A life-sized statue of a Roman emperor depicted as the Greek hero Hercules was discovered near the Appian Way, ancient Rome’s first highway. The statue was recovered on January 25 during a sewer repair project.

The statue’s face emerged as a bulldozer was tearing through old pipelines. On-site archaeologists investigated the find.

The marble statue has Hercules’s trademark lion skin pelt and club, with frown lines on its forehead that are meant to indicate of a time of deep crisis for the Roman Empire. Its style is typical for 3rd-century depictions of emperors.

Archaeologists believe that the statue might be Emperor Decius, who ruled Rome from 249 CE to 251 CE. Decius was the first Roman emperor to be killed in battle by a foreign enemy. He died while fighting against the Visigoths in present-day Bulgaria, and was also responsible for the first organized execution of Christians.

The statue now exists as several broken pieces, as it sustained some accidental damage during its discovery. It is currently undergoing cleaning and restoration ahead of its public display.

This week, a French appeals court upheld the charges against Jean-Luc Martinez, the former president and director of the Louvre in Paris, for his alleged complicity in the trafficking of antiquities from Egypt.  

Martinez, who led the Louvre from 2013 to 2021, was charged in May for “complicity in fraud,” money laundering, and “facilitating” the purchase of artifacts linked to a vast trafficking ring that has been the target of a years-long police inquiry. French authorities suspect that the network of smugglers and their accomplices have sold art and relics to museums and galleries worldwide, including the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi outpost between 2014 and 2017. 

Martinez’s former colleague, the curator and archaeologist Jean-Francois Charnier, was also charged for his suspected involvement in the operation. Both are expected to appeal the ruling in France’s supreme court, per Le Monde. 

When Martinez and Charnier were first charged last year, the art community in Paris and beyond was stunned. Martinez, France’s current official ambassador for international cooperation on cultural heritage issue, had dedicated his recent career to the preservation of art in conflict zones and had authored a report that France presented to the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization that detailed new strategies for deterring looting. 

In November 2022, the public prosecutor requested to have the charges against Martinez dismissed following a re-examination of the evidence against him. The prosecutor’s decision seemed to signal that Martinez, a trained archeologist, had been wrongfully implicated in the case. According to the French legal system, an indictment does not ensure the defendant will stand trial, and charges can be overturned by a special magistrate at any point in the investigation.

It may have been only a couple days since word leaked out that a long-awaited Anish Kapoor sculpture in New York was finally complete, but already, crowds have begun to form on a previously unremarkable corner on Leonard Street in Tribeca to see it. They’re there to greet a 19-foot-tall sculpture that resembles a legume being squashed by a luxury building, its steel form appearing to bulge out beneath the weight of a sleek outcropping.

The New Yorker once termed the sculpture, which is not yet titled, “the mini-Bean,” a reference to the nickname given to Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the work this piece is loosely based on. That Chicago sculpture, which debuted in 2006, is well-loved, both by locals and tourists, and its following may explain why this new Kapoor work has already attracted so many influencers and curious onlookers.

Yet this sculpture is no Cloud Gate, and personally, I wouldn’t mind if the building above it made good on its promise and crushed the thing altogether. Kapoor’s latest is a big, shiny, reflective object that feels like the final boss of ugly public art in New York—not that that will stop people from flocking to it.

In some ways, it feels like a mistake to call Kapoor’s sculpture public art, however, since the structure above it is about as private as it gets. Designed by the starchitect firm Herzog & de Meuron, the building, known as the Jenga Tower, contains 60 stories of luxury condominiums, some of which even overlook the mini-Bean. (Kapoor bought one of those units for more than $13.5 million.) The tower rises so high, you can’t see its uppermost floors from the street, but if you were in an airplane, you’d notice that portions of them jut out like unevenly laid blocks.

This new sculpture, which may have cost as much as $10 million to fabricate, had always been a part of the building plan, appearing in reporting on the Herzog & de Meuron building as early as 2008. (The building itself was completed more than five years ago.) Manufacturing difficulties and the pandemic caused the piece’s years-long delay, and for a while, the mini-Bean existed only as a partially empty shell New Yorkers could see from the street. In 2021 Curbed New York made a plea for the piece to remain that way, arguing that Chicago’s Bean should be allowed to retain its glory, but alas, that was not to be.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

The Headlines

ARTIST MIRA LEHR, whose multifarious art tackled environmental issues, and who was involved in founding Continuum, a cooperative gallery in Miami Beach, Florida, for women artists in 1966, has died at the age of 88, Neil Genzlinger reports in the New York Times. Powerfully influenced by her participation in a 1969 experiment by inventor R. Buckminster Fuller that looked at how to allocate natural resources, Lehr made work in a variety of mediums—paint, video, gunpowder, and more—that addresses ecosystems, animal life, and other topics. While being profiled by the Times in 2020, Lehr said, “We have to think of the loss and destruction and that there is more of this to come.”

SHOWTIME. One of the most anticipated exhibitions of the season in New York has to be Sarah Sze’s outing at the Guggenheim, which will open in March. In WSJ Magazine, the wily installation artist spoke about what she has on tap—video projections on the outside of the building, for one thing—with journalist Ted Loos. “I wanted to make pieces you could only do at the Guggenheim,” Sze said. “The building became a tool for making the work.” Meanwhile, painter and musician Mike Henderson spoke with David Smith in the Guardian about his just-opened show at the University of California, Davis’s art museum. It includes his “protest paintings” from the 1960s to ‘80s, which look at racist violence in the United States. He knew they “weren’t going to hang in anybody’s living room but the paintings were coming through me,” he said. “There was a deeper calling.”

The Digest

Why country-pop superstar Shania Twain is riding higher than ever

The exhibition “But Tell Me, Is It a Civilized Country?” is the result of Max Guy’s deep dive into the Land of Oz, a territory the self-deprecating Witch of the North described as uncivilized because it harbors wizards and witches like her. The exhibition title—actually, the witch’s question to Dorothy about Kansas from the first Oz book, published in Chicago in 1900—brings to mind the racist and criminal inhospitalities of recent times, from Texas and Arizona governors’ callous shuttling of migrants north to Donald Trump’s question about why the United States would want immigrants from “shithole countries.”

For Guy, Oz is a mirror. In an artist talk when the show opened at the Renaissance Society in Chicago, he compared the interrelated Oz literature and films to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as one self-perpetuating franchise. Two keystones of this franchise, The Wizard of Oz (1939) and The Wiz (1978), play side by side in Guy’s silent video The City and the City, sixth cut (2022). The first effort features an Emerald City that feels at times like Chicago while the later rendition involves many New York filming locations. (Guy’s connection here: he grew up in New York and is now based in Chicago.) In its time, The Wiz suffered at the hands of white critics who questioned the need for revisiting Oz with Black actors, a new script, and new songs. Guy’s video suggests his own study of the changes. He has slowed down both films and plays them to end at precisely the same time, as if to put on equal footing Motown and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, an all-white cast and an all-Black one, and Dorothy as played by Judy Garland and by Diana Ross.

Max Guy: The City and the City, sixth cut, 2022, single channel video, 3 hours, 5 minutes, and 35 seconds.

Guy’s cultural critique through juxtaposition continues in Emerald City Leperello (Featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno), 2022, which stands open on a table at the center of the gallery. The pages of the giant book comprise eight vintage copies of a poster showing the Chicago skyline; the poster promoted a 1989 exhibition in which the Renaissance Society paired 24 of On Kawara’s deadpan “Date Paintings” with contemporaneous works by 24 artists, from heavyweights with minimalist and conceptual leanings, such as Jenny Holzer and Joseph Kosuth, to those associated with the Windy City, including the Hairy Who. At the time, this exhibition may have appeared far-reaching and representative for putting Kawara in dialogue with peers and local traditions, but in retrospect, the curatorial conceit appears exclusive. The artists were almost all white, and are now mainstream. Guy added a harlequin-pattern border and yellow, green, and black architectonic forms to the exhibition posters, making the cityscape look more like the Emerald City and implying that Kawara and the other artists could stand in the place of Dorothy and her famous traveling buddies—Toto, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. Whom would an artist choose to accompany them on the Yellow Brick Road as they create imagined worlds? Who is cast to walk beside them? If Guy had traveling companions, they might include the artist Lorenzo Bueno (mentioned in the book’s title), whose Pointless Rendering (2018) is part of a whimsical proposal to build an upside-down replica of New York’s Citigroup Center building right on top of the actual structure on Lexington Avenue. We can imagine that Guy likes how this ambitious-but-impossible proposition plays with monumentality and implies an alternate universe.

Max Guy: Emerald City Leperello (featuring Pointless Rendering by Lorenzo Bueno) (detail), 2022, acrylic ink, laser print, enamel paint, and colored pencil on vintage On Kawara posters, cotton fabric, chipboard.

Another sort of inversion happens when viewers look up to see a gigantic, multicolored flag draped across the immense ceiling of the Renaissance Society. It’s called Dargerino (2022) and intends to summon and perhaps commune with Henry Darger, the legendary Chicago outsider artist who worked alone in a tiny apartment, sometimes under the influence of Oz, and was undiscovered until the last year of his life. The flag’s colors represent the regions of Oz, though the flag adds an extra point to the usual Emerald City star, making it more like the six-point stars of the Chicago flag. What if Chicago were Oz? Or, what if we made Chicago into a kind of Oz? Guy proposes that we would then have to distinguish meaningful gestures from small arrogant ones. In his artist talk, when discussing Dargerino, Guy referred to the colossal torn American flag sculpture Trinket (2008/15) by William Pope.L, who told Artforum that his sculpture refers to “our mouse nature” and “how we blot out the sky with our paw and think we’ve vanquished the sun.”

Chicagoans dye their river bright green every year on St. Patrick’s Day. Guy captured this bizarre tradition on video for Chicago (2022). In the context of this exhibition, the festivities appear so entirely out of this world that they could almost have taken place in Emerald City. In so many ways, we mortals create and re-create highly developed worlds, determine their strange rituals and exclusive memberships, and exalt them. In The Wiz, the denizens of Emerald City extol green as the height of fashion until The Great and Powerful Oz declares green dead, and endorses red. “I wouldn’t be seen green,” the chorus sings. By bringing Oz into the present, Guy’s smart show prompts the question: With the forcefulness of the collective imagination that we regularly display and sometimes shift at the drop of a hat, how can we reimagine, stand on end, and remake the careless, rough, stained, and unwelcoming parts of our world?

An open letter voicing support for Manuel Borja-Villel, the former head of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, is circulating amid Spain’s election to appoint a new director for the state-backed museum. Borja-Villel abruptly stepped down on January 20 from his post after 15 years with the institution.

In an open letter first published by e-flux, artists, scholars and museum leaders in Belgium, Germany, and Luxembourg published their support of the recently-departed Borja-Villel. The former museum leader has faced criticism in the Spanish press as a result of what the letter contends is a growing right-wing political movement in the country. The signatories called for Borja-Villel’s legacy of bringing progressive arts programming to Madrid to continue even as Spain grapples with a so-called “culture war”.

The letter’s stakeholders voice concern over the museum’s uncertain future and call for the preservation of the “inclusive” model that Borja-Villel established during his tenure at the institution. They also condemned the “attacks” that Borja-Ville has received from far-right media pundits, including a Spanish media outlet that labeled the museum’s exhibitions under his leadership “political propaganda”. The same news organization alleged the Reina Sofia violated codes when it renewed Borja-Villel’s contracts in 2013 and 2018. (Borja-Villel has denied the accusations.)

The letter, which has drawn 1,700 signatories, says that Borja-Villel made the museum into a place that “allows us to talk about justice and correction,” and described it as a center for “historiographical reflection”.

After taking up the position in 2008, Borja-Villel drew acclaim from Madrid’s art community for expanding the once modern-focused Reina Sofia into a contemporary art hub. Under his direction, the museum revamped its permanent collections and tripled its visitor foot traffic, reaching a milestone high of 4.5 million visitors in 2019.

The historic center of the Ukrainian Black Sea port city Odesa has been added to UNESCO’s list of endangered World Heritage sites. 

The key strategic port city, known for its cosmopolitan history and architectural landmarks, has been the target of Russian bombing since its invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. Last October, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made a formal appeal to the United Nation’s cultural organization to place the city center under its protection—a move which offers Odesa additional international aid along with potential consequences for its destruction.

“I’m grateful to partners who help protect our pearl from the Russian invaders’ attacks!” Zelensky tweeted after UNESCO voted in favor of the inscription during a special meeting of its World Heritage Committee on January 25.

In a statement, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, described Odesa as “a world city, a legendary port that has left its mark on cinema, literature and the arts”. 

“While the war continues, this inscription embodies our collective determination to ensure that this city, which has always surmounted global upheavals, is preserved from further destruction,” she said.

How the impact of information overload has fascinated artists for decades

The Sixth Sense director is all out of twists in his new high-concept chiller

11 min read

The Importance of Ale

From the 1300s to the late 1700s, the most popular drink was ale.

Ale, also known as “small beer”, was nutritious, easy to produce and cheap. It was consumed every day by every person in medieval England, including children, as the alcohol content was low, only serving as a preservative. It was a drink necessary to public health, as it provided hydration and nutrition in a time when sources of safe, fresh water were extremely unreliable. Records show that workers in some industries, such as agriculture, could even choose to be paid in ale rather than traditional currency.

Wine was expensive, owing to the complex nature of production and cost of sourcing ingredients, and European style hopped beer had not yet reached England, so the market was dominated by ale, particularly among the lower classes. It had a short shelf life and wasn’t transported well, necessitating small scale local production in medieval towns. In 1577, there was one alehouse for every 142 inhabitants per town. This novel business structure meant that women were able to participate in the industry. They became brewers, known as Alewives.

What were Alewives?

It wasn’t merely that women were able to take part in the brewing industry – they dominated it. Evidence from medieval records includes regulations that appear to treat brewing as a purely female endeavour.

Alewives would brew in their homes, most often using malted barley or oats. They often made ale at first just for their family, selling the excess, then expanding to take on local customers from nearby families, transitioning to a small scale commercial enterprise. Women were allowed to continue their trade because it was a simple scaling up of the responsibility they had to provide food and drink for their own family, and public perception was generally positive.

December 9, 2022 – January 28, 2023

November 19, 2022 – January 21, 2023

What is the perfect balance between clutter-free and comfortable?

Including the third films in both the Ant-Man and Magic Mike franchises

December 10, 2022 – February 11, 2023

December 9, 2022 – January 28, 2023

Foundwork is delighted to announce that the 2022 Foundwork Artist Prize has been awarded to Marseille and Essex-based artist Dominique White. As honoree, White will receive an unrestricted $10,000 grant and studio visits with each of the 2022 jurors who include esteemed curators, gallerists, and artists: Edgar Arcenaux, César García-Alvarez, Lauren Kelly, Eva Langret, and Javier Peres.

‌

Three artists were named to the 2022 short list: Anna Perach (London), Junghun Kim (Netherlands/South Korea), and Chris Zhongtian Yuan (London). Each of the honorees and shortlisted artists will be featured in interviews as part of the Foundwork Dialogues program to be published over the coming months. For more information, visit www.foundwork.art/artist-prize.

‌

‌

How Colette's scandalous stories of sex and love captivated a nation

December 16, 2022 – January 28, 2023