February 25 – April 13, 2024

Netflix's Scoop recreates the 2019 royal interrogation – but has the wrong focus

Andrew Scott stars in a wonderfully creepy new series

December 15, 2023 – April 7, 2024

February 28 – April 9, 2024

How John Carpenter's absurd student spaceship movie Dark Star set a new template

11 min read

Introduction

November 2023 marked twenty years since the repeal of Section 28. Introduced in 1988, Section 28 was a piece of legislation prohibiting the discussion of homosexuality within schools. Specifically, it forbade the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality, emphasising that no school maintained by the Local Authority could ‘teach the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationships’ . The legislation was wildly controversial, particularly due to the ongoing AIDS epidemic; whilst the legislation did not forbid sexual health education, many foresaw that the hostile educational environment being cultivated would not be conducive to effective HIV/AIDS education. As a result, many LGBTQ+ groups came together to stand up to this legislation, through the creation of community groups, protests, and publications. In Oxfordshire, this manifested in the creation of Gay and Lesbian Oxford Rights Campaign (GLO), and its publication, Pink Times. The group launched Pink Times to be ‘not just a newsletter, but an independent lesbian and gay newspaper for Oxfordshire ’.

Section 28’s legislative significance lies in the culture of silence and fear created for LGBTQ+ teachers, and the marked absence of positive education role models and discussions for queer youth. Though there were no cases of legal prosecution under the section, the metaphorical significance had an undoubtable effect on those working in the education sector – encouraging self-censorship and a sense of fear about what could or could not be brought into the workplace. However, its significance outside of its official legislative domain is also notable: bringing communities together in opposition to the section. Thus, this blog post examines some of the significant impacts of Section 28, as told through Pink Times.

The Inception of Pink Times

Oxford has an interesting history with Section 28. Though Section 28 marked a return to regressive legislation, it nonetheless had the effect of invigorating the community – bringing together different groups within the community to unite against the government’s oppressive legislation. This blog post takes a dive into some of the developments that emerged in Oxford, as reflected and recounted within the pages Pink Times.

From Gladiator 2 and Nosferatu to Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

March 7 – April 2, 2024

February 24 – April 6, 2024

We’re honored to release the Contemporary Art Quarterly archive of Monica Majoli. This archive includes documentation of all of her solo shows going back to 1995, as well as 4 curated projects, an interview and group exhibitions. We're so grateful to the artist for working with us and providing so much material!

The HBO show has landed on the streamer – where it may provoke new audiences

February 29 – April 4, 2024

'Britain's Schindler': The man who saved 669 children from the Nazis

The expansive collection of Cuban-born, Miami-based philanthropist and art collector Rosa de la Cruz will be sold at Christie’s over a series of auctions starting this May during the New York evening sales.

De la Cruz, who died last month at 81, was central to Miami’s art scene. With her husband Carlos, she opened a 30,000-square-foot museum in Miami to display their contemporary art collection, which is thought to number 1,000 works.

The artists responsible for those works range from established blue-chippers like Wade Guyton and Albert Oehlen to younger emerging artists like Su Su and Christina Quarles. Their collection earned the de la Cruzes a repeated spot on the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors list.

Artnet News first reported news of the collection’s sale on Friday. The collection will likely be sold by the auction house over several sales for an estimated total of $30 million, with lots ranging from $5,000 on the low end to $5 million on the high end.

The Miami space the de la Cruzes have run since 2009 is now closed, Artnet reported.

Marian Zazeela, an artist whose abstract drawings and light installations envisioned dream states, died at her home in New York at 83 on Thursday. The MELA Foundation, an organization she cofounded with her partner, the artist La Monte Young, announced her passing on Friday, saying she died of natural causes while sleeping.

Zazeela produced work that did not fit neatly within the confines of any movement, even as it flirted with the aesthetics of Minimalism. By her own admission, she produced “borderline art,” a term she favorited for work that “‘borders’ and challenges the conventional distinction between decorative and fine art by using decorative elements in the fine art tradition,” as she once put it.

She is best-known for Dream House, a sound and light installation conceived in collaboration with Young. First mounted in 1969 and since staged in a variety of forms, the installation features drone music by Young and Light, an installation by Zazeela whose illumination, typically in a single shade of magenta, colors the entire space.

The version of Dream House that is now open for visitation on Church Street in Lower Manhattan is beloved by the general public, with visitors regularly venturing there to recline in the installation for extended periods of time. “It’s a simple concept,” M. H. Miller remarked in a 2020 T: The New York Times Style Magazine profile of Young, “and yet this harmony between sound and light was one of the earliest cohabitations of contemporary music and art.”

Working solo, Zazeela produced drawings composed of intricate calligraphic forms that are by turns hypnotic and dizzying. They are currently the subject of an exhibition at Artists Space in New York that has earned acclaim from critics. In Art in America, Andy Battaglia wrote of the show, “drawings of the kind in ‘Dream Lines’ tell the story of an artist who awakens different states of dreaming on her own.”

Earlier this week, Bravo announced that all six cast members of the rebooted Real Housewives of New York City would return for their second season (the franchise’s 15th), as reported by Variety, bringing rumors about whether the network would add two new members, including one with ties to the art world.

It’s now rumored that that cast member might be Racquel Chevremont, a collector and curator who is also the ex-partner of artist Mickalene Thomas. Chevremont is also a friend of current cast member Jenna Lyons, the former creative director of J. Crew. (Bravo blog Bravo and Cocktails first posted a blind item about the news on March 19; Artnet News’s Wet Paint column picked up the story on Friday.)

Chevremont has amassed a modest collection of around 70 to 80 works by artists such as Lorna Simpson, Glenn Ligon, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Deborah Roberts, and Toyin Ojih Odutola. She also previously served as a trustee of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

She recently consulted on the art-filled set decoration for the Netflix film Leave the World Behind. Beyond the art world, she has modeled, most recently walking in Batsheva Hay’s New York Fashion Week show in February.

Prior to their spilt, Thomas and Chevremont founded Deux Femmes Noires, which was aimed to raise the profile of artists of color. Together, they mounted exhibitions, including one in 2022, titled “Set It Off,” at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York. The two also co-produced a performance by artist Kia LaBeija as part of the 2019 Performa Biennial in New York.

California legislators have introduced a bill intended to give Holocaust survivors and their heirs a greater chance of recovering artworks stolen, or sold under duress, during periods of political oppression.

Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), co-chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, who has led the legislative effort, told the Los Angeles Times that it was inspired by a ruling this January that determined that Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum could keep a Camille Pissarro painting taken from its Jewish owner by the Nazi party. 

“It immediately made sense to me that this was a unique opportunity to correct a historical injustice and make sure that something like this doesn’t happen again,” Gabriel said. “Respectfully, we think that the 9th Circuit got it wrong, and this law is going to make that crystal clear.” He added that the bill has bipartisan support.

The keenly followed case of the Pissarro, titled Rue Saint Honore, apres midi, effet de pluie (Rue Saint Honore, Afternoon, Rain Effect) and depicting a rainy Paris street, has bounced between California courts for nearly two decades, as the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer have argued for its recovery. 

Cassirer Neubauer was forced by the Nazi party to sell the painting in 1939 for 900 Reichsmarks (roughly $360 today) in exchange for a visa to escape Germany. According to court documents, she never received payment. The painting was acquired in 1993 by the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum from the collector Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza. Cassirer Neubauer’s heirs allege in the initial complaint filed in 2005 that the museum knew upon acquiring the work that it had been sold under duress. 

Two men have been sentenced to jail in London for selling more than £2.6 million (around $3.2 million) in fake fine art attributed to Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso.

A six-year money laundering investigation by Sussex Police found Behrad Kazemi and Raj Nasta had sold works by Dalí for £2,000 to £3,000 and works by Picasso for £5,000 to £20,000 each to more than 125 victims between October 2016 and June 2018.

The scheme involved cold calls from a company called Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group and encouragement to buy artwork instead of traditional investments.

A press statement from Sussex Police noted many of the victims were vulnerable and elderly, with some of them not knowing they had been conned until contacted by police. Some had paid over £150,000 to the scheme and lost their life savings as a result.

Suspicions arose after the victims and their families could not longer contact Asset Consulting Services and Treasury Asset Group. Artist signatures on the artworks were discovered to be false and the actual value of the works sold was between £200 and £300.

Breezing through the 35,000-square-foot home of Materials for the Arts is about as close as you might get to touring Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Earlier this year, the vast warehouse in Queens was chock-full of Christmas fixings, like ornaments, pink artificial evergreens, and Lush soap cartons, alongside perennial aisles of paper and books, envelopes, archival photos, all manner of fabric, buttons, beads, and trim. There are also lab coats from hospitals, furniture from the Javits Center, and vintage typewriters and PC towers, CDs and file folders. Full of castoffs of contemporary New York City life just waiting to be plucked from obscurity, the list goes on. The majority of these wares are in pristine condition, and they are all meticulously organized and labeled.

It’s also accessible, for free, to public school students and teachers, as well as art nonprofits.

As New York’s largest creative-reuse center and a program of the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, Materials for the Arts collects a boundless array of reusable materials from businesses and individuals that are then made available to nonprofits, schools, and other city agencies, thus diverting some 1.7 million pounds of materials from landfills in 2023.

That 1.7 million pounds is almost quadruple the amount of donated material just three years ago, and today the nearly-50-year-old organization is poised to keep expanding as it continues to evolve to meet the needs of the ever-changing, ever-resourceful but ever-resource-strapped city.

“It’s not just about our organization—it’s about our city,” MFTA executive director Tara Sansone told ARTnews. “As New York grows, so too must our program because our mission remains pivotal to the very essence of New York itself.”