The recently published summer novels you need to read

More than 100 firefighters and 15 fire engines are tackling a blaze at Somerset House in central London. The Georgian-era complex, which was built on the site of a palace dating back to the Tudors, houses the Courtauld Institute of Art and other arts and education organizations.

A pillar of smoke can be seen billowing from the roof of the former stately home on the Strand. The London Fire Brigade (LFB) reportedly received the first call about the fire on Saturday just before midday. The Metropolitan Police said there are no reported injuries so far and the LFB said the cause of the blaze is not known.

Somerset House posted on X, “Owing to a fire in one small part of Somerset House, the site is currently closed.” It added that all of its Saturday events have been cancelled or postponed.

“Two of the brigade’s 32-meter ladders have been sent to the scene to support fire-fighting operations,” an LFB spokesperson said. “Traffic in the surrounding area will be impacted as crews respond.”

Social media users are posting photos and videos showing the grey smoke rising above the River Thames and nearby Waterloo Bridge.

The central six-ton altar stone at Stonehenge may have come from more than 450 miles away, according to a new study published in the scientific journal Nature.

Stonehenge is thought to have been erected in several phases between 3100 BCE and 1600 BCE, with the circle of large sarsen stones placed there between 2600 BCE and 2400 BCE by Neolithic and Bronze Age people. While larger local stones may have been moved by hundreds of individuals with ropes and log rollers, the Welsh bluestones could have been transported by sea using rafts.

Researchers have already established that the sarsen stones came from 16 miles away from the site, in what is now the British town of Marlborough, and that the smaller bluestones were brought in from 125 miles away, from the Preseli hills in what is now Wales.

Until now, it was believed that the partially buried altar stone came from the same area in Wales. But this latest study suggests that the center stone is from the old red sandstone in the Orcadian Basin in Northeast Scotland, more than 450 miles away.

The study was conducted by researchers from Aberystwyth University, University College London, Curtin University, and the University of Adelaide. The source of the stone, they believe, is a region that includes the Orkney isles, John O’Groats in Caithness, and a narrow strip along the coast that extends to the Moray Firth around Inverness.

Archaeologists from the University of Cádiz have uncovered 57 ancient Roman-era sites in Spain’s Guadalete River region, according to a story published in the Independent. The find suggests that the area may have been a significant hub within the Roman Empire.

Led by Macarena Lara, the team employed ground-penetrating radar to reveal structures and settlements across the Arcos de la Frontera, Bornos Villamartin, and Puerto Serrano regions in Spain. Some of these structures were previously unknown to historians. 

They indicate a complex network of settlements, strategically located along trade routes, and could further historians’ understanding of Rome’s influence in southern Spain. 

This discovery marks the first comprehensive study of these sites, many of which were initially identified decades ago, in the 1980s and 1990s, but had never fully explored. 

“Our main objective is to continue carrying out excavations and surveys with non-traditional techniques and tools that will be completed with the study of the contexts found, as well as analyze techniques on the documented materials that will allow us to obtain a holistic vision of the Roman settlement and the territory in the area around the Bornos and Arcos de la Frontera reservoirs,” Lara said in a statement.

When Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings purchased Utah’s Powder Mountain ski resort in 2023 for an undisclosed sum, the first thing he did was turn it into a private members club. He cordoned off 2,000 acres of the mountain and only made it accessible to people who own houses nearby for an annual fee between $30,000 and $100,000. Hastings did inherit $100 million of debt with his mountainous purchase, so he has to cut the deficit somehow.

To show that he’s also a man of the people, Hastings, who is the chairman of Powder Mountain, has opened up the rest of the mountain to the hoi palloi. He also recently announced that Powder Mountain is developing a public art park that will be filled with large-scale sculptures and land artworks.

Artists James Turrell, Nancy Holt, Jenny Holzer, and Paul McCarthy have all been tapped to create works for the project, which is slated to open in 2026.

Turrell’s walk-in light installation, titled Ganzfeld Apani (2011), was originally commissioned for the 2011 Venice Biennale and will be installed in a new trailside pavilion within the mountain’s 156 ski runs and numerous hiking and biking trails.

“At Powder, we want every experience—from the ski resort to the residential community to the outdoor art museum—to be intentional, and the integration of art into the mountain is a manifestation of that consideration,” Hastings said in the statement. “We aim to transform Powder into a multi-season destination that blends recreation, art, and meaningful connection for our entire community.”

Matthew Thompson is the director of Powder Mountain’s new arts program. He conceived the initial plan alongside Alex Zhang, the company’s chief creative officer, and independent curator Diana Nawi (who was appointed curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in July).

The death knell has been rung for print media many times over in the past decades: thousands of local newspapers have shuttered, digital readership has shot up, and journalism has suffered a crisis. But if print really is dead, you wouldn’t know it from “Multiplicity: Blackness in American Collage,” a smart survey that features dozens of pieces that invest precious publications with new life.

Take Helina Metaferia’s Headdress 61 (2023), featuring artist Chase Williamson donning a grand, collaged headdress. This headdress is partially formed from newspaper clippings sourced from archives in Nashville, the city were Williamson was employed at the time, working as a curatorial fellow at the Frist Art Museum. Certain headlines are visible—one advertises a report on integration efforts in Birmingham, Alabama—while others are tucked away beneath images of demonstrations held following the 1968 killing of Martin Luther King, Jr. The yellowed, puckered quality of the clippings causes Williamson’s crown to appear golden.

There’s also Narcissister’s Untitled Kingston NY Collage Series (Grey hair quilt), from 2021, in which a person’s face is hidden beneath triangular cutouts of portraits found in magazines and art catalogs. It’s tough to tell which articles these swatches were excised from, but it’s clear that Narcissister has lovingly pored over that source material to assemble the dizzying array of eyes, noses, and mouths seen here. The artist has posed this mix-and-match array of facial features with one big hand set atop it all, its carefully manicured figures seemingly caressing these rephotographed papers.

Both Metaferia and Narcissister’s works evince a winsome geekiness: these artists, like nearly all the others in the show, have obviously spent hours in bookshops, libraries, and archives, plucking tattered volumes off the shelves and poring over their pages. Yet they are both not content to leave their materials as they found them—they make their magazines and newspapers their own and envision new possibilities for all that printed matter along the way.

“Multiplicity,” which opened earlier this summer at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., after first appearing at the Frist in Nashville, adds a significant chapter to the history of collage. The technique has historically been associated with white artists like Georges Braque and Hannah Höch, who likewise relied heavily upon newspapers, cutting and pasting their words and pictures to form shocking new associations. (And, in the case of Höch, to commit acts of casual racism: she had a habit of appropriating images of African masks, then matching them with photographs of white women’s nude bodies.) To do so, for artists like Braque and Höch, was a means of provocation.

A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

One morning in 1958, while researching his ancestry in the English city of Leeds, the Antiguan artist Frank Walter awoke to a disturbance. He looked out his window and noticed some aliens who appeared to glow. Rather than cowering in fear, he was awed by what he saw. 

It was hardly his only encounter with realms beyond our world. Walter, who died in 2009, would go on to claim to have been visited by a spectral King Charles II, and to have knowledge that extraterrestrials had overrun his estate in Dominica. It would be wrong to romanticize such events—Walter was periodically institutionalized and was diagnosed with schizophrenia, for which he does not seem to have taken any medication—but it is hard not to marvel at the paintings that stem from his visions. 

MWG Milky Way Galaxy (ca. 1994), one of the nearly 200 works in Walter’s current survey at New York’s Drawing Center, features an eye-like form, its iris bisected by a spear whose tip is set within a target. This work, with its obscure symbols, recalls the paintings of Hilma af Klint, another artist who gave form to alternate universes. Yet the Drawing Center show suggests that, unlike af Klint, Walter channeled other worlds to escape his own, which was haunted by racism and violence. 

Walter was born in Liberta, Antigua, in 1924, and became familiar with death from a young age: before he turned 18, his grandfather was murdered, and his mother died from tuberculosis. Walter was subsequently left in the care of his grandmother, who told him about his European heritage—effectively showing him that his family lineage was shaped by enslavement and colonialism. The rest of Walter’s biography contains many details that are just as grim: he was incarcerated more than once; he ran a plantation in Antigua, stoking distrust from the Black community; and he was stripped of his estate in Dominica, since he could not produce legal documents needed to keep it. 

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

THE HEADLINES

PRICE OF GOLD. It cost the UK more than $315 million of tax payers’ hard-earned cash to prepare its athletes for the Paris Olympics. Team GB won 64 medals, which equates to almost $5 million per podium place. To whittle it down further, each of the UK’s 14 gold medals cost an average of $22.5 million. What’s this got to do with art? Well, a writer from The Times crunched the above numbers and wondered why the government spends so much on synchronized swimming, breakdancing, and canoeing when arts funding in the UK has fallen off the cliff. “Against such a grim background [of the country’s slashed cultural budget], is it reasonable to spend £245 million of public money on training just 327 British athletes to win Olympic medals — or, in most cases, not win them?” Richard Morrison writes. “And let’s be frank, there were some real disappointments for Team GB in Paris. Our hockey teams didn’t get anywhere near the podium. That was £13.7 million of funding down the drain. (Don’t ask me why it takes £13.7 million to train two hockey teams.) In boxing we won just one bronze; not much to show for £12.1 million of investment.” He rages on, arguing that a “prosperous and civilized country” would value both the arts and sports equally.

OIL SOLD OUT. A Western Australian art collective called pvi has handed some oversized invoices to five corporations it claims are the state’s biggest carbon polluters. Eight members of the art group personally delivered the roughly 7-foot-tall mock bills to the Perth offices of BHP, Glencore, Inpex, Woodside, and Chevron. The invoices total tens of billions of dollars, which is what pvi say the cohort of polluting firms owe the community for the environmental and societal damage caused by their carbon emissions. Kelli McCluskey, pvi’s chief executive artist, told The Art Newspaper, “We’ve learned that coming at things with aggression doesn’t help,” taking aim at the Just Stop Oil members who are intent on covering paintings in soup. “We need to go the other way, and lead with kindness and humor. I think people are more open to humor than they are to aggression.” The artists call themselves The Social License Watchdogs and said the companies have 21 days to cough up the cash, and have the option of payment plan. “Six easy installments of $71 billion,” pvi kindly offered.

THE DIGEST

For over a week, the mysterious street artist Banksy took to the streets of London and, under the cover of night, took the Big Smoke for a walk on the wild side by introducing stenciled wildlife into the urban cityscape. 

Every day, for nine consecutive days, a new Banksy mural depicting a member or members of the animal kingdom appeared somewhere in the city. They perched on the roofs of buildings and swung from infrastructure. One of the portrayed animals even get very, very friendly with Nissan Micra. After each discovery, the artist claimed the work as his own via posts on Instagram.

There was no explanation as to why he chose to decorate the city with elephants, monkeys, and fish (oh my), which suited his followers well enough. Half of the pleasure of a new Banksy every day was speculating what message the artist was trying to send.

“The camera is looking at the falling rocks, rather than what’s causing them to fall,” one person wrote on the Banksy’s Instagram post of a stenciled goat standing just so on the buttress of a wall new Kew Bridge in Richmond, a town in southwest London, as rocks tumble from beneath the animal’s feet. “Goats are adapted to climbing on narrow ledges, so it isn’t in danger, but the camera’s view doesn’t give the full picture. So I’d guess that it’s referencing the need to understand that news needs context before forming an opinion.”

On a post in which Banksy “claimed authorship” of three stenciled monkeys swinging from a bridge over Brick Lane, near Shoreditch High Street, one user wrote that the work “can be seen as a critique of the chaotic and irrational behavior in society, especially during the Trump era and the fears of terrorism.” The monkeys, the user went on, might symbolize “the masses blindly following a fragile path, reflecting how populism and fear can lead to reckless actions.” Heady stuff. 

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg caused a stir on Wednesday after sharing an image on Instagram of a 7-foot-tall statue resembling his wife, Priscilla Chan. The statue, commissioned by Zuckerberg, was created by New York-based artist Daniel Arsham and placed next to a tree in what appears to be a lush garden.

In the Instagram post, Chan, seen sipping from a mug that matches the statue’s color, playfully commented, “The more of me the better?” The statue’s design, with its flowing silver garment, looks like a mashup of ancient Roman Sculpture and the T-1000 from Terminator 2. According to Zuckerberg, the inspiration came from the former: he captioned the photo “bringing back the Roman tradition of making sculptures of your wife.”

The sculpture features a reflective silver robe wrapped around a blueish green figure that brings to mind a photoshop-smooth version of the weathered and oxidized copper of the Statue of Liberty in New York. The statue’s striking color and size led to a flurry of online comparisons to characters from “Avatar” and jokes about Zuckerberg being the ultimate “wife guy.”

Zuckerberg and Chan met in 2003 while both were students at Harvard. They have been married since 2012 and share three daughters.

Arsham has worked across sculpture, architecture, drawing and film to explore his concept of “fictional archaeology” He most recently opened the exhibition “Phases” at Fotografiska New York earlier this year and he has long been represented by Perrotin. Last month, Arsham was accused of violating national labor laws by employees of his studio, according to a complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board.

Next May, one of Yayoi Kusama’s most famous “Infinity Rooms” returns to Dallas, ending an infinitely-Instagrammed museum tour. 

The Dallas Museum of Art jointly acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins in 2017 with the Rachofsky Collection, which is also based in Dallas. Like other entries in the series, viewers are invited to step inside a small mirrored room filled with Kusama’s whimsical, often polka-dotted sculptures, in this case, her signature yellow and black pumpkins. The effect is a kaleidoscopic sea of sculptures stretching into oblivion—very selfie-friendly. 

All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins is “key to understanding [Kusama’s] practice,” Gavin Delahunty, a contemporary-art curator at the museum, said in a statement in 2017.

Due to its popularity, the installation comes with a recommendation of one to four visitors at a time, though that didn’t prevent property damage during its stint at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. In a headline-grabbing 2017 incident, a visitor tripped on one of the hand-painted acrylic gourds, shattering it in the process, while trying to take a photo. The Washington Post reported at the time that the museum instructed for no security to be in the narrow room with visitors, who are allowed 30 seconds inside of viewing. 

A Hirshhorn spokesperson told the Post that the cost of replacing a pumpkin was “negligible,” and the site-specific nature of the installation allows for seemingly endless reconfigurations, all of which are executed in consultation with Kusama.

July 13 – August 17, 2024

June 29 – August 10, 2024

June 29 – August 24, 2024

March 7 – August 25, 2024

June 28 – August 29, 2024

May 17 – September 22, 2024

June 8 – August 17, 2024

June 15 – August 18, 2024

June 12 – August 11, 2024