Arts news

• One man’s epic quest to recover a stolen painting by ‘Iraq’s Picasso’

  09-04-2017 23:00
  
  The president of the Iraqi Artists Society is on a mission to return a painting by Faeq Hassanwho he calls Iraqs Picassoto the Iraqi state. The 1968 painting, a dramatic depiction of Saladins famous 12th century conquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders, was due to be auctioned at Christies Dubai last month, but was withdrawn after he sent a letter to the auction house. I am like Sherlock Holmes, says Qasim al-Sabti, the Artists Society president.
  In the letter, sent on 4 March, Al-Sabti alleged
  
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• National Gallery expansion plan ‘starting to take shape’

  09-04-2017 23:00
  
  Following the opening of a new ground-floor display space at the National Gallery last month, the institution is considering a much more ambitious project: an extension. It would be built behind the Sainsbury Wing, in a plot now occupied by St Vincent House. This architecturally dull 1960s glass-and-concrete block currently houses gallery offices and is partly rented to outside tenants.Gabriele Finaldi, the National Gallerys director, says that the proposed site offers opportunities for a much-
  
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• London's National Gallery goes for Bellotto after failing to buy Pontormo

  09-04-2017 23:00
  
  The National Gallery is trying to buy an 11m export-deferred Bellotto landscape, The Art Newspaper can reveal. This follows the London gallerys recent failure to secure a Pontormo portrait, a result described by its director, Gabriele Finaldi, as tremendously disappointing, after a matching offer was refused by the US owner, Tom Hill.
  The Bellotto, depicting the Fortress of Knigstein from the North (1757), was recently sold by the Earl of Derby to a foreign buyer, who is believed to be another
  
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• Comments from the Peanut Gallery

  09-04-2017 23:00
  
  React, a pop-up exhibition organised by the Peanut Gallery at 240 East 4th Street in New York (until 17 April), features works that respond to pressing social and political issues, from immigration to economic justice to Trump. The artists represented include Marilyn Minter, Carlos Aires and the collective t.Rutt, who generated buzz last year when they toured the United States in a re-purposed Trump campaign bus, altered to read T.Rump/Make fruit punch great again. Mary Mihelic of t.Rutt has ma
  
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• Our Stories About The Founding Of The U.S. Are Split, And That's One Reason For The Culture Wars

  09-04-2017 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The U.S. should see itself as a land of "civil religion" rather than a land of "radical secularism" or "religious nationalism," says one historian. Would this solve our wars over culture? (Would the N.E.A. be fully funded? Would 'Sesame Street' be on the chopping block?)
  
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• Language Loves Legends About Itself

  09-04-2017 21:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  What happens if you start looking up the word 'modegreen'? "The churning sea of language raises its watery head to look around and then dives back into itself, splashing out words like litotes, genericide, and yes, metaphor. I collect these terms like Easter eggs, thrilled to have names for the ways we outfit our messages with color, rhythm, and nuance."
  
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• What Would Monsters Actually Sound Like?

  09-04-2017 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Turns out that's a pretty tough question when reptiles are involved. "We asked paleontologists, who’ve been trying to figure out what dinosaurs sounded like for decades. It’s hard to get an answer because the vocal organs used to make sounds, like the vocal cords in our throat, are mostly made of flesh. And flesh doesn’t fossilize."
  
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• Almost Half Of Atlanta Ballet Dancers Leaving Company After One Year With New Artistic Director

  09-04-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The turnover may be somewhat normal for new artistic directors, but it's partly because of an intense change in style: "For some of the veteran dancers leaving the Atlanta Ballet, the switch from former director John McFall’s contemporary style to Bolshoi-trained [Gennadi] Nedvigin’s traditional style was a major adjustment."
  
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• How Does Hollywood Get Professor Life, And Tenure, So Wrong?

  09-04-2017 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Basically, because it's not really a subject for TV. "The actual process of professor tenure is so exquisitely boring that there is no way an accurate depiction would be anything anyone, anywhere, would watch on purpose."
  
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• Should Babies Be At The Theatre? One Policy Is Making Parents Mad

  09-04-2017 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Glasgow's Pavilion Theatre, in addition to asking patrons to try to ensure their babies won't spit up on other patrons, has a policy that in part says, "We do not think that the theatre is a place for any child who cannot yet walk and can be very distressing during certain performances due to flashing lights and loud sound levels."
  
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• Peter Zumthor Redesigns The LACMA Makeover

  09-04-2017 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For one thing, the entire metaphor has changed: "What began as an organic black form spreading across the landscape of the Miracle Mile, in homage to the color and texture of the La Brea Tar Pits adjacent to the museum, has become a less fluid, harder-edged and more muscular form in sand-colored concrete."
  
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• Artist-in-infection sheds new light on HIV/Aids

  09-04-2017 18:54
  
  The UK artist John Walter has taken on a rather unusual role in the past six months: resident artist-in-infection at University College London (UCL), working alongside Greg Towers, professor of molecular virology, in the universitys Division of Infection and Immunity. Walter has drawn upon Towerss revolutionary research on HIV/Aids for a project called Capsid due to go on show at CGP gallery in London in June, and at Home in Manchester next year. Towers and his team discovered that channels
  
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• Classic British Cathedrals Are Under Increasing Threat From Time And Loss Of Funds

  09-04-2017 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Can the Anglican Church save them? Staff have been laid off, assets sold and some cathedrals have fallen into disrepair. The chairman of a group designed to fix this: "The buildings themselves are a huge problem. It is possible to see a cathedral as an albatross, but they are also our best assets."
  
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• Striptease Has Long Been The Province Of Women, But 'Magic Mike' Sparked A Revolution In Men Performing For Cash As Well

  09-04-2017 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Thanks not only to the two "Magic Mike" movies starring Channing Tatum but also to "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its sequels, business is booming for the several dance teams who also sometimes sing and always strip. The movies and books "have prompted women in more conservative areas ... to more openly enjoy watching guys gyrate onstage."
  
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• A Famous Los Angeles Mural, Once Whitewashed, Is Now Getting A Different Type Of Washing

  09-04-2017 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros painted "América Tropical" in 1932. It was literally whitewashed - covered in white paint - for decades after. Now that it's fully visible again, there are other issues, says a conservator with the Getty Institute: "We look to to monitor for changes. And what we see is that the mural is filthy — just from all of the particulates in downtown Los Angeles.”
  
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• Where The Silence Is Utterly Overwhelming

  09-04-2017 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In this art installation, silence is the plan, but maybe not the point. "In such a deadened room, a body bursts with life, spilling it out through every sense. I felt enraptured and paralyzed, as if I were a disembodied mind seared in the void, listening to a recording of silence played at top volume."
  
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• The Motion Picture Academy Has A New 'O.J. Rule' That May Change How The Oscars Deal With Documentaries

  09-04-2017 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  You could call it "the O.J. rule" after this year's winner, or you could think of it as "the Netflix rule" - in other words, if something is intended primarily for streaming consumption, that makes it ineligible for the Oscar documentary prize.
  
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• Is This Florida Monument To Chinese Literature Ambitious Or Foolish?

  09-04-2017 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Whoa: "Elling O. Eide decided to bring the world of Sinology to Sarasota. Already a voracious collector, he doubled down on his passion, buying entire collections of academic journals and books. His research specialty had been China’s most famous poet, Li Po, who lived during the Tang dynasty of the seventh to 10th centuries, often called China’s greatest. That dynasty became his focus. He amassed 75,000 volumes, including 50,000 in Chinese."
  
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• The Typewriter Orchestra Is A Real Thing, Making Real Music

  09-04-2017 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Boston Typewriter orchestra doesn't travel, but (ironically?) its music is all too available online.
  
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• Writing 'Homeland' During The First Months Of The Trump Presidency

  09-04-2017 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It wasn't pretty, says one of the showrunners. Plots had to change quickly to keep up, or even partially keep up, with the changing times: "What began to happen in real life felt in some ways so much more dramatic and so much more terrifying than what we were dramatizing on television."
  
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• It's The Best Of Times, But About To Subside Back To The Worst Of Times, For Craft Beer

  09-04-2017 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  You can blame mergers and a weirdly laissez-faire U.S. Department of Justice. "This unwillingness to use effective antitrust enforcement to protect American economic interests is in stark contrast to how the rest of the world operates."
  
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• 'Harry Potter And The Cursed Child' Sets A Record At The Tonys

  09-04-2017 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The show had tied the record for nominations at 11 - and it won nine, which burst above the previous records set by "Matilda the Musical" and "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."
  
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• Is It Ethical To Make Art Out Of Suicide?

  09-04-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The new podcast "S-Town" and the new Netflix series - named after a popular YA book - "13 Reasons Why" raise a lot of questions. One deals with them well, and ethically, and the other? Not even close.
  
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• Bach's St. John Passion - And All Other Classical Music - Belongs On The Stage, Not Just On A Recording

  09-04-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  There are several dangers in listening to classical music only in recordings. But the worst is that "we are in danger of losing touch with the greatest strength of classical music – its liveness. The unrepeatable, unpredictable nature of great music performed in the moment for that moment only."
  
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• Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?

  09-04-2017 11:00
  
  Eric Gill was one of the great British artists of the 20th century – and a sexual abuser of his own daughters. A new exhibition at Ditchling asks: how far should an artist’s life affect our judgment of their work?Last October, I was one of 25 delegates at a “workshop day” at the Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, a small but beautiful gallery, whose acclaimed spaces are dedicated mostly to displays of work by Eric Gill and the many artists and makers who followed him to the
  
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• Queer British Art 1861-1967 review: indifferent shades of gay

  09-04-2017 09:00
  
  Tate Britain, London
  Odd inclusions and glaring omissions spoil what could have been a glorious celebration of gay British artDaedalus is helping Icarus into his wings for the fateful flight. The father is a wizened brown husk compared to his beautiful son, nude except for a wisp of silk barely covering his genitals. Not that there are any genitals to cover, it seems, for the groin is just a euphemised blank. And when Lord Leighton’s painting appeared at the Royal Academy in 1869, what&rsq
  
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