Arts news

• Cyborgs, sirens and a singing murderer: the thrilling, oligarch-free Venice Biennale – review

  25-04-2022 18:19
  
  The Russian pavilion is closed and you can’t speak in the Italian one. Thank goodness for the opium-smoking cat and the human turning into a mobile phone. Our writer reports from the groundbreaking arts spectacularWonders and marvels, the beautiful and the terrible, the celebratory and the morbid all fill the 59th Venice Biennale. Business as usual, you might say, but there are no trillionaire oligarch yachts moored by the Giardini and there is less razzmatazz all round. As well as being t
  
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• Cynthia Plaster Caster: the artist whose rock star penis sculptures asked big questions about manhood​

  25-04-2022 14:55
  
  The 74-year-old artist, who died last week, turned the tables on rock musicians with her notorious plaster casts – and complicated the image of the groupie“She’s like the Michelangelo of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll,” Pamela Des Barres once said of her friend and peer in penis admiration, Cynthia Albritton. Better known as Cynthia Plaster Caster, the 74-year-old artist died last week after battling a long illness. She was one of the last living “supergroup
  
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• The art of resilience: how the museum has endured through crisis

  25-04-2022 08:11
  
  In a new book, author Samuel Redman looks back on times of strife and how arts institutions have responded and survivedThe Museum: A Short History of Crisis and Resilience was a book born out of the pandemic. Originally conceived in early 2020 as a look at the current state of museums and where they were headed in the future, the project took on a new meaning – and a new trajectory – as the coronavirus swept across the globe. “Like a lot of people, I started to think back to th
  
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• Our Selves: celebrating photographs taken by female artists

  25-04-2022 07:03
  
  An empowering new exhibition looks back on the work of female photographers from around the world over the last 100 yearsAs the news cycle regularly demonstrates, the simple, quintessentially modern act of taking a photograph has now become a predominant way of subverting entrenched power. And female artists, often on the fringes of cultural society, have been using their cameras to do just that for well over 100 years. This is one of the provocative declarations made by Our Selves: Photographs
  
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• ‘An apparition came towards me’: Tracey Emin on seeing a ghost and building a new life in Margate

  25-04-2022 07:00
  
  Still in recovery from cancer, the artist has moved home with plans to open an art school, launch a catering college, and even spruce up the streets. She talks about her new sense of freedom – and the pain that infused her latest devastating nudesTracey Emin is curled up on the red sofa of her new home in Margate, with her kittens Teacup and Pancake lolling beside her. “Some critic,” she tells me, “said I was influenced by Matisse. I said, ‘Oh, you mean because of t
  
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