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The Guardian
Sep 13 2019
Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire
The Italian art prankster redecorates Churchill’s birthplace with an 18-carat loo, hideous union jacks and Hitler himself. What a fitting show for a country unravelling into madness
At a time when Britain is slipping further down the toilet day by day, it is curious to visit Blenheim Palace, a colossal monument to our finest hours. The Battle of Blenheim in 1704 may not be remembered as one of those now, but John Churchill’s victory over Louis XIV’s France was so significant in its day that a grateful nation paid for this jaw-droppingly spectacular baroque palace. What kind of child might be born among its triumphant martial memories? Winston Churchill, that’s who. A set of memorabilia-crowded rooms commemorate the cigar-chomping hero’s childhood here.
Related: Your chance to feel very flush: the 18-carat golden toilet hits Britain
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 13 2019
The Scottish painter constructs a darkly sexual scene of cultural appropriation
Peter Doig’s paintings have the heightened feel of dreams and movie stills, meshing the landscape and people of his adopted home of Trinidad with personal history and pop culture.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 12 2019
The Mexican capital was founded by Aztecs on an island in a vast lake. No wonder water flows through so many of its unbuilt projects
Ever since Mexico City was founded on an island in the lake of Texcoco its inhabitants have dreamed of water: containing it, draining it and now retaining it.
Nezahualcoyotl, the illustrious lord of Texcoco, made his name constructing a dyke shielding Mexico City’s Aztec predecessor city of Tenochtitlan from flooding. The gravest threat to Mexico City’s existence came from a five-year flood starting in 1629, almost causing the city to be abandoned. Ironically now its surrounding lake system has been drained, the greatest threat to the city’s existence is probably the rapid decline of its overstressed aquifers.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 12 2019
Abandoned Queensbury tunnel is in Victorian Society’s list of most endangered buildings
An abandoned and flooded Victorian railway tunnel hundreds of feet under the Pennines could be restored for use by cyclists and tourists but instead faces being filled with concrete and allowed to collapse.
The Victorian Society on Friday threw its weight behind a campaign to bring new life to the 1.4-mile (2.3km) Queensbury tunnel.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 12 2019
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Sep 12 2019
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Sep 12 2019

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Sep 12 2019

The New York Times
Sep 12 2019

The New York Times
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
The New York Times
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
artforum.com
Sep 12 2019
The Guardian
Sep 12 2019
In 2017, ten years on from the death of the great Guardian photographer, we gave readers the chance to buy three limited edition prints of his work.
Don McPhee’s picture of a picketing miner facing up to an officer is one of the abiding images of the 1984 coal strike and is now available again in a second limited edition run, in two sizes.
Produced on premium heavyweight Hahnemüele Photorag paper, the prints are supplied with a Guardian Archive certificate of authenticity.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 12 2019

The Guardian
Sep 11 2019
Gamblers wait for the wheel of fortune to stop spinning. Ice creams start to drip. A family photo in mid-burn. What do these shots of the moments inbetween tell us about the world?
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Sep 11 2019
‘This is my partner breastfeeding in our loft, which was one step up from a squat in an area full of painters and sculptors. It’s a luxury condo now’
This image was made in a loft in Brooklyn, New York, where I lived with Marion, my partner and now my wife, and where we started our family. It’s where I came of age, I guess, and where I photographed most of the pictures for my book Son. It represents youth and love and home, and it’s also particular to a place where we lived, and Brooklyn as a community.
That loft had a lot to do with my development as a photographer, particularly my use of light and colour, because it was bathed in bright sunlight most of the day. Though it was one step up from a squat, it was one of the important nodes of the creative community of Williamsburg. Many photographers lived there – including Tim Hetherington, Alex Majoli, Stanley Greene and Thomas Dworzak – and all these well-known sculptors and painters. Then it was bought by developers and we were all evicted in 2016. It was the end of an era. Now it’s luxury condos.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 11 2019
More than 450 artists from around the world have work on show at Carriageworks but, with a potential recession on the way, who’s buying it?
What a difference two years make. The first time we checked in on Sydney Contemporary in 2017 the event had consolidated its position as Australia’s largest and most commercially successful art fair.
That event was marked by both its ambition and scope, and in total the fair sold just over $16m worth of art. That record was topped in 2018 with $21m in sales. At the press launch on Wednesday for the 2019 outing, Tim Etchells, director of Art Fairs Australia – the company that stages the event – speculated that they would see perhaps $26m in sales if the upward trend continued.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 11 2019
artforum.com
Sep 11 2019
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Sep 11 2019
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Sep 11 2019
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Sep 11 2019
The New York Times
Sep 11 2019

The Guardian
Sep 11 2019
The painter is moving to France due to a mistaken belief he can smoke in its restaurants. But there are plenty of other reasons for Brits to envy our friends across the Channel – from French working hours to La Marseillaise
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal this week, David Hockney announced he is moving to France. Enthusing about €13 lunches and claiming “the French know how to live”, Hockney expresses the traditional British belief that – with its charming village markets, sexy public intellectuals, endless cheese and lunchtime wine – France does things better.
As a fellow Francophile, I applaud his decision, but not his reasoning (his apparent belief that he can smoke in restaurants is wrong for a start). France is superior, but not because they don’t shed Pret crumbs over their keyboards. These are the real reasons.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 11 2019
His stark masterpiece The Americans changed photography. Yet there was more to this countercultural hero who captured the debauchery of the Stones – and his own personal tragedies
‘People want to know so much,” Robert Frank answered wearily when I asked him back in 2004 about the lasting resonance of his classic photobook, The Americans. “All the time, this wanting to know. Where does it lead? Nowhere.”
We were sitting in the spartanly furnished kitchen of his apartment on Manhattan’s Bleecker Street, my tape recorder resting on a rickety table between a large brick of a mobile phone and a single bread roll. He was, it strikes me now, a man for whom fame and its comforts meant very little, whose sadness seemed more palpable than his genius. Almost 80 then, he seemed ineffably world-weary.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 11 2019
The giant of 20th-century photography, who has died aged 94, captured singular, candid moments of the 1950s and helped free picture-taking from the boundaries of clean lighting and linear composition
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Sep 10 2019
On the streets of La Paz, the Bolivian capital, a tribe wearing ski masks go about their work buffing up shoes. The disguises are to keep their identities secret – and avoid discrimination
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Sep 10 2019
Untitled (Red) and In wake donated by Valeria Napoleone, who only collects art by women
An art gallery has unveiled two new works in an attempt to address its gender imbalance, where less than 10% of its permanent collection are by women. The self-portraits by the Cape Town-based visual artist Berni Searle have been added to the permanent collection at Manchester Art Gallery, in a move to extend “the discourse around representation and identity”.
Untitled (Red) and In wake were donated by the art collector and philanthropist Valeria Napoleone, who only collects art by women, as part of a scheme to redress criticisms of a historical lack of female representation.
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 10 2019
The New York Times
Sep 10 2019

artforum.com
Sep 10 2019
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Sep 10 2019
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Sep 10 2019
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Sep 10 2019
The Guardian
Sep 10 2019
This powerful documentary, about a UN investigator travelling the planet to get to the bottom of the global housing crisis, lays bare a $217 trillion scandal
‘I don’t believe that capitalism itself is hugely problematic,” says Leilani Farha, as she marches along a pavement in Harlem, New York. The UN’s special rapporteur on adequate housing is on her way to visit a sprawling low-income housing project that was recently acquired by a private equity fund, leading to massive rent hikes and probable evictions. “Is unbridled capitalism in an area that is a human right problematic? Yes.”
The conflict between rights and profits lies at the heart of a thought-provoking documentary, Push, which follows Farha’s forays into the bleak depths of the global housing crisis, as she attempts to unpick exactly how we got here. In the Harlem estate she meets a man who already spends 90% of his income on his rent. Soon, his two-bedroom flat will cost $3,600 (£,2920) a month, and he will be forced to move.
Continue reading...artforum.com
Sep 10 2019
The Guardian
Sep 10 2019
Photographer whose work captured the lives of ordinary people and those on the margins
Robert Frank, who has died aged 94, was to the photography of 1950s America what Walker Evans was to the 30s and Robert Mapplethorpe to the 70s. His black-and-white images captured the ignored and rejected lives of individuals existing on the edge.
In 1957, Frank met the beat writer Jack Kerouac at a party in New York and showed him a sheaf of photos he had recently taken on road trips around the US. Kerouac offered to write an introduction for what became Frank’s best known book, The Americans, published in Paris in 1958 and in New York the following year. Kerouac noted the coffins and jukeboxes that litter the work until “you end up not knowing any more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin”. He concluded: “To Robert Frank I now give this message: You got eyes.”
Continue reading...The New York Times
Sep 10 2019

artforum.com
Sep 10 2019
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Sep 10 2019

The Guardian
Sep 10 2019
Frank’s seminal book The Americans, with an introduction by Jack Kerouac, helped to change the direction of photography
Robert Frank, the American artist whose photographs captured the lives of everyday people and influenced a generation with his raw and evocative style, has died aged 94.
The Swiss-born photographer’s seminal book The Americans, which had an introduction from Jack Kerouac, beat generation author of On the Road, helped to change the direction of photography with its 83 pictures rejecting many conventions of the art form up to that point.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 10 2019
Pop art pioneer was a friend and contemporary of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg
Surreal, innovative and political paintings by an American artist worshipped by Andy Warhol have gone on display in London.
James Rosenquist was a pop art pioneer whose name is well known in America and parts of Europe, but far less so in the UK.
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 09 2019
In Britain in the 1980s, the Black Country’s metal industry was hit hard and a landscape that had been formed by the Industrial Revolution disappeared. John Myers’ book The End of Industry captures that time
Continue reading...The Guardian
Sep 09 2019
The Sedition festival is celebrating the underground art and music subculture that challenged the government, society and the mainstream media in Sydney in the 1970s. Alongside performances by some bands of the era, more than 200 works – including posters, films and art – are being exhibited. For Guardian Australia, the co-curator and former Rolling Stone editor Toby Creswell has selected some of the posters that inspired the festival. ‘Before social media, the best way to get your message out there was with paper and flour and water and a creative expression of your ideas,’ he says. ‘They are angry, amusing, funny and provocative’
• Sedition 2019 runs until 1 December across various locations in Sydney
• ‘We need to do something’: the poster art of a new political era
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