Arts news

• Kennicott: Controversy Over Loan Of Painting For Trump Inaugural Is A Test

  13-01-2017 23:57 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The St. Louis museum isn’t backing off its commitment to send the painting to Washington, and the effort to stop it is a small pre-election skirmish in what will be a long, fraught and likely disorganized boycott of the Trump administration by artists, scholars, and citizens who align themselves with the arts and humanities sector. The petition, and the flurry of attention it raised, is important as a moment of what might be called the “stress testing” of this country’s
  
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• The Choice Of Tristram Hunt To Lead The V&A Museum Is Shocking

  13-01-2017 23:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  Few would doubt his interest in the art and heritage sectors, or his knowledge of his own academic field. But now that he is to be the director of one of them, does he still support the reintroduction of admission fees in national museums, which he proposed in 2011 as ‘a truly equitable cultural policy’?
  
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• Jennifer Holliday To Sing At Trump Inaugural Concert

  13-01-2017 23:10 via feedproxy.google.com
  “I’m singing on the mall for the people,” she said. “I don’t have a dog in this fight — I’m just a singer, and it’s a welcome concert for the people on the mall.”
  
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• How Algorithms Designed Hamburg's Stunning New Concert Hall

  13-01-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The auditorium—the largest of three concert halls in the Elbphilharmonie—is a product of parametric design, a process by which designers use algorithms to develop an object’s form. Algorithms have helped design bridges, motorcycle parts, typefaces—even chairs. In the case of the Elbphilharmonie, Herzog and De Meuron used algorithms to generate a unique shape for each of the 10,000 gypsum fiber acoustic panels that line the auditorium’s walls like the interlocking p
  
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• Another Day in Paradise review – a raw, emotional insight into Bali Nine artist's life on death row

  13-01-2017 23:01
  
  Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney
  The first major exhibition of Myuran Sukumaran’s art is showing at Sydney festival and reflects his struggle to come to terms with his own death• Another Day in Paradise: Bali Nine member Myuran Sukumaran’s art – in pictures Myuran Sukumaran looks over his shoulder, chin up-titled, appraising you with a wary expression in the portrait that greets you as you walk through the doors of the Campbelltown Arts Centre gallery. It is a self portrai
  
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• Another Day in Paradise: Bali Nine member Myuran Sukumaran's art – in pictures

  13-01-2017 23:00
  
  The first major exhibition of the artwork by executed Bali Nine member Myuran Sukumaran is showing as part of Sydney festival. Co-presented by Campbelltown Arts Centre and curated by Ben Quilty and Michael Dagostino, Another Day in Paradise features Sukumaran’s paintings alongside a selection of commissioned works from Australian artists responding to issues such as justice, racism and capital punishment• Another Day in Paradise review – a raw, emotional insight into Bali Nine a
  
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• From the Archives: Lawrence Alloway and William Feaver on Anthony Caro’s Gritty Sculptures

  13-01-2017 22:44 via artnews.com
  With an Anthony Caro show currently on view at Mitchell-Innes & Nash gallery in New York, we turn back through the ARTnews archives. Because the show brings together very early and very late work from the British artist’s career, we … Read More
  
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• Soil, Dust, Life: Dineo Seshee Bopape on Her Earthy, Searching Art

  13-01-2017 22:40 via artnews.com
  Dineo Seshee Bopape’s first solo exhibition in the United States—“sa ___ ke lerole, (se lerole ke __),” at Art in General through January 14—considers history, gender, politics, and memory contained within land itself. Bopape has used actions and symbols to … Read More
  
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• Montaigne Was The Inventor Of Liberalism. But What Do We Really Know About Him?

  13-01-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  “What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? And what do we really know about him now? We may vaguely know that he was the first essayist, that he retreated from the world into a tower on the family estate to think and reflect, and that he wrote about cannibals (for them) and about cruelty (against it). He was considered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, no less, to be the first social scientist, and a pioneer of relativism—he thought that
  
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• Nasty Women art exhibit aims at taking power back from Trump

  13-01-2017 22:13
  
  A collection of pieces from more than 700 artists celebrates femininity and strength in the face of adversityYesterday, while the French far-right leader Marine Le Pen was sipping coffee at Trump Tower, volunteers gathered at a converted factory building in Queens to put the finishing touches on the Nasty Women installation, an art exhibit staged as a visual protest. More than 700 female-identifying artists contributed works to the show, which was named after the slur that Trump called Clinton i
  
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• "Fake Art" - Has Richard Prince Invented A New Kind Of Conceptual Art?

  13-01-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  The phrase sort of made my head spin — is it possible Prince had just invented a whole new conceptual category of art? What could “fake art” mean? It certainly doesn’t mean “forgery,” and it can’t simply mean “bad art.” But it doesn’t seem to me simply to mean “work bought by someone the artist disapproves of” or even “work no longer condoned by the artist.” It seems — to me, anyway — to suggest somet
  
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• V&A celebrates life and work of the other Kipling

  13-01-2017 22:00
  Hear the name Kipling and you are more likely to think of The Jungle Book than of Indian Arts and Crafts. Yet the lesser-known Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), father of the English writer and poet Rudyard, was an influential figure in the Arts and Crafts movement in England and a champion of traditional Indian craftsmanship.
  Having begun his career as a designer, Lockwood Kipling spent almost 30 years teaching and working in the arts in India. In the early 1860s, he joined the South Kensington Mus
  
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• A musical performance through AI eyes

  13-01-2017 22:00
  
  How do machines see a musical performance? The artist Trevor Paglenwhose probing work has included locating underwater cables and charting US military bases in the desertwill explore this in a new performance piece, Sight Machine, to be staged at Pier 70 in San Francisco today (14 January) at 8pm. The San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet will play a live 12-song set that ranges from Bach to blues, to an audience of both people and machines. During the first song, Bachs Contrapuntus II, a live vid
  
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• Seydou Keïta at Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Brussels

  13-01-2017 21:58 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Why Hypocrisy Is The Unforgivable Sin

  13-01-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Researchers: "We contend that the reason people dislike hypocrites is that their outspoken moralizing falsely signals their own virtue. People object, in other words, to the misleading implication — not to a failure of will or a weakness of character."
  
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• 'Red Bull Flying Bach' - Break-Dancing To 'The Well-Tempered Clavier'

  13-01-2017 21:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  "When German break-dancer Vartan Bassil came up with the idea for Red Bull Flying Bach, he hoped to bring together those who sneer at pop culture and those who snore at high culture. And he hoped to impress the other parents in the room."
  
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• LA's Construction Boom Is Provoking An Existential Crisis

  13-01-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "On the same Tuesday in March that will see Mayor Eric Garcetti facing no real opposition for reelection, L.A. voters will consider Measure S (once known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative), which calls for a two-year moratorium on major new development projects. Its backers say new construction is out of control — and out of scale with historically low-rise Los Angeles. What they can’t quite bring themselves to say is that the measure itself is an expr
  
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• The Strangest Things Librarians Have Found In Returned Books

  13-01-2017 20:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Inspired by [Claire Fuller's] Swimming Lessons, we went to the experts in unexpected ephemera and well-loved books - librarians - and asked them to tell us the most interesting thing they'd found in a library book. Their answers delighted, disgusted, and exceeded our wildest expectations. It was hard to pick our favorites, but here they are."
  
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• The 24-Year-Old Choreographer Who Wants To Make Dance The Intersection Of Everything

  13-01-2017 19:55 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Artists fail when they aren’t able to make their art a brand,” says the choreographer and dancer, who is lean in an almost feline way, with thick muscles that propel him into lithe motion at the slightest provocation. “We want to be at the intersection of dance and fashion — of dance and advertising. How do we get dance to a wider audience?”
  
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• The Problem With 'Frankenstein' And The Warnings Against 'Playing God'

  13-01-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Secular and religious, critic and journalist alike have summoned the term to deride and outright dismiss entire areas of research and technology, including stem cells, genetically modified crops, recombinant DNA, geoengineering, and gene editing. ... To urge against playing God ... is to convey a mistrust of scientists - and to criticize their arrogance in the face of the power and unpredictability of nature."
  
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• American embassy hosts Syrian painting show in London

  13-01-2017 18:49
  
  The American embassy in London is hosting a display of paintings by Syrian exiles, a week before the US Ambassador to the UK leaves his post, ahead of President-Elect Donald Trumps inauguration. In one of his final speeches as ambassador at the exhibition opening on 13 January, Matthew Barzun stressed the importance of showing the art in this period of destruction in Syria.
  Entitled The Art of Resilience, the show is displayed in the entrance foyer of the embassy in Grosvenor Square, which norm
  
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• Adam Smith obituary

  13-01-2017 18:47
  
  Our son, Adam Smith, who has died aged 32 of cancer, was an artist and sculptural fabricator who leaves a pictorial testimony; not only in his own paintings, but also in works by artists such as Mat Collishaw and Cath Campbell, which were made possible by his capacity for translating a basic concept into an engineering triumph.Born in Aldershot, Hampshire, but brought up on the edge of the New Forest, Adam was the son of Adrian, a history professor, and Mary (nee Broad), a teacher. He attended O
  
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• For Years No One Wanted To Make "La La Land"

  13-01-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "There were so many instances, in the five or six years since I wrote it, where it seemed so close to being made. It's the typical Hollywood story — everything falls apart. Every time, I would curse myself and go, 'Goddamn it.'"
  
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• New York City Hall Gives $2 Million To Increase Diversity In Theatre

  13-01-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The funding, provided by the city's Theater Subdistrict Council, will go to paid training and mentorship opportunities at organizations like the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Harlem Stage, Roundabout Theater Company and the New York Theater Workshop."
  
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• Lord Snowdon, photographer of British high society, dies aged 86

  13-01-2017 17:43
  Lord Snowdon, the British photographer who was married to Princess Margaret, the younger daughter of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, died on 13 January at the age of 86.
  Antony Armstrong-Jones established himself early in his career as a society, fashion, design and theatre photographer. Of solid upper-middle-class stock (his father was a barrister), Armstrong-Jones attended Eton and Jesus College, Cambridge, where he failed to take his degree. His career as a society portraitist flourishedin 1
  
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• How "The Front Page" Works Behind The Scenes

  13-01-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "How does a cast of 25 actors, plus a dozen stage managers, stagehands, electricians, dressers, props handlers and makeup artists get into the proper groove to envelop a Broadway audience in the antics of an 88-year-old play? Musicals these days are often as large or even larger. But rising costs and a shrinking pool of interested theatergoers have made straight plays of this magnitude an extreme rarity on BroadwayIt’s a complex organism, a Broadway production of this caliber, with a backs
  
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• Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropologist Of Voodoo

  13-01-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  When she was pursuing a Ph.D. at Columbia, she got a GuggenheimFellowship to study obeah in Jamaica and (later) vodou in Haiti. Her goal was to write what she called "the proper voodoo book," raising the understanding of Afro-Caribbean religion beyond the "black magic" and "devil worship" (her words) caricatures prevalent in the 1930s.
  
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• Martha Swope, Dance And Theatre Photographer, Dead At 88

  13-01-2017 16:38 via feedproxy.google.com
  "From 1957, when Ms. Swope was invited by Jerome Robbins to shoot rehearsals of West Side Story, to 1994, when she shut down her Times Square studio and sold her archive, Ms. Swope produced hundreds of thousands of images of performers in action, capturing Gelsey Kirkland and Mikhail Baryshnikov in full flight, the cast of La Cage Aux Folles in full drag and John Travolta in full Saturday night fever."
  
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• Walker Art Center Artistic Director Fionn Meade Has Resigned

  13-01-2017 16:23 via artnews.com
  The Walker Art Center, the 76-year-old contemporary art institution in Minneapolis, Minnesota, announced this morning that its artistic director, Fionn Meade, has resigned. He has been at the institution for three years, and the museum had created two new posts … Read More
  
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• The Strange Story Of David Bowie's Unfinished Broadway Musical (Told By The Pulitzer Winner Bowie Asked To Write The Book)

  13-01-2017 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  "When novelist Michael Cunningham got a call from someone claiming to be David Bowie, he thought it was a friend pulling a prank. He didn't know he was about to be launched into a yearlong collaboration on a musical involving space aliens, mariachi bands, and an imaginary trove of unreleased songs by Bob Dylan."
  
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• Greek mythology, Kipling's father and Matisse's scissors – the week in art

  13-01-2017 15:52
  
  Ovid inspires artistic transformations while Michael Andrews’ Gagosian show makes him ripe for rediscovery – plus the rest of the week’s art happeningsMichael AndrewsPoetic and haunting paintings by a major British artist ripe for rediscovery.
  • Gagosian Gallery, Grosvenor Hill, London, 20 January–25 March Continue reading...
  
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• These Texas Standardized Test Questions About My Poems Are So Bad Even I Can't Answer Them, Says Writer

  13-01-2017 15:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  Sara Holbrook: "These test questions were just made up, and tragically, incomprehensibly, kids' futures and the evaluations of their teachers will be based on their ability to guess the so-called correct answer to made up questions. ... Stop it. Just stop it." (includes test questions, plus annotations)
  
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• 'Ballet Remains A Sexist View Of The World' - Alastair Macaulay On The Form's Gender Roles In The 21st Century

  13-01-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[That view is] one that privileges the woman, certainly, but on terms that let her shine only by doing what no man can. Should we agree with the choreographer George Balanchine (1904-83) that 'ballet is woman'? Or do we qualify this, as the choreographer Pam Tanowitz (born in 1969) has recently done, by saying that ballet is a man's idea of woman?"
  
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• Plan For New Concert Hall For London Brought Back From The Dead

  13-01-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The scheme, costed at £278m, appeared derailed in November when the [national] government unexpectedly announced it was withdrawing money it had pledged for a detailed business case to be made. On Thursday the City [of London] said it would provide the money, up to £2.5m, needed to complete it." The move comes just as Hamburg has opened its new concert hall to ecstatic reviews.
  
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• Maria Balshaw: Tate's director-elect dares artists to be different

  13-01-2017 15:08
  
  The Tate’s choice of leader helped inspire Manchester’s cultural revival and is said to have an instinctive feel for what worksIn 2004, Maria Balshaw was one of 27 people chosen to take part in what was then an experiment to forge a new generation of arts leaders. “If all goes to plan,” as one newspaper put it at the time, the candidates on the Clore leadership programme “will be as significant in the cultural life of Britain in the years to come as Sir Nicholas Ser
  
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• Hamburg's Spectacular New Concert Hall Sounds As Good As It Looks

  13-01-2017 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Rick Fulker: "From my vantage point, the stage was far below, but despite the distance from the source of the music, I had the sensation of sitting amidst it. ... [The program] spanned five centuries of Occidental art music, and the interior space played along. Soloists and small ensembles sometimes performed from the upper balconies, but whether five or fifty meters away, they sounded equally vivid as the orchestra down there onstage."
  
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• Morning Links: Denounced ‘Instagram Portrait’ Edition

  13-01-2017 14:57 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the art world Read More
  
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• Artist Blacklist Is Yet Another Side Of South Korea's Massive Presidential Scandal

  13-01-2017 14:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  The bad news: More than 9,000 cultural figures were barred from any government support and sometimes harassed.The good news: Three of President Park Geun-hye's aides have been arrested over the blacklist.
  
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• Canada 150 Composers' Competition Has Prizes So Small It's Appalling - And Composers Are Definitely Appalled

  13-01-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Composers across the country have been outraged over a competition launched by the Canadian House of Commons in honour of [the confederation's sesquicentennial]." The main issue is award money so stingy that even former prime minister Stephen Harper might be embarrassed.
  
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• Surprise: New V&A Director Is A Member Of Parliament

  13-01-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  Tristram Hunt, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, a Midlands city that's been dubbed "the Brexit capital" (66% 'leave' vote), is leaving politics to take over the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
  
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• Major Arts Center In Manchester Gets Go-Ahead

  13-01-2017 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Manchester's proposed £110m arts centre, the Factory, has moved a step closer to being built after city councillors gave planning permission for the Rem Koolhaas-designed building." The project is part of a larger plan to make Manchester and northern England "a genuine cultural counterbalance to London."
  
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• True Confessions of a Justified Art Dealer, Part Seven: Go East, No Longer Young Man

  13-01-2017 14:00 via artnews.com
  Our memoirist returns after a year-and-a-half break. You can read his previous entries here.I spent a good 25 years using drugs and alcohol to get by. It’s the same old story: A neurotic born into a dysfunctional family, arrested development … Read More
  
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• Jake Chapman is right to criticise Ai Weiwei's drowned boy artwork

  13-01-2017 13:58
  
  What was Ai Weiwei thinking? Posing as a dead refugee boy on a beach in Lesbos was risible, fatuous and grotesqueArtist Jake Chapman is not known for his sentimentalism. In their masterwork Hell, he and his brother Dinos showed no pity for thousands of toy soldiers they tortured and eviscerated in a landscape of baroque psychosis.They have also collected and exhibited paintings attributed to Adolf Hitler, and in interviews, Jake Chapman goes out of his way to defy liberal soppiness with provocat
  
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• Los Angeles, lovers and light: David Hockney at 80

  13-01-2017 13:00
  
  From cool blue pools in LA to Yorkshire woodland to desert highways, a major Tate retrospective to mark Hockney’s 80th birthday celebrates his vibrant visionAs a small boy in Bradford, David Hockney would watch his father paint old bicycles and prams. “I love that, even now,” he remembered decades later. “It is a marvellous thing to dip a brush into the paint and make marks on anything, even a bicycle, the feel of a thick brush full of paint coating something.” He k
  
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• Gee Vaucher’s Oh America: hip-hop artwork turned anti-Trump meme

  13-01-2017 13:00
  
  The illustrator and musician’s painting went viral following the US election and made the front page of the Daily MirrorGee Vaucher created Oh America for experimental hip-hop group Tackhead. Recently, though, this gouache has enjoyed fresh celebrity, pinging around social media in the wake of Trump’s election, and even gracing the cover of the Daily Mirror. Continue reading...
  
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• Tania Bruguera detained in Cuba again

  13-01-2017 12:44
  
  The Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera was detained and interrogated in Cuba yesterday (12 January). Bruguera was travelling by car from Havana to the Cuban city of Baracoa to deliver humanitarian aid, such as rice and mattresses, to the victims of Hurricane Matthew. She was delivering the aid as part of her work for the Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (Instar), which she launched two years ago.
   
  Bruguera and her companion, the scientist Oscar Casanellas, were intercepted" by po
  
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• Ferens Art Gallery reopens to celebrate Hull’s City of Culture year

  13-01-2017 12:36
  
  A rare early Renaissance painting by Pietro Lorenzetti, which underwent extensive conservation at the National Gallery in London, goes on show today (13 January) at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, which reopens after a 5.2m revamp. The relaunch of the 90-year-old- gallery marks the beginning of Hulls tenure as the UKs City of Culture.Lorenzettis work, Christ Between Saints Peter and Paul (around 1320), is the centrepiece of the exhibition Pietro Lorenzetti: Siena to Hull, a Masterpiece Rev
  
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• Politician and historian Tristram Hunt named V&A director

  13-01-2017 11:01
  The Labour MP Tristram Hunt will be the next director of the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A). The announcement today (13 January) took many in the museum and political world by surprise.While he might lack experience running a large institution, Hunt has an academic background and has been a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and Heritage Lottery Fund. Before he entered politics he was a university lecturer with a burgeoning career as a TV historian and writer.
  Hunt brings "a
  
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• Michael Andrews and Matisse: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  13-01-2017 10:30
  
  Flourishes of postmodern storytelling and cutouts from the French great. Plus: Tales From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The New Line and William Kentridge And Vivienne KoorlandA poetic eye for reality and flourishes of postmodern storytelling make Michael Andrews one of the most interesting, important British painters of the 20th century. Hopefully, this exhibition of some of his most haunting paintings will start a fashion for his admirable ways of seeing. It includes his eerie painting of a ball
  
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