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The Guardian
Sep 08 2017
Joseph McQuiggan recalls life as a miner at Nettlesworth Colliery, County Durham in 1965
I was 15 when I began mining. I had my heart set on it, and left school on the Friday and started on the Monday. I began with screen work, separating the stones from the coal. Before long, I’d been trained to go underground. It wasn’t claustrophobic – even when you’re working a seam that’s only 18 inches high. Typically, I’d work at the face, up against the rock, chiselling the coal out. We’d go down clean and come back up covered in coal. Every 18 months, you got a chest x-ray to make sure you had no dust on your lungs. I was OK; I always wore a mask at the coalface.
When this photo was taken, I was around 23 years old; I’m on the far right, looking cheeky. I remember the photographer, John Bulmer – he was a young man, a lot like us. He’d say: “Forget I’m here, get on with your normal day,” and we did. We’d go to the stables with the ponies from the pit and wash them down with a hosepipe, put them in their stalls and make sure they were fed and brushed; all the while, John was snapping away.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 08 2017
Frank Bowling’s abstract masterworks hit the capital, Corbyn makes fashion history and Reni provides a divine revelation – all in your weekly dispatch
Rachel Whiteread
The ghostly casts of everyday things and places that Whiteread makes are wonders of our time.
• Tate Britain, London, from 12 September to 21 January.
The Guardian
Sep 08 2017
A Basquiat painting has been sold for more than $100m, but nearly 30 years after his death his art is as painfully relevant as ever
In the spring of 1982, a rumour started swilling around New York. The gallerist Annina Nosei had some kind of boy genius locked in her basement, a black kid, wild and inscrutable as Kaspar Hauser, making masterpieces out of nowhere to the accompaniment of Ravel’s Boléro. “Oh Christ”, Jean-Michel Basquiat said when he heard. “If I was white, they would just call it an artist-in-residence.”
These were the kind of rumours he had to work against, but also the deliberate myth he constructed about himself, part canny bid for stardom, part protective veil. Basquiat was 22 by then, and could make up out of the whole cloth of his childhood experience all kinds of patchworked, piecemeal selves, playing off people’s expectations of what a grubby, dreadlocked, half-Haitian, half-Puerto Rican young man might be capable of.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 08 2017
This early work is from his prolific Nice period, when he eschewed a more abstract style for one where the eroticism erupts in pattern as much as in flesh
The Moorish Screen inevitably calls to mind that famed Matisse quote about art being like a good armchair where “the businessman as well as the man of letters” can relax.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 08 2017
Abstract, spooky works come to the Tate Britain, while Cyberman-style statues are placed in the sea off two south coast towns
The ghostly power of Whiteread’s casts is one of modern British art’s wonders. Her sculptures – preserving the shapes of lost objects – combine the authority of abstraction with the spookiness of Victorian photographs. Her work has a poetic intensity that has not diminished since she created her now-demolished public sculpture House in 1993. It is very possible her art will survive and be admired when so much else of our time is forgotten.
Tate Britain, SW1, 12 September to 21 January
The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Baron Rogers of Riverside comes on so wood-fired, so extra-virgin, so biodynamic, so ethically sourced and cloudily unfiltered that he might be an obscure Umbrian goatherd’s dish served at Lady Rogers’s River Café. A lesser man would be crippled by the very yoke of the angelism that burdens him and afflicts everything he does.
But, somehow, over the past 50 years this virtuoso has, in various partnerships and configurations, designed a number of sheerly thrilling and stylistically various buildings. Most of his architectural near peers (Frank Gehry, Santiago Calatrava, Daniel Libeskind) are plodding one-trick ponies. Rogers is a very different sort of dobbin – a Lipizzaner stallion with a modern jazzer’s hairdo, a deafening apple green shirt and a capacious store of axels, salchows and triple skips.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Akademgorodok is a science centre situated in a remote Siberian forest. Photographer Pablo Ortíz Monasterio gained access to marvel at its brightly coloured chemistry labs and nuclear particle accelerators
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Sep 07 2017
The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Artist Gordon Hookey has created an immersive artwork experience for the Brisbane writers’ festival, inspired by the work of Alexis Wright’s award-winning novel Carpentaria. It recreates the world of the book’s colourful character, Angel Day
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Gift shop, which will open in autumn in West Bank, will sell pieces including crucifixes fashioned into grappling hooks
It’s the sort of merchandise you might find in any hotel gift shop: mugs emblazoned with slogans, T-shirts, prints of local beauty spots and novelty key rings. But this is not any ordinary holiday tat.
Banksy’s Walled Off hotel in the Palestinian territories will open a gift shop and sell new works by the elusive street artist for the first time in four years.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Wellcome Collection, London
This hard-hitting exhibition explores the impact of graphic design in health and pharmaceuticals as companies seek to educate, save lives, or simply sell us stuff
If graphic design can save your life, it is eminently capable of killing you, too. That’s the conflicted message at the heart of a powerful new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, which explores graphic design’s complex relationship with health, medicine, and the world of big pharma – and the different ethical positions that designers choose to take.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
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Sep 07 2017
London gallery to bring together 250 objects, including canoes, god figures and feast bowls, for landmark show in its 250th anniversary year
Historic objects from the South Pacific, some of which have remained undocumented and unseen in the stores of European museums for more than a century, are to be part of the UK’s first major show exploring Oceanic art.
The Royal Academy of Arts (RA) has announced details of its 2018 Oceania exhibition, which will bring together 250 objects from the vast region that stretches from New Guinea to Easter Island, and Hawaii to New Zealand.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Sep 07 2017
The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Federico Beltrán Masses painting of silent film stars Valentino and Pola Negri heads to auction – but will buyer break gem’s hex?
Related: Last of the red-hot myths: what gossip over Rudolph Valentino's sex life says about the silents
There were three in the relationship: Rudolph Valentino, Pola Negri – the Latin Lover and the Femme Fatale, two of the greatest stars of the silent screen – and the massive jewel on her finger, said to be the fateful ring that cursed a string of owners.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 07 2017
Instagrammer Roc Isern shows another side to Barcelona’s architecture by capturing the beautiful geometric shapes and patterns of the city’s buildings
Barcelona is known for its iconic landmarks, but Roc Isern turns his camera to buildings others may tend to look past.
Isern is a technical architect and photographer based in the Catalan capital. Since 2014, he has been capturing the facades of Barcelona’s buildings for tens of thousands of followers on Instagram at @barcelonafacades.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 06 2017
What would the world be like if we weren’t dependent on oil? Photographer Richard Allenby-Pratt imagines a deserted Dubai in which the wealthy have fled, leaving giraffes and zebras to wander the alien landscapes
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Sep 06 2017
He has appeared on more magazines than most supermodels. From Black Enterprise to Rolling Stone, the author of a new book traces the rise, fall – and legacy of the cover-star-in-chief
In October 2004, Barack Obama, then an Illinois state legislator, appeared on the cover of Black Enterprise, a popular African-American business monthly. It was his first-ever cover, and he shocked the magazine’s editors by proclaiming his intention to run for the United States Senate. They wondered if the young statesman was setting his hopes too high. Nevertheless, they ran the cover story with the prophetic headline: The next big thing in politics.
Cut to 2008, and Obama, having made it to the US Senate, now had his sights on the presidency. The experts said that America was not ready for an African-American leader; that white people wouldn’t vote for a non-white candidate or a man with a funny-sounding name, whose middle name is Hussein and who actually has Muslim relatives; and that even if they did, he would be assassinated before he saw out his first term.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 06 2017
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Sep 06 2017
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Sep 06 2017
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Sep 06 2017
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Sep 06 2017
The Guardian
Sep 06 2017
Fortune teller Pilar Abel loses 10-year campaign to prove she is Spanish surrealist’s only child and heir
DNA evidence taken from the recently exhumed body of Salvador Dalí has shown that he is not the father of a woman who had claimed to be the only child and heir of the eccentric surrealist.
Pilar Abel, a 61-year-old tarot card reader and fortune teller from Girona, has spent the past 10 years trying to prove that she is the fruit of a liaison between her mother and Dalí in 1955.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 06 2017
Objects and artworks including artist’s spectacles, correspondence and a terracotta pot to be auctioned by Christie’s
Previously unknown objects and artworks from the personal collection of Claude Monet, which have remained with the artist’s family, are to be sold at auction.
The trove of objects includes artworks by Monet himself and his friends such as Édouard Manet, Auguste Rodin and Paul Signac; Japanese prints that he owned and that inspired him; and more personal items such as photographs, his spectacles and a garden pot.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 06 2017
‘The owner of Prada was standing on the riverbank shouting at everyone. When he asked me if I’d got the shot I said, “No!” and stormed off in a huff’
We had to shut the river Tiber in Rome for this picture. It’s expensive to shut down a whole river, but this was for the Prada 1997 autumn/winter campaign, so we had the budget for it. You can’t see them, but there are about 10 people in the water, setting fire to bales of hay covered in kerosene to try and make it look misty. We had to shoot it in the last 10 minutes of daylight, so that the colours would be just right. I wanted it to be more than dusk – you could call it the gloaming.
We’d painted the boat the right colour. Everyone was lined up, ready to go, about four hours before we were due to shoot. But right at the last minute, the stylist decided to change the dress to a red one. That proved too vibrant. Then the boat started to sink and one of the guys throwing the bales of hay in the river forgot to let go and disappeared into the water after it. I’d been planning it for three months but in the last five minutes of daylight, the entire scene descended into utter chaos.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 06 2017
The Guardian
Sep 06 2017
Museum’s director Tristram Hunt says it welcomes money from people of ‘all political views’
The V&A director, Tristram Hunt, has said the museum was “honoured” to have the financial support of the billionaire supporter of Donald Trump Len Blavatnik, and welcomed it from donors of “all political views and no political views”.
Hunt on Wednesday launched the museum’s annual review, announcing exhibitions on a diverse range of subjects including Frida Kahlo, video games, and the environmental impact of fashion.
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