Cargoes or skinnies – the trouser styles dividing Gen Z and millennials

In Colombian artist Carlos Motta’s 2013 video, Nefandus, an indigenous man and a Spanish man travel down Colombia’s Don Diego River telling stories of the violent sodomization against natives by the Spanish during the conquest in Latin America. “The landscape does not confess what it has witnessed; the images are out of time and veil the actions that have taken place there,” the narrator explains.

This question of colonial violence against the land and the passage of time is at the center of Nefandus and Part II of “El Dorado: Myths of Gold,” the exhibition in which it is currently being shown. On view until May 18, the exhibition at Americas Society in New York features over 100 objects and artworks from 60 artists linked by El Dorado, the mythical city of gold believed to be in the deep jungles of Colombia.

“From at least the sixteenth century onward, the myth of El Dorado was a central force in establishing the Americas as a “utopian” place, a venue of desire and a land ripe for conquest and plunder,” Edward Sullivan, co-curator of the exhibition and a ​professor of art history at New York University, told ARTnews.

The works in the exhibition collectively show the consequences of this deep-seated myth, which penetrated the minds of colonizers and spurred the extraction, excavation, and brutal transformation of the Americas.

(Part I of the exhibition, which closed in December, displayed 16th century maps that attempted to place El Dorado, alongside contemporary maps by artists who engaged with topics of extraction and colonization.)

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THE HEADLINES

NEW KLIMT CLAIM. A potential heir to the legal successor of Adolf Lieser came forward with a claim they own the Gustav Klimt portrait of Fraulein Lieser, right before it sold at auction for a low estimate of $32 million, according to Der Standard. The potential heir, a Munich-based architect who is not a relative of the Lieser family, learned last week about the sale of the 1917 painting that had gone missing for a century, and lodged his claim the day before it was sold to an anonymous Hong Kong collector, on behalf of the Lieser family that commissioned the painting and its owner at the time. What does this mean for the painting’s fate, which fetched a low price (relative to Klimt’s market) at least in part out of fear something like this might happen? Patti Wong, owner of the Hong Kong–based art advisory that bid for the anonymous buyer said, “We have been assured that the seller and all Lieser heirs are covered [by the contract between the auction house and the consignor],” reports the South China Morning Post.

BRONZE RETURN. The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced it is returning a bronze head of a young man to Turkey, more than a decade after the country requested it. The news came following an investigation indicating the illegal 1960s excavation of the head, dated 100 BCE–100 CE, that had been detached from an unidentified life-size figure. “In light of new information recently provided by Matthew Bogdanos and the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office … we agreed that the object needed to be returned to Türkiye,” said museum leadership in a press release.

THE DIGEST

Did anyone see Kyle Walker lay an egg last night? Well, Jim Campbell did and he tells Marcus, Luke and Andy why he thinks it’s a good omen for Arsenal.

Elsewhere, we ask: was Man City’s win so comfortable that it might encourage Oasis to get back together? Plus, Marcus questions whether Anne Hathaway is a fraud and Luke gives us exclusive insider information on why Matt Ritchie has been training for his Large Goods Vehicle licence.

We're back on stage and tickets are out NOW! Join us at London Palladium on Friday September 20th 2024 for 'Football Ramble: Time Tunnel', a journey through football history like no other. Expect loads of laughs, all your Ramble favourites, and absolutely everything on Pete's USB stick. Get your tickets at footballramblelive.com!

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This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s 3,000 billionaires should pay a minimum 2 percent tax on their fast-growing wealth to raise about $313 billion a year for the global fight against poverty, inequality, and global heating, ministers from four leading economies have suggested.

In a sign of growing international support for a levy on the super-rich, Brazil, Germany, South Africa, and Spain say a 2 percent tax would reduce inequality and raise much-needed public funds after the economic shocks of the pandemic, the climate crisis and military conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.

They are calling for more countries to join their campaign, saying the annual sum raised would be enough to cover the estimated cost of damage caused by all of last year’s extreme weather events.

“It is time that the international community gets serious about tackling inequality and financing global public goods,” the ministers say in a Guardian comment piece. “One of the key instruments that governments have for promoting more equality is tax policy. Not only does it have the potential to increase the fiscal space governments have to invest in social protection, education, and climate protection. Designed in a progressive way, it also ensures that everyone in society contributes to the common good in line with their ability to pay. A fair share contribution enhances social welfare.”

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.

The French polymath Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) was never content to work in one mode—and was ostracized for it. His retrospective at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice is titled “The Juggler’s Revenge”: it makes a case for this versatility, showing a cohesive spirit across works in film, sculpture, collage, drawing, literature, and jewelry.

No bother, Cocteau was unperturbed, impressively juggling this range of media. He inflected even his most commercial films with avant-garde impulses. An excerpt from his 1930 Surrealist film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet) features a handsome shirtless man communing with an anthropomorphic armless Classical sculpture. At one point, the man finds a pair of animate lips on his palm, which he then transfers to the sculpture. The sculpture, now equipped with a mouth, instructs the man to go through the looking glass, so he positions himself along its frame and presses his body against it. Suddenly, he splashes through, as if into a swimming pool, and falls into the abyss.

By 1953, Cocteau served as the jury president for the Cannes Film Festival, a post he held two years in a row. But André Breton, Surrealism’s self-appointed gatekeeper, “despised Cocteau,” the catalog reveals—not on the quality of his work, but on the simple fact that Breton was a raging homophobe, describing himself as “completely disgusted” by male homosexuality.

The show positions Cocteau as a brave forerunner for generations of queer artists who would follow. It opens with a piece not by Cocteau, but by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The gesture, from curator and art historian Kenneth E. Silver, highlights Cocteau’s influence on younger generations (but only in this first room: the other works in this 150-plus-object show are by Cocteau or related ephemera). Made in 1991, the year that Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s partner died, “Untitled” (Orpheus Twice) features two side-by-side full-length mirrors that recall the Orpheus myth—a long-standing motif in Cocteau’s work. While mourning and with his premature death looming, Gonzalez-Torres seemingly felt like Orpheus: separated from his lover, the twinned mirrors served as a kind of connection to Ross. Next to the mirrors, we see a clip from Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée, which also uses that metaphor of the mirror as a portal—this time, one that takes the protagonist to Hades, where Orpheus seeks to save Eurydice.

Come and join all the Ramblers at The London Palladium on Friday 20th September for a live show unlike any other. Tickets are now on general sale – click here to get yours or search ‘footballramblelive.com’. Be there!

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John Cage’s 1952 work 4′33″ has proven a touchstone for artists, composers, and thinkers of all kinds, spawning conceptual artworks, experimental gestures, and even an iPhone app. But even as almost everyone agrees on its importance, misunderstandings about the work proliferate.

For one, 4′33″ is sometimes affectionately known as Cage’s “silent piece,” since the work calls for its enactor to stop using their instrument for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage himself used that terminology to describe the work, then would go on to contradict it, claiming that 4′33″ was not silent.

This week’s big art-related discourse—on social media, anyway—centered around a botched interpretation of the work. In a New York Times op-ed, Columbia University professor John McWhorter claimed that he had been trying to teach his music humanities students about the Cage piece when he was interrupted by pro-Palestine protesters shouting “From the river to the sea.”

“I had to tell the students we could not listen to that piece that afternoon because the surrounding noise would have been not birds or people walking by in the hallway but infuriated chanting from protesters outside the building,” McWhorter wrote.

This comment spurred one X user to respond: “‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect.” At the time this article was published, the tweet had 38,000 likes.

Donald Trump is on trial in Manhattan facing 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of another crime: conspiring to influence the 2016 election. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argues that, to squelch negative publicity that might hurt Trump’s 2016 campaign, Trump directed the creation of fake records to hide hush-money payments to women who claimed they’d had extramarital sex with him. 

That’s a complicated case to prove. And one in which it does not matter one whit, at least legally, who Trump actually had sex with. All Trump’s lawyers have to argue is that the payoffs, while perhaps unseemly, were legal. And they’re doing that. Yet Trump’s lawyers are also going further, asserting that the former president didn’t have sex with any of the three woman whose possible encounters with him resulted in payoffs for silence.

In one case—a $30,000 payout to a doorman who claimed to know of Trump fathering an out-of-wedlock child—the underlying allegation in fact seems to be false. But it’s striking that Trump’s defense includes denials that he slept with porn star Stormy Daniels (who received $130,000) and Playboy model Karen McDougal ($150,000). That’s because, to exaggerate only a bit, no one believes him.

The ongoing testimony of David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, who helped spearhead the so-called “catch and kill” scheme to buy the rights to stories about Trump’s alleged encounters in order to suppress the claims, drives home that point. Pecker on Thursday indicated that he, former Enquirer editor Dylan Howard, and Trump fixer Michael Cohen all believed McDougal’s account of a year-long sexual affair with Trump.

What’s more, according to Pecker, Trump did nothing at the time to counter that impression. Pecker recounted a June 2016 call with Trump which came while Pecker’s company was in the process of buying the rights to McDougal’s story. Trump, who Pecker said knew of McDougal’s claims and the talks about paying her to stay quiet, remarked that “she is a nice girl,” Pecker recalled. Trump then asked: “What do you think I should do?” Pecker said. Pecker said he suggested paying her. Trump, that is, did not deny McDougal’s claims. Nor, according to Pecker, did Trump dispute her claims in a January 2017 Trump Tower meeting in which he thanked Pecker for “handling” the matter.

When I took my mother back to Paris for her first visit in nearly five decades, there was no question we would go to the Louvre. I was more surprised that she wanted to stand in the long line to see Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (1503) for the few seconds we would get to take pictures and selfies with the famous painting.

This experience is often annoying and disappointing for tourists, with one recent analysis of 18,000 reviews deeming the Renaissance portrait “the world’s most disappointing masterpiece.”

Da Vinci’s iconic image of an almost-smiling woman is protected by bullet-proof, anti-reflective glass, along with tightly-controlled temperature and humidity settings to ensure the painting’s conservation.

In an effort to remedy this situation, the Mona Lisa may be moved to an underground chamber, according to a report in The Telegraph Tuesday.

Louvre director Laurence des Cars recently suggested the relocation of the popular artwork to a dedicated room constructed in the institution’s basement.