| | The First Art Newspaper on the Net |    | Established in 1996 | Sunday, December 31, 2023 |
| | Botticelli, beyond the Renaissance | |
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Sandro Botticelli and Workshop, Virgin and Child With Saint John the Baptist and Six Singing Angels, circa 1490. Tempera on panel. Viewers gravitate to his astonishingly tender paintings, but at the Legion of Honor, his preparatory drawings offer a view of a gifted master of line. (Borghese Gallery via The New York Times)
by Karen Rosenberg
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- As the largest loan exhibition of Sandro Botticelli in the United States to date, Botticelli Drawings, at the Legion of Honor, sounds at first like a celebration of a Renaissance talent on the order of the Metropolitan Museums celebration of Michelangelos drawings from a few years ago. But this is not that kind of show and Botticelli, as we come to see, is not that kind of artist, even if the auction houses would like us to think so. Resisting the pressure to blockbusterize Botticelli, this exhibition is true to the material (which is limited in quantity; fewer than three dozen of the artists drawings are known to survive) and to Botticellis quirks (which are manifold). In place of the genius polymath, it offers an undeniably gifted but erratic master of line a figure not intimidating in his virtuosity, like a Leonardo da Vinci or a Michelangelo, but certainly endearing. Born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in Florence around 14 ... More |
The Best Photos of the Day Alexander Reben's retrospective exhibit "AI AM I?" on display at the Crocker Museum of Art in Sacramento, Calif., Dec. 19, 2023. Reben is taking his tech-savvy perspective to OpenAI, a company that some in the art world believe is a threat to their future. (Rozette Halvorson/The New York Times)
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| Climate Museum pops up in SoHo, capital of buying stuff | | Exhibition features the works of Riccardo Guarneri, Marianna Gioka and Min Woo Nam | | A 'Holopoem' for the Cosmos | 
After four tries, its founder hopes patrons support a permanent home. We burn through a lot of carbon having to move every six months, she said.
by Helene Stapinski
NEW YORK, NY.- On a 60-degree Saturday in December no longer unseasonably warm in Manhattan by todays climate standards hordes of holiday shoppers flooded the luxury shopping center that is SoHo. On a street lined with high-end stores like Chanel and Canada Goose stood a young woman handing out free coffee to lure people into a storefront that has nothing or maybe everything to do with conspicuous consumption. The Climate Museum, after wandering from pop-up to pop-up in New York City for the past five years, has found a new temporary home (through April) at 105 Wooster St. in a 4,200-square-foot, 13-foot-high loft space with a skylight. Using a blend of informational panels and artwork, the free museum hopes to educate ... More | | 
Riccardo Guarneri, 'Una rivisitazione in rosa', 2022 (detail). 95 x 120 cm.
LONDON.- gallery rosenfeld is presenting the exhibition Within and Beyond - Looking into the Infinite, which features the works of Riccardo Guarneri, Marianna Gioka and Min Woo Nam. Each of these three artists are very different, both in the language they use in their art and in their very different ages, yet all share similar preoccupations. None of them are making any political, economic, or social declarations but rather they are united in a metaphysical search for meaning both deep within us and beyond us in the unfathomable universe. The eldest of the three is the artist Riccardo Guarneri. His finely wrought and refined artworks are realised with the simplest of materials; pencils, coloured crayons, rulers, rubbers etc. Essentially no different from those that young children utilise when they take their first steps into art. The titles are a literal description of the apparent contents of the works. ... More | | 
Eduardo Kacs Ãgora, a hologram encoded on a sliver of glass, at the Henrique Faria gallery in New York, Dec. 5, 2023. (Balarama Heller/The New York Times)
by Frank Rose
NEW YORK, NY.- Artist Eduardo Kac was at his New York gallery the other day to show a reporter his work: a hologram encoded on a sliver of glass resting inside a tiny metal case. This little package is the capstone of Kacs career to date an artifact he created in 1986 that is now, finally, about to find its intended home in space. On Jan. 8, it is scheduled to be on board a Vulcan Centaur rocket as it lifts off from Cape Canaveral and heads into orbit around the sun. This holographic artwork a holopoem, Kac calls it might or might not be discovered hundreds of thousands of years from now by whatever creatures are around to find it. But for the moment, it was here at the Henrique Faria gallery, ... More |
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| UCLA's new Nimoy Theater highlights historic architecture | | An artist in residence on AI's territory | | Where you can still glimpse the glory of a vanished grand hotel | 
According to Page & Turnbull, The Nimoy reimagines the historic Crest Theatre, also called the UCLAN Theatre, from a historic 1940s movie and performing arts venue and its more recent landmarked renovation, into an engaging, modern cultural offering full of original architectural detailing and art. Photo: Courtesy Shawmut.
NEW YORK, NY.- A newly renovated live performance venue unites an iconic historic building and interior with state-of-the-art sound, production and stage design at the UCLA Nimoy Theater. Known now as The Nimoy and named for the actor and philanthropist Leonard Nimoy, the updating of a landmarked, Art Deco-inspired renovation from the late 1980s creates a new home for the Center for the Art of Performance UCLA, or CAP UCLA, says preservation architect Page & Turnbull, which collaborated with the projects architect, BAR Architects & Interiors. According to Page & Turnbull, The Nimoy reimagines the historic Crest Theatre, also called the UCLAN Theatre, from a historic 1940s movie and performing arts venue and its more recent landmarked renovation, into an engaging, modern cultural offering full of original architectural detailing and art. An influential leader ... More | | 
Alexander Reben is taking his tech-savvy perspective to OpenAI, a company that some in the art world believe is a threat to their future.
by Leslie Katz
SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- At a reception for OpenAIs first developer conference in San Francisco last month, a crowd mingled, wine in hand, as withering criticism of art created with artificial intelligence flashed on a blue wall at the front of the room. Ive seen more engaging art from a malfunctioning printer, one critic jabbed. The fine art equivalent of elevator music, huffed another. Inoffensive, unmemorable and terminally dull. It might seem an odd strategy for OpenAI, the company behind widely used generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, to promote scorn of AI art, until you catch the twist: AI itself wrote the criticism. Alexander Reben, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated artist behind the presentation, combined his own custom code with GPT-4, a version of the large language model that powers the ChatGPT online chatbot. Next month, Reben, 38, will become OpenAIs first artist in residence. He steps in as generative AI advances at ... More | | 
The Hotel Pennsylvania in New York, Dec. 18, 2019, its 100th anniversary year. It was the largest hotel in the world when it opened in 1919. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
by Dan Barry
NEW YORK, NY.- An absence rises from the Manhattan pavement, a Seventh Avenue nothingness soaring 22 stories into the midtown sky. There is vacancy now where the Hotel Pennsylvania once stood. Its Ionic columns and limestone facade, its guest rooms and conference rooms and dining rooms gone. Its whistling doormen and bustling bellboys, weekend vacationers and afternoon adulterers, its peddlers and show dogs and tipsy conventioneers, all moving in rhythm to some faint big-band beat history. Demolition crews carried away the last of the century-old hotel in late summer, leaving a void across from Pennsylvania Station that reflects either progress or shortsightedness. Its planned replacement will be a supertall office tower for a city in no need of more office space. But if you know where to look say, in a certain Hells Kitchen shop window you might see a dazzling hint of what once ... More |
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| Kehrer to publish 'Salt of the Earth by Barbara Boissevain - A Visual Odyssey of a Transforming Landscape' | | Jim Ladd, free-form radio trailblazer, is dead at 75 | | The building spree that reshaped Manhattan's skyline? It's over. | 
Salt of the Earth is a striking monograph, which skillfully captures humanitys impact on the environment.
NEW YORK, NY.- Twenty years ago, in the South Bay region of San Francisco, the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project was established to address the impact of human activity on the diminished marshes of the Bay and the role wetlands play in protecting vulnerable communities from sea level rise. This expansive environmental project is the largest tidal wetland restoration project on the West Coast and is dedicated to converting over 15,000 acres of commercial salt ponds at the south end of San Francisco Bay to a mix of tidal marsh, mudflat, and other wetland habitats. Since the 1800s, the ecosystems of the tidal marshes have been replaced by salt ponds, and in her new book, Salt of the Earth: A Visual Odyssey of a Transforming Landscape (Kehrer), California-based photographer Barbara Boissevain documents the efforts being made to return these ... More | | 
An institution of the airwaves in Los Angeles and beyond, he capitalized on the freedom the FM band offered in the 1970s to blaze his own path.
by Alex Williams
NEW YORK, NY.- Jim Ladd, a maverick Los Angeles disc jockey who helped pioneer free-form FM radio in the 1970s, and who went on to become a rock institution and an inspiration for Tom Pettys song The Last DJ, died Dec. 17 at his home near Sacramento, California. He was 75. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Helene Hodge Ladd. With his laid-back manner and his considerable equestrian skills, Ladd was known to longtime listeners as the Lonesome LA Cowboy, after a 1973 song by the New Riders of the Purple Sage. His expansive musical knowledge, saucy humor and outspoken political views made him a celebrity in rock circles not only in Los Angeles, where he had storied runs at KLOS and KMET, but also nationally, thanks to his long-running hourlong ... More | | 
One Vanderbilt, which is more than 99 percent leased, in Manhattan, on April 19, 2023. New office buildings flourished over the past 25 years in Manhattan, but a construction drought has begun. (Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times)
by Matthew Haag
NEW YORK, NY.- The Manhattan office construction boom is over. Just three large office towers of more than 500,000 square feet are being built across New York City, with two expected to open in 2024 or 2025 and nothing else projected to go up for years. Normally, a handful of sites that size would be in various stages of construction, with at least one opening every year since 2018, according to JLL, a real estate services firm. Nearly 20 large office buildings that developers have proposed, including the final tower near ground zero, have yet to break ground. Many are on indefinite hold as developers face numerous challenges. Rising construction costs and interest rates have significantly driven ... More |
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| Mike Nussbaum, celebrated Chicago theater actor, dies at 99 | | Mazzoleni marks the 10th anniversary of Agostino Bonalumi's death with a major retrospective | | The 2024 of Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo | 
Mike Nussbaum, widely regarded as the dean of Chicago theater, at home in the Lakeview neighborhood on Oct. 10, 2014. (Nathan Weber/The New York Times)
by Penelope Green
NEW YORK, NY.- Mike Nussbaum, an actor known as the dean of Chicago theater who found success during his early association with David Mamet, the Chicago-born playwright, died Dec. 23 at his home in Chicago. He was 99. His death was announced by his daughter Karen Nussbaum, a labor organizer. For the past decade, Nussbaum had also been known as the countrys oldest working actor, a distinction that mildly irritated him. (For admiring journalists, he gamely performed his daily regimen of 50 pushups, a practice he kept up until he was 98.) He often said he would have preferred to have been recognized solely for his acting skills, not the age at which he was acting. Nussbaum came up in Chicagos community theaters, notably Hull House, an incubator of talent ... More | | 
Agostino Bonalumi, Il Teatro delle Forze. Installation view, © Alto Piano. Photo: Agostino Osio.
TURIN.- The exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini, focuses on one of the most remarkable phases of Bonalumis creative activity (from the late 1960s through the 1970s), but begins by exploring two of Bonalumis lesser-known works which require a multidisciplinary approach to their exploration. Alongside a rich selection of large-scale plastic and or three-dimensional works, the show also presents a series of original documents and sketches, thanks to the collaboration with the Archivio Bonalumi in Milan, the Fondazione Cini in Venice and loans from the Archivio Storico of Romes Teatro dellOpera and and Fondazione Egri per la Danza, Turin. The exhibition, curated by Marco Scotini, focuses on one of the most remarkable phases of Bonalumis creative activity (from the late 1960s through the 1970s), but begins by exploring two of Bonalumis lesser-known works which require a multidisciplinary approach to their exploration. Agostino Bonalumi: il Teatro delle Forze foc ... More | | 
This is the map of the journey I invite you to make, connecting the dots between the exhibitions and the works we have chosen to draw our archipelago.
by Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo
TURIN.- This year, Hans Ulrich Obrist gave me a perfect image to describe Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. During a long and intense conversation, we were reflecting on the history of the Fondazione, on its venues and exhibitions: Hans Ulrich thinks that all together they form an archipelago. The idea of the archipelago is excellent. I like to think of an archipelago of different places -each with its own soul, its own architecture, its own territory- where, from time to time, to invite the artist best suited to interpret them. Our conversation is now published within the pages of Reaching for the Stars, the catalogue ... More |
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Robert Pattinson on the Character of Curation
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 36 hours in Córdoba, SpainNEW YORK, NY.- The winds of innovation are again rustling the orange trees shading the lanes and plazas in Córdoba, a city in the Andalusia region of southern Spain. Visitors can trace Córdobas history from its Roman ruins, to the Moorish architecture left by five centuries of Muslim rule (when the city was one of Europes largest and most cosmopolitan capitals), to its later churches and Christian palaces. While many day-trippers move on before nightfall, todays Córdoba rewards a few days exploration: not only to enjoy its monuments (the city has four UNESCO designations), but to see how young artists and chefs are mining the citys rich multicultural past. In winter there are fewer crowds and milder temperatures, and Córdoba is now even easier (and cheaper) to get to, with a new high-speed rail operator, Iryo, competing for fares ... More  NYC officials reassure revelers before New Year's Eve festivitiesNEW YORK, NY.- New York officials Friday tried to reassure people planning to take in Times Square on New Years Eve that there were no specific credible threats against Sundays festivities. The Police Department is preparing for hundreds of thousands of attendees at the annual ball drop in Times Square and will deploy thousands of officers, including 631 who graduated from the Police Academy on Friday, Jeffrey Maddrey, the polices chief of department, said at a news conference Friday. Law enforcement will be monitoring an expanded area in Manhattan with canine units and officers on horseback. Helicopters and boats will also be deployed. The full complement of our public safety apparatus will be on display, Mayor Eric Adams said at the conference. Drones will be deployed along the outer perimeter of the security zone surrounding ... More  Need a home for 80,000 puzzles? Try an Italian castle.NEW YORK, NY.- Meet the Millers, George and Roxanne, proprietors of the worlds largest collection of mechanical puzzles: physical objects that a puzzler holds and manipulates while seeking a solution. In total, the Miller collection an accumulation of collections, and collections of collections amounts to more than 80,000 puzzles. It comprises some 5,000 Rubiks Cubes, including a 2-by-2-by-2 rendering of Darth Vaders head. And there are more than 7,000 wooden burr puzzles, such as the interlocking, polyhedral creations by Stewart Coffin, a Massachusetts puzzle maker; they evoke a hybrid of a pine cone and a snowflake and are George Millers favorites. Roxanne Miller is fond of their 140 brass, bronze and gold puzzle sculptures by Spanish artist Miguel Berrocal; Goliath, a male torso in 79 ... More  A pilgrimage to Verdi-landSANTAGATA.- I was 15 when I went to my first Giuseppe Verdi opera, Il Trovatore, at the Met, the old Met, in 1964. I could barely figure out what was going on but didnt care. Leontyne Price sang Leonora, and I was in awe of her plush, beautiful voice. The singing, the chorus, the orchestra, the emotional drama, the music with its mixture of soaring melody, intensity and structure (though I couldnt have expressed this back then) all hooked me. Two months later I was back at the Met for Verdis Otello starring, no less, Renata Tebaldi as Desdemona. I still remember the poignant warmth and uncanny bloom of her voice as she sang the sighing refrain of salce, salce in the Willow Song. I would go on to hear, and eventually review, most of the Verdi operas in productions around the world. I studied the scores in music classes ... More  Anna Jermolaewa's Swan Lake: Austrian Contribution to the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di VeneziaVIENNA.- Swan Lake is the exhibition title of the Austrian contribution to the Biennale Arte 2024 in Venice, conceived by artist Anna Jermolaewa and curated by Gabriele Spindler. In her work, Anna Jermolaewa, born in Leningrad (USSR) and based in Vienna since 1989, has proven a precise observer of human coexistence, its social conditions and political prerequisites. Her process results in videos, photographs, and drawings, as well as room-spanning mises-en-scène, where she questions, in a critical yet humorous fashion, seemingly insignificant and trivial manifestations of the human condition. However, Jermolaewas art is humorous and anecdotal only at first glance, behind it lies a clear critique of political ... More  In the wake of hope: The 2024 Museion programMILAN.- In 2024, Museion will focus on sustainable social engagement. This will be achieved not only by looking at historical and contemporary artistic models, but also through the involvement of institutional and private partners and foundations with whom Museion will collaborate to expand its exhibition program and collection. Special attention will also be paid to the promotion of young artists and regional and international transdisciplinary exchanges. What follows hope? The spring exhibition program will spark a rebirth, in various ways. RENAISSANCE_2024, a major exhibition of works by young artists with ties to Alto Adige and Milan, will focus on forms of regenerative artistic practice. The spirit of these works, which hovers between independence and belonging, visual and applied art, can also be found in the legacies of earlier Italian ... More  Hauser & Wirth announces representation of Uman in joint partnership with Nicola Vassell GalleryLONDON.- Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Marc Payot, Co-Presidents of Hauser & Wirth, recently announced the gallerys representation of the artist Uman in equal partnership with Nicola Vassell Gallery, NY. In undertaking this collaboration on behalf of the critically admired Somalia-born, New York based painter and sculptor, Hauser & Wirth and Nicola Vassell hope to model a new kind of alliance between galleries operating at different scalesan approach wherein full transparency and intensive resource sharing can contribute to the further development of artists careers and the future health of the wider gallery ecosystem. Their first jointly organized exhibition of Umans work will open to the public on 30 January 2024 at Hauser & Wirth in London, where the show will remain on view through 1 April 2024. In October 2025, Umans ... More  New Museum extends exhibitions through March 3, 2024NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum announced the extension of Judy Chicago: Herstory and Puppies Puppies (Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivo): Nothing New through March 3, 2024. The most comprehensive New York museum survey of Judy Chicagos work to date, Herstory emcompasses six decades of Chicagos career across a plethora of media spanning four floors of the museum. The exhibition also illuminates her tireless efforts as a cultural historian through The City of Ladies, a show-within-the-show spotlighting the work of more than eighty other women essential to the history of art and Chicagos own practice. Also extended through March 3, 2024, is Nothing New, Jade Guanaro Kuriki-Olivos first New York museum solo exhibition exploring notions of surveillance and transparency in relation to trans and racial identities. ... More  Aaron Wright joins the Southbank Centre as Head of Performance and DanceLONDON.- Aaron Wright has been appointed Head of Performance and Dance at the Southbank Centre to lead its performance arts programme including dance, theatre, comedy and live art. Currently Artistic Director at Fierce in Birmingham, Aaron will join the Southbank Centres Artistic Programming team in April and will report to Mark Ball, Artistic Director. Aaron will lead on the long-term strategy for Performance and Dance, building relationships and partnerships with artists, producers and organisations to develop innovative projects and programmes. He will be responsible for curating programme strands for performance, including a dance programme, an international programme and a programme of interdisciplinary performance, ensuring a diverse and exciting performance programme at the Southbank Centre. Aaron will ... More |
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PhotoGalleries 
Gabriele Münter 
TARWUK 
Awol Erizku 
Leo Villareal
Flashback On a day like today, Italian painter Giovanni Boldini was born December 31, 1842. Giovanni Boldini (31 December 1842 - 11 July 1931) was an Italian genre and portrait painter who lived and worked in Paris for most of his career. According to a 1933 article in Time magazine, he was known as the "Master of Swish" because of his flowing style of painting.
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