April 23 – November 27, 2022

April 23 – November 27, 2022

Why did America became obsessed with aliens?

The Gray Man borrows from a slew of CIA thrillers

Why Japanese masterpiece Princess Mononoke flummoxed the US

Magical transformations, from Cinderella to new film Mrs Harris Goes to Paris

How a 1922 painting broke the mould

As Better Call Saul ends, how it improved on its acclaimed predecessor

Memoir, poetry and time travel stories are among the BBC Culture picks

The films, TV shows and books exposing the painful realities of having a child

How the underrated masterpieces of Eric Ravilious offer a unique view of wartime

Taika Waititi's latest Thor is 'thundering and sensitive'

Jenny Moore will step down from the Chinati Foundation after serving nine years as director. Her term at the nonprofit organization, which manages more than 100 works by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, will officially end on July 31.

Marella Consolini, who was the chief operations officer of the nonprofit institution from 2010 to 2014, will act as interim director while the board of trustees conducts an international search for Moore’s replacement.

During her time as director, Moore overhauled the organization’s management and vision, transforming Chinati, which was established in a series of warehouses on 340 acres in the west Texas desert by Judd in the 1980s, into a full-fledged contemporary art museum with an annual attendance that peaked around 50,000 before the pandemic. In 2017, she introduced the multiphase “Master Plan” for the preservation of the museum’s buildings, the improvement of its visitor experience, and the restoration of its vast grounds.

Among her accomplishments is the 2016 unveiling of untitled (dawn to dusk), a 10,000-square-foot, C-shaped concrete structure by Robert Irwin. It’s monumental reconstruction of a former army hospital, divided by corridors of alternating windows and translucent scrims that cast the building half in darkness and half in sunlight.

This April the museum completed a $2.7 million restoration of the John Chamberlain Building, one of three converted wool warehouses dedicated to contemporary artists Judd admired, and the 22 large-scale sculptures made of crushed automobile parts installed inside. It is the world’s largest permanent installation of Chamberlain’s works, and had for years suffered damage in the region’s scorching heat, high altitude, and winds.

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Four hundred religious monuments in Spain are in serious danger due to neglect, Hispania Nostra, a nonprofit that works to promote and conserve “cultural and national heritage” in Spain, said in a statement Thursday.

Hispania Nostra publishes a record of different monuments, buildings, and sites of archaeological importance around the country and the condition they’re in. The Red List, which is published on a rolling basis, notes which sites are in a state of serious disrepair; their most recent update notes that many religious monuments are fading away due to neglect and looting.

“Monasteries, hermitages, monasteries, churches and hospitals were abandoned, if not razed, vandalized and looted, and what used to be monuments that housed valuable libraries and works of sacred art, were reduced to a heap of rubble,” reads the statement.

“Many times, the stones and wooden beams of these convents were uprooted to build houses, fences or even bullrings, while the most valuable and elaborate ones (capitals, columns and even entire cloisters) were sold, sometimes to foreign buyers.”

Hispania Nostra pointed out sites like Sanctuary of the Virgin of Grace which was built in 1795 and is located in Teruel in eastern Spain. Only its walls and floors remain, but the imagery that once adorned it have all been erased by time, the organization said. Many of the sites on the list contain decorative elements such as frescoes and altar pieces that are being destroyed by humidity and lack of care.

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum will return to Turkey a marble head of the Greek deity Eros that was separated from a sarcophagus dating to the 3rd century CE. The move resolves a struggle of nearly a century to restitute the object.

The V&A described the artifact’s return as “a cultural partnership” with the Turkish government agency overseeing culture and tourism.  The loan agreement, which is set to last for a period of six years, acknowledges shared ownership between the Turkish government and the U.K. museum, which is state-run.

The Eros fragment was taken in 1882 by Charles Wilson, a British military official during a stint in Anatolia, when he discovered a Roman sarcophagus in the Karaman province of central Turkey. Wilson subsequently loaned the head to the V&A, which was then known as South Kensington Museum. It was gifted to the museum in 1933 after his death.

The V&A discussed returning the head to Turkey in exchange for a Byzantine antiquity. The museum’s then director, Eric Maclagan, openly expressed concern about potential repercussions of such a restitution deal on other artifacts held in British museums.

In 1934, though, the U.K. government authorized the marble head’s return to Turkey. To see if the marble head really was from the original sarcophagus, the V&A initially provided a plaster duplicate to experts in Turkey. The marble head continued to be held in storage in London into the late 20th century.

David Hammons, one of today’s greatest living artists, does not appear in The Melt Goes on Forever: The Art & Times of David Hammons, a new documentary about him that is directed by Judd Tully and Harold Crooks. This won’t be a surprise to anyone who knows even a little about Hammons, who almost never gives interviews to journalists and has a tendency to be evasive with dealers, collectors, and curators. He’s an artist who is more often heard about than seen—a figure who often seems constantly present yet always just barely out of reach.

It’s not clear whether Hammons himself was ever given an opportunity to comment for this documentary, not that it really matters—he would have said no anyway. The late artist Steve Cannon alludes to this at one point when he says, “David believes that the less said about him, the better it is.”

Regardless, everyone seems to have something to say about Hammons, and The Melt Goes on Forever is chock-full of stories about him. Tully is a journalist (he’s published articles in this magazine), and Crooks is a documentarian; together, they have assembled an impressive array of interviewees, from artists like Lorna Simpson, Henry Taylor, and Fred Wilson to critics like Antwaun Sargent and Richard J. Powell, to shed light on a truly great sculptor whose objects are frequently shown and little understood by most who come in contact with them.

The picture of Hammons that emerges is that of an elusive chronicler of Black life in America who plays by his own rules. At times, it feels as if the viewer is the butt of Hammons’s jokes. For his justly famed piece Higher Goals (1986), he sculpted a grouping of basketball hoops that were so high as to be virtually unusable, even to a giant. For Concerto in Black and Blue (2002), a cult favorite among Hammons heads, he invited viewers into a totally darkened gallery and gave them blue flashlights to navigate the empty space.

“A good comedian, whoever’s speaking, has to know how to handle the hecklers, as well as those who aren’t,” Hammons tells filmmaker Michel Auder in archival footage. One way to deal with hecklers and fans alike, it seems, is to crack jokes that nobody completely gets.

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In the last stretch of auctions staged in London this week, Phillips held an evening sale offering works of modern and contemporary art evening at its U.K. headquarters, bringing in a combined total of £17.5 million ($21 million) with fees.

The 33 lots offered spanned works from mid-career artists like Shara Hughes and Caroline Walker to less valuable pieces by historical figures like Cy Twombly. Thirty-one works sold, with two withdrawn in advance. Six pieces, including examples by Flora Yukhnovich, Damien Hirst, and Stanley Whitney were secured with irrevocable bids.

The total hammer price for the entire group before fees came to £14.3 million ($17.5 million), landing at the low end of its combined presale estimate of £13.5 million–£18.4 million ($16.4 million–$22.4 million). The total with premium was $21 million.

The energy for the hour-and-a-half-long sale, led by auctioneer Henry Highly, was higher than in sales led by its larger competitors—Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week—whose sales are twice the size. More than in the other London sales, which were anchored with top lots by canonized male artists, Phillips relied on some of the market’s youngest artists to activate momentum with bidders.

The Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine-era religious building in Istanbul, Turkey, was reportedly damaged last week when heavy cleaning equipment cracked the marble floors. It is just the latest incident in recent years that has seen the site damaged.

The Hagia Sophia, constructed by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537, served as the largest Christian cathedral in the world until Constantinople was taken over by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. It was then turned into a mosque and subsequently into a museum by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1935. Considered one of the most important religious and cultural sites in the world, it was deemed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.

In 2020, the Turkish government decided to convert the structure from a museum back into a mosque. The decision sparked controversy both globally and locally, and required that the Department of Religious Affairs take over control of the Hagia Sophia from the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Antiquities.

Since 2020, reports have documented other kinds of damage at the site. The Imperial Gate, also known as the Door of Repentance, which dates back to the sixth century, is one such example. The doorway stands at roughly 23 feet tall and is, according to the Byzantines, constructed of oak from Noah’s Ark. Above the door is a mosaic depicting Jesus alongside the Theotokos, or mother of Jesus and Saint Mary of Egypt—all of which were brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The Imperial Gate would have been used solely as an entrance for the emperor.

Earlier this year on April 18,  a group called the Turkish Association of Art Historians documented vandalism to the gate in a Twitter post. “We discovered that the historic Imperial Gate of Hagia Sophia is in such a state and we photographed it, around 20:45 tonight,” they wrote. The photo accompanying the post shows deep gouges in the wood surface.