Arts news

• It’s Official: Pittsburgh Symphony Strike Is Over

  23-11-2016 23:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The musicians are taking a sizable pay cut in the first year of the new contract’s five-year term, with salaries edging back upward later.
  
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• This Notion Of Fakes In The Art World Prompts The Need For A Definition Of Real

  23-11-2016 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What is it about a specific piece of art that makes it become seen as an esteemed creation, while something entirely similar can be viewed as nothing more than (quite literally) a vessel for disposing of human excrement? This was the brazen question that researchers at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Leuven in Belgium recently tackled using the scientific method. They published their results in the journal Human Nature in October.”
  
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• That Running Conversation You Have With Yourself Inside Your Head? It’s Called “Inner Speech” And We’re Learning About It

  23-11-2016 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I think it was assumed that inner speech was just this kind of monologue, the output of a solitary voice chattering away in your head. And we now think there are a few main kinds of inner speech. Inner speech varies according to how compressed it is, how condensed. We think inner speech varies according to how much it’s like a conversation between different points of view. We’re starting to tease apart these different qualities. And that fits with the idea that inner speech ha
  
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• Writers muse on millennium-long music project and Trump the 'Ogre King'

  23-11-2016 22:00
  
  There was much food for thought in the erudite, animated and often extremely funny exchanges between the novelist and playwright Ali Smith and the writer and academic Marina Warner last night (23 November) in the anatomy lecture theatre of Kings College London. The formidable duo were the latest participants in Artangels annual series of public Longplayer Conversations, in which a pair of leading cultural thinkers discusses ideas around Longplayer, a musical composition that unfolds in real tim
  
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• The colossal public sculpture show that the UK forgot

  23-11-2016 22:00
  In 1971, organisers of the City Sculpture Project invited 24 artists to submit models for possible construction and public installation in one of eight cities across the UK. They had whittled down their list from around 200 artists, and finally selected 14 works to be put in cities including Birmingham and Liverpool. For six months, the sculptures (by artists such as Barry Flanagan, Nicholas Monro and Liliane Lijn) were kept in situ, after which each city could then elect to buy the work and mak
  
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• National Gallery's acquisition of Pontormo portrait under threat

  23-11-2016 22:00
  
  The National Gallery in London is facing a hurdle in securing a Jacopo Pontormo portrait after raising more than 30m to acquire it. The American owner, who bought the painting last year and then applied for an export licence to bring it to the US, has not yet accepted the gallerys offer to match the price he paid for the work, although he is obliged to do so under UK export regulations.Portrait of a Young Man in a Red Cap (1530), depicting the Florentine aristocrat Carlo Neroni, was sold last y
  
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• King of the mountain: $11m Lawren Harris painting breaks all records for Canadian art

  23-11-2016 22:00
  
  One crack of the hammer, one giant leap for Canadian art, said David Heffel, the president of the auction house Heffel Fine Art, on Wednesday night, as he closed bidding on the record-shattering sale of the evenings star lot, a landscape painting by the artist Lawren Harris. Mountain Forms, a somewhat somber oil from around 1926, nearly doubled its pre-sale high estimate of $3m-$5m and sold for $9.5m Canadian dollars ($11.2m with buyers premium), boosting sales at Heffels annual fall auction in
  
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• Auction houses avoid Chinese New Year clash

  23-11-2016 22:00
  Christies, Sothebys and Phillips have changed the dates of their February auctions in Londonfrom the start of the month to its final week and the beginning of March. The new schedule avoids a clash with Chinese New Year, a one-week public holiday in China that next year will last from 27 January to 2 February.
  The first to announce the change was Christies, at a press conference after last weeks New York sales in response to a question about how Asian clients gave the evening sales a much-neede
  
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• Each Age Imagines That Technology Will Make The World Better. There Are Problems With This Idea…

  23-11-2016 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Technological utopianism is always self-aggrandizing. “We stand at the high peak between ages!” the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in his “Manifeste du Futurisme” in 1909, predicting, among other things, that the Futurist cinema would spell the end of drama and the book. Every other modern era has seen itself in exactly the same way, poised at the brink of an epochal transformation wrought by its newly dominant technology, which, as Carr notes, is always seen as &ld
  
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• What Mark Rylance, Anne-Marie Duff, Simon Russell Beale, And Michael C. Hall Really Do Backstage

  23-11-2016 21:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Rylance plays ping-pong; Beale runs through his entire part; Dominic Cooper east lots of cheese; Duff is too superstitious (and embarrassed) to tell us what she does.
  
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• 28 Things That Would Make The Visual Art World A Better Place

  23-11-2016 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What if the art world was a lot more integrated into the world world? What if the art world and the world world existed in a state of mutual accountability to one another? What if art was valued as a shared cultural transmission that brings people together despite difference, instead of as a luxury good that promotes class division?”
  
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• Fifty Years Ago, Truman Capote’s Black And White Ball Was The Best Soirée Ever

  23-11-2016 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Before the Black and White Ball, no one had ever imagined, let alone attended, a formal party with a guest list so wildly catholic that it brought into one room the poet Marianne Moore and Frank Sinatra, Gloria Vanderbilt and Lionel Trilling, Lynda Bird Johnson and the Maharani of Jaipur, the Italian princess Luciana Pignatelli (wearing a 60-carat diamond borrowed from Harry Winston) and the documentary filmmaker Albert Maysles.”
  
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• Poem Signed By Anne Frank Sells For $150,000

  23-11-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The eight-line poem, half of which was copied from a Dutch book of verse, is dated March 28, 1942, shortly before Anne and her family went into hiding from the Netherlands’ wartime Nazi occupiers in a secret apartment in an Amsterdam canal house.
  
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• Behind The Scenes Of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” (And The Two Times He Quit)

  23-11-2016 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  A new book details it. “For all the fun it looked like everyone was having, it turns out the climate behind the scenes wasn’t always such a joy. (Though, to be clear, there was plenty of that, too. Tired joy, to read the staffers’ accounts. But joy nonetheless.)”
  
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• The Great Passion Project Of Martin Scorsese’s Career Is About — A 17th-Century Jesuit In Japan? Why?

  23-11-2016 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “He is known for his gangster pictures; he is a grandmaster of the profane. From the beginning, he has revealed himself to be an artist of intensely Catholic preoccupations, and the poisoned arrow of religious conflict runs straight through his career.”
  
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• ‘Enacting Stillness’ at the 8th Floor, New York

  23-11-2016 19:00 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• These Are The Biggest Hollywood Flops Of 2016

  23-11-2016 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Comedies accounted for 50% of the flops on this year’s list of least profitable movies. The worst performing funny film: horror comedy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which made back just 58% ($16.4 million) of its estimated $28 million production budget at the box office.
  
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• Fog on the Tate: gallery seeks to reshape idea of what an art show can be

  23-11-2016 18:27
  
  Ten Days Six Nights at Tate Modern, London, will include immersive fog sculpture outside Switch House extensionFor 10 days next spring a dense fog will envelop the new Tate Modern building while, inside, visitors might enter a conceptual nightclub, follow elephants to their graveyard or learn how to dance kizomba.
  The gallery has announced details of what it called a “new departure in the concept of the art exhibition”. For “Ten Days Six Nights”, the first BMW Tate Live e
  
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• Francis Picabia: the art 'loser' who ended up winning it all

  23-11-2016 18:08
  
  An extravagant new retrospective of the avant-garde French-Cuban artist highlights often troubling yet always distinctive workThe president-elect’s favorite term of abuse is “loser” – lobbed more than 200 times from his toxic Twitter account, at victims from Jeb Bush to Rosie O’Donnell. When people like him are winners, “loser” might be an insult worth reclaiming. There’s a photo-collage from 1920, the first Francis Picabia ever made, in which the
  
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• ‘An Antidote To Shame’: Garth Greenwell On James Baldwin’s ‘Giovanni’s Room’

  23-11-2016 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Shame is one of the central subjects of Giovanni’s Room … But that’s not stating it strongly enough: the whole novel is a kind of anatomy of shame, of its roots and the myths that perpetuate it, of the damage it can do. … That was the balm of the book when I first read it, the sense it gives that the tragedy it recounts is anything but inevitable.”
  
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• The Totally Inspiring Story Of How Two Kenyans Started A Library And A Bookstore

  23-11-2016 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The online store, which Arunga described as “Amazon for Africa, with fewer payment options,” has now sold a thousand books in Kenya and beyond—a relative handful, but, to Williams, a meaningful start. In order to support a full-time employee, he said, the store only needs to sell fifty books a day. And if that happens it could serve as a proof of concept for literary entrepreneurship in the developing world.
  
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• Swahili – How A Minor Zanzibar Dialect Became The Lingua Franca Of Half A Continent

  23-11-2016 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  An estimated 100 million people speak Swahili – more than French, Turkish, or Korean. And now enthusiasts are trying to spread use of the language all across Africa. (audio)
  
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• Norman Rockwell's Statue of Liberty can point Trump towards decency | Jonathan Jones

  23-11-2016 17:00
  
  Rockwell’s painting was positioned behind Donald Trump’s head as he met Obama in the White House. But this isn’t trolling – it’s a reminder to Trump that America is the land of the freeNorman Rockwell is the great healer of American art. His paintings reconcile midwestern values with surprisingly progressive ideals, artistic traditionalism with optimism about the modern world, old-fashioned conservatism with liberal decency. Related: The unholy power of that Farage-
  
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• State Hermitage Museum to stage Pompeii show in 2018

  23-11-2016 16:57
  
  The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is to host a major exhibition dedicated to the lost Roman city of Pompeii in 2018 after signing a four-year partnership with the sites superintendency and the Naples Archaeological Museum.
  This is the second major agreement to show artefacts excavated from the 2,000-year-old site abroad, following the US tour of Pompeii: The Exhibition, which opened last week at Union Station Kansas City (until 29 May 2017) and will travel to venues in Phoenix, Texas,
  
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• Hansfried Defet obituary

  23-11-2016 16:57
  
  My wife’s uncle, Hansfried Defet, who has died aged 90, was the founder and driving force behind Da Vinci Künstlerpinselfabrik, the Nuremberg-based manufacturer of high-quality artists’ and cosmetic brushes, a third of which are sold in the UK. Hansfried also contributed to the contemporary art movement through his support for artists and as an art collector.The elder of two children of Anna (nee Hagen) and Friedrich Defet, Hansfried was born into a family of brush-makers in the
  
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• Reimagining A Bauhaus Ballet For The Age Of Smartphones And Artificial Intelligence

  23-11-2016 16:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Oskar Schlemmer created his 1922 Triadic Ballet as a response to the Industrial Age. Now two curators and 30 collaborators, including Karole Armitage (choreography) and furniture designers the Campana brothers (costumes), have mounted an updated version in, of all places, Jersey City.
  
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• An Olfactory Artist Recreates The Aromas Of 35 Cities

  23-11-2016 16:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Sissel Tolaas has a collection – a library, if you will – of more than 6,500 odors in airtight cans as well as a “smell camera” she travels with. She’s created what she calls SmellScapes of towns as varied as Mexico City, Paris, Berlin, Cape Town, London, Kansas City, and, most recently, Singapore. Here’s how she does it.
  
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• Tied and True: Françoise Grossen’s Twisted Ropes at MAD Conjure Intriguing Records of Time Wound Up in Exacting Repetitions

  23-11-2016 15:53 via artnews.com
  Through March 15 Read More
  
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• Tied and True: Françoise Gossen’s Twisted Ropes at MAD Conjure Intriguing Records of Time Wound Up in Exacting Repetitions

  23-11-2016 15:53 via artnews.com
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• ‘To What Degree Are We Really Improvising?’: Avram Fefer on Making Music With Richard Serra Sculptures

  23-11-2016 15:35 via artnews.com
  Together with a small group of spectators and a couple cameramen, I recently watched the New York-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Avram Fefer play music in and around a Richard Serra sculpture at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The rust-colored sculpture, titled … Read More
  
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• ‘To What Degree Are We Really Improvising?’: Arvam Fefer on Making Music With Richard Serra Sculptures

  23-11-2016 15:35 via artnews.com
  Together with a small group of spectators and a couple cameramen, I recently watched the New York-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Avram Fefer play music in and around a Richard Serra sculpture at Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea. The rust-colored sculpture, titled … Read More
  
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• ‘Blamegiving Day’ – For Decades, Secularists Campaigned To Get God Out Of Thanksgiving And Concern For The Poor Into It

  23-11-2016 15:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  You think the “War on Christmas” is a bitter struggle, Bill O’Reilly? Pish-posh. Repeated efforts by secularists to erase the religious element from a U.S. government-declared national holiday go all the way back to President Grover Cleveland and before.
  
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• Morning Links: Matchstick Edition

  23-11-2016 15:11 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• The High-Tech Workshop That’s Produced Exact Replicas Of Caravaggio Paintings And Tutankhamun’s Tomb

  23-11-2016 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Factum Arte won fame for installing a faithful copy of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana where Napoleon had ripped the original from the wall. Its full-size copy of the teenage pharaoh’s burial chamber has been installed at Luxor so that tourists can spend time in it without their breath and body moisture damaging the original. Now there’s a hope that Factum could help recreate at least some of what ISIS destroyed at Nimrud.
  
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• Japan pledges $11.4m for mosaic conservation project in Hisham’s Palace in Jericho

  23-11-2016 14:50
  
  Conservation work has begun on one of the Middle Easts largest mosaics. The project to restore the nearly 1,300-year-old, 827 sq. m carpet mosaic in the hammam (public bath) at Hishams Palace complex near Jericho, in Palestines West Bank, is expected to cost at least 1.235bn (around $11.4m).
   
  The project, funded by the Japanese government, launched on 20 October with a ceremonial unveiling of the mosaic, which has been hidden under protective layers of fabric, soil and sand since it was e
  
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• Eight Broadway Stars And Directors Give Their Thoughts On Trump’s Tweets And Theater As Safe Space

  23-11-2016 14:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Susan Stroman: “For somebody like me who’s done The Scottsboro Boys, it’s a space to start a conversation.”Matthew Broderick: “We’re now talking about yet another nonissue. … It’s like [Trump] flashes a little shiny paper in front of everybody and any bit of bad news gets forgotten.”Andrea Martin: “‘A safe place.’ Not if Patti LuPone’s onstage!”
  
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• In 19th-Century America, Theater Was Anything But A Safe Space

  23-11-2016 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  To judge from newspaper reports of the time, audience behavior was more like what you get at a midnight screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  
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• Tate Modern launches ten-day live art exhibition in the Tanks

  23-11-2016 14:25
  
  Tate Modern is launching a ten-day exhibition of live art in and around its subterranean Tanks space next spring. The BMW Tate Live Exhibition (24 March-2 April 2017), which will be held annually, will mix installation, performance, video and sound works, marking a "new departure in the concept of the art exhibition", the organisers say. The project is an "essential cornerstone" of Tates ambition to "become a museum of the 21st century", said Tate Moderns director of exhibitions, Achi
  
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• Manifesta Taps Office of Metropolitan Architecture as ‘Creative Mediator’ for 2018 Edition

  23-11-2016 14:00 via artnews.com
  Manifesta, the roving European biennial, announced today that the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) will be creative mediator for its upcoming 12th edition, set to open in Palermo, Italy, in 2018.As creative mediator, OMA will investigate how Italian cities are governed, … Read More
  
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• Interview with John M. Bennett

  23-11-2016 13:59 via feedproxy.google.com
  John M. Bennett is incredible. He’s an old school experimental writer. He takes no prisoners. He looks for new ways of expressing his ideas. And he finds anywhere he looks. His work ethic is insane and he can be considered to be “the man” in realm of experimental literature. He’s a go-to guy if you need to know something about being experimental all the time and not being ridiculous. His body of work is an example of how it is possible to steadily move forward for more th
  
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• Bauhaus centenary in 2019 will be marked by events across Germany and beyond

  23-11-2016 12:22
  
  The 2019 Bauhaus centenary celebrations are set to include two new museum openings in the pioneering design schools home cities of Weimar and Dessau, jubilee exhibitions, an opening festival in Berlin and a Grand Tour of Modernism to encompass 100 destinations around the country, the organisers have announced.The new Bauhaus Museum Weimar, a glass cube set on a concrete pedestal to be built on the edge of the Weimarhallenpark, is designed by the Berlin architect Heike Hanada with a budget of 22
  
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• Jenni Lomax to step down as director of Camden Arts Centre after 26 years

  23-11-2016 12:11
  
  After 26 years at the helm, Jenni Lomax is to step down as the director of the Camden Arts Centre in north London next July. During her tenure, Lomax transformed the public institution into an internationally renowned exhibition space, giving artists such as Sophie Calle, Valie Export and Marlene Dumas their first solo shows in the UK.Her first exhibition at the centre in 1991 was a show of Michelangelo Pistolettos Minus Objectsthe first time the group of everyday and found objects was sho
  
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• On Kawara’s One Million Years to be performed at the Venice Biennale

  23-11-2016 12:03
  
  The Japanese-born American conceptual artist On Kawaras performance piece, One Million Years, is heading to the Venice Biennale next year. The epic, ongoing project will be performed for the first three months of the biennial (13 May until around 1 August) in the Oratorio di San Ludovico Dorsoduro, a 16th-century ecclesiastic building dedicated, fittingly, to the spoken word.The ecclesiastic setting is very appropriate for a work that has such profound philosophical implications, says Jonathan
  
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• Bob Dylan on Da Vinci, Van Gogh and the camera obscura

  23-11-2016 11:00
  
  In 1974 I played the first of many shows with The Bandmaybe in eight years. We were in a hockey arena in Chicago. There were maybe 18,000 people there. The Band and I hadnt played publicly together since 1966 where our shows caused a lot of disruption and turmoila lot of anger. Now we were in Chicago starting up again. There was no way to predict what was going to happen. At the end of the concert we had played over 25 or 30 songs and we were standing on the stage looking out. The audience was
  
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• What unites us all? Nobel prize winner Bob Dylan says the answer, my friend, is in his paintings

  23-11-2016 09:26
  
  In 1974 I played the first of many shows with The Bandmaybe in eight years. We were in a hockey arena in Chicago. There were maybe 18,000 people there. The Band and I hadnt played publicly together since 1966 where our shows caused a lot of disruption and turmoila lot of anger. Now we were in Chicago starting up again. There was no way to predict what was going to happen. At the end of the concert we had played over 25 or 30 songs and we were standing on the stage looking out. The audience was
  
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• Jenni Lomax to step down as director of Camden Arts Centre

  23-11-2016 09:00
  
  Lomax, who gave early break to UK artists including Martin Creed and Mike Nelson, to leave after 26 years in charge of venueJenni Lomax is to step down after 26 years as director of Camden Arts Centre, having elevated it from a local artist-run space to an arts venue of international stature.Lomax, who was awarded an OBE in 2009, will step down in July 2017. During her time as director she oversaw a redevelopment of the building and gave an early break to major British artists such as Martin Cre
  
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• All fired up: Attenborough’s Picasso ceramics sell out at Sotheby’s

  23-11-2016 00:06
  
  The late, great British actor and director Richard Attenborough was ahead of the curve when it came to Picasso ceramics if the prices paid at an auction of such works held today (22 November) is anything to go by. Sixty-seven lots from the collection that he and his wife Sheila built over 50 years went under the hammer at Sothebys London with an estimated combined total in the region of 1.5m. All of the lots were sold in a white glove sale that fetched 3m in total ($3.8m; with buyers p
  
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• Research Reveals Six Story Arcs We All Respond To

  23-11-2016 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  They examined 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection — all English-language texts between 20,000 and 100,000 words — using three language processing filters. In the end, they found “broad support for the following six emotional arcs…”
  
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