Invented The World Wide Web Thinks It Needs To Be Reinvented

  09-06-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Tim Berners-Lee: “It controls what people see, creates mechanisms for how people interact. It’s been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong websites – that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” So this week Berners-Lee met with a group of his peers to consider ways to create a Web that’s less centralized and less subject to control by governments and corporations.
  
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• When Morley Safer Sent Jerry Saltz A Bunch Of His Watercolors

  09-06-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Yes, the late television newsman, notorious in the art world for his supremely snarky 1993 60 Minutes segment “Yes, But Is It Art?”, was himself a painter, and just last year he sent a package of his work to a famously uninhibited art critic.
  
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• Watching A High-Powered Dealer Prepare For Art Basel

  09-06-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Who knew you could parse Benjamin Moore Classic Gray by percentages? That’s what Dominique Lévy was doing with her team recently while readying their gallery’s booth for the Art Basel art fair in Switzerland, which starts next week – determining how deep the shade of a wall should be behind a Gerhard Richter landscape (50 percent? 75? 100?).”
  
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• Tate Taps ICA London Director Gregor Muir to Head Collection of International Art

  09-06-2016 15:01 via artnews.com
  Big news from London this morning: Tate announced that it has hired Gregor Muir, the director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in the city, to be the new director of collection, international art. Muir takes the place of Frances … Read More
  
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• North America’s Mostly White Orchestra World Gets Together To Talk Diversity

  09-06-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The League of American Orchestras, representing a mostly white industry, opens a three-day national conference Thursday in a majority African-American city at a time of increased racial tensions and heightened awareness of economic and educational disadvantages. The principal topic of the 2016 gathering in Baltimore: diversity.”
  
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• Moscow’s Garage Museum Is Organizing a Triennial Dedicated to Russian Art

  09-06-2016 15:00 via artnews.com
  The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow announced today that it will be organize the first triennial dedicated to contemporary Russian art. The event will open March 10, 2017, at the Garage.The triennial will be run by Kate Fowle, Garage’s … Read More
  
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• Russian Performance Artist Pyotr Pavlensky Freed From Prison After Conviction

  09-06-2016 14:59 via artnews.com
  The Moscow Times reports that performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky has been released from prison seven months after setting fire to the Federal Security Service building as part of his piece Threat. Lubyanka’s Burning Door (2015). Convicted of the crime of … Read More
  
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• ‘Hamilton’ Raises Top Ticket Price To Staggering High, Doubles Number Of Cheap Lottery Seats

  09-06-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The paired moves – raising the price for premium seats to $849 while offering 46 seats per show at $10 each – are part of a broader effort to stanch the loss of tens of millions of dollars in potential revenue to scalpers, and to make the show available to people who can’t afford costly theater tickets.”
  
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• Absolut Art Award Creates Offshoot Prize for Emerging Artists, Names Jury

  09-06-2016 14:41 via artnews.com
  Absolut announced today that it has created a new award for emerging artists. It will be called—no, this is not a joke—the Emerging Artist Award, and will be eligible to any artist who has collaborated with Absolut between January 2015 … Read More
  
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• South Londoners Adele and Bowie celebrated at National Portrait Gallery

  09-06-2016 14:39
  
  Images of famous residents displayed alongside portrait of local students in experimental artwork by Simon TerrillDavid Bowie, Adele and Rio Ferdinand are among the famous past and present residents and students of south London celebrated in an exhibition opening on Friday at the National Portrait Gallery.The portraits include Roots Manuva, whose first album was recorded in a community studio on the Angell Town estate, fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, former soldier Johnson Beharry, who
  
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• Morning Links: Art Basel Edition

  09-06-2016 14:39 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the world Read More
  
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• The Massive Pile Of Money ‘Hamilton’ Is Going To Make, And Where It’s Going To Go

  09-06-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Just how many Hamiltons can Hamilton make? … Here, based on documents filed with government agencies and interviews with people familiar with various aspects of the musical’s finances, is a look at how Hamilton makes money and where that money goes.”
  
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• Turning The Bridges On The Thames Into A ‘Free Outdoor River Gallery’

  09-06-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A competition launched last week by London’s new mayor Sadiq Khan will bring a striking nocturnal makeover to the city’s River Thames. Called the Illuminated River, the contest will see 17 of Central London’s bridges enhanced by a creative lighting design from the winner, turning what is often a hidden, lugubrious space at night into a string of pearls that could attract more nighttime visitors to the riverbank.”
  
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• What Do You Get When You Cross Harry Partch’s Instruments With A Sax Quartet?

  09-06-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  David Patrick Stearns gets with the PRISM Quartet to find out.“The nine instruments coming to Philadelphia – with names such as chromelodeon and cloud-chamber bowls – collectively weigh 2,473 pounds, with transportation costs of approximately $10,000, equal to a healthy performance fee for a star soloist.”
  
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• The performance artist fighting class shame with drop scones and dead rats

  09-06-2016 13:51
  
  Catherine Hoffmann is a self-confessed survivor of Britain’s ‘feral underclass’ of the 1970s and 80s. As Stench Wench, she is now stripping half naked and scrabbling in squalor to reclaim a voice for her peersThree minutes into my interview with Catherine Hoffmann, sitting in a cafe in Bow, I notice a thick black hair growing out of my neck. I am horrified. “That’s just what happens,” says Hoffmann, cool as a cucumber. “I’m constantly tweezering, w
  
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• Sexual Harassment In The Theater, And How Chicago’s Theater Community Is Combating It

  09-06-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Auditions are tough, and casting directors may be unwilling to hire a so-called ‘problematic’ actor when there are so many talented people in line for the job. If you’re worried that one complaint could stall your career, you’re not alone. The dynamics of power persist from one type of performance to another, and we can learn from what happened in Chicago.”
  
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• How The Young Ernest Hemingway Invented ‘Ernest Hemingway’

  09-06-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “When it came to selling copy, Hemingway was one of America’s most versatile leading men, and certainly one of the country’s most fascinating entertainers. By then, everyone had long forgotten one of his earliest roles: unpublished nobody. It was one of the few Hemingway personas that never really suited him. In fact, in the early 1920s – strapped for cash, ravenous for recognition – he was frantic to rid himself of it.”
  
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• Trend for art in shopping malls hits France

  09-06-2016 13:26
  The Fondation Maeght has loaned five sculptures by Joan Miró to Polygone Riviera, a multi-purpose “centre of commerce” which opened last October in Cagnes-sur-Mer on the Côte d'Azur, for a temporary, outdoor exhibition. The bronze sculptures have been installed in a fountain, which has 24-hour security, in front of a restaurant.“One needs to help exceptional places like this so that it becomes, with time, a beautiful place because before the area was dreadful,&rdq
  
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• The fashionable world of Antonio Lopez – in pictures

  09-06-2016 13:00
  
  Lopez was at the forefront of fashion illustration for 30 years and, with life-long business partner Juan Ramos, influential in launching the careers of Jerry Hall and Grace Jones and championing non-white models. His flamboyant work and lifestyle is the subject of a new exhibition at El Museo Del Barrio in New York, Antonio Lopez: Future Funk Fashion, which runs from 14 June to 16 November Continue reading...
  
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• La Fanciulla del West, Grange Park Opera, Hampshire, review: 'Genuinely moving'

  09-06-2016 10:43
  
  Puccini declared it 'the best opera I've ever written', but history hasn't generally agreed. Grange Park's of La Fanciulla del West (originally directed by Stephen Medcalf, revived by Peter Relton) shows, despite its shortcomings, why he might have thought so.
  
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