“False eyelashes are like a piece of fine jewelry for your face,” says M.A.C. Cosmetics senior artist John Stapleton, and what better season to add maximum sparkle than the holidays? With the most packed weeks of parties ahead, now is the perfect time to try a dramatic look...

Webbed in London’s kaleidoscopic fashion grid is a burgeoning biology, a semaphore for the city’s still-forming industry ID: color. Mary Katrantzou exploded onto the circuit a few years back with her fine-tuned prints, bowed and pixilated like so many tiny iPad screens. Christopher Kane sent pulse-waves ’round the world with his acidic-pastel graduate collection in 2006, progressing along the way to a full-spectrum phantasmagoria for Resort 2012. And everyone’s favorite hype-machines, Meadham Kirchhoff, are in no way quiet about their riot – these kids live and breathe the term “eye-candy.” Yet a fresh, glittering swell is about to crash upon the CMYK shores of Britain’s design industry, bringing with it a venerable tide of the new-new, poised for global attention. Sam Leutton and Jenny Postle (of their surname-eponymous line Leutton Postle) could very well be riding its crest.

“We have quite equal skills but we assume different positions, as we don’t really work in the same way,” Postle told ARTINFO in a recent interview. “I have to float around and dip in and out of things to come up with something.” It’s an apt insight, considering the airy contemplativeness of her and Leutton’s fledgling knitwear label. Spindled strands in Pantone-rich dyes are the duo’s jump-off — Postle opened the Central Saint Martins Master’s Fall/Winter 2011 show with a series of tufted, Navajo-tech meets predacious scarecrow looks, from which the brand’s aesthetic was born. 

Shortly after her graduate show Postle paired with Leutton, a fellow Saint Martins undergrad alum who had been cutting her teeth in knitwear innovation in China before moving back to the U.K. It’s been a harmonious partnership ever since, culminating (thus far) in a knockout Spring/Summer 2013 presentation rife with threads, beads, and an only-out-of-London cool factor all but impossible to locate elsewhere.

It formed out of “traditional patch-working techniques, appliqués, collages, and the decorative works of the Ndebele tribe,” said Leutton of the mix-and-matched, sportily bohemian collection. “We were aiming for a kind of ’70s disco-acid and youthful feel.” Combining and harmonizing crochets, quilting, tousled wrap skirts, and slouch, these girls blow granny chic out of the water. 

When asked about her and Leutton’s consistent sources of inspiration, Postle bluntly replied, “Eurovision, friends, and Memphis.” Friendship is a keen talking point here, as amicability takes on its own sort of phenomenon amongst London’s young and talented design set. Most of them know each other, most of them can be found in Dalston or Hackney at any given hour, and most of them attended Central Saint Martins. That such a precocious group could all essentially come from the same place is a testament to the master program’s director, Louise Wilson, who is famous for teaching her students to edit and re-edit and re-re-edit until the faintest skeletons of their original ideas are left. “We think about her quite a lot," said Postle. “She is the wisest person I have ever met so it would be impossible not to.” The educational bloodline shows through in Leutton Postle’s output: it vetoes and tames what could easily veer into arts-and-crafts territory — it makes the zany look considered. 

At this point, what remains to be seen is the brand’s flight path. They’ve been buoyed by the London-based sponsorship platform Vauxhall Fashion Scout over the past two seasons, yet they remain relatively tiny on the larger scale of things (they’ve only got a handful of stockists, namely Brown’s and Avenue 32, plus three new stores in Asia for Spring/Summer 2013). They’ve hinted at menswear and they’ve considered expansion, yet as Postle said, “We wouldn’t do anything unless we knew we could do it amazingly.”

For now it would appear that they are likely to keep things small and neat — happy to groove out their colorful little niche in the rising tide. And as for finding riches at the end of their rainbow, these girls needn’t worry. They’re striking gold along the way. 

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AGE: 46

HAILS FROM: Turin, Italy

PRESIDES OVER: Bortolami Gallery, 520 West 20th street, New York

GALLERY’S SPECIALTY: Contemporary Art

ARTISTS SHOWN: Richard Aldrich, Daniel Buren, Tom Burr, Morgan Fisher, Michel François, Piero Golia, Thilo Heinzmann, Patrick Hill, Scott King, Jutta Koether, Jonathan Meese, Anna Ostoya, Peter Peri, Ben Schumacher, Gary Webb, Eric Wesley, Aaron Young

GALLERY’S FIRST SHOW: “Closing Down,” September 2005, Bortolami + Dayan (during 2005–07 partnership with Amalia Dayan)

What is your background? Was there art on the walls when you were growing up?

My father is Italian and my mother is Dutch. I grew up with my father and stepmother — who is from the former Yugoslavia — and started visiting my mother in Geneva as a young child. I learned a great many languages and did a lot of traveling, but did not grow up with art. Art is something I discovered on my own in my late teens.

Do you recall the first work of art that impressed you?

I was visiting my mother in Geneva and out of boredom one afternoon I went to the Musée des Beaux Arts by myself. I saw a painting by Arnold Böcklin, Isle of the Dead, and it suddenly felt like a visual representation of the way I was feeling, the way I thought every angst filled teenager must feel. This painting just struck a chord. It wouldn’t be my favorite painting now, but the feeling was undeniable. From that moment art became my obsession. I changed my major from political science to art history and never looked back (or learned anything else aside from art)!

When did you first open your gallery, and what drew you to the business?

I first opened a little gallery in Barcelona in 1993. There was an existing gallery owned by a friend of a friend, and he gave me a little cleared-out storage area in the back. I called it Backspace. I realized that if you are not an artist, your options in the art world are to be a critic, a curator, or a merchant of some sort. I was interested in being a catalyst for making and showing new work rather than being devoted to the purely commercial part of the business.

What is most challenging about running an art gallery? Most rewarding?

By far the thing I dislike the most is looking at the bottom line. Sometimes I must be cautious with what I can produce or how extensively we can experiment. The gallery is entirely independent with no investors or silent partners or wealthy spouses. This is an enormous challenge but also spectacularly rewarding — I am beholden to no one but my artists and myself.

What has been your strangest experience in the art trade?

I was on holiday in Siwa, a remote Egyptian oasis in the Libyan desert. I struck up a conversation with a Swiss man who lives in Madrid. The subject of collecting came up, and I asked what was the last piece he’d bought. He pulled out his phone: A Richard Aldrich work from my gallery was his screen saver! The painting had been consigned to a group show, and he had purchased it the week before. He became a client.

What sets your gallery apart?

I like the fact that my roster of artists is multigenerational. It runs the gamut from Ben Schumacher, who is 27 years old, to Barbara Kasten, Morgan Fisher, and Daniel Buren, all in their 70s. I also like the diversity of my program, from the rigor of Buren to the expressionism of Jonathan Meese. I don’t think anything about my gallery could be described as “one note.”

Is there somebody who early on gave you good advice?

Anthony d’Offay. It was less about any one piece of advice and more about the way he ran his gallery. I worked there for almost three years, and Anthony held a staff meeting every day at 9 a.m. We discussed everything in these meetings, and they became a daily hour full of advice. It made me realize that every single detail of having a gallery and mounting exhibitions requires thought and care.

If you could own any artwork in the world, with price being no object, what would it be?

I think I would be very happy owning the Baptism of Christ by Piero della Francesca that is hanging in the National Gallery in London. Despite being a very important Old Master painting, its formal solutions and conceptual strategy are still avant-garde today.

Beyond the art world, what are you passionate about? If you were not an art dealer what would you be doing?

If not an art dealer, I don’t know what I would be! It really does define me in many ways. I swam for the Italian national team as a teenager, so perhaps I could have been an athlete, but only for a minute. The art world is the only environment I have found that is constantly changing and always stimulating.

This story was published in the December 2012 issue of Art+Auction. 

HBO shows are getting plenty of product promotions for next season. “Girls” inspired a Deborah Lippmann nail polish set, and “Game of Thrones,” the show adapted from the books by George R. R. Martin, will get its own line of beers, reports the New York Times. Cooperstown, New York-based Brewery Ommegang will be working with HBO to develop microbrews inspired by the themes and characters of the fantasy series.

The first, Iron Throne Blonde Ale, will be released in late March to coincide with the show’s third season premiere on March 31. Three more beers from the Belgian-style brewery are in the works for the future. We wonder what other brews are in store… Westeros White Ale? Stark Family Stout? We’re sure the drinking games will be popular next season with “Thrones” fans.

Name: Carroll Dunham

Age: 63

Occupation: Artist

City: New York and Connecticut

Current Exhibition: Carroll Dunham at Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, Chelsea, through January 19, 2013

This exhibition at Gladstone Gallery centers on your new paintings, predominantly female nudes and landscapes. In a recent interview in Gotham Magazine, you said, “My recent paintings of women are not really paintings of women. And my trees don’t resemble any trees in our universe.” Why are you drawn to these particular representational subjects?

They emerged from other things in my work and then evolved into their present form. 

If you aren’t interested in representing the real world in your art, what are you interested in representing?

I’m not interested in representing anything per se. I try to follow where my work goes and to pay attention to what it wants. 

It’s been 10 years since your major mid-career survey at the New Museum in 2002. How has your art — and your life — changed since then?

My children have more or less grown up and I split my time between the city and the country. I couldn’t say how my work has changed; it always feels the same from the inside.

The popular stereotype is that people get more conservative as they grow older, but in your art you seem to have done the opposite, moving from abstraction to figurative eroticism that can seem almost brutal in its vulgarity. Do you feel freer to experiment now than earlier in your career?

I am arguably more conservative in the sense that I have “doubled down” on my enthusiasm for painting, and its connection to a tradition. As far as subject matter goes, I don’t think you can map left/right tendencies onto the spectrum that connects “abstraction” and “representation,” there are too many moving parts and the definitions are all too squishy.

The art press loves to pronounce the death of painting and then, a few years later, trumpet its return. You’ve been loyal to the medium your whole life. Why do you paint, and why do you think the medium won’t go away anytime soon?

The “death” thing is fake.

 I have no idea what the future holds, but people do seem to need pictures.

You have a very talented and artistically inclined family, but with different approaches and perspectives. Do you see any influence on each other’s work?

Impossible to say.

What’s the last show that you saw?

The Carroll Dunham exhibition at Gladstone Gallery, sadly.

What’s the last show that surprised you? Why?

Mark Grotjahn sculptures at Gagosian gallery in New York, because it was surprising.

Where is your favorite place to see art?

Italy.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

A level.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

Around…

Do you collect anything?

Drawings when I can.

What’s the last great book you read?

“Why Does the World Exist?” by Jim Holt.

To see images of Carroll Dunham's work, click on the slideshow.

Fashion and art converge in the world of couture, where the finest fabrics are embellished with techniques like hand beading and embroidery. It’s a luxury that’s been reserved mostly for women, and one that designer Jonathan Meizler is determined to bring into menswear, one tie at a time.

The pieces he creates under the label Title of Work are equal parts fashion statement and art object — thin strips of fabric adorned with materials such as cock feathers, sprayed rubber, body jewelry, black diamonds, and impossibly delicate snake bones topped off with onyx and sewn on like oversized beads. It’s an approach that came from his desire to combine his experience designing custom women’s eveningwear and his artistic vision.

“I figured that the tie was the perfect canvas to do that, where I could create these little organisms, and I could use my background with the beading and couture and blend that with the world of men’s clothes,” Meizler told ARTINFO at the opening of “Anatomy of a Tie,” an exhibition of his work at New York’s HPGRP Gallery. The designer was wearing one of his simpler designs, a tie clip in the shape of a human heart – a personal reminder of an illness he overcame.

Around him were samples from past collections from his line, which he launched in 2011 with a collection inspired by couture techniques. Since then, he has experimented with darker themes, such as “Gentleman Meets Fetishist,” “Taxidermy,” and “Inked” (his most recent), which reference more taboo topics like piercing, decomposition, and tattoo culture. The creations are sold at high-end retailers, including Barneys New York and Isetan in Japan, and have decorated the necks of natty dressers from Elton John to Wiz Khalifa.

The exhibition, which runs through December 28, combines the label’s past four collections with Meizler’s own artwork – installation pieces that deconstruct and dissect the tie. In one, the tie’s components are shown like an anatomical model, each layer separated by a pane of glass. Across the room, a tie embroidered with 43.5 carats of black diamonds is suspended in space by a series of threads. Nearby, a beader sits silently, painstakingly adding miniscule Japanese Miyuki beads to a work in progress.

Meizler’s interest in art is evident even in the brand’s smallest details. The ties are packaged in round tins and labeled with their medium and dimensions. Next to the label’s name, Title of Work, is a little red dot — a symbol that a work has sold in galleries around the world. 

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news. 

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As part of our look back at the year that was on ARTINFO, we have plowed through the literally thousands of items we published in 2012, culling what we consider to be the top 20 quotes we published from interviews and questionnaires with artists, dealers, and television stars-turned-artists. They shared many things: the strangest things they’ve ever seen in galleries, how they really felt about “fairtigue” (thats art fair fatigue, for civilians), life-long regrets, and other things that range from the silly to the surprisingly profound. Also included — just so you're ready — is ARTINFO’s most expletive-ridden shout-out ever, courtesy of one blogging, blue-chip artist who has been very naughty this year.

To see ARTINFO’s best quotes of the year click the slide show here. 

As the preferred luxury car of accountants across the globe, BMW naturally has a thing for numbers.

The German automaker recently unveiled the latest generation of its 3 Series Coupe, a concept so stylish and so sporty, according to the company, that it transcended its own numeric identity.

Meet the newly titled 4 Series Coupe.

A slightly stretched version of its two-door predecessor, with aesthetic upgrades including hand-braided leather seats and satin-finish aluminum accents, the au courant concept is the first BMW model to carry the 4 Series designation.

According to the company’s official announcement, the all-new classification “doesn’t just mark the start of a new cycle, it represents the zenith of a development curve.” Hence, the numeral upgrade. “[T]he ‘4’ stands for greater sportiness, greater exclusivity, and even clearer differentiation from the BMW 3 Series range,” the company said.

To the marketing staff in Hamburg, the series shakeup probably served its purpose, generating new hype for an old, if updated, type of automobile.

To numerologist Tammi Rager, though, the choice of the number 4, in particular, sends the wrong message.

“From a numerology standpoint, it’s not a smart move,” said Rager, a frequent mystic interpreter for the press who has decoded the esoteric meanings of everything from lottery numbers to hip-hop mogul Sean Combs’s repeated name changes. (This is her first time commenting on the nomenclature of a car company.)

A little background for those who are unfamiliar with BMW’s numeric hierarchy: The brand is perhaps best known for its fleet of odd-numbered vehicles – 3, 5, and 7 Series, especially — which represents the largest segment of its lineup.

According to Rager, the emphasis on odd digits fits in nicely with the company’s overall branding. “Odd numbers are introverted,” she explained. “The energy of those tends to be a little more detached, aloof, a little more mysterious, if you will, which, I think, would be great for BMW. To me, they would kind of want to separate themselves with that air of aloofness.”

Even numbers, which Rager described as more practical and crowd-pleasing, do exist within the BMW universe, just on a much smaller scale. The company reports rising demand for its existing 6 Series, for instance, though actual sales of the Sixers (2,166 delivered worldwide this past November) don’t come close to matching the 3 Series (40,700) or 5 Series (30,232).

Each series number says something about the car and also something about the owner — or, more precisely, the size of the owner’s wallet. Generally, smaller numbers are more compact and more affordable, while the bigger numbers are bigger cars with bigger bells and whistles and even bigger price tags.

On this rising scale of 1 (compact hatchback) to 7 (roomy executive saloon-cum-limousine), the existing 3 Series occupies the populist middle. It remains the company’s best seller, which also makes it the most common BMW on the road — a somewhat dubious distinction for a brand that prides itself on prestige and exclusivity.

So it makes sense that BMW would look to inject some new energy into its bread-and-butter model.

In the socio-economic language of Beamerspeak, the switch from three to four suggests a whole new level of affordable luxury, something slightly more refined than your stepfather-in-law’s post-mid-life crisis mobile – but, by no means a 5 Series!

In the mystical language of numeric meanings, however, four conveys a whole different message, and “greater sportiness” is not it.

“The actual meaning of the number four is dependability, reliability,” Rager said. “Think of a four-square foundation. These are things you can bank your money on. As for sporty or fun, I mean, the four is an accountant number. It’s dry. It’s military. It’s organized.”

That should resonate well with the stereotypical Beamer-driving bean-counter. But, it’s the exact opposite of the sexy, sporty vibe that BMW seems to be going for.

It would make a far better identifier for a line of gas-efficient, low-maintenance vehicles, Rager said.

“If they really want to make an impact with it, I would say two would be a better number,” she said. “With two, you think partnerships, you think romance, you think fun, you think communication, give and take. If I were to splurge on a sports car, two would be a good vibration there.”

Rager prefaced her comments by noting that she knows very little about BMWs from a technical standpoint. “Only that I can’t afford one,” she said.

Internationally he is known for his colorful, heavily textured and layered abstract oil paintings of landscapes, large-scale works that earned him his breakthrough in the 1990s — and a belated recognition that Siegfried Gohr, the curator of Kirkeby’s 2012 retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, has termed a späternte, or “late harvest.”

Throughout his expectation-defying career, Kirkeby has also been a geologist, poet, sculptor, and filmmaker. He has always been allergic to routine and convention. But with his recent painterly interventions on Masonite board, which echo pieces made but little noticed in the 1960s, the artist is pondering whether he’s finally found his groove — and whether that is a good thing. A cross-section of Kirkeby’s paintings and sculptures are currently on view at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., through January 6, 2013, the most extensive U.S. survey of his work to date. Nicolai Hartvig visited Kirkeby’s home studio in the leafy Copenhagen neighborhood of Hellerup, where the artist discussed going color-blind and the intangibility of Fluxus, among other things.

To see images of Kirkeby's work, click on the slideshow. 

Tell me what you’ve been working on recently.

Not too long ago, I decided to no longer paint my boards black. They have a beautiful golden tone and I wanted to paint directly on that, as if it were paper. It was great. I discovered that I could draw figures and landscapes, distribute the colors in different ways, and use a varnish that I just dripped on there. And I noticed that they resembled my works from the 1960s, which some have been surprised to see in my recent large exhibitions at Tate Modern and the Palais des Beaux-Arts. Suddenly I was no longer bound to do a solid painting, I could put anything in it and tell stories like I did in the old days. It was a terrific freedom. The works were really good. They sold well. And then came the problem.

There has always been a yearning in my work to not be pigeonholed, to do something a bit unexpected. And I realized that perhaps I was returning to an old pattern. I had a model, a grip. This frightened me, filled me with panic and a certain despair.

Because you don’t want to settle?

At my age, you realize that some things have caught you. You can see that as a positive or a negative. On the negative side: Are you in a routine, unconsciously adapting to things that work well? Or on the positive side: Is this merely you, what you have in your kit, the structures that constitute you? If so, then that would be all right. When I worry about following up work that has been successful, as with these latest paintings, I have sculpture. I’ve made a couple in the past two years — they’re pretty far out, and I don’t know how they came to be. Right now, sculpture is the place where I cannot be caught. It has become my free space, which I keep for myself. The black Masonite filled that role for many years. But recently, by not painting them black and instead making them beautiful, I’ve wondered if I have sold that particular idea. Edvard Munch, as he got older, sat at his home and painted like a wild man. Those works were not very popular and have come to be considered the “wrong” Munch. But that’s how you need to be when you get old. I call it the arrogance of age: You don’t need recognition. You just don’t care.

You have also returned to some of the signature elements of your older paintings, like the outline of a cave.

I’ve done that for many years. Georg Baselitz goes back to his serious works and liberally mistreats them. For me it is a rückbild, or a look back, where I would create paintings without lightening them, using components from my earlier works. Like the hut, for example. In the 1980s, when I decided to begin to paint in oil on canvas in the great European tradition — a decisive turning point for me — there was an openness and an incertitude to the work. Each painting was different, and that is what I wanted. But through the 1990s I developed signatures, somewhat radical and unmistakably mine. Francis Picabia remains my hero. The more you dive into his work, the wilder it becomes. He painted the skewed Cubist paintings that we all know. Then came the kitsch works. And he ended up doing these strange, abstract works that are impossible to grasp. Whenever you think you’ve got him, he’s always moved along. That’s what I aspire to do.

Picabia was also a link between you and your gallerist, Michael Werner.

Yes. Michael found me, God knows how. He had indeed started collecting Picabia. At the time, it cost him a yearly lunch with the artist’s widow. Michael has played a colossal role for me, most of all through his incomprehensible brutality. He has the ability to point out the weakest spots. He kept me low in the gallery hierarchy for many years, which I was happy about.

Michael often came to see my work. He walks like a cowboy. He would look, grunt, and say that it was a complete miss, that he couldn’t use it. Which was actually good, since it forced me to think whether the work truly was a miss — and if so, whether it was something that I still wanted to hold on to. With an outside gaze, I also begin to see the weak points, the places where I’ve skipped ahead and things have gotten too easy. So I begin again.

Your paintings are labor-intensive.

I keep working on them. I would love to paint a picture in one session, but I’ve never succeeded. I’ve worked on a painting, on and off, for a year. It’s layer upon layer — but then again, isn’t all painting? I’m quite jealous of artists who can paint in one go and do it really well. Peter Doig is a good example. But perhaps his work process is just structured differently. Maybe he paints layer upon layer before he begins the real painting. He may paint 10 pictures to reach the final one, which I also do; it’s just all on the same canvas. In the end, you reach a certain audacity on the surface. You can liken that to my entire career. I’ve been painting all my life to be able to do what I do now. And it’s high time!

Your experiences have had a large influence on your art.

Around the year 2000, I suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. Recovering was a slow, upward struggle that added a greater radicalism to my paintings. Then, two years ago, I suffered a stroke, right in my field of vision where color appears. For an entire year, I couldn’t really see colors. I was like Monet, who had to have his daughter read the labels on the paint tins to see what he was using. When she was mad at him, she would give him red when he asked for green.

When I emerged from this black-and-white world, the first color to return was red. Something powerful happened, giving me a free abstraction. Abstraction doesn’t quite exist for me; there is always a backstory in my work that the world may not need to know, but which is necessary for me. I can’t paint entirely abstract pictures.

Still, your best-known paintings appear as quasi-abstract landscapes.

I have a garden and across the road, a park. I never go for walks, but I look out the window and “ask for permission,” as I call it. If I need some green, I find it there. In that sense, I’m a very old-fashioned painter, tied to nature. But I remain modern in that I execute some rather impious structures. I will react if I feel that my paintings, though abstract, become too naturalistic. I have another studio in Italy and I worked a lot there this summer. I still depend on my surroundings, so some of my work was very influenced by the Italian landscape, its olive trees and the very cold green color of the leaves. You could identify the specific landscape in those paintings and it drove me crazy. So I had to destroy them. But even destruction can still help underline what is good about a picture.

I imagine that your interest in the intricacies of landscapes and the idea of structure comes from your training as a geologist.

A structureless painting is, to me, a painting that does not matter. Structure mirrors your degree of responsibility toward the work. You can’t just let it float around in pretty colors. It needs a kind of core. But this is an inner structure. It does correspond to being a geologist — the metaphor may be trite, but it works. Like when you see these breathtaking mountains in strange colors in eastern Greenland. As a geologist, you want to know what exactly they’re doing.

You’ve avoided being part of most major art movements.

Even when I left Denmark for Germany, where I was a professor for two decades, my background remained Danish and it was always Denmark to which I’d return. Baselitz told me he had always been envious of me because I had Denmark: I could travel out into a larger world where I could follow my ambitions, and at the same time keep a refuge from this enormous space that could swallow you. I became part of this German wave of new painting and sculpture, even though I didn’t fit in. Baselitz and the other young German artists, their paintings were demonstrative figuration, while my work was more lyrical and Cubist, based on still life. None of the curators of the exhibitions at the time knew what to do with it. I could see that they almost wished I’d just withdraw.

But it’s an outsider position with which I’ve been really comfortable. I was able to extend myself within my own thing, which wasn’t very successful internationally. My work was not punchy enough. I succeeded in constantly evading branding.

Were you still inspired by different artists and art movements?

Definitely. I’ve surveyed it all, often in the sense of saying, “Well, now he has done that, so I don’t have to. I’m exempt from going into this particular cul-de-sac.” I’ve always seen other artists and movements as a positive opportunity for me; I’ve never felt them to be a threat. Then again, I’ve also wandered, in many respects. I spent some years with Fluxus, for instance.

That’s surprising.

In France, where they are very Fluxus fixated, I’ve had to cut short interviews because the journalists took me to be a traitor to Fluxus, to its ideals. But early in my youth, I did share these: that art should not be commercial, should not even come close to being salable. That everything should be pared down.

My history with Fluxus is actually quite funny. I went to New York in 1966 as a relatively young man, wanting to meet all these artists. Denmark was extremely small and stuffy. In high school I had discovered something called Jackson Pollock, and I was furious that no one had told me about this before.

How was New York?

It went pretty well. It was winter and very cold. I had no money. I lived somewhere pretty squalid and didn’t speak English — I tried to learn by watching television. I was calling around, saying, “Hello, I’m a Danish artist. I would like to meet you.” It was embarrassing. I called Bob Morris. But I also got to meet George Maciunas, the father of Fluxus. I wanted to know what this Fluxus was, so I asked him, “If I put salt in a tea bag and then into hot water, then the salt will dissolve, and when you pull the bag up, there is nothing in it. Is that Fluxus?” “Let’s make that one right away,” Maciunas replied. And it became a Fluxus object. I told him that I was a painter and that I would keep painting. “Well,”  he said, “that doesn’t matter, as long as you do it the right way.” Getting to know him, I understood that the right way was with a certain sense of justice.

For two decades you taught at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and the art academy in Karlsruhe.

It’s difficult when you’re teaching. I always painted while at the academies, practiced what I preached. You have your own studio and the door was open so the students could see what they wanted to. Aside from the abstract, I’ve always tried to have the students learn something real. I tried to push the students slowly toward the edge, questioning their work with little remarks to make them uncertain, only to then give them the final push and, while they hurtled downward, yell, “Are you sure this is what you want to do?” There is nothing more terrible than to become an artist, with all the pretensions, and then to not function. You have to be ready to do it, even if you don’t succeed in catching some artistic wave.

At the Städelschule we also had a professional kitchen, where each student would learn to cook. Once a year we would hold a wirtshaus where they would serve their dishes before an audience. The idea was that you could not cheat. You can approach an artist and say that his work looks crazy. And the artist could easily say that it’s supposed to look like that. Anything can be fixed this way. But if you burn food, there’s no way around that. It was a kind of morality.

Literature seems to be an important inspiration for you. The room we’re sitting in is filled with books.

It’s a collection in constant flux. Somewhere up top, I keep all the books from my student years. It’s been a great boon because I often peruse the books and borrow elements. Whenever I stall, I leaf through books, among them some fantastic ones with Renaissance paintings. The last many years, Byzantine art has been a major source of inspiration. Its structures are really carved up, with wild colors, but still strict. I was always fascinated by how dangerous it was to be a painter in iconoclastic Byzantium and the ensuing exodus of artists into Western Europe.

You’ve been a prolific writer as well.

I’m a painter, writing — but the writings need to be taken seriously. There are some lyrical texts and some essays but decidedly no poems. It’s poetic argumentation, which some may see as less serious, but it is close to my method. It shows a different aspect of me, that of a painter who thinks about things.

This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters. 

As museums, galleries, and artists increasingly incorporate social media into everything they do, encouraging active participation with an exponentially accelerating online cultural cycle, the rate of cross-fertilization between the art world and the Internet ephemera known as memes will only increase. This year saw unparalleled development on this front, from hugely popular artworks that spawned memes of their own — including, we'd argue, the meme of the year, not just in the art world but in the world in general — to memes from the work of politics whose rapid propagation spilled over into the realm of visual art. Here, then, are ARTINFO's top 10 art memes of 2012. (To see our gallery of the memes, click on the slideshow.)

* Beast Jesus

By far the biggest art meme of the year, and quite possibly the greatest meme of all 2012, was triggered by an admittedly very unfortunate accident: Amateur Spanish art restorer Cecilia Gímenez's attempt to fix a damaged 19th-century “Ecce Homo” fresco at her local church in Boria spawned “Beast Jesus,” an incomprehensibly cartoonish, childlike, monkey-ish, terrifying, and vaguely vegetable-shaped likeness of the Christian savior. The ensuing propagation of “Beast Jesus” images, videos, merchandise, and pop cultural crossovers quickly made Gímenez's accidental masterpiece one of the single most iconic artworks of the recent past.

Favorite instance: “Beast Jesus” in Caravaggio's “Ecce Homo”

* #2Deep4U

This hashtag meme, a text message abbreviation of the sentence “too deep for you,” has a two-fold purpose: Either to ridicule self-important and high-minded cultural artifacts that seem too complex for the common consumer or, conversely, to sarcastically mock those who aren't in on a particularly obscure or difficult-to-grasp concept, artwork, or subculture. Not surprisingly, many participants have deemed contemporary art #2Deep4U, either as a way of mocking its obtuseness, or of making fun of those who don't get it.

Favorite instance: Abstract minimalist is #2Deep4U

* The LACMA Rock

The fanfare surrounding the extraction, transportation, and installation of Michael Heizer's massive Land Art work “Levitated Mass” reached such a level during its 11-day journey through Los Angeles that it had achieved meme status long before its very own dedicated Twitter account @LACMARock began tweeting. After opening, it continued its life as a meme, with visitors to the suspended boulder coming up with increasingly elaborate poses to suggest they were holding it — like an earthworks version of the Pisa's leaning tower.

Favorite instance: Jesus lifting “Levitated Mass”

* Novelty Art Fair Twitters

With the ever-increasing number of art fairs, the need for each to distinguish itself has become ever more important, while art world citizens' exhaustion at pacing through aisle after aisle has only become more acute. In May, the Twitter account @FriezeTent satirized the former trend, making a very, very big deal of incoming British fair Frieze's giant tent, one of the star attractions of its States-side debut. In December, the Twitter handle @ArtBaselProblem not only lodged its own complaints about the overfull Art Basel Miami Beach events calendar, but collected other attendees' beefs using the hashtag #ArtBaselProblems.

Favorite instance: #ArtBaselProblems

* Iconic Artwork Poses

This year two viral marketing campaigns — one for the art documentary “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” the other for MoMA's exhibition of the auction record-setting copy of Edvard Munch's “The Scream” — involved participants striking posts from famous artworks in a kind of art historical version of the popular “planking” meme. In the former case, participants gave the camera their middle finger, in an inverse homage to Ai's “Study in Perspective” series, or followed Ai in flipping off their own chosen symbol of oppressive power. In the latter, visitors to MoMA posted pictures of themselves making the same “Scream” face popularized decades ago by Macaulay Culkin in a famous scene from “Home Alone.”

Favorite instance: These guys

* Angelina Jolie’s Wayward Leg

When actress Angelina Jolie stepped out at the 84th Annual Academy Awards in her black Versace dress, the real star became her right leg, prominently flaunted through the dress’s scandalously high slit. “Leg-bombing” became a sensation on Twitter and Tumblr, and was Photoshopped just about everywhere, including onto some very famous paintings. 

Favorite Instance: Angie’s Leg on da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man

* Gangnam Style, Art Style  

You may not think of anything created by Korean pop star Psy as a work of art. However, artists Ai Weiwei and Anish Kapoor eventually joined the trend and made their own videos for the song, though more to make a statement than to make an ass of themselves with that stupid horse dance. Although, there was a little of that too. (And let’s not forget the gang at the Brooklyn Museum also going Gangnam Style!)

Favorite Instance: Anish Kapoor’s politically charged Gangnam style video, made with Amnesty International 

* McKayla is Not Impressed 

She wasn’t impressed with winning a silver medal in the 2012 Olympics, she’s not impressed with the “Mona Lisa,” the “Creation of Adam,” or even pointillism! 

Favorite Instance: McKayla’s Not Impressed expression on the Mona Lisa 

* Hennessy Youngman’s Thoughtz

Hennessy Youngman, in case you didn't know, a character created by Brooklyn-based artist Jayson Musson, who takes to YouTube to dispense his one-of-a-kind art critique in a series called “Art Thoughtz.” Among other things, Musson has provided the priceless definition of Performance Art as “a pre-Internet method of annoying groups of people using your body and voice working in conjunction in order to create a compelling spectacle that heightens said annoyance.” If you haven’t already, you must check it out — Youngman's viral fame was substantial enough to score Musson a show at Salon 94.

Favorite Instance: Art Thoughtz’s takedown of Damien Hirst, by far one of the most savage reviews of that show.

* Binders Full of Women

Erstwhile Republican candidate for president Mitt Romney’s poor choice of words during the second U.S. presidential debate sparked one of the quickest full-blown Internet meme reactions we have ever seen, with thousands chiming in to riff on the phrase. The Binders Full of Women meme showed the world just how quickly Internet art can be created and shared— we can now, in effect, expect real-time art commentary on current events.  

Favorite Instance: Dan “The Painter of Pancakes” Lacey’s painting “Mitt Romney With Binders Full Of Women” (2012)

LOS ANGELES — Allison Agsten, the dynamic and intrepid curator of Public Engagement at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has built her department from scratch. After three years spent designing and refining the Public Engagement department’s infrastructure and mission, she is now poised to make a real impact in a field that is still new and innovative in the museum world. Agsten talks with ARTINFO’s Yasmine Mohseni about her unorthodox career path, her passion for gaming, and which L.A. artist she’s dying to work with.

You have had an atypical and non-traditional career trajectory for someone in the curatorial field. Tell me a bit about your background.

I interned at CNN during college and they offered me a job – it was a different time when you could actually have a job lined up after college – and I worked my way to being a producer. Most people [in Los Angeles] were covering movies and television, but I was especially interested in the arts, so I was able to carve out a little niche for myself. I got to do some really great stories on museums, the symphony and the theatre, and I spent a week doing a big production at LACMA in 2005 when their King Tut show was on [“Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs”]. Then LACMA had a job opening as Communications Manager, and they knew me, they knew my work ethic, and it’s not terribly uncommon for journalists to make the switch from journalism to PR. I’d always longed to be even more immersed in the arts than I already was. Michael Govan came on board shortly after I was hired — he’s such an incredible visionary and force, and under his leadership, I was able to explore and to do some things museums weren’t really doing yet, especially digitally. Things that, five years ago, felt very provocative. I initiated Twitter at the museum and the first Spanish language Twitter account for a museum. So we had the first bilingual Twitter account, in English and Spanish. 

How did the Hammer position come about?

When the position [of curator of Public Engagement] became open, I think that the Hammer was probably looking for someone with a traditional curatorial background. But somebody with that background maybe didn’t have some of the administrative experience or production background that I had. All of these things coalesced to make me a candidate that fit. It seems atypical or unusual on paper, but I know how to work within a museum and I understand that structure pretty well. I actually think that [my production background] is the most helpful for making things happen.

 Your mandate is public engagement — what does that mean?

In 2009, when we got the Irvine Foundation Grant [which led to the founding of the Public Engagement department], it was to create a new kind of visitor experience that included not just artists’ projects, but starting a visitor’s services department. I think this is another reason why I probably ultimately got the job — the person needed to not just have curatorial skills but to have a level of administrative savvy and understanding to create this department from scratch. [At the beginning, my job] was hiring a staff, creating a manual, figuring out what credit card machines would synch with our bank, money handling procedure — I mean, everything! So, when we originally were thinking about working with artists, the idea was to bring artists in to help us think through important decisions. We found with our first artist residency, “Machine Project,” that as much as we thought artists wanted to help us solve our problems, they actually wanted to complicate the problems or examine other problems entirely. I think that we had maybe overprescribed what we thought the boundaries of their work would be. Over time, it has evolved. I would say that now all of the public engagement we present values exchange between the visitor and the museum and the visitor and the artist.

What is striking is the massive learning curve you had – not only did you start a new job, but also a new department and a new iteration of the artist-museum-visitor exchange.

And for so much of the work there is no precedent. There’s nobody I can call to say, “I’m working with this artist [Lisa Anne Auerbach, “United We Stand,” 2012], who wants to put sequins on the backs of the blazers of our security guards. Do you have any idea who can do the sequins? What do your guards think when you want to sequin their blazers?” There’s not a lot of reference for this exact kind of work within museums. There are artists who have been doing incredible work in the realm of social practice for a long time, but many museums haven’t exercised this muscle a lot, including ours.

The 2010 collaboration with “Machine Project”was your department’s first major project. What was that like?

It’s the most intensive residency that we’ve had in Public Engagement so far. We did 80 programs or so in a year. Things like micro concerts, five-minute live concerts held in the coatroom, were totally easy and ran themselves because we did them so extensively. With many of them, though, it feels like you’re reinventing the wheel. It ranged from music – like a live personal soundtrack where you could check out a guitarist who would walk you through the galleries – to a sleepover at the museum. We had a “Microscope Day” where we got access to the newest model of microscopes not released to the market yet.

Do your programs relate to the museum’s exhibitions or are they free-standing?

Most are free-standing and not in the galleries. Once you enter the galleries, there’s a whole separate set of considerations. But we did a piece with Charles Long for “All of This And Nothing” [2011, the sixth Hammer Museum’s biennial invitational exhibition series]. Charles was familiar with all the artists in the show, so we approached him to see if he wanted to do anything. He set up a vitrine outside of the gallery [filled with leaves stamped with thought-provoking phrases]. Before you came in, you could scoop up a few leaves and walk through the galleries, reading the prompts stamped on them. One of my favorites is “Spend some time experiencing the qualities of this artwork that cannot be photographed or described.” 

What have you found people react to and what engages them the most?

Music, for sure. Music is across the board something our visitors really appreciate. We find that even if we don’t give them much context, they love it. Even when we’re experimenting with music, it somehow doesn’t alienate people, whereas I think when you see work that feels very experimental in the visual arts, it can feel very alienating.

How do you engage the general audience without dumbing down the content?

I think it’s carefully selecting the projects; it’s a fine line. Some of them exceed our expectations, and other times it doesn’t work as well. There are a couple of things that I’ve been sure would be hits and they were, but a lot of the time, I just don’t know.

Can you give me an example of one you knew would be a hit?

“Libros Schmibros” [a nonprofit lending library and used-book shop in L.A.’s Boyle Heights, which was set up in the Hammer Museum’s lobby gallery in 2011]. That one really challenged what we as a museum put in a gallery. It took a lot of internal discussion. But the great thing about Libros Schmibros was that because I had seen it and experienced it in Boyle Heights, I didn’t have to imagine what it could be. I could walk in that space and feel this vibration that I knew without a doubt would translate anytime, any place, anywhere.

Tell me about “Game Room,” the current project you opened on December 1. 

Around this time last year, I was talking to Eddo Stern [artist, game designer and professor at UCLA’s Design Media Arts] about the big change in gaming culture that’s come about in the last five years. If you and I were talking five years ago and I said, ‘How many games do we have between the two of us?’ we would’ve probably said none. But now I’m looking at your iPhone and my iPhone, and maybe we have 10 games between the two of us. There’s an ubiquity in game play as never before in our history, but we’re also playing games so differently, because we can be separated by continents and still play [digitally]. The touch aspect of it is gone unless you think about our screens, and so is the eye contact, the human part of it. It got me thinking. And when I was at CNN I somehow ended up on the gaming beat, so I had an interest and a base understanding of that culture. A year later, we have “Game Room,”which is an installation of art works [by seven artists] that all happen to be games, all analog and all playable by visitors. 

How are you able to engage an audience on a national and international level?

I think that we engage on that level not through experience but through storytelling. Particularly with Machine Project, some of the projects are so incredible; they’ve kind of taken on a life of their own. I don’t curate projects so they will create their own little mythology and go out into the world. But that’s how it works with some of these things, and so on that level, I think we do have that presence. Last week I was asked to be the 2013 educator-in-residence at the Aspen Art Museum, and a few days later, the Gardner Museum in Boston asked if I could come speak to their board about this work. I don’t know if we’re making an impact internationally. I want us to get this work outside of the museum, but right now, I am focused on Los Angeles and how we can find ways to facilitate work like this outside of our four walls. That’s a goal of mine and of my colleagues for the next year.

You’re working primarily with Los Angeles artists?

I am. I work with artists from elsewhere but, even if you put the money and consideration aside, when we work with Los Angeles artists, often they’ve spent a lot of time at the Hammer already and they can embed here in a unique way.

Are there any particular L.A. artists you’d like to work with?

Yes, there’s definitely an artist I’m super interested in, Olga Koumoundouros. She did the “Notorious Possession project” [a 2012 social sculpture when the artist occupied an abandoned home in Los Angeles], and I would love to spend time with her and learn more about her work. 

To see images from recent Public Engagement projects at the Hammer Museum, click on the slideshow.

– Online Exhibition Tackles the Fiscal Cliff: Rebuild the Dream, an organization run by President Obama's former green jobs advisor Van Jones, is launching an art-related day of action called "ARTSTRIKE" to expose "the 'fiscal cliff' as a 'fiscal bluff,'" according to Jones. The event features an online exhibition of political art with works ranging from a riff on "American Gothic" in which the background farmhouse bears a sign that reads, "Bank Foreclosed" to a pop-inflected painting of sad-looking children titled "Don't Punish Our Future. Make the Rich Pay." [CNN] 

– Who Owns Body Art?: We know that artists own the copyright for their work — but what about tattoo artists? This question is the subject of a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Arizona, where tattoo artist Chris Escobedo claims that video game producer THQ, Inc., is infringing on his copyright in a new mixed martial arts video game. The game features fighter Carlos Condit, who — both in the game and in life — has one of Escobedo's lion tattoos inked on his torso. Now Escobedo, the artist, wants credit. [Clancco via Art Law Blog] 

– Are British Galleries Skirting Their Taxes?: The Art Newspaper has an in-depth report on British commercial galleries' tax payments, which are in some cases lower despite substantial sales. Hauser & Wirth, for example, earned UK sales of £33 million in 2011 (over four times more than its 2010 turnover of £7.7 million) but paid no corporation tax in the country. The gallery justified its losses from high overhead. But it also transferred £23.9-million worth of art from its UK subsidiary to its parent company in Switzerland — a tactic other galleries have adopted as well. [TAN]

– Pompidou to Shanghai: Paris's Centre Pompidou is sending masterpieces from its collection to Shanghai. On Sunday, "Electric Fields: Surrealism and Beyond — La Collection du Centre Pompidou" opened at the Power Station of Art as part of the Shanghai Biennale. The exhibition includes 65 cases worth of video art, paintings, sculptures, and manuscripts. Just last month, the Musée d'Orsay sent 19th-century French artworks to the Shanghai China Art Museum. [LAT]

– Modern British Art Sale Bombs: Christie's hit a painful bump last week when its sale of modern British art, which was estimated to fetch at least £16.5 million ($27 million), brought in only £8.4 million ($13.7 million). Half of the 252 lots found no buyers, including the most highly-valued works by LS Lowry and Ben Nicholson. "It is hard to remember when a major sale in this category, which has been experiencing steady growth for over a decade, has performed so badly," writes Colin Gleadell. [Telegraph]

– Arts as Antidote for Academic Troubles: Turnaround Arts, a new federally sponsored public-and-private experiment, is putting arts at the center of curricula. Eight at-risk schools across the country are currently participating in the pilot program, which receives extra funds for supplies and instruments, teacher training, partnerships with cultural organizations, and high-profile mentors like artist Chuck Close and Broadway producer Margo Lion. Students from the participating Roosevelt School in Bridgeport, Connecticut recently got a private tour from Close of his new Pace Gallery exhibition in New York. [NYT]

– Children's Museum Has New Hope for Opening: The Children's Museum of Los Angeles, a $21.8-million facility on the city's northern edge that has stood vacant since its completion in 2007, may become an attraction after all. Following more than two years of discussions with the nonprofit Discovery Science Center in Santa Ana, the City Council has approved putting an additional $18.1 million into the project, which would enable Discovery to equip the L.A. site with new science exhibits and open its doors by March 2015 as the Discovery Science Center Los Angeles. [LAT]

– Iman Issa Wins New Spanish Art Award: Sculptor and installation artist Iman Issa is the winner of the inaugural Fundació Han Nefkens MACBA Contemporary Art Award. Presented by the three-year-old foundation and the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the biannual award includes $66,0000, half of which goes toward the production of a new project. The Egyptian-born Issa, who is based in Cairo and New York, will unveil her new project in Barcelona in 2013. [AiA]

– Brits Save Art From Export: Nearly $50-million worth of artwork was prevented from leaving the UK this year thanks to a Secretary of State-enforced export ban that gives British museums and galleries more time to raise funds for objects deemed of national importance. Among the items staying put in England due to the loophole are Edouard Manet's portrait of Fanny Claus and "The Crouching Venus" by Flemish sculptor John Nost. [BBC]

– RIP Collector and Dealer Giuseppe Nahmad: The Aleppo-born collector and dealer died last month in Monte Carlo, at 80 years old. Over the course of his 55-year career buying and selling modern art with his brothers and business partners, David and Ezra, Nahmad built a collection worth more than $3 billion, according to Forbes. (It includes some 300 Picassos.) He opened his first gallery in Milan in 1957. [AiA]

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YEAR IN REVIEW: A Look at 10 Controversies That Divided the Art World in 2012

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“Look around your living space. Do you surround yourself with things you really like or things you like only because they are absurd?” asks Christy Wampole, author of the mildly controversial (and much-mocked) New York Times essay, “How to Live Without Irony,” one Princeton University assistant professor’s very earnest criticism of our generation’s unabated use of irony as a safety blanket.

“This generation has little to offer in terms of culture,” she mused, which must be the reason why we choose self-mockery from the outset over having our worthlessness pointed out to us by others. Published in November to the dismay of many a 20-something, moustache-sporting blogger, her column was the perfect bookend to a year that, in fact, began with similar accusations. Despite all of our technological advances, creatively we’re quite worthless, according to Kurt Andersen, whose January Vanity Fair article “You Say You Want a Devolution?” points out the unprecedented similarities of today’s aesthetics with those of 20 years ago. Unlike the vast differences between the ‘50s and ‘70s, or ‘70s and ‘90s, the fashions, musical tastes, and architecture of the moment have gone largely unchanged since the ‘90s. “Our culture’s primary M.O. now consists of promiscuously and sometimes compulsively reviving and rejiggering old forms,” he writes. Ouch.

And in fact, the accusations that we’ve stalled in our creative evolution as a species are difficult to counter given the objects we’ve surrounded ourselves with. A quick survey of recent design (performed this summer, before Wampole’s prompting) revealed that many of the objects with which we live exist for the sake of their own absurdity: Leica-looking cases for our iPhones and gramophones rigged to amplify our iTunes playlists. These goofy inventions also reveal a fondness for pairing our beloved high-tech gadgets with very low-tech companions of days of yore. Fine, Wampole, you’ve got us pegged: our resignation to the idea that everything has already been done means that rather than dare propose anything new, we’d rather look to the past for inspiration (in, like, total gest, of course). We are trapped in our own unbearable echo chamber of invention.

It can’t be nostalgia, the go-to scapegoat for lameness, that’s driving this trend; personally I was not alive to experience the gramophone at the height of its popularity. It must instead be a longing for a long-ago sensation we shed when we became followers of the Church of Apple: Tactility. Texture. Weight. Substance. In the last months, our practice of nostalgic irony has reached its saturation point, and as a result has taken a bizarrely unexpected turn: The current vogue is for objects that are physical but reference our digital past, a past which had been, in turn, already created as skeumorphs to the physical originals. The design ouroboros just caught hold of its own tail. 

As a nod to this perplexing year in self-referential design, ARTINFO has gathered a handful of examples of what we're talking about, from the lens you can attach to your camera to make your photos look like they’ve been processed through Instagram, to the game board that allows you to play Words With Friends without a 3G connection — before, of course, you realize it’s just a bad imitation of Scrabble on your coffee table.

To take a tour of five hyper-ironic designs from 2012, click on the slideshow.

Famous (and infamous) remains were unearthed, looted artifacts were returned (or not), a rich archeological site faces destruction, and plenty of people freaked out about the potential doom promised by the Mayan calendar. The year in archeology was an eventful one; and with researchers increasingly intent on tracking down lost sites, as museums face serious scrutiny for where their ancient artifacts originated, it seems clear that the value of historical preservation and the tenuousness of its ownership in our industrialized world will continue to be significant issues in the coming years. Here are five of our favorite stories from the year in archeology:

The Last of the Machu Picchu Artifacts are Returned by Yale


This past November, following decades of contention, Yale University repatriated the last of the Machu Picchu artifacts controversially taken by Hiram Bingham III (the “discoverer” of the Pre-Columbian citadel’s site) on expeditions between 1911 and 1915. The returns were sparked by a 2008 lawsuit resolved in 2010, in which Peru sued Yale for the artifacts (originally intended to be loaned to the university for 18 months of study, and consisting of human remains, art, ceramics, silver, and jewelry). The final shipment, which came with no fanfare or ceremony, was a quiet end to a nearly 100-year struggle. 

Famous Skeletons Unearthed: The Bones of Richard III & the Mona Lisa


This was a prolific year for the discovery of famous skeletons lost in anonymous sepulchers. Richard III, whose reign and defeat from 1483 to 1485 were made infamous by Shakespeare, was found this September buried under a parking lot in Leicester in the UK (it had once been the site of the Church of Grey Friars). While the DNA has yet to be tested, it looks like archeologists will crown this pile of bones — “rudely stamp’d” by scoliosis in the spine and displaying a defeating battle wound — king. Then there was the skeleton of Lisa Gherardini, believed to be the woman who posed for Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa,” which was disinterred in Florence from the rubble of the Franciscan convent of Saint Ursula. DNA tests are planned, and while there are debates as to whether the “Mona Lisa” was indeed a portrait of one woman or even a woman at all, the face of the figure whose mysterious visage has entranced art historians and the public for ages may finally be reconstructed.

Turkey Revs Up its Battle for Stolen Art


Fueled by its rising economy and political profile, Turkey is taking on major museums around the world demanding returns of art and artifacts it claims were looted. The “art war” has intensified from last year’s success in getting the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to return its 1,800-year-old “Weary Herakles” marble torso, and the Pergamon to return a 3,000-year-old sphinx (Turkey would still also like the Pergamon altar back, but that is much less likely), with Turkey’s cultural leaders threatening to revoke excavation permissions and stop lending art to institutions who do not comply. (The threat of bad PR is also implied). Confronting institutions like the J. Paul Getty Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Museum, the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, Turkey has already reclaimed numerous objects. The “Orpheus Mosaic” was recently returned by the Dallas Museum of Art, and other current quests include over 1,500 tiles at the Louvre, and 18 pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was hit with a criminal complaint by Turkey this summer. This has led to criticism of Turkey’s own historic role in art theft, having famously let the Parthenon marbles go to London in the 17th century (after having previously used the monument for munitions storage, leading to an explosion that caused major damage).

The Looming Destruction of Mes Aynak


An over 2,000-year-old Buddhist city in Afghanistan that has survived its country’s years of wars and turmoil is set to be destroyed this December 25. The reason: following the discovery of a massive copper deposit valued at some $100 billion, China Metallurgical Group Corporation plans to harvest the copper using an open-pit mine, which will obliterate the remains of temples, homes, and monolithic statues in the process. Filmmaker Brent Huffman has been documenting Mes Aynak’s final days, and archeologists are continuing to work at the site up to the deadline; recent discoveries include a monk’s skeleton, Bronze Age pots, and jewelry, but full excavation would require an estimated ten more years of digging. With the 2001 detonation of the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban (for religious reasons) still fresh in the mind, the loss of yet another site of such significance to Buddhist history would be a brutal blow. Unless a last-minute miracle saves Mes Aynak, the fragments and film will be all that is left.

Mayan Calendar Apocalypse Madness


Was 2012 to be mankind’s last? Some thought the Mayans predicted it so, and a flurry of archeological examinations have punctuated the months leading up to December 21, the supposed day to end all days. This is thanks to the Long Count calendar, a Mayan measure of time that runs for 13 cycles adding up to 5,125 years, which started on our August 11, 3114 BCE, and ends this winter solstice (the Mayans were adept at keeping time by the stars, and had several distinct types of complex time measurers correlating to astral phenomenon). The Long Count is meant to turn over and start again, much like our 12-month year, but some find the prospect of restarting at “Day Zero” terribly ominous. Pseudo-science aside, the event this year led to an intense interest in Mayan archeology and the fascinating and complicated numerology of their culture. Extraordinary finds — including the discovery in Guatamala of a 1,300-year-old carving on a staircase, the longest Mayan text ever found, which references the 2012 end date, as well as a Mayan warrior queen’s tomb and the oldest Mayan calendar so far in recovery — received international attention, when in an ordinary year they might have been overlooked.

2012 was a huge year for the performing arts. Across film, music, television, and theater, boundaries were broken, the inexplicable seemed to happen time and time again, and key figures were lost. With that in mind, we’ve decided to collect what we consider the year’s most important stories. Though they may not have been the biggest events (with some exceptions), these are the 10 that we’ll remember long after 2012 is over.

For an illustrated guide to the year in pop culture, click on the slideshow.