Arts news

Follow @ArtsUK1

• An Unlikely Arts Oasis Arises In LA, Built Partly With LACMA’s Rubble

  06-04-2025 16:30 via artsjournal.com
  Conceptual artist David Horwitz has created the 7th Avenue Garden in an empty lot, turning it into “a small but verdant oasis that hosts exhibitions, poetry readings and performances.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
  
  Read more

• ‘I love humans – it gives me the courage to approach them’: the disarming work of Mao Ishikawa

  24-04-2025 09:00
  
  For five decades the Japanese photographer has captured the internal lives of a host of unlikely subjects, from dockers to Black GIs. Now a new show celebrates an artist dedicated to documenting the underdogIn 1975, when Mao Ishikawa was in her early 20s, she took a job in a bar frequented by Black American GIs stationed at Camp Hansen, in Okinawa. She had grown up hating the Americans who controlled her home island and, to this day, maintain military bases there. Yet she found kindred spir
  
  Read more

• British artist claims he has created paint in ‘new’ colour announced by scientists

  24-04-2025 06:00
  
  Stuart Semple is selling product for £10,000 (or £29.99 to fellow creatives) – but scientists say hue cannot be replicatedA British artist claims to have replicated in paint a colour that scientists say they discovered by having laser pulses fired into their eyes.Stuart Semple created his own version of the blue-green colour based on the US research published in Science Advances, which he is selling on his website for £10,000 per 150ml jar – or £29.99 if you s
  
  Read more

• An irrelevant bourgeois ritual: this year’s Turner prize shortlist is the soppiest ever

  23-04-2025 15:16
  
  Holy balls of wool! From pointless paintings to emotionless snapshots, the once-controversial award tiptoes too earnestly across the minefield of today’s culture warsRemember when controversy was fun? If not, that’s because you’re too young. But back in the 1990s, my child, Britain got itself in hilarious knots about conceptual art, the readymade and whether a pickled shark or elephant dung can be art, with the Turner prize as battleground. It was a culture war but with laughs,
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Spat at, skint and splattered with sludge: the fearless artistic life of Gustaf Broms

  23-04-2025 14:10
  
  In 1993, the Swedish artist had reached a dead end – so he burned all his work. Seeing the ashes inspired him to embark on an epic journey through the Indian wilderness, a Swedish cave – and now BritainDrive north of Stockholm for an hour or so and, buried within woodland near the village of Vendel, you will come across the 200-year-old house where Gustaf Broms lives. There are no shops or even neighbours here – just trees, wild animals and a man making beguiling performance ar
  
  Read more

• Raphael’s School of Athens review – rewarding study of Renaissance fresco

  23-04-2025 14:00
  
  During the latest in Howard Burton’s Masterpiece series, the art historian turns his low-tech but scholarly attention to Raphael’s interior decoration in the Vatican palaceHere is the latest in the series of high-minded, low-tech studies of Renaissance art history from Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist turned art historian, who has launched a series of films called, with admirable Ronseal-ness, Renaissance Masterpieces. Having already looked over Botticelli’s Primavera, Bu
  
  Read more

• ‘I like pushing boundaries’: Yinka Shonibare on his landmark art show in Madagascar

  23-04-2025 13:40
  
  The British-Nigerian artist explores colonialism and connection in his first major solo exhibition in Africa. Plus, a grime MC goes oyster farmingHello and welcome to The Long Wave. Earlier this month I was in Antananarivo, Madagascar, where I checked out the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare’s first major solo exhibition in Africa. For this week’s newsletter I caught up with him about the landmark show, and learned a lot about the growing Malagasy art scene.Madagascar is not a
  
  Read more

• Videotape sculptures and war trauma paintings make Turner prize shortlist

  23-04-2025 12:38
  
  Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, Rene Matić and Zadie Xa nominated for £25,000 contemporary art prizeAn artist who creates swirling sculptures out of fabric and old videocassette tape, and another who installed huge paintings evoking wartime trauma in the genteel rooms of Blenheim Palace, have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner prize.Nnena Kalu, a Scottish-born, London-based artist, and Mohammed Sami, who fled his native Iraq as a refugee, have been chosen alongside Rene Mati
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• ‘Filling in these gaps’: Paul McCartney’s recently rediscovered photographs

  23-04-2025 11:16
  
  A new exhibition at the Los Angeles Gagosian showcases previously unseen pictures taken by the musician during the rise of BeatlemaniaHe is not drowning but waving. John Lennon’s arms stretch at angles like the sails of a windmill. His face wears a toothy, incandescent smile. Beads of water dance around him like an upside-down waterfall as he swims off Miami Beach.“He’s so carefree,” says Joshua Chuang, director of photography at the Gagosian art gallery. “It’
  
  Read more

• ‘It’s almost like Vaseline’: artists including Antony Gormley swap paint for seaweed ink in art challenge

  23-04-2025 06:00
  
  Ocean-inspired artworks created using kelp-based pigment will be sold to raise funds for conservationLast year in early summer, Alex Glasgow could be seen hauling up a long string of orangey-black seaweed on to the barge of his water farm, located off the west coast of Scotland near Skye. Growing on the farm was what Glasgow described as “perhaps the quickest-growing biomass on the planet”: seaweed.The weed from Glasgow’s farm, KelpCrofters, is used in everything from soil fert
  
  Read more

• Netflix’s Big Time Bet On Streaming Live Sports

  21-04-2025 19:44 via bbc.com
  
  The stakes are high. WrestleMania, which began in 1985, is being treated as a litmus test – not just for WWE’s global expansion, but for Netflix’s potential move into live sports. – BBC
  
  Read more

• What Happens To Our Culture When Hobbies Get Too Expensive

  21-04-2025 19:36 via theatlantic.com
  
  Hobby inflation, understood in this light, is about much more than price hikes: It’s about the shrinking and possible disappearance of opportunities for people from different backgrounds to get to know one another. – The Atlantic
  
  Read more

• Coming To Terms With Richard Serra

  21-04-2025 19:15 via nplusonemag.com
  
  Over the past half century the art history industry has produced reams of interpretation, incorporating no shortage of words by Serra himself. The author of work so totally laconic has set the terms of its understanding as if the death of the author bypassed him entirely. – N + One
  
  Read more

• How “Blockbusters” Degraded Hollywood’s Soul

  21-04-2025 19:00 via latimes.com
  
  I think Hollywood used to propose itself as a place where artists and creative people could sustain themselves, perhaps even strike it rich, and that’s gone. The loss of that idea is … incalculable. – Los Angeles Times
  
  Read more

• A Mathematical Model To Better Understand Language?

  21-04-2025 18:49 via quantamagazine.org
  By thinking of language as a mathematical category, Tai-Danae Bradley‘s been able to apply established tools to study it and glean new insights. Linguists hope her model can help them to prove certain theories about how grammar and meaning emerge from strings of words, and to identify how AI-generated text differs from human language. – Quanta
  
  Read more

• Study Literature? What It Means

  21-04-2025 18:30 via 3quarksdaily.com
  
  As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation. – 3 Quarks Daily
  
  Read more

• So What Comes After DEI?

  21-04-2025 17:44 via newyorker.com
  Conservatives have painted D.E.I. as a uniform set of programs, ideas, and ideologies. In reality, the term encompasses a wide-ranging set of practices. Still, D.E.I. spaces often share certain analytic frameworks, usually centering on questions of justice. – The New Yorker
  
  Read more

• Books Have “No Economic Value” Claims Meta

  21-04-2025 17:31 via futurism.com
  Meta cited an expert witness who downplayed the books’ individual importance, averring that a single book adjusted its LLM’s performance “by less than 0.06 percent on industry standard benchmarks, a meaningless change no different from noise.” Thus there’s no market in paying authors to use their copyrighted works, Meta says. – Futurism
  
  Read more

• Will Ryan Coogler’s Movie ‘Sinners’ End The Studio System?

  21-04-2025 17:15 via vulture.com
  “Directors owning their own movies is the opposite of business as usual — and to studios, cause for freaking out. According to senior executives at rival studios, the Sinners deal sets a ‘very dangerous’ precedent.” – Vulture
  
  Read more

• Are Blockbusters A ‘Fascist’ Turn For Hollywood?

  21-04-2025 17:00 via msn.com
  This author thinks so: “When you stop making middle-class movies — movies with a moderate budget, as opposed to ones made on a shoestring or ones that cost $200 million — you’re hollowing out a middle class of people who make them.” – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
  
  Read more

• The Book That Transformed How We See Ballet

  21-04-2025 16:30 via nytimes.com
  Alexey Brodovitch’s Ballet gets an 80th anniversary reprint. He “intended to foreground shape, blur, contrast, gesture and motion — the atmosphere of dance — in the photographs. ‘The photograph is not only a pictorial report,’ Brodovitch said. ‘It is also a psychological report.’” – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• British Authors Protest Zuckerberg’s Taking Of Their Books For Generative AI

  21-04-2025 16:00 via theguardian.com
  “Earlier this month, a group of protesters gathered outside the London headquarters of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. They were demonstrating over the company’s use of millions of pirated books and research papers to feed their family of generative AI models.” – The Guardian (UK)
  
  Read more

• Van Gogh’s Final Painting Is Causing Trouble In This Idyllic French Village

  21-04-2025 15:45 via nytimes.com
  “The continued fight over Van Gogh’s tree roots has cast a pall over what is usually a celebratory season in Auvers, population 7,000, where art tourism is a big business that heats up in the spring.” – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• Why New York’s Parking Lots Are Stuffed To The Brim And Beyond

  21-04-2025 15:30 via english.elpais.com
  It’s the food trucks. Their owners or renters are gone, or in hiding, never opening their doors. In this version of the Big Apple, “the usual recourse to a quick, tasty and cheap snack is now an endangered option.” – El País
  
  Read more

• The Naval Academy Was Supposed To Host A Lecture On Idea Censorship And Reading Fearlessly

  21-04-2025 15:15 via nytimes.com
  Then the Academy, apparently not fearless, censored the lecture. “I did not want to cause them trouble. I did, however, feel it was essential to make the point that the pursuit of wisdom is impossible without engaging with (and challenging) uncomfortable ideas.” – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• The US Knew It Needed Public Housing, But The People Building It Often Didn’t Like It

  21-04-2025 15:00 via msn.com
  Despite the decades of neglect, when a new “Chicago museum’s leadership was pursuing oral histories of public housing, they found other narratives as well — of community, empowerment and self-sufficiency.” – Washington Post (MSN)
  
  Read more

• Buying A Book, Novelist Kiley Reid Says, Isn’t Going To Fix Racism

  21-04-2025 14:45 via theguardian.com
  “Theme always comes last. I never say, I want to write about capitalism or women. What gets me into writing is always this tiny moment of someone saying something that’s stuck with me.” – The Guardian (UK)
  
  Read more

• An Updated Timeline Of The Harvey Weinstein Trials

  21-04-2025 14:30 via npr.org
  As jury selection begins in the newest trial, here’s a timeline of all of the trials and appeals so far. – NPR
  
  Read more

• David Cronenberg Found His Will To Live By Making A Movie About Death

  21-04-2025 14:15 via nytimes.com
  “During the pandemic, when I was watching a lot of old movies, it occurred to me that every person who worked on this movie is dead now. The director, the producers, the actors — they’re all dead, and I’m watching their ghosts.” – The New York Times
  
  Read more

• Turns Out UK Taxpayers Gave Nearly Ninety Million Pounds Toward A Recent Jurassic Park Movie

  21-04-2025 14:00 via theguardian.com
  It’s easier to make a profit when the people of the country where you film underwrite the whole thing, no? At least it’s transparent: “Studios set up separate companies for movies made in the UK to show more than 10% of the total cost was spent here.” – The Guardian (UK)
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUK1 on Twitter!