Arts news

• Elites? What Elites? Defending Against Vague Scapegoating

  16-12-2016 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "If pundits can agree on anything about 2016, it is surely that it has been bad for elites. Populist wave after populist wave has broken over Western politics, with a vote for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and Italy’s loss of a popular young prime minister over a constitutional referendum that he called—and lost. The masses are out for blood, and the elites are quaking."
  
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• Does This 300-Year-Old Ruggieri Violin Look So Good Because It Was Buried With Its Owner?

  16-12-2016 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  Violinist Chun-Yee owns the instrument, and it is pristine. After a performance in Israel, an audience member asked her about her Ruggieri. “My father often wondered about your violin,” she says he told her. “The reason he was wondering is he had heard that it had been buried with one of its owners.”
  
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• Rocky For NEA Chairman? Okay, Well...

  16-12-2016 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  To be sure, this is a weakly attributed story, even if it does open with a decent Rambo pun and a cheap allusion to Trump’s campaign slogan. And the rest of the Mail‘s story is just backfill on Stallone’s support for previous Republican candidates like John McCain in 2008. But, man, do I hope it’s true. Here’s why...
  
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• Canada's Essential National Culture Question

  16-12-2016 21:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  "How does a mid-sized power maintain any notion of cultural sovereignty in the face of the aptly acronymed FANG? (That’s Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google.) France, more aggressive than Canada in protecting and promoting its cultural industries, has always lent a sympathetic ear, and Paris is the home of UNESCO, the United Nations body charged with protecting culture internationally."
  
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• New York Times Classical Critics Pick Their Favorite CDs Of 2016

  16-12-2016 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  Five titles each from Zachary Woolfe, Anthony Tommasini, David Allen and James R. Oestreich. (Where's Corinna?)
  
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• Croatia Declares Itself A "Free Reading Zone"

  16-12-2016 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  It has made available more than 100,000 of the "top" books worldwide to readers. "It should not be important whether you are a member of an institution and whether you live in a city with bookstores and libraries in order to have access to books. We still approach the book depending on where we are and which institution we belong to. We still read what others dictate to us rather than what we find ourselves. There is still a very small number of writers who get a chance to publish. When the book
  
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• Rising US Visa Fees, Longer Processing Times, Are Making Touring Difficult For Canadian Musicians

  16-12-2016 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "At $325 (U.S.) a band, it’s not cheap – particularly for new musicians trying to get a foothold in a crucial music market that, on a map, looks otherwise easy to enter from here. And there are other troubles for artists: The processing time for these visas has ballooned over the past several years from 45 days to nearly 120, according to the Canadian Federation of Musicians (CFM), which helps artists file for permits."
  
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• Now That We Can Digitally Copy Art, Can We Save It?

  16-12-2016 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  As the world faces ongoing cultural heritage crises – from poverty, to war, to natural disaster – is the creation of copies the answer? Increasingly sophisticated technology, including 3D printing, offers an alternative to traditional preservation techniques. However, while these new technologies may solve problems of accessibility to precious antiquities they also raise other problems of authenticity and trust.
  
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• The Serpent’s Trail: Ernesto Neto Leads Us Through a Woven Forest of Symbols

  16-12-2016 19:28 via artnews.com
  Through December 17, at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York Read More
  
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• How To Be A Stoic (A Real One) And Stop Making Yourself Crazy

  16-12-2016 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Reading Epictetus, I realized that most of the pain in my life came not from any actual privations or insults but, rather, from the shame of thinking that they could have been avoided." Elif Batuman writes about how the teachings of a first-century ex-slave kept her sane.
  
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• A Blade of Grass Kicks Off Second Season of Its ‘Fieldworks’ Documentary Series, With Dread Scott, Suzanne Lacy, More

  16-12-2016 18:53 via artnews.com
  One of the problems of social practice artworks is that many times, after they are presented, they disappear. A Blade of Grass, the nonprofit devoted to socially engaged artists and artworks, has come up with a solution to that with … Read More
  
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• From the Archives: Mark Rothko’s 1957 Letter to the Editor About Being Called an ‘Action Painter’

  16-12-2016 18:47 via artnews.com
  With a show of Mark Rothko’s dark paintings now on view at the Pace gallery in New York, we turn back to the December 1957 issue of ARTnews, in which the artist wrote a letter to the editor, complaining that Elaine … Read More
  
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• ‘Feminist Avant-Garde of the 1970s’ at The Photographers’ Gallery, London

  16-12-2016 18:39 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Crowdfunding Has Become Increasingly Important For The Arts

  16-12-2016 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "In the US, Kickstarter famously helped raise more funds for the arts than the National Endowment for the Arts. In the UK crowdfunding for the arts has also grown rapidly, with models such as rewards-based crowdfunding – the model most popular with artists and creatives – facilitating £42m worth of donations in 2015, a growth of more than 60% from £26m in 2014."
  
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• University In St. Petersburg Has License Revoked; Putin Asked To Intervene

  16-12-2016 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "On Friday, the state education watchdog Rosobrnadzor forced the European University in St. Petersburg, a private post-graduate school for the social sciences and humanities, to halt all education activities. The order came after a St. Petersburg district court ruled that the university had violated several legal regulations."
  
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• How A City Can Use Tax Policy To Kill Creative Activity

  16-12-2016 18:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  In Toronto's hot real estate downtown property taxes are set to rocket. A small creative cluster at Trinity Square pays about $4,000 per month in rent for a 1,700-square-foot space. In 2016, the annual tax bill was $3,566. In 2017, it jumps to $6,808, and by 2020, it will be $11,900. The small arts groups that use the space will have to leave. They've protested, “but the message here is, ‘No, sorry — we don’t care.’ That really speaks to the issue: What do we want t
  
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• Tracey Emin to swap London for Kent after losing planning battle

  16-12-2016 17:33
  
  Turner prize-nominated artist says she is joining exodus of artists after being refused permission to expand east London studioTracey Emin is planning to leave east London, where she has lived and worked for decades, after a losing a protracted battle with Tower Hamlets council to expand her art studio, she has told the Guardian.The Turner prize-nominated artist was refused planning permission to build a studio and living space adjoining her Spitalfields studio space, after the project faced voc
  
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• A Dead End-End Career Track For English Majors?

  16-12-2016 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Traditionally, writing and teaching at the university level have been the career paths of choice for English majors. Nice work if you can get it. I never could, which is why I’ve spent most of my life as a librarian. My up and down career as a writer, on the other hand, has afforded me much satisfaction and very little money...  My real career as a librarian is all very well, but since it’s fundamentally a paycheck, I can’t muster excessive enthusiasm for an institution t
  
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• What Is Time? Perhaps It's No More Than Our Own Experience Of It

  16-12-2016 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "For more than two thousand years, the world's great minds have argued about the essence of time. Is it finite or infinite? Does it flow like a river or is it granular, proceeding in small bits, like sand trickling through an hourglass? And what is the present? Is now an indivisible instant, a line of vapor between the past and the future? Or is it an instant that can be measured - and, if so, how long is it? And what lies between the instants?" Adam Burdick argues that the first thinker we know
  
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• Chattering classes cause an almighty row at the Musée d’Orsay

  16-12-2016 16:55
  
  A teacher at a French secondary school has sparked debate about the treatment of school groups in French museums after a warden at the Muse dOrsay told her party of 93 pupils to shut their mouths during a visit to the Paris museum. The French Minister of Culture, Audrey Azoulay, has also been drawn into the row, and requested that a report be drawn up on the incident and its aftermath.Marianne Acqua, a teacher at the Maurice Utrillo de Stains school in Seine-Saint-Dennis northeast of Paris, has
  
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• In the Context of No Context: A Digital Billboard in Chicago Raises Questions About Art in the Public Sphere

  16-12-2016 16:29 via artnews.com
  Flashing brightly for a few seconds at a time, the black-and-white mugshot of an unnamed African-American male loomed against the Chicago skyline, interrupting the mundane ads—for sandwiches, lawyers, Hondas—that shared space on the same digital billboard. I only just glimpsed … Read More
  
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• Daily Mail Reports: Trump Offers Sylvester Stallone Top Job At NEA

  16-12-2016 16:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Sources have told DailyMail.com the president-elect sees Hollywood icon Stallone as the perfect choice to make art great again.  The likely position would be Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that doles out funds to aspiring artists and creative projects."
  
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• The Obama Paintings: using art to examine a presidential legacy

  16-12-2016 16:10
  
  Rob Pruitt has created an ambitious project made up of almost 3,000 panels devoted to each day of Barack Obama’s administration
  The valedictions for Barack Obama’s presidency are being prepared. Perhaps few will have the romanticism as the epic labor that New York artist Rob Pruitt has been preparing daily over the past eight years.
  By the time Obama steps down on 21 January, there will be some 3,000 red and blue shaded panels, each one taken from a news photograph taken of the presi
  
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• The Mummers Of Newfoundland (They're Nothing Like Philly's) Nearly Died Out, But Now They're Back

  16-12-2016 16:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  The old English Christmastime tradition never got as fancypants elaborate on The Rock as it did in Philadelphia. But it still included rowdy carousing by partyers in disguise - and, inevitably, some drunken mayhem and violence; as a result, for decades mummering was outlawed entirely there. But, beginning in 2009, the tradition was revived.
  
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• Now Hundreds Of Academics All Over America Want To Be On The Professor Watchlist

  16-12-2016 15:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  Last month, a conservative college group launched the Professor Watchlist, which purports to name and shame academics who "advance leftist propaganda in the classroom." Last week, 200-odd professors at Notre Dame demanded to be included on the list alongside two of their colleagues who had already been singled out. ("This is the sort of company we wish to keep," they said.)Now there's a website called Free Academics where professors can join the petition to be added to the Watchlist, and more th
  
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• How The New York Times Book Review Really Works

  16-12-2016 15:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  Pamela Paul, editor of the Sunday Times's literary supplement, did a Reddit "Ask Me Anything" this week, and Emily Temple has dug out from it ten things that most people probably don't know about the Book Review - not least, its differences with the daily paper's book reviews by staff critics.
  
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• Cornelius Gurlitt's Hidden Hoard Of Art Can Go To Swiss Museum, Rules Court

  16-12-2016 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Cornelius Gurlitt, son of one of Hitler's art dealers, was of sound mind when he bequeathed his extensive art collection to Bern Museum of Fine Arts in 2014, a Munich court has ruled. A cousin had launched an inheritance counter-claim. Bern can now take possession of the collection."
  
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• Morning Links: Gurlitt Collection Edition

  16-12-2016 15:00 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Unknown Velazquez Portrait To Go On View At Prado

  16-12-2016 14:50 via feedproxy.google.com
  "William B. Jordan, the art historian, said that he took his painting" - a portrait of Philip III of Spain - "to the Prado's art experts last year to have it authenticated after acquiring it in an auction in 1988."
  
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• Poland's Great National Epic Play Becomes The Same Sort Of Cultural Battleground That 'Hamilton' Just Became In The US

  16-12-2016 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady (usually rendered in English as Forefathers' Eve), a text every Pole studies in school, has been used to make strong cultural and political statements for decades. And, as in the States, a low-turnout election recently brought a right-wing nationalist government to power. So the new production of Dziady at the 2016 Theatre Olympics in Wrocław this past fall was potentially far more fraught than Hamilton became after Mike Pence saw it.
  
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• Jake and Dinos Chapman to have first major exhibition in Turkey

  16-12-2016 14:12
  
  British artists and brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, part of the YBA generation that rose to fame in the 1990s, are to have their first major solo show in Turkey next year. In the Realm of the Senseless opens at Arter, a private museum in Istanbul run by the Turkish billionaire and collector and Vehbi Ko, on 10 February (until 7 May).
  Organised by Nick Hackworth, the director of the London-based private collection Modern Forms, the exhibition will unite more Hell sculptures than ever before. Th
  
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• Frederic Leighton’s Flaming June: the Mona Lisa of the southern hemisphere

  16-12-2016 14:00
  
  The Victorian artist’s 1895 painting of a sleeping beauty blooms with tantalising, luxurious lifeUnconscious women, be they sleeping, entranced or dead, are a bit of a fixture in Victorian painting. Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Flaming June is one of the most famous; the other is Millais’s drowning Ophelia. Continue reading...
  
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• Ilaria Bonacossa to direct Artissima art fair for the next three years

  16-12-2016 12:52
  
  The directors of the Fondazione Torino Musei have named the curator and art historian Ilaria Bonacossa the director of the next three editions of Artissima, the leading Italian contemporary art fair based in Turin. She is no stranger to the northern Italian city, having served as the curator at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo from 2002 to 2009.Bonacossa succeeds Sarah Cosulich, who has been at the helm of the art fair for the past five years. Cosulichs initial three-year term was extende
  
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• Moomins, board games and taxidermy – the week in art

  16-12-2016 12:49
  
  The first UK exhibition devoted to the Moomins opens, while Djordje Ozbolt’s bizarre pastiches arrive in Bath – plus the rest of the week’s art happeningsAdventures in Moominland
  Interactive exhibition for all ages about the Finnish artist and writer Tove Jansson and her surreal creations the Moomins.
  • Southbank Centre, London, until 23 April Continue reading...
  
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• Appeals court upholds two-year suspended sentence for Picasso’s electrician

  16-12-2016 11:22
  
  The court of appeal in Aix-en-Provence upheld the two-year suspended prison sentence of Pierre Le Guennec, 77, Picasso's electrician who hid 271 works stolen from the artist for over four decades. In this final judgement on 16 December, his wife Danielle received the same penalty.The art works, valued at 70m to 80m, will be returned to the Picasso family. Dated from between 1900 to 1930, they include portraits of family and friends, such as his first wife Olga, Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jac
  
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• Why Brussels is not the new Berlin

  16-12-2016 10:00
  
  When I moved to Brussels a decade ago, the talk about the city being the new Berlin had already started. There were a small group of well-known international artists living here in 2006 and the contemporary art centre Wiels had just opened. There were several good galleries and a few non-profit spaces, but not enough to justify the new Berlin hype. Ten years on the gallery scene has expanded (but not exploded) to include a number of international players, mainly coming from neighbouring Paris f
  
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• The Grammar Police And Do They Matter?

  16-12-2016 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  The last time I Googled “grammar Nazi,” I got 1,660,000 hits, including many images of a “G” that looks like a swastika. “Grammarian” drew only 1,230,000, even though grammarians were performing their evils long before Hitler. The Urban Dictionary’s top definition of “grammar Nazi” was “someone who believes it’s their duty to attempt to correct any grammar or spelling mistakes they observe.” Not a very appealing someone. The
  
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