Cécile B Evans, “What the Heart Wants” at the Berlin Biennale
- In this podcast, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation discusses keeping artists in New York and the city’s affordability crisis. Confession: I haven’t heard the whole piece, but apparently the foundation is shifting its focus to inequality. [WNYC]
- Jason Farago is not a fan of the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale. It’s too sarcastic, it’s offensively aloof in the context of unfolding humanitarian crisis, the organizers seem to have given up faith in the goodness of art in favor of courting LOLs—these all sound like valid criticisms. We haven’t seen the Biennale yet, but it seems as if DIS was more concerned with keeping the curation “on brand” than making sure works didn’t get drowned out in a sea of normcore sameness. Which is a shame, because DIS’s politics and cleverness beyond surface could’ve really shown through with a project on this scale. Still, Farago notes highlights. On Cécile B Evans’ video installation: “Evans imagines the end of the world as routed through an Aaliyah video, in which love itself has been commoditised, and slickness is no escape from psychological or ecological meltdown.” [The Guardian]
- Art Basel’s Unlimited section—where work that’s too big for traditional galleries is presented—has a record breaking 88 massive pieces on view this year. It’s curated by Gianni Jetzer of the Hirschorn Museum, and a lot of the work looks pretty boring but very big. A notable exception, Hans Op de Beeck’s concrete “The Collector’s House” is so cool I would live in this installation. [Artsy]
- Liste charges a fee to galleries that present work by artists who are more than 40 years old. Its focus remains on youth. Is it any good this year? Anything remarkable about the fair? Impossible to tell from Nate Freeman’s report, which mostly just says it’s retained its youthful spirit. [ARTnews]
- Ah, the convoluted web of art, real estate, and bankruptcy. Ace Gallery in Los Angeles is in serious financial straits, paying massive rent on a building that’s become central to their brand identity. But I’m not sure real estate alone is to blame for Ace’s dilemma—friends who have worked with Ace tell me it’s a mess across the board, from rumors about attempting to sell work it didn’t technically own to last-minute pull-outs from art fairs. Ace sounds like it’s been poorly managed on many fronts. [The Art Newspaper]
- ¡Escandalo! The Clark Art Institute has loaned 28 paintings from the Prado Museum—including work from Titian, Tintoretto, Guercino, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens— for an exhibition about art the Spanish royal family had to hide from the Catholic Church because it was too sexy. The exhibition is called Splendor, Myth, Vision, (really? That sounds like a New Age self-help book, not an exhibition about secret sexy paintings) and runs through October. [Observer]
- Kaleidoscopic GIFs by Anna Taberko. [Colossal]
- Bret McCabe reviews Hasan Elahi’s latest show and I really want to see it. Elahi obsessively documents his movements, meals, and minutia as an absurdist critique of the surveillance state. The truly ironic thing about his work, though, is that it actually discloses less than most people’s social media presences. [BmoreArt]
