Arts news

• Berlin Faces Backlash Over Proposed Cut to Culture Budget

  27-11-2024 18:25 via artnews.com
  
  Berlin’s plan to cut its cultural budget by €130 million, a reduction of around 13 percent, has sparked a wave of opposition from the city’s arts workers.More than 450 publicly funded institutions, including galleries, theaters and music venues are now protesting the budget cuts under the campaign Berlin Is Culture, the Guardian reports. Cultural workers warn that the move could lead to closures and mass layoffs, destabilizing the German city’s arts infrastructure in the l
  
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• Justin Sun Promises to Buy 100,000 Bananas From Street Vendor Who Sold the Banana for Sotheby’s $6.5 M. ‘Comedian’

  29-11-2024 21:34 via artnews.com
  
  The story about cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun and Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian keeps on giving.Sun made good on the promise he made immediately after buying the artwork, comprising a banana duct-taped to the wall, by eating it on Friday in front of baying journalists. The day before, though, he made an even stranger announcement on X: he said he was going to buy 100,000 bananas from the New York street vendor who sold the fruit to Sotheby’s before the house displayed the art
  
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• Justin Sun Promises to Buy 100,000 Bananas From Street Vendor Who Sold 25-Cent Banana Used for $6.2 M. ‘Comedian’

  29-11-2024 21:34 via artnews.com
  
  The story about cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun and Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian keeps on giving.Sun kept the promise he made immediately after buying the artwork, comprising a banana duct-taped to the wall, by eating it on Friday in front of baying journalists. The day before, though, he made an even stranger announcement on X. He said he was going to buy 100,000 bananas from the New York street vendor who sold the fruit to Sotheby’s for 25 cents, before the house displayed t
  
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• A Painter’s Studio in France Needed Maintenance. The Contractor Found Ancient Art Behind its Walls.

  29-11-2024 17:18 via artnews.com
  
  After 35 years of use, Jean Charles Blais’ art studio in Vence, France, sprung a leak. As the painter tells it, a contractor removed a bit of the wall’s plaster coating in search of water, only to find a ghost of ancient Rome.Cradling the studio’s walls was a mosaic from the first or second century CE, when the Romans called this land Vintium. Vintium was a provincial but notable city in Roman Gaul; its legacy endures largely in the architecture of its old town—if you kno
  
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• Does Beeple Deserve a Museum Exhibition?

  29-11-2024 17:00 via artnews.com
  
  There’s something to be said about an artist committed to an everyday practice: On Kawara, for example, recording the date in white blocky letters and numbers over a black background, or Ann Craven painting the birds and moons in her tender canvases. Mike Winkelmann, the artist known to the world as Beeple, is also one of those artists. Since 2007, long before NFTs had entered the zeitgeist, Beeple created a new work daily, resulting in some 6,420 works—the majority of them digitally
  
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• Justin Sun Eats Maurizio Cattelan’s Banana He Bought for $6.2 M. at Sotheby’s in New York Last Week

  29-11-2024 13:56 via artnews.com
  On Friday, Justin Sun – the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur who purchased Maurizio Cattelan’s banana duct-taped to a wall for $6.2 last week – made good on his promise to eat it.Immediately after buying the controversial artwork, titled Comedian, at Sotheby’s in New York, Sun announced on X that he would not only pay for it with the cryptocurrency he created – TRON – but also consume it.In front of journalists at one of Hong Kong’s most e
  
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• Ralph Lemon Talks about Dance, Drawing, and Maintaining a Decades-Long Generative Practice

  29-11-2024 13:00 via artnews.com
  
  Working in the contexts of dance, drawing, painting, installation, and writing, New York–based Ralph Lemon has expanded what art can be through a generative practice that questions the conventions of his different disciplines and his body’s relationship to each. Through an interest in theater, he discovered dance by the likes of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk. He recalled seeing Monk’s Quarry: an opera in three movements (1976) and being completely “in
  
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• Ming Smith’s Four Ohio Shows See a Restless Artist Come Home

  29-11-2024 12:00 via artnews.com
  
  The photographer Ming Smith (b. 1947) has four shows in Ohio this season—a homecoming of sorts, as part of this year’s FotoFocus Biennial. Three of the shows mark the first major exhibitions of her photographs to take place in Columbus, her hometown. The fourth, “Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue,” at the Gund in Gambier, showcases her camera’s encounters with and within Europe. This work is layered, sonic even its empty spaces and silences. T
  
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• Banksy’s ‘Well Hung Lover’ Mural Will Soon Be Sold with the Building It is Painted on

  28-11-2024 14:46 via artnews.com
  
  A Banksy mural of a man hanging out of a bedroom window as he tries to evade his love rival is being sold at auction with the building it is painted on.Titled Well Hung Lover, it was painted on the wall of a sexual health clinic in Bristol, UK, in 2006. Banksy, who is from the city, said he wasn’t aware of the building’s coincidental use at the time.Real estate agent Hollis Morgan is auctioning the property – and therefore the artwork – with a new 250-year lease
  
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• Nadia Myre Brings an Exhibition on French Colonization in Canada to France’s Heartland

  28-11-2024 12:00 via artnews.com
  
  The first thing Nadia Myre did when she went to do her residency on an island in a man-made lake in central France was to make her own charcoal. At a local grocery store on the mainland, she found trimmed willow branches that she eventually built into a little fire when she was back on the island. While serving as a way to create a medium rooted in this place, it was also a way for the Montreal-based Algonquin artist to “to enter my own ideas and personhood into that space,” as she t
  
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• If Ana Mendieta Were Alive Today, She Would Be 76. These Artists Are Finishing What She Started.

  28-11-2024 12:00 via artnews.com
  
  If Ana Mendieta were alive today, she would be 76. One can’t help but be curious as to the works she might have made—and be making still.A new exhibition at Museo Jumex in Mexico City considers artists who have picked up where she left off and testifies to Mendieta’s enduring impact by arguing, uncontroversially, that she was ahead of her time and then gone too soon. One of the artists in the show, Vivian Suter, was born just a few months after Mendieta, and the contrast—
  
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• American Art Galleries Closing in Mexico City: ‘Nobody Likes a Tourist’

  28-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  Over the course of just three months this year, three mid-sized US galleries have shuttered their outposts in Mexico City: Morán Morán (Los Angeles), Deli (formerly based in New York and now permanently shuttered), and Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles). None of them had been in the country for longer than three years.Seeking to expand their business to one of the buzziest art capitals in the world, the galleries faced rising shipping costs, issues with customs, and difficulty
  
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• To not know if you will ever be safe is torture. Labor’s deportation laws are cruel | Mostafa Azimitabar

  28-11-2024 02:59
  
  Trauma is a friend of mine. I’m healing myself through the connection I have with many amazing Australians A couple of days ago I heard that the Labor government is seeking the power to deport non-citizens under its controversial migration bills. I’m really worried. So many refugees and asylum seekers are also worried about what these new laws will mean for us. Who will be deported and when? We already have no real security and this latest political gamesmanship makes us worry even m
  
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• Forgotten Caravaggio Portrait Goes on Public View for the First Time

  27-11-2024 22:03 via artnews.com
  
  A portrait attributed to Italian painter Caravaggio has gone on view in Rome, marking the first time it can be seen by the painting’s existence was made public 60 years ago.The painting depicts Maffeo Barberini, a Florentine aristocrat who was coronated as Pope Urban VIII in 1623. By papal standards, his reign was illustrious reign. Barberini expanded the church’s territories through armed force and keen politicking, even weathering 21 years of the Thirty Years War. Urban VIII was a
  
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• Ptolemaic Temple Entrance Discovered in Egypt

  27-11-2024 21:11 via artnews.com
  
  An entrance to what may have once been a sanctuary was found by researchers among the cliffs of Athribis in a small Egyptian village near present-day Sohag, roughly 124 miles north of Luxor.Arthribis was once a hub for the worship of the god Min-Re; his wife, lioness goddess Repyt; and their son, the child-god Kolanthes. It spans more than 74 acres and includes a temple complex, a settlement, a necropolis, and ancient quarries.Researchers from Germany’s University of Tübingen, with su
  
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• Fall Marquee Auctions Highlight an Even More Fragmented Post-Election Market

  27-11-2024 20:45 via artnews.com
  
  Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in On Balance, the ARTnews newsletter about the art market and beyond. Sign up here to receive it every Wednesday.With the fall marquee sales in New York complete, let’s take a look at the scoresheet. This time, there were a few big winners and some surprising disappointments, even for blue-chip names. That may come down to what we might call a granular market: one dependent on the quality of the specific work that hits the block.“T
  
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• Hauser & Wirth–Owned Groucho Club Closes Temporarily After ‘Serious Crime’ Committed on Premises

  27-11-2024 19:13 via artnews.com
  
  The Groucho Club, the iconic London members club that was bought by Hauser & Wirth’s founders in 2022, has closed temporarily as police investigate a “serious crime” on the premises.In a statement on Tuesday, Westminster City Council said the club’s licence has been revoked for 28 days following a request from the Metropolitan Police.“This decision follows reports that a serious crime may have taken place at the premises in circumstances linked to a breach in th
  
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• Hauser & Wirth-Owned The Groucho Club Closes Temporarily After ‘Serious Crime’ Committed on Premises

  27-11-2024 19:13 via artnews.com
  
  The Groucho Club, the iconic London members club that was bought by Hauser & Wirth’s founders in 2022, has closed temporarily as police investigate a “serious crime” on the premises.In a statement on Tuesday, Westminster City Council said the club’s licence has been revoked for 28 days following a request from the Metropolitan Police.“This decision follows reports that a serious crime may have taken place at the premises in circumstances linked to a breach in th
  
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• Groucho Club Closes Temporarily After ‘Serious Crime’ Committed on Premises

  27-11-2024 19:13 via artnews.com
  
  The Groucho Club, the iconic London members club that was bought by Artfarm in 2022, has closed temporarily as police investigate a “serious crime” on the premises.Artfarm, a hospitality company set up by Hauser & Wirth dealers Iwan and Manuela Wirth in 2014, has majority owned the club for the last two years. The firm reportedly bought its stake in the institution, which is frequented by A-list celebrities, for $50 million. The Groucho Club is run separately to the other operati
  
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• Diana Cumming obituary

  27-11-2024 18:19
  
  My great-aunt Diana Cumming, who has died aged 94, was a painter whose diverse work across a 70-year career can be found in collections including those of the Contemporary Arts Society, the Arts Council and Britten Pears Arts.As a student at the Slade School of Art in London from 1950 until 1954, she won several scholarships including the prix de Rome in 1954. Her work was admired by the school’s principal William Coldstream and Lucian Freud, a visiting tutor, among others. The Slade&rsquo
  
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• Electric Dreams review – the future ain’t what it used to be

  27-11-2024 17:51
  
  Tate Modern, London
  The singing robots and 8-bit graphics are diverting and sometimes sublime, but there’s a darker story to be told in this show about technologically-assisted art before the internetThere’s a popular meme of two lovers embracing against a digital field of sunflowers. Their pursed lips would be locked were it not for their bumping VR headsets. “What if we kissed at the intersection of art and technology?” the text reads. The meme makes fun of a route heav
  
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• Are New York’s Fall Auctions Proof That the Hype is Real?

  27-11-2024 13:30 via artnews.com
  
  There are only a few prominent collectors who would want to pay for a banana stuck to a wall with anything other than fiat money. So when Sotheby’s announced a week before Wednesday’s evening sale that it would accept cryptocurrency for Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, it was no surprise that crypto-enthusiast collectors Ryan Zurrer, Cozomo de’ Medici (a pseudonym), and Justin Sun were vying for the work. Zurrer and de’ Medici were bidding together; the friends wanted
  
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• The Long Wave: How Brazil is celebrating its Black heritage

  27-11-2024 13:17
  
  Afro-Brazilians marked Black Consciousness Day as a national holiday for the first time, but the celebrations are facing resistance. Plus, a fertility ‘miracle’ rattles Nigeria and Kendrick Lamar’s surprise dropDon’t get The Long Wave? delivered to your inbox? Sign up hereHello and welcome to The Long Wave. It was a big week in Brazil, where Black Consciousness Day on 20 November was a public holiday for the first time. I spoke to Tiago Rogero, our South America correspon
  
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• Dorothea Rockburne – New York great’s first big UK show all comes down to one long, mesmerising line

  27-11-2024 12:12
  
  Bernheim Gallery, London
  Now aged 95, the great polymath had trouble finding the right chipboard in Britain – but this is still a show of disarming simplicity with one stunning standout workSometimes a work gets to you and blows everything else away. It begins with a narrow black line, about the breadth of a pencil, running at waist-height around the walls of the ground floor gallery. The line negotiates the mouldings, runs under a mantelpiece, takes the corners and recesses, makes a turn,
  
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• As the AI Girlfriend Industry Takes Off, These Feminist Artists are Hacking the System

  27-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  WHEN AI BECAME A TOOL WITH publicly accessible interfaces, I got an influx of ads suggesting I try an app, Gencraft, to generate a kind of dream woman. The app can ostensibly generate any image, but ads and algorithms favor pretty girls. A few of the prompts I screenshotted—perhaps encouraging the algorithm to send me more ads—read:“A French girl with brown hair wearing a red leotard.”“A woman with blonde hair dressed in battle armor.”“Back shot of a gir
  
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• Artist-Tinkerer Carl Cheng Teaches a Lesson in Surrendering to Systems

  27-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  Since the 1960s, Carl Cheng has sometimes worked under the alias “John Doe Co.,” a sly response to his accountant’s suggestion that his art practice become a business. This coy refusal is perhaps one of several reasons why his ingenious work has yet to receive the art historical recognition it deserves. Another is the way his kinetic, ecologically minded sculptures play with their own impermanence, from machines designed to erode rocks (“Erosion Machines,” 1969&ndas
  
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• A Groundbreaking Show on the African Diaspora Raises Pressing Questions About Portugal’s Colonialist Past

  27-11-2024 11:00 via artnews.com
  
  In 2008, Danish Trinidadian artist Jeannette Ehlers traveled to Ghana, where she visited Fort Prinzenstein, which was built by Danish traders in 1784 and used in the transatlantic slave trade. Located in Keta, in the West African country’s Volta Region, the fort is classified as a UNESCO World Heritage site because of its historical significance.“That was my first encounter with Danish colonial history, and I was shocked to learn about it,” Ehlers recalled, speaking to ARTnews
  
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• Bronwyn Oliver’s Tide breaks record for Australian sculpture after selling for $1m

  27-11-2024 10:25
  
  Monumental work which adorned upmarket Sydney restaurant Quay for almost 25 years was billed as the most valuable Australian sculpture offered for auction in the countryGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastThe late Sydney artist Bronwyn Oliver has broken the sales record for Australia sculpture, with her monumental 2000 work Tide fetching $1m at auction, or $1.25m with buyer’s premium, in Sydney on Wednesday evening.The sale surpasses the record set by Joel Elenberg&r
  
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