Arts news

• London Tattoo Convention – in pictures

  23-09-2016 23:57
  
  The ink flows and the needles dance as 400 of the world’s finest tattoo artists showcase their work in the British capital Continue reading...
  
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• Seriously? Did China Just Pave Over The Great Wall?

  23-09-2016 23:49 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Chinese preservationists, internet users and media commentators have been incensed this week after pictures showed that officials repaired part of the Great Wall in northeast China by slapping a white substance on top of the crumbling, weathered stones.”
  
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• Mirror, mirror at the Freud Museum

  23-09-2016 23:00
  
  Mark Wallingers Self Reflection show, in which he has installed a mirror across the entire ceiling of Sigmund Freuds study at the Freud Museum in Londons Hampstead, is one of the most successful of the many artistic interventions that have taken place in this iconic room. As well as its richly chiming references to Freudian notions surrounding the doubled self and self-reflection, it also presents a weirdly disorientating and decidedly unheimlich perspective for anyone entering the room, especi
  
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• Epic 500-year-old poem comes to life through vivid illustrations

  23-09-2016 23:00
  Now seldom read for pleasure, Ludovico Ariostos epic Italian poem, Orlando Furioso, was familiar to all literate Europeans from the moment of its first publication in 1516  and was part of the common literary culture for centuries afterwards. With 38,736 lines, the poem is one of the longest ever written, and tells a story of make-believe about Charlemagnes crusades against the Saracens. Among the artists who painted scenes from the work are Poussin, Delacroix, Tiepolo and Fragonard.
  
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• Antiques dealers arrested and $4.5m worth of ivory seized in New York

  23-09-2016 22:50
  
  On 22 September, three dealers who operate the Metropolitan Fine Arts and Antiques store in New York were arrested for selling ivory works of art without a licensea felony in a state under a law passed in 2014 to limit the ivory trade. Officials with the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation raided the shop and found 126 objects totalling $4.5mincluding two pairs of elephant tusks, one of which was seven feet long. This followed a sting operation in which undercover investigat
  
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• Elmgreen and Dragset to install ‘tiny little lonely booth’ in the Grand Palais

  23-09-2016 22:14
  
  What is an art fair actually? asks Michael Elmgreen, one half of the Berlin-based duo Elmgreen and Dragset. We love to go, and we love to complain about it. Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, the duos other half, explored this art world institution at their fake art fair solo show, The Well Fair, at the Ullens Centre for Contemporary Art in Beijing earlier this year. They are continuing this inquest with a one-day pop-up event at the Grand Palais in Paris on 24 September, Galerie Perrotin. The install
  
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• Are These The World’s Best New Highrises?

  23-09-2016 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  To qualify for “the world’s most important prize for high-rises,” buildings have to present at least 100 m (328 ft) in height and must have been completed in the previous two years.
  
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• Danny Lyon at Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

  23-09-2016 22:00 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Art Critic John Bentley Mays, 75

  23-09-2016 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “His life’s work was as a critic and he was for four decades one of Canada’s great observers, interpreters and explainers of art and architecture.”
  
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• Feel Lonely A Lot? It May Be Genetic

  23-09-2016 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A large new study published online last week in the Nature journal Neuropsychopharmacology …finds that loneliness appears to be a ‘modestly heritable’ trait. A predisposition to feeling lonely may run in the family, in other words. But there’s a caveat here.”
  
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• The Trial Of George W. Bush And An Audience’s Verdict

  23-09-2016 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Don’t worry if you didn’t know the 43rd president was on trial. This was an off-Broadway verdict, the conclusion to a new play called The Trial of an American President. The trial was fiction, but the vote, from nine members of the audience chosen to be the jury, was very real.”
  
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• Egypt’s Mallawi Museum reopens with looted collection mostly restored

  23-09-2016 20:04
  
  The Mallawi Museum, in Egypts Al Minya Governorate, reopened this week after a 864,000 renovation. Most of the museums 1,000-piece collection has also been recovered from looters and is back on display.The museum was ransacked in August 2013 during a period of violence in the country following the ousting of the former president Mohamed Morsi. The looters shot one member of the museum staff dead and stole almost all of the artefacts on display. Other items, too large to remove, were vandalised,
  
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• TV – Even Peak TV – Does Not Work In A Film Festival

  23-09-2016 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Frankly, it felt weird to be watching TV at a film festival. A movie is a closed loop: it begins and an hour and a half or two or three hours later, it ends.”
  
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• Don’t let it be curtains for Tate’s neighbours | Letters

  23-09-2016 19:40
  
  On Sunday, with half an hour to spare before my timed entry to the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition, I ventured to Tate Modern’s 10th-floor viewing platform (Get some net curtains, says Tate director in row over flats and a not so private view, 22 September).The view from there is fine if you want to look at modern office blocks such as the Shard and the Gherkin, but if you want to spot Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament you have to twist your body, bend low and put your head on one
  
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• People who live in glass houses by the Tate Modern shouldn’t throw tantrums | Deborah Orr

  23-09-2016 19:31
  
  To the those people living opposite the modern art gallery who don’t like its visitors looking into their pad, I say: buy some curtainsA few porcelain sunflower seeds caught in an escalator: this was the nearest Tate Modern had ever got to a problem. Otherwise, the abandoned power station’s transformation into an awesome art-and-tourism behemoth had been a tale of uninterrupted glory and triumph. But then it did the thing of dread – Tate Modern pissed off the neighbours.The new
  
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• Incoming Arts Council England Boss Surprised By Plan For Arts Quality Assessments

  23-09-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Tate boss Sir Nicholas Serota responded with disbelief to presenter Sue MacGregor when she told him of ACE’s plans to introduce Quality Metrics to measure artistic quality and said “the Arts Council is going to say if it doesn’t tick these boxes we’re not going to give money to it.” Serota responded: “I suspect you caricature the decision”, which MacGregor denied, saying: “No, I’m almost quoting it word for word from the press release.”
  
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• Throwing shade: Mark Bradford tackles Clyfford Still

  23-09-2016 19:18
  
  The LA polymath responds to one of the most elusive abstract expressionists in a groundbreaking exhibition that sheds new light on the work of both menMark Bradford, a polymath of an artist best known for his big, broad multimedia canvases of densely layered material abstraction, is gay, black and with deep inner-city roots. Parallel to his art practice, he maintains a robust, bricks-and-mortar program for disadvantaged youth in the same South LA neighbourhood in which he creates his multimillio
  
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• Managing Director – Druid Theatre Company

  23-09-2016 19:08 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Druid Theatre Company wishes to fill the position of Managing Director and seeks applications from suitably qualified individuals. The person appointed will be an exceptional leader with key experience in national and international theatre production. S/he will report to the Artistic Director and to the Board of Druid to produce work of the highest quality for national and international audiences. The post is based in Druid’s Galway home but will involve work in various locations. It requi
  
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• 'I’m a work in progress': feeling the buzz at the London Tattoo Convention

  23-09-2016 19:03
  
  One in five adults have gone under the needle, according to a poll, and this event showcases the broad appeal of body art“Oh, of course I’m obsessed,” says Robert Lahr with a wide grin. “It’s an addiction, clearly it is. If you come to a place like this, it’s the sound, the smell – that’s what gives you the kick.”The place in question is a large exhibition space in east London, where for three days this weekend, tens of thousands of Lahr&rsqu
  
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• 'I’m a work in progress': feeling the buzz at London Tattoo Convention

  23-09-2016 19:03
  
  One in five adults has a tat up their sleeve, according to YouGov poll, and this event showcases the broad appeal of body art“Oh, of course I’m obsessed,” says Robert Lahr with a wide grin. “It’s an addiction, clearly it is. If you come to a place like this, it’s the sound, the smell – that’s what gives you the kick.”The place in question is a large exhibition space in east London, where for three days this weekend, tens of thousands of Lahr&
  
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• Staging Death: A Brief History

  23-09-2016 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  From Sophocles through Roman spectacles and the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol to Sarah Kane, a look at the means – decorous, horrifying, inventive – playwrights, directors and stage managers have used to depict characters’ ends.
  
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• Coding Is Not “Fun.” It’s An Expression Of Values And Ethics

  23-09-2016 18:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more ‘decisions’ are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it’s rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what’s going on beneath these processes.”
  
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• There’s No Need To Fret About Today’s Decline In ‘Proper’ Punctuation

  23-09-2016 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses intended by an absent author. … With the more speech-like IM, texts, tweets, punctuation is just getting back to its roots, as a way to convey prosodic and speech cues in the absence of sound and vision.”
  
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• Martos Gallery Rechristens Los Angeles Space as West Coast Offshoot of Shoot the Lobster

  23-09-2016 17:40 via artnews.com
  Two years after opening a 1,000-square-foot space in Los Angeles, Martos Gallery has decided to switch gears: instead of being a Martos Gallery outpost, it will be an outpost of owner Jose Martos’s project space, Shoot the Lobster.The news comes just … Read More
  
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• Who Threw the First Punch?: Shana Lutker Stages a Surrealist Fight in Los Angeles

  23-09-2016 17:32 via artnews.com
  Late on the evening of July 2, 1925, police cordoned off the Closerie des Lilas, a Paris café, after an intellectual altercation. At a dinner in honor of Symbolist poet Saint-Pol-Roux, young Surrealists had verbally attacked older literati before the … Read More
  
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• Three to see: Vienna

  23-09-2016 17:31
  
  The second edition of the Viennacontemporary fair at the Marx Halle (until 25 September) continues to focus on Eastern European and younger art. The Serbian artists collective Sok Zadruga presents a series of drawings by Slobodan Stosic, Of Dogs and Dogs (2016), priced at 400 each, which show individuals biting themselves (the artist explains that the works were inspired by press reports about people claiming insurance for fictitious dog bites). Local gallery Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman is, me
  
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• The Phone Call, R.I.P.

  23-09-2016 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The phone call always was an invasive form of communication, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that as soon as a plausible substitute presented itself we grabbed it.”
  
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• The Will of an Athlete: On Matthew Barney’s Early Career

  23-09-2016 17:19 via artnews.com
  Before The Cremaster Cycle existed, and long before Kanye West claimed its director as an inspiration, Matthew Barney climbed across the ceiling of Gladstone Gallery in New York for his first show there. That was 25 years ago, in 1991, and … Read More
  
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• Habitat: Obsessions—A Look at Matthew Higgs’s Formidable Record Collection

  23-09-2016 17:02 via artnews.com
  Habitat: Obsessions is a ten-part series of visits to the surprising non-art collections of art-world professionals.Matthew Higgs’s collection of records numbers about 7,500, about 5,000 of which are neatly organized in his Chelsea apartment. “The rest are either in my office, storage, … Read More
  
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• Habitat: Obsession—A Look at Matthew Higgs’s Formidable Record Collection

  23-09-2016 17:02 via artnews.com
  Habitat: Obsessions is a ten-part series of visits to the surprising non-art collections of art-world professionals.Matthew Higgs’s collection of records numbers about 7,500, about 5,000 of which are neatly organized in his Chelsea apartment. “The rest are either in my office, storage, … Read More
  
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• The Trouble With Sombreros At Tequila Parties: Francine Prose On Lionel Shriver’s Cultural Appropriation Speech

  23-09-2016 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The topic is a complicated and sensitive one, and Shriver’s first mistake, I think, was to ignore that complexity and sensitivity by adopting a tone that ranged from jauntiness to mockery and contempt. … To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is more than just a hat.”
  
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• Liverpool’s The World Transformed festival aims to build Momentum on the British left

  23-09-2016 16:48
  
  The UKs Labour Party is experiencing its biggest crisis for 30 years, and it comes to a head this weekend. The result of its leadership election, a battle between the incumbent leader, left-winger Jeremy Corbyn, and the more centre-left candidate Owen Smith, is due on Saturday, 24 September. When the winneralmost certainly Corbynis announced, the party will be in Liverpool for its annual conference. Alongside it runs The World Transformed, a four-day politics and arts festival organised by Mome
  
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• Strobe Warning: Peter Burr on His New Video Installation, ‘Pattern Language’

  23-09-2016 16:38 via artnews.com
  “You’re not prone to seizures, are you?” the artist Peter Burr asked me before firing up Pattern Language, a new “immersive multi-channel video environment” that he has made with the programmer and video artist Mark Fingerhut, the artist Brenna Murphy, … Read More
  
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• Wadsworth Atheneum Hires Grant S. Smith as Director of Development

  23-09-2016 16:30 via artnews.com
  The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, announced today that Grant S. Smith will be its director of development, starting on September 26. In his new position, Smith will work to re-up the museum’s philanthropic and fundraising efforts.Much … Read More
  
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• Even After 20 Years, ‘South Park’ Gets Thrown Together On The Fly Each Week

  23-09-2016 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Said co-creator Trey Parker one day earlier this month: “There are times where we go, ‘How do we tell Comedy Central we don’t have a show?’ This is one of those.” Dave Itzkoff watches how they pull it off.
  
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• Monty Python’s Terry Jones Diagnosed With Dementia

  23-09-2016 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The 74-year-old is suffering from primary progressive aphasia, which affects his ability to communicate. As well as appearing in the BBC TV shows and films, Jones also directed the features The Life Of Brian and Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, and co-directed Monty Python And The Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam.”
  
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• Albright-Knox Gallery Receives $42.5 M. Gift, Will Change Name

  23-09-2016 15:36 via artnews.com
  Big news from upstate New York! The Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo announced today that investor and art collector Jeffrey Gundlach has donated $42.5 million to the museum. To recognize the gift, the Albright-Knox will be rechristened as the Buffalo Albright-Knox-Gundlach … Read More
  
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• ‘Sick Joker Or Avant-Garde Savior?’ Romeo Castellucci Makes Theater That’s Powerful, Confounding, And Icky

  23-09-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “His often-abrasive theater pieces won’t let you look away – whether it’s an elderly man struggling to control his bodily functions beneath a benevolent painting of Christ (On the Concept of the Face) or a klatch of Amish women cutting off one another’s tongues (The Four Seasons Restaurant).”
  
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• Meet The NYC Sanitation Department’s Artist In Residence

  23-09-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “For an artist obsessed for nearly half a century with the concepts of maintenance and sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles keeps an office in desperate need of a cleaning. Or maybe an intervention by a department of doctoral students.”
  
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• Jackson Pollock, Paula Rego and Victoria Beckham – the week in art

  23-09-2016 15:00
  
  The RA’s mega overview of abstract expressionism opens this week, along with portraits of dream worlds and pop stars – all in your weekly art despatchAbstract ExpressionismJackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning … some of the greatest art of the modern age crosses the Atlantic to awe us with its all-embracing sublimity. What’s not to like? See it several times.• Royal Academy, London, 24 September–2 January Continue reading...
  
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• Buffalo Philharmonic Board Chair Arrested On Corruption Charges

  23-09-2016 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “[Louis P.] Ciminelli has been chairman of the BPO’s board for two terms, assuming the office in 2012. He has been generous to the orchestra, and his tenure has been a time of prosperity. In 2015, when his 60th birthday coincided with the BPO’s fall season-opening gala, Ciminelli gave the orchestra a gift of $1 million. “
  
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• Morning Links: Controversial Kelley Walker Paintings Edition

  23-09-2016 14:46 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Teacher Steps On An American Flag During Free Speech Lesson, Gets Death Threats And Investigation By School District

  23-09-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The civics teacher from Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, N.C., was giving a lesson last week about the Bill of Rights that touched on Texas v. Johnson, the Supreme Court case upholding the constitutional right to burn the American flag. To illustrate the landmark decision, Francis pulled out a full-size Star-Spangled Banner and laid it on the classroom floor. ‘Does anybody have a lighter,’ he asked the class. When no one responded, Francis stepped on the flag
  
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• Marina Abramović’s Ex Wins Intellectual Property Suit Against Her

  23-09-2016 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Abramović and Ulay, born Frank Uwe Laysiepen, had been lovers and co-creators for more than a decade before their separation in 1988 … Ulay launched a lawsuit last year in which he claimed that Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created together.” On Thursday, a Dutch court agreed.
  
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• Balanchine’s ‘Divertimento No. 15’ – Alastair Macaulay Does The Arithmetic

  23-09-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Three men to partner five women! … I’ve often wondered if the name Divertimento No. 15 gave him the idea: 15 = 5 x 3, a kind of numerical pun. Having eight principals (5 + 3), he matches them with a corps of eight women. As you watch the changing corps patterns, Balanchine shows how neatly divisible the number eight can be – two fours, four twos: symmetries abound. But then you see those eight principals. Eight, after all, can contain an imbalance.”
  
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• Vlassis Caniaris draws art and energy from the Greek resistance movement

  23-09-2016 14:00
  
  The politicised artist’s Homage To The Walls Of Athens 1941–19…, 1959 documents the collective struggle against oppression in his native Greece The letters that scream from a makeshift-looking sackcloth and plaster base have the desperate energy of graffiti in the red of a bloodied handprint. The central “E” hollers at you – E for Ellas (Greece), for Eleftheria (freedom) and for EAM, the resistance movement that challenged the Axis occupation of Greece during
  
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• A Rising New Opera Star In The Rarest Of Voice Ranges

  23-09-2016 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Says conductor Thomas Crawford of 25-year-old contralto Avery Amereau, “I don’t mean to exaggerate, but this woman made my knees shake.”
  
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• God, Did I Write That? New York Times Gets Playwrights To Look Back At Their Teenage Work

  23-09-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “How mortifying would it be to page through the creative writing you did as a teenager? And then, years or even decades later, actually see it in print? That’s what we recently asked a set of notable playwrights” – among them Lynn Nottage, Neil LaBute, Tina Howe, Nicky Silver, and Marcus Gardley – “to do.”
  
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• Professional Byzantine Chant (!) Choir In Oregon (!) Has Thrived For 20 Years

  23-09-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “[Cappella Romana], the Portland-based vocal ensemble, which performs annual concert series in its hometown and Seattle, has released more than 20 recordings. Its tours have brought the group’s sometimes ethereal, sometimes austere, always powerfully moving music to venues such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles’ Getty Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Stanford and Yale universities and festivals throughout Europe.”
  
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