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Given the prevailing trend of infographics—think Hank Willis Thomas’s chart Colonialism and Abstract Art, 2020, a reimagining of Alfred H. Barr’s diagram for his 1936 exhibition “Cubism and Abstract

Structure compared to monolith featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey – and could it be the work of sculptor John McCracken?

A giant, metal mystery slab has captured the attention of millions, as people speculate over how such a structure came to be in a remote part of southern Utah.

The object was first spotted last week by a helicopter pilot and wildlife officers who were flying above the rugged area to conduct an annual count of bighorn sheep for the state. It immediately drew comparisons to the monolith featured in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as inviting suggestions it could be the work of extraterrestrials.

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The move comes as museum workers across the country increasingly look to collective bargaining as a way to reform their institutions.

For the first exhibition at their new Parisian location, Lévy Gorvy has adorned the large gallery with a series of six monumental and lyrical minimalist paintings by Group Zero’s Günther Uecker—mural-like

Fatos Üstek has resigned from her position as artistic director of the Liverpool Biennial after seventeen months on the job in the wake of a disagreement with the biennial’s board of trustees. Board

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Jenn Nkiru’s standout film of Detroit’s techno history evokes the rhythm of fractured black lives in a show with no winner but plenty to mull over

A tsunami of black, computer-generated goo rushes along ancient streets, floods a courtyard and inundates a chapel. Fires break out, smoke and flame billowing around minarets and churches. The opening scenes of Larissa Sansour’s 2019 film In Vitro are gripping enough, before you realise that the city in question is an apocalyptic Bethlehem, where time runs in several directions at once, and there’s a big, black, sci-fi sphere haunting the basement of a brutalist sanctuary. All this must be a metaphor for something or other. “Bethlehem,” one of the protagonists says, “was always a ghost town, the present upstaged by the past.”

Related: Anatomy of an Artwork: Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro, 2019

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The Australian Centre for Photography once hosted Australia’s elite cohort of photographers. It can no longer afford to remain open

It has been 30 years since a young photographer working in Albury-Wodonga walked into the Australian Centre for Photography in Paddington, Sydney and showed the director her 4x5 transparencies of a new photographic series she had been working on.

The photographer was Tracey Moffatt and the resulting solo exhibition, Something More 1989 – with its now iconic images confronting race and rural disadvantage – put her on the art world’s international stage.

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This year’s Taylor Wessing photography prize focused on the way we’ve coped during Covid-19 – and featured an all-female winners list for the first time

• Alys Tomlinson wins Taylor Wessing photography prize

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National Portrait Gallery names Alys Tomlinson winner of £15,000 prize

• Portraits from the pandemic: Taylor Wessing prize winners - in pictures

Poignant images of teenagers all dressed up for school proms that were cancelled because of the pandemic have won one of the world’s most prestigious photography prizes.

The National Portrait Gallery on Tuesday named Alys Tomlinson as winner of the 2020 Taylor Wessing photographic portrait prize. She wins £15,000.

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The outspoken artist talks about his new book arriving in an ‘absolutely weird’ year and why Trump remains ‘the worst person in our known history’

When the Welsh artist Ralph Steadman picks up the phone, he sounds a bit paranoid.

“It’s Friday the 13th, you know,” he says with a doomsday tone.

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Cars have always been part of cinema and some have become stars in their own right. From Back to the Future’s DeLorean to The Italian Job’s Minis, motoring writer Giles Chapman presents an eclectic collection in Cars on Film: A Celebration of Cars at the Movies

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In SLUMS OF PARADISE (all works 2020), one of seven new paintings in Ida Ekblad’s show “Slice of the Inaccessible,” a white net seems to have captured a jumble of swirling red, black, and green patterns.

Francesco Polenghi, a painter whose unusual life course meant that his public career as an artist began only when he was in his late sixties, has died in his hometown of Milan, Italy, at the age of

Employees of the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston on Friday voted 133 to 14 to unionize, becoming one the newest bargaining units at a major US arts institution. The staff of the MFA will join the

This past Friday, with the installation of his 1962 sculpture Floor Frame in the White House Rose Garden, Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) became the first Asian American artist to have his work acquired for

Amid theft rumours, council says bicycle removed by owner of building for ‘safekeeping’

A bicycle with a missing wheel accompanying a Banksy mural in Nottingham has vanished, prompting sadness and frustration in the city.

The artwork depicts a girl appearing to hula hoop with a tyre from the bike, which was chained to a nearby pole outside a beauty salon.

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Lavita McMath Turner will lead new initiatives at the museum as it aims to become more inclusive.

Along with his wife, a muse of Yves Saint Laurent, he was at the center of Paris’s glittering 1970s-era social scene, where art, style and money collided.

The first woman to be prime minister of Britain is seen as a political colossus abroad, but her 11 years in power have a complicated legacy at home.

Elizabeth Turk imagined illuminated umbrellas spreading hope during the pandemic. A retirement community said yes, and became her canvas.

Three decades of the photographer’s work is now showing at the National Gallery of Victoria, but she still gets people saying it’s ‘not art’

“Everyone thinks that God’s a white man, but actually it’s a black woman,” says Destiny Deacon.

The artist – who descends from Kuku (Cape York) and Erub/Mer (Torres Strait) people – is standing in front of a series of four photos featuring a black doll in a tutu. The doll hovers over a simple tableau of neon green plastic palm trees, and a pile of smaller white baby dolls.

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Her daring unmade bed won her notoriety – and star status among the Young British Artists. But a hoard of formative work reveals a very different talent

Before Tracey Emin, there was Traci Emin. That was how the young woman who would go on to be a star of conceptual art signed her name on a stark black-and-white woodcut poster back in 1986. It was for her degree show at Maidstone College of Art, where she earned a first in printmaking. It caught my eye a year ago while I was exploring her studio archive.

The woodcut – showing two desperate lovers clinging together in a dark night of the soul, the woman with an anchor tattoo – is part of a previously unseen hoard of Emin’s all but forgotten early work that reveals a different side of the artist from the one most people think they know. Much of it is lost and exists only as slides, the originals having been destroyed, she thinks, by a former boyfriend. They show the sincere and skilled artist Emin was before she became a household name and an infamous figure to many. When I saw these student works, I wanted to get them published so that everyone else could encounter that intense young soul. I was thrilled when she let me include them in a new visual book about her art.

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Among a growing number of films about coronavirus, artist-activist Ai Weiwei takes a citizen’s-eye view in China while Alex Gibney counts the cost of America’s distrust of scientific advice

As early as April this year, Vulture reported that at least 20 coronavirus-related documentary projects were shooting or seeking funding. Seven months later, five significant feature documentaries about the virus have been completed, with countless more due to follow. Made from various perspectives, each film has something different to say about the earliest days of the pandemic.

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National Gallery to display painting of astronomer by superstar Polish artist Jan Matejko

A spectacular three-metre-wide painting of the astronomer Copernicus is to be shown in the UK for the first time, to showcase a superstar 19th-century artist little known outside his native country.

The National Gallery said Jan Matejko is widely regarded as the national painter of Poland, revered for his huge, minutely detailed depictions of key moments in the nation’s history.

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Changing Rooms’ flamboyant master of maximalism has made a great living out of being himself. But is lockdown altering him? Is he suddenly dressing down, or brooding on the tragedy that marked his childhood? And does he have any decor tips for our interviewer?

If curating your surroundings for a Zoom call is an art, then Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is its maximalist master. Immersed in the dark colours of his 17th-century manor-house living room, he sits with enviable poise, one arm cocked and propped on his thigh, as though modelling for a portrait. Flanked by a medley of blue velvet and patterned cushions, the latter matching his William Morris-inspired sofa, he is lit by an assortment of lamps.

It is a stark contrast to my more modest framing – a single pine bookshelf and a large houseplant. I show him the rest of my living room: pale blue walls, a navy/charcoal sofa, a single cushion with Julianne Moore’s face, a coffee table, a few more palms and a TV unit. Britain’s best-known interior designer doesn’t spare my feelings.

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He wanted to be a savage political cartoonist – but ended up drawing Stacey’s Tropical Trifle Terrine. On the eve of the Bake Off final, the show’s artist reveals his own star bakes

‘I’m more of a savoury kind of guy,” says Tom Hovey, the illustrator who has now made around 3,500 drawings for The Great British Bake Off. “I would have been very happy illustrating a show about, say, barbecuing – but that is not the hand life dealt me. I am quite a foodie, though, and really like to cook.”

Even if he doesn’t have a sweet tooth, Hovey has had his favourite contestants over the years. “I really liked Helena,” he says, referring to the Spanish goth from last year’s series. “She was a vampire-bats-at-home kind of woman. Her bakes reflected that and it was a pleasure to illustrate them. I also loved Kim-Joy [2018’s Belgian-British finalist]. I like people who embody their worlds through their bakes. For them, it’s not about producing stuff – it’s about expressing yourself. I love that.”

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Gregory Crewdson “An Enclipse of Moths” Four years after the spectacular Cathedral of the Pines show, Gregory Crewdson’s latest series “An Eclipse of Moths” will premiere in Europe at Templon in Paris.

Barranquilla and Cartagena, the vibrant port cities of Colombia’s north Caribbean coast, were once slave-trading posts during Spanish rule. Since the 1950s, a music and dance culture emerged, manifesting

If, in our contemporary moment, the word “muse” bears the gendered connotation of a passive source of inspiration for artistic genius, the term reacquires its original identification with active creativity

Council was set to paint over it because of wartime PM’s V-sign rather than his lingerie

A rainbow mural of seven Winston Churchills wearing stockings and suspenders which prompted a complaint from the local council because of the wartime prime minister’s trademark V-sign is to be allowed to remain in place.

The artwork, which appeared on the wall of the Sandpiper guest house on one of Brighton’s busiest streets, was the subject of a council complaint over Churchill’s two-fingered victory sign, which he used throughout the 1939-45 war.

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It spanned the River Eamont for over 250 years, then Storm Desmond swept it away. Now Pooley Bridge has been rebuilt – and a local delicacy must be updated

When Pooley Bridge lost its namesake crossing to the torrential floods of Storm Desmond in 2015, the picturesque Lake District village was robbed of more than just a route over the water. “It was like losing a well-loved relative,” says Miles MacInnes, chairman of the parish council. “Our community was split in two.” It was the symbol of the place, the essence of the community’s identity. As one local resident said: “We’ll have to call ourselves Pooley No Bridge now!”

At Granny Dowbekin’s Tearooms, which had overlooked the historic bridge for generations, there was another dilemma. What would become of their trademark hand-baked delicacy, the Pooley Gingerbridge biscuit? “We’ll have to sell it in bits,” said baker Sarah Fowler.

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Pioneering Ndebele artist fears young people are losing a sense of their roots

One of Africa’s best-known artists has made an impassioned appeal for governments and communities across the continent to preserve their traditions and culture in the face of globalisation.

Esther Mahlangu, 85, said that she was worried young people in Africa were losing a sense of their roots.

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Georgian house where infamous French poets lodged was to become an arts centre – but its owner has had a change of heart

It was the London home of the 19th-century Decadent poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, two of France’s greatest literary heroes, whose tempestuous love affair ended with a shooting and prison. A Georgian building in Camden, where they rented lodgings in 1873, was to have become “a poetry house”, an arts and education centre in one of the capital’s most deprived areas, after a campaign involving some of Britain’s foremost arts figures.

But the arts charity behind the project has been dismayed to discover that Michael Corby, the benefactor who promised to bequeath the historic building to the charity a decade ago, has changed his mind without warning, deciding instead to sell it on the open market.

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Among ‘weird and wonderful objects’ are early works by one of Britain’s most important artists

Four previously unknown drawings by John Constable have been discovered hidden among a jumble of letters, poems, jokes and even dried leaves accumulated in a family scrapbook made over the course of the late 18th and 19th centuries.

The auction house Sotheby’s said it had authenticated “an extraordinary re-emergence” of drawings by one of Britain’s most important artists.

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Residents fear state-of-the-art ‘glowing blob’ to rival O2 will blight the area

It has been a long time coming but a decision on whether east London will get a slice of Las Vegas in the form of a state-of-the art entertainment venue almost as tall as St Paul’s may be nigh. The Madison Square Garden Sphere in Stratford would, its owners claim, create 4,300 construction jobs and a further 3,200 when it opens.

Capable of hosting concerts for 21,500 people, the Sphere will feature the largest, highest resolution screen in the world, according to MSG, which owns many US entertainment venues.

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When is a pile of bricks not a pile of bricks?

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The French photographer, renowned for images of conflict as well as moments of surreal beauty, died earlier this month

In the obituaries of Bruno Barbey, among the greatest of photojournalists, who died aged 79 on 9 November, one quotation was ever-present: “Photography,” Barbey said, “is the only language that can be understood anywhere in the world.”

The Frenchman’s catalogue of indelible images – of students hurling stones at police in Paris in May 1968, of kids in Northern Ireland facing off with British troops during the Troubles, of US marines driving through a desert of burning oilwells in Kuwait at the end of the first Gulf war – often spoke in the most extreme of human tongues. But Barbey resisted any idea of himself as a war photographer. Just as often, as here, he made his pictures articulate the quieter delight of surreal encounters.

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Her father’s Christmas Day tradition of showing his old slides to the family inspired Panebianco’s award-winning series, which connects tender memories to the present

When US photographer Catherine Panebianco was a child, her family moved around North America a lot: by the time she entered high school she had had maybe 10 different homes – “in Pennsylvania, Georgia, a couple places in California, two places in New York…”. One constant, though, was a set of photographic slides. Her father, Glenn, a metallurgical engineer, had taken the pictures when he was a young man in Toronto during the 1950s and 60s. On Christmas Day each year, wherever they were, Glenn would lug out a hulking, prewar metal projector and set up an old slide screen. The family would then gather round, the children in pyjamas with a bag of popcorn, and listen to stories they had heard “a bazillion times”.

I wanted my hand to be in there… it links the series and I wanted my past and present to be physically linked

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Art historian Geoffrey Shamos and Lauren Hartog, manager of the University of Denver’s Vicki Myhren Gallery, asked 45 artists making masks to participate in a topical show.

Shamos says choosing favourites is tough, but Trey Duvall ’s Incalculable Loss , made from hospital wristbands inscribed with names of those who have died from Covid complications “hits me every time ”, while Liz Sexton’s Porcupine Fish “makes visitors smile”.

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The aftermath of the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, Rudy Giuliani at that press conference, the continuing conflict in Idlib and the enduring impact of Covid-19: the most striking images from around the world

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Isamu Noguchi’s 1962 installation, “Floor Frame,” will be the first piece by an Asian-American artist in the White House collection.

The National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC, will close on November 21 owing to a recent local and nationwide spike in Covid-19 cases, the institution announced yesterday. All seven of the city’s

EARLIER THIS MONTH, France’s National Assembly took a step toward the restitution of colonial plunder promised by President Emmanuel Macron three years ago, voting unanimously to return twenty-six

Galleries are closed due to Covid – so a group of artists have taken to displaying their work from their houses for passersby. Our writer takes to the streets

It is not a good time for art lovers. The second lockdown has closed galleries once more – I’m imagining portraits waiting moodily in the National Gallery in London to be admired again; Van Gogh’s sunflowers wilting further – and so it is not a good time for artists.

Artists Walk is an initiative that aims to improve that state of affairs. It’s a simple idea for an art trail that began as a joint endeavour between printmaker and painter Rosha Nutt, and her art marketing consultant friend Holly Collier. Those who in normal times would be exhibiting in galleries or community spaces can now place their work in the windows or surroundings of their homes for passers-by to admire. Kind of like “how much is that doggy in the window?” Except that it might be that Picasso sketch of his dachshund.

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At the end of October, following a ruling that made abortion due to fetal defects unconstitutional, women across Poland took to the streets and disrupted religious services in protest. The slogan

With its online Rear Window show, the White Cube is letting you ‘spy’ on works by Jeff Wall, while Cardiff celebrates Welsh national treasure Richard Burton, and Mary Quant goes back to the 60s – all in your weekly dispatch

Rear Window
Stuck indoors for lockdown? This witty online show suggests it’s a bit like being James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. In this cinema classic, Stewart plays an ace photographer trapped in his apartment with a broken leg. Like Stewart’s curious voyeur watching his neighbours, you are tempted here to “spy” on seductive artworks by Jeff Wall, Ellen Altfest, Gillian Carnegie and more. Good fun.
• White Cube online.

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Court case at end of four-year feud hears contested allegations of financial mismanagement and ‘clandestine relationships’ between practice principal and junior staff

Dame Zaha Hadid was never far from controversy in her lifetime, nor has she been since her death. In the four years since the celebrated Iraqi-born architect died suddenly in March 2016, a “toxic dispute” has been taking place between the executors of her estate, with claims and counterclaims filed over the interpretation of her wishes and the future of her architecture practice. The long-running feud has finally been settled in an explosive court hearing involving contested allegations of financial mismanagement, disregard for corporate governance and “clandestine relationships” between the current practice principal and junior members of staff.

In a remote hearing conducted via Skype, the court was told that, after years of negotiations, the four executors of Hadid’s will trust had finally reached an agreement over the distribution of her estate, which is now valued at around £100m – bar one detail. The agreement will see the bulk of Hadid’s assets go to the Zaha Hadid Foundation, a charitable body, with plans to establish a museum and award scholarships, focused on supporting the architectural education of Arab women in particular.

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