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In Memoriam: From Mike Kelley to Herb Vogel, the Luminaries We Lost in 2012

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In Memoriam: From Mike Kelley to Herb Vogel, the Luminaries We Lost in 2012
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Some of the biggest art stories of 2012 were obituaries, as the passing of many leading figures from the corners of art, design, architecture, and criticism were met with eloquent eulogies and ardent words of tribute. Here is a short list of some of the most notable figures we lost (to see a gallery of images with quotes from critics about these figures, click on the slideshow):

* Robert Hughes (1938 - 2012), perhaps the most influential art critic of his time, was the official art critic for TIME magazine before his foray into television, later lauded for his work on “The Shock of the New” for the BBC and “American Visions” for PBS.

* Mike Kelley (1954-2012), whose work with collage, installation, and found objects put the Los Angeles art scene on the map in the 1980s and 1990s, died in January. A few days later, a spontaneous memorial to the artist was built from stuffed toys, wax candles, afghans, and dried corn appeared in a parking lot in the Highland Park neighborhood of L.A., which contributors described as an attempt to rebuild his work “MORE LOVE HOURS THAN CAN EVER BE REPAID AND THE WAGES OF SIN” from 1987.

* One half of the postwar art world’s most famous couples (she was married to Max Ernst for 30 years), Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) asserted her gifts across almost every field of art and design, excelling as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, creating sets for the theater, and fashioning costumes for ballet dancers.

* A mainstay of the right-of-center cultural review the New Criterion, critic Hilton Kramer (1928-2012) was respected by artists and writers both right and left, but best-known for his critique of Pop, his stern predictions about the “giggles and sneers” of Postmodern art, and his salvos against the NEA.

* Lebbeus Woods (1940-2012) was an emphatically radical architect who inspired generations of students with his ideas on design as a means of political change. Though surprisingly few of his plans ever came into fruition, Woods left behind an immense legacy as a writer, draftsman, and, of course, educator, having served for years as one of the most beloved instructors of the architecture school at Cooper Union.

* Ken Price (1935-2012) spent his life investigating the amorphous quality of clay, applying a color-laden playfulness to a would-be terrestrial medium. His work has since become inseparable from the aesthetic timbre of the American Southwest.

* Though panned by critics for what they saw as a crass self-promotion and a a sugary, pseudo-spiritual approach of painting, Thomas Kinkade (1958-2012) nevertheless succeeded at establishing one of the most successful franchises ever devoted to a single living artist, producing prints and original paintings that were bought and hung in homes across the United States and around the world.

* After serving as an RAF in India and Sri Lanka, William Turnbull (1922-2012) pursued a vigorously Romantic course as a sculptor of stainless steel, fashioning some of the most tremblingly understated works in 20th century art.

* In addition to his work as a collector, Herb Vogel (1922-2012) was a commanding autodidact who educated himself in the world of art with discernment, intuition, and keen foresight. Acquiring works from Roy Lichtenstein, Cindy Sherman, John Chamberlain, Robert Mangold, and Richard Tuttle, the Vogels regularly bought art directly from the artist, eventually furnishing a web of friendships and institutional connections that placed them at the center of New York life.

* Among the most recognizable popular painters of the 20th century, Leroy Neiman (1921-2012) created illustrations for every great event in American sports, painting memorable portraits of the Super Bowl, the Master’s golf tournament, baseball’s World Series, the Kentucky Derby, and championship boxing.

* Franz West (1947-2012) was best known for his works in synthetic materials, including plastic, plaster, polyester, and aluminum. West’s experiments with sculptural “environments” foreshadowed his later sojourn into his works of furniture as well as his later “Fitting Pieces,” sculptures meant to be worn on the head or face, works which seemed to blur the lines between art, craft, and design out of intelligibility. “It doesn't matter what the art looks like,” West once wrote, “but how it's used.”

* Will Barnet (1911-2012) experienced and partook in an immense range of movements and confrontations across the history of 20th-century art. Initially setting his sights on Social Realism, Barnet soon moved to abstract painting and printmaking, creating portraits from bold blocks of color and elegant, sparing shapes and lines. As an instructor at the Arts Students League, Barnet was a mentor to a range of artists whose own work would be eventually be entered into the canons of Abstract Expressionism and Pop, including Cy Twombly and James Rosenquist.

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30 Must-See Shows in 2013, From El Anatsui in Brooklyn to David Bowie at the V&A

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30 Must-See Shows in 2013, From El Anatsui in Brooklyn to David Bowie at the V&A
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“Eyebeam Resurfaces: The Future of the Digital Archive,” at Eyebeam, New York, January 8 January 12
Reflecting on the game-changing effect of Hurricane Sandy on the conservation of art — from the analog to the digital — this four-day event series will include lectures, workshops, and exhibition of works saved from Eyebeam’s collection, and a screening of the documentary “Archive,” in which director Jonathan Minard examines our society’s collective reliance on digital records.

“Dorothea Tanning: Unknown but Knowable States” at Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco January 10 March 2
A full year following the death of this emphatically mixed-media artist, this exhibition will bring together over 30 works of painting, sculpture, craft, and collage from the 1960s and ‘70s, during which time Tanning lived and worked in Paris with fellow artist Max Ernst.

“Alighiero Boetti a Roma,” Fondazione MAXXI, Rome, January 23 October 6
Arte Povera devotees rejoice as 30 works by Boetti — in addition to those of fellow Conceptualists Francesco Clemente and Luigi Ontani — are included in an exhibition centered around the themes of place and identity.

“Manet: Portraying Life,” at the Royal Academy, London, January 26 April 14
In 1865, the unveiling of Manet’s “Olympia” stunned the Paris Salon for its portrayal of a commodified female body. Of course, this wasn’t the artist’s first engagement with the human form; portraiture was a fascination of Manet’s, and as this exhibition shows, his paintings of Antonin Proust, Émile Zola and Stéphane Mallarmé are among the most endearing chronicles of Parisian life at the dawn of modernity.

“Gravity and Grace: Monumental Works by El Anatsui” at the Brooklyn Museum, February 8 – August 4
Combining elements of painting and sculpture via the appropriation of found objects, El Anatsui is globally recognized as one of the foremost contemporary artists. This exhibition — the first solo show in an American museum  — includes site-specific sculptures in wood and metal, as well as 12 malleable wall and floor sculptures composed of liquor bottle caps.

The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection at MOCA, Los Angeles, February 10 –  March 28
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel collected over 4,000 works by contemporary artists in the second half of the 20th century. In 2008, they donated 50 works to museums in each of the 50 states as part of the Vogel 50x50 initiative. A selection of the works donated to MOCA will be on view, offering a chance to see a piece of the famed collection of these "proletarian art collectors."

Dancing Around Duchamp” at the Barbican, London, February 14 June 9
On the anniversary year of the 1913 Armory Show, where Marcel Duchamp scandalized the art world with "Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2," the Barbican is hosting a massive Duchamp-centered season, including the exhibition "The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns" with around 90 pieces, some exhibited for the first time the UK, focusing on his influence on the American modern masters.

“Gutai: Splendid Playground” at the Guggenheim, New York, February 15 – May 8
One of postwar Japan’s most influential artistic movements, Gutai was an avant-garde collective that sought a response to the postatomic world in radical artistic creation. “Splendid Playground” presents over 100 works — from painting and installation to sound and light — created by members of the movement between 1965 and 1972.

“Lebbeus Woods. Architect” at the San Francisco MoMA, February 16 June 2
There have been few architects as fearless as Lebbeus Woods, who passed away this October leaving behind a stunning legacy of architectural drawings that challenged design, structure, and gravity, and this exhibition explores his often brutal and severe approach, driven by his belief that "architecture must learn to transform the violence, even as violence knows how to transform the architecture."

“Picasso and Chicago” at the Art Institute of Chicago, February 20  May 12
Back in 1913, the Art Institute of Chicago was the first American museum to show the work of Pablo Picasso, who was then in the midst of Cubism, and this exhibition, the first in 30 years at the museum to focus on Picasso, celebrates the 100-year anniversary with more than 250 examples of his work sourced from the museum's collections and private collections in Chicago, tracing the artist's career and the relationship between the city and modern art.

“Lichtenstein: A Retrospective” at the Tate Modern, London, February 21 – May 27
Over 100 of Lichtenstein’s immediately recognizable Pop paintings are brought together in this retrospective; the first one dedicated to the artist in over 20 years. With famed works like “Look Mickey” and “Oh, Jeff...I Love You, Too...But...” this exhibition highlights Lichtenstein’s enduring influence on 20th-century art.

“Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity” at the Met, New York, February 26 – May 27
As Paris became the epicenter of fashion in the 1800s, Impressionist painters saw an opportunity to portray the stylish men and women of the times in their works. With works by Manet, Monet, Renoir and their contemporaries presented alongside Parisian photographs, prints, costumes, and accessories from the era, this exhibition sheds light on the influence of fashion upon Impressionist painters.

“Jay Defeo: A Retrospective” at the Whitney, New York, February 28 – June 2
This retrospective of Beat artist Jay Defeo — known for her wide experimentation with material, and the almost 2,000-pound painting, “The Rose” — presents some of her works in jewelry, photography, and collage amongst the 130 works in the show.

“The Angel of the Odd. Dark Romanticism from Füssli to Max Ernst” at Musee d'Orsay, Paris, March 5 – June 9
Beginning in the late 1700s, flourishing in the 1880s, and remaining popular throughout the 1920s, so-called Dark Romanticism has established itself both within art history and in popular culture. This exhibition presents works by Goya, Füssli, and Max Ernst in tandem with Expressionist films of the 1920s to illustrate the complexity and breadth of the genre.

Garry Winogrand at the San Francisco MoMA, March 9 – June 2
Garry Winogrand is one of his generation's most important photographers, yet much of his oeuvre remains out of the public view. This exhibition — the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date — is the culmination of extensive archival research, and offers the opportunity to see many of his lesser-known photographs of America in the 1960s.  

Parallel Practices: Joan Jonas & Gina Pane at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, March 23 – June 20
Joan Jonas and Gina Pane, born one year apart, and working on different continents (Jonas in New York and Pane in Paris), were both pioneers in the early days of performance art. This exhibition explores the similarities and differences of their practices and includes live performances of Jonas’s works.

“David Bowie Is” at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, March 23 July 28, 2013
Keep your ‘lectric eye on the V&A to freak out in the daydream of the incomparable David Bowie, with this retrospective, sourced from the David Bowie Archive, the first to give a concentrated look at the career of the glam icon/Ziggy Stardust rocker/chameleon-of-modern-music through 300 pieces including art, video, instruments, costumes, photography, film, and other artifacts of the earthbound starman.

“In Focus: Ed Ruscha” at the Getty, Los Angeles, April 9 – September 29
Ed Ruscha is to Los Angeles what perfumes are to Paris and baile funk is to Brazil. Bringing his meditation on horizontal cityscapes and car-driven architectural photography back to the fore, this exhibition includes some of the gems of the Getty’s stash of Ruscha’s work as an art book maker, including the iconic "Every Building on the Sunset Strip" (1966).

The Reopening of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, April 13
Following 10 years of work on its 19th-century home, the Rijksmuseum finally reopens with Rembrandt's "The Night Watch" returned to its place of honor in the stately corridors, along with a revamped presentation of galleries and gardens showcasing 800 years of Dutch art and culture.

Claes Oldenburg: The Street and The Store” at MoMA, New York, April 14 – August 5
Claes Oldenburg’s storefront installations of sculptures of quotidian commercial objects came to redefine ideas of sculpture in the 1960s. MoMA brings together various works  from this period, along with the rarely seen installation, “The Street” in an exhibition paying homage to Oldenburg’s complexity and inventiveness.

“Chagall: Modern Master” at the Tate Liverpool, June 7 – September 29
With a selection of works highlighting the formative years of Chagall’s career — from his pre-war time in Paris, to his time in Russia during the Revolution — this exhibition explores Chagall’s early influences, and traces his development into an iconic 20th-century artist.

James Turrell at the Guggenheim, New York, June 21 September 25
Best known for his still-uncompleted “Roden Crater,” for which he intends to transform a 3-mile-wide volcanic cone into a naked-eye observatory, James Turrell will perform a similar feat of reorientation and site-specificity with this exhibition, turning his skills to transforming the Guggenheim’s immense atrium.

“Vermeer and Music: The Art of Love and Leisure” at the National Gallery London, June 26 September 8
There are only just over 30 known paintings by Vermeer, so having three in the same place at once is a special occasion. In this case, the works all depict young ladies practicing music, and the National Gallery is celebrating with an exhibition of 17th-century music with rare instruments, songbooks, and works by contemporaries of the Dutch master of light.

Balthus: Cats and Girls at the Met, New York, September 2013 – January 2014
While some have debated the erotic nature of Balthus’s work, nobody has doubted the accuracy with which he depicts adolescent ennui. With just 35 works, this exhibition offers a selection of Balthus's finest paintings, featuring his preferred models: young girls and cats.

“Damage Control: Art and Destruction since 1950” at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, September (TBA) February 16, 2014
Sometimes it seems like we're living in the age of destruction, with the brutal wars of the 20th century, the obliterating atomic age, and ongoing fear of terrorist attacks. The Hirshhorn is salvaging through the wreckage with contemporary work from around the world for the first in-depth museum exploration of the art of annihilation.

Janet Cardiff: “The Forty Part Motet” at the Cloisters, New York, September 10 December 8
As part of the Cloister's 75th year anniversary, Janet Cardiff's "The Forty Part Motet" (2001), which breaks out each voice in Thomas Tallis's "Spem in alium numquam habui" (1573) into 40 speakers, inhabits the acoustically friendly medieval Fuentidueña Chapel for what will surely be one of the most transcendent art experiences of the year.

“The Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 Magritte” at MoMA, New York, September 22, 2013 – January 12, 2014
Dedicated exclusively to the years of Magritte’s life in which he began painting in order to “challenge the world,” this exhibition explores the most groundbreaking period of the artist’s life and traces his development as a definitive Surrealist painter.

Paul Klee at Tate Modern, London, October 15, 2013 – March 9, 2014
Curated to illustrate the relationship between Klee’s work, his personal life, and the changing political climate of Europe, this exhibition brings together works from throughout Klee’s career — from his years teaching at the Bauhaus to his forced to return to Switzerland after his work was declared “degenerate” by the Nazi regime.

Christopher Wool at the Guggenheim, New York, October 25, 2013 – January 22, 2014
Combining elements of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, Christopher Wool’s works continually explore the ways in which images can be conceived and experienced. Presented in the museum’s rotunda, this retrospective includes paintings, works on paper, and photographs that engage these questions in an open-ended visual dialogue.

“War Is Over! (If You Want it): Yoko Ono,” at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, November 14, 2013 February 23, 2014
Not enough educated people (artists even!) seem to appreciate how cool Yoko Ono was before she became Mrs. John Lennon. Borrowing the name from a work of Ono’s that first appeared in 1969, this much-warranted retrospective of one of the co-authors of Conceptual art spans five decades.

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Pixel-Friendly Fashion: The Meadham Kirchhoff Take Over

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Pixel-Friendly Fashion: The Meadham Kirchhoff Take Over
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Currently airing on Meadham Kirchhoff’s website is a short film titled “A Cautionary Tale,” featuring the house’s Spring/Summer 2013 womenswear collection. It’s engrossing — emphasis on gross — a spectacular, orchestrated mess of baroque confectionery with gilded sugar flourishes and bowed garters and go-lightly chiffon wisps that suggest, in a way, the consequence of certain ravenous pleasures from the night before. The collection reads like an even-more-unhinged Sofia Coppola-Marie Antoinette, replete with dying roses and girls stumbling about upholstered settees, coated in jewelry and feathery bits and bobs. Thus, the Meadham Kirchhoff formula herein congeals almost as a pseudo-pornographic equation for fashion die-hards. Functioning ostensibly as an NC-17 rated sartorial Disneyland, it’s campy and sexy and ostentatious — but there’s an intellect beneath the pomp, a sharp and modern wit that supersedes the two-dimensionality of the frivolous. 

Officially founded in 2006 by Edward Meadham and Benjamin Kirchhoff, the London-based label has slowly gained traction in both the public eye and in bottom-line sales — their wares are now sold worldwide, with lucrative retail deals from highbrow Net-A-Porter to trust-funded hipster haunt Opening Ceremony. While they’ve grown physically, their aesthetic DNA (it can only be described as a garnished, cartoon-vomit-hued double helix bonded by glitter and frills) has remained unbroken. 

Take for example their first catwalk sponsorship for Fall/Winter 2010 in which crowns and veils, cut in swooping shear and trimmed in dust-ruffles (and bows – even back then Meadham and Kirchhoff were using them as decorative touches) highlighted the show. The iconoclasm proved marvelously insane, for it basically swung a wrecking ball through the proverbial boudoir and sent its revelers scurrying out into the daylight. The duo progressed to Spring/Summer 2012’s lighter-hearted and much hyped heart-emoji/eyeball motifs, vaguely reminiscent of Takashi Murakami’s ocular jellyfish bloodline, to Fall/Winter 2012’s faux-fur monsters in fuchsia and ochre, to Spring/Summer 2013’s garish and off-the-deep-end princesses. Starting to get the picture?

Until six months ago, though, a spoke was missing from Meadham Kirchhoff’s spinning rims – menswear. It’s a little perplexing to consider, for while their designs are sexy at least in color and pin-up-ishness, they undercut gender associations – rendered, actually, sexless in the carefully choreographed milieu and subsequent settling of the dust. Everything up until this point looked like something the glittering asexual rat-packs of Stoke Newington or Dalston would wear (and in fact, did). 

Thus, assumedly thanks to the success and stability of their women’s line, the duo decided to introduce a capsule pour les hommes at London’s inaugural men’s weekend (preceding Milan and Paris’ respective men’s fashion weeks) this past June. The static display garnered critical acclaim, if not a bit of an audience recoil; here was a mashed up, any-20-something’s apartment, like some kind of Dan Colen and Dash Snow shredded-phonebook drug den laced with flowers and potpourri, empty pizza boxes, and Disney character bedsheets (literally — Jasmine was on the linens). Moreover, the boys themselves were no less, or no more, fitting — they appeared in various states of undress, in boxer shorts, fluorescent high-tops, skullcaps, and gold ankle-bangles. One model even had Sharpie ink (everyone’s favorite party prank instrument) blocked out across his forehead to form the word “WALLFLOWER.” Again, the interplay between the translucent and the bejeweled, between hard street and pop-religion, came across not as Male with a capital M, but something without assignation — the realization of a regular club kid Joe waking up in an incredible outfit from an incredible night, ready to relive it all again come sundown. Meadham and Kirchhoff do not simply design clothes — they design aspirational or fantastic dreams of entire lifestyles, all the more exacerbated by their hyperactivity. 

So, can the over-the-top last for Meadham Kirchhoff? Will they eventually tone down their output to fit a more public standard? Is “A Cautionary Tale” actually a subconscious recognition of the sparkling razor-blade upon which they dance and the formidable parapet of convention to which they regularly give the finger?

It is this writer’s opinion that we won’t see Meadham Kirchhoff pumping the breaks anytime soon, for this house caters in near perfect symmetric harmony to both an increasingly educated fashion fan-base and the eye-candy starved digital generation. Fashion, and fashion consumption whether it be purchasing power or perusing LiveJournals, has moved well past the days of the big box brands — much to the credit of places like the aforementioned Opening Ceremony. There has been a push towards individuality and quality, or, at least, the quality of the ideas behind the manifests. Meadham Kirchhoff is among the current forerunners of this proverbial enlightenment, a gateway label showcasing that a brave new territory exists beyond the Pradas and the Proenzas of the world. Moreover, the Internet has helped tremendously with smaller or outré brands attracting bigger numbers, what with its endless comment sections and G-chats and embeddings. But Meadham Kirchhoff is by nature more pixel-friendly than most, and was therefore always destined for the blog-o-sphere out of mere aesthetic principle alone, regardless of whether or not one likes fashion or design. People want pretty pictures, and MK delivers them — without micro-nicheing itself. 

Labeling this brand “irreverent” would be incorrect; they are not disrespecting the craft, they aren’t cushioned by anything anarchic. Rather, Meadham Kirchhoff is celebratory at its core, milkshake-blending-in-an-apron-and-nothing-else all the guilty pleasures of modern living into unique ready-to-wear, good and worthy of its cult status. And what fun is any party without a bit of a warning label? 

To see images from Meadham Kirchhoff’s Spring/Summer 2013 sampling, click on the slideshow.  

Meadham Kirchoff will show their second men’s collection at London’s upcoming Collections: Men weekend on January 7. 

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NRA Sticks to Its Guns Exhibition, Tim Noble and Sue Webster Split, and More

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NRA Sticks to Its Guns Exhibition, Tim Noble and Sue Webster Split, and More

– NRA Sticks to its Guns Exhibition: The National Rifle Association has no plans to take down its exhibition of famous firearms from film history, "Hollywood Guns," which has been on view at Virginia's National Firearms Museum since 2010, and contains weapons including Javier Bardem's shotgun from "No Country For Old Men" and Robert DeNiro's pistol from "Machete" (as well as, randomly, the actual Maltese Falcon from "The Maltese Falcon"). This is despite the fact that the NRA itself has in part sought to turn the recent tragedy in Connecticut into a referendum on the media rather than on guns themselves. NRA VP Wayne LaPierre, for one, recently denounced the celebration of violence in Hollywood: "They all have the nerve to call it entertainment. But is that what it really is? Isn’t fantasizing about killing people as a way to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?" (For a glimpse of "Hollywood Guns," see our VIDEO OF THE DAY, below. ) [Hollywood Reporter]

– Tim Noble and Sue Webster Split: After four years of marriage and 20 years as a couple before that, power artist duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster have filed for divorce. The pair, who were married by friend and fellow YBA Tracey Emin in 2008, have pledged to continue making artwork together. "It’s almost like we shouldn’t have got married," admitted Noble. "We said, '---- our relationship, let’s save the art.'" [Telegraph]

– Six New Otto Dix Murals Discovered: Workers renovating the former home of German painter Otto Dix near Lake Constance unearthed a surprising find on Wednesday: six original murals created by the artist himself. The house, which reopens in June as a museum dedicated to the painter, now finds itself one attraction richer. The murals, dated 1966, were hidden behind a massive bookshelf. They include a drawing of a monster whose appendages each play a different instrument in a jazz band. [Spiegel Online]

– Seaport Museum Gets Anonymous $500,000 Check: Just a few days before Christmas, the South Street Seaport Museum received an unexpected gift: a $500,000 check in the mail from an anonymous donor. The donation will contribute to ongoing repairs from Hurricane Sandy, which inundated the museum and destroyed its heating and electrical systems. The institution reopened on December 19, but is continuing to pick up the pieces. It has collected more than $750,000 in donations since the storm. [DNAinfo]

– New York Times Culture Editor Leaving: After 26 years at the New York Times and over three years as its culture editor, Jonathan Landman is accepting a buyout offer and will leave the paper. A replacement has yet to be named. "We all know that the newsroom has to reduce its costs," Landman wrote in a company email. "No less urgent is its responsibility to cultivate a new generation of leaders. My continued presence would help accomplish neither. So it’s time to go." [The Wrap]

– Charges Against Kunsthalle Wien Director Dropped: Austrian authorities have dropped charges against former Kunsthalle Wien director Gerald Matt and three of his former colleagues. Matt, who left the museum in January 2012, was accused of offering Austrian citizenship to foreigners in exchange for significant donations to the kunsthalle. After an investigation, prosecutors concluded they "could not find a conscious abuse of power based on an intent to harm." [Art Review

 Petrit Halilaj to Rep Kosovo in Venice: The sculptor, known for large-scale works, has been chosen to represent Kosovo at the 2013 Venice Biennale. This year marks the first time the eastern European nation will participate in the international art event. The pavilion will be curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, who said, "The invitation comes with a high degree of responsibility, which I would have been more anxious about, were it not for the artist Petrit Halilaj." [ArtReview]

– Bloodstained Gourd May Contain Louis XVI's DNA: Immediately following his decapitation in 1793, former king Louis XVI's blood pooled at his feet and many dipped their handkerchiefs in it for a momento of the historical beheading. Now, traces of that blood have allegedly been found on an ornate souvenir gourd that now belongs to an Italian family. By cross-referencing the blood traces left on the artifact with DNA taken from the mummified corpse of Louis XVI's ancestor, Henri IV, researchers hope to confirm that the droplets were in fact taken from the French monarch's beheading. [Telegraph]

– Kanye to Create Lil Wayne's Next Album Cover: Rapper, producer, and daddy-to-be Kanye West has commissioned his share of high-art album covers, including several paintings each by George Condo and Takashi Murakami. Now, he's becoming an artist himself, taking over design duties for the next record from Lil Wayne, "I Am Not a Human Being II," which is currently due to be released next month. "It was his idea. I was just like 'OK, do whatever,' because I don’t do nothing but rapping," Wayne said. [FACT]

– San Francisco's Wattis Institute Expands: The California College of the Arts's Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts is starting the new year in an expansive new space — an existing building renovated by Mark Jensen, the architect of SFMOMA's rooftop sculpture garden — where its inaugural exhibitions will include an installation by Parisian collective Claire Fontaine and a projection of Werner Herzog's 2012 Whitney Biennial hit "Hearsay of the Soul." The Wattis is also looking for a new director following Jens Hoffmann's departure to take a curator gig at the Jewish Museum in November. [TAN]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Trailer for the NRA-curated "Hollywood Guns" show 

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As Free Ports Open Around the Globe, Geneva’s Plans Expansion

Hoberman: Spending (More) Time with "The Clock"

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

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Slideshow: "One on One" at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art

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Made In Chelsea's Make Up Artist Reveals The Girls' Favorite Looks

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Ever wondered just how Made In Chelsea's Millie gets the perfect dewy look? Or how Binky nails the smokey-eyes every time? Us too. But fear not — Annelise Levy, who runs make up blog makeartnotwars.tumblr.com, is on hand to take us through the girls' favorite looks...

Berlin's Best Farm-to-Table Restaurants

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Katz Orange – Courtesy of Katz Orange
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Berlin has made heroic strides to overcome its culinary reputation as a city of overcooked, fatty foods. A case in point is how the recent farm-to-table movement has appealed to Berliners' appetites. Come prepared to have an involved conversation with your server about the precise sourcing of every ingredient. Here is a roundup of the best, ranging from simple German fare to full-on Brooklyn-style artisanal heaven.

 

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Katz Orange

 

Don't let the rec room–style wood paneling or the rickety-looking chairs in this two-floor restaurant fool you; Katz Orange is one of Berlin's most adventurous and upscale farm-to-table places to eat. High on the list of lip-smacking winter courses are a tartar of free-range beef that includes boudin (the beloved French-inspired blood sausage), and 12-hour roasted pork served with Champagne cabbage and lemon-garlic yogurt. Vegetarian dishes deliver too: A bean salad includes pea cream and sake mayonnaise, while a decadent fried potato pancake comes with braised heirloom vegetables. Tasting menus start at €47.

 

 

Picture: Katz Orange – Courtesy of Juliane Spaete and Sven Hausherr

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Little Otik

 

Little Otik is a 20-seat, candle-lit bistro with stripped back plain walls and dark wood floors that's located in the ultra-hip Graefe Kiez neighborhood. It kick-started the local-and-seasonal movement in Berlin with some talent from Brooklyn's Diner. Dishes are kept simple, with appetizers ranging from radishes with fleur de sel and butter, to spare ribs served with raisin chutney. The list of main courses changes often, but usually includes fish such as Zander (similar to perch) and seasonally appropriate meat such as wild-boar sausage served with lentils and figs. The wine list is budget-friendly, with most bottles priced under €20. People-watching bonus: This is Berlin's favorite place for starving artists to bring their better-off parents. Appetizers €3–9, mains €21–23.

 

Picture: Little Otik – Courtesy of Little Otik

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Lokal – Courtesy of Berlin Reified
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Lokal

 

The prime lunch spot for Mitte—the pioneering chic neighborhood of East Berlin that's still going strong—Lokal is the epitome of a modern Berlin restaurant. Flooded with light from its many tall windows, the plain dark wood tables and white chairs make for a minimal interior. Char is a frequent star on the fish menu, and the meat selections run typically to game, including lots of venison and the only wild-boar schnitzel in town, though more typical bistro fare like côte de boeuf makes an occasional appearance. Appetizers €5–12, mains €13–20.

 

Picture: Lokal – Courtesy of Berlin Reified

 

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Berlin's Best Farm-to-Table Restaurants
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Three city bistros for locavore lovers

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A Panel of Pint-Sized Critics Sum Up NYC's New Math Museum

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A Panel of Pint-Sized Critics Sum Up NYC's New Math Museum
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On December 15, one of the more innovative additions to New York City’s cultural scene, the National Museum of Mathematics, finally opened its doors to the public. Also known as MoMath, the institution is the brainchild of mathematics Ph.D. and hedge fund manager Glen Whitney, who hopes to solve what he called“the cultural problem in this country when it comes to the role and the perception of math” — namely, the idea that the subject is boring, rote, and unimaginative.

ARTINFO decided to investigate the results, and brought a panel of critics: including a fifth-grader, a third-grader, a first-grader, and a pre-schooler (who was a bit too young for the museum’s offerings). Both panel members and their mothers agreed that MoMath is a place of both inspiration and confusion.

Located on the northern boundary of Madison Square Park, MoMath takes up two floors of a building on East 26th street — including a fairly spacious main floor, where exhibits are showed off to major “wow” factor, as well as a more-cramped lower level. The exhibits target an audience of fourth- through eighth-graders, a demographic considered to be aging out of the city’s children’s museums. On the Friday after Christmas, it was packed.

Walking through the main floor, it seemed immediately clear that the museum had succeeded in making abstract mathematical principles tangible, through interactive displays that involved tasks such as riding a square-wheeled tricycle to experience how square wheels fit into a grooved track to create a smooth ride. My kids’ personal favorite (also my own) was the “Coaster Rollers,” which enable children to ride on a cart that glides over objects shaped like inflated triangles. You’d expect the ride to be bumpy, but because the shapes are isometric, meaning of equal dimensions, the cart glides smoothly over them. My third-grade daughter Clara and I were both interested to learn from a nearby screen that a circle is the simplest isometric shape, but not the only one.

This was one of the rare times, however, when we learned something useful from one of the information screens stationed around the museum. Each screen corresponds to three or four exhibits, and when you finally find the correct one (often difficult to locate) the information is often scanty. At other times, the screens “were set up as if you already knew about mathematics,” as Idris, the fifth-grader in our group, put it.

My daughter’s main complaint about MoMath was that “for some things they don’t explain how they have to do with math or what exactly you do with it.” In one exhibit, you turn interlocking wheels with partial images of monkeys on them — but the object of the game, and its relationship to math, was unclear to us. Entering the section named the Mathenaeum, we found kids manipulating images on the screens with joysticks — but none of us had any idea what they were doing (I’m not sure they did, either). I subsequently learned from the museum’s press kit that in the Mathenaeum, you can “use one of the stations to transform basic shapes into original designs. A 3-D printer will build some of the original designs before your very eyes.” I didn’t see the 3-D printer, and I’m also not sure that we need to bring kids into a museum in order to give them more time in front of screens.

Given that the museum has just recently opened, it’s also still getting some of the kinks out. When we arrived on the lower level, four exhibits were under repair by staff members (although they were up and running again that afternoon). And though admission prices are basically on a par with other children's institutions in the city, nothing comes cheap — it’s $16 for adults and $10 for children ages two to 12, with a one-dollar discount if tickets are purchased online.

Ideally, once the exhibits are all functioning reliably, staff members will be able to spend more time interacting with the public to explain the mathematical principles at work. They could also help alleviate crowding around certain exhibits by leading demonstrations with child participation. (A very cool exhibit called the “Tracks of Galileo,” which lets visitors build downhill tracks to race little cars, was chaotically monopolized by one or two children, making it impossible to pull off the intended math experiment.) In the meantime, it’s likely that kids on school trips (and math teachers seeking to jazz up their curriculum) will best experience MoMath on guided tours during off-hours.

But even if the formula still needs to be tweaked, the museum is already pulling off its mission to show the exploratory side of math. In the Enigma Café, which serves up puzzles instead of food, visitors young and old crowded the tables to investigate a variety of mathematical games. When one museum-goer wondered about the point of a maze that must be navigated without making any left turns, another young visitor explained: “it’s about perspective.” There is a certain infectious energy of exploring mathematics among so many other visitors, and my third-grader and first-grader are both interested in going back again. They can count me in.

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Swiped From the Beauty Closet: Bare Escentuals Buxom Divine Goddess Luminizer

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A post New Year's Eve complexion often looks a little sallow (I know mine did the day after... and the day after that). I decided to put this new product that landed on my desk to good use: Bare Escentuals Buxom Divine Goddess Luminizer in Venus, $28, sephora.com.

Louise Bourgeois's Dark Vision Reanimates a Romanesque Church in Rural France

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Louise Bourgeois's Dark Vision Reanimates a Romanesque Church in Rural France
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BONNIEUX, France — On the road out of Bonnieux, a postcard-picturesque hilltop village in the South of France with torturously narrow roads and squat stone structures, a marker at the top of a sinuous street that is simply and mysteriously marked “Ô” leads the occasional curious traveler down a steep alley. At the bottom sits the Couvent d'Ô, a former convent whose chapel has, since 2004, housed a series of sculptures created specifically for that space by Louise Bourgeois. Now known as the Louise Bourgeois Church, this peculiar project was commissioned by the convent’s owner, Jean-Claude Meyer, a banker, collector, and close confidant of French president François Hollande. It remains a little-known pilgrimage site for lovers of the French-American sculptress.

The solemn Romanesque church was decommissioned in 1906,  and later served numerous functions — including as a split-level stable and schoolhouse — until it was lovingly restored by Meyer in 1998. Within are housed five works by the late artist (which do not belong to Meyer, but are rather on very long-term loan from the artist’s estate). The pieces take up many of Bourgeois’s trademark tropes while riffing on conventional church fixtures. Upon entering the building (call ahead to make an appointment with the groundskeeper, as opening hours vary from season to season) visitors first find an apparent holy water font hewn from flesh-toned rose marble. Inside, instead of blessed water, seven breast-like forms reminiscent of Bourgeois’s breakthrough 1974 installation “The Destruction of the Father” jut into the empty basin. Around the corner, Bourgeois created a confessional of sorts using many of the materials that appeared in her series of cell installations — the upper rim of its oval form etched with words like “resurrection” and “revolution.” With its interiors plainly visible through fence-like walls, this confessional truly has nothing to hide.

One of Bourgeois’s iconic spiders occupies the next alcove, but it neither crouches at the center of the room nor towers over viewers as they walk between her legs. Instead, a comparatively tiny bronze arachnid sits gripped high on the far wall, its distant and guarded siting suggesting both caution and mischief. Nearby, a more traditional symbol of motherhood — a Virgin and Child rendered in pink cloth — sits under a glass dome on a high shelf, the small figures’ features rendered childlike and creepy by the pink-hued textile’s mesh. At the front of the church’s high, arched central space, in the place of an altar, Bourgeois — who, being too old to travel, never set foot at the site, but created works based on extensive photos and videos of the space taken by an assistant — placed a bronze crucifix whose horizontal bar ends in hands, one open and the other clenched. Its religious symbolism is deeply ambiguous, both inviting and forbidding, much like the cage-evoking confessional.

As a spiritual space shaped by a singular artist’s vision, Bourgeois’s church diverges from the likes of both Henri Matisse’s still-in-use Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence a few hours east on the French Riviera and the abstract, non-denominational Rothko Chapel in Houston. Her sculptural interventions in the moving Bonnieux building remain reverent without being deferential, taking up the beautiful site’s incontrovertible Christian imagery and processing it through a idiosyncratic and complex myth system, to present faith as simultaneously nurturing and confining. The divine icons are invested with earthly frailty and vulnerability, without an attempt to mask or overpower the palpable gravity of the centuries-old architecture.

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Slideshow: "Materializing Six Years: Lucy R. Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art" at the Brooklyn Museum

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One-Line Reviews: Pithy Takes on Barnaby Furnas, Judy Fox, Charles Ray, and More

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One-Line Reviews: Pithy Takes on Barnaby Furnas, Judy Fox, Charles Ray, and More

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One-Line Reviews: Pithy Takes on Barnaby Furnas, Judy Fox, Charles Ray, and More
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To start the new year, once again our tireless staff has set off around our New York offices, charged with the task of reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. Click on the slideshow for:

— “A Question of Slow” at Skylight Gallery, reviewed by Terri Ciccone 

— Mattia Biagiat at Anna Kustera, reviewed by Allison Meier

— “Beyond Bling: The Artist as Jeweler” at Claire Oliver, reviewed by Alanna Martinez

— Louise Despont at Nicelle Beauchene, reviewed by Benjamin Sutton

— Judy Fox at P.P.O.W., reviewed by Julia Halperin

— Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky, reviewed by Rachel Corbett

— David LaChapelle at Paul Kasmin, reviewed by Sara Roffino

— Charles Ray at Matthew Marks, reviewed by Ben Davis

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Four Decades After Lucy Lippard's "Six Years," Is Conceptual Art Still Relevant?

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Four Decades After Lucy Lippard's "Six Years," Is Conceptual Art Still Relevant?
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If you want to understand the stakes of the “dematerialization of the art object,” look no further than the late British artist John Latham’s “Art and Culture,” the entrance piece at “Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” at the Brooklyn Museum. The piece mockingly takes its title from mid-century formalist art critic Clement Greenberg’s influential text: An open briefcase reveals a copy of Greenberg’s book, an overdue notice from the library, and vials containing the masticated pulp of its pages. The byproduct of a party where Latham invited guests to chew the pages of Greenberg’s book, the work takes the radical propositions of dematerialization quite literally, turning the bible of formalist art criticism into formless cud.

Casting off the cloth of the detached, Greenbergian art critic, Lucy Lippard played a crucial role, not only as a writer, but as curator and collaborator within the diverse artistic activity that’s now catalogued under the rubric of Conceptual Art. As she writes in the forward to the exhibition, Lippard and her circle “invented ways for art to act as an invisible frame for seeing and thinking rather than as an object of delectation or connoisseurship.” In their critique of the art object, they sought to remake the art world as a network of ideas to be shared, rather than a marketplace of objects to be bought and sold.

Named after her book, “Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972” (its unabridged title is a long-winded conceptual art joke), the exhibition includes the artists Lippard championed, mapping her evolution from questioning minimalist orthodoxy in her 1966 “Eccentric Abstraction Show,” to her engagement with Conceptual Art, to her turn towards feminism. In keeping with the feminist program of the museum’s Sackler Center, the scope of the exhibition goes beyond the six-year period of Lippard’s book: A curatorial epilogue summarizes her activities in 1973, the year she organized her first all-woman show.

Over 170 curatorial notes, exhibition checklists, posters, and artworks, from land artist Nancy Holt’s “Eccentric Abstraction” themed crossword puzzle, to German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies of vernacular architecture, to conceptual artist Doug Huebler’s written pledge to photograph every living person, form a densely packed, text-heavy, and mostly black-and-white husk around the Sackler Center’s permanent installation of Judy Chicago’s lush, vulvamorphic “Dinner Party.” Yet few works could be further from Chicago’s second-wave essentialist bonanza than Joseph Kosuth’s dry and logocentric “Titled (Art as Idea as Idea),” a blown-up dictionary definition of the word “word.” With his tautological dictum — “Art is the definition of art” — Kosuth’s meta-discursive brand of anti-formalism argued that art’s value lay in its capacity for self-referential commentary. In his words, “a work of art is a kind of proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art.”

Other artists were invested in expanding art’s parameters, bringing “art” to an asymptotic tango with “life.” In his “Live Airborn System,” Hans Haacke — now known as an outspoken practitioner of institutional critique — threw breadcrumbs off a Coney Island pier, imagining the flight-patterns of the ensuing flock of seagulls as an ephemeral artwork. A poster from the British art collective Art & Language’s “Air-Conditioning Show” proposed an objectless exhibition where an air conditioner would match the temperature of the gallery to that of the world outside. Bruce Nauman documented his friend William Allan catching a fish in the deadpan three-minute video “Fishing for Asian Carp.”

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, an awakening antiestablishment counterculture, and the waning of the world order of the WWII generation, the dematerialized, soft Marxist strategies of Conceptual art make a certain sense. A stoner-hippie ethos can be read in Nauman’s goofy “Thighing (Blue),” — a four-and-a-half minute video portrait of the artist massaging his thigh — and in Lee Lozano’s “No Title (Grass Piece)” (1969), in which the artist followed a directive to “stay high all day, every day, [to] see what happens.”

Nevertheless, the byzantine pedantry of so much Conceptual Art seems at odds with Lippard’s activist streak. The impenetrable erudition of Agnes Denes’s “Dialectic Triangulation” module and the maddening obscurantism of Bernar Venet’s “Relativity’s Track” — a recorded performance featuring three physicists lecturing simultaneously on different topics — seem to hold their viewers in contempt. When projects touch upon thorny political issues, they do so with the 10-foot pole of detached neutrality. Take, for example, Vito Acconci’s well-known “Following” piece — wherein the artist stalked random strangers around New York City. Speaking about the work, Acconci has said, “I am almost not an ‘I’ anymore; I put myself in the service of this scheme.” What might have been an experiment with surveillance and criminality becomes a textbook example of the decentered, antiauthorial subject of Conceptual Art. Of all the works made before 1972, only the Art Workers’ Coalition’s notorious “And babies” agitprop poster and Graciela Carnevale’s “Entrapment and Escape” wear their politics on their sleeve. Carnevale locked unsuspecting participants inside a storefront gallery until they smashed the storefront windows and escaped, orchestrating an allegory of political oppression and organized resistance.

The final chapter of the exhibition reflects Lippard’s critical shift from mandarin Conceptualism towards her engagement with a more explicitly political, subject-oriented feminism. Notes and ephemera from Lippard’s 1973 all-women show, “.c 7,500,” held at CalArts in Valencia, suggest a different, socially engaged Conceptualism. Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Fluxus-like rehearsal of mundane household tasks critiqued the devaluation of women’s labor. Athena Tacha took a pseudoscientific inventory of facial expressions. What the Bechers did for blast furnaces, Martha Wilson did for breast shapes.

In a 1977 article in the feminist journal Lippard co-founded, “Heresies,” she vehemently critiques the art she once promoted, writing, “Conceptual Art’s democratizing efforts and physical vehicles were canceled out by its neutral elitist content and its patronizing approach. From around 1967 to 1971, many of us involved in Conceptual Art saw that content as pretty revolutionary and thought of ourselves as rebels against the cool, hostile artifacts of the prevailing formalist and minimalist art. But we were so totally enveloped in the middle class approach to everything we did and saw, we couldn’t perceive how that pseudo-academic narrative piece or that art-world oriented action in the street were deprived of any revolutionary content by the fact that it was usually incompressible and alienating to the people ‘out there,’ no matter how fashionably downwardly mobile it might be in the art world.”

By 1973, the attenuated politics of conceptual art had become clear. Replacing painting and sculpture with instructions and documents wasn’t going to short-circuit the art market. Conceptual art became assimilated into the art historical cannon, and many conceptual artists became rich and famous. Ironically and inescapably, the Brooklyn Museum exhibition testifies to Conceptual Art’s absorption into the economy that it attempted to circumvent. Photography is verboten and index cards, mimeographs, and faxed correspondence are enclosed in glass vitrines like precious reliquaries. As the French conceptual artist and critic Daniel Buren sagely warned in his essay “Beware!,” a concept is reified as soon as it’s exhibited in an art context. Instead of doing away with the irksome art object, “the exhibited ‘concept’ becomes ideal-object.Ideas — like objects — can be commoditized, privileged, and consumed as art.

In her exhibition forward, Lippard poses a vexing question: “Why is the work documented here of any interest in 2012?” Almost 40 years after the Lippard argued for art’s dematerialization, we don’t seem to have moved past our anxiety over the art object. We are dubious of art for art’s sake, equally dubious of academic austerity and visual impoverishment. A particularly sketchy answer to this stalemate is so-called “object-oriented ontology,” a fashionable anti-anthropocentric metaphysics that attempts to scrutinize the existence of inanimate objects. As a major organizing theme of the recent Documenta (13), object-oriented ontology puts objects on level footing with humans, suggesting, as Modern Painters’s Steven Henry Madoff put it, “that things, not just humans, speak; things feel, are violated, and voice their wills.” This magical thinking unintentionally echoes Marx’s surrealistic description of the paranormal workings of commodity fetishism on a mundane household table: “So soon as it sets forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than ‘table-turning’ ever was.” Lippard, it turns out, may have been too harsh in judging Conceptual Art’s limitations. We can accept that it’s impossible, even undesirable, to transcend the art object, without succumbing to commodity fetishism wrapped in the bacon of seductive metaphysics. The positive legacy of “Six Years,” then, might be healthy dose of skepticism.

To see images from the show, click on the slideshow.

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Paula Deen Bonkers for Shell Art, Ryan McGinley Will Share Your Cab, and More

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Paula Deen Bonkers for Shell Art, Ryan McGinley Will Share Your Cab, and More

– Paula Deen Is an Artist: Turns out former butter evangelist and current weight loss expert has a hobby: art. A behind-the-scenes look inside her Savannah home on Woman's Day's website includes photos of her improbable and very detailed shell artwork. Inspired by a local Savannah woman known as The Shell Lady, Deen began hot-gluing seashells and starfish to basic stone busts. She calls it "the best therapy ever." But it isn't just busts she's starfishing: "I've done picture frames, the handles on serving utensils — you name it, I've shelled it, y'all!" she says. [Eater, PaulaDeen.com]

– Taxi TV Gets an Art Jolt: Thanks to the nonprofit Art Production Fund, Taxi TV screens will soon feature MTV "Art Breaks"-style video art sandwiched between its regular weather reports, local news, and Guess commercials. The first featured artist is Ryan McGinley, whose clip of his friend Jessica Tang wearing nothing but a gold wig and blue T-shirt as she parades through the streets of New York will run through February 5 in about 3,000 taxis. "It’s something I made this summer around the city, guerrilla style, with no permits or anything," McGinley said. [NYT]

– Korean and American Museums Team Up: As a result of a new partnership between museums in South Korea and the United States, art will travel between the two countries' institutions more freely in coming years, beginning with the painting and decorative arts exhibition "Art Across America" — drawn from the collections of LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Terra Foundation, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art — at the National Museum of Korea (February 4-May 19). Next year, the Korean institution will send an exhibition tentatively titled "The Art of the Joseon Dynasty, 1392-1910" to those museums in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Houston. [TAN]

– Banned Sex Manual Comes to Auction: A manual of sex and pregnancy first published in 1684 and banned in Britain until 1961 will go under the hammer in Edinburgh next week. The copy, dating from 1766, is expected to sell for between $490 and $650. "There were a lot of urban myths in the book, particularly about the risks of having sex outside marriage and the impact that could have on the birth of the child," said book specialist Cathy Marsden. Over time, the volume — titled "Aristotle's Compleat Master-Piece" to hide its risque content — became an oddball pornographic hit. [AI UK]

– Online Art Sales Account for 10 Percent of the Trade: Tucked into a now-familiar story questioning the viability of online art initiatives like Art.sy ("As a tool for broadening public engagement, art.sy is on surer footing; its business model, less so") is an interesting factoid: Online art sales account for 10 percent of the art trade, according to a March 2012 report by the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF). [Economist]

– Louvre-Lens Launches With Strong Attendance: The Louvre's new satellite location in northern France, Louvre-Lens, logged an impressive 140,000 visitors in its first month of operation, putting the €150-million ($197-million) museum on track to meet its first year attendance goal of 700,000. Among those visitors, more than half came from the surrounding region, while attendees from other areas of France accounted for 32 percent and Belgians made up 10 percent. [AFP]

– How Do You Authenticate a Picasso?: The question is more difficult than it sounds. For years, two ofthe Cubist's heirs issued competing certificates of authenticity; this fall, four of Picasso's five surviving children agreed to consolidate the authority to authenticate their father's works in the hands of his second-oldest child, Claude. But not everyone who matters is on board. Trust us, the knotty affair is more interesting than it seems. Best just to read the story. [ARTnews]

 Coffee Shop Art Made to Last: A mural on the side of the appropriately named coffee house Frescoes in Bedford, England is drawing applause for its flawless replication of a section of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling (to see the opus, click on our VIDEO OF THE DAY, below). The café's owner, Kevin Kavanagh footed most of the paint and lime plaster work's £12,000 ($19,500) bill himself. The artwork, created by local artist Ian Carstairs using a 3,500-year-old method, is now apparently more durable than the building on which it's painted. "The lime plaster mix that you put on first, you could hit it with a sledgehammer and it wouldn't break," Kavanagh said. [BBC]

– More and More Artists Making Wallpaper: From lining entire booths at fairs to selling roll online for three- and four-digit sums apiece, high-art wallpaper is drawing increased interest from artists, collectors, and interior decorators. "Artists are becoming more interested in that line between what's art and what's part of your everyday life," said artist Gregg Louis, "and wallpaper becomes this weird fuzzy space — is it art, or is it decoration?" [WSJ]

– Australia's Heritage Gum Trees Torched: Two gum trees in the Australian outback that were made famous when Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira included them in one of his watercolor landscape paintings — so famous, in fact, that they were slated to become national heritage sites — have been destroyed in an apparent act of arson. His paintings helped establish the gum tree as a symbol of Australian identity and, according to McCulloch's Encyclopedia of Australian Art author Susan McCulloch, the trees' destruction is "appalling and a tragic act of cultural vandalism." [Guardian]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Ian Carstairs's Michelangelo mural on a Bedford coffee shop 

 

ALSO ON ARTINFO:

6 Ways the Fiscal Cliff Deal Will Impact the Art World

A Panel of Pint-Sized Critics Sum Up NYC's New Math Museum

Louise Bourgeois's Dark Vision Reanimates a Romanesque Church in Rural France

A Piece of Tape From a Marina Abramovic Performance Goes Up For Sale on eBay

Largest Le Corbusier Exhibition Ever Produced in New York Coming to MoMA

How an Indiana High School Got a Multi-Million Dollar Art Collection

For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

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VIDEO: Artist Aidan Salakhova on the Changing Roles for Women in Modern Russia

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VIDEO: Artist Aidan Salakhova on the Changing Roles for Women in Modern Russia

In the Russian art world, Aidan Salakhova is a star. As a gallerist, she founded Moscow's Aidan Gallery, while as an artist she has showed at the Venice Biennale, albeit not without controversy, and is known for work that tackles issues of gender, often via metaphoric uses of material. Now, she has been honored with a selection of her work — most of it made in the last three years — at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, titled "Fascinans and Tremendum," and ARTINFO's Vanessa Yurkevich caught up with her about the show.

 

by Vanessa Yurkevich,Visual Arts,Visual Arts
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Slideshow: Fisker

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WEEK IN REVIEW: Art and the Fiscal Cliff, Pirating Zaha Hadid in China, More

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WEEK IN REVIEW: Art and the Fiscal Cliff, Pirating Zaha Hadid in China, More

Our most-talked-about stories in Visual Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, December 31, 2012 - January 4, 2013:

ART

— The deal to stop the perilous tumble down the fiscal cliff will have both positive and negative results for the art world, and Rachel Corbett listed six of the most significant.

— Chloe Wyma examined the current exhibition “Materializing Six Years: Lucy Lippard and the Emergence of Conceptual Art” at the Brooklyn Museum, and pondered the relevancy of conceptual art four decades after Lucy Lippard’s seminal book.

— The village of Bonnieux in the south of France contains the Couvent d'Ô, with a chapel that houses sculptures Louise Bourgeois crafted especially for the former convent space, and Benjamin Sutton related his visit to the offbeat art pilgrimage site.

— “One on One” at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art has rooms experienced individually with installations and art environments, and Alexander Forbes explained why it was the most important Berlin exhibition of 2012.

— Who better to review the new youth-oriented National Museum of Mathematics than a coalition of grade schoolers? Kate Deimling accompanied the child critics to “MoMath to rate its success in encouraging enthusiasm for calculating.   

DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE

— A replica of Zaha Hadid’s Wangjing SOHO building is being constructed in China by “pirate developers,” and Kelly Chan looked at its part in a new wave of counterfeit architecture clones.

— The MoMA announced that this June they will open the largest exhibition on the modern architect Le Corbusier ever staged in New York.

— A massive Hadrian-era arts center was uncovered in Rome, and believed by some to be the greatest unearthed discovery in the city since the Forum.

— The bolt strength of the new Barclays Centerwas revealed to be faulty, long before its grand opening.

— Janelle Zara wrote that Jean Nouvel’s Paris Philharmonieescaped the large arts cuts in France, and is still planned to be built in the Parc de Villette

FASHION & STYLE

— The Spring/Summer 2013 Meadham Kirchhoff collection has been unveiled with a sugary baroque spectacle of a film on their website, and Nicholas Remsen explored their sartorial direction, along with their recent hyperactive involvement with menswear.

— With David Bowie, a Metropolitan Museum punk party, and dandies galore, Ann Binlot selected some of the most promising fashion exhibitions of 2013.

Pitti Immagine Uomo, the biannual tradeshow for sharp-dressed men, arrives next week, and Heather Corcoran ranked five reasons for fashionable gents to get excited.

— The sprawling red carpets with their flitting stars and starlets offered numerous fashion highlights in 2012, and ARTINFO chronicled some favorites.

Steven Kolb, the CEO at the Council of Fashion Designers of America, talked to Lee Carter about his new gig and its unique aspects, like working with Diane von Furstenberg.

PERFORMING ARTS

Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” has returned, and J. Hoberman considered this popular artistic portrayal of the passage of time.

— With masks and rants about the media, Kanye West arrived in 2013 with the promise of a year of crazy ahead.

Nina Hoss stars as the title character in Christian Petzold’s new feature “Barbara,” and Bryan Hood spoke to the actress on the DDR-set film and her longtime collaboration with the director.

— Craig Hubert discussed the role of silence in music with musician and composer William Basinski, whose “The Disintegration Loops” were rereleased this past fall.  

— If the biopic “Rodham” was produced, could Scarlett Johansson pull off a portrayal of a young Hillary Clinton? Graham Fuller speculated

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— Vanessa Yurkevich reported from Moscow on Aidan Salakhova’s exhibition at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, which involves a modern feminine take on hijabs. 

 

 

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Montblanc Sprouts a Patriotic Shop in the U.S. for the Presidential Inauguration

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Montblanc Sprouts a Patriotic Shop in the U.S. for the Presidential Inauguration
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Montblanc will make an appearance in Washington, D.C. during the Presidential Inauguration. From January 18 to 22, the Swiss luxury brand is joining forces with the St. Regis Washington, D.C. and publisher Thornwillow Press for a pop-up boutique in the hotel’s lobby, reports WWD.

A variety of stately accessories, including cufflinks, pens, timepieces, and leather goods will be available at the shop, the first pop-up location for Montblanc in the U.S. A bound book of Barack Obama’s first inaugural address will be offered in conjunction with the President’s second inauguration.

President Obama won’t be the only American leader featured in the boutique. Montblanc’s “America’s Signatures for Freedom” collection, a series of limited edition fountain pens launched in 2007, pays tribute to Thomas JeffersonAndrew Jackson, James Madison, and John Adams. Thornwillow Press will present the hand-printed letterpress book “A Presidential Miscellany,” by Lewis Lapham, which touches on highlights from past inaugurations – the book will be given to hotel guests that week and sold at the shop.

Finally, visitors will be provided with Montblanc pens and stationery to write letters to President Obama, which will be delivered by St. Regis butlers to the White House.

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Cool Calendars for 2013

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