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Monuments
Congolese activist Mwazulu Diyabanza has been staging protests that involve attempts to take artworks from institutions in Europe so as to return them to their places of origin. After doing so at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, he will go to trial at the end of this month. [The New York Times]
Here’s the story of how and why Russian billionaire, chess enthusiast, and art collector Andrey Filatov—and others like him—are trying to buy up culturally fractious monuments that have been taken down after public protests. [The Washington Post]
Exhibitions
“In a world first, Rotterdam’s Boijmans museum has put its entire collection on display in a mammoth new warehouse. As the V&A considers a similar experiment, is this ‘open storage’ model the future?” [The Guardian]
Cassidy George wrote about “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” a show of art by artists in prison and others who are non-incarcerated at the newly reopened MoMA PS1 in New York. [The Cut]
A show at the British Museum in London focuses on tantra in the service of a pressing question: “Is there more to it than marathon sex and massages?” [The Guardian]
Photoville—comprising more than 60 exhibitions of photography by 300 artists in public places across New York—serves as “a reminder of photography’s power not just to document crisis, but to help imagine better lives.” [The New York Times]
Artists
Kehinde Wiley, Ashley James, Naomi Beckwith, Kimberly Drew, and more feature on the Root 100 list of “most influential African Americans in 2020.” [The Root]
Tiona Nekkia McClodden shows and tells about some ephemera that’s meaningful to her for This Long Century, a site that features artists musing over “such intimate work as sketchbooks, personal memorabilia, annotated typescripts, short essays, home movies and near impossible to find archival work.” [This Long Century]
In New York, Colin Moynihan has the story of changes made to Metronome—”one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.” After a modification, the giant digital clock near Union Square that used to tell the time in a cryptic fashion “is [now] measuring what two artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, present as a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.” [The New York Times]
Misc.
Allegations of bribery in a case involving Marlborough gallery and its former director of Asian arts along with a retired curator from the Guimet Museum and the family of the artist Chu Teh-Chun “shines a light on growing cosiness between curators, state museums and galleries.” [The Art Newspaper]
Luc Sante wrote about the gritty, grimy pleasures of reading old publications on newsprint, in an excerpt from his new book Maybe the People Would Be the Times. [The Paris Review]
Published at Tue, 22 Sep 2020 13:29:04 +0000