In the early morning, one can hear the birds perched on trees around the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University. Farther off, there are sounds of protest and counterprotest. But inside the camp itself—technically the second camp after the New York Police Department cleared out the first and caused even more national attention to focus on this campus lawn—the resistance is often quieter if steady: a community formed to call for ceasefire, divestment, and the end to war.

This is a village built overnight. On April 17, student activists descended on the lawn outside the library—which had already been locked off to outsiders without a student identification card—and set up green tents and Palestinian flags. It was planned for the same day Columbia President Minouche Shafik appeared before Congress to discuss antisemitism on college campuses. The protesters hoped to call attention to the role of the United States and Columbia University in supporting Israel. Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, in which more than 1,000 Isrealis were killed and 129 hostages were taken, the Israeli government has waged a war that has led to more than 34,000 dead Palestinians and led Gaza to the brink of famine. 

Following her testimony, Shafik called the New York Police Department, which came in wearing riot gear, and students involved in the protests gained new energy. They quickly built a second encampment. Student demands have remained: that Columbia’s endowment divest from companies they say enable the conflict; that Columbia be transparent about its investments going forward; and that amnesty be provided for all students and faculty who have participated in protests. They hope to center the struggles in Gaza, where Israel is on the brink of a potential invasion of Rafah.

Inside the encampment over the past week, I have found life different than most social media posts and news coverage might have you believe.

Students are not only protesting but attempting to create a new world. Within the camp, there is a certain normalcy in the daily communal flow. The few hundred students here—who each night come outside despite memories of the NYPD’s charge—wake up each morning, stretch, and brush their teeth. An IKEA table serves as an ersatz whiteboard, where students can see daily programming. Next is a morning assembly where leaders update everyone on the status of negotiations between protesters and the administration. Occasionally there are guest speakers and lectures.

A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser has emerged and claimed ownership of the Gustav Klimt portrait sold for $32 million in a buzzy auction in Vienna, per Der Standard. The individual, a Munich-based architect, is not a relative of the Leiser family, but lodged a claim after learning last week that the painting missing for a century had resurfaced at im Kinksy auction house.

Titled Portrait of Fräulein Lieser (1917), the work was purchased by an anonymous Hong Kong dealer for its low estimate (but still an art auction record for Austria). The work is unfinished, but Klimt rarely underperforms on the block; bidders, perhaps, were afraid of this very situation, an ownership challenge supported by gaps in the portrait’s provenance. 

According to Der Standard, the restitution settlement reached by the auction house only involved the seller and the heirs of Adolf Lieser and his sister-in-law Lilly Lieser. Typically, heirs declare that their decision—in this case, to give the painting to the auction house—represents the will of all possible legal heirs. When contacted for comment, the lawyers of both parties told the German news outlet that the situation was under review by the clients. 

According to im Kinsky, the painting, one of Klimt’s last works, resurfaced in the private collection of an Austrian citizen. “A painting of such rarity, artistic significance and value has not been available on the art market in Central Europe for decades,” the auction house said in a press statement on its website. 

Catalogs of Klimt’s works (2007 and 2012) identify the subject of the portrait as an 18-year-old Margarethe Constance Lieser (b. 1899), the daughter of the industrial magnate Adolf Lieser. Klimt likely began painting the portrait in 1917, only a year before his death from a stroke. The painting—barring a few unfinished spots—was later given to the Lieser family. 

A year and a half after Mother Jones exposed how Oklahoma courts were imprisoning mothers for longer than their abusers, state lawmakers passed a bill that could allow some of those mothers’ sentences to be shortened. But this week, Gov. Kevin Stitt vetoed the legislation.

In an award-winning investigation in 2022, I told the story of Kerry King, a mom in Tulsa who got 30 years in prison under the state’s “failure to protect” law because she couldn’t stop her abusive boyfriend from beating her 4-year-old daughter. He received significantly less time behind bars for committing that violence. When my colleague Ryan Little and I conducted a groundbreaking review of Oklahoma’s court records, we identified hundreds of people like King who had been charged under the state’s law since 2009 for allegedly failing to protect their children from another adult’s harm. About 90 percent of those imprisoned under the statute were women, disproportionately Black mothers. Many of them experienced abuse from the same person, often a romantic partner, who harmed their children.

In recent weeks, Oklahoma’s legislature overwhelmingly approved the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, which would allow courts to shorten prison sentences for people who can prove their crime stemmed from domestic violence. The legislation could help mothers like King who are convicted for “failure to protect,” as well as others who killed an abuser in self-defense, or committed a crime while attempting to escape from the abusive relationship, or followed an abuser’s order to break the law for fear of retribution. It would apply to both new and old cases, theoretically helping people with active trials or those who want to retroactively shorten their sentences.

It’s a big deal that this legislation passed with so much support: As I’ve reported before, only a few other states have laws like this, including New York. And none of those states are as conservative as Oklahoma. But the issue appears to have struck a chord on both sides of the Sooner State’s political aisle. “This may be the first time in my life I agree with someone from San Francisco,” then-Rep. Todd Russ, who is Republican and now Oklahoma’s state treasurer, wrote to me in 2022 after I emailed him from California to share our investigation. In March, the state Senate unanimously approved the Oklahoma Survivors’ Act, and in April the state House approved it with a vote of 84-3.

Despite such broad support, Republican Gov. Stitt vetoed the bill on Tuesday. He described the legislation as “bad policy,” arguing that “untold numbers of violent individuals who are incarcerated or should be incarcerated in the future will have greater opportunity to present a threat to society due to this bill’s impact.” (Our investigation found that the vast majority of women in Oklahoma convicted for failure to protect—a nonviolent crime—had no prior felony record.)

The first criminal trial of a former US president is underway, with Donald Trump facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to hush-money payments allegedly made in 2016 to cover up an affair he had with adult film star Stormy Daniels. Here’s the latest—the key updates and absurd moments—from the historic trial.

Public birthday wishes are a tricky art. Some are cute! Others give the ick. But on the 54th birthday of Melania Trump, a new entry into the canon of birthday messages has emerged—and it defies neat categorization.

“I want to start by wishing my wife Melania a very happy birthday,” Donald Trump told reporters on Friday. “It would be nice to be with her but I’m at a courthouse for a rigged trial.”

Trump begins today's rant by wishing Melania a happy birthday while simultaneously whining about his case pic.twitter.com/qgAkHA2voJ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 26, 2024

Dani Levinas, an art collector who gained a following for interviewing other collectors, has died at 75. The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., where he formerly served as board chair, announced his death on Wednesday.

“Dani Levinas’s passion and enthusiasm for art by living artists will have an enduring impact on The Phillips Collection,” said current board chair John Despres in a statement. “We will truly miss his inspiration and guidance.”

With his late wife, Mirella, Levinas bought a significant grouping of works by Latin American artists, acquiring pieces by Jose Dávila, Cildo Meireles, Gabriel de la Mora, Iván Navarro, Jorge Pardo, and others. His collection also came to include works by artists based outside the region, among them Anish Kapoor and Amalia Pica.

“I love to help artists, but I also enjoy living with the pieces,” he told the New York Times in 2020.

His most lasting legacy within the art world, however, is not his collection, but his conversations with his colleagues, from the late Rosa de la Cruz to the collecting couple Don and Mera Rubell. He published these interviews in a 2023 book called The Guardians of Art: Conversations with Major Collectors and as articles in El País, where he served as a columnist. “I don’t just collect art, I collect collectors,” he said in the Times interview.

Works from the art collection of Iowa business leader and philanthropist John Pappajohn and his wife Mary will be offered as a group of highlights during Christie’s Spring sales in New York next month, the auction house announced Friday. 

The Pappajohns were a mainstay of ARTnews’s Top 200 collector list from 1998 to 2014. John passed away last year on April 26 at 94. Mary, aged 88, died in 2022.

The collection, which is comprised of works by post-war and contemporary luminaries including  Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Ad Reinhardt, will be led by Jasper Johns’s 1961 work 0 through 9 (estimate $5 million – $7 million) which debuted that same year at the artist’s first European show at Galerie Rive Droite in Paris.     

Johanna Flaum, Christie’s vice chairman of 20th and 21st century art, described the Pappajohns’s collection as “richly reflective of post-war and contemporary art in America” and “best in class,” and praised the couple, who began collecting art in the 1960s, for acquiring works that at the time “challenged accepted norms and pushed boundaries, proposing new concepts and ideas of what art could be.”

Also notable among the collection is Agnes Martin’s acrylic and graphite canvas Untitled #7 from 1996 (estimate $3 million – $5 million) and Bruce Nauman’s sexually charged Hanged Man (1985, estimate $4 million – $6 million).

Various Russian publications reported on Friday that Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art was being searched by local police, potentially in connection to LGBTQ+ literature that is thought to be housed at the institution.

On the social media platform Telegram, Ostorozhno Novosti, a local news channel, said that police officers were at a building that holds the Garage Museum’s archives. The museum’s leaders and curators were reportedly being kept from using their phones and were being held until the search ended.

The reasons for the search were not clear, but Ostorozhno Novosti speculated that it was related to the LGBTQ+ literature archived by the museum. Earlier this month, works put out by the left-wing publishing house Directio Liberia and tomes released by Moloko Plus, an alternative publisher that promises to provide “journalism that no longer exists,” were removed from Garage Museum’s bookstore, according to Ostorozhno Novosti.

Adding further confusion to the mix was a Telegram post from Podyom, which reported that employees at the museum denied that the search was still active earlier today.

A spokesperson for the museum did not immediately respond to ARTnews’s request for comment.

In 1924 the French poet and critic André Breton published the Surrealist Manifesto. The 4,000-word document marked both the birth of the eponymous movement and the moment when its dogmas were codified, effectively laying the groundwork for the countless derivations of the form that would follow—in the 15 years before World War II, certainly, but also after, up to, and including today. The Surrealist movement may have waned, but its ideas have not.

Now, exactly one century removed from the genesis of this art form, we find ourselves contending with the emergence of another: art made by artificial intelligence, or AI. In all kinds of little ways, the latter feels eerily evocative of the former. Like Surrealism, AI art is automatic and disembodied, at home in the space between language and image. Its schemes are described as dreams, and one of its prominent programs is named after Salvador Dalí. Even the idea of an invisible electronic apparatus that transforms ones and zeros into bizarro images sounds like something a Surrealist would cook up.

It is an imperfect analogy, but it may also be an instructive one, particularly as we wade through the moral and legal repercussions of AI and the ambient anxiety that it will replace art as we know it. Can looking at the past reveal something about where the future of this form is headed?

Read an excerpt from The Book Against Death on the Paris Review Daily here. 

Quixotic is a word that comes to mind when thinking of Elias Canetti, not just because Cervantes’s novel was his favorite novel but because Canetti, too, was a man from La Mancha. His paternal family hailed from Cañete, a Moorish-fortified village in modern-day Cuenca Province, Castile-La Mancha, from which they were scattered in the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Having fared better under Muslim rule than Catholic, the Cañetes passed through Italy, where their name was re-spelled, and settled in Adrianople—today’s Edirne, Turkey, near the Greek and Bulgarian borders—before moving on to Rusçuk, known in Bulgarian as Ruse, a port town on the Danube whose thriving Sephardic colony supported itself by trading between two empires, the Ottoman and the Austro-Hungarian.

Elias, the first of three boys, was born to Jacques Canetti and Mathilde Arditti in Ruse in 1905 and in childhood was whisked away to Manchester, UK, where Jacques took over the local office of the import-export firm established by Mathilde’s brothers. In 1912, a year after the family’s arrival in England, Jacques died suddenly of a heart attack, and Mathilde took her brood via Lausanne to Vienna and then, in 1916, in the midst of the First World War, to neutral Zurich. It was in Vienna that Canetti acquired, or was acquired by, the German language, which would become his primary language, though it was already his fifth, after—in chronological order—Ladino, Bulgarian, English, and French. Following a haphazard education in Zurich, Frankfurt, and Berlin, Canetti returned to Vienna to study chemistry and medicine but spent most of his energies on literature, especially on writing plays that were never produced, though he often read them aloud, doing all the voices. At the time, his primary influence was journalistic—the feuilletons of Karl Kraus—which might have been a way of giving himself the necessary distance from the German-language novels of the Viennese generation preceding his own, the doorstops of Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, both of whom were known to him personally. His own contribution to fiction—his sole contribution to that quixotic art—came in 1935 with Die Blendung (The blinding), which concerns a Viennese bibliophile and Sinologist who winds up being immolated along with his library. Die Blendung was translated into English as Auto da Fé—a preferred punishment of the Inquisition—though Elias’s original suggestion for the English-language title was Holocaust. In nearly all the brief biographical notes on Canetti, this is where the break comes: when he abandons the theater, publishes his only fiction, and escapes the Nazis by leaving the continent. Exile brought him to England again, and to nonfiction, specifically to Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power), a study of “the crowd,” be that in the form of an audience, a protest movement or political demonstration, or a rowdy group threatening to riot—any assemblage in which constituent individuality has been dissolved and re-bonded into a mass, as in the chemical reactions in which Canetti was schooled, or as in the atomic reactions that threaten planetary existence. Canetti’s singular study of collective behavior, published in 1960, stands at the center of his corpus, along with his remarkable series of memoirs, each named for a single sense: The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in My Ear, The Play of the Eyes. Five volumes were projected, but the series went unfinished: no volume connected to smell or touch was ever completed, and the final year of his life covered in the memoirs is 1937, the year Canetti’s mother died and he began to conceive of a book “against” death, a version of which—the only available version of which—can be found on the pages that follow.

In 2007, the same year I was taking my third undergraduate poetry class with John Shoptaw at UC Berkeley, I wrote a short story for a fiction seminar. It involved two estranged friends driving a route familiar to me, between Cupertino and the sparsely visited San Gregorio State Beach. Halfway through the story, we learn that there has been a nationwide pandemic of debilitating anxiety and that everyone has received government-issued Ativan pills. We also learn the reason for the friends’ strained conversation: the Ativan is not working for one of them. When he looks at the world, all he sees is loss and future agony. The friends have a final showdown at the beach, which is littered with dead bees. One friend insists that everything is fine (though his denial is wearing thin), and the other skulks off to a boat that he plans to launch recklessly into the slate-gray, unfriendly surf.

This was of course an argument with myself, one I failed to resolve in my life as much as in the story. Thanks to Shoptaw, with whom I reunited eleven years later, and whom I count as a close friend and mentor, I’ve learned a word that helps me understand the problem I faced. It came up one hot day a few years ago, in a sliver of redwoods at a local botanical garden, where we were discussing our respective projects involving time. The term is prolepsis, a figure of speech in which a future event is represented as having already taken place. An oft-cited example of prolepsis is in Keats’s “Isabella,” in which two men and a man they plan to kill are described as “two brothers and their murder’d man.” For many of us, especially those of my generation and younger, there is a serious need to address something like a habitual prolepsis, a feeling that we inhabit a(n already) murdered world.

How does one find the missing character, the hidden part, the middle—where things still grow, actions remain possible, and the heart recovers its appetite? It is in this ambiguous, breathable space that you’ll find Shoptaw’s practice of ecopoetics. Against the timelessness of traditional nature poetry, ecopoetics takes place in a crisis-ridden present that is populated with individuals and mixtures, not symbols or binaries. The nonhuman characters of these poems are not allegorical but fellow imperiled travelers whose earthly wisdom and survival instinct are one with our own. This can be seen in “For the Birds,” the very first poem in Shoptaw’s forthcoming book, Near-Earth Object. The visiting birds are transcendent, but they are also familiars, and in a few cases even have names. Where a bird in a nature poem might be an impersonal stand-in for immortality, these are mortal neighbors and refugees from the wildfire smoke that the poet breathes too. The poem is simultaneously ode and elegy: a line perfectly capturing the personality of chickadees is immediately followed by the mournful observation that “the chickadees once came to my feeder in bunches.”

With Shoptaw as their human agent, many nonhuman denizens of the world speak to us in Near-Earth Object: Max the cat, garden ants, squirrels, the crickets chirping the temperature. Perhaps one of the most important messages they impart has to do precisely with declinism. It is in the nature of Nature to try to flourish; to give up on life is unnatural. In “After a Cricket,” a cricket has