News

Investigators in Manhattan seized the mosaic from the home of a collector, asserting that it had been looted from Italy decades ago.

The artist Omer Fast and protesters are at odds over his recreation of a Chinatown waiting room.

Falke Pisano’s “Wonder-What-Time-It-Is,” to be performed at FIAC, continues an inquiry into how colonialism and racism play out in modern life.

Our guide to new art shows, and some that will be closing soon.

In “Generation Wealth,” the photographer shows that she can satirize her subjects. But does she give insight into why we live the way we do?

press

The New-York Historical Society’s show on the Vietnam War highlights its racial and class divisions, generational rifts and governmental mendacity.

From Danish modern furnishings to African masks, a jewelry power couple’s collections are inspired by memories and travels.

His role in bringing Beyoncé’s concept album to the small screen sealed his place as the planet’s hottest video maker. But fame, he says, doesn’t mean anything. It’s about the art and he’s got the work to prove it

There is a biblical proverb, “Iron sharpens iron,” but when the film-maker Kahlil Joseph relays it down the phone, he gives it an update: “Steel sharpens steel.” Joseph is talking about what happens when you put talent in a room together, specifically “black talent”. “Black talent is exponentially propelled by other black talent – it’s a theory that a friend of mine and I have. Whether you’re LeBron James and Steph Curry or Miles Davis and Charlie Parker – any talent meeting other talent – there’s an inborn, healthy competitive nature. But black talent has a cultural specificity. We have a particular genius for improvisation, from preachers in the pulpit to pianists.”

This theory became part of the thinking behind Black Mary, a short film Joseph produced for Tate Modern this year as part of the exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power. Billed as a tribute to the photography of Roy DeCarava, who shot portraits of jazz musicians in the 40s, 50s and 60s, Joseph’s film is a five-minute-long cut of a jam he put together in Harlem this year. And like any jam, he says, it was casual; he texted Lauryn Hill inviting her and Kelsey Lu (a friend and a “musical genius”). He also asked his wife, the producer Onye Anyanwu, to call the singer Alice Smith, whom he had once seen live and was blown away by.

Continue reading...

She’s always been outspoken, honest and unfiltered. But now the singer is taking more control of her sound, with a new album, “Meaning of Life.”

Anthony Hernandez’s photography, Tom Friedman’s short animated videos and Julia Bland’s fiber weavings are among the works on display around town.

My partner, Chris Hoggett, who has died aged 89, was a book illustrator and a towering figure on the Cheltenham art scene for many decades. Over the years he presented solo shows of his work and regularly contributed to Open Studios events, as well as being the mainstay of the Cheltenham Group of Artists.

He was born in Cheltenham, at Columbia Place, Winchcombe Street. His father, Christopher, was a violinist and his mother, Theodosia (nee Carter), a pianist and piano teacher. When Chris was young the family moved to Bristol, where his father played in the orchestra at the Hippodrome. After he lost his job – Chris said this was due to the advent of the talkies – they returned to Cheltenham, and his father died when Chris was only six. After that Chris led a rather precarious family life, a defining element in his later artwork.

Continue reading...

Artnews

An Oslo building seen as a symbol of social democracy, and damaged in a deadly 2011 car bombing, is to be torn down, with its artworks relocated.

The Tajik capital’s Soviet-era buildings are being systematically razed and replaced by multistorey apartments and malls. Most residents seem pleased

“Once this shop was one of the most beautiful buildings in the city,” says Nematullo Mirsaidov as he gazes up at an old department store now dwarfed by new towers. He has been struck by how much Dushanbe has changed since he started visiting from the northern city of Khujand more than a decade ago, but sees change as a positive. “Dushanbe’s architecture has changed significantly,” he adds. “Its residents should be proud.”

Dushanbe was a village of only a few thousand people when it was made capital in 1924 but it has grown rapidly since then and continues to do so at speed. The city’s territory is expected to triple in size and its population to grow from around 800,000 to more than 1.2 million by 2030 according to the new strategic urban development plan recently adopted by the Tajik authorities.

Continue reading...

David Yeo’s photography places naturally small species alongside animals that have been selectively bred to be tiny and cute

Continue reading...

The annual art event brings a range of works to the Sydney coastal walk between Bondi beach and Tamarama. This year the outdoor exhibition celebrates its 21st birthday, featuring creations by 104 artists from around Australia and the world. It runs until 5 November

Continue reading...

Crystal sphere in Salvator Mundi artwork lacks optical exactitude, prompting experts to speculate over motive and authenticity

A new biography of Leonardo da Vinci has raised “a puzzling anomaly” in a rediscovered painting that is estimated to fetch $100m (£75m) at auction next month.

Related: Only Leonardo da Vinci in private hands set to fetch £75m at auction

Continue reading...

Hyperallergic

‘We fulfilled people’s fantasies. We gave them a chance to experiment, to escape their ordinary lives. The aeroplane backdrop was particularly popular’

I grew up in a rural area of what is now Burkina Faso, but I moved to Bobo-Dioulasso, the country’s second city, when I was about 17. There was a real buzz about the town. I started taking ID photos, straight-up portraits, for a small fee. With the help of my cousin Idrissa Koné, who was a musician and entrepreneur, I was able to set up a studio called Volta Photo. That’s when it all began.

At first, I only had one backdrop, a set of Roman columns. But in my second studio, I had a bit more space, so I commissioned a few more from artists in Ghana and Benin. The aeroplane backdrop was particularly popular with young people who couldn’t afford to travel. It gave them a chance to experiment, to escape their ordinary lives and play with elements of the modern world. My studio fulfilled people’s fantasies.

Continue reading...

Nick Pinkerton on Poverty Row Classics at the Museum of Modern Art

press

Patty Chang’s show at the Queens Museum sees water as a metaphor for gender fluidity, migration and life.

press release

Artnews

As the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, has pushed boundaries under Jennifer Flay’s leadership, it has drawn broad-based support.

Paris is still a city of stamp lovers, and for four days in November vendors and collectors from France and around the world will gather there.

As the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC, continues expanding around Paris, it is also expanding its offerings to include art from 29 countries.

Times Square is one of the world’s busiest pedestrian areas, drawing an estimated 50 million visitors annually. But while most tourists pass through to take a selfie, do some shopping or see a show, the photographer Adam Gray spent a full day from sunrise to sunset in the area once called ‘the crossroads of the world’

Continue reading...

The art fair in Paris has expanded the scope of its offerings not only intellectually but also physically, to the Petit Palais, the Avenue Winston Churchill and beyond.

Linda Yablonsky around Paris before FIAC

Storrier’s The Lunar Savant wins $150,000 national portrait prize and Dagmar Cyrulla’s self-portrait highly commended

• Doug Moran portrait prize finalists – in pictures

The artist Tim Storrier has won the $150,000 Doug Moran national portrait prize for The Lunar Savant, his painting of the artist McLean Edwards.

Storrier was one of 30 finalists in the annual award, Australia’s richest portrait prize, which was announced on Wednesday. The list of finalists also included one of McLean’s own self-portraits, along with works by Anh Do, Jiawei Shen, Prudence Flint, Celeste Chandler and Vincent Namatjira.

Continue reading...

New York Times

Chicago Tribune

Claudia La Rocco on Sarah Michelson's September2017/\ at Bard College

These vivid, fleshy paintings of restaurant and hotel staff in 1920s France reveal the brutalised souls beneath the uniforms

The Butcher Boy looks like a killer who has bathed in blood. His black eyes are full of trouble. One of them is a horrible round hole in the pink, red and white hunk of flesh that is his face. The same crimson gore that streaks it saturates his once-white smock. Behind him there is more blood, a sea of red. He is a man of meat, a glaring golem of animated flesh.

Chaim Soutine painted this meat monster in Paris in about 1919-20. The first world war had left the French art world exhausted. Soutine’s Butcher Boy might be an image of the war’s psychological effects – perhaps this brutalised youth has come back from the front full of violence – yet for art dealers craving the latest new thing, Soutine’s directness was also a commercial godsend. For in 1919 the latest new thing was that old thing, unpretentious figurative painting, free from the taint of the avant-garde. The dealer Paul Guillaume cashed in on this conservative mood when he found a market for Soutine’s “traditional” portraits.

Continue reading...

Hito Steyerl is at war with the commodification of art and the corrupting power of the market. What’s she fighting them with? Manure. Meet the new wave of artists asking us to reconsider everything from the web to war

Why make art when buyers treat works as an alternative currency, hiding them away like bullion bars in storage facilities? Can anything be done about questionable corporations and oppressive regimes using contemporary art to generate a spot of positive PR for themselves? And what links can be made between fuzzy surveillance images and abstract art?

Hito Steyerl’s new book, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War, poses uncomfortable questions about today’s image culture and the art market. In it, the artist and film-maker builds up a picture of sickly interdependence, following a trail that stretches from battleground to bank vault to biennale and back again.

Continue reading...

John Hoke invited us into his office in Beaverton, Ore., where he talked about his dyslexia, his doodling and some weird shoes that inspire him.

Cosey Fanni Tutti talks about the origins of Throbbing Gristle

Architect often described as ‘the man who built Cambodia’ and who transformed Phnom Penh into an elegant city

The architect Vann Molyvann, who has died aged 90, was often described as “the man who built Cambodia”. In the 1960s he transformed Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh, from a colonial backwater into one of the most beautiful and innovative of south-east Asian cities. Drawing inspiration from the ancient bas-reliefs and designs of the Angkor Wat temple complex, Vann’s style, which came to be known as New Khmer architecture, blended Khmer tradition with the modernist principles he had mastered during studies in Paris.

After Norodom Sihanouk abdicated from the Cambodian throne in 1955 in order to enter politics, and became prime minister, he launched a programme of cultural revival, educational expansion and economic development, with Vann in charge of urban planning. The architect’s most famous works in Phnom Penh included the lotus-shaped Independence Monument, the National theatre, the Chaktomuk conference hall, and the National Sports Complex, also known as the Olympic Stadium (though it never hosted the event).

Continue reading...