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The Headlines

DOUBLE LEAK. In The Art Newspaper, Theo Belci reports that lists containing the names of more than 16,000 artists allegedly used to perfect the Midjourney generative artificial intelligence (AI) program have gone viral. The Google spreadsheet named “Midjourney Style List”, including references to Frida Kahlo, Walt Disney, Banksy, and Yayoi Kusama, was supposedly retrieved from Midjourney developers while the program’s ability to mimic specific works and styles was being refined. If access to the web document was restricted, it remains partially visible on the Internet Archive). Many of the names in it feature on another 25-page list used for a 2023 class-action lawsuit. “Even though the practice of using human artists’ work without their permission to train generative AI programs remains in uncertain legal territory, controversies surrounding documents like the ‘Midjourney Style List’ shed light on the actual processes of converting copyrighted artwork into AI reference material”, Belci wrote. 

BE PREPARED. What better way to enter the year (and the weekend) than to prepare for the events it holds? Galerie Perrotin, which has reached an agreement with the real estate investment company Colony Investment Management, is opening a new space during Frieze LA. In March, New York’s Grey Art Gallery, once relocated in a purpose-designed space at 18 Cooper Square, will officially become the Grey Art Museum. In Paris, the reopening of the Grand Palais multi-purpose venue for the summer Olympics is as expected as that of Notre-Dame de Paris. The entire Normandy region is celebrating, through some 150 exhibitions, the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, which was 99% ready in October 2022, should finally be accessible by May. Lastly, 2024 is also the year of the 60th Venice Biennale.

The Digest

Nicholas Galanin’s wide-ranging new exhibition, “Interference Patterns,” at SITE Santa Fe opens with something that the multidisciplinary Lingít and Unangax artist posits is uniquely American: a scream.

His new site-specific installation, Neon American Anthem (red), consists of a neon sign inviting visitors to “Take A Knee and Scream Until You Can’t Breathe” in front of a grid of doormats. The last several years have provided plenty of reasons to heed Galanin’s invitation and unleash a catharsis of emotion in this crimson-lit room. The piece threads together many different protest movements: Galanin created the work in response to climate change and other contemporary crises, but the piece in its final form ended up alluding to Black liberation and the kneeling gestures seen at football games.

Neon American Anthem, which is also currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum, is a perfect encapsulation of Galanin’s practice, which is sharply critical of systems of power and often acts as a mordant commentary on art world institutions, taking them to task for their continued role in colonialism. As Galanin explained in a recent interview with ARTnews, when the Seattle Art Museum first approached him about the piece, he was queried about how institutions could decolonize, a question he said he is often asked as an Indigenous artist. When his first proposals—to return tribal objects to their communities—were rejected, he arrived at the current work which, in its own way, bluntly unsettles the institutions in which its versions are housed.

“It’s interesting for me to see these engagements in different institutional spaces,” Galanin said. “It’s been getting strong feedback … but it’s also been difficult. [SAM] has had a hard time with it. They’re supporting the work, but it is engaging and challenging the entire institutional structure.”

When visitors engage the work by screaming, it is disruptive across the museum. At SITE, a contemporary arts space sprawled across a single floor, you hear the screams throughout the central lobby and many of the adjacent galleries.

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about about art that surprises us, about the works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

“Which orifice am I looking at?” is a question you’ll likely find yourself asking as you explore Tishan Hsu’s latest show at Vienna Secession. It’s a curious query to mull as you’re unable to look away from labial-looking mouths and anus-appearing belly buttons, all recurring throughout the exhibition’s dozen sculptures and wall works.

A most intriguing orifice can be seen in a photograph that Hsu affixed to the end of an abstract, lumpy, supine sculpture, right between two leglike mounds that appear to be spread apart. There, a black hole punctures through a distended mound of flesh. The print, with its black edges and rounded corners, might be mistaken for an iPad—even a moving image. For a moment, you may expect full-on body horror in the form of a video of a prolapsed anus. (Nearby, Hsu shows an actual video work in which bodily bits lurk behind a meshy surface, moving so slowly that you’re primed to question whether the things on-screen are moving or still.) Step closer to this mysterious orifice and you’ll see an innocent picture of an ear that—shot from an unusual angle, its attendant head blurred out—Hsu has rendered utterly uncanny.

Hsu wants viewers to attend to the changing ways that technology encourages us to relate—or not—to our own bodies. He shows us how we can now see ourselves from more angles than ever before, and yet this often breeds alienation instead of intimacy.

This exhibition in Austria debuts new works by a septuagenarian artist who’s been exploring ever-weirder relationships between bodies and technology since the 1980s. He worked largely under the radar until a 2020 traveling survey at SculptureCenter in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His next stop was the 2022 Venice Biennale; amid all this, he retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Now, he’s debuting new works that are his best yet.

With follow-ups to Gladiator, Alien and Mad Max, 2024 is a year of sequels

Martha Diamond, a painter who gracefully pictured New York from all its many vantage points, died on Saturday at 79. A representative for David Kordansky, her gallery, said she died of a long illness.

Skyscrapers, scaffolding, reflections of tall buildings in glassy windows, and distinctive features of the Manhattan skyline were among the many subjects that Diamond regularly depicted. Rather than painting them naturalistically, however, she rendered them expressionistically, allowing their forms to smear and blur as she depicted the city through her own lens.

“Diamond is a New York visionary,” wrote the poet Bill Berkson in a 1990 profile of her for Artforum. “Her pictorial embodiments of the stuns and implosions of urbanity are best understood in the company of those painters of Manhattan across whose surfaces the arguments between representation and abstract form are deflected by the urge to nail down the forces that contend at just about any intersection.”

Because her paintings’ subject matter was so straightforward, many critics noticed a tendency among viewers to disregard them as flat or easy to take in. That, of course, was hardly the case.

“Ms. Diamond’s whole approach to painting is deceptively simple, full of hidden skills and decisions that only gradually reveal themselves, along with a good deal of humor and very little pretension,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in a laudatory review of one of her shows.

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