How a sense of excitement and cultural renaissance awoke across the continent

How Norse sagas and medieval myths inspired The Lord of the Rings

June 12 – August 28, 2022

June 29 – September 4, 2022

After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Almost an hour long, the video features actors reading aloud from a selection of inquiring letters that vary widely in affect, etiquette, and contextual detail. Whereas some performances are deadpan, as is the enactment of a clear-sighted married mother of four from Walla Walla, Washington, others brim with emotion, like that of a teary woman, a chihuahua sitting on her lap as she vocalizes a mother writing from Hood River, Oregon, on behalf of her pregnant 21-year-old daughter. Each reader sits before a different resplendent bouquet that injects an uneasy funereal quality; after all, the video does not reveal the outcomes for any of the women whose stories are so briefly told here. The actors appear in clothing from the mid-2000s rather than period dress, as if to bring the compendium into the present to illuminate the ongoing obstacles individuals face when seeking abortions.

While the video makes this epistolary archive audible, the bound collection and wall installation—a checkered pattern of enlarged photocopied reproductions and decorative wrapping paper—make it visible. The emphatic physical presentation of these formerly furtive letters elicits a tension between public and private, while the project as a whole considers silence and speech, stillness and action. As if anticipating an era of nauseating regression, Bowers’s eternally urgent work insists that, when words fail us most, we need them more than ever.

May 28 – August 28, 2022

April 14 – September 4, 2022

From Bowie to Blonde, these are September's unmissable releases

The art collection of tech mogul Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft who died at the age of 65 in 2018, will be sold at Christie’s in what will be one of the highest-valued single-owner sales ever to come on the open market, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday.

Listed among the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors for more than two decades, Allen amassed a collection worth an estimated $1 billion. The house has not yet announced when Allen’s holdings will hit the block.

Christie’s will sell a group of 150 artworks from Allen’s estate, the collection poised to be the most expensive ever sold at auction, beating out two recent marquee single-owner holdings. It is likely to surpass the $922 million generated by the sale of the court-ordered Macklowe’s collection, sold at Sotheby’s earlier this year, as well as the 2018 sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018, which brought in $835 million.

Allen, whose cause of death was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, designated his sister Jody Allen as sole executor of his estate. She remains chair of his investment company, Vulcan.

Known primarily as a tech pioneer starting in the mid-’70s, Allen also gained a reputation for being a serious philanthropist and art collector, a vocation around which he was highly discreet. He first appeared on the Top 200 Collectors list in 1997, and held a place there in every edition until his death in 2018. In the 2020 edition, ARTnews predicted that Allen’s collection would soon head to auction.

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The Headlines

A TEN-FIGURE SALE. Clear your schedule, ready your paddle, and line up a pile of cash (or a fulsome line of credit): The treasure-filled collection of the late Microsoft cofounder Paul G. Allen is coming to Christie’s in New York in November with a valuation north of $1 billion, ARTnews reports. The proceeds will go to charity, as Allen—who died in 2018 —had planned. The lot lineup has not yet been announced, but it will include more than 150 works from artists including Botticelli and Cézanne, whose La Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1888–90) is arriving with an estimate above $100 million. (The exact timing of the auction has not yet been announced.) If all goes according to plan, the haul will set a new all-time record for a single-collection auction.

GOO GONE. Following cases of climate activists gluing themselves to the frames of artworks in the U.K. and Italy, the movement has now reached Germany, with actions this week at the Gemäldegalerie in Dresden (a Raphael), the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt (Poussin), and the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (Cranach the Elder), the Associated Press reports. An organization that advocates for cultural institutions in the country, the German Cultural Council, slammed the protests. “As much as I can understand the despair of the climate activists, I say clearly that the act of gluing themselves to the frames of famous works of art is clearly wrong,” Olaf Zimmermann, its managing director, told the AP. “The risk of damaging the artworks is very high.” 

The Digest

Even if your child is back in the classroom, it’s important that they have a dedicated space at home for working and storing supplies. This back-to-school season, consider giving them their very own age-appropriate desk. When it comes to kids’ desks, a top priority is comfort: Students shouldn’t find themselves hunched over or struggling to reach the floor. (Unsurprisingly the standing desk revolution has reached this market, and we’ve included some examples of these in our roundup as well.) Importantly, desks should also feel secure—no wobbling allowed!—and should be able to support a goodly number of books. They should also be safe, and many of our picks feature rounded edges and other adaptations to avoid pinched skin. Finally, desks should be a breeze to clean. You certainly want your kids to use them often, but a work space that is spick and span makes for a clear mind and clean homework. Check out our favorite kids’ desks below.

Yevgeny Roizman, a prominent Russian museum director, has been detained for speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine, the Art Newspaper reports.

Roizman is not just the director and founder of the Nevyansk Icon Museum in Yekaterinburg, but also a former mayor and parliament member.

He was the last of the opposition to be arrested for speaking out against the invasion. His referred to Russia’s actions in Ukraine as an “invasion” and a “war,” as opposed to a “special military operation,” which is a crime in Russia, according to Vladimir Putin’s new censorship law. Most Russian dissenters have been arrested using this new law.

The New York Times reported that officials held out so long on arresting Roizman because of his great popularity in Yekaterinburg, one of Russia’s largest cities.

With an upcoming gubernatorial race in the offing, Roizman’s sentencing could potentially destabilize the region. His arrest has been met with masses of protestors outside his museum and the court.

Art and architecture maintain a self-evident, though largely unarticulated, relationship. Paraphrasing and inverting Ad Reinhardt’s maxim applies: “architecture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a sculpture.” Yet the art world pays scant attention to buildings, at least when the conversation ventures beyond a new museum.

But unlike art—much of which lives in storage or on private walls—architecture is there for the seeing. And the world of architecture, like the world of art, is rife with untold stories and unknown work that unlike most under-recognized art, lies hiding in plain sight.

In March 2020, when the pandemic began and galleries closed, my wife Dyanne and I got into our car and went traveling to see architecture in the field. These trips started when the gallery’s Instagram account was created in 2015. Now they became the daily diary of our pandemic life. Since traffic was nonexistent in the disease’s early days, we ranged far and fast. Destinations were identified and corroborated using Google Street View. Could the building be photographed without trespassing?

Like art, architecture reveals itself in myriad ways. Since nothing comes from nowhere, and little is less nowhere than the built environment, anecdotal webs began to be woven, with the local emerging as an intricate historical document.

Below, a look at how 10 buildings and their architects can reveal the exigency of  the personal relationships, inclusive memory, and community recognition that lives in the architecture and art that surround us.

The New York Attorney General’s Office said it found evidence that at least a dozen clients were involved in an alleged tax fraud scheme led by Sotheby’s.

The investigation, which began in 2020, initially centered around a private collector who obtained a false resale certificate. Now, the AGO claims that that collector’s case was not an outlier.

The false resale certificate allowed the anonymous individual from the initial investigation to fraudulently pose as an art dealer. Doing so may have allowed the collector to avoid paying millions of dollars in tax revenue on the sale.

The new allegations were made public in a Manhattan court on Wednesday by an attorney working for the government agency, according to a report from Law360.

That complaint is related to a 2018 lawsuit in which Sotheby’s was accused of defrauding the state out of taxes on $27 million of art purchased by an offshore account Porsal Equities. The original complaint alleged that the auction house’s staffers knew the client was a private collector purchasing art for his personal holdings. Under New York City law, only dealers planning to resell art qualify for exemptions to city and state sales tax.

After a year-long controversy, the International Council of Museums (ICOM) has approved a new definition for what makes a museum today, marking the first time in 15 years that the group has done so.

The new definition describes a museum as “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets, and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage,” adding that it is “open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability. They operate and communicate ethically, professionally, and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing.”

While the new standard mimics the definition’s previous structure, it includes mention of progressive concepts like “diversity,” “sustainability,” and “accessible”—terms that are meant to reflect recent debates around the civic role of museums.

In a press statement on Wednesday, ICOM president Alberto Garlandi called the revised phrasing a “great step forward” for the museum world at large, while also acknowledging the update is “not perfect.”

The revision passed with 92 percent vote of approval on the final day of ICOM’s General Conference held in Prague this week.

July 14 – August 19, 2022

June 28 – August 27, 2022

Featuring a new Game of Thrones saga and an 'unfilmable' fantasy