Arts news

• Google partners with 180 institutions to launch art and fashion platform

  08-06-2017 23:57
  
  Digital giant Google has partnered with 180 institutions, schools and archives around the world for a new online project focusing on the history of fashion. We Wear Culture, which launched on the Google Arts & Culture website and mobile apps looks at how fashion is stitched into the fabric of our societies, according to a press release.
  "We live in a world were there's a divide between high culture and popular culture and we believe there really is no division," said Amit Sood, the director
  
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• Welsh National Opera Offers First Virtual Reality Opera Experience

  08-06-2017 23:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Created by Welsh National Opera, the project will allow visitors to step inside the worlds of The Magic Flute and Madam Butterfly, including performances from WNO productions. Called Magic Butterfly, the production will combine motion capture, animation and music to create an "immersive experience using responsive animation and sound". WNO claims this is the first time an opera company has used VR in this way.
  
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• Reena Spaulings at Museum Ludwig, Cologne

  08-06-2017 23:29 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Wall Labels, Part 2: Because Isn’t This What Everyone Thinks When They See a 15th-Century Painting of a Saint?

  08-06-2017 23:13 via artnews.com
  Sorry, we're still not done with wall labels. Read More
  
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• Bob Dylan's Singular, Quirky Performance Of His Nobel Speech

  08-06-2017 23:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Dylan submitted his lecture, four thousand and eight words long, to the Swedes on June 5th. You can read it here, and listen, too; Dylan made a recording of his text, speaking for twenty-seven minutes over a smoky, meditative jazz-piano arrangement. Not for him, the sombre pomp of the podium. He sounds like a lounge singer lost in contemplative patter, just letting the thoughts flow. Pour yourself a whiskey, honey, pull up a chair, and stay awhile."
  
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• When does a photograph lie? Taryn Simon's Innocents series looks at how images can be used to blur truth and fiction

  08-06-2017 23:00
  
  To mark the 25th anniversary of the Innocence Project, the US non-profit organisation that aims to use DNA evidence to exonerate those who have been wrongfully convicted, the Guild Hall arts centre in East Hampton, New York, opens its summer season this month with a display of the US artist Taryn Simons 2002 photographic series The Innocents (17 June-30 July).
  In her first major project, Simon photographed men and women who served time for crimes they did not commit at sites that the prosecutio
  
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• Economic blues on back burner as collectors flock to Art Basel

  08-06-2017 23:00
  
  With the presidential election in France in the rearview mirror, and spring auctions in New York bringing reassuring prices for top-flight material, collectors may feel that the political and economic instability roiling the Western art market in the first half of the year has begun to abate. The 291 dealers at this years Art Basel fair, now in its 48th year, are poised to meet the sustained demand for exceptional, undiscovered material, but are also coming armed with works that speak to the co
  
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• Ancient China: a crossroads to the world

  08-06-2017 23:00
  
  As mummies are to ancient Egypt, so the terracotta army is to ancient Chinaa way to make the mysterious past tangible to modern eyes. Since more than 7,000 life-size terracotta warriors were first discovered in 1974 in three burial pits less than a mile from the funerary compound of the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (reigned 221-210BC), they have surprised and dazzled the world. Now, a group of them are in New York.The exhibition Age of Empires: Art of the Qin and Han Dynasties at the M
  
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• Why Frank Lloyd Wright's Los Angeles Houses Are Unique

  08-06-2017 22:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  He was trying to shape an indigenous regional architecture for Southern California. And he was attempting to put a definitive end to — to bury for good — a deeply troubled decade in his personal and professional lives. The regionalism of the houses, their response to the landscape, history and climate of Southern California, is at once their most powerful and most naive feature.
  
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• Photos: A Look Around Documenta 14 in Kassel

  08-06-2017 21:59 via artnews.com
  A quick tour of a quinquennial that could take days to see in its entirety. Read More
  
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• Pop to the shop: inside Lucy Sparrow’s handmade felt bodega

  08-06-2017 21:34
  
  Every New York neighbourhood has its bodegathat 24-hour store that sells all manner of last minute necessities, from tall-boys of Coors and late-night snacks to condoms and toilet paper. The Meatpacking District, home of the High Line and the Whitney, just got a suitably arty version with the opening of 8 till late, an installation by the British artist Lucy Sparrow in the Garden Room at The Standard hotel. Named after its hours of operation (8am-8pm, until 30 June), the shop is filled entirely
  
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• Rich People's Demonstrations Of Status Are Changing - It's No Longer Just About Conspicuous Consumption

  08-06-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The democratisation of consumer goods has made them far less useful as a means of displaying status. In the face of rising social inequality, both the rich and the middle classes own fancy TVs and nice handbags. They both lease SUVs, take airplanes, and go on cruises. On the surface, the ostensible consumer objects favoured by these two groups no longer reside in two completely different universes. Given that everyone can now buy designer handbags and new cars, the rich have taken to using much
  
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• The Great Wall Label Shortage of 2017! Critic Chaos! Artists Take Matters into Their Own Hands

  08-06-2017 21:07 via artnews.com
  All we are is just another trick on the wall.Read More
  
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• The Differences Between "Political" Art In Response To London And Manchester Attacks And Activist Political Art

  08-06-2017 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It was different from the calls for “resistance” art we have been seeing in other Western countries because, this time, the existential threat being responded to was not part of out own culture; it was from outside. One could talk of a difference between “protest art” (aimed at Western-generated political problems) and “solidarity art” (designed to lift morale in the face of terrorism). And although the solidarity art is not a complaint directed at any particu
  
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• If The Globalization Of Writing Is So Great, Why Are People Attacking It?

  08-06-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "If the argument for globalism is so water-tight and damn-near irreproachable, why in the area of literature does one find so many supposedly progressive voices constantly bashing the very books that come out of the cauldron of heterogeneity? Why, in other words, are those from the intellectual class so quick to assume the mantle of the God of Genesis, impugning works that should be celebrated for either depicting or inhabiting the qualities of our modern world?"
  
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• At Kassel’s Stadtmuseum, a View to a Kill

  08-06-2017 20:07 via artnews.com
  Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo places herself in the crosshairs. Read More
  
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• 'Trout Fishing In America' - Minor Masterpiece, Silly '60s Relic, Or Both?

  08-06-2017 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Richard Brautigan's first novel sold less than 800 copies. His next novel sold 4 million copies. Trout Fishing in America turns 50 this year, and while most novels of that age now seem dated, Brautigan's work seems particularly so: playful, goofy, fragmentary, optimistic. Trout Fishing in America is worth revisiting for exactly its status as an artifact of that time, a book that reveled in language, and made its writer into an imperfect legend."
  
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• Why Sony Is Producing "Clean" Versions Of Its Movies

  08-06-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The shift to new home options for these 'clean' versions aligns with the public movement away from traditional broadcast venues towards on-demand or streaming services. Simply waiting for scrubbed content to arrive on television is not only inconvenient from the audience’s new get-it-now standpoint, but allows studios including Sony a new vector for improved profitability. While the streaming revolution has, for the most part, been a knife in the heart of network television, it could prov
  
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• 'We Never Really Left High School At All' - How Popularity Matters Throughout Adult Life

  08-06-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Study after study ... suggest[s] the ways that popularity imprints itself on people's lives, far beyond the teenage years, through both its presence and its absence. Popularity affects people's ability to find success in their careers, regardless of their intelligence or their work ethic. It affects their ability to find fulfilling friendships and romantic relationships. ... [It's] much like class in America: It divides people. It defines people. Yet we generally treat it as a relic of the past
  
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• Careful Whisper: Pope.L Discusses His Documenta Sound Work, Hidden Across Kassel

  08-06-2017 19:02 via artnews.com
  Cryptic communiqués are in the air—for those who listen.Read More
  
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• Clonofornication: On Alexandro Segade’s ‘Future St.’ Performance Piece at the Broad Museum

  08-06-2017 19:00 via artnews.com
  Future St., a multimedia theater work by Alexandro Segade performed at the Broad museum in Los Angeles last week, opened with a euphoric presentation of propaganda for a future state called Clonofornia. Holograms appeared on screens as a leader from … Read More
  
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• Clonoforincation: On Alexandro Segade’s ‘Future St.’ Performance Piece at the Broad Museum

  08-06-2017 19:00 via artnews.com
  Future St., a multimedia theater work by Alexandro Segade performed at the Broad museum in Los Angeles last week, opened with a euphoric presentation of propaganda for a future state called Clonofornia. Holograms appeared on screens as a leader from … Read More
  
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• Kurt Schwitters's Merz Barn under threat from property developers

  08-06-2017 18:32
  
  German artist’s ‘outstanding’ unfinished work in Cumbria could be sold after art institutions refuse to save itA small stone barn nestled in the Cumbrian hills revered as a pioneering piece of modernist art is under threat from property developers, after arts institutions including Arts Council England refused to save it.Merz Barn is the unfinished work of artist Kurt Schwitters, who fled Nazi Germany after his work was deemed degenerate and made his home in Langdale in the Lak
  
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• Researchers Are Teaching Machines How To Draw. Is This A Way To Teach Them To Think?

  08-06-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "For humans, a sketch is a depiction of a real thing. We can easily understand the relationship between the abstract four-line representation and the thing itself. The concept means something to us.  For SketchRNN, a sketch is a sequence of pen strokes, a shape being formed through time. The task for the machine is to take the essences of things depicted in our drawings and try to use them to understand the world as it is."
  
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• The Surprising Place Where A Mother Lode Of Historic Silent Film Footage Turned Up

  08-06-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Dawson City, in the Yukon Territory, wound up being the end of the line in an early film distribution network, and distributors thought shipping the prints back from there was too expensive to bother with - so an enormous body of films piled up there. Filmmaker Bill Morrison made an avant-garde documentary (?!) about it all.
  
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• How Video Games Teach Positive Values

  08-06-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Video games are an art form. They make a player feel. “Journey” helped me understand how and why games could make me feel just as much books, movies and TV do.
  
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• Peggy Guggenheim’s granddaughter takes the reins at the late collector’s Venetian museum

  08-06-2017 17:19
  
  Peggy Guggenheims granddaughter, Karole P.B. Vail, has been appointed as director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, replacing Philip Rylands who led the museum for 37 years. Vail, who has been a Guggenheim curator since 1997, takes up the post this month. She is based at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York where she organised exhibitions such as Moholy-Nagy: Future Present (2016). Vail is co-organising a retrospective of Alberto Giacometti due to open in New York next
  
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• 'A place to call our own': Europe's first Roma cultural centre opens in Berlin

  08-06-2017 17:11
  
  Groundbreaking institute to showcase and promote artistic and cultural contribution of Europe’s 12 million Roma peopleAs a boy facing bullying and discrimination for his Roma identity in his native Albania, Sead Kazanxhiu said he had harboured a simple dream: “To be considered equal to those around me. It was the same dream as our forefathers,” he said. “To not have to hide our identity in order to survive.”Related: Fighting Gypsy discrimination: ‘What people
  
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• Making Sense Of Isadora Duncan's Life (And Her Less-Than-Reliable Autobiography)

  08-06-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Amelia Gray: "Isadora spent her whole life straddling the gap between public perception and private reality. In writing Isadora, a novel set during a particularly dark year and a half of her life, I found myself having to pick through that reality, reality as Isadora wished to create it, and a third, emotional reality, which aspired to contain recognizable truths."
  
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• Here's Why Some People Are Fascinated By Gross Internet Videos

  08-06-2017 16:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Dr. Pimple Popper" (a California dermatologist), for instance, has well over 2 million YouTuibe subscribers. "There's actually a psychological explanation for loving these videos - or at least voluntarily watching more of them." Katherine Ellen Foley explains this intersection between disgust and curiosity.
  
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• A Brief Seven-Year History Of 'Dear Evan Hansen'

  08-06-2017 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "What follows are some highlights, beginning with the first private airing of the efforts of Pasek, Paul, Levenson and all their collaborators. It's a shorthand mapping of Dear Evan Hansen's march to critical and popular acclaim and its position as one of the more remarkable shows in recent musical-theater history."
  
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• June is the month of May or Jez We Can: the best election artwork

  08-06-2017 16:04
  
  In the run-up to the UK election, social media users have been getting creative. Here are some of the best offeringsDuring the course of the election campaign, Instagrammers have been getting creative and sharing their #generalelection artwork. And while some have been inspired by one politician or party, others have dedicated their efforts to encourage everyone to use their vote regardless of party preferences.Continue reading...
  
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• Foundation for Piero Manzoni Goes to Hauser & Wirth

  08-06-2017 16:00 via artnews.com
  Piero Manzoni may not have lived to be 30, but he produced one of art history’s funniest gestures: Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit), a 1961 project for which the Italian artist supposedly canned his own excrement. Reports from more recent years claim that … Read More
  
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• Karole P.B. Vail Named Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

  08-06-2017 15:46 via artnews.com
  The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation has announced that Karole P.B. Vail will be the next director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and director of the foundation for Italy. She succeeds Philip Rylands, the collection’s first director … Read More
  
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• History gathers dust … photographers add an extra layer to the story of a century

  08-06-2017 15:44
  
  From 9/11 to Hiroshima, from a vandal in the Louvre to the car Mussolini was dragged from, the Whitechapel’s fascinating new show A Handful of Dust sees seismic events in a different lightIn 1920, on a visit to Marcel Duchamp’s studio in Manhattan, Man Ray’s ever-curious eye was drawn to a large sheet of dust-covered glass. When viewed though his camera, its surface, he later noted, “appeared like some strange landscape from a bird’s eye view”. He opened the c
  
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• Doing 'Daily Show'-Style Satire On The Russia Today Network Has, Well, Certain Limits

  08-06-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Lee Camp, an "acerbic left-wing comic," hosts a weekly show called Redacted Tonight on RT America, the Russian-funded cable network. Jason Zinoman looks at the show and its host - and at Camp's visible discomfort when asked about the one American political issue that his counterparts make hay with but he doesn't touch.
  
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• Face to Face: Mounira Al Solh Presents a Suite of Portraits at Documenta’s Glass Pavilions

  08-06-2017 15:30 via artnews.com
  Installation view of Mounira Al Sohl, I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, 2012–17, in Kassel. ARTNEWSOne of the most charmingly named venues at Documenta 14 in Kassel—even more charming than Tofufabrik (an old tofu factory)—is the stretch … Read More
  
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• Finding Hidden Treasures Of The African Musical Diaspora

  08-06-2017 15:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Music librarian and historian Melanie Zeck writes of the works and composers she discovered for the first time when she went to work at the Center for Black Music Research in Chicago.
  
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• At Documenta, Artists Confront Europe’s Anti-Immigrant Bigotry

  08-06-2017 15:07 via artnews.com
  Documenta 14 is nothing if not clever. Exhibit A of its dry wit in referencing Europe’s anti-immigrant bigotry would be the positioning of Olu Oguibe’s monumental obelisk placed smack in the center of Königsplatz. On each of the obelisk’s four … Read More
  
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• A 'Nondenominational Leader' At This Year's Ojai Music Festival

  08-06-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The annual gathering [in Southern California] is seen as a litmus test, suggesting where contemporary Western art music is headed. [Vijay] Iyer is the first jazz musician - and the rare artist of color - to serve as music director, a position that rotates every year. He has paid less attention to the festival’s history than to the opportunity it presents."
  
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• Morning Links: Egg-Shaped Museum Edition

  08-06-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Documenta’s Warm and Cuddly Side (With a Pillow for Your Thoughts)

  08-06-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  For those who think they know everything there is to know about the history of Documenta, this edition has a couple footnotes to add. For instance, in the main venue in Kassel, the Fridericianum, there are photographs that Hans Haacke … Read More
  
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• The In Sound from Way Out: Benjamin Patterson at Documenta 14 in Kassel and Athens

  08-06-2017 14:59 via artnews.com
  Benjamin Patterson’s work in Kassel. ARTNEWSThe work by the late, great Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson at Documenta 14 is both gigantic and almost entirely invisible. In Athens, it is tucked away in the gardens of the lovely Byzantine and Christian Museum, … Read More
  
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• Founder Of DC's Woolly Mammoth Theatre Stepping Down After Four Decades

  08-06-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In another seismic change for Washington theater, Howard Shalwitz, who in nearly 40 years at the helm has made Woolly Mammoth Theatre a national champion of the new - and frequently provocative - American play, will leave his post as artistic director in June 2018."
  
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• Documenta 14 to collaborate on show in Luanda

  08-06-2017 14:36
  
  Documenta 14 broke with tradition when it opened in Athens before its home city of Kassel. And now, the German quinquennial is broadening its geographical reach even further by collaborating on a show in Luanda, Angola. The exhibition, planned for 2018, will feature 16 artists of African descent who are participating in Documenta 14 (until 16 July in Athens; until 17 September in Kassel). They include Akinbode Akinbiyi, Sammy Baloji, Bili Bidjocka, Manthia Diawara, Theo Eshetu, Aboubakar F
  
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• 'Piddling But Priceless' - Tales Of The Small Regional Grants From The NEA And What They Accomplish

  08-06-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Joanna Walters visits a choreographer in Ohio who created dances based on ailing seniors' life stories, the director of a literary center in Idaho that gives writing classes and workshops to low-income kids, an award-winning poet and novelist in New Mexico whose early-career NEA grant kept her and her husband off food stamps, and the community arts center in Florida that taught the writer of the Oscar-winning film Moonlight.
  
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• Oops, Never Mind: Banksy Withdraws His Offer Of Free Prints To Britons Who Vote Against Tories

  08-06-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The artist, who found global fame with his pop-up street art, [had] offered prints of his famous 'girl with balloon' for those who voted against Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservative party in six constituencies near his Bristol home." His reason for cancelling the offer is a good one, though.
  
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• Here’s the Map of Documenta 14 Works in Karlsraue Park in Kassel

  08-06-2017 14:03 via artnews.com
  The Karlsraue Park in Kassel is huge, measuring about 1.5 square kilometers, and it’s heavily wooded, so the fact that the map booklet for Documenta 14 doesn’t provide details about the locations of the four works installed there is a … Read More
  
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• Charles Simmons, Novelist And Satirist, Dead At 92

  08-06-2017 14:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "[His] five critically acclaimed novels included a savage sendup of The New York Times Book Review, where he had worked as an editor for three decades."
  
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