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The New York Times
May 17 2019
The New York Times
May 17 2019
The New York Times
May 17 2019
The New York Times
May 17 2019
The Guardian
May 17 2019
In the latest of our Guardian Print Shop series, we have an image of bees, shot by Gerrard Gethings, which will feature as part of the World Bee Day Gallery that launches on Monday
Every summer for the past five years, since the birth of his son, photographer Gerrard Gethings has had a bumble bee hive delivered to his home. In 2016, he decided to try to shoot them. He set up a backdrop next to the entrance to the hive, lit the scene, positioned the tripod and camera six inches away with a remote control – and waited. “I had to pull the trigger as soon as I saw the shadow of a bee emerging, as there was a tiny delay,” says Gethings. “It was a pleasurable way to spend the weekend.” Up close, you can see the bees’ extraordinary anatomy, their punky yellow buzz cuts. “They are so un-aerodynamic,” he says. “You can see how heavy their bodies are, how flimsy their wings. Theoretically, they shouldn’t be able to fly at all.” Ahead of World Bee Day on 20 May, photographs like this can remind us to appreciate these wonderful creatures afresh, and how important they are to the health of our planet.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 17 2019
Ieoh Ming Pei, known always as IM Pei, who has died aged 102, lived and worked long enough to become the doyen of American architects and perhaps the most renowned of all Chinese-born Americans. His resolute intervention in the form of a glass pyramid at the Louvre in the 1980s marked the high point of his fame. A series of cultural monuments followed all over the world, culminating in the Museum of Islamic Art at Doha, jutting out like a fortress on a manmade island from the coast of Qatar.
But Pei’s greatest and subtlest achievement, as well as the turning point in his career, was the East Building that he added to Washington DC’s National Gallery of Art (1968-78). Its geometrical and sculptural virtuosity gave fresh hope to those who feared at the time that modern architecture was losing its way. It perfectly embodies the blend of boldness and suavity that lay at the heart of Pei’s architectural personality, and is arguably the noblest art gallery of the last half-century.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 17 2019
The British Museum is turning Japanese for Manga, Gin Lane is making a racket at the Foundling Museum, and the V&A has a lot on its plate – all in your weekly dispatch
Manga
The wildly popular contemporary comic strip art from Japan gets the BM’s blockbuster treatment. Wot, run out of old pots?
• British Museum, London, 23 May to 26 August
The Guardian
May 17 2019
Photo London has named Stephen Shore as its master of photography for 2019. New work will be shown at Somerset House alongside this classic series Los Angeles, which features 60 photographs taken in one day in 1969
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 17 2019
From his provocative Louvre pyramid to his inverted wedge for Dallas, the Chinese-American architect was too modern for his time – but his angular marvels look perfect now
So bold were IM Pei’s designs, they were often regarded as wilfully controversial, designed to shock. But Pei himself never saw it like that. He was possibly the last living link to such founders of modernism as Le Corbusier and Bauhaus stalwarts Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, all of whom he met. He carried their torch, abiding by their principles and adding flourishes of his own – usually too many for the general public. To those modernist foundations of proportion, simplicity, geometry, Pei added audacious angles and structural daring. The result is a body of work that is instantly recognisable – more so than their retiring creator, who died this week aged 102.
Pei’s Dallas Civic Center was a statement of intent. Commissioned as part of a drive to rebrand the city following the assassination of President John F Kennedy, it was a statement of civic grandeur with more than a touch of sci-fi. It was later used as a location in the movie RoboCop. Its huge, inverted wedge of office floors looked too precarious in early designs: Pei had to express the stairwells as cylindrical columns, to give the impression they were holding up the seven-storey overhang when in fact they served no structural purpose.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 17 2019
The American photographer captures the grim reality and the fantasy associated with carnival strippers
In the late 1970s, Susan Meiselas’s images of civil war and insurrection in Nicaragua and El Salvador established her as one of the great humanitarian photographers. But she had earned her place on Magnum’s books via a rather different series, capturing carnival strippers performing across rural New England.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 17 2019
The New York Times
May 17 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The Guardian
May 16 2019
The festival’s downfall has left artists hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. What went wrong?
The voodoo doll sat for several weeks in March on the bar of Barboaa, the pop-up drinking establishment opened by the inaugural Biennale of Australian Art (Boaa), on Lydiard Street in Ballarat.
Small and not particularly spooky, the doll bore an uncanny resemblance to the director of the National Association of the Visual Arts (Nava), Esther Anatolitis.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2019
IM Pei, one of the most celebrated and prolific architects of the 20th century, has died aged 102. The son of a prominent Chinese banker, he favoured stone, steel and glass in his creations that bore his hallmark geometry and reverence for light
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 16 2019
Pei, whose portfolio included the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was one of the most prolific architects of the 20th century
IM Pei, whose modern designs and high-profile projects made him one of the best-known and most prolific architects of the 20th century, has died. He was 102.
A spokesman at Pei’s New York architecture firm confirmed his death to the Associated Press.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The Guardian
May 16 2019
From displaced Kurds to carnival strippers, documentarian praised for carving ‘a new form of socially engaged photography’ by getting close to long-term subjects
The prestigious Deutsche Börse photography prize has been won by Susan Meiselas, an American whose work over five decades has seen her engage deeply with her subjects, from the scattered communities of the Kurdish diaspora to the women in her still edgy Carnival Strippers series.
The award, which in the past has tended to favour more conceptually driven artists, is a vindication of sorts for this socially committed documentarian. At the Photographers’ Gallery in London, which hosts the prize, Meiselas chose to exhibit In the Shadow of History, her long-term engagement with the plight of the Kurdish people, which was part of her recent touring retrospective, Mediations. Begun in 1977, it traces the lives of ordinary Kurds living in exile across the globe using photographs, film, text and projections, all of which reflect the depth of her collaboration with scholars, historians and local communities.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The Guardian
May 16 2019
The 16th-century paintings will be shown as a series in London, Edinburgh, Madrid and Boston
One of the most important groups of high Renaissance paintings is to be brought together for the first time in more than 300 years.
A partnership between galleries in London, Edinburgh, Boston and Madrid was announced on Thursday which will allow five of Titian’s greatest paintings to be seen as they were intended – together as a series.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 16 2019
The New York Times
May 16 2019
The Guardian
May 16 2019
A new exhibition tells the human stories of the infamous refugee camp through the objects created, used and discarded there.
Sarah Mallet calls herself a “normal” archaeologist. An expert on how English diets changed between the iron age and the medieval period, she is a member of a discipline whose bread-and-butter work might involve recording and dating, say, Saxon fibulae. But today, at Pitt Rivers anthropological museum in Oxford, she is holding out for inspection not of an ancient coin or a shard of prehistoric pottery, but a decidedly modern teargas canister.
“I’ve recorded quite a few of these,” she says. “This one’s dated 2009, which means it must have been out of date by the time it was used. Some of the ones I’ve seen as are old as 1998 – and teargas gets more potent over time. There are a lot from 2015 and 2016.”
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2019
The Assignments exhibition is an annual chance to see the top images by UK photojournalists, as chosen by the British Press Photographers’ Association. Warning: readers may find some of the images upsetting
- Assignments runs from 17–19 May at Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, London SE1 9PH. Entry is free
The Guardian
May 15 2019
Pictures on a Postcard auctions anonymous signed works by big-name photographers from Larry Clark to Roger Ballen, Todd Hido and Karen Knorr. Here are our favourites …
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2019
‘They’re out on the site of the old Newstead Colliery. They do eat the rabbits they catch – or trade them for beer. Thirty years ago, they would have been miners’
I started my Thanks Maggie project back in 2012. The title is definitely sarcastic. It’s a series of photographs about culture and social life in the former coalfield areas of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and the evolution of old colliery sites from places of industry to landscapes of leisure. Much photography work about these postindustrial parts of England often focuses on deprivation, and it’s usually from the perspective of a concerned outsider. Thanks Maggie is semi-autobiographical – my dad worked in the pits, as a shaftsman – and I wanted to take photos that were more of a celebration of the people and places I grew up with.
The project looks at different ways that people interact with this landscape. This is one of the first photos I took, of locals hunting rabbits on the site of the old Newstead Colliery. When I was a teenager, hanging out on these former mining sites, you’d see people with air rifles and stay well away from them. They looked intimidating. But I had an “in” with Andy, the guy in the camo cap, and he took me out rabbiting with his mates on a Saturday.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 15 2019
The Guardian
May 15 2019
Barbican, London
This crowd-pleasing show throws robots, shiny toys and interactive paintings at viewers. But there’s little sign of creativity amid the chaotic overload
In 2016, a machine beat the world’s best (human) player at the ancient strategy game Go, which up to then was said to be too intuitive for a computer. AlphaGo’s victory was doubly stunning because it taught itself Go by trial and error. Does the fact that computers can now learn mean that artificial intelligence (AI) has moved from science fiction to reality?
The story of AlphaGo is told in a specially isolated display, almost like a little temple, at the heart of the Barbican’s sprawling survey of the past, present and future of machines that can think for themselves. It’s a show that’s sorely needed. AI is everywhere in the media, but public understanding of it is confused. It sometimes seems vested interests want to keep it that way. Why do tech companies create uncannily humanoid interfaces if not to fool us into believing their algorithms are consciously speaking to us? AI: More Than Human should be the exhibition that clarifies our understanding of AI and where it’s really at, but instead it opts for chaotic overload and a groovy utopianism that perpetuates the current blur in public discussion of reality and fantasy of this potentially earth-shaking technology.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2019
Works depicting dozens of female politicians and campaigners to be introduced
Parliament is to receive an overhaul of its publicly displayed art work, with dozens of former and current female politicians and campaigners to be introduced to the walls of the Palace of Westminster.
A painting of Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in the Commons, and photographs of the MPs Yvette Cooper and Seema Kennedy, are among the works to be introduced following discussions among a committee of MPs.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2019
Designs from architects around world also suggest glass, crystal and metal spires
An architecture firm has proposed replacing the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral with a swimming pool, as France prepares to launch an international competition to restore the fire-damaged gothic edifice to its former glory.
After the roof and spire of Notre Dame were damaged in a fire watched worldwide in April, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, said he was open to a “contemporary gesture” in rebuilding it “more beautiful than before”, and the prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, called for a new spire “adapted to the techniques and the challenges of our era”.
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 15 2019
Paternalistic social engineering or make-Britain-great-again utopianism? A new archive film compilation takes a look at the UK’s controversial postwar towns
“People sometimes say to me, ‘You must get a terrific kick out of having been responsible for a huge thing like a new town,’” said Sir Frederick Gibberd in an interview in 1982, 35 years after he created the new town of Harlow. “Well, I get a lot of misery out of it, in fact. I go around and think, ‘My god, that’s unbelievably bad, and it could have been so good.’”
If that was what the designer thought, imagine how everyone else who moved to Harlow felt. The interview comes in a short film at the end of New Towns, Our Towns, a new compilation of archive films from the Independent Cinema Office chronicling Britain’s pioneering postwar new town movement – and our ongoing love-hate relationship with it. Paternalistic social engineering or make-Britain-great-again utopianism? Textbook example of the failures of macro modernism, or the type of bold, ambitious government initiative we need more of?
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2019
A hypnotised live dove, a migrant boat, a cow on rails, a Lithuanian beach … the Guardian’s David Levene on how he captured the vast art fair
• Mawkish monuments and the beach from hell: our verdict on this year’s arts celebration
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 14 2019
The show, increasingly typified by controversial resistance art, is presenting a mostly safe front this year despite a growing protest over a Whitney trustee
When the doors open on the sixth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the first thing one sees is a snowman painting by Calvin Marcus. It’s an underwhelming statement for the Whitney Biennial, arguably America’s most politically charged art event, which opens on Friday.
The curators, Jane Panetta and Rujeko Hockley, both staffers at the museum, wanted to take a more subtle approach for this 79th edition of the biennial, which features 75 artists, half of whom are women. Despite the country’s political upheaval and the looming elections in 2020, it comes as a surprise that resistance art is so little represented.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 14 2019
The Guardian
May 14 2019
Hadley’s Art prize is an annual acquisitive prize for Australian landscape art which, at $100,000, is believed to be the richest in the world. Selected from more than 630 entrants, the 33 finalists among this year’s shortlist – 12 of them from Tasmania – were chosen by Tasmanian artist Raymond Arnold, Mona’s senior research curator Jane Clark, and Tasmanian art writer, curator and gallerist Susan McCulloch.
The prize, now in its third year, is presented by the Hadley’s Orient hotel in Hobart, where all 33 finalists will be exhibited until 18 August. Below is a selection
- Hadley’s Art prize will be awarded on 19 July 2019. Out of respect for the artist’s moral rights, please refrain from saving any image. No reproductions may be made
The Guardian
May 14 2019
She livestreams her dates, once became a real-life Alexa and built a light that dims in boring company. As AI: More Than Human opens at the Barbican, meet an artist for the tech age
In a gallery in downtown Manhattan, people are huddling around four laptops, taking turns to control the apartments of 14 complete strangers. They watch via live video feeds, and respond whenever the residents ask “Someone” to help them. They switch the lights on and off, boil the kettle, put some music on – whatever they can do to oblige.
The project, called Someone, is the latest in a series exploring our ever more complicated relationship with technology. It’s by the American artist Lauren McCarthy and is a sort of outsourcing of Lauren, an earlier work in which she acted as a real-life Alexa, remotely watching over a home 24 hours a day, responding to its occupants’ questions and needs like a flesh and blood version of Amazon’s voice-operated virtual assistant.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 14 2019
The New York Times
May 14 2019
The Guardian
May 13 2019
Brooklyn gangs and a glimpse behind North Korea’s closed regime are just two of the highlights of this year’s Photo London festival
Photo London is at Somerset House London, 16-19 May 2019
Continue reading...The Guardian
May 13 2019
The Austrian capital has been pioneering ‘gender mainstreaming’ for nearly 30 years. How did the city come to be so far ahead – and could its gains be lost?
At 240 hectares, the neighbourhood of Aspern, Vienna, is one of the largest urban developments in Europe. By the time it is complete in 2028, it is due to be home to 20,000 people, plus another 20,000 workplaces, and with an explicitly family-oriented design. Centred on an artificial lake and with half of the entire area devoted to public space, it is billed as “Vienna’s Urban Lakeside”: a model city-within-a-city, in a place that already has the one of the highest qualities of life of any city in the world.
When Christina Atta moved to Aspern four years ago, she was one of its rare single women. “I was alone with my cats, and everybody had children,” she says. Now she is pregnant with her second child, however, Atta, 35, can better appreciate its design. Her only complaint is that the bus to the city can’t accommodate all the young children.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 13 2019
The Guardian
May 13 2019
Artemisia Gentileschi’s 17th-century work to be displayed at secondary school in Newcastle
A baroque period masterpiece bought by the National Gallery for £3.6m last year is to go on display alongside the GCSE artwork of probably apprehensive schoolgirls.
Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria (about 1615–17) will begin a four-day visit to Sacred Heart Catholic high school in Newcastle upon Tyne on Tuesday.
Continue reading...The New York Times
May 13 2019
The New York Times
May 13 2019
The Guardian
May 13 2019
Even the housing minister admits the soulless developments gobbling up Britain’s countryside will soon have to be bulldozed
A glance through the window of virtually any long-distance train reveals how much countryside is being gobbled up by identikit, soulless, mediocre housing designed around cars. Earlier this month, the housing minister, Kit Malthouse, predicted that many of the boxes being thrown up on the outskirts of towns would soon be “ripped down and bulldozed” as unsuitable.
The evidence for his claim is simple. As Malthouse observed, housing is the one thing that virtually everyone likes to buy secondhand – and that means the issue of housing quality is now critical, particularly given the government’s aim to get 300,000 new homes built every year by the mid-2020s. But despite new planning guidance, billions being poured into financial support for housebuilding and land supply and growing political and public pressure over the shameful growth in homelessness, this government is no nearer to working out how to build enough good quality, affordable homes that will adapt to people’s changing needs.
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