Candida Gertler, co-founder of the Outset Contemporary Art Fund, has stepped down from the organization’s board of trustees and all voluntary roles within UK arts institutions, according to a report by The Art Newspaper.

Her resignation follows an open letter signed by over 1,100 artists and art workersa and addressed to Tate leadership ahead of the Turner Prize ceremony on December 3, calling for the museum to divest from the Zabludowicz Art Trust, Zabludowicz Art Projects, and Outset Contemporary Art Fund. The three organizations are run separately by arts philanthropists Anita and Poju Zabludowicz and Gertler.

As ARTnews‘ Angelica Villa reported earlier this week, the letter accuses the groups’ founders of being connected to Israel’s “genocidal” policies in Gaza, citing findings from the International Court of Justice and the United Nations that describe Israel’s military actions as being consistent with genocide and apartheid. Amnesty International has also labeled Israel’s policies as crimes of apartheid. The letter points to the roles of the Zabludowicz Art Trust and Outset Contemporary Art Fund in providing what activists term “artwashing,” or the use of partnerships with museums and artists to obscure ethically dubious political connections.

The letter was signed by prominent figures such as Turner Prize nominee Jasleen Kaur and past winners Helen Cammock, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, and Charlotte Prodger.

While both the Zabludowiczs and Outset declined to comment on the letter, Poju and Anita Zabludowicz directed attention to a 2023 statement in which they stressed their support for a two-state solution, and saying that they were “deeply saddened and troubled by the horrific war that is unfolding in Israel and Gaza.”

The story about cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun and Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian keeps on giving.

Sun kept the promise he made immediately after buying the artwork, comprising a banana duct-taped to the wall, by eating it on Friday in front of baying journalists. The day before, though, he made an even stranger announcement on X. He said he was going to buy 100,000 bananas from the New York street vendor who sold the fruit to Sotheby’s for 25 cents, before the house displayed the banana for last week’s auction.

Each banana comprising Comedian, which is represented by a certificate of authenticity, is replaced every two to three days when the work is exhibited.

The fruit seller is a 74-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant called Shah Alam. He runs a stall near the auction house on East 72nd Street and York Avenue.

When a New York Times reporter told Alam that the banana had sold for over $6 million, he started to cry. “I am a poor man,” he said. “I have never had this kind of money; I have never seen this kind of money.”

“To thank Mr. Shah Alam, I’ve decided to buy 100,000 bananas from his stand in New York’s Upper East Side,” Sun posted on X. “These bananas will be distributed free worldwide through his stand. Show a valid ID to claim one banana, while supplies last.”

However, the grand gesture went down like a lead ballon with Alam. He told the New York Times that buying so many bananas (worth $25,000) from his stand would only equate to $6,000 net profit. This is because firstly, it would cost him thousands of dollars to procure 100,000 bananas (which come in boxes of 100) from a Bronx wholesale market. Secondly, he said any money would rightly go to the fruit stand’s owner, not Alam.

The New York Times managed to contact the owner, Mohammad R. Islam, who said that he would share any profit between himself, Alam, and the six other employees who earn $12 an hour by working at his two fruit stands. That said, Sun – nor any of his representatives – have apparently been in touch with him about buying the bulk order of bananas.

Sun is yet to comment on the economic and logistical challenges of his offer.

In the latest twist, a Go Fund Me page has been set up for Alam, which at the time of writing has raised $13,500, far exceeding the target of $5,000.

Alam, a widower, reportedly moved to the US in 2007 to be closer to his married daughter, who lives on Long Island. He told the newspaper in Bengali that he rents a basement apartment, which he shares with five other men, for $500 a month.

After 35 years of use, Jean Charles Blais’ art studio in Vence, France, sprung a leak. As the painter tells it, a contractor removed a bit of the wall’s plaster coating in search of water, only to find a ghost of ancient Rome.

Cradling the studio’s walls was a mosaic from the first or second century CE, when the Romans called this land Vintium. Vintium was a provincial but notable city in Roman Gaul; its legacy endures largely in the architecture of its old town—if you know what to look for—and a modest collection of artifacts, which has just increased in number by one (large bound).

During the summer maintenance, Blais and the contractor first spotted a Latin inscription. Chipping away the rest of the pale plaster revealed a hidden design, a series of faded, looping florets.

“I would see this as the central part of a funerary inscription, probably carved on three of these stones one above the other,” Professor Roger Tomlin of Oxford University said in a statement emailed to ARTnews.

Tomlin was the first expert contacted by Blais’ representation, Opera Gallery (locations in New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere worldwide). The first stone, Tomlin said, would have borne the name of the deceased, followed by the name of the inscription’s dedicatee (or executor). What’s visible is the description of the dead, identified as “CONIVGI,” a gender-neutral term in Latin which can mean “wife” or “husband”.

There’s something to be said about an artist committed to an everyday practice: On Kawara, for example, recording the date in white blocky letters and numbers over a black background, or Ann Craven painting the birds and moons in her tender canvases. Mike Winkelmann, the artist known to the world as Beeple, is also one of those artists. Since 2007, long before NFTs had entered the zeitgeist, Beeple created a new work daily, resulting in some 6,420 works—the majority of them digitally, aside from the first year when he did physical drawings—and counting. His NFT Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which sold at Christie’s in 2021 for a historic $69.3 million, was the first sampling of this. 

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Beeple’s resulting fame led the Deji Art Museum in Nanjing, China, to acquire S.2122 (2023), a kinetic video sculpture consisting of a rectangular rotating steel-framed cube encasing four screens depicting an animated high-rise in a dystopian setting, for a reported $9 million at Art Basel Hong Kong shortly after it was created. It only made sense that the private museum would follow this purchase with a solo exhibition dedicated to the artist. The Nanjing institution didn’t want to execute just any show, but one for the history books. Earlier this month, the Deji opened “Beeple: Tales From a Synthetic Future,” the artist’s first institutional survey, slated to be on view for the next two years.

While Beeple continues to struggle for art world legitimacy—some artists resigned from Jack Hanley’s roster in protest after Beeple’s first solo gallery exhibition there in 2022—the artist has several art-world heavyweights behind him, most notably Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the former director of the Castello di Rivoli in Turin who showed Beeple’s related HUMAN ONE (2021) at the museum in 2022, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London and the Deji’s senior artistic adviser. This all brings up the question, Does Beeple deserve a museum exhibition? The short answer is yes. Digital artists like DRIFT and Refik Anadol have had institutional shows, at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum in 2018 and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2022, respectively. So why not Beeple, too?

Located on the eighth floor of Deji Plaza, an expansive luxury mall owned by the Deji Group, the Deji Art Museum was launched in 2017 by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Wu Tiejun with a mission to “to transcend state borders, cultures, histories, and media.” Upon reaching the entrance to Beeple’s exhibition, his voice booms from loudspeakers welcoming visitors. Those hesitant about entering the exhibition are teased with the institution’s prized acquisition, the ever-evolving S.2122, which can be updated by changing the water levels for example, displayed behind an exterior-facing window. The exhibition traces Beeple’s life from his chronology (born in 1981 to today) to his early, analog experiments, with a section full of illustrations resembling that of a high school art student; equipment like an Intel 386 DOS, his first computer, or his late ’90s–era iMac; and his early aughts short films shown with poster reproductions  of films that influenced him, like Donnie Darko, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Pulp Fiction, and Fight Club. (The actual posters didn’t make it through customs.)

Further along is a room featuring every work from Beeple’s “Everydays” series, mosaiced together on immersive digital walls. (The screens are updated daily, with each new entry into the series.) The works scroll by at a fast pace, refracted by with mirrors on the ceilings, surely an ideal setting for taking selfies. I couldn’t help but compare the room to some of the expansive—and to some insufferable—touring immersive exhibitions for the likes of Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh that have been popular on Instagram.

On Friday, Justin Sun, the Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur who purchased Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, the banana duct-taped to a wall, for $6.2 last week – made good on his promise to eat it.

Immediately after buying the controversial artwork at Sotheby’s in New York, Sun announced on X that he would not only pay for it with the cryptocurrency he created, TRON, but also consume it.

In front of journalists at one of Hong Kong’s most expensive hotels, Sun chowed down on the banana after giving a speech praising the artwork as “iconic.” He also drew comparisons between conceptual art and cryptocurrency.

“It’s much better than other bananas,” Sun told reporters. “It’s really quite good.”

The 34-year-old said he was “intrigued” by the work and admitted that he had “dumb questions” about whether the banana rotted.

Sun was one of seven bidders—including crypto-enthusiast collectors Ryan Zurrer and Cosomo di’ Medici—battling for Comedian. He said he was overcome with “disbelief” in the first few seconds after realizing he had won the lot, but soon realized “this could be something big.” He said he decided to eat the banana in the following 10 seconds after that.

“Eating it at a press conference can also become a part of the artwork’s history,” Sun said on Friday. During the stunt, he compared conceptual art to decentralised blockchain technology and NFT art. “Most of [conceptual art’s] objects and ideas exist as [intellectual property] and on the internet, as opposed to something physical,” he added.

Earlier this week, Sun—who is an avid art collector—revealed that he’s investing $30 million in cryptocurrency project World Liberty Financial, backed by Donald Trump, the US president-elect.

This is not the first time Cattelan’s artwork, which has three editions, has been eaten. In 2019, one edition that sold for $190,000 at Art Basel Miami was wolfed down by performance artist David Datuna. “Art performance by me. I love Maurizio Cattelan artwork and I really love this installation. It’s very delicious,” he posted on Instagram.

Last year, a South Korean student was filmed ripping the banana off the wall at the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul before eating part of it. He then re-stuck the peel to the wall. When asked why he did it, the student said he was hungry and argued that “damaging a work of modern art could also be [interpreted as] artwork.”

Each banana comprising Comedian, which is represented by a certificate of ownership, is replaced every two to three days when it is displayed.

Before it was sold at Sotheby’s last Wednesday, a fresh banana was purchased for 35 cents from a street vendor near the auction house for the installation. A GoFundMe page has since been set up for the fruit stand seller, a 74-year-old immigrant named Shah Alam, and so far it’s raised more $10,000 for him.

At the press conference in Hong Kong on Friday, Sun gave everyone in attendance a banana and a roll of duct tape as a souvenir.

Working in the contexts of dance, drawing, painting, installation, and writing, New York–based Ralph Lemon has expanded what art can be through a generative practice that questions the conventions of his different disciplines and his body’s relationship to each. Through an interest in theater, he discovered dance by the likes of Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, and Meredith Monk. He recalled seeing Monk’s Quarry: an opera in three movements (1976) and being completely “in wonderment of the body” and the “totality of her idea of performance.” Lemon followed Monk around in 1978 to experience her performances and joined a workshop with her, after which she invited him to move to New York and join her company.

Born in 1952, Lemon rose to prominence in the ’80s downtown scene as founder of the Ralph Lemon Dance Company, creating works like Joy (1990), set to a score composed by John Cale. He disbanded the company in 1995 and, over the course of some 10 years, developed what would become the Geography Trilogy (1996–2004), which explored his research into the cultures of Africa, Asia, and the American South, and their various traditions of dance and movement. The work took the form of movement-based multimedia pieces; part three, Come home Charley Patton, involved close collaboration with Walter Carter, a former Mississippi sharecropper with whom Lemon worked until Carter’s death in 2002.

Lemon exhibited hundreds of drawings in the 2022 Whitney Biennial, in a presentation that rotated during the exhibition’s run. His drawings and a video are among works by dozens of artists in “Edges of Ailey,” a show devoted to dance icon Alvin Ailey that runs through February 9 at the Whitney. And MoMA PS1 opened “Ceremonies Out of the Air” this past November, a major survey that features more than 60 of Lemon’s works made in the last decade, including 1856 Cessna Road (2002–24), a video series that incorporates documentation of his collaboration with Carter, and Rant redux (2020–24), a four-channel sound and video installation based on collaborative performance work with sculptor and sound artist Kevin Beasley. Below, Lemon discusses his long engagement with dance, working within institutions, and navigating the personal and public possibilities of art.

Had you already formulated an idea for the Geography Trilogy when you ended the Ralph Lemon Dance Company in 1995?

That was kind of an accident. When I disbanded the company, it had more to do with feeling like I was [leading] an organization more than an art practice. I was like, What do I do? My friends said, “Go to Africa. Get out into the world.” I started traveling to parts of West Africa, having a conversation with that dance community. The Geography Trilogy began with dance artists from Cote d’Ivoire and Guinea. I loved working in that foreign environment, where I was more a tourist than anything else. It destabilized any confidence I had. It took a lot of my identity apart, and I thought, I want to keep doing this. That’s how it became a three-part trilogy. It was more about the research than the making. Conceptually, it felt important to show that there’s a certain messiness to trying to understand something beyond what you understand. Ultimately, it was about the cacophony of different kinds of languages and practices. The third part, Come home Charley Patton, is about coming back home, which I wanted to be about a place I should have known but didn’t: the Black American South.

The photographer Ming Smith (b. 1947) has four shows in Ohio this season—a homecoming of sorts, as part of this year’s FotoFocus Biennial. Three of the shows mark the first major exhibitions of her photographs to take place in Columbus, her hometown. The fourth, “Jazz Requiem—Notations in Blue,” at the Gund in Gambier, showcases her camera’s encounters with and within Europe. This work is layered, sonic even its empty spaces and silences. The first show, “Transcendence,” on the ground floor of the Columbus Museum of Art, sees Smith grapple with what it means to live in, and remember, a city like Columbus. On a higher floor at the same museum, one can visit “August Moon” (1991), Smith’s smaller-in-scale (but not in scope) cinematic photo series inspired by playwright August Wilson’s 10-play “The Pittsburgh Cycle.” The last big show, “Wind Chime” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, focuses (partly) on dance and movement. It spans Smith’s first ever photography series, “Africa,” begun in the early 1970s, to her newest works, such as a collaboration with her son Mingus Murray: he has crafted a beguiling ambient soundscape, whose tinkling piano-ish notes hit the ear like drops in a wine glass as one walks among collages in tribute to, among many others, Smith’s mentor and hero, the movement philosopher Katherine Dunham. 

The meaning of “home” skates nimbly across her photographs: Smith seems at home while exploring. Visiting countries like Senegal and Ethiopia, Smith found a continuity from the Midwestern town she knew consciously to the Africa she was discovering for, and in, herself. “I was touched by the vastness, the serenity, and the timelessness of the land. Seeing all Black people. The people were sashaying in a perfectly choreographed dance,” she said in an interview in Ming Smith: An Aperture Monograph (2020). Later in that same interview: “It was like returning home; maybe it wasn’t just Africa, but it was returning home to myself. Ancient ways, daily ways of connecting to spirit.” 

Smith left Columbus partly to escape the Jim Crow laws that still dominated Ohio in the mid-20th century. So M. Neelika Jayawardane tells us in her essay in the Aperture monograph. Smith came to New York in 1973 after graduating from Howard University, where she developed as a dancer under the Katherine Dunham technique; as a model; and, on a fashion shoot to Africa, as a photographer. She soon became part of the Kamoinge Workshop of Black photographers: Kamoinge, a Kikuyu word, means “to act and work together as an ensemble.” Restlessness, transformed into dance, informed Smith’s early work: “All of us [were] trying to move up from places we didn’t like, trying to survive.” 

Smith, after restlessness, rests. Many of Smith’s Columbus pictures in “Transcendence” are of figures and objects in repose, taking a beat. In Kites Inside (1972), across a bare living-room ceiling and the tops of closed curtains, a fish kite floats in free air, while its brother, a dragon kite, is hitched to a lightbulb, sticking its tongue out at us. Sunlight shimmers through the curtains. Beat: playtime to come. Elsewhere, in October Nightskies (1981), clouds pass over a childhood home, moon peeking out. Beat: what we take for granted. In Aunt Ruth (1979), an elder, her leg raised up in bed, is covered by a translucent blanket, her sleep-inclined outline etched by the same sparkly curtain-clouded light as in the Nightskies. Aunt Ruth, as Jacqueline Woodson’s poem of the same name tells us in a verse caption next to Smith’s photograph, “took to her bed in the middle of the day and was whispered about.” She is “Warrior” and “Revolutionary,” says Woodson; she also takes a beat, harmonizing bed, pain, light, and delight in her resting body. 

Aunt Ruth is one of many in Smith’s ensemble, whom she silently directs, adding masks, hats, and character-actor gestures: a cabbie cap here, a slouch in a diner booth between meals there. A few more: the baby in First Haircut (1991), a toddler calmly waiting in mother’s lap like the sacrificial lamb; the white-smocked dude in Cook and Duke (1991), who gawps at Smith’s camera while on his smoke break, blessed from up above by a photograph of Duke Ellington, whose charming open mouth shows that he’s in the middle of making a point; and the man in Man on the Telephone (1991), with his unforgettable, perfectly looped pay-phone cord, as groomed as the man’s sleek leather jacket and striped trousers. Smith shot all these in Pittsburgh, chasing August Wilson’s plays for her “August Moon” series, a collaboration-in-spirit with Wilson. “After I saw August Wilson’s play Two Trains Running, I wanted to go to Pittsburgh and shoot,” she says. How many scenes of Pittsburgh life are possible? Endless: Ming Smith fills in certain blanks, while leaving others.

A Banksy mural of a man hanging out of a bedroom window as he tries to evade his love rival is being sold at auction with the building it is painted on.

Titled Well Hung Lover, it was painted on the wall of a sexual health clinic in Bristol, UK, in 2006. Banksy, who is from the city, said he wasn’t aware of the building’s coincidental use at the time.

Real estate agent Hollis Morgan is auctioning the property – and therefore the artwork – with a new 250-year lease next year.

The Grade II-listed Georgian building has five floors and is located close to Bristol Cathedral and the University of Bristol. A nightclub operates in the basement. Hollis Morgan is promoting the property’s potential to be converted into student apartments.

As for the fate of the artwork, the real estate agent pointed to the fact that Bristol city council has no official policy on street art, no matter who it is by.

“It is recognised that street art is created not as a permanent work of art but as a form of protest which is usually, but not always, created illegally and without the permission of the owner of the building,” Hollis Morgan told the Guardian. “As such, the life of any image as a work of art will evolve and change over time depending on how the work weathers or indeed is subsequently painted over or removed.”

The property’s guide price is just under $900,000. Given Banksy’s most expensive work ever sold at auction went for more than $23.5 million (Love is in the Bin), the estimate looks like a bargain. However, any potential buyers hoping to purchase the building so they can sell the Banksy will have to think again.

Hollis Morgan added, “Accordingly the purchaser will be required to accept a restrictive covenant in the lease ensuring that the image cannot be removed from the building, however, the vendor will not require a positive obligation on the purchaser to maintain the artwork or insure it for as long as it shall remain visible and in place on the building.”

The walls went up in Cutteslowe in North Oxford between the posh houses and the council houses. The news sent shock waves not just across the country but across the world…

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Discover Oxford’s pivotal role in how dinosaurs got their names.

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The system of twinned towns in the UK is not one commonly known to the public, despite its long history dating back to the end of World War 2. Oxford is one of the leading cities in the UK for town twinning..H

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As a result of this charter, Oxford became a corporate, free city, and as such, Oxford city corporation had the power to make by-laws, punish breaches by fine or imprisonment, sue and be sued in the corporate title, and be able to hold or dispose of property under a common seal…

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Oxford has seen its fair share of women who have fought to be more than simply footnotes in history. Through their actions, they have inspired or paved the way for other women to continue the journey towards an equal society. Though their actions might have been singular in nature, a personal fight, in the grand scheme of things, it is important not to only view them as such…

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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.

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Who was the first female councillor in Oxford and what do we know about her?

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When it comes to describing what ‘Oxford Sauce’ is, many would likely differ in their answers, if they were aware of its existence at all…

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The Peter McQuitty Bursary, a research bursary awarded by the Museum of Oxford to fund local heritage projects led by young people in Oxford, has chosen to award local historian Dan Poole with funding for the research and creation of a biography of Charlie Hutchison.

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Even though the printing press was introduced to England in 1476, it was only in the 16th century that printed news took off, and even then, at a very slow pace, due to the necessity of town criers to provide them, stemming from the illiteracy of the general population.

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September 8 – December 1, 2024

September 5 – December 7, 2024