News

Housebuilders appropriate art to sell luxury homes at the expense of local artists and communities. But now there’s a fightback over ‘artwashing’

London sells itself on being the world’s cultural capital. Tate Modern had a record 6.4 million visitors following the opening of its new extension. Art fairs such as Frieze and the publicity surrounding big exhibitions such as the Jasper Johns show at the Royal Academy consolidate this brand identity.

But just a mile or two from the galleries and auction houses of the West End, some of the same cultural players whose creativity the city trades on are protesting that their own communities are being desecrated by development. Spectres of Modernism, a site-specific exhibition at Bowater House in the City of London until December, sees balconies draped with banners by artists including the Turner prizewinners Jeremy Deller and Elizabeth Price.

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The last known Leonardo in private hands, “Salvator Mundi,” and Andy Warhol’s final silk-screen, “Sixty Last Suppers,” will be sold Nov. 15.

Salvator Mundi was confirmed as an authentic old master just six years ago, having sold for £45 at auction in 1958

The only Leonardo da Vinci painting in private hands, which fetched just £45 at a sale in 1958, is to be sold at auction with an estimate of $100m (£75m).

Salvator Mundi, one of the 15 or so known to be by the artist, was lost for centuries before its authenticity was confirmed in 2011.

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press release

Cauleen Smith discusses her collaborative work at Gallery TPW in Toronto

The artist Sebastian Errazuriz used augmented reality to deface a famous sculpture by Mr. Koons to protest what he views as Silicon Valley’s monopoly on digital public space.

press release

The designer blends Scandinavian-inflected minimalism with warm English comfort in her practice, and at home.

The Art Newspaper

press release

Catalonia’s president, Carles Puigdemont, addresses the Catalan parliament on Tuesday evening for the first time since the independence referendum that provoked the standoff with the Spanish government. Photographer Chris McGrath has spent the past two weeks in Barcelona covering the referendum and its fallout

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Perlux, cod. 8300. La natura intima della materia a cura di Anna d’Ambrosio dal 19/10 al 10/11 Opening 19 ottobre h. 18.30 Materia ed energia sono trasformabili una nell’altra. Ogni materiale od oggetto può essere impiegato nella creazione di un’opera d’arte, ma ciò che realmente conta, in fondo, è il modo in cui viene inserito in essa dalla mente dell’artista: [...]

New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro chosen from six-strong shortlist, and will work to submit a design for the building by December 2018

The dream of building a new City of London concert hall and home for Sir Simon Rattle’s London Symphony Orchestra has taken an important step forward with the appointment of New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

The practice, founded by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio in 1979, has an impressive list of major cultural projects to its name including the High Line park in New York, the vast 10-year project to redesign the city’s Lincoln Center and the Broad museum of contemporary art in Los Angeles.

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The Remote Area Medical volunteer corps make several weekend-long clinics each year, providing free dental, visual and general health services to hundreds of people in remote areas of the United States. In Grundy, care was given to 750 people, with dental care being the most sought-after service

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From log trails to lava houses, from mud baths to melting glaciers, US photographer Lucas Foglia explores our relationship with the natural world. In his new book Human Nature, he has captured off-grid families, climate scientists at work, and a hotel over-run with greenery

• Read Sean O’Hagan’s review of Lucas Foglia’s Human Nature

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He is one of America’s most outspoken artists. As his new show The Beautiful Game hits Britain, Hank Willis Thomas talks about sport as warfare and why race is a myth

For some people, football is a matter of life and death. But for Hank Willis Thomas, much like Bill Shankly, it’s far more important than that. Yes, on an aesthetic level The Beautiful Game, his first solo UK show, is a riot of colour and energy: dazzling patchwork collages of Premier League football tops; totem poles of rugby, football and cricket balls inspired by Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși; a solitary leg performing a midair bicycle kick that invites you to hear the gasps of a non-existent crowd.

But Thomas is also attempting to start a conversation about what the game represents. Beyond the shock of seeing Liverpool and Manchester United jerseys snuggled up next to each other, cooperating in the same colour scheme, you’re also asked to examine the web of corporate sponsorship logos and expensive players from across the globe, and to question the contradictions that underpin Britain’s national sport. Who is really making the money? How many people’s dreams and labours come to nothing so that a select few can succeed? And why are we so determined to pick sides?

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DV

Photographs and film shot by officers in the 1960s and 1970s document a turbulent era and some debated police practices.

Press Release

The museum will move to the Essex Crossing complex in the Lower East Side next year.

A retrospective opening at the Met Breuer shows Singh straddling the chasm that separates modernist street photography and traditional Indian culture.

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Raghubir Singh captured the jumbled sensations of modern Indian life in his lyrical color photos. His first New York museum show is at the Met Breuer.

Lucian Freud was rude about David Hockney’s work – but their tiff barely compares to those of the old masters

News that Lucian Freud was privately dismissive of some of David Hockney’s paintings shouldn’t come as a surprise. Freud, the cantankerous eminence grise of British portraiture, was not one to lavish praise on any contemporary; indeed, he would often refer to his friend-turned-bitter-rival Denis Wirth-Miller as “Dennis Worth-Nothing”. That the latter may have stolen one of Freud’s paintings probably didn’t help, but neither left anybody in any doubt as to their opinions of each other’s output.

However, Freud was neither the first nor the last artist to get into a slanging match. Hockney himself has levelled several barbs in the direction of Gerhard Richter. “To be honest, I don’t really understand Richter,” he said in 2015. “[…] I just can’t see any profundity.” He added: “[It’s] OK, but I don’t see what’s so great about it.” Just in case the message was lost, he clarified that he meant all this “pejoratively”.

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Architect who both designed and made a reality of the London Eye and the British Airways i360 tower on Brighton seafront

David Marks, who has died aged 64 of cancer, was passionate about the potential of architecture to improve people’s lives. His most prominent contribution was to the skyline: the London Eye, the British Airways i360 observation tower on the seafront at Brighton, and the Treetop Walkway at Kew Gardens, west London.

Marks’ skill as a designer and innovator was complemented by a socially conscious entrepreneurialism – idealistic, potentially reckless, but ultimately very successful. Traditionally architects work by commission, designing what they are paid to design. However, Marks, with his wife and professional partner, Julia Barfield, often did not wait around to be asked.

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The Los Angeles Times

The Art Newspaper

The New York Times

Artnews

Linda Yablonsky at the 15th Frieze Art Fair

From a wavy waterfront chapel in Cape Town to a giant light-soaked gym in China … here are the highlights of the shortlist for Arcaid’s 2017 architectural photograph of the year

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A sometime interior designer himself, Mr. Walrod knew a lot about a lot and shared it with those outfitting restaurants, hotels and homes.

Fans of rock’n’roll, rockabilly, rockin’ blues and Americana gather at Seacroft Holiday Village in Hemsby, Norfolk, to dress up in period clothing and relive the 1950s

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Laura Raicovich is particularly outspoken on immigration, an issue that hits close to home: Five percent of the museum’s staff members are DACA recipients.

Store Studios, London
This group show by 24 artists, including Marina Abramović, Anish Kapoor, Ai Weiwei and Laure Prouvost, doesn’t try to make sense but it does take you places

A white line snakes through the spaces of Store Studios, housed in a 1971 brutalist office block on the Strand. Painted using one of those wheeled contraptions that mark out football pitches and sports fields, the line trundles from under a closed lift door, makes its way splashily up a swanky staircase – passing a Lawrence Weiner work that repeats the same phrase, “WHOLE CLOTH STRETCHED TO THE LIMIT”, on the wall in big letters on every level – makes arcing oxbow detours across the concrete floors, and comes to a stop, where the machine ran out of paint, on the first floor. There it stands. Phew. Ceal Floyer’s Taking a Line for a Walk follows Paul Klee’s famous definition of drawing. Floyer’s work is a nice detour in a show of 24 Lisson Gallery artists that doesn’t try too hard to make any sense at all.

I looked for a theme but there wasn’t one, apart from the fact that all the artists show with the gallery, now celebrating its 50th year. From Dan Graham, who first showed at Lisson in 1972, to Turner prize winner Laure Prouvost, who joined this year, it is just everything at once, and one damn thing after another, in a group show whose title comes from a 1966 quotation by John Cage. “Nowadays everything happens at once and our souls are conveniently electronic (omniattentive),’ Cage wrote, presciently. He should have tried 2017. Attentiveness is difficult. Everything at Once is a portmanteau conceit, unlike the Hayward’s excellent offsite film and video project The Infinite Mix, which occupied the same building in 2016.

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Art Newspaper / Artforum

Tate Modern; Parasol Unit, London
The Danish collective’s Turbine Hall installation is astonishing in its banality. For true wonders, seek out the work of African American sculptor Martin Puryear

First the bad news. This is by far the worst Turbine Hall commission in the history of Tate Modern, and the steepest decline from Miroslaw Balka’s overwhelming black box, Ai Weiwei’s ocean of seeds or Olafur Eliasson’s great radiant sun. After Carsten Höller’s silver slides, moreover, tossing us down through the hall’s chasmic space, you might think no artist would be caught dead repeating the playground theme. But so it is with Danish art trio Superflex, who have filled the place with swing upon swing upon swing.

Superflex’s projects range from manufacturing biogas in developing countries to building a park that transformed a run-down Copenhagen district. Civic-minded as ever, their swings start outside the museum, although they are easily overlooked. If it weren’t for the fact that the seats hanging from orange steel frames are big enough for two or three, you would never know they were art swings.

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Trinity Square, Hull; Sir John Soane’s Museum, London
A handsome installation outside Hull Minster and a candy-coloured miniature cityscape both use the language of ancient forms to say something new

Bubbling beneath the surface of contemporary architecture is a certain restlessness, a craving that this art form recover its art, its ability to stir, provoke, enthral, speak. Which also means that it should do so with complexity and contradiction, in different registers, like music, with nuance and wit as well as oomph – not, in other words, the depthless sugar rush of much that gets called “iconic”. And not its usual alternative, in the two-party system of architectural style: the careful, dutiful sobriety that at best can produce a subtle poetry of space but at worst is no more than managerial.

This craving looks to the past for inspiration. The rise in nostalgia for brutalism shows a wish for forms that can emote. Beyond that architects look to the baroque and ancient Rome. They also look at 1980s postmodernism – often gauche and risible, and rapidly degraded by the embrace of the more cynical end of the property business, but nonetheless a previous attempt at plundering history for its communicative power. There’s a surge of small signs of these feelings, such as an exhibition of photographs by Hélène Binet of the impassioned stonework of Nicholas Hawksmoor at Large Glass in north London, and a show at the Riba of delicate drawings by the artist Pablo Bronstein, which contrive to make 1980s neo-Georgian look fascinating.

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Next month, Sotheby’s will auction art, furniture and antiques owned by the French interior designer who designed homes for Yves Saint Laurent, Sofia Coppola and others.

Despite its prominent public profile, North Korea remains one of the world’s most enigmatic countries. A new publication from North Korea specialist Nicholas Bonner offers new insight into this isolated, fiercely ideological society by showcasing its visual culture. “Graphic design in North Korea breaks down into traditional elements and contemporary socialist influences,” says Bonner, whose work in the DPRK has spanned film-making and tourism. “The graphics have developed largely independently of the outside world and they now have a much more assured Korean style.” Well-known Korean landmarks provide common motifs, which serve to “imbue products with instantly recognisable ‘Korean-ness’, thereby making them, in their eyes, ‘the best’ – even in the absence of any competition”.

• Made in North Korea is out now on Phaidon
  

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The Las Vegas shooting, Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, the Catalonia referendum and the Iraqi advance against Islamic State – the news of the week captured by the world’s best photojournalists

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No matter how you feel about Ken Done – underrated genius or kitschy sell-out – the impact his ubiquitous, technicolour vision has had on Australia’s cultural identity through the 1980s cannot be denied. A new volume of his more recent work, all painted since the year 2000, shows Done’s practice continues to develop – but his love of colour, beaches and the ocean has remained a constant. Here he picks out 15 of his favourites.

• Ken Done: Paintings You Probably Haven’t Seen is out 11 October; an accompanying exhibition at the Ken Done Gallery in Sydney opens on 11 October

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