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      A 50-Mile Art Road Trip Celebrates the Culture in Agriculture

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      It’s not every day that lifelong Wisconsin farmers take time out during the frenetic harvest season to do pirouettes and turns in their tractors like so many John Deere Baryshnikovs.“The Hay Rake Ballet” in an alfalfa field — set to opera music in front of a rapt crowd who oohed and aahed at every lift of the rakes used to move hay into rows — was a hit of the Farm/Art DTour, a 10-day, 50-mile self-guided driving tour of large-scale art installations and “pasture performances” along the pristine, hilly back roads of rural Sauk County, Wis.“The Hay Rake Ballet,” choreographed by Sarah Butler.Held every other October, the DTour draws more than 20,000 “D-Tourists” from Madison, Milwaukee and beyond. They come to soak up art in surprising contexts — a screaming pink abstract deer blind hoisted above a corn field, for instance, or a plucky dragon concealing a 250-foot-long irrigation system.“I think it’s neat that urban people get a kick out of what we see every day,” said Andy Enge, a dairy farmer and a star of the ballet, in which three tractors twirled around each other in a pas de trois.His 93-year-old father, Maurice, saw it differently. “If a man drove like that out in the hayfields, I’d fire them!” he said.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

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      Paris Is Rising as an Art Market Hub, With Some Way Left to Go

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      Sotheby’s opened a new salesroom and international collectors are arriving for the inaugural Art Basel Paris fair. But visiting is one thing; buying is another.“This is the Mona Lisa of handbags,” said Aurélie Vassy, Sotheby’s head of handbag and fashion sales in Europe, as she unlocked a glass display case and proudly revealed a battered black leather Birkin.“The first in the world, made for Jane Birkin. It’s the beginning,” said Vassy, pointing out the design features of the bag, specially made by Hermès for the Anglo-French singer and actress in 1984. Three years earlier, Birkin had found herself sitting next to the chief executive of the luxury brand on a flight from Paris to London and had sketched the design on the back of a sick bag.This precious fashion icon, on loan from the collection of the pre-owned luxury dealer Catherine B, was one of the star exhibits at the opening of Sotheby’s new salesroom in the Avenue Matignon district of Paris on Saturday. The auction house will hold Surrealism and modern art sales on Friday, just days after the inaugural edition of the Art Basel Paris fair begins in the newly renovated Grand Palais.Aurélie Vassy, Sotheby’s head of handbag and fashion sales in Europe, with the very first Birkin bag.Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York TimesThe Paris art scene is expanding. After Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the European Union, a procession of international gallerists established spaces in the French capital, expecting its underperforming art market to revive at London’s expense.When Art Basel took over the management of Paris’s flagship October fair in 2022, this nurtured hope that the city’s art scene would become a magnet for international collectors. (It ran the fair for a couple of years from a temporary location under the ungainly name “Paris+ par Art Basel” before rebranding for this year’s edition.)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

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      Art Basel Returns, Larger, and More French, Than Ever

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      The fair will open in a freshly redone space with a new name. ‘In a way, it’s year zero,’ explained Art Basel’s chief executive.Art Basel Paris returns for its third edition with two big changes: It will be held for the first time in the newly renovated Grand Palais, and its name, formerly Paris+ by Art Basel, has been simplified and brought in line with the organization’s other art fairs.Open to the public Oct. 18-20, 195 galleries will display their wares, an increase of 27 percent from last year, since the Grand Palais can now accommodate more dealers than the former venue, the temporary Grand Palais Éphémère.A new section will debut, too: Premise, for focused presentations of older works that can include those made before 1900, the usual cutoff point for art to appear in the Art Basel fairs. Nine galleries will participate.“In a way, it’s year zero,” Noah Horowitz, the chief executive of Art Basel, said of the fair’s reset.Despite the larger number of exhibitors this year, Horowitz noted that it was still the smallest of the four Art Basel fairs (the others take place in Hong Kong, Miami Beach and Basel, Switzerland) and had the smallest booths. Space is still at a premium.“The selection process for Art Basel Paris was in many ways the most excruciating process I’ve ever borne witness to, only because of the extra amount of demand and the relative paucity of space,” Horowitz said. “There are incredible galleries, all very well deserving, that are not in the show.”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

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      Lisa Nandy ‘absolutely determined’ to ensure access to arts for every child in UK

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorFind out moreLabour minister Lisa Nandy has said she is “absolutely determined” to ensure that access to the arts is a reality for every child in the UK. The secretary of state for culture, media, and sport spoke at an event in Westminster on Tuesday (8 October), as she announced the winner of the Robson Orr TenTen Award 2024. Grenada-born British artist Denzil Forrester was the recipient of the prize for his work, Altar, which depicts a scene from a reggae festival in Cornwall, where the artist lives and works. The 10-year scheme was launched in 2018 and was presented by the Government Art Collection. It is sponsored by leading philanthropists Sybil Robson Orr and Matthew Orr. Nandy praised Forrester as she hailed his story as an example of the importance of getting “great art works out of the basement and into communities where they belong”. “We’re going to lead by example, with the Government Art Collection to make sure that people in every part of the country can see what it is,” she said. “But while talent is everywhere in our country, we are aware that opportunity is not. It is down to people like Sybil today that that is beginning to change, because not only do they support emerging artists, but they also work tirelessly to take us back into our schools and into our classrooms where they move it along to a whole new generation of young people.”Speaking about the impact of previous government rule, Nandy continued, “Over the last decade we have seen culture and creativity erased from our classrooms.”Nandy presented Denzil Forrester with the Robson Orr TenTen Award More

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      Welcome to Mike Kelley’s World: Beautiful, Ugly, Funny and Dumb

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      The American artist died in 2012, but a new exhibition in London shows how his deadpan-weirdo works continue to resonate today.Fantasy birdhouses, monkey islands, U.F.O. abductions, poltergeist possessions, hillbillies, rockers, goths, stuffed animals, graffitied history books and colorful banners with humorous phrases (most of which can’t be printed in this newspaper): The work of the Detroit-born multimedia artist Mike Kelley has something for everyone.At Tate Modern, in London, “Ghost and Spirit,” the first British retrospective of Kelley’s work (on through March 9, 2025,) shows how he mirrored America back to itself, like a twisted fun house maze filled with deranged, anarchic duplications.“My interest in popular forms wasn’t to glorify them, because I really dislike them in most cases,” he said of his work, which draws on references as varied as Pop Art, Roman Catholic ritual, folk traditions, mainstream television and tabloid newspapers. “All you can really do now,” he said, “is work with the dominant culture, flay it, rip it apart, reconfigure it.”Hung chronologically, Tate Modern’s extensive exhibition begins with Kelley’s time at the California Institute of the Arts, a school known for its experimental and political approaches, during the late 1970s. Early photographs, sculptures and works on paper show the artist, recently transplanted from Michigan, where he had been involved in the underground music scene, experimenting with concepts of identity and authorship in what would become a characteristic deadpan-weirdo style.The Tate Modern is the first British retrospective of Mike Kelley’s work.Lucy Green/TateA 1982 series called “Personality Crisis” has three large paintings of Kelley’s name in different fonts, stacked above each other like an adolescent doodling — sort of. The first variation is in looping cursive; variation two, in angular death metal font; and the third, subtitled “Death Trail of a Flea,” shows the artist’s signature, the ultimate stamp of authenticity, dissolved in an erratic curlicue trail — at once an insect’s dying gasp and a nod to the automatic writing of the Surrealists.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

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      In London, a Pro-Palestinian Protest Disrupts the Launch of an American Mural

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      The U.S. ambassador Jane Hartley was en route to the dedication of a climate-themed mural in London by Shepard Fairey, who created the iconic Obama ‘Hope’ poster. But then a protest began.It’s the kind of cultural exchange any diplomat would savor: A prominent American street artist paints a mural, dedicated to the cause of climate activism, on an apartment building in one of London’s hippest neighborhoods.Jane D. Hartley, the United States ambassador to Britain, who proposed the idea to the artist Shepard Fairey, has a track record in these projects. When she was ambassador to Paris from 2014 to 2017, she asked another well-known American artist, Jeff Koons, to create a sculpture to honor victims of terrorist attacks there.But when Ms. Hartley was on her way to the dedication ceremony for this latest project on Monday morning, she got word that a small band of pro-Palestinian demonstrators had gathered in the Shoreditch neighborhood, beneath the red-and-blue mural, which rises four floors above the street.They began chanting anti-American slogans and unfurling banners calling for justice for the Palestinians in Gaza — a message that seemed even more fraught than usual, given the timing on the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel.It was another example of how the Israel-Gaza conflict has reverberated around the world, fueling protests, large and small, on college campuses, city squares,and in this case, in a normally tranquil neighborhood.Ms. Hartley’s security team diverted her car, while Mr. Fairey, who was on hand to greet her, hurriedly relocated with embassy staff members to a nearby café. He seemed bemused by the disruption, noting that much of his work has a protest element, even if his patron on this project was a government official.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

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      Tacita Dean Draws Her Way Into the Menil

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      In the artist’s first major U.S. museum survey, she bonds with Cy Twombly through works on paper, films and photographs.During a residency at the Menil Collection in Houston last February, the British artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean spent the night in the Cy Twombly Gallery.She wanted to be surrounded by Twombly’s work, having long felt connected to the so-called Blackboard artist, who died in 2011, and in particular to his collage-drawings and preoccupation with the passage of time.“He connects to the classical world in a way that is deeply emotive,” Dean said. “I’m interested in where your mind goes when you look at one of his works. It can go to memory, it can go to envy — you think, ‘God, that’s so perfect.’”Now Dean is bringing her own monumental blackboard drawings and her rarely shown drawings on paper, found postcards, and albumen photographs to the Menil, in a show that opens on Oct. 11. The exhibition, “Tacita Dean: Blind Folly,” is her first major museum survey in the United States.“The presence of Cy Twombly in Houston really ignited the show and the conversation,” said Michelle White, senior curator at the Menil, who organized the exhibition. “It just became such a lovely point of connection.”In a recent interview at her Los Angeles studio, Dean, 58, said a focus on her drawings “is quite unusual for me,” given that shows typically focus on her films. And the artist said it is meaningful to be presenting her work in a place where Twombly’s presence is felt.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

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      Arts District, Decades in the Making, in Ruins After Helene

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      The hurricane damaged an estimated 80 percent of the buildings in the River Arts District of Asheville, N.C., and upended the lives of artists who had recast the city as a cultural force.The French Broad River provided a scenic backdrop as an industrial neighborhood in Asheville transformed over the past 40 years into the River Arts District, a vibrant creative hub for art studios and galleries.More than 300 artists called the district home and its riverside vitality helped cement Asheville’s reputation as a cultural outpost, one worth settling near or venturing to as old warehouses and mills were converted into centers for both creative expression and economic growth.“There is nothing like the River Arts District in the United States and maybe even the world,” said Jeffrey Burroughs, president of River Arts District Artists, a support group. “It’s spaces where artists are in control of their businesses, their lives.”But much of the district was washed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Helene. Buildings were swept away. Some galleries no longer exist. Creative works — some birthed decades ago — have been damaged and destroyed. Mud reigns.“It’s heartbreaking,” said Judi Jetson, founder and chair of Local Cloth, a nonprofit network of fiber artists, educators and enthusiasts. “We have three or four inches of mud inside the building and on most of our items. We’re trying to rescue whatever we can and people will take it home and wash them. The problem is a lot of us don’t have water, even at home, and nobody has electricity.”Jannette Montenegro tries to salvage items from the Cotton Mill Studios in the River Arts District.Andrew Nelles/The Tennessean, via USA Today NetworkWe 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