Arts news

• Clark Art Institute reopens its ‘beating heart’, the Manton Research Center

  10-11-2016 23:45
  
  The Manton Research Center, due to reopen this weekend on Saturday, 12 November, is the beating heart of the Clark Art Institute says Olivier Meslay, the director since last August. He fell in love with the Williamstown, Massachusetts museum 15 years ago as a fellow in its international research residency programmehoused in the centre.
  Re-worked by Annabelle Seldorf as the final step of the Clarks $145m expansion, the 1970s Brutalist building also includes work space for museum staff and gradua
  
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• Francofonia review – a wayward meditation on art, history and humanity

  10-11-2016 23:30
  
  In this sophisticated but playful cine-prose poem, Alexander Sokurov does for the Louvre what he previously did for the Hermitage in Russian ArkFourteen years after Russian Ark, that renowned single-take movie journey through the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg, Alexander Sokurov has created another absorbing meditation on art, history and humanity’s idea of itself – this time centred on the Louvre in Paris. It is a sophisticated, complex film: a cine-prose poem or installation tab
  
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• The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts honours veterans

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  To commemorate Veterans Day, 11 November, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia is granting free admission to military veterans and active personnel from 11-13 November. The museum is currently showing World War I and American Art (until 9 April 2017), the first major exhibition to look at how American artists portrayed experiences of the war, from the trenches to the home front to Armistice Day celebrations. It includes works by 80 artists, such as Georgia OKeeffe, Childe Hassa
  
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• How Toronto learned to embrace its street art

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  At one of the busiest street corners in Toronto, a nine-storey mural by the British graffiti artist Phlegm depicts a human figure curled into a sleeping position. Inside the figures outline is a congested landscape of buildings. The untitled work, commissioned by the city, is an example of how the local government has turned around its view on street art.
   
  It wasnt too long ago that Toronto waged a war on graffiti, led by its former mayor Rob Ford, who in 2011 toured the city streets with
  
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• Glocal dynamics versus the R-word

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  In 2011, the Getty Foundation launched an ambitious academic experiment conceived by the late Natalie Kampen as part of the Connecting Art Histories initiative. A group of mainly junior researchers from differing backgrounds and disciplines was recruited for a roving seminar devoted to re-examining and debating the comparatively neglected subject of art in Romes provinces in the field.
  The provinces of the Roman Empire offer plenty of scope for roving. At their greatest extent they encompassed t
  
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• Eduardo Paolozzi takes centre stage

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  Eduardo Paolozzi, the late UK artist known for his decorative mosaics at Tottenham Court Road underground station, will be honoured next year with a major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (16 February-14 May). The long-awaited show will include more than 250 works including the famous sculpture Diana as an Engine (1963), which resembles a Surrealist fire hydrant, and the Whitworth Tapestry (1967). Look out also for key material from the artist's import
  
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• China’s new Silk Road leads west to Middle East

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  China is increasingly engaging with countries with mainly Muslim populations through cultural exchanges as its government champions the creation of a new, economic Silk Road. Two biennials opened this autumn in the countrys far-flung western regions, which are the respective homelands of Chinas two largest Muslim minorities, the Turkic Uyghurs and the more assimilated Hui. Meanwhile, the 11th Shanghai Biennale, which is due to open on 11 November (until 12 March 2017), features an unprecedented
  
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• Can you digit? A media art pioneer celebrates 15 years

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  When Steven Sacks opened bitforms gallery in November 2001, digital art was still considered niche, or merely novel. But what was a big risk for Sacks, who set up with his own money in a second-floor space in Chelsea just two months after the Twin Towers fell, now seems prescient: media departments are proliferating in museums, mega-galleries such as Pace and Lisson are signing artists like Leo Villareal and Cory Arcangel, and sales to collectors are finally catching up with early institutional
  
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• American machismo, dreams and nightmares, and a European antidote in this week’s London exhibition roundup

  10-11-2016 22:00
  
  Richard Serra: N-J 2, Rounds, Equal Weight, Unequal Measure, Rotate, Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street (until 25 February 2017)Abstract Expressionism, Royal Academy of Arts (until 2 January 2017)Jeff Koons, Almine Rech Gallery (until 21 January 2017)My plan was to round up the plethora of big and predominantly male transatlantic artists to be seen in the capital this week, but after Tuesday nights (8 November) result I havent really the stomach for any more showy US muscularity. While both are
  
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• Our Movie History – Alive Only Because Of The Obsessives Among Us

  10-11-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Given the ubiquity and popularity of movies, it’s easy to imagine that there’s some sort of central repository for all the movies ever made. But in fact, old movies disappear all the time, and sometimes it’s only because some obsessive collector found and saved a movie that it still exists.
  
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• Those Who Say Illness Makes You A Better Person – Are They Full Of Shinola, Or Do They Have A Point?

  10-11-2016 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Bookshops are already filled with memoirs, diaries, accounts and letters by, for and about the ill. We seem to be living through a veritable ‘golden age of pathography’, as the historian Thomas Lacqueur observed recently. … But Lacqueur notes that asking deep questions isn’t the same as being able to answer them, or even being able to write well.”
  
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• Putting Abstract Expressionism In Its Place

  10-11-2016 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, Abstract Expressionism was not a style or a movement. What the five pioneers had in common was not a shared aesthetic, a painting technique, or a manifesto but a sense of the overwhelming importance of art, a bedrock belief in the power of painting to address ideas and emotions at the deepest level. That sense of importance was there from the beginning.”
  
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• When Nations Become Brands: GCC on Tackling the Gulf Region’s Values, and Gazing Into the Area’s Future

  10-11-2016 18:51 via artnews.com
  When the nine-person collective GCC opened its first show, at Sultan Gallery in Kuwait City, in 2013, some of the artists’ friends didn’t attend their opening. The reason was some very understandable confusion: visitors thought GCC referred to the Gulf … Read More
  
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• Can’t Get Back To Sleep At 4AM? Yeah, That May Be Creative Anxiety

  10-11-2016 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The airy study and the quiet afternoons look awfully nice in the videos, but the life described by my correspondents was one riven by fever and fret, a life of staving off panic and the harsh voices in one’s head. Don’t believe the videos: The most famous writers in the country can’t get over their divorces and take a lot of pills.
  
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• After the Fast: Marco Maggi Offers a Feast of Bauhaus-like Emojis at Josée Bienvenue Gallery

  10-11-2016 18:28 via artnews.com
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• After the Fast: Marco Maggi Offers a Feast of Bauhaus-like Emojis at Josée Bienvenu Gallery

  10-11-2016 18:28 via artnews.com
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• Rosamond Bernier, Lecturer Known for Her Art-Historical Smarts, and Her Wardrobe, Dies at 100

  10-11-2016 18:05 via artnews.com
  Rosamond Bernier, the impresario who transformed the art lecture, turning it into an involving, even entertaining form of education, has died at 100. Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic for the New York Times, confirmed the news today on Twitter.Over the course of … Read More
  
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• ‘Rocky’ At 40 – The Most Successful Bad Movie Ever Made?

  10-11-2016 18:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Nicholas Barber: “Yes, it has James Crabe’s superb Steadicam shots of Rocky Balboa mooching around the industrial sites and working-class neighbourhoods of pre-gentrification Philadelphia. And, yes, it has Stallone’s heart-swelling sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the accompaniment of Bill Conti’s irresistible funk-fanfare. But for every terrific moment you remember, there is another terrible one you may have forgotten.”
  
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• What Made Kafka Kafka? Insomnia

  10-11-2016 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Here’s a Kafkaesque approach to the creative process: staying up so late that, as you doze at the writing desk, insights slip out of your unconscious. This was, according to a new paper in Lancet Neurology, precisely what Franz Kafka himself employed.”
  
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• ‘Hamilton’, Prince Hal, And The Nature Of Honor

  10-11-2016 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A playwright in his mid-30s wants to pen an epic tale of ambition, authority, and power. He turns to his nation’s history, to characters familiar to his audience from school and legend. He performs a kind of magic trick.” Hamilton or Henry IV, Part One? Both, of course – and they have more than that in common.
  
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• Crown jewels of Scottish art to be housed in new £16.8m complex

  10-11-2016 16:19
  
  Rebuild of National Gallery in Edinburgh will extend lower floor, resculpt eastern gardens and add a grander main entranceScotland’s main national art collection, including works by Sir Henry Raeburn, Samuel Peploe and the Glasgow Boys, is to be housed in a new gallery complex in central Edinburgh.Sir John Leighton, the director general of the National Galleries of Scotland, said the warren of corridors and rooms currently housing the Scottish collection underneath its neo-classical galler
  
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• Uncertainty Can Be A Tool Of Persuasion

  10-11-2016 16:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In fact, persuasion research reveals that in some situations people can make their own message more persuasive by explicitly noting that they are unsure about what they’re saying!” Especially if the person saying it is an expert.
  
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• What We Need In Scary Times Like These Is Our Favorite Old Shows/Movies/Records

  10-11-2016 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Peter Marks: “In an age of high anxiety – economic or political – we tend to reach into the cabinet of our comforts and scrounge for reminders of stabler periods. So now, it seems, is prime time for nostalgia. As a relatively popular presidency, and the most vulgar and corrosive national election of modern times, both wind down, a nation looks for reassuring signs – and often finds them in the rearview mirror.”
  
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• TV Companies Try To Win Back Cord-Cutting Millennials With Their Favorite ’80s And ’90s Shows

  10-11-2016 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “‘In a weird way, the strategy seems to write itself: Like, huh, we have all this stuff, we already own, it, people seem to want it,’ [MTV exec Erik] Flannigan says of MTV Classic. It helps, of course, that MTV’s vintage programming, for many millennials, coincides with ‘that window of your life that’s so formative and so meaningful.'”
  
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• Here’s The Best Part Of Morton Feldman’s Six-Hour String Quartet, Chosen By A Violinist About To Perform It

  10-11-2016 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Andrew Bulbrook of the Calder Quartet explains why he likes page 107 best (and also how he and his colleagues prepare to perform a six-hour piece). (includes sound clips)
  
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• Morning Links: George Lucas Edition

  10-11-2016 14:54 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Leonardo’s ‘St. John The Baptist’, Newly Cleaned, Is Back At The Louvre

  10-11-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  There was some concern among conservationists about this project, because the last two restorations of the painting didn’t work out so well.” But they went ahead because the work was “probably the most varnished painting in the Louvre’s [entire] collection.”
  
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• Raoul Coutard, 92, The Cinematographer Of The French New Wave

  10-11-2016 14:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “In that era of portable cameras and fast film stock, his simplified approach to filming and imaginative use of natural light broke with traditional aesthetics, in particular the polished images of the 1950s cinéma de qualité in France. He was identified most with the director Jean-Luc Godard, and Coutard’s direct and unorthodox, yet highly inventive, photography became a pure expression of New Wave values.”
  
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• The Possible Caravaggio That Turned Up In Some French Family’s Attic Is Now On View In Milan

  10-11-2016 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The owners of a house in Toulouse found it when they went up to fix a leak in the roof. Milan’s Pinacoteca di Brera museum is now showing it alongside a different copy of the same image –Judith Beheading Holofernes – by Caravaggio disciple Louis Finson.
  
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• Evicted Cape Town City Ballet Finds Temporary Quarters But Fears It Will Have To Shut Down

  10-11-2016 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The University of Cape Town told the company to move out after students protested ballet as “Eurocentric and colonial”; the dancers claimed they were physically threatened. For now CTCB is using a studio at the back of its performance venue, but the executive director says they’ll have to close entirely if they don’t have a home by January.
  
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• The Cairo Arts Center That Terrible Things Kept Happening To Has Finally Reopened

  10-11-2016 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Poor Townhouse. First the police shut it down because – well, because that’s what military dictatorships do. Then the walls fell in, literally. In February the staff returned to work but weren’t allowed to present anything. Now, finally, there’s a new space and new activity.
  
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• At Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Collection Grows As Curatorial Staff Shrinks

  10-11-2016 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi’s second, collection-based exhibition is due to open next March … The announcement comes amid speculation over the momentum of the much-delayed [museum] project, which was launched ten years ago, prompted by the recent departure of two key members [out of five] of its curatorial team.
  
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• Bullingdon Club portrait of Cameron and Johnson in tails to go on sale

  10-11-2016 13:27
  
  Oil painting of 10 ‘confident’ Oxford students, including former Tory pals, was commissioned to get around copyrightA painting of posh, privileged members of the Bullingdon Club, which was commissioned to get around copyright law, is to appear at auction.Rona Marsden’s “class of ‘87” image is a familiar one – 10 young and confident students, including David Cameron and Boris Johnson, lined up in their tails and yellow waistcoats and posing on the steps o
  
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• ‘Afghan girl with green eyes' Sharbat Gula deported from Pakistan

  10-11-2016 12:20
  
  Sharbat Gula, the green-eyed girl who appeared on the cover of the National Geographic magazine in 1985, has been deported from Pakistan to Afghanistan after she was convicted by a court in Peshawar, northern Pakistan, of having fake identification papers.
  The deportation was condemned by Amnesty International. Pakistans decision to deport Sharbat Gula is a grave injustice. By sending her back to a country she hasnt seen in a generation, her plight has become emblematic of Pakistans cruel treat
  
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• Photographers on their best Trump shot: 'I think he's a damaged person'

  10-11-2016 09:00
  
  Holding a million bucks, cradling a dove, looking broken, refusing to pose … in a My Best Shot special, four photographers reveal what it’s like to shoot Donald TrumpI’ve been photographing Trump for over 30 years now and I’ve never heard him say no to anything. You can go the extra mile with him. He’s obliging, he’s got a sense of humour, though you would never tell him a joke. I once shot him on top of Trump Tower. He had a shirt and tie on and did a boxer
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.09.16

  10-11-2016 08:14 via feedproxy.google.com
  What is our “Great Work” in light of this election?
  Several hours ago now, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. As the results of the election became clear, more than a few theater friends on my Facebook feed began to post the words: “The Great Work Begins” … read more
  AJBlog: Jumper Published 2016-11-09
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• Masterji: Coventry's secret 94-year-old photographer – in pictures

  10-11-2016 08:00
  
  Maganbhai Patel, known as Masterji, came to Coventry from India, and soon packed in his factory job for a career as a photographer. His images – now on show in his first exhibition – add up to a brilliantly evocative portrait of immigrant life Continue reading...
  
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