News

The City Council approved a budget last week that reduced citywide arts funding to $5.84 million, a cut of 40 percent.

With a “multicamera global livestream” in place of its usual New York sale, the auction house tried breathing life back into a pandemic-numbed market.

I FIRST HEARD OF LUTHER PRICE long before I saw him in person. Sodom (1989), his film juxtaposing Gregorian chants and gay porn footage that he had mutilated with a hole punch and then painstakingly

Talking with two organizers of the movement to reclaim the long-ignored history of Black Wall Street and the Greenwood district’s achievements.

This new track sees Kanye at his very best, corralling his anger with masterful focus into an apocalyptic vision of America

America, divided along racial and political lines and led by its own Herod, faces an invisible plague and a public reckoning against its history of violence. It’s against this Biblical backdrop that Kanye West imagines the next apocalyptic event, in one of his most focused and arresting tracks for years.

Wash Us in the Blood sees the rapper call for a blood rain to deliver black America from evil. We’re at the point, perhaps, where normal water won’t wash; an emergency where we need something stronger. That sense of alarm is amplified by the two-note siren motif, a flattened-out version of the feedback sound on The Life of Pablo’s Feedback or Yeezus’s Send It Up, another of his warnings that puts the listener on alert. It gets your blood up.

Continue reading...

Sotheby’s tests a new hybrid auction market with a work by the British painter — and socially-distanced bid-takers in three cities.

Print of the Beeckestijn, now identified as a slave ship, forms part of Amsterdammers and Slavery exhibition

The only known contemporaneous drawing of a Dutch West India Company slave ship from the early 1700s in which more than 1,000 people died has been identified and is being exhibited as part of a wider attempt by the city of Amsterdam to reckon with its past.

The Beeckestijn transported about 4,600 slaves from the African west coast to the Dutch colonies of Suriname and St Eustatius over seven voyages to South America and the Caribbean between 1722 and 1736. At least 1,000 slaves died on board.

Continue reading...

Director unveils coronavirus measures and says visitors can ‘linger’ at London venue

• Coronavirus – latest updates
• See all our coronavirus coverage

After the longest closure in its 196-year history, the National Gallery in London will reopen to visitors on 8 July with three one-way art routes of about 25 to 35 minutes through the collections and a promise that people will be allowed to linger.

The gallery will be the first big museum to open in England after the government announced it was easing the lockdown from 4 July.

Continue reading...

Williamson Art Gallery & Museum in Birkenhead hosts today’s quiz, setting questions to explore collections of museums closed due to coronavirus

This quiz is brought to you in collaboration with Art UK, the online home for the UK’s public art collections, showing art from more than 3,000 venues and by 45,000 artists. Each day, a different collection on Art UK will set the questions. Today, our questions are set by Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead. The Williamson has a broad collection specialising in British art and decorative art, particularly local to the Merseyside and North Wales area, and with a strong maritime slant with many ship models on show.

You can see art from Williamson Art Gallery & Museum, Birkenhead on Art UK here. Visit the museum’s website here.

Continue reading...

A new exhibition features art made during quarantine as well as pre-existing pieces that speak to a tumultuous year

In 1918, when the world was plagued by the Spanish flu, artists tried to make sense of the world around them. Edvard Munch made lonely self-portraits, while Egon Schiele drew his mentor Gustav Klimt on his deathbed. Photographers captured empty streets and ghostly cityscapes, like Morton Schamberg’s rooftop views from 1917, to hospitals shot by the California photojournalist, Edward A “Doc” Rogers.

With the Covid-19 pandemic still raging on, and the world in quarantine, the online exhibition Life During Wartime: Art in the Age of the Coronavirus hosted by the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, offers a window into what artists are up to right now.

Continue reading...

Detroit’s early 20th-century buildings were astonishingly grand – now they’re being destroyed. Philip Jarmain captured their fading glamour

Continue reading...

Pallant House Gallery gets Leonard Rosoman’s paintings of John Osborne play

Paintings that show the first gay kiss in British theatre history and an extravagant drag ball have been acquired for the nation in lieu of inheritance tax.

Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, West Sussex has announced it is now the owner of five paintings by Leonard Rosoman from the 1960s.

Continue reading...

A Princeton art history professor said the figures were stolen and called on Christie’s to halt the sale, but it went ahead in Paris on Monday.

Tracking contentious statues, a journal devoted to Pan-African culture, fashion designers who geek out on art and politics: Here are the Instagram accounts that brighten our art critic’s daily feed.

He designed the interiors of the Tower Bar and the homes of Sofia Coppola, Marc Jacobs and other celebrities.

This cement slab is a remnant of a discarded cardboard box, one that had been abandoned after being used as a bed by somebody sleeping outside. Corrugated cardboard is ubiquitous because it is cheap

Start your summer reading, learn about leaping lemurs, and actually enjoy the fireworks this week.

A conversation with the graphic designer, who, until his death at 91, was still thinking about how his craft could help his beleaguered city.

An exhibition at the palace that hosted the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II examines the event’s far-reaching impact.

As a young artist in Berkeley during the 1960 and ’70s, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s involvement with issues of civil rights, community, and the conditions for defining a public—most notably through the

The Queen’s House, Greenwich hosts today’s quiz, setting questions to explore art collections of museums closed due to coronavirus

This quiz is brought to you in collaboration with Art UK, the online home for the UK’s public art collections, showing art from more than 3,000 venues and by 45,000 artists. Each day, a different collection on Art UK sets the questions.

Today, our questions are thanks to the Queen’s House, Greenwich. One of the first buildings in the UK to be constructed in the Palladian style, it has long been an important site for women’s history. Today this London building is home to the National Maritime Museum, spanning old master paintings to contemporary installations.

Continue reading...

Are seatless, stroll-through shows the future of theatre? Can one-way dancing save nightclubs? Could budding indie bands storm Wembley stadium? Scientists imagine the arts after Covid-19

The day before museums began closing in Britain, I saw Aubrey Beardsley at the Tate and Titian at the National Gallery. It was a strange experience, the power of the art undercut by the unsettling feeling that something deadly could be among us. “Don’t come too close to me,” I found myself thinking, or: “I can’t believe you’re coughing in public.” I wondered if it was wrong of me to even be there. With the words “global health emergency” ringing in my ears, I resolved not to leave the house again for pleasure. Soon, there was no choice anyway.

Those thoughts have resurfaced now that lockdown is easing and arts institutions face enormous pressure to reopen – and keep visitors safe. “The virus has produced a great deal of anxiety,” says Gabriel Scally, honorary professor of public health at the University of Bristol. “Coming out of lockdown, there are bound to be people whose psychological problems – OCD or agoraphobia – will be exacerbated by this. We need to make sure people can enter venues with confidence.”

Continue reading...

Her books, including My Farm, Imagine, and Magic Beach, are adored by younger readers. Now she’s answering their questions – send them in by Monday 6 July

In Guardian Australia’s series, Ask A Children’s Author, writers open themselves up to questions from their young readers – about their books, about their characters, about anything at all, really.

First up was Andy Griffiths – the author of the Bad Book series, the Bum series and, of course, the number one bestselling 13-Storey Treehouse series – who answered all manner of questions about writing, about his next book, and about whether or not his bum has ever come off.

Continue reading...

Mural to victims of 2015 Paris attacks was found in Italy after its removal from outside theatre

Police have arrested six people in France over the theft of a work by the British street artist Banksy that commemorated the victims of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

Thieves used an angle grinder to remove the mural of a mourning girl from a steel security door at the Bataclan concert hall, where 90 people died during a wave of shootings and bombings across the city that left 130 dead.

Continue reading...

The Observer’s critics recommend the best art, theatre, music and more on TV and online this week

Music
Paul Weller

Delayed by the pandemic, On Sunset finally comes out this week, offering both familiarity and experimentation from the restless, evergreen singer-songwriter. Out on Friday. Kitty Empire

Continue reading...