Arts news

• Impressions from the Fair: A Paean to Abstract Paintings and Food for Thought at Frieze

  05-05-2017 23:57 via artnews.com
  So long at the fair. After trolling the aisles, tripping over service dogs, and passing by booths to find a sea of abstract paintings old and new, foreign and national—by artists ranging from the minimalist “artist’s artist” Nancy Haynes and … Read More
  
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• The NYC Public Library Currently Blocks 225,000 Kids From Checking Out Books. Should It?

  05-05-2017 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In their 2015 public tax returns, the city’s three independent library systems, the New York Public Library, the Queens Library and the Brooklyn Public Library, reported collecting a total of $5.5 million in fines. Just as adults discover they cannot renew their driving licenses if they have too many unpaid tickets, children discover that they lose library privileges if they rack up more than $15 in late fees. The library is the Department of Motor Vehicles on training wheels."
  
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• Megan Fox Kelly Elected President of Association of Professional Art Advisors

  05-05-2017 23:14 via artnews.com
  Today, the Association of Professional Art Advisors announced that it has elected as its new president Megan Fox Kelly, who has run her own advisory firm since 1999 and assists institutions, private collection foundations, and estates. She will replace Joe … Read More
  
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• The Library Of Congress's Porn Collection (And How It Came To Define Obscenity)

  05-05-2017 23:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Libraries will often have a restricted collection—a locked case, a unit of shelving behind the circulation desk, or a special room—that requires readers to obtain permission from a librarian to view the books within. Very often the restricted materials contain explicit adult content or valuable illustrations. During and after World War II the Library of Congress held one of the largest collections in the world of this kind, composed mostly of erotica and items considered to be porno
  
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• Work and play at BDSM show

  05-05-2017 23:00
  
  A BSDM dungeon is not your run-of-the-mill contemporary art exhibition venue, but it was fitting for Sexual Fragments Absent, a recent a one-night show held at the New York basement dungeon Paddles (28 April). People are in a very difficult space to see art, says Tiona McClodden, one of the three artists presented in the show. That dungeon is a very active dungeon. In fact, it was the dungeons best-attended event in years, says Ikechukwu Casmir Onyewuenyi, an assistant curator at Performa, who
  
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• The artist who wants to get under your skin—via your nose

  05-05-2017 23:00
  Anicka Yi: Life Is Cheap Solomon R. Guggenheim MuseumUntil 5 JulyVisitors to Anicka Yis exhibition Life Is Cheap, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, will smell her work before they see it. Working with a team of Columbia University biologists and chemists, the artist has created a scent using bacterial samples collected from Asian-American women in Manhattans Chinatown and Koreatown and from carpenter ants. Diffused into the first room of the show, this scent, Immigrant Caucus, is the inculca
  
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• Freeing Tania Bruguera

  05-05-2017 23:00
  
  Deep into Tania Libre, the new documentary that explores the artist Tania Brugueras fraught relationship with the Cuban government, comes a particularly intimate moment. Sounding a bit more sheepish than usual, Bruguera admits that she was attracted to one of her interrogators during her detention in 2015.
  She not only experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of her harassment and imprisonment, she says, but also some form of Stockholm syndrome, the condition by which hosta
  
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• Edvard Munch gets novel treatment from Karl Ove Knausgård

  05-05-2017 23:00
  In his debut as a curator, the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgrdwho penned the six-volume autobiographical series Min Kamp (My Struggle)has collaborated with Kari Brandtzg, a curator of the Munch Museum in Oslo, to organise an exhibition of rarely seen works by Munch from the museums collection. Over the past years, the two worked through more than 1,000 objects and chose around 140 of them, including some of Munchs very few and fragile sculptures, Brandtzg says. The exhibition, titled Toward
  
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• Ticket-Pricing Strategies? The Scottish National Orchestra Has Figured It Out To Audience Goals

  05-05-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Working in a multi-city and multi-venue environment requires an approach to pricing that is adaptable in the different marketplaces in which we operate. Pricing is therefore viewed as a flexible tool that helps us achieve the central and multiple imperatives of the organisation: generate revenue, encourage attendance, reach new audiences, offer new experiences and promote the artistic reputation of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. To translate these imperatives into tangible tactics, our
  
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• Sweet Melodies: Frances Stark Stages Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ in Los Angeles

  05-05-2017 22:24 via artnews.com
  “You know Mozart died five and a half weeks after the debut, so there’s something very intense about this work,” Frances Stark said last Friday night, introducing her film version of the composer’s The Magic Flute at the Los Angeles … Read More
  
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• From Phone Sex To The Oscars - The Irrepressible Gabourey Sidibe

  05-05-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  On her start after filming "Precious": "Phone work paid well, but she quit to play Precious. Money was tight after the film wrapped; she was paid scale, about $2,500 a week, but it took a month for her to receive her first check. After “Precious” made its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009, Ms. Sidibe experienced fame without fortune, riding subways and buses to red carpet events. Life at home was still precarious. On the morning of one event, her landlord tried to evict
  
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• Flooding causes road closure on Randall’s Island

  05-05-2017 22:00
  
  A flooded road on Randalls Island caused Frieze New York to stop admitting visitors around 4pm on Friday 5 May. Vehicles were rerouted and those arriving later in the day were not allowed to enter. The City Authorities asked us to stop transporting new visitors because of congestion caused by a road closure, a spokesman for the fair said. This affected people planning to attend the last couple hours of the fair. For those unable to get into the fair, all tickets will be honoured this weekend or
  
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• What's All The Fuss Over The .Art Domain Name?

  05-05-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The pitch is that .art instantly creates an identity aligned with the art world; you can see plainly why Apple Inc. rushed to register iphone.art and facetime.art, among 36 domain names. During the preferred access period, which launched in December, more than 2,000 domains were purchased on .art by cultural organizations, as well as tech companies, luxury brands and banks. Instagram.art, Rolex.art and Beyonce.art were all snatched up. Ditto: .art domains for the Louvre, Tate and Centre Pompidou
  
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• How The Feds Saved Literature In Tennessee

  05-05-2017 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "This is the tale of how Tennessee literature was saved from a fate closely resembling oblivion by an unlikely hero: the United States government. Specifically, it was saved by the tiny portion of the US federal budget allocated to the National Endowment for the Humanities. More specifically, by the even tinier part of the federal budget that the NEH budget disburses to Humanities Tennessee, an independent affiliate of the national agency. The knight in shining armor who swooped in to save liter
  
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• Libertarians Tend To Be An Argumentative Lot. Robert Nozick Had A Different Idea

  05-05-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  ‘The language of analytic philosophy,’ he complained, ‘“forces” the reader to a conclusion through a knock-down argument.’ Discussion thus became a zero-sum game. If the loser of an argument did not accept his opponent’s conclusion ‘he dies’, a victim of his own mental weaknesses. Among the collateral damages of this aggression was an appreciation of intellectual diversity. Nozick aspired to pacify philosophy.
  
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• In Honor of His 80th Birthday, John Giorno Will Be the Subject of a New York City–Wide Survey in June

  05-05-2017 20:13 via artnews.com
  John Giorno is now an octogenarian, which means it’s time to properly celebrate. As a toast to the artist, activist, and poet, 13 New York museums, alternative spaces, and institutions will showcase various aspects of Giorno’s career starting on June … Read More
  
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• Frank Rich Swears That 'Veep' Hasn't Imitated, And Won't Imitate, Real U.S. Politics Or Donald Trump

  05-05-2017 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The longtime New York Times and New York magazine columnist, executive producer of HBO's political cringe-comedy, says, "We really believe in the integrity of this alternative-reality version of Washington that we've created. It has its own internal laws and its own original characters. Journalists - including me - have all had to update our premises and our assumptions as a result of Trump's victory, but [at Veep] we have our own world."
  
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• How The Coin Toss Became A Cultural Stand-In For Unbiased Outcomes

  05-05-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Culture has taken the coin toss as an impartial way to select between two possible outcomes. It implies fairness—there isn’t anything that coin tossers can do (besides cheat) to favor one outcome.No agency appears to intervene in the decision, and thus the human actors committed to it can comfortably distance themselves from the result. Indeed, in popular culture, the coin toss has become a way to shed moral responsibility for an outcome."
  
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• Benjamin Millepied To Direct His First Movie

  05-05-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The director of L.A. Dance Project (and former director of the Paris Opera Ballet) will make a music-and-dance adaptation of Carmen, with the heroine crossing the deserts from Mexico to Los Angeles.
  
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• The "Miracle" Of The Shakespeare Globe's £5 Tickets

  05-05-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “At the heart of the Globe are, for me, two things. First the £5 ticket for the yard. Over the last twenty years that single fact has given over five million people an extraordinary experience for less than a sandwich costs. They have seen Mark [Rylance] in his pomp, Gemma Arterton’s Rosaline, Gugu Mbatha Raw’s Nell Gwynn, Roger Allam’s Falstaff, Eve Best’s Beatrice and Cleopatra, and countless others for only £5. It is a miracle.
  
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• AR Penck obituary

  05-05-2017 18:20
  
  German artist whose primitive-style imagery, recalling cave art, reflected the harsh realities of the cold warRalf Winkler, better known as AR Penck, claimed never to have heard of conceptualism at the start of his five-decade career. Despite this, the German artist’s early Standart body of work, developed in isolation behind the Berlin Wall during the late 1960s, chimed with the emerging avant-garde tendencies of his western contemporaries. Like Lawrence Wiener and Joseph Kosuth, Penck, w
  
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• Biggest Podcast Ever? 'S-Town' Has More Than 40 Million Downloads In 30 Days

  05-05-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For comparison, the previous titleholder, S-Town's older sister Serial, averaged 4 million downloads per episode in the same time frame, and its studio grandparent, This American Life, gets around 2.2 million downloads each week.
  
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• ‘The Variables Have Changed’: 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair Returns to Brooklyn for Third Edition

  05-05-2017 17:32 via artnews.com
  Currently filling nearly the entire back wall of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a familiar-looking flag. There are the stars and stripes, and even some red, but there is also black, green and yellow—colors representative of West Africa. Attached to each … Read More
  
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• ‘The Variables Have Changed’: 1:54 Africa Art Fair Returns to Brooklyn for Third Edition

  05-05-2017 17:32 via artnews.com
  Currently filling nearly the entire back wall of Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn, is a familiar-looking flag. There are the stars and stripes, and even some red, but there is also black, green and yellow—colors representative of West Africa. Attached to each … Read More
  
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• How Hollywood Special Effects Production Was Outsourced To Far-Flung Corners

  05-05-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For Hollywood’s VFX workers, it’s easy to be nostalgic for a time when movies were made entirely in their own backyard. When I met with Squires in a Studio City coffee shop, he told me about making “Close Encounters” in two buildings, just one block apart, with Spielberg dropping in each week to check on the progress of different parts. Today’s business model is far more complex: The brain directing most of the action may be in one place (usually Los Angeles), but d
  
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• How The Old Vic Has Reinvented Itself After The Kevin Spacey Era

  05-05-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "We needed to devise a way of working that didn't rely on either a subsidy or the star power supplied by Spacey. What producing model would allow the Old Vic, a £13 million turnover break-even business, to continue generating its own work, and to stay solvent?" Old Vic executive director Kate Varah writes about how she, artistic director Matthew Warchus, and their colleagues found the way.
  
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• Now They've 3D-Printed A Stradivarius - And Here's What It Sounds Like

  05-05-2017 16:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Mind you, the instrument wasn't spit out whole by the printer: individual parts of the instrument, carefully copied from the 1677 "Sunrise" Strad violin, were printed out and carefully assembled by hand. Here's a video of the new copy being played, along with video of an original Strad (played by a different violinist with a different style) for comparison.
  
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• New Nonprofit That Owns Philadelphia Inquirer Has More Than Doubled Its Endowment - And Is On Track To Quadruple It

  05-05-2017 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The Lenfest Institute for Journalism, launched in January 2016 with an endowment of $20 million from philanthropist Gerry Lenfest, announced today it has raised $26.5 million in additional gifts from a variety of sources. Impressed by the response, Lenfest says he's ponying up another $40 million, an amount that will have to be matched."
  
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• From the Archives: Three Reviews by Vito Acconci, from 1968 and 1969

  05-05-2017 16:00 via artnews.com
  The performance and video artist on Sylvia Sleigh, Julian Stanczak, and Haim Steinbach. Read More
  
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• Giacometti, Thunderbirds and a fish-and-chip shop – the week in art

  05-05-2017 15:46
  
  Tate Modern’s major retrospective of Alberto Giacometti opens this week, while Bruce Conner’s early video art is resurrected – all in your weekly dispatchGiacometti
  The sculptor who started as a surrealist, then turned to compassionate portrayals of the isolated human figure after the second world war, is one of the 20th century’s defining artists.
  • Tate Modern, London, 10 May–10 September Continue reading...
  
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• 'Enough Is Enough': Gustavo Dudamel Makes Strongest Statement Yet About Venezuelan Crisis

  05-05-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  After years of strenuously avoiding any public statement about the ever more dire political situation in his homeland, the star conductor last week gave a strenuously evenhanded plea for both sides to settle their differences - whereupon both sides attacked him. Now, after a young musician was shot while protesting, Dudamel has directly called on "the President of the Republic and the national government to rectify and listen to the voice of the Venezuelan people. ... Democracy cannot be built t
  
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• Breaking and Entering: In His Videos, Zhang Pelli Destroys and Restores to ‘Capture and Emphasize Time’

  05-05-2017 15:30 via artnews.com
  In 1988, Chinese artist Zhang Peili presented one of his artworks on a television screen at a conference in Huangshan. The piece, a three-hour video, titled 30×30, has gone down in history as the first example of video art in … Read More
  
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• Breaking and Entering: In His Videos, Zhang Peili Destroys and Restores to ‘Capture and Emphasize Time’

  05-05-2017 15:30 via artnews.com
  In 1988, Chinese artist Zhang Peili presented one of his artworks on a television screen at a conference in Huangshan. The piece, a three-hour video, titled 30×30, has gone down in history as the first example of video art in … Read More
  
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• Tate acquires British impressionist painting Le Passeur for £1.5m

  05-05-2017 15:18
  
  Tate Britain puts William Stott of Oldham’s 1881 work Le Passeur (The Ferryman) on public display after buying it for the nationAn important but little-known example of 19th-century British impressionism, depicting two girls gazing across a river as they wait for a ferryman, has been acquired for the nation.Tate Britain has put on public display William Stott of Oldham’s Le Passeur (The Ferryman) (1881) which it has bought for £1.5m. Continue reading...
  
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• Street Artist Dies After Falling Through Roof While Working On New Piece

  05-05-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Jordan (Tead) Vaughn, 34, made a reputation for himself in Detroit's street art scene over the past 20 years. The Trenton-reared artist was known for being able to seamlessly blend various styles to create an approach that was pulled from the early days of graffiti yet uniquely his own."
  
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• This Is The Most Powerful Woman In The New York Art World, Says The New York Times

  05-05-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "At 63, [she] has been running an art museum in New York longer than anyone except Glenn Lowry at the Museum of Modern Art. ... She is one of only two directors in the city who has overseen the construction of a brand-new building. ... And she is now in the midst of an $80 million capital campaign to double her museum's size, a project notable at least so far for its sotto-voce nature, in sharp contrast to the expansion Mr. Lowry is overseeing.
  
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• Morning Links: Don’t Slash My Christopher Wool Edition

  05-05-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• David Lang Creates A Symphony For 1,000 Broken School Instruments

  05-05-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The School District of Philadelphia has over 1,000 broken musical instruments, from flutes with bent keys to trombones missing slides. Some of their fixes are easy, others complex, yet due to funding cuts in the city, the district doesn't have a budget for either." But a Temple University professor had an idea for making music with them as-is, using that as a way to raise money to start fixing them.
  
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• End Of An Era: Brooklyn Academy Of Music's Longtime Executive Producer To Retire

  05-05-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "It is time for the next wave to roll in at the Brooklyn Academy of Music: Joseph V. Melillo, who has helped shape the academy's cutting-edge aesthetic for more than three decades, will announce on Friday that he plans to step down as executive producer at the end of 2018. Mr. Melillo, 70, is the last link to the organization's impresario and visionary leader, Harvey Lichtenstein."
  
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• Largest-Ever Cash Gift To A UK Museum - And It Comes From An American

  05-05-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Ukrainian-American businessman Len Blavatnik - who funded the $100,000 Warner Music Prize and gave a $25 million naming gift to Carnegie Hall last June after his nemesis stepped down as board chair there - has made a donation of more than £50 million to the Tate Modern, which will name its popular new extension after him.
  
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• British Museum Signals It's Willing To Lend Out Parthenon Marbles - And Doesn't Get Much Interest

  05-05-2017 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The British Museum has received only a single request to borrow one of the Parthenon Marbles since the sensational loan of a sculpture to [the Hermitage in] Russia in December 2014 ... [which] was the first time that any of the Parthenon Marbles had left the British Museum since arriving in London in 1807."
  
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• Minotaure Caressant Du Mufle La Main D’Une Dormeuse: Picasso embraces his ugly side

  05-05-2017 13:00
  
  The minotaur is an awesome alter ego in the hands of the Spaniard, one used to express the extremes of his personal lifeWhat an awesome alter ego the minotaur is, at least in the hands of Picasso in the 30s. Part-superhuman, part-sacrificial beast, the monster was used by the artist to express the extremes of his personal life. Continue reading...
  
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• Death from above: how David Maisel turned 'the new Area 51' into land art

  05-05-2017 13:00
  
  Dugway Proving Ground has been a testing ground for US military since the second world war, and now the mysterious site has been turned into visual artWhile militarized landscapes may not have shifted in their general character – the Nevada Test Site, where nuclear devices have been tested since 1950, now hold monthly tours for morbid adventurers – there is a clear and present sense that global warming applies geopolitically as well as ecologically. Photographer David Maisel’s
  
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• Richard Mosse wins Prix Pictet award

  05-05-2017 12:39
  
  The Irish-born photographer Richard Mosse has won the Prix Pictet award, for his series of black-and-white images entitled Heat Maps (2016-17). Now based in Leeds, Mosse used a military-grade thermal camera that detects body heat to depict sites on the journeys faced by migrants in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Regarded as a conceptual documentary photographer, his work was shown earlier this year in the Barbican Centres Curve gallery. The prize was presented last night (4 May)
  
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• Giacometti, Syria and Richard Long: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  05-05-2017 10:30
  
  Track the evolution of the Swiss visionary’s art, explore the worst humanitarian crisis of our time and take in the pioneering ecologist’s landscapesThere are two Alberto Giacomettis. One is the revered, perhaps even over-revered, visionary whose tall, thin figures and heavily expressive portraits helped to define the anguished culture of postwar Europe. Yet before he became an existentialist, Giacometti was a surrealist. His sculptures from the 1930s are sensual, violent and often s
  
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• Burden review – persuasive look at art's 'Evel Knievel' – or David Blaine

  05-05-2017 10:00
  
  This stimulating film about the radical performance artist Chris Burden, who once got himself shot through the arm for a piece, is a thorough exploration of his work and reputationChris Burden is the conceptual artist who started his career in the 70s as the dangerous situationist radical who didn’t want art to be composed of objects to be bought and sold. He wanted a pure essence, a form that might come into being purely ephemerally, mysteriously, in performance art that challenged our se
  
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• Tracking the 'render ghosts' – tech podcast

  05-05-2017 08:00
  
  Artist James Bridle reveals his quest to trace the anonymous faces appearing on hoardings around our cities
  Artist and writer James Bridle has been preoccupied for the last decade by a strange mission: to find the real-life counterparts of the people who appear in the architectural renderings that appear on hoardings around our cities. These photos were probably taken for a stock database, and now they live forever, suspended in the imagination of a space. James, who’s now based in Athens,
  
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• Despite Low European Turnout at Frieze New York, American Collectors Spur on Sales

  05-05-2017 01:45 via artnews.com
  Frieze New York evolved out of an art fair in London and attracts collectors of a globetrotting cosmopolitan sort, but after 2 p.m. on Thursday’s VIP preview day, a ripple went through the crowd due to something big happening in … Read More
  
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• A Tour of Frieze New York 2017

  05-05-2017 01:13 via artnews.com
  The sixth edition of Frieze New York opened to invited guests today on Randall’s Island and runs through Sunday evening. Via ferry, car, or maybe even carrier pigeon (see above), the international art world descended to look, pay exorbitant prices for … Read More
  
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