Arts news

• N.W.A.’s Rap Classic ‘Straight Outta Compton’ to Be Preserved by Library of Congress

  30-03-2017 23:45 via artnews.com
  On Wednesday it was announced that the controversial rap landmark Straight Outta Compton by the group N.W.A.–which consists of Dr. Dre, MC Ren, Ice Cube, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and Arabian Prince–is among this year’s 25 selections for preservation in the National … Read More
  
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• Website to Fax Artworks to Congress in Protest Against NEA Budget Cuts

  30-03-2017 23:23 via artnews.com
  With many resorting to phone calls to government officials as a form of activism, voicemail boxes have begun to fill up and congressional employees have become overwhelmed. Now, some are resorting to a service thought to be long outmoded: faxing. “The … Read More
  
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• What happens when the identity politics of the Left meet up with the racial isolation of the Right

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  There are three paintings by Dana Schutz in the 2017 Whitney Biennial, but two of them capture the contention that has sprung up around the exhibition. The first, titled Open Casket, is a George Grosz-style expressionist likeness of the disfigured body of Emmett Tilla 14 year-old child who became a Civil Rights Era martyr after he was killed and mutilated by two men in Money, Mississippi in 1955. The second painting, titled Elevatorbesides depicting an eye-gouging brawl in a liftperfectly
  
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• Saudi Arabian artist’s first US solo show escapes shadow of 9/11

  30-03-2017 23:00
  The Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem is known for his politically and socially engaged work that draws on his Muslim heritage. Gharem, who was until recently a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi Arabian army, opens his first US solo show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) this month. The exhibition, organised with the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, includes 11 works, among them a new painting and sculpture, all of which were created with the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Ce
  
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• Philadelphia Museum of Art breaks ground on Frank Gehry-designed core renovation

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  When you hear the name Frank Gehry, you likely picture his splashy, titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which put the industrial city on the worldwide map when it opened in 1997. But when the Philadelphia Museum of Arts former director Anne dHarnoncourt initially approached Gehry in the late 1990s about designing a major overhaul of the encyclopaedic Pennsylvania museum, she gave him a different sort of challenge: to transform the museum within its current footprint, completed in
  
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• Japanese artist reveals his mature, 'grown-up' side

  30-03-2017 23:00
  In his current solo exhibition in New York, the Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara presents a new body of work that digs into a more meditative and contemplative chapter of his life and practice, the artist says. Yoshitomo Nara: Thinker at Pace Gallery (until 29 April) includes over 60 paintings, sculptures, works on paper and ceramics that show a softened, shifted approach from the work that I created in Tokyo, which definitely had a more rebellious and aggressive tone, he says.
  For more than ten y
  
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• In the heart of Europe, a new show reflects a diverse and globalised world

  30-03-2017 23:00
  Strangely, the capital city of Belgium and the de facto capital of Europe has no dedicated museum of contemporary art. The contemporary collection of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium is mostly in storage amid ongoing renovation. The recent announcement that Pariss Centre Pompidou will launch a Brussels outpost in 2020 met with mixed feelings from the local art community.
  In the absence of a homegrown museum, the Wiels contemporary art centre has become an influential exhibition venue,
  
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• How Eduardo Paolozzi channelled the chaos of Modern life

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  London. Every year, millions of commuters pass through an all-encompassing art installation of vibrantly coloured mosaics in Londons Tottenham Court Road underground station. While many may not realise it, this vast collage, drawn from images related to technology, jazz music, ethnography and Modern life was designed by Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005), one of the so-called godfathers of Pop Art.His style may seem familiar now, but it has been hidden in plain sight and the current survey at the Whi
  
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• European cobalt blue imported to China from early 18th century

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  Tests conducted by UK scientists show that, from the early 18th century, Chinese artisans used European cobalt blue to produce famille rose porcelain. This is the first scientific evidence that overglaze pigment was imported from Europe from the early part of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912).
  Cobalt blue was an important pigment in the production of Chinese porcelain during this period. The cobalt used for blue-and-white ceramics was locally mined in China and has a high manganese content. But fami
  
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• Dispatches from our Man at the Antarctic Biennale: setting sail

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  Thursday 16 March 2017, Buenos Aires, ArgentinaUp at 7 in first light of Buenos Aires, pounding hammer hangover from last nights heady celebrations of the Yves Klein show at Proa Foundation, too much delicious Malbec with Kleins fabled widow the artist Rotraut and her dazzling second husband Daniel Moquay, as vibrant and provocative as the late Yves lui-mme. My forthcoming adventure stirred intrigue over the steakswhole link made between Kleins Vide and the vast vide of the Antarctic, not to me
  
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• Details emerge about Damien Hirst’s Venice show

  30-03-2017 23:00
  Damien Hirsts two-venue exhibition in Venice, Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, opens at the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana this month (9 April-3 December), just in time for the Venice Biennale. Few details about the exhibition have been released, but organisers say it is ten years in the making and includes at least 190 works reportedly made to look like discovered treasures. According to the New York Times, the works are for sale through Hirsts galleries, Gagosian and White
  
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• Chinese institutions work with the Metropolitan for groundbreaking exhibition

  30-03-2017 23:00
  In a remarkable cultural exchange, 32 institutions in China are lending more than 160 objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for a show exploring the Qin and Han dynasties. Age of Empires: Chinese Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties (3 April-16 July), which covers around 440 years of history, examines the development of a cohesive Chinese Han ethnic identity in light of recent scholarship and archaeological digs conducted in the past 50 years. The show opens with a group of the celeb
  
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• Artist's resale rights must be paid by sellers, French court rules

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  There has been a new twist to an eight-year old legal battle between Christies and France's associations of antique dealers and galleries. A French court stated on 24 March that artist's resale rights must be paid by sellers, with no exception. Saying that the ruling might hurt the contemporary art market, the auction house is now challenging the judgement in front of the high court.The feud, which has already resulted in several contradictory judgements, began in
  
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• Artists and curators reveal their Damascene moments

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  Much of what you read in our annual report on museum attendance is concerned with big numbers. But amid the hordes are thousands of unique, intimate communions between art and people. We asked leading art world figures to recall an early encounter that inspired them to pursue art as a career. For some, there was no such event: when the artist Mark Wallinger was invited to contribute to this article, he simply said: To be honest, I always wanted to be an artist. But others have had Damascene mome
  
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• Aipad Photography Show clicks with new venue

  30-03-2017 23:00
  
  The annual Photography Show, presented by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (Aipad), opened on 30 March (until 2 April 2) in a new venue, Pier 94, welcoming a significant number of new exhibitors117 in total, up from 86 last year.While the Park Avenue Armory is the most beautiful exhibition space in New York City, the size of the space restricted what dealers could do, says Aipad president, dealer Catherine Edelman, of the move. Pier 94 provides dealers with amp
  
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• ‘ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate’ at Schwules Museum, Berlin

  30-03-2017 22:49 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Whitney Museum to Partner with Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute for Discussion About Dana Schutz Controversy

  30-03-2017 20:55 via artnews.com
  For the past week, the art world has been consumed by a debate surrounding Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2016), a controversial painting currently on view in the Whitney Biennial that features an abstracted view of Emmett Till’s open casket funeral. … Read More
  
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• Artforum’s Don McMahon Named Editorial Director of Publications at MoMA

  30-03-2017 20:51 via artnews.com
  After nearly 20 years at Artforum, Don McMahon will be the editorial director of the Museum of Modern Art’s publications department. He is currently the magazine’s executive editor.McMahon begins his new position on May 30. He succeeds David Frankel, who … Read More
  
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• Selfie as art at Saatchi gallery: from Rembrandt to a grinning macaque

  30-03-2017 19:43
  
  Exhibition explores the history of the selfie and our changing relationship with this most everyday of art forms It is a show that includes painstakingly executed self-portraits by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo, as well as rather more spontaneous selfie portraits by Kim Kardashian, Tom Cruise and a macaque monkey from the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.The images are being displayed together in London’s Saatchi gallery, and while the curators are not assigning them any aesthetic equi
  
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• Avant-Garde Tendencies in Tennessee: A Report from the Big Ears Music/Art Festival

  30-03-2017 18:39 via artnews.com
  At once site-specific and sprawling across a city that might strike some as a surprising home for an occasion of the kind, the annual Big Ears festival in Knoxville, Tennessee, reconsiders the terms by which experimental music can be presented … Read More
  
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• City Slickers on the Wild Side: The Barnes Foundation Celebrates the ‘Art of Flânerie’

  30-03-2017 17:57 via artnews.com
  Through May 22, in Philadelphia Read More
  
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• Morning Links: The Over-50 Is the New Under-50 Edition

  30-03-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  BlimeyAnish Kapoor spoke out against yesterday’s formal declaration for the next step for Brexit at the opening of a show in London. “Frankly,” he said, “nationalism diminishes ourselves.” [The Art Newspaper]On Kaya Mar, a professional portraitist in London who now … Read More
  
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• OBAs (and YBAs) now eligible for the Turner Prize

  30-03-2017 13:26
  
  The Tate has scrapped the age limit on the Turner Prize, which means that artists of any age are now eligible for the headline-hitting award (artists aged over 50 have previously been ruled out). Alex Farquharson, the director of Tate Britain, says that the Turner Prize has always championed emerging artists now that its reputation is so firmly established, we want to acknowledge the fact that artists can experience a breakthrough in their work at any age. Another surprise development is that th
  
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• From Lawrence of Arabia’s robes to Napoleon’s horse: National Army Museum reopens in London

  30-03-2017 12:35
  
  The National Army Museum in Londons Chelsea reopens its doors today (30 March) after a three-year, 23.75m makeover. The museum created by royal charter in 1960 and originally located in former stables at the military academy Sandhurst houses the central collection of the British Army and of the Commonwealth land forces. Thanks in part to a 11.5m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum has now transformed its brutalist 1960s building and taken hundreds of objectsuniforms, weapons, equip
  
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• Deputy director at Hermitage put under house arrest

  30-03-2017 11:15
  
  Mikhail Novikov, a deputy director in charge of construction at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has been placed under house arrest on charges of suspected fraud.Moscows Lefortovsky District Court ruled on 29 March that Novikov is to be held under house arrest until 23 May. In January, the Hermitage acknowledged in a statement that investigators from the Federal Security Service, a successor agency of the KGB, had been conducting operational procedures at the museums Staraya De
  
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• Nick Ut: a career in photography – in pictures

  30-03-2017 08:00
  
  Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took one of the most famous photographs of all time – of a young girl running along a road in Vietnam after a napalm raid. But during his 51 years as a press photographer, Ut worked as a staff photographer, covering many and varied assignments Continue reading...
  
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• Free your mind: the underground comics of Skip Williamson – in pictures

  30-03-2017 08:00
  
  The US comic artist Skip Williamson has died, leaving behind hilarious work that pokes fun at the hypocrisies on both sides of the political spectrum Continue reading...
  
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