Arts news

• Bombshells and Cringe Jokes on a Huge Day of Testimony

  20-11-2019 23:36 via nytimes.com
  
  In the explosive impeachment-hearing appearance by Gordon Sondland, drama and farce were never far apart.
  
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• The Met Opera’s Credit Outlook Darkens After Modest Deficits

  20-11-2019 23:12 via nytimes.com
  
  Rising capital expenses, including the repair of its theater’s travertine exterior, are among the company’s financial challenges.
  
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• ‘Pumpgirl’ Review: Gas for Sale but Dreams on Hold

  20-11-2019 23:00 via nytimes.com
  
  An exquisite Irish Repertory Theater revival captures a trio of lost souls aching to connect in their constricting small town.
  
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• French Court Upholds Jail Sentence for Picasso Electrician Accused of Stealing Artworks

  20-11-2019 21:59 via artnews.com
  
  A decades-long legal saga between Picasso’s estate and the artist’s electrician involving a trove of hoarded artwork has ended with a decisive verdict from the French High Court.
  Per AFP, a court in Lyon upheld two-year suspended jail terms for Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec, who were convicted in 2015 of possessing 271 works that authorities believed were stolen. The massive trove included nine Cubist collages and a work from Picasso’s Blue Period.
  That verdict was upheld in 2
  
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• French Court Upholds Jail Sentence for Picasso Electrician Accused of Stealing Artworks

  20-11-2019 21:59 via artnews.com
  
  A decades-long legal saga between Picasso’s estate and the artist’s electrician involving a trove of hoarded artwork has ended with a decisive verdict from the French High Court.
  Per AFP, a court in Lyon upheld two-year suspended jail terms for Pierre and Danielle Le Guennec, who were convicted in 2015 for possessing 271 works that authorities believed were stolen. The massive trove included nine Cubist collages and a work from Picasso’s Blue Period.
  That verdict was upheld in
  
  Read more

• The Istanbul Biennial Ignored the City’s Specific Social Issues in Favor of General Ecological Themes

  20-11-2019 21:41 via artnews.com
  
  Five weeks before the Istanbul Biennial’s opening in mid-September, its organizer, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud changed the exhibition’s main venue from the historic Haliç shipyards, dating from 1455, to the sleek new Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum. Over the past half-decade a tycoon loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been developing the shipyards into a shopping mall complex, the construction of whic
  
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• The Istanbul Biennial Ignored the City’s Specific Social Issues in Favor of General Ecological Themes

  20-11-2019 21:41 via artnews.com
  
  Five weeks before the Istanbul Biennial’s opening in mid-September, its organizer, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts, and curator Nicolas Bourriaud changed the exhibition’s main venue from the historic Haliç shipyards, dating from 1455, to the sleek new Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum. Over the past half-decade a tycoon loyal to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been developing the shipyards into a shopping mall complex, the construction of whic
  
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• Ask a Curator: A New Column by Venice Biennale Veteran Francesco Bonami

  20-11-2019 21:05 via artnews.com
  
  Even as the word “curate” has become commonplace—from curated music playlists to The Curator restaurant at Heathrow Airport, which sells seven kinds of burgers—the actual job of the art curator remains mysterious to many. To help elucidate the profession, curator Francesco Bonami has taken on a new monthly column for ARTnews, in which he will answer our (and your!) questions. Bonami, who is also an artist and writer, knows a fair amount about curating
  
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• Ask a Curator: A New Column by Venice Biennale Veteran Francesco Bonami

  20-11-2019 21:05 via artnews.com
  
  Even as the word “curate” has become commonplace—from curated music playlists to The Curator restaurant at Heathrow Airport, which sells seven kinds of burgers—the actual job of the art curator remains mysterious to many. To help elucidate the profession, curator Francesco Bonami has taken on a new monthly column for ARTnews, in which he will answer our (and your!) questions. Bonami, who is also an artist and writer, knows a fair amount about curating
  
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• Syrian Artist Calls Out BP Sponsorship of ‘Troy: Myth and Reality’ Exhibition at British Museum

  20-11-2019 21:04 via artnews.com
  
  After British Museum director Hartwig Fischer reaffirmed the institution’s longstanding relationship with the oil company BP earlier this year, the museum has faced backlash on several fronts. Novelist Ahdaf Soueif resigned from its board of trustees in July, citing concerns about BP funding, and more recently, human-rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC called on the museum to return looted objects to their countries of origin in his book Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case fo
  
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• When Book Deals Get Politicians Into Hot Water

  20-11-2019 20:38 via nytimes.com
  
  The former Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh, charged with fraud over her “Healthy Holly” children’s series, isn’t the first elected official who’s run into book trouble.
  
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• The Met Hires Denise Murrell, Curator of Acclaimed ‘Posing Modernity’ Exhibition

  20-11-2019 20:34 via artnews.com
  
  Denise Murrell, the curator behind the highly praised exhibition “Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today” that opened last year, will now hold the post of associate curator for 19th and 20th century art, a newly created position that will involve her working closely with both the museum’s modern and contemporary department and its European painting department. She will begin in her post in January.
  The announcement, which was first reported by the New
  
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• They’re Actual Supporting Actors, and Oscar Should Take a Look

  20-11-2019 20:33 via nytimes.com
  
  If leading performers drop into supporting categories to score a nomination, they may push out performances given by these seven standouts.
  
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• Collection of German Artworks Worth $331.9 M. Disappears, Leaving Artist Markus Lüpertz Distraught: Report

  20-11-2019 20:21 via artnews.com
  
  What happened to a group of works by Anselm Kiefer, Renate Graf, and Markus Lüpertz that’s said to be worth €300 million (about $331.9 million)? According to a new report, the pieces have disappeared somewhere in China.
  On Monday, Lüpertz held a press conference in Beijing to lament his vanished paintings—152 of them, to be exact, in addition to 87 paintings by Kiefer and 103 works by Graf. According to Süddeutsche Zeitung, the artist feared for his works’ w
  
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• Walter J. Minton, Publisher Who Defied Censors, Dies at 96

  20-11-2019 20:17 via nytimes.com
  
  As president of Putnam’s, he broke ground with sexually explicit works like “Lolita” and “Fannie Hill,” worked with top authors and scored many best sellers.
  
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• Muses: Flying Lotus on David Lynch, Renaissance Paintings, and Ralph Steadman’s ‘Weird Bug-Out’ Art

  20-11-2019 20:06 via artnews.com
  
  “Muses” is a column for which creators from different disciplines reveal sources of artistic inspiration and instigation. 
  Flying Lotus has been making expansive electronic music with a basis in hip-hop beats since 2006, when his debut album led the way for a discography that has touched on elements of spiritual ambience and astral jazz. He’s related to the great pianist and harpist Alice Coltrane (she was his aunt), and from his home base in Los Angeles—where he fou
  
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• Diane Simpson, Elia Alba, Torkwase Dyson Among 2019 Anonymous Was a Woman Grantees

  20-11-2019 20:06 via artnews.com
  
  Last year, artist Susan Unterberg revealed herself as the benefactor for the Anonymous Was a Woman award, which she established anonymously to support the careers of women artists over 40 years old. Now the organization behind the award has named the 10 women who will receive this year’s set of grants, which comes with $25,000 each.
  Among the grantees are Diane Simpson, Elia Alba, Nona Faustine, Amie Siegel, and Torkwase Dyson, who also recently won the Studio Museum in Harlem’s 2019
  
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• A Rose Is a Rose Is … Your Experience of a Rose? A Writer Plumbs Consciousness

  20-11-2019 19:58 via nytimes.com
  
  In “Out of My Head,” Tim Parks turns to scientists, philosophers and psychologists to explore ideas about human perception.
  
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• Four Directors Cast Out of Hollywood. Four Different Futures.

  20-11-2019 19:42 via nytimes.com
  
  Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Louis C.K. and Nate Parker are all trying comebacks. How they fare depends on the audience and the work, among other factors.
  
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• Robert Morris’s ‘Para-Architectural’ Drawings Envision a Fantasy Complex that Prioritizes Movement over Static Form

  20-11-2019 19:06 via artnews.com
  
  With “Robert Morris: Para-Architectural Projects,” Hunter College’s Leubsdorf Gallery spotlighted a seldom-seen portfolio by a postwar artist whose sculpture and writings helped define the Minimalist idiom of the 1960s and its eventual unmaking in “process art.” Illustrating Morris’s turn toward environmental scales, the show collected seven large-format drawings from 1971 that offer glimpses of what the late artist termed a “fantasy complex” of wa
  
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• How Leo Castelli, MoMA, and Two Wealthy Collectors Charted Today’s Rocket-Fueled Art Market

  20-11-2019 18:56 via artnews.com
  
  We might never have known about it, if it weren’t for the boast. Just as collectors brag about their acquisitions, art dealers have been known to brag about their sales, even the legendarily genteel Leo Castelli, widely considered the most important contemporary art dealer of all time. He was interviewed in 1969 by Paul Cummings from the Smithsonian, for an oral history. Knowing the interview would be sealed for years, Castelli felt at ease confiding his heroic tale from six years back.
  In
  
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• Overlooked No More: Pauline Boty, Rebellious Pop Artist

  20-11-2019 18:35 via nytimes.com
  
  With her daring feminist art and freewheeling lifestyle, Boty personified the cultural scene known as Swinging London.
  
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• Oxford Names ‘Climate Emergency’ Its 2019 Word of the Year

  20-11-2019 18:30 via nytimes.com
  
  In a break from precedent, the dictionary company released an all-environmental shortlist including “climate action,” “climate denial” and “eco-anxiety.”
  
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• After ‘For Sama,’ a Syrian Family Finds Refuge in London

  20-11-2019 18:22 via nytimes.com
  
  As Waad al-Kateab’s intimate documentary about life during the Syrian uprising airs on PBS, she discusses what her family’s day-to-day looks like as refugees in England.
  
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• The Trickster Art of Pope.L Draws Power from Negation

  20-11-2019 17:44 via artnews.com
  
  In 1978, Pope.L got on his hands and knees in a suit and safety vest, and made his way through the bustling crowds of Midtown Manhattan. Titled Times Square Crawl a.k.a. Meditation Square Piece, his performance combined a disturbance in public space with abjection and perverse humor, setting the tone for his subsequent experiments with what it means to make art and move through the world as a black man.
  William Pope.L, who exhibits under the name Pope.L (his mother invented it by appending the f
  
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• Review: Philip Glass, at 82, Unveils His First Piano Sonata

  20-11-2019 17:42 via nytimes.com
  
  Maki Namekawa gave the American premiere of the piece, a pleasant and passing revue of Glassian riffs.
  
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• AIDS Memorial Quilt to Return Home to San Francisco

  20-11-2019 17:00 via nytimes.com
  
  The quilt’s more than 50,000 panels will move to the National AIDS Memorial, while its archive of personal items will go to the Library of Congress.
  
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• Trevor Shimizu’s Painter Persona Spoofs Masculine Ideals of Artistic Genius

  20-11-2019 16:59 via artnews.com
  
  Throughout his expansive body of work, New York–based artist Trevor Shimizu has been “willing to reveal highly personal and potentially shameful things” while simultaneously “cultivating a Fantasy Self—an ideal self-image.”1 I’ve excerpted those characterizations not from a piece of art criticism but from a description of Type Four individuals, one of the nine categories defined by the Enneagram personality test popularized in the 1970s. Shimizu’s
  
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• Grammys Snubs and Surprises: Taylor Swift, Lil Nas X and More

  20-11-2019 16:31 via nytimes.com
  
  A new crop of pop stars lead the 2020 nominations, leaving stalwarts like Swift out of some major categories.
  
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• Welcome to the New ARTnews.com

  20-11-2019 16:30 via artnews.com
  
  Stop the Presses!
  In one of my favorite scenes in Tom Wolfe’s novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, the reporter character, Peter Fallow, experiences “a feeling that journalists live for. Before the mind can digest what the ears have just heard, an alarm puts the nervous system on red alert. A story! It is a neural event, a feeling as palpable as any recorded by the five senses. A story!”
  Here at ARTnews, we get that exact kind of thrill from delivering yo
  
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• A New Website for Art in America Asserts the Relevance of Art Criticism Today

  20-11-2019 16:27 via artnews.com
  
  Why relaunch a website in 2019? The question feels too obvious to answer but too fundamental to avoid. Part of the reason is that a new website allows us to look our best. Our new online home is more readable, easier to navigate, and visually sharper than any of Art in America’s previous digital incarnations. Consistent with the print redesign we introduced this summer, this site is meant to be more inviting. On the backend we’ve established systems that will allow us to grow rapidly
  
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• What Small Theater Does for New York? A Lot, Study Finds

  20-11-2019 16:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Playhouses and troupes beyond Broadway generate $584 million in economic benefit. But dependence on volunteer labor is high.
  
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• Mickalene Thomas Shares Everything. Even a New Show

  20-11-2019 16:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Inviting fellow artists to join her exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art fits into her notion that art can create positive change.
  
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• Meet the Artists in Mickalene Thomas’s Orbit

  20-11-2019 16:00 via nytimes.com
  
  For her exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Ms. Thomas pulled on her connections to the city to feature established and emerging artists.
  
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• As Kids, They Starred in Holiday Hits. They Moved on. Can We?

  20-11-2019 16:00 via nytimes.com
  
  For former child actors best known for Christmas movies, “Groundhog Day” is probably the seasonal film that best describes their experiences.
  
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• Grammy Nominations 2020: Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X Dominate

  20-11-2019 15:31 via nytimes.com
  
  Young artists lead the major categories as the Recording Academy strives to align its awards with the musicians pushing pop into the future.
  
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• Picasso’s Electrician Gets Suspended Two-Year Jail Sentence, Hélio Oiticica Estate Heads to Lisson, and More: Morning Links from November 20, 2019

  20-11-2019 15:00 via artnews.com
  Reanimating History
  An appeals court in France has upheld a suspended two-year jail sentence given to a former electrician to Picasso, who was convicted of having stolen 271 works by the artist. [Al Jazeera]
  The publication of artist Celia Paul’s new book about her time with the painter Lucian Freud, who has long dominated her narrative, is “of great significance,” writes Frances Spalding. [The Guardian]
  Lisson Gallery now represents the estate of Hélio Oiticica, one of
  
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• Grammy Nominations 2020: See the List

  20-11-2019 15:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Highlights from the 62nd annual awards’ 84 categories.
  
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• 2020 Grammy Nominations: Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X Dominate

  20-11-2019 14:40 via nytimes.com
  
  Young artists lead the major categories as the Recording Academy strives to align its awards with the musicians pushing pop into the future.
  
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• Estate of Hélio Oiticica, One of Latin America’s Most Important Modernists, Goes to Lisson Gallery

  20-11-2019 14:30 via artnews.com
  Hélio Oiticica may have lived to be just 42 years old, but over the course of his short career, his restlessly inventive spirit made him one of the most important Latin American artists of all time. He effectively helped define modern art in his home country, Brazil, though his interest in chance operations and utopian societies earned him a global audience. And now a major gallery is taking on the artist’s estate with the hope of growing that audience even more.
  Lisson Gallery, whi
  
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• What Happened to the Stolen Gold Toilet?

  20-11-2019 14:28 via nytimes.com
  
  There is still no sign of Maurizio Cattelan’s “America,” which went missing from a palace in England two months ago. But theories abound.
  
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• ‘OK Boomer’: Trying to Trademark a Meme

  20-11-2019 11:23 via nytimes.com
  
  At least five trademark applications are pending for the retort, according to a database for the federal patent office, including one by Fox Media, which hopes to use it for a possible television series.
  
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• What If Porn Had No Pictures?

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Female-run businesses want to bring audio pornography to the imaginative, ethically conscious masses.
  
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• The Trees and the Forest of New Towers

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  As engineered wood evolves as a construction material, the sky is becoming the limit for timber office and institutional buildings.
  
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• Peer Inside Tashkent’s Art-Filled (and Long-Shrouded) Subway

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  For decades, the city’s elaborately decorated metro stations were largely hidden from the outside world.
  
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• Murder at Lake Maggiore

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Piero Chiara’s existential thriller “The Bishop’s Bedroom” explores a dangerous game of deception in the years just after World War II.
  
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• Looking at Where Chicago Works

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  A tour reveals how form and function have evolved in the places where people earn a living.
  
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• Building David Byrne’s ‘Utopia,’ One Gray Suit at a Time

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  Bare feet, bare stage, roving musicians — and yes, those suits. Here’s what goes into every performance of the stylish Broadway concert “American Utopia.”
  
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• Black and White and Redone all Over

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  In Nashville, an architecture studio installs its headquarters in a former public library.
  
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• At the Entrenched Met Museum, the New Director Shakes Things Up

  20-11-2019 11:00 via nytimes.com
  
  One year into the job, Max Hollein shows that art shouldn’t be seen solely through a Western lens.
  
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