Arts news

• Stars Of 'The Handmaid's Tale' Decline To Describe The Story As Feminist, And The Audience Is Not Happy

  26-04-2017 23:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Typical of the responses at a panel following the Tribeca Film Festival screening of the opening episode was this from Elisabeth Moss: "For me, it's not a feminist story. It's a human story because women's rights are human rights. ... So for me, you know, I never approach anything with any sort of, like, political agenda. I approach it from a very human place, I hope." As reporter Laura Bradley puts it, "[these] answers were much less in tune with the audience than the episode itself had been."
  
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• Why Does Our Musical Taste Get Frozen In Our Youth?

  26-04-2017 23:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "It’s simply not realistic to expect someone to respond to music with such life-defining fervour more than once. And it’s not realistic, either, to expect someone comfortable with his personality to be flailing about for new sensibilities to adopt. I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of those who truly do, as the overused phrase has it, listen to everything. Such schizophrenic tastes seem not so much a symptom of well-roundedness as of an unstable sense of self. Liking everyth
  
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• The champion of the new: Kenneth Baker on the Dwan Gallery at Lacma

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  The dealer and collector Virginia Dwan's 57th Street gallery in New York had already delivered several shocksincluding my first encounter with Sol LeWitt's wall drawings, although Paula Cooper had shown them earlierwhen I was sent there in 1971 to review a show of Carl Andre's sculpture as a novice contributor to Artforum.
  That assignment made possible a critical and formative confrontation with a key question: what could make thissomething so barren of expressive, communicative form or intenta
  
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• Thaddaeus Ropac defies the Brexit blues with his new Mayfair gallery

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  The London art worlds Brexit blues were temporarily dispelled last night (27 April) with the opening of Thaddaeus Ropacs new gallery in a Georgian mansion in the heart of Mayfair. The grand new premises signal a significant gesture of faith in the capitals future as a European art hub. The Austrian born, Salzburg- and Paris-based, gallerist declared that although he was heartbroken by the referendum result, for me, London is still the ultimate art centre. Amongst a very cheery crowd that i
  
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• Nudity, high living, intense emotion, danger, tragedy and erotic allure

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  While waiting in southern Italy to part from her husband Marcus Brutus during the Roman civil wars, the aristocratic Porcia found herself overcome with emotion in contemplating a mythological picture. This was a painting of Andromache and Hector taking leave of each other at Troy through which Porcia made a detailed comparison of her sad situation with that of the Trojan heroine. Porcia and Brutus were top-level Roman viewers: they breathe the refined air of Hellenic literature, art and mytholog
  
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• Mummy mania makes comeback in Liverpool

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  The UKs largest ancient Egyptian collection outside the British Museum goes back on show today (28 April) at Liverpools World Museum after an 18-month, 1.8m refurbishment. The renewed displays trace 5,000 years of Egyptian antiquity, as well as the history of the collection, which was founded by a local jeweller, Joseph Mayer, at the height of 19th-century Egyptomania. The gallery has trebled in size to 1,000 sq. m and will house around 1,000 artefacts, from a four-metre-long Book of the Dead p
  
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• More patriarch than dictator

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  Charles Le Brunthe subject of Wolf Burchards beautifully presented bookhad the rare combination of skill and social grace required to succeed in the faction-ridden, bureaucratic climate of Louis XIVs court. He worked for the king nearly half his life, entering Louis XIVs service in 1661 at the age of 42 and working for him until he died at 71 in 1690. His preeminent position among the Sun Kings artists is evident from the many offices that he held: he was the kings premier peintre; chancellor, r
  
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• ‘Brexit won't change anything,’ says Thaddaeus Ropac at opening of London gallery

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  In a defiant move in the face of Brexit, the Paris- and Salzburg-based art dealer Thaddaeus Ropac opened his first London gallery in Ely House, an impressive, five floor mansion in the heart of Mayfair today, 27 April. Brexit is the main topic of conversation, but the art world left behind its geopolitical borders a long time ago, Ropac says. We are part of an international movement, and so Brexit will not change anything.On a personal note, however, Ropac is less sanguine. Morally, f
  
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• Janelle Monáe celebrates the MCA Chicago

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  The musician and actress Janelle Monewho had a supporting role in this years Best Picture Academy Awards winner, Moonlight (and starred in category contender, Hidden Figures)will help the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA Chicago) celebrate its 50th birthday this June. Mone is due to perform at the museums MCA ArtEdge: 50 gala on Saturday, 3 June, which gives a sneak peek of the exhibition Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats its Own Leg (6 June-24 September), featuring sculptures, monument
  
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• Guardians Of The Galaxy stars show off their artistic sides

  26-04-2017 23:00
  Who knew the actor Chris Pratt was also a decent artist? When the Guardians of the Galaxy hero sat down with his co-star, the professional wrestler Dave Bautista, to paint each other's portraits, Pratt's 10-minute sketch bore a reasonable resemblance to the muscle man. Bautista meanwhile decided to "capture the essence" of the Starlord by painting a five-pointed shooting starnot a "giant penis" as Pratt assumes. The impromptu paint-off seemed to spark the creative spirit in both actors. "Tune in
  
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• Frieze New York 2017

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
   Our daily papers from Frieze New York, including news, analysis, interviews and live reporting from the fair
  
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• Artists who made it a family affair

  26-04-2017 23:00
  Although Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski worked primarily in different mediasculpture and painting, respectivelythe married couples relationship was of crucial importance to their artistic theories and work, says Jarosaw Suchan, the curator behind Katarzyna Kobro and Wladyslaw Strzeminski: Avant-garde Prototypes at Madris Reina Sofa (25 April-18 September).
  The two met in Moscow in 1918 and were heavily influenced by European avant-garde movements like De Stijl and Constructivism. The
  
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• Art Basel's film programme taps into political zeitgeist

  26-04-2017 23:00
  
  The film programme at this years Art Basel has a distinct political streak, with screenings that confront issues of terrorism, racism, war and revolution. Call it the zeitgeist, says Maxa Zoller, the Cairo-based curator organising the sector for the third year running. These politically-charged themes emerged organically from the feature-length and short films that artists and their galleries submitted for consideration, she says.
   
  Presented in the Stadtkino Basel, the Swiss citys single-
  
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• Claire Chase Wins This Year's $100K Avery Fisher Prize

  26-04-2017 22:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Chase, 38, became the first flutist to receive the Fisher Prize, which is awarded every few years to recognize musical excellence, vision and leadership (and whose payoff was increased this year from $75,000). The prize comes half a year after Ms. Chase stepped down from leading the International Contemporary Ensemble, the vital new-music collective commonly known as ICE, to focus more on her performing career.
  
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• Can Berlin Really Afford A Dazzling New Museum Of Modern Art?

  26-04-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The museum, set to be built in the center of the Kulturforum—a collection of museums that includes Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, the Kunstbibliothek art library, and neighboring the Hans Scharoun-designed Philharmonic—has been controversial from the outset. Herzog & de Meuron won a second competition, after the initial one hailed no winner."
  
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• Why The CIA Secretly Funded Arab Art For Years

  26-04-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Suspicions about the almost sudden spread and funding of American art movements such as Abstract Expressionism led critic Max Kozloff to describe it in a 1973 essay as"a form of benevolent propaganda." But while much is known about CIA funding for American art during the Cold War, their support for Arab art during the same period has rarely been discussed.
  
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• Sales and Advertising Manager, The Oregon Shakespeare Festival

  26-04-2017 21:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) is seeking an experienced and creative Sales and Advertising Manager to develop and implement marketing plans through a variety of media to ensure audience growth and retention, integrating the values and practices of equity, diversity, and inclusion in those plans. Each year, OSF presents an eight-and-a-half-month season of eleven plays in three theatres plus extensive educational offerings to students, teachers and all playgoers.
  Duties include, but are no
  
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• Tori Wrånes at Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo

  26-04-2017 21:47 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Director Jonathan Demme, 73

  26-04-2017 21:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Mob wives, CB radio buffs and AIDS victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Mr. Demme (pronounced DEM-ee) plucked his subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work — including fiction films and documentaries, dramas and comedies, original scripts, adaptations and remakes — that resists easy characterization.
  
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• This Year's NFL Football Draft Is At The Philadelphia Museum Of Art (Huh?)

  26-04-2017 21:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Standing on those steps and seeing that this is such a heroic moment, this is a culmination for these [draft picks], we set out on, 'Could we create a theater? Could we build a theater here?' " said Peter O'Reilly, the NFL's senior vice president of events. "We know it's going to be complicated. We know it's going to be audacious. But this is what we have to do, and the Parkway itself was natural. It's a home to so many iconic events over the years."
  
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• Yokohama Triennale 2017 Announces First Batch of Artists

  26-04-2017 21:24 via artnews.com
  The organizers for the Yokohama Triennale announced a first group of participating artists that will be included in the upcoming 2017 edition, which will open in the Japanese port city on August 4. The 26 artists and one project make up a … Read More
  
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• A Look into Jonathan Demme’s History of Collecting Outsider Art

  26-04-2017 21:15 via artnews.com
  Jonathan Demme, who died this morning in New York after battling esophageal cancer, was best known for his films and concert documentaries, and rightfully so. The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia were both big, celebrated Oscar-winners, just two years … Read More
  
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• John Waters Is Hosting A Summer Camp For Grown-Ups

  26-04-2017 21:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Sure, there will be campfires and s'mores, but there will also be burlesque lessons, Hairspray karaoke, scotch and cigars, and Bloody Mary Bingo - not to mention a movie marathon, a costume contest, and the national treasure's own one-man show. Also arts-and-crafts and archery, which seem pretty kinky in this context.
  
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• Do We Really Need To Dress Up When We Go To The Opera?

  26-04-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Americans might say that their freedom of self-expression is being denied if they are told how to dress. I think we can learn that self-expression and respect for certain traditions are not mutually exclusive. I have seen many of my fellow citizens dressed in attire more suited to a workout at the gym or for mowing the lawn in restaurants, offices and theaters. This detracts from the specialness of certain occasions."
  
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• What Do The Residents Of The S-Town Make Of 'S-Town'? Wellllll ...

  26-04-2017 20:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Connor Towne O'Neill travels to Woodstock, Alabama to ask the folks there about finding themselves the subject of a record-smashing podcast - and finds some fair-mindedness, some defensiveness, plenty of ambivalence and even more awkwardness. After all, they really do all know each other. (Warning: includes spoilers)
  
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• Wait—What Was That?!: History’s Bygone Art Movements

  26-04-2017 19:39 via artnews.com
  “Fame,” according to art critic Henry McBride, “is a most uncertain garment.” The same is true of art movements and labels. Some—Abstract Expressionism, for instance—are familiar to the average museumgoer. However, others that were at one time in the vanguard … Read More
  
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• The Extraordinary Steppenwolf Theatre Leader Martha Lavey Dies At 60

  26-04-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  An indefatigable, unstinting and intellectually voracious artistic director who reinvented Chicago’s most audacious and aggressive theater for a new era, Martha Lavey wrestled the Steppenwolf Theatre Company — kicking and screaming — into the 21st century. And in her cajoling, bullying, flattering, outwitting and otherwise leading its hugely talented but famously passionate and opinionated ensemble of tightknit actors toward reinvention and expansion for changed times, this art
  
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• We Need To Split The 'Millennials' Into Two Separate Generations

  26-04-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Old Millennials, as I'll call them, who were born around 1988 or earlier (meaning they're 29 and older today), really have lived substantively different lives than Young Millennials, who were born around 1989 or later, as a result of two epochal events that occurred around the time when members of the older group were mostly young adults and when members of the younger were mostly early adolescents." Jesse Singal, an Old Millennial, explains.
  
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• At the Drawing Center’s 40th Anniversary Gala, Soggy Patrons Toast a Jet-Lagged Rashid Johnson, a Humbled Marcel Dzama

  26-04-2017 18:36 via artnews.com
  Despite pouring rain and unusually bitter April weather, guests crowded into Capitale last night for a gala to celebrate the Drawing Center’s 40th anniversary. As Brett Littman, the Drawing Center’s executive director, noted, it was something of an arbitrary marker … Read More
  
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• NPR Pioneer Robert Siegel To Retire After 40 Years

  26-04-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "This is a decision long in the making and not an easy one. I've had the greatest job I can think of, working with the finest colleagues anyone could ask for, for as long a stretch as I could imagine. But, looking ahead to my seventies (which start all too soon) I feel that it is time for me to begin a new phase of life. Over the next few months, I hope to figure out what that will be."
  
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• Some Numbers On America's Culture Economy (And California's Place In It)

  26-04-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The data, which look at the economic role of the arts at the federal level, show that the arts and cultural sector contributed nearly $730 billion to the U.S. economy in 2014, the year for which the agencies evaluated data. That is roughly 4.2% of the U.S. economy for that year. (The NEA’s annual budget, as a point of comparison, is $148 million.)
  
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• Picasso's obsession with bullfighting laid bare at London gallery

  26-04-2017 17:15
  
  ‘Those horses are the women in my life’: Minotaurs and Matadors exhibition sheds fresh light on artist’s recurring themesThere are many matadors, picadors, minotaurs, bulls and horses in a new show exploring Picasso and the importance of bullfighting – but also a glimpse into his terrible treatment of women.An exhibition opening to the public on Friday traces Picasso’s lifelong engagement with bullfighting and includes the artist’s earliest surviving painting,
  
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• 'The Avant-Garde That Lost By Winning' (Jerry Saltz Goes To Glenn O'Brien's Funeral)

  26-04-2017 17:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The wild man of art criticism/failed artist/Instagram auteur is haunted by the thoughts he had seeing the art-world stars gathered to mourn the '80s impresario: "I don't mean that these people and their ideals lost. On the contrary, these people represent a kind of total victory!"
  
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• How To Attract New Audiences To The Arts? Report Says Focus On Fun

  26-04-2017 16:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Key to the success of projects is promoting “the ‘fun’ and ‘social’ aspects of participation as opposed to focusing on the artistic aspects of activities”. The report notes that using “exclusive ‘arts’ language and jargon” acts as a barrier to encouraging local communities to get involved.
  
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• New book lifts lid on Mohammed Afkhami’s Iranian contemporary art collection

  26-04-2017 16:16
  
  A new book out next month will lift the lid on a major contemporary Iranian art collection amassed by a Middle Eastern financier, reflecting also the trajectory of the countrys art from the 1950s to today. The book, titled Honar (art in Farsi) and published by Phaidon, features 250 works from the collection of Mohammed Afkhami. It includes a joint essay by Venetia Porter, the assistant keeper of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art at the British Museum in London, and Sussan Babaie,
  
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• How Do The Sexual Politics Of 'Chasing Amy' Look After 20 Years? (They Didn't Look Great At The Time)

  26-04-2017 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Director Kevin Smith says, "The weird thing about it is, you know, when you look at it now - to borrow a term from the present - it was very woke for 1997." Queer critics didn't agree: as Shannon Keating sums it up here, "Ultimately, the film assumes that a lesbian can go straight, even if just for a little while, as soon as the right guy comes along." But then, Keating continues, "Questions about how to define different queer identities, the possibilities and limits of sexual fluidity, and what
  
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• Social Media Firefight Over Female Choreographers And Sexism In Ballet Sparked By NY Times' Peck-Wheeldon-Ratmansky Interview

  26-04-2017 15:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Brief answers by the three (male) star dancemakers to this question (evidently texted to them after the main conversation recorded in the article was over) - "Most of the major choreographers in classical dance are men. Why is that?" - led to a ferocious response from The Observer's Luke Jennings, after which "Twitter went mad." Courtney Escoyne surveys the battlefield.
  
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• The Holiday When People Give Their Beloveds Books Along With Roses

  26-04-2017 15:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It's April 23, el dia de Sant Jordi (St. George's Day), the Catalan counterpart to Valentine's Day - except that it's a book and not a box of chocolates that goes along with the bouquet for your true love. Natasha Lomas gives us a look at the celebration, for which €20 million worth of books are sold each year.
  
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• Langlands & Bell: the artists storming Silicon Valley's fortresses

  26-04-2017 15:10
  
  With their eerily pristine models of Apple and Facebook’s offices, Turner-nominated artist duo Langlands & Bell expose the ‘fantasy of total control’ that is Silicon Valley architectureEerie white forms appear to float off the walls of a gallery on Pall Mall, hovering in front of lurid blocks of colour like the preserved cadavers of some alien race displayed in a future museum of natural history. There are amoebic creatures with bulbous appendages, others with angular facet
  
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• Jonas Burgert’s monster landscape confronts decay, decline and death

  26-04-2017 15:07
  
  Inside Jonas Burgerts studio, in the Berlin suburb of Weissensee, an enormous painting is approaching completion. At a panoramic 22 metres wide, the work called Zeitlaich is a fantastical frieze of nightmarish visions, grotesque figures and apparently random objects, tumbling together in a surreal dreamscape, rendered in Burgerts characteristic palette of rich, dark tones clashing with violent graffiti-like outbursts of neon and fluorescence.
   
  I thought I wanted to have a really beautiful
  
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• What One Red State Will Lose When The NEA Is Gone

  26-04-2017 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "If any state knows the value of publicly financed art, it may be South Dakota: One of its biggest tourist attractions, Mount Rushmore, is, among other things, a colossal federally funded sculpture. ... [The NEA's] generally small grants can have a bigger impact here than they would at the Metropolitan Operas of the world." Michael Cooper visits the Coyote State to see in action some of the arts programs funded by the agency the Trump administration proposes to eliminate.
  
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• World Monuments Fund launches Instagram campaign to save Modern buildings

  26-04-2017 15:00
  
  The World Monuments Fund (WMF) launched its first Instagram campaign today, 26 April, to draw attention to the plight of the worlds Modern buildings, an increasing number of which are at risk because of the lack of regulations or political will needed to protect them.
  The fund kicks off the programme with a list of 30 sites nominated by architects, experts and students posted on its website and is appealing to the public to add to this list by submitting nominations via Instagram. Until 25 May,
  
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• Morning Links: Solange Edition

  26-04-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Meet The Dancer With A Prosthetic Arm Who's Making Herself A Mainstream Career

  26-04-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Annie Hanauer, 30, has achieved what many thought impossible for a performer with a disability: a thriving career in the mainstream dance world. After performing with the UK's Candoco Dance Company from 2008 to 2014, she is now an in-demand freelancer." (includes video)
  
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• Pop Artist Marisol Leaves Entire Estate To Albright-Knox Art Gallery

  26-04-2017 14:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The bequest from the artist, who died last May, is the largest gift of art in the history of the Buffalo museum, which made news last fall by raising $100 million in 12 weeks.
  
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• Robert M. Pirsig, 88, Author Of 'Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance'

  26-04-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Where [Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan] pursued enlightenment in hallucinogenic experience, Zen argued for its equal availability in the brain-racking rigors of Reason with a capital R. Years after its publication, it continues to be invoked by famous people when asked to name a book that affected them most deeply."
  
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• L.A. Dance Project Gets Its Own Headquarters

  26-04-2017 14:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Benjamin Millepied's young company "has signed a five-year lease for its own rehearsal and performance space in the downtown Los Angeles arts district, and will move to its new headquarters in October. [Its space will] include two studios and a performance space with a seating capacity of about 300.
  
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• Arachnid Art: Argentine Artist And 7,000 Spiders Create World's Largest Web

  26-04-2017 13:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Tomás Saraceno and his eight-legged collaborators are displaying their installation, titled Quasi-Social Musical Instrument IC 342, at Buenos Aires's Museum of Modern Art.
  
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• Actors Making Fun Of The Powerful And Their Politics In Ancient Rome

  26-04-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Of course, the dangers were rather greater than they are for the cast of Saturday Night Live, or even Bassem Youssef, and more immediate than even for the Belarus Free Theatre.
  
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• What French presidential candidates Macron and Le Pen have in store for the arts

  26-04-2017 12:51
  
  Culture has featured in the policy proposals and values of both Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, who will contest the French presidential election on 7 May.
   
  Spending on culture has been a bone of contention during the five-year mandate of current president Franois Hollande. He failed to keep his promises as a candidate to maintain the cultural budget, which shrank by around 430m during his five years in office, compared with his predecessor Nicolas Sarkozys last budget, according to ou
  
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