Art

Subterms

    More stories

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      On Covering the Arts in California

      by

      A conversation with Robin Pogrebin, a Los Angeles-based arts writer for The New York Times.The Frieze Art Fair at Paramount Studios in 2019.Graham Walzer for The New York TimesThough New York is often thought of as the center of the art world, there’s plenty going on in California.The New York Times has been covering California’s ambitious museums, top-notch art schools and adventurous galleries for years. Some of my favorite recent articles discussed how the Los Angeles art scene is eclipsing the Bay Area’s, how old San Francisco theaters are rethinking the size of their seats and how San Diego is finally getting its answer to the Hollywood Bowl.Robin Pogrebin, a longtime arts writer for The Times, moved to Los Angeles from New York last fall to bolster the coverage, reporting on art, architecture, music, theater and cultural institutions in California.Just this week, she published an article on the Resnicks, an L.A. couple who have made big donations to cultural organizations but have come under scrutiny for their water use, and another on the increasing recognition of Asian artists at the Frieze Art Fair, which opens today in Santa Monica.I spoke to Robin about her impressions of the West Coast art scene. Here is our conversation, lightly edited:In such a big state, how do you think about what to focus on?I had always considered the West Coast an important part of our cultural coverage, given that many important museums and galleries are here and that Los Angeles has a long tradition of producing artists. Hollywood also has the potential to feed the theater and dance worlds, and classical music as well as opera have their own vibrant followings here.Now that I’m based here, I’m exploring, discovering, learning and responding to what strikes me as newsworthy or interesting. I am out for lunches and dinners every day with people who can help me understand the cultural ecosystem here, attending events almost every night in many different arts disciplines. I’m keeping track of potential trends worth noting and individual stories worth telling.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      How Does a Day Job Affect an Artist’s Work? This Exhibition Has an Idea

      by

      Plus: an installation in an Indian palace, a farm shop in upstate New York — and more recommendations from T Magazine.Visit ThisSeven Decades of Toshiko Takaezu Ceramics, Together at the Noguchi MuseumLeft: Toshiko Takaezu with closed forms, 1989. Right: Takaezu​’​s “Closed Form​” (2004​).Left: Toshiko Takaezu papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution © Family of Toshiko Takaezu​. Photo: Charlotte Raymond. Right: Private collection, ​courtesy of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum © Family of Toshiko Takaezu. Photo: Nicholas Knight.The Hawaii-born artist Toshiko Takaezu was known for her ceramic works that redefined the genre with their “closed forms,” as she called them — sealed vessels whose hidden interior spaces were meant to activate the imagination. Next month, Takaezu’s life and work will be the focus of a major retrospective at the Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens. “Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within” will present over 150 pieces from private and public collections around the country, co-curated by the art historian Glenn Adamson, the museum curator Kate Wiener and the composer and sound artist Leilehua Lanzilotti. (A 368-page monograph, published in collaboration with Yale University Press, will accompany the exhibition.) Visitors will be able to see a collection that spans seven decades of Takaezu’s career, from her early student work in Hawaii in the 1940s to immersive, monumental ceramic forms she produced in the late 1990s to early 2000s. “Takaezu was also a weaver and painter, and often constructed multimedia installations where her ceramics, textiles and paintings operated together,” says Wiener. To play off this idea, the curators organized the show chronologically, incorporating each of these media into various sections, inspired by Takaezu’s own installations. Sound will also play a role. In her ceramic pieces, Takaezu would often place a dried fragment of clay within her closed form vessels, creating a musical rattle. For this exhibit, Lanzilotti (a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in music) has developed a series of videos offering insight into the sonic elements of Takaezu’s work — and visitors can hear those rattles firsthand via an interactive display. From March 20 to July 28; noguchi.org.Browse HereA Chef-Owned Farm Shop Opens in Hudson, N.Y.Located on Warren Street in Hudson, Farm Shoppe carries its own lines of granola and condiments, as well as antique tableware.Courtesy of the Farm ShoppeIn 2015, the chef and cookbook author Emma Hearst and her husband, the chef and farmer John Barker, moved from Manhattan to upstate New York, intent on cultivating the restaurant-quality produce they found difficult to source locally. They founded Forts Ferry Farm, a 100-acre spread in Latham, N.Y., along with Barker’s brother, the artist and photographer Jamie Barker. The farm now grows more than 250 varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs and flowers, that go into the prepared foods, honey and condiments that are sold at the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market and online. The next phase in the farm’s development is a physical store, Farm Shoppe, a 50-minute drive south in bustling Hudson. The whimsical space, which opened in early February, has sea foam green walls and handmade wooden treillage. Its shelves are stocked with seasonal produce and flowers, the farm’s popular hot pepper sauces and a tightly edited collection of antique table goods including terrines, serving platters and ceramic pitchers. Later this summer, look out for open-air shopping in the store’s soon-to-be-completed backyard. fortsferryfarm.com.Wander HereIn Jaipur, a Reflective Installation Within the Walls of a Historic Pleasure Palace“Superposition,” an installation by the artist Alicja Kwade, takes over the central courtyard of the Sculpture Park at Madhavendra Palace in Jaipur, India.Courtesy of Alicja Kwade, Saat Saath Foundation and Nature Morte, India. Photo: Jeetin SharmaFrom the jungles of Brazil (Inhotim) to the ranch lands of Montana (Tippet Rise Art Center) and historic estates in France (Château La Coste), art parks are popping up in unexpected places all over the world. In Jaipur, India, the Sculpture Park at the Madhavendra Palace, which opened in 2017, debuted its fourth exhibition at the end of January. Peter Nagy, an American who has run the contemporary gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi for more than two decades, curated the show, bringing together a dozen artists to exhibit their work throughout the apartments of the palace, which itself is set within the 18th-century Nahargarh Fort. In the open air courtyard, the Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade has installed “Superposition,” an arrangement of polished stone spheres, bronze chairs and mirrors. Nagy says Kwade was intrigued by the architecture of the palace, which was completed in 1892 as a pleasure retreat for the Maharajah Sawai Madho Singh II. There is a complex of identical apartments, each meant for one of his multiple wives; wandering through them is like encountering “a maze of architectural doppelgängers,” says Nagy, noting Kwade’s oft-visited themes of reflection and illusion. The Fourth Edition of the Sculpture Park is on view through Dec. 1, instagram.com/thesculptureparkjaipur.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Jeffrey Gibson Will Bring Sculptures of Ancestral Spirits to Met Facade

      by

      The Met named its 2025 art commissions, which include Gibson’s facade sculptures and a roof garden installation by the soundsmith Jennie C. Jones.Last summer, Jeffrey Gibson received an honor that most artists wait for their entire lives. Would he represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, the art world’s version of the Olympics? Only a few weeks after accepting, there was another auspicious ring on the telephone.It was the curator David Breslin, wondering if Gibson would become the sixth artist to alter the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s facade with newly commissioned sculptures.“He called me from the beach,” recalled Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist known for infusing abstract works with queer and native themes.For the commission, Gibson will return to the ancestral spirit figures he started assembling in 2015. The challenge will be translating these delicate structures of beadwork, textiles and paint into four weatherproof sculptures that will gaze upon museum visitors from their plinths above Fifth Avenue. They will be on view from September 2025 through May 2026.Breslin, who leads the Met’s modern and contemporary art department, described Gibson as “one of the most incredible artists of his generation.”Gibson’s 2015 sculpture, “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You,” an ancestral spirit figure made from glazed ceramic and repurposed tipi pole, artificial sinew and copper jingles. Gibson will explore his Indigenous heritage, abstraction and popular cultures on the Met facade.Jeffrey GibsonWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Investigators Say Chicago’s Art Institute Is Holding onto ‘Looted Art’

      by

      The museum asserts it is the rightful owner of an Egon Schiele drawing that New York investigators say in a new court filing was stolen by the Nazis.New York investigators trying to seize a drawing from the Art Institute of Chicago filed an exacting 160-page motion on Friday accusing the museum of blatantly ignoring evidence of an elaborate fraud undertaken to conceal that the artwork had been looted by the Nazis on the eve of World War II.While the court papers, filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, did not accuse the museum of being party to the fraud, they said it had applied “willful blindness” to what the investigators said were clear indications that it was acquiring stolen property.The drawing, “Russian War Prisoner,” by Egon Schiele was purchased by the Art Institute in 1966. It is one of a number of works by Schiele that ended up in the hands of museums and collectors and have been sought by the heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, a Jewish cabaret entertainer from Vienna who was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp. The institute paid about $5,500 for the drawing, which has been valued by investigators today at $1.25 million.In a statement, the Art Institute said it had good title to the work by Schiele, an Austrian Expressionist, and would fight the district attorney’s attempt to seize it.“We have done extensive research on the provenance history of this work and are confident in our lawful ownership of the piece,” the museum said, adding: “If we had this work unlawfully, we would return it, but that is not the case here.”But the investigators said in their court filing that the institute’s “failure” to vet the work properly “undercuts any arguments that AIC were truly good-faith purchasers.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Hors Pistes’ Is an Arts Festival About Sports, for People Who Don’t Like Sports

      by

      A series of events in preparation for the Paris Olympics explores a paradox, since arts and sports rarely mix in France.When it comes to the biggest sports show on earth, many Parisians have reached the stage of begrudging acceptance. The level of disruption — and metro price hikes — to get the city ready for this summer’s Olympic Games hasn’t exactly endeared the event to locals, especially those who favor culture over sports.“The Olympics are coming — whether we like it or not,” a curator from the Pompidou Center, Linus Gratte, said as he introduced a performance there this past weekend as part of the “Hors Pistes” festival. The audience chuckled.“Hors Pistes” (meaning “Off-Piste”), a festival the Pompidou Center says is devoted to “moving images,” came with an Olympic-ready theme this year: “The Rules of Sport.” It is part of the Cultural Olympiad, the program of arts events that is now a part of the Olympic experience in every host city.For the Paris Cultural Olympiad — spearheaded by Dominique Hervieu, an experienced performing arts curator — the city has opted to go big. Any cultural institution could apply for the “Olympiad” label, leading to a sprawling lineup of sports-related exhibitions and performances, which started back in 2022. This has led to a degree of confusion over what, exactly, the Olympiad stands for: Its official website currently lists no fewer than 984 upcoming events.And quite a few of them end up exploring a paradox, because art and sports rarely mix in France. As a rule, the country’s artistic output leans toward intellectualism rather than the virtuosity embodied by high-level athletes. The Pompidou Center, a flagship venue for contemporary art, telegraphs as much in its “Hors Pistes” publicity material, which says the festival’s goal is “to question and subvert the rules of sport, and to imagine new interpretations of them.”While the Pompidou is primarily an art museum, and “Hors Pistes” comes with a small exhibition, the festival features a significant number of performances, onstage in the center’s theater, or in its galleries. Some of these struggled to find coherent common ground with sports, however, like Anna Chirescu and Grégoire Schaller’s “Dirty Dancers,” an hourlong dance performance staged in the exhibition space, with sports-style bleachers for the audience.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Mighty Shiva Was Never Meant to Live in Manhattan

      by

      “What if museums give back so much art that they have nothing left to display?” As a scholar of the debates about returning cultural objects to the countries from which they were stolen, I have, over the years, heard many variations of that question. “Museums have lots and lots of stuff,” I usually answer, fighting the urge to roll my eyes. “It’s not like they’re just going to shut down.”But in December, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it would return a substantial proportion of its Khmer-era works to Cambodia, which is claiming still more, including nearly all the museum’s major Cambodian pieces. Last month, the American Museum of Natural History indefinitely closed two of its halls in response to new federal regulations about the display of Native American sacred and burial artifacts. Now Manhattan’s Rubin Museum of Art, which features art from the Himalayas, has announced that it will close later this year. The museum says the decision is unrelated to issues of cultural repatriation, but it comes after the museum faced many accusations of cultural theft and returned some prized pieces.Clearly, I need to change my answer.When stolen artifacts go back to their rightful owners, it is now clear, some display cases will indeed empty out, some galleries will shut their doors, and entire museums may even close. But it’s worth it. Repatriating these precious items is still the right thing to do, no matter the cost.Why? Museums are supposed to educate us about other ways of being in the world. But looted artifacts alone — removed from their original context, quarantined in an antiseptic display case — cannot do this. Unlike, say, Impressionist paintings or Pop Art sculptures, ritual objects were not meant to be seen in a gallery at a time of the viewer’s choosing. Used alongside music, scents and tastes, these holy relics are tools to help participants in rituals achieve a transcendent experience. Imagine looking at a glow stick necklace and thinking it could teach you what it’s like to greet the sunrise dancing ecstatically with hundreds of strangers.The Rubin Museum, which displays art from Tibet, Nepal and elsewhere in the Himalayan region, returned two stolen objects to Nepal in 2022 and last year surrendered another, a spectacular 16th-century mask depicting one of Shiva’s manifestations. By chance, I heard the news about the Rubin’s closing while I was looking at photographs from the mask’s homecoming ceremony.The mask was one of a nearly identical pair depicting the snarling deity with golden skulls and snakes twining through blood-red hair. For centuries, they had been featured in an annual ceremony, in which worshipers sought blessings by drinking rice beer from the masks’ lips. In the mid 1990s they were both stolen from the home of the family that was entrusted to care for them when the ceremony was not underway.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      The Power of Cute: Sweet, Cuddly and Taking Over the World

      by

      There is plenty of fun and truly adorable stuff in “Cute,” a new exhibition in London. But there are some creepy and unsettling things, too.Try this: Ask someone you know to define “cute.” They are not allowed to simply give an example of a cute thing, so no babies or sweet little rabbits singing a song about being brave; they must try and give a definition for the adjective itself. See how long it takes before words give way to gestures (hands making clutching motions, arms squeezing tightly around invisible teddy-bear-size objects) or inarticulate noises (cries of anguished delight, high-pitched vowel sounds). See how long it takes before they are scrunching up their faces in what looks a lot like pain.It’s not just that the term is difficult to define, it’s that there is often a confounding gap between the smallness, or seeming irrelevance, of the cute object, and the strength and range of the feelings it invokes. Words alone don’t seem to cover it.Cuteness — its properties, its uses and its increasingly dominant position in culture — is the subject of a dazzling new exhibition in London called simply “Cute,” running at Somerset House through April 14. Not exactly a history of an aesthetic and not exactly, or not only, a collection of particularly cute commodities, the show explores the unsettling power of apparently powerless things, looking at the fantasies that cuteness enables and creates, and making us think about how and why it has come to saturate our world.“Go On and Hit a Lick of Benevolence” by Sean-Kierre Lyons. The exhibition features several works of contemporary art.David Parry/Press Association for Somerset HouseWhy does everything have to be so cute now? What does it mean that we have so enthusiastically allowed ourselves to be manipulated by an aesthetic that prioritizes the infantile, the teeny-weeny, the doe-eyed? Why, when I saw a can of Hello Kitty-branded motor oil in one of the show’s first rooms, did I desperately want to pick it up and give it a big hug while shouting, “Awwwwwww?” Why am I trying to buy one on eBay right now? I don’t even have a car.If these questions give off a strong smell of the seminar room, do not be cast down: There is plenty of fun, and truly adorable stuff, to be consumed. Just ask the group of girls who were giddily twirling around taking selfies in the Hello Kitty disco room on the morning that I visited. (The show, in fact, is sponsored by Sanrio, the Japanese company that created Hello Kitty, and is timed to coincide with her 50th birthday this year. She’s 50 years old! According to a sign at the show, she was born in London on Nov. 1, dreams of becoming a poet and is the height of five apples! She doesn’t have a mouth!)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Elections

      Protesters at the Louvre Hurl Soup at the Mona Lisa

      by

      Two women from an environmental group threw pumpkin-colored soup at the artwork, which is behind bulletproof glass at the Louvre and did not appear to sustain damage.Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists said, speaking in French. “Our agricultural system is sick.” They were led away by Louvre security guards.It was not immediately clear how the women got the soup through the elaborate security system at the museum, which borders the Seine and contains a vast art and archaeological collection spanning civilizations and centuries.One of the women removed her jacket to reveal the words Riposte Alimentaire, or Food Response, on a white T-shirt. Riposte Alimentaire is part of a coalition of protest groups known as the A22 movement. They include Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil, the group that poured tomato soup over Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London in 2022.The attack on the Mona Lisa came as French farmers have blocked roads, including approaches to Paris, in recent days to protest low wages and what they see as excessive regulation. Many new regulations in France reflect the attempt to forge a green, carbon-free European economy, an objective that the farmers consider too expensive and burdensome in the near term.The protests by the two young women and the farmers appeared to reflect two starkly different views of agriculture and the appropriate priorities for European society.Staff at the Louvre on Sunday tried to erect cloth screens to conceal the soup-splashed Mona Lisa, but the screens were not effective. Images of the attack quickly went viral on social media.The Mona Lisa has been behind glass since the 1950s, when a visitor poured acid on it. In 2019, the museum installed glass of what it said was superior transparency. Three years later, another environmental activist threw cake and cream at the painting. It was undamaged.The latest attack will heighten security concerns ahead of the Paris Olympics.The opening ceremony is just six months away and will take place on the Seine. A flotilla of boats will carry about 10,000 athletes to the foot of the Eiffel Tower, as nearly a half-million spectators, including many heads of state, line the four-mile route. The boats will sail past the Louvre as part of a ceremony conceived to showcase the beauty of Paris, but which has raised serious security issues that are still under review. More