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Still from Reina Gossett and Sasha Wortzel’s Happy Birthday, Marsha! (detail), 2018, on which Arthur Jafa served as cinematographer.
COURTESY THE ARTISTS
For the Ages
The Spring 2018 issue of ARTnews, on newsstands now, features “Icons” as its theme and includes profiles of five impactful figures who loom large in the art world: Dara Birnbaum, Arthur Jafa, Amalia Mesa-Baines, Fred Moten, and Cady Noland. Read about them all in the pages of the magazine and, starting this morning, online at Artnews.com. [ARTnews]
Museum Practices
The Art Newspaper ranked the top-ten shows in nine different categories on the basis of attendance figures in the past year or so. Topics featured include “Post-Impressionist and Modern,” “Thematic,” “Contemporary,” and more. [The Art Newspaper]
It turns out you can order drinks and carry them around while touring Madame Tussauds wax museum in New York. “Electric Lemonade” sells for $9.95, and margaritas are $10. [The New York Times]
Purchase Power
A Tuscan villa once owned by Michelangelo is on the market, and you can make it yours for $9 million. [The Daily Beast]
In Hong Kong, Sotheby’s is putting a Picasso up for auction on Saturday on top of four paintings it’s offering for sale at Art Basel Hong Kong—all part of a “multi-pronged Picasso marketing strategy [that] follows years of efforts by auction houses to promote the artist in Hong Kong and in mainland China, efforts that have paid off handsomely, they say.” [The Art Newspaper]
Critics
The Whitney Museum’s exhibition devoted to Nick Mauss, a multidisciplinary artist who drew on the history of ballet and early modernism in New York, pleased New York Times dance critic Alastair Macaulay. Near the beginning of his rave, he writes, “You go to sample it as history; you absorb it as poetry.” [The New York Times]
Renoir painted some onions, and New York Review of Books writer Christopher Benfy really, really likes them. “Their stems interlaced, these onions are dancing, taking cues from one another as they follow the meandering red and blue stripes of the napkin, or dance floor, that encircles them,” he writes. “There’s a rugged, windswept feel to the picture.” [The New York Review of Books]
For the Los Angeles Times, classical music critic Mark Swed saw Taylor Mac’s ambitious performance piece A 24-Decade History of Popular Music and opined on the experience under a headline deeming it a “necessary 246-song attack on the heteronormative narrative.” [Los Angeles Times]
Brutality
Michael Rakowitz, an Iraqi-American who the Guardian deemed “one of the world’s most political—and powerful—artist-provocateurs,” has set out to reconstruct all 7,000 objects known to have been looted from the National Museum of Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion of that country in 2003. [The Guardian]
Hal Foster is giving a lecture at the National Gallery of Art next month under the title “Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period.” For Artnet News, Ben Davis spoke to the eminent scholar-theorist for the sake of a Q&A. [Artnet News]
The Guardian has a ripping slideshow devoted to a new book of photos of “the Golden Age of British wrestling” from 1950 to 1990. [The Guardian]
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