Why 1970s mystery The Enfield Poltergeist continues to disturb, decades on

Four Artforum staffers have resigned after David Velasco, the publication’s former editor, was fired this week.

On Friday, Kate Sutton, an associate editor at Artforum since 2018, announced on X that she had officially resigned. On Saturday, Zack Hatfield and Chloe Wyma, both of whom were senior editors at Artforum, also announced that they had resigned. ARTnews has also learned that Emily LaBarge, a London-based contributor who edited international reviews, has severed ties with Artforum.

“The firing of David Velasco violates everything I had cherished about the magazine and makes my work there untenable,” Wyma wrote on X.

Meanwhile, prominent artists Nan Goldin and Nicole Eisenman told the New York Times that they would no longer work with Artforum, with Goldin describing the current environment as the most “chilling period” she’s ever lived through.

Velasco’s firing came after Artforum published an open letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza on October 19. The letter, signed by thousands of artists, also appeared in e-flux and Hyperallergic, and had circulated as a Google document before it was published on those websites and Artforum. Velasco, along with several other members of Artforum’s staff, signed the letter, although it is still unclear who initially wrote it.

Two climate activists were recently arrested at the Natural History Museum in London after spraying a dinosaur skeleton reproduction with orange cornstarch while demanding the UK government halt oil and gas projects.

Gastroenterologist Dr. Will Stableforth and physiotherapist Steve Fay sprayed the museum’s reproduction of the 26-foot-tall Patagotitan mayorum skeleton at approximately 1:50 pm on October 26, according to a press release from the organization Just Stop Oil. The two also unfurled a banner that said ‘For health’s sake- Just Stop Oil’ before sitting on the floor and waiting for police to arrive. Both Stableforth and Fay were arrested on suspicion of criminal damage.

The dinosaur replica is central to the exhibition “The Titanosaur: Life as the Biggest Dinosaur”, which was closed to the public the rest of the day, according to The Telegraph. The skeleton was made using fossils unearthed from South America in 2014 and is on loan to the museum from the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF), a science research and exhibition center in Trelew, Argentina.

“As an NHS medical consultant I’ve spent many years looking after patients with diseases which, at their root, are caused by fossil fuels. I have done everything legal I can to get our message across. Most of that has been ineffective; so it’s time to break the law. I cannot see another way at this time,” Stableforth said in a statement prior to the protest.

Stableforth and Fay called for health professionals and members of the public to march in London on October 30, but the press release from Just Stop Oil said the organization was calling for daily marches in the city until the government ends its approval of new oil and gas projects.

A 2,700-year-old Assyrian lamassu—a protective deity sculpture—was recently re-excavated in Iraq, astounding experts with its size and condition. 

The Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) announced yesterday that the figure, depicting a human head and a body akin to bull or lion with wings like a bird, had survived the two millennia with relatively limited damage. The alabaster sculpture weighs roughly 19 tons and measures around 12 and a half feet long.

The re-excavation was conducted by a joint Iraqi-French team led by Ahmed Fakak Al-Badrani. The French archaeologist Pascal Butterlin—the professor of Middle East archaeology at the University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne—told France24: “I’ve never unearthed anything this big in my life before…Normally, it’s only in Egypt or Cambodia that you find pieces this big.”

According to the SBAH release, the lamassu was commissioned by Assyrian King Sargon II to guard the new capital of Khursbad after he gained power in 721 BCE. The death of Sargon II’s son, however, prompted the capital to move, leaving the lamassu behind.

It was first uncovered in 1992 during an Iraqi-led excavation. However, Iraq had recently been placed under a devastating economic embargo in retribution for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. This consequently destabilized systems designed to protect cultural heritage from Iraq, fueling a spike in antiquities thefts.

Artist Ryder Ripps and Ripps’ business partner, Jeremy Cahen, have been ordered to pay Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs roughly $1.6 million, concluding the protracted court battle over copyright infringement. 

Per CoinTelegraph, John F. Walter, U.S. District Judge of Central California, ruled Wednesday that the pair must pay for “disgorgement and damages”, in addition to legal fees. Walter awarded Yuga Labs $1.38 million after concluding the company was entitled to a disgorgement—or a court-ordered repayment of illegally gotten gains—as well as $200,000 in statutory damages relating to cybersquatting violations. The order also covers attorney’s fees and costs from Ripps and Cahen after the judge deemed the trademark infringement to be an “exceptional case.” In the order, Walter reasoned that the “infringing and noninfringing elements of [the] work cannot be readily separated” and said the trademark infringement was an “exceptional case.”

“A trademark case is generally considered exceptional for purposes of awarding of attorneys’ fees when a party has taken positions that can be characterized as ‘malicious, fraudulent, deliberate or willful,’” the judge wrote in his ruling. 

Yuga Labs filed its complaint in June 2022, after Ripps began selling RR/BAYC NFTs that were identical to Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. However, Ripps claimed that the RR/BAYC NFTs were a form of appropriation art meant to undermine BAYC, which he has said he believed to be threaded with alt-right, Neo Nazi dog whistles and imagery.

Yuga Labs, which has denied that their project contains references to esoteric right-wing ideology, sued Ripps for trademark infringement and cybersquatting, with their main contention being that Ripps was confusing potential customers with his knockoff project.

Right-wing journalist Pietrangelo Buttafuoco has been nominated to replace Roberto Cicutto as president of the prestigious Venice Biennale, according to multiple English and Italian news outlets.

Buttafuoco is a close friend of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and a supporter of her far-right Brothers of Italy party. He began his career as a writer for several right wing Italian newspapers and magazines and was once the leader of the Fronte della Gioventù, the youth wing of the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement party that preceded Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, according to The Art Newspaper.

Despite Buttafuoco’s lack of managerial experience, supporters view his nomination as triumph for Italy’s cultural right and fatal blow to the Italian liberal/left which, according to Raffaele Speranzon, an Italian senator and member of the Brothers of Italy, “thought of the Biennale Foundation as a fiefdom where it could place friends and acolytes.” Speranzon has said that Buttafuoco’s nomination “represents the kind of sea change the Meloni government wants to extend to every cultural and social institution in the nation: figures will be chosen for their depth, competence and experience alone.”

Center-left politician Rachele Scarpa has said Speranzon’s comments “bring forth a chilling vision of how the right conceives the cultural institutions” in Italy. “What is most alarming is that he calls into question the work of an institution, such as La Biennale, whose sole aim must be to take care of its exhibitions and certainly not to make the [Brothers of Italy] happy.”

Italy’s minister of culture Gennaro Sangiuliano confirmed Buttafuoco’s nomination, which now has to be assessed by the cultural commissions in Italy’s Senate and House of Deputies before it becomes official. Their decision is to be made public on November 14, according to Artnet News. 

Contemporary art fairs have been proliferating across Asia lately, as they did a decade or so ago in the United States and Europe. Frieze Seoul arrived in 2022, Art SG in Singapore in January, and Tokyo Gendai in July. Art Basel Hong Kong is still the dominant player in the Asian art market, but it is gaining competitors fast. Remember complaints about “fairtigue” prior to the pandemic? That seems like long ago. The argument put forward by fair organizers has been that these economic hubs, with their own distinct art scenes, merit fairs of their own. No arguing with that. But strolling the aisles (or just perusing Instagram), there is a creeping sense of monotony to it all: Well-capitalized dealers carting their wares from one white-walled trade-show booth to the next.

But at least one art fair has set out to do things differently. Behold Art Collaboration Kyoto, a young public-private entity that asks each selected Japanese gallery to partner with one or two galleries from abroad on a single display. That intriguing conceit has “a synergistic effect on the quality of the booth,” Yukako Yamashita, ACK’s program director, argued in an interview with ARTnews ahead of the event, which opens this weekend. (Typically, the Japanese gallerist invites the foreign colleague, but the fair also sometimes assists.)

“It’s just such a nice way of doing something with colleagues from the other side of the world, sharing resources,” Paris-based dealer Robbie Fitzpatrick said. His eponymous gallery will be in a booth with Anomaly (of Tokyo) and ROH (of Jakarta); each is bringing work by three of their artists, including Hannah Weinberger, Kei Imazu, and Dusadee Huntrakul, respectively.

ACK debuted in 2021, when Japan’s borders were still closed amid the pandemic; they reopened fully last October, weeks before its second edition. And so the latest outing, which runs October 28 to 30 at Sachio Otani’s 1960s sci-fi Kyoto International Conference Center, has the feel of being a major event, with exhibitors coming from around the globe.

New York’s 47 Canal, for one, has linked up with Tokyo’s Misako & Rosen to show some of the beguiling impressionist landscapes that Trevor Shimizu, who is represented by both galleries, has been making in recent years. This will be dealer Jeffrey Rosen’s third time doing ACK, having collaborated with São Paulo’s Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in 2021 and London’s Herald Street in 2022. “It was fun, and because it was fun, it generated business,” Rosen said of that second fair, adding that he “met Japanese collectors that we did not otherwise know.”

Last week, Israeli performance artist Tamy Ben-Tor posted a video to Instagram and YouTube titled “Dear Hamas…” In the video, Ben-Tor dons a mask and a wig of black hair, and embodies a character that might best be described as a caricature of an elite liberal academic. 

“I’d like to utter support for your freedom fight,” says Ben-Tor in the video. “I’m still on the fence about the massacre of the babies. On the one hand, they were colonizing babies, they were Zionist babies…” 

In the video, which has since been taken down on Instagram, Ben-Tor suggests that the alleged killing of babies and raping of women during the October 7 attack in Israel—when Hamas killed more than 1,400 Israelis and took over 200 hostages—was justified and is supported by the women’s rights movements. 

“I will be waiting for you at the university campus when you invade and finally win your exhilarating battle of freedom,” she says.

Ben-Tor is known for performing a range of “despicable stock characters,” as New York Times critic Ken Johnson wrote in a 2012 review, including Jews and other identities. In Johnson’s words, “It emerges that the real targets of Ms. Ben-Tor’s satire are not particular deluded people but academic institutions that embrace and support ludicrous ideas in the name of open inquiry.” Ben-Tor’s work has been generally well received by critics, and her art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the Israel Museum, among others. 

Now in its 40th year, the EVA International, in Limerick, Ireland, is more transient than other biennials like it. Rather than opening all at once, its exhibitions, events, and interventions are taking place gradually, at different points throughout the show’s run, through late October. This removes the need to see it all at once—and also enables the show to more thoroughly dialogue with the city and its history.

Guest curator Sebastian Cichocki has themed his program, “The Gleaners Society,” around the notion of citizenship. It focuses on the practice of gleaning, a term that traditionally refers to the act of collecting surplus crops following a harvest and redistributing them to people in need. Gleaning was declared illegal by the British courts in 1788, and yet, as Cichocki writes in an accompanying text, it remained a strategy of survival and resourcefulness essential to those marginalized by the emerging forces of capitalism.

Cichocki did not train as a traditional curator, although he now serves as chief curator of Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Instead, his background is in sociology and it is this experience that has clearly informed his EVA program, which looks at art’s relationship to society, bringing ideas about farming, feeding, and nurturing to the fore. The shows suggests that art can aid in supporting political opposition and can also expand ideas of alternate methods of queer survival, specifically by holding up rural ways of living as a form of protesting societal oppression. Below, a look at a few of the best works on view at this edition of the EVA International.

After a call for a ceasefire in Gaza signed by thousands of artists appeared on its website, Artforum has fired its top editor, David Velasco, claiming that the publication of the letter did not meet its editorial standards. His firing was first reported by the New York Times.

The letter, which went live on October 19, also appeared in e-flux and Hyperallergic, and had circulated as a Google document before it was published on those websites and Artforum. Velasco, along with several other members of Artforum’s staff, signed the letter.

“We support Palestinian liberation and call for an end to the killing and harming of all civilians, an immediate ceasefire, the passage of humanitarian aid into Gaza, and the end of the complicity of our governing bodies in grave human rights violations and war crimes,” the letter reads.

In a statement posted to the publication’s website, Artforum publishers Danielle McConnell and Kate Koza wrote, “On Thursday, October 19, an open letter regarding the crisis in the Middle East was shared on Artforum’s website and social platforms without our, or the requisite senior members of the editorial team’s, prior knowledge. This was not consistent with Artforum’s editorial process. Had the appropriate members of the editorial team been consulted, the letter would have been presented as a news item with the relevant context.”

They noted their dismay over both the Hamas attack and the resultant “destruction and suffering” in Gaza, and said that the letter had put some members of the Artforum team in the “untenable position of being represented by a statement that was not uniformly theirs.” (Not all of the Artforum editorial masthead signed the letter.)

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. closed in August 2021 for renovations and an expansion, and has now reopened to a very different country. In that two-year interval, abortion rights were severely curtailed, murder rates for trans women have shot up, and fears of a Handmaid’s Tale–like future have become pervasive. Keeanga-Yamahatta Taylor got right to the point when she wrote, in the New Yorker, “Without the ability to control when, where, how, and if one chooses to become pregnant or give birth, no other freedom can be achieved.”

I thought of this remark while looking at Niki de Saint Phalle’s Pregnant Nana (1995), the work that greets viewers in the newly enlarged permanent collection galleries of this museum. The sculpture depicts a buoyant female figure, her bared nipples replaced with a heart and an asterisk. She seems to be enjoying the moment, her hands held above her head—but her tumescent belly features a multicolored target, hinting that she is also the object of someone else’s violent gaze.

“I’m not the person who can change society, except through showing some kind of vision of these happy, joyous, domineering women,” de Saint Phalle once said. “That’s all I can do.” The curators of the National Museum of Women in the Arts seem to have resigned themselves to something similar.

Across this museum’s galleries, there are reminders of the dour situation that has long faced women across history. There are stark Guerrilla Girls prints reminding viewers of how under-represented women have been in art institutions throughout history—something that also becomes a refrain in the wall text for works by Old Masters just starting to get their due, like Rachel Ruysch and Lavinia Fontana. There are pieces that allude to centuries of racism and colonialism, and plenty of artworks that deal with loss and sickness, too.

But the focus is instead mostly on freedom, with few works explicitly alluding to the danger of being a woman in the US today. Generally, the mood is celebratory and light.

September 9 – October 7, 2023

September 15 – October 21, 2023

September 8 – October 21, 2023

September 8 – October 28, 2023

September 21 – October 28, 2023

September 9 – October 28, 2023

September 9 – October 28, 2023

September 14 – October 28, 2023

September 14 – October 15, 2023