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Salomon Gessner, A Park with Figures at a Statue Near Water, ca. 1775.
COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Fickleness
Guardian critic Jonathan Jones does not care for Edward Burne-Jones, the pre-Raphaelite painter (now on show at Tate Britain) who made “art that shows how boring beauty can be.” [The Guardian]
Bob Nickas wrote about ’70s-era guerrilla performance work by Stephen Varble—a New York artist who today “would be immediately notorious, slid down Youtube as if it were a waterpark slide, commissioned to present new work at Performa, seated next to Marina Abramovic at the gala dinner for the Met’s Costume Institute.” [Affidavit]
Artists
Kehinde Wiley talked to the New Yorker’s Vinson Cunningham about “painting masculinity and blackness, from President Obama to the people of Ferguson.” [The New Yorker]
Jenny Kroik talked about Arthur Avenue, the painting she made of a woman in a Bronx pastry shop for the cover of this week’s New Yorker. “Of course, I surrounded her with as many delicious pastries as I could fit in the composition, because I want to eat them all!” [The New Yorker]
Ugo Rondinone is unveiling stacked day-glo rocks of the kind he installed outside Las Vegas in England as part of the Liverpool Biennial. “The city is so grey—it needs some strong, aggressive colors,” he said. [The Guardian]
Tributes
“Emmanuel Macron woos French art world with call for new cultural policy that fights extremism.” Among other things, the president announced plans to revise the visa system for artists wishing to reside in France. [The Art Newspaper]
Wen C. Fong, a renowned scholar from Princeton University who helped the Metropolitan Museum of Art build one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of Asian art, died at 88. [The New York Times]
Mark Swed on a timely opera: “‘Satyagraha,’ the term Mohandas K. Gandhi designated for nonviolent resistance, is often translated as ‘truth force.’ But as the title for Philip Glass’ first opera written for the forces of an opera company and finally reaching Los Angeles on Saturday night, 38 years after its premiere, in a must-see magnificent production by Los Angeles Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, I prefer something like ‘the force of truth’—with the understanding that neither force nor truth is an absolute term.” [Los Angeles Times]
Misc.
Some shade? “Christie’s, Trying to Be Relevant, Puts AI Art on the Block.” [The New York Times]
A Brooklyn street “will likely soon bear the name of the late local hip-hop legend, Christopher ‘Biggie Smalls’ Wallace, after members of the neighborhood’s community board . . . approved a pitch to co-name the block where the rapper grew up.” [Brooklyn Paper]
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