Arts news

• June Simms obituary

  20-03-2025 20:41
  
  My mother, June Simms, who has died aged 92, was one of the first people to benefit from the newly created NHS in 1948, and among the first to give back, contributing as a nurse, theatre sister and midwife.The only child of Priscilla (nee Goodacre) and Fred Ringe, a carpenter, June was born and brought up in Rugby. She was bought ballet lessons, a rare treat in their working-class household, as a distraction from the second world war she saw overhead, living near heavily bombed Coventry; her par
  
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• What These Newly Deciphered 4,000-Year-Old Tablets Tell Us About The Akkadian Empire

  20-03-2025 20:04 via theguardian.com
  
  These particular artifacts mostly demonstrate that the people running the empire day-to-day were (pick one or both) thorough, detail-oriented administrators or obsessive bureaucrats. – The Observer (UK)
  
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• How Government Layoffs Are Affecting DC Bookstores

  20-03-2025 19:34 via publishersweekly.com
  
  “There’s also been a noticeable uptick in conversations among shoppers about the general plight of federal workers and the precarity of government employment these days.” – Publishers Weekly
  
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• Behind the Scenes: How The Great Golden Toilet Robbery Went Down

  20-03-2025 19:01 via bbc.com
  
  Maurizio Cattelan’s satirical piece America, a fully functioning 18-karat gold toilet, was ripped from the plumbing and stolen from an exhibition in England in 2019. With security video and interviews with staffers at the venue, Blenheim Palace, the BBC has a report on how the theft happened. – BBC
  
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• A dustpan and brush with fine art | Brief letters

  20-03-2025 18:49
  
  What is art? | Wordsearch | Labour membership | Dark matter | Change for the worseRe your letters on art, or the question of what is art (19 March), I am reminded of two gallery visits. In one, a friend and I were looking at an “installation” in the foyer, involving canvas and a brush and pan, to discover they were workmen’s tools awaiting some repair work. In another gallery, in a large bare room with a stepladder at one end, my husband asked when the exhibition
  
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• ‘The drill scene was dead. They’d locked everyone up’: RIP Germain on his shocking coffin installation

  20-03-2025 13:01
  In a room stinking of industrial bleach and cooled to the temperature of a morgue, the artist explores pop culture’s voracious appetite for violence – by trapping the viewer in front of 101 hours of drill videos‘A generation has been completely wiped out,” says Luton-born artist RIP Germain. He’s talking about the UK drill scene, a subject he explores in his latest exhibition. In an image used to publicise the show, we see the faces of 42 rappers, all of them in pri
  
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• ‘Every stone tells a story’: Cornish hedge labyrinth opens on Bodmin Moor

  20-03-2025 12:32
  Artist behind giant piece of land art made using ancient Cornish hedging technique says work is a message to future generationsIt is an intriguing piece of land art, a hymn to the almost-lost craft of Cornish hedging and also – perhaps – an optimistic message from the early 21st century to future generations.As the sun rose over Bodmin Moor on spring equinox morning, a Cornish bagpipe struck up and Kerdroya, five years in the making and built to last four millennia, was officially op
  
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• Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other review – compelling portrait of a passionate marriage

  20-03-2025 12:00
  From serious injury and coping with different levels of fame to resentment and ping-pong – a powerful insight into a life shared by two charismatic creativesIt’s hard not to wonder why this excellent documentary about an older married couple – writer and artist Maggie Barrett and photographer Joel Meyerowitz – is getting released just as Meyerowitz’s Tate Modern show is coming to end; you’d think there would be an overlap, if only to enhance traffic to both. C
  
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