September 14 – October 26, 2024

Meet the founder of the slogan-jumper brand celebrities love

If you're in New York please join us at SculptureCenter to celebrate the release of Kerstin Brätsch's fantastic Quarterly archive. CFGNY will be activating the archive and KAYA will be serving drinks.

How 1974's Emmanuelle caused a sensation – but dated badly

August 24 – November 9, 2024

August 24 – October 15, 2024

Why there's outrage over Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi's latest starring roles

August 24 – September 22, 2024

September 7 – October 5, 2024

From sex-and-scandal-filled comedy drama Rivals to the return of The Diplomat

July 7 – November 10, 2024

Behind The Shawshank Redemption’s remarkable reversal of fortune

From performing elephants to a WW2 pigeon

How the hugely popular sitcom brought a new way of living into the mainstream

Is Demi Moore's The Substance a gross-out masterpiece or shallow and sexist?

Nikita Gale, a Los Angeles–based artist best known for installations that mesh unexpected elements, pairing video and sound equipment with industrial materials like concrete and metal barricades, has been named the winner of the Whitney Museum’s Bucksbaum Award, which goes to a participant in the Whitney Biennial and comes with $100,000.

Gale is among the most closely watched artists today. For the 2018 edition of the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. biennial, the artist presented a sculptural and sound installation titled PROPOSAL: SOFT SURROUND SYSTEM (2018), dissecting the roles music and physical barriers play in galvanizing protest and mass detainments. In 2022, when Gale’s work was shown at 52 Walker Street, the New York Times argued the artist has become part of a distinct group of women artists of color applying new rules to minimalism that were set in place by an older generation of male predecessors.

For the 2024 Biennial, titled “Even Better Than the Real Thing,” Gale presented a player piano for the installation TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME). But instead of playing its set tune, Gale has made it so the piano emits no sound, other than the clanking of the keys as they are activated. Additionally, the installation, presented in a black box, is dramatically lit, with the lights oscillating up and down as if on a dimmer.

“Works like TEMPO RUBATO decline to perform to the viewer’s liking,” ARTnews senior editor Alex Greenberger wrote in his review of the exhibition. “In doing so, they refuse their viewers’ gaze, mirroring an unwillingness by many artists here to participate in structures that seek to oppress them.”

Gale’s work, relating the body to technology, was selected as the winner by a six-person jury, that included the Biennials cocurators, Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli, as well as Whitney Museum director Scott Rothkopf, Hammer Museum curator Erin Christovale, University of Virginia art history professor David Getsy, and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art chief curator Stamatina Gregory.

I first tried AI the way many people did: I fell prey to a viral marketing trend. In late 2022, photo-editing app Lensa briefly broke the internet when users flooded social media with its uncanny AI-generated avatars. As my feeds overflowed with yassified portraits of friends in bootleg Marvel gear, I couldn’t help but think about my mother. What would Mom look like as an Avenger? I’d been making images of her in my art practice for more than 15 years, using every modality I could manage. AI seemed like a funny, if unexpected, next step.

My first reaction was simple amazement. The representational prowess of AI was shocking. But while the avatars in my feed were all GigaChads and Stacies in space, the renderings of my mom were remarkably more morose. The algorithm didn’t seem to know what to do with an androgynous barefaced older woman. The best it could manage were clichés of a cougar or a crone. I looked at my fierce friends and I looked at my mutated mom—all the normative visual tropes were there, but they were twisted, roughly hewn. Everything was so eerily familiar and yet so indescribably weird.

I suddenly thought, I’ve finally found the perfect tool.

Up until then, photography had been my primary medium, in large part for its dual ability to alienate a subject while also drawing it more into view. I had a little catchphrase: Taking a picture of trash is like crowning a prince. Conversely, making a postcard of a landscape can be a kind of dethroning, an unceremonious flattening. The mechanisms of this transformation have slowly revealed themselves to be one of my most important and bedeviling subjects (something I explore at length in my book Hello Chaos: a Love Story).

In photographing my mother, I had to confront the social conventions that underlie every aestheticized gesture. I crammed her into pitiless high heels and bound her breasts in forced masculinity. What voice did these visual conventions have, and how did they speak through the singular subject of my mother? How did my mom and my representations of her make these social and aesthetic expectations sing—or scream, or laugh, or cry? What assumptions do we draw upon to categorize what we see, and what are their political implications?

In a video clip posted to social media Wednesday, former First Lady Melania Trump defended her prior history of nude modeling by comparing it to several classical paintings and sculptures, including Michelangelo’s David.

In the 45-second video, Trump speaks in a voice-over asking, “Are we no longer able to appreciate the beauty of the human body?”

“Throughout history, master artists have revered the human shape, evoking profound emotions and admiration,” she continues. “We should honor our bodies and embrace the timeless tradition of using art as a powerful means of self-expression.”

Images of David, John Collier’s Lady Godiva (1897), a painting from Paul Cézanne’s “Bathers” series, and other works appear in the background as Trump talks.

While, in the video, Trump references media scrutiny over her nude modeling, it’s not clear what exactly prompted the video.

The US Department of Justice has charged political advisor and Russian television contributor Dimitri Simes and his wife, Anastasia Simes, with violating US sanctions through schemes involving art and antiques.

The two indictments against the couple were unsealed on September 5, according to a DOJ press release.

The first indictment accused the Simeses of laundering funds for the Russian state-funded network Channel One Russia, where Dimitri Simes hosts a popular news commentary show, for which they allegedly received over $1 million and various personal benefits including a personal car and driver, a stipend for an apartment in Moscow, and a personal team of ten employees from the station. Channel One Russia was sanctioned in May 2022.

The second indictment focuses on Anastasia’s role in purchasing and storing art and antiques, including a 19th-century painting by F.C. Welsch and a statue of the Greek goddess Minerva by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, for Russian oligarch and close friend of the newly appointed Prime Minister, Aleksandr Y. Udodov, who was sanctioned by the US government in February 2023. 

According to that indictment, the artworks and other antiques were acquired from American and European galleries and auction houses, then stored at the couple’s home in Virginia before finally being sent to Russia. However the FBI seized the couple’s collection during a four-day raid in August. Some of the items were family heirlooms, Dimitri said in an interview with the New York Times, which he said were irrelevant to the government concerns. 

A man destroyed a porcelain sculpture by Ai Weiwei seemingly on purpose during the opening reception of an exhibition dedicated to the Chinese dissident artist on Friday evening in Italy.

The destroyed work was Ai’s blue-and-white Porcelain Cube, which was included in a survey on Ai titled “Who am I?” at the Palazzo Fava in Bologna, which opened to the public on Saturday.

Footage of the destruction was captured on CCTV and posted to Instagram by Ai. In the video, the man steps onto the plinth that holds the Cube and pushes it forward, shattering the work. He then lifted up a portion of the broken porcelain over his head. The work was installed in an atrium near the museum giftshop and ticket office.

The Bologna edition of Milan-based daily newspaper Corriere della Sera identified the man as 57-year-old Czech Vaclav Pisvejc, who was stopped by museum security and detained until police arrived. It is still unclear how he entered the museum during the invite-only reception. He was arrested for “destruction, dispersion, deterioration, defacement, soiling and illicit use of cultural or landscape assets,” according to the paper.

Arturo Galansino, the exhibition’s curator and the director general of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi  in Florence, told Reuters, “Unfortunately, I know the author of this inconsiderate gesture from a series of disturbing and damaging episodes over the years involving various exhibitions and institutions in Florence.”