Arts news

• Pornography or art? Outrage master Georg Baselitz’s sex prints are sublimely carnal

  09-11-2023 18:04
  
  Cristea Roberts Gallery, London
  These huge upside-down linocuts showing clothed couples having sex, with a white circle at the pivotal point, are ‘like Picasso on schnapps’Are there any limits to art’s ability to transform? Not according to Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who has reworked the imagery from a set of 19th-century “erotic lithographs” that many might describe as pornography. For starters, he flips the pictures upside down – his habitual
  
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• Love letters, gossip, prayers and poetry: the tapes that sustained the Somali diaspora

  09-11-2023 12:04
  
  An art project explores the cassette culture that brought news from home – while providing a vehicle for political opposition and a thriving music sceneFozia Ismail has clear memories of being summoned to the living room where the rest of her family sat on the floor huddled around a cassette player. When her mum pressed play, the voice of relatives in Somalia filled their north London flat. “I had to listen to people that I hadn’t met: uncles and aunties, and then record an awk
  
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• Picasso painting of his ‘golden muse’ sells for $139.4m in New York

  09-11-2023 09:49
  
  Femme à la montre, painted in 1932, becomes artist’s second most expensive work sold at auctionA portrait of Pablo Picasso’s “golden muse” and secret lover has sold for $139.4m (£114m) at auction in New York, making it the second most valuable work by the 20th-century artist.Femme à la montre, painted in 1932, was described by the auctioneers Sotheby’s as the “prized jewel” of about 120 artworks owned by Emily Fisher Landau, one of th
  
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