April 28 – June 18, 2022

May 14 – June 18, 2022

Has cinema perpetuated damaging stereotypes?

The story of long-forgotten 16th-Century musical genius Vicente Lusitano

Why the enigmatic star's mystical songs are being constantly re-purposed

The event that created a myth

Buzz Lightyear's origin film has a 'gloomy setting' and 'depressing storyline'

How Steven Spielberg's film about a loveable alien stands up, forty years on

How musicians are using hip-hop as a form of protest

How videogame music plays our emotions

The final of the two trilogies is 'packed with silliness, spectacle, romance'

How Marvel has struck gold with a young Muslim superhero

I made Cold Dark Matter in 1991 for the Chisenhale Gallery in East London. It’s a dark space with no natural light, so I wanted to make something that had its own light source. I was making a series of works about things having almost a cartoon death—falling off a cliff, getting blown up, steamrolled, burned. I said to the curator, Jonathan Watkins, that I wanted to blow something up in the space. There were a lot of explosions happening in cities at this time, because of the IRA [Irish Republican Army], so that’s what gave me the idea. He had just laid a new polished concrete floor, so he talked me out of that.

I would have loved to blow up a house, but that wasn’t practical. I decided that a garden shed is the kind of place where all the stuff from the house gets dumped anyway. It’s full of psychological baggage. Jonathan asked me who I wanted to have blow it up, and I suggested the British Army. Jonathan phoned them up, and they said we should come to the Army School of Ammunition in Banbury. By the time we got there, they’d already decided to do it. I had some shed-builders construct a composite shed for me. The objects came from boot sales where people were selling things from their own sheds. A few friends gave me things from their sheds, like pushchairs and motorbikes. It was a bit of a crowd-sourced piece in a way.

We did the explosion in a big open field. The Army treated it like another exercise. A few friends came along, plus some journalists. Major Doug Hewitt, who oversaw the project, was there. Sadly, he has died, but I still keep in touch with his daughters. There was also a group of Kenyan soldiers who were there training; they were very puzzled. The major said, “Oh, this is what we do in Britain—we have this ritual where we blow up sheds.” It was so funny; everyone was having a joke. It was quite joyous.

The show at Chisenhale was two weeks after the explosion. The materials got taken straight to the gallery and laid out on the floor. It smelled of explosives and looked very menacing, as if a disaster had happened. Once we put the work in the air, it stopped being like a morgue and became more like a dynamic display. I also didn’t realize how much the shadows would play into the work. That was really lovely to see.

—As told to Leigh Anne Miller

Ethereum, the crypto-currency on which most NFTs are minted, dropped below $1,800 Friday, its lowest value in over a year. It’s a far cry from its peak in the high $4,000s last November. 

With the drop, the mourning has begun, even among a crypto-community used to weathering the asset’s volatility. NFT platforms, however, are not wading through the five stages of grief before taking action.

In quick succession, major NFT platforms like Foundation, SuperRare, and OpenSea have announced major changes to the way they run their businesses. 

While none of these pivots has been explicitly labeled as a response to the market, the timing and nature of the new initiatives seem designed to make up for the lack of enthusiasm in the market currently.

Take Foundation, for example. 

Early on in Crimes of the Future, filmmaker David Cronenberg’s newly released big return to body horror, a man named Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) has his chest opened up for a rapt audience. A machine with fast-moving scalpels pulls apart his stomach and reveals his innards to the crowd. Meanwhile, his partner Caprice (Léa Seydoux) paces around the room, fingering a squishy gadget with blinking lights to control this surgery, which serves no medical purpose. All the while, Saul moans and writhes, perhaps in pleasure, perhaps in pain, perhaps in a mix of the two.

Could this makeshift surgery be considered art? At least within the film’s world, yes. Caprice labels herself as a performance artist, though Saul is not merely her subject — he is a collaborator unto himself, and he considers his organs his creations.

While this may all seem rather strange, Crimes of the Future is, in fact, couched in recent art history. It draws on a kind of performance art in which artists use their body as their material, subjecting themselves to particularly painful situations that have involved bloodletting and the modification of their skin.

“Twenty years ago when I wrote this script, there were lots of performance artists of various kinds,” Cronenberg told critic Amy Taubin in an Artforum interview this week. “Once you have it in your head that something exists, that artists were compelled to make those performance works and that there was an audience for them, that frees you to invent what you’re going to invent.”

A man broke into the Dallas Museum of Art on Wednesday night, significantly damaging several artworks, including three Greek artifacts and a contemporary Native American piece.

According to the Dallas Morning News, Brian Hernandez, 21, shattered the museum’s glass entrance with a metal chair. Once inside, he began targeting the collection. Among the casualties of his vandalism was a 6th-century BCE Greek amphora, a ceramic vessel used to store liquids, and a Greek box dated from 450 BCE.

Police said Hernandez also destroyed a delicate bowl from ancient Greece decorated with vignettes of Heracles fighting the Nemean lion. A ceramic Caddo bottle depicting an alligator worth $10,000 was pulled from its displayed case and shattered on the museum floor. A dozen smaller objects also suffered minor damage.

“While we are devastated by this incident, we are grateful that no one was harmed. The safety of our staff and visitors, along with the care and protection of the art in our stewardship, are our utmost priorities,” the museum said in a statement.

Hernandez reportedly called 911 on himself while inside the museum before being apprehended by DMA security. He confessed to police and is currently detained at the Dallas County Jail on a charge of criminal mischief. In addition to the collection pieces, he is also accused of causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage to museum property including display cases and furniture.

Most New York gallerists who’ve opened spaces in the Hamptons got their start in the city and built up a network of artists and collectors before venturing out east. Dealer Harper Levine did the reverse. He started his gallery in East Hampton in 1997, tapping a rich community that would launch him from a rare bookseller to an established gallerist. Now, he has five spaces under his auspices, with three of them located in Manhattan.

This past weekend, Levine celebrated a major milestone, opening “25 Years,” a show in East Hampton that toasted the gallery’s 25th anniversary.

Dealer Jack Hanley and artist Cindy Sherman were among those who came this past Saturday to see the show, which includes work by Mark Grotjahn, Richard Prince, and Eddie Martinez. Artists Rashid Johnson and Joel Mesler, who both have nearby studios and also have work in the show, were also on hand, mingling among artist Mary Heilmann and collectors Stafford and Laura Broumand.

“I want to celebrate the fact that I survived this for 25 years,” Levine said in an interview last week in the gallery space he opened in New York’s Chelsea art district in 2020. The anniversary show, he said, is “a celebration of my life and business and is a way for me to sort of commingle artists. [It’s] about believing in my own story and seeing what we’ve been able to do.”

In 2001, Levine, who was born and raised in Manhattan, was living in Minnesota when he decided to come back to New York and make a new start. As he puts it, “I had a hundred bucks.” But his trip back home ended up coinciding with the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and, with a new baby in tow, he and his wife decided to instead settle in the Hamptons, where Levine opened a rare book store that eventually also became a gallery.

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The Headlines

ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, a 21-year-old man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the Dallas Museum of Art and seriously damaging at least four pieces on display, including a Greek amphora from the 6th century B.C.E., the Dallas Morning News reports. Initial reports had placed the value of the damaged works at $5 million, but the museum’s director, Agustín Arteaga , said that the actual figure may be “a fraction” of that. The man was charged with criminal mischief of $300,000 or more, which carries a possible sentence of five years to life in prison, according to the Guardian. Dallas police said that the suspect told the guard who apprehended him that “he got mad at his girl so he broke in and started destroying property.”

CHINA DISPATCH. The exact date has not been announced, but Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said that the Hong Kong Palace Museum will be inaugurated this summer amid celebrations tied to the 25th anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, the South China Morning Post reports. Over in Shanghai, an intense Covid lockdown has ended, but cultural venues institutions remain shuttered, and there has been no word about when they will be allowed to reopen, the Art Newspaper reports. A rep for UCCA Edge, branch of the Beijing-based museum in the city, said that it will soon be able to install shows, which will ease reopening when that is allowed.

The Digest

Paul Gunther, a revered expert in arts administration who held posts at the Municipal Art Society, the New-York Historical Society, and the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, has died at the age of 65. [The New York Times]

The Dulwich Picture Gallery in London has quietly stopped billing its director as the “Sackler Director.” The move comes as many museums have removed the Sackler name from projects supported by the family, some of whose members have been accused of fueling the opioid crisis through the sale of OxyContin via their company Purdue Pharma. [The Art Newspaper]

Say goodbye to the days of dusty chalkboards and hello to the glories of dry erase. Dry-erase boards have become a staple in homes, schools, and offices, making dependable dry-erase markers must-haves. In the classroom, teachers hoard and treasure them. On the job, workers use them to quickly communicate ideas in meetings. Kids love to draw and write with them. While most dry-erase markers are made for whiteboards, you can also find dry-erase markers specially designed for use on glass. Perfect for brainstorming sessions in glass-walled offices, as well as writing on glass boards, windows, and mirrors, these markers lay down smooth, vivid color on glass without beading or streaking.  Browse our selection of dry-erase markers for glass, below.