Arts news

• Apichatpong Weerasethakul at Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila

  29-03-2017 23:11 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Yayoi Kusama hits the spot in Washington, DC

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  When David Zwirner Gallery in New York presented two of Yayoi Kusamas Infinity Rooms in 2013, visitors queued for hours to get a 45-second glimpse of her work. Now, six of the Japanese artists immersive rooms are on show at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC (until 14 May)and the museum is drawing crowds unlike any it has ever seen.There has been a learning curve. During opening week, one installation sustained minor damage and was temporarily closed after reports that a
  
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• What is the point of a biennial in the Middle East?

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  The art world stinks of money and rampant ambition, while there is deprivation, both physical and spiritual, all around us: this thought has led artists like Theaster Gates in Chicago to become activists in their communities, more like social workers or pastors than commodity producers. Christine Tohm, 53, a post-grad in contemporary art theory at Goldsmiths College London and curator of the current Sharjah Biennial (until 12 June), should be seen in the same light. Except that she founded
  
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• Thee to see: New York

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  The exhibition Marsden Hartleys Maine at the Met Breuer (until 18 June) is not a show about pretty landscapes, the curator, Randall Griffey, explains in a video preview, despite the beauty of the work. Instead, the exhibition explores Hartley's wonderfully rich but complicated and sometimes contradictory relationship with Maine, which he left for New York and Europe but returned to throughout his life. (He died in Maine in 1943.) The show includes around 90 paintings and drawings from throughou
  
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• How museums deal with the art crowds

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  A hit exhibition is not all fun and games. High attendance can complicate upkeepespecially for a show that already requires a great deal of maintenance.Consider Take Me (Im Yours), which closed in February at the Jewish Museum in New York. Curators presented objects that visitors were free to take home, like self-portrait lapel pins by Alex Israel and fortune cookies by Ian Cheng and Rachel Rose. An average of 10,000 items were produced for each project.The curator Kelly Taxter says the museum
  
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• Fifty years of photographs: Milton Gendel’s work on view in France for the first time

  29-03-2017 23:00
  Milton Gendel: 50 Years of Photographs, which opens this month at the Galerie en Atelier Aroa in Neuilly-sur-Seine, is the first exhibition in France to focus on the work of the American-born photographer and art critic. Gendel became a correspondent for Art News in 1954 and is known for his connections to figures like the artist Salvador Dal, the art dealer Leo Castelli and the British Royal Family.
  The show comprises around 70 black-and-white photographs taken throughout Europe, America and As
  
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• Curators cautiously venture into virtual reality

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  Want to explore Zaha Hadids unbuilt architecture or visit the worlds first photography exhibition? With virtual reality (VR), you cansort of. Museums are increasingly using the tool to offer visitors new experiences. But curators remain cautious about investing too much in a still-rapidly-evolving medium.These kinds of skill sets are not that prevalent in the art world yet, says Ben Vickers, the curator of digital at Londons Serpentine Galleries. He worked with Google Arts & Culture and the
  
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• Contemporary art dominates US museums, our visitor surveys confirm

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  Leading US museums, many with collections that span centuries if not millennia, now devote nearly half of their temporary exhibitions to shows of contemporary art, The Art Newspapers annual surveys reveal. More than 1,000 exhibitions44% of the more than 2,300 shows organised by 29 major US museums between 2007 and 2015were dedicated to the work of artists active after 1970.
  It was not always this way. Just 20 years ago, Impressionism was king; no contemporary shows cracked the top ten most visi
  
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• Brexit blues across London’s art scene as Theresa May triggers article 50

  29-03-2017 23:00
  
  Yesterday (29 March) as Theresa May enacted Article 50 and so officially kick- started the UKs withdrawal from Europe, responses across Londons art world were both direct and oblique, but universally negative. At Lisson Gallery, Anish Kapoor was unveiling his throat-grippingly visceral new sculptures that look as if some giant beast has been flayed, dismembered and bagged-up in the gallerys clean white spaces. But while Kapoor had already told The Art Newspaper in no uncertain terms that h
  
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• The fate of Alexander Calder’s Universe hangs in the balance

  29-03-2017 22:25
  
  Alexander Calders large motorised mobile Universe, an abstracted depiction of the sun, moon and stars which has hung in the lobby of Chicagos Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) since 1974, is being de-installed and heading for an art storage facility, the Chicago Tribune reports. The process of dismantling the workwhich will reportedly take ten daysbegan on Monday, 27 March. The works eventual fate is as of yet unknown, although there is some speculation that it could end up coming to auct
  
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• Getty Research Institute Acquires Frank Gehry Archive

  29-03-2017 21:02 via artnews.com
  The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles has acquired the archive of the architect Frank Gehry. The acquisition is part gift, part purchase, and includes 30 years of materials related to Gehry’s designs.Gehry’s archive features some 120,000 working drawings, 100,000-plus … Read More
  
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• The Abbey Road Studios Console Used to Make ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ Sells for $1.8 Million at Auction

  29-03-2017 20:02 via artnews.com
  The mixing board formerly housed at the legendary Abbey Road Studios in London and used to make records for artists as diverse as Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, and three out of four Beatles was sold at auction on Monday for $1.8 million, Rolling Stone reported … Read More
  
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• Dame Vera Lynn, Becomes Oldest Musician To Have A Top-10 Hit

  29-03-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "She is the first ever centenarian to chart in Britain. Dame Vera beats her own record from 2014, when she became the oldest living artist to reach the Top 20 with her National Treasure album. She still holds the record for the oldest living artist to score a No. 1 album, when her Very Best Of collection hit the top in 2009, at the age of 93."
  
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• Teaching Computers To Read: A Short History Of Optical Character Recognition

  29-03-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Optical character recognition, or OCR, is a technology that came up with computing in general. In a lot of ways, it still feels like magic - even though it's a problem we solved long ago. Today's Tedium tells its story."
  
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• This Year's List: The Most-Visited Art Exhibitions In 2016

  29-03-2017 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Christo had the most-visited art event. And in New York, "the Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved to its new Renzo Piano-designed home in downtown Manhattan in 2015, has put an end to the city’s traditional duopoly of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Whitney hosted five of the ten most-attended exhibitions in New York in 2016."
  
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• Jesse Green Had *Not* Planned On Being A Critic, Let Alone A Theater Critic (And Now He's Headed To The New York Times)

  29-03-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Rob Weinert-Kendt talks to Green about how he got into criticism (sideways and reluctantly), all the things he did before, and how even he had hoped the Times wouldn't hire another white guy.
  
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• Afghan skateboarding girls turn up in Qatar

  29-03-2017 17:49
  
  Photographer Jessica Fulford-Dobsons images of skateboarding Afghan girls are due to go on show at the QM Gallery Katara in Doha this summer (15 June-16 September). The photographs, shown at the Saatchi Gallery in London in 2015, depict the so-called skate girls in Kabul who are in full-time education thanks to an NGO called Skateistan. "With the Skate Girls of Kabul portraits, I wanted to show these young Afghan girls with their skateboards within the liberating environment that Skate
  
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• Turner prize: artists over 50 will now be eligible for prestigious award

  29-03-2017 17:45
  
  Artists of any age will be able to participate in Britain’s most prestigious contemporary art prize following rule changeBritain’s most prestigious contemporary art prize is making major rule changes to allow artists of any age to participate – an acknowledgement that people are never too old to “experience a breakthrough in their work”.The Turner prize, which has helped the early careers of artists including Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, will from
  
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• ‘Geometry of Now’: A Moscow Power Station Generates a Sound-and-Art Festival

  29-03-2017 17:42 via artnews.com
  Thousands of people descended on a derelict power station in Moscow for a historic festival of experimental music and art in late February, before work began on transforming the iconic pre-Soviet building into a vast art site set to revolutionize … Read More
  
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• Writers Look, Whereas Painters See. But There's A Link

  29-03-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Of all the arts, writers most envy music, for being both abstract and immediate, and also in no need of translation. But painting might come a close second, for the way that the expression and the means of expression are coterminous—whereas novelists are stuck with the one-damn-thing-after-another need for word and sentence and paragraph and background and psychological buildup in order to heftily construct that climactic scene."
  
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• Another Tate Modern? Former power station to be converted by Herzog & de Meuron into art hub

  29-03-2017 17:14
  
  A defunct, turn-of-the-century power station on the Gowanus canal in Brooklyn, New York, will be converted into an arts complex with workshops for artists and designers under ambitious plans drawn up by the non-profit Powerhouse Environmental Arts Foundation. Ceramics, textiles and prints will be produced in the revamped venue, known as the Powerhouse Workshop, which will also include exhibition spaces. The high-profile Swiss architectural practice Herzog & de Meuron won the commission to d
  
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• Michael Chabon, Nostalgia, And A Hundred-Year-Old Jew

  29-03-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  "My work has at times been criticized for being overly nostalgic, or too much about nostalgia. That is partly my fault, ... but it is not nostalgia's fault, if fault is to be found. Nostalgia is a valid, honorable, ancient human emotion, ... the ache that arises from the consciousness of lost connection."
  
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• Sol LeWitt, behind the scenes

  29-03-2017 17:00
  Get a behind-the-scenes look at the execution of Sol LeWitt wall drawings in this time-lapse video, which shows a group of students from Central Saint Martins in London in the painstaking process of installing four drawings at Marian Goodman Gallery London, where they are on view through 27 May. The drawingslarge blocks of colour conceived by the artist between 1988 and 1995are executed directly on the gallerys walls and require multiple successive layers of ink wash, a task that takes weeks to
  
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• David Arben, 89, Violinist Who Survived Seven Nazi Concentration Camps

  29-03-2017 16:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  In 1941 he was pulled out of a group of Jewish inmates who were digging their own mass grave by a guard who recognized him as a violinist and thus useful. Arben made his way to the U.S. after the war and ended up playing in the Philadelphia Orchestra for 34 years, retiring as associate concertmaster.
  
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• Could Programs For The Military And Veterans Help Save The NEA And NEH?

  29-03-2017 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  "All one has to do is review the extent to which President Trump spoke of veterans issues while on the stump to understand the potency of an issue like whether the nation provides adequate care for its servicemen and women. Now, with the fate of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the hands of the Republican lawmakers controlling Congress, supporters of the endowments say mentioning the work they do with the military and veterans is important when
  
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• On Kawara’s Epic ‘One Million Years’ Reading Will Take Place During Venice Biennale, Volunteers Needed

  29-03-2017 15:39 via artnews.com
  The opening of the Venice Biennale is only a little more than a month away, and the lineup of shows timed to coincide with it is looking increasingly juicy. The latest to be confirmed for the grand affair is a … Read More
  
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• 'Prestige TV': 13 Ways To (Let Everyone) Know Your Series Is *Art*

  29-03-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  "1. 'It's like a novel.' It's not TV - it's literature, but with title credits and a ten-episode season order.
  2. 'It's like a movie.' ..."
  
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• Why Can't People Let Go Of The Idea That High-Quality Television Has To Be Like *Cinema*?

  29-03-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  "For some reason, [people seem to think] TV can't stand on its own as a 'prestige' narrative. For TV, prestige means getting reframed as something else and basking in the reflected glow of another art form's cultural currency." Kathryn VanArendonk looks at why this idea seems to stick, and why it's so frustrating.
  
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• Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Project Should Be Put On Ice, Says The Guy Who Thought It Up In The First Place

  29-03-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Thomas Krens, the longtime director of the Guggenheim Foundation and the driving force behind the global expansion of the Guggenheim brand, now says "The world financial crisis and the Arab Spring has [sic]changed the equation radically ... It may not be such a good idea these days to have an American museum ... with a Jewish name in a country [that doesn't recognise Israel] in such a prominent location, at such a big scale."
  
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• Morning Links: Sharp Instrument Edition

  29-03-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Pittsburgh Symphony Begins Five-Year, $75 Million Stabilization Campaign

  29-03-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  In response to extensive financial difficulties that led to a musicians' strike this past fall, the orchestra has launched this fundraising campaign with three large gifts totaling $6.5 million.
  
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• Roberta Knie, Wagnerian Soprano, Dead At 79

  29-03-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  She was known particularly for her performances of Brünnhilde (including at Bayreuth) and Isolde (opposite Jon Vickers at the Met). She had to give up performing in 1991 when her retinas began to detach from the sheer force of the vibrations from her larynx.
  
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• Gainsborough Painting Back On View, Just Ten Days After Attack

  29-03-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The much-loved 1785 painting, Mr and Mrs William Hallett (‘The Morning Walk’), received two scratches of about 1-metre and 65cm long in the incident, which happened on a busy Saturday afternoon."
  
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• Another Principal Dancer Leaves Pennsylvania Ballet (But This Time, For A Happy Reason)

  29-03-2017 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Amy Aldridge's retirement evidently has nothing to do with the major personnel changes (and associated hard feelings) following the arrival of Ángel Corella as artistic director. She's been dancing with the company for 23 seasons, 16 of them as a principal, and it's time to retire.
  
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• Firestorm Erupts As Copenhagen Jazz Festival Turns Down Israeli Musician For 'Political Reasons'

  29-03-2017 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  "In response to asking whether it was possible for his jazz band to attend the festival, the Israeli musician Alon Farber was informed that Copenhagen Jazz Festival did not accept Israeli musicians due to 'political reasons'." Farber posted this on Facebook, word got around the internet, Copenhagen's deputy mayor demanded an explanation and made noises about city funding - and the festival's director is claiming that this is all due to a misunderstanding of what he meant by "political."
  
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• Philadelphia's Old Metropolitan Opera House To Reopen (Though Not For Opera)

  29-03-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  The 4,000-seat theater was built in 1908 by Oscar Hammerstein I (grandfather of the Broadway lyricist) on what is now a gentrifying section of North Broad Street; it served as a cinema, ballroom, circus, and church before being abandoned a number of years ago. Now a real estate developer is renovating the Met and has signed Live Nation to operate it as a performance venue.
  
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• A 'heartbreaking' day: Anish Kapoor on Theresa May invoking Article 50

  29-03-2017 12:46
  
  Today, 29 March, the British prime minster Theresa May enacted Article 50, formally notifying the European Union (EU) of the UKs intention to withdraw. Artists, museum directors and members of the art trade have all expressed their shock and concern over the results of the June referendum, in which 52% of voters opted to leave.Speaking at the opening of his exhibition at Lisson Gallery today, the British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor described the move as heartbreaking. He says: Its one of those t
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.28.17

  29-03-2017 08:55 via feedproxy.google.com
  Doin’ It
  After almost two generations of declining emphasis on the arts in public schools we face communities largely made up of people who have little or no experience participating in the arts. Where once large percentages ... read more
  AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-03-28“Emet” & Emmett: Why Truth-Telling (like Schutz’s) about Till’s Murder Should Be Ecumenical
  The Whitney Museum has now composed what is, to my mind, the most succinct, sagacious resp
  
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• Scarlett Hooft Graafland's far-flung fantasies – in pictures

  29-03-2017 08:00
  
  Photographer Scarlett Hooft Graafland collaborates with people living in remote areas, making vivid tableaux that heighten reality Continue reading...
  
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• The Downtown Brooklyn Arts Management Fellowship Program

  29-03-2017 02:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Downtown Brooklyn Arts Management Fellowship Program is a paid 11-month opportunity for a cohort of young people to gain experience and skills for careers in arts management. The program aims to increase the diversity of staff in cultural organizations by creating a route into arts management without having to take unpaid internships or earn a master’s degree. It is sponsored by four organizations in the Brooklyn Cultural District: BRIC, Mark Morris Dance Group, Theatre for a New Audie
  
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• Two Arts Marketing, Development & Ticketing Conferences to Choose From – Get 3-for-1 by April 21!

  29-03-2017 02:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  Seattle, May 3-4 & Toronto, June 12-13. This is the conference for your entire revenue-building team! Register by the Early Bird Deadline of 4/21 and bring 2 colleagues for FREE! Includes Digital Marketing Track.Two Arts Marketing, Development & Ticketing Conferences to choose from! Seattle, May 3-4 & Toronto, June 12-13. This is the conference for your entire revenue-building team! Register by the Early Bird Deadline of April 21 and bring 2 colleagues for FREE! Includes Digital Mark
  
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• Here's An Idea To Boost Engagement With The Arts

  29-03-2017 00:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "I believe that there is a strong rationale for the creation of a Cultural Endowment Foundation. It should aim to synthesise existing evidence, promote greater evidence use and generate rigorous new evidence (through supporting and evaluating promising interventions) on one and only one issue: how can we narrow social class gaps in adult arts attendance?"
  
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