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The Headlines

DOUBLE LEAK. In The Art Newspaper, Theo Belci reports that lists containing the names of more than 16,000 artists allegedly used to perfect the Midjourney generative artificial intelligence (AI) program have gone viral. The Google spreadsheet named “Midjourney Style List”, including references to Frida Kahlo, Walt Disney, Banksy, and Yayoi Kusama, was supposedly retrieved from Midjourney developers while the program’s ability to mimic specific works and styles was being refined. If access to the web document was restricted, it remains partially visible on the Internet Archive). Many of the names in it feature on another 25-page list used for a 2023 class-action lawsuit. “Even though the practice of using human artists’ work without their permission to train generative AI programs remains in uncertain legal territory, controversies surrounding documents like the ‘Midjourney Style List’ shed light on the actual processes of converting copyrighted artwork into AI reference material”, Belci wrote. 

BE PREPARED. What better way to enter the year (and the weekend) than to prepare for the events it holds? Galerie Perrotin, which has reached an agreement with the real estate investment company Colony Investment Management, is opening a new space during Frieze LA. In March, New York’s Grey Art Gallery, once relocated in a purpose-designed space at 18 Cooper Square, will officially become the Grey Art Museum. In Paris, the reopening of the Grand Palais multi-purpose venue for the summer Olympics is as expected as that of Notre-Dame de Paris. The entire Normandy region is celebrating, through some 150 exhibitions, the 150th anniversary of Impressionism. Giza’s Grand Egyptian Museum, which was 99% ready in October 2022, should finally be accessible by May. Lastly, 2024 is also the year of the 60th Venice Biennale.

The Digest

Nicholas Galanin’s wide-ranging new exhibition, “Interference Patterns,” at SITE Santa Fe opens with something that the multidisciplinary Lingít and Unangax artist posits is uniquely American: a scream.

His new site-specific installation, Neon American Anthem (red), consists of a neon sign inviting visitors to “Take A Knee and Scream Until You Can’t Breathe” in front of a grid of doormats. The last several years have provided plenty of reasons to heed Galanin’s invitation and unleash a catharsis of emotion in this crimson-lit room. The piece threads together many different protest movements: Galanin created the work in response to climate change and other contemporary crises, but the piece in its final form ended up alluding to Black liberation and the kneeling gestures seen at football games.

Neon American Anthem, which is also currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum, is a perfect encapsulation of Galanin’s practice, which is sharply critical of systems of power and often acts as a mordant commentary on art world institutions, taking them to task for their continued role in colonialism. As Galanin explained in a recent interview with ARTnews, when the Seattle Art Museum first approached him about the piece, he was queried about how institutions could decolonize, a question he said he is often asked as an Indigenous artist. When his first proposals—to return tribal objects to their communities—were rejected, he arrived at the current work which, in its own way, bluntly unsettles the institutions in which its versions are housed.

“It’s interesting for me to see these engagements in different institutional spaces,” Galanin said. “It’s been getting strong feedback … but it’s also been difficult. [SAM] has had a hard time with it. They’re supporting the work, but it is engaging and challenging the entire institutional structure.”

When visitors engage the work by screaming, it is disruptive across the museum. At SITE, a contemporary arts space sprawled across a single floor, you hear the screams throughout the central lobby and many of the adjacent galleries.

It’s FA Cup third round weekend! And what a curtain-raiser it was last night on ITV4…

Marcus, Luke, Jim and Vish discuss Sunderland gaffes ahead of the derby, Arsenal moaning ahead of their clash with Liverpool, and why Paul Cook is definitely ready to spring a cupset!

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

“Which orifice am I looking at?” is a question you’ll likely find yourself asking as you explore Tishan Hsu’s latest show at Vienna Secession. It’s a curious query to mull as you’re unable to look away from labial-looking mouths and anus-appearing belly buttons, all recurring throughout the exhibition’s dozen sculptures and wall works.

A most intriguing orifice can be seen in a photograph that Hsu affixed to the end of an abstract, lumpy, supine sculpture, right between two leglike mounds that appear to be spread apart. There, a black hole punctures through a distended mound of flesh. The print, with its black edges and rounded corners, might be mistaken for an iPad—even a moving image. For a moment, you may expect full-on body horror in the form of a video of a prolapsed anus. (Nearby, Hsu shows an actual video work in which bodily bits lurk behind a meshy surface, moving so slowly that you’re primed to question whether the things on-screen are moving or still.) Step closer to this mysterious orifice and you’ll see an innocent picture of an ear that—shot from an unusual angle, its attendant head blurred out—Hsu has rendered utterly uncanny.

Hsu wants viewers to attend to the changing ways that technology encourages us to relate—or not—to our own bodies. He shows us how we can now see ourselves from more angles than ever before, and yet this often breeds alienation instead of intimacy.

This exhibition in Austria debuts new works by a septuagenarian artist who’s been exploring ever-weirder relationships between bodies and technology since the 1980s. He worked largely under the radar until a 2020 traveling survey at SculptureCenter in New York and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. His next stop was the 2022 Venice Biennale; amid all this, he retired from teaching at Sarah Lawrence College. Now, he’s debuting new works that are his best yet.

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

Last year, climate change came into sharp relief for much of the world: The planet experienced its hottest 12-month period in 125,000 years. Flooding events inundated communities from California to East Africa to India. A heat wave in South America caused temperatures to spike above 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the middle of winter, and a heat dome across much of the southern United States spurred a 31-day streak in Phoenix of 110 degree-plus temperatures. The formation of an El Niño, the natural phenomenon that raises temperatures globally, intensified extreme weather already strengthened by climate change. The US alone counted 25 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023—more than any other year. 

Yet this devastation was met by some of the largest gains in climate action to date. World leaders agreed for the first time to “transition away” from oil and gas at the annual United Nations climate summit, hosted last month by the United Arab Emirates. Funds and incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, started to roll out to companies and municipalities. Electric vehicle sales skyrocketed, thousands of young people signed up for the first-ever American Climate Corps, and companies agreed to pay billions of dollars to remove harmful chemicals called PFAS from drinking water supplies.

As we enter a new year, we asked Grist reporters what big stories they’re watching on their beats, 24 predictions for 2024. Their forecasts depict a world on the cusp of change in regard to climate—both good and bad, and often in tandem. Here’s what we’re keeping an eye on, from hard-won international financial commitments, to battles over mining in-demand minerals like lithium, to the expansion of renewable energy.

With follow-ups to Gladiator, Alien and Mad Max, 2024 is a year of sequels

One student has died and four others, as well as an administrator, have been injured in Perry, Iowa early Thursday, in what appears to be the year’s first mass school shooting. 

The attack, which unfolded at Perry High School just after 7:30 a.m. local time, led to the death of an unnamed sixth-grader, according to Mitch Mortvedt, assistant director of the Division of Criminal Investigation at the Iowa Department of Public Safety. It was not immediately clear why that victim, a student at Perry Middle School, was at the high school; NBC News reported that the shooting unfolded during a breakfast program, before classes began, and that students of different ages may have been on campus. 

The five injured people are being treated at local hospitals, Mortvedt told reporters Thursday afternoon. Their conditions weren’t immediately clear Thursday night. 

The attacker, a 17-year-old student at the high school, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Mortvedt said, adding that authorities believe the shooter acted alone, employing a pump-action shotgun and small-caliber handgun. Authorities who swarmed the school following reports of gunshots also found an improvised explosive device on campus, which officials from the State Fire Marshal and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms “rendered…safe,” Mortvedt said. 

The shooting came on the first school day of 2024 in Perry, some 40 miles northwest of Des Moines. 

Republicans are standing with Donald Trump in record numbers—and a majority consider him to be a “person of faith,” according to two polls that dropped this week. 

Republicans today are more likely to be sympathetic to Trump regarding his involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, compared to the week after the insurrection, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll found. Fourteen percent of GOP-identified respondents said last month that Trump bears a great or good amount of responsibility for the deadly insurrection, compared to 27 percent who said the same nearly three years ago. Only 18 percent of Republicans in that survey said the insurrection was “mostly violent,” compared to 26 percent who said so in 2021. (As a reminder, the insurrection led to injuries to approximately 140 police officers.)

The Washington Post reports that, in follow-up interviews, some participants said their views changed over the past couple years—because they’ve grown to believe the conspiracy theory that January 6 was an inside job. (GOP presidential candidate and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy has espoused this theory during his campaign and did so again today in response to the Post story.) 

Additionally, only 31 percent of Republicans surveyed said they believed President Biden was legitimately elected in 2020, compared to 39 percent in 2021; overall, the poll found, 36 percent of Americans don’t accept Biden’s presidency as legitimate. 

“From a historical perspective, these results would be chilling to many analysts,” Michael J. Hanmer, director of the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at the University of Maryland, told the Post. But the results also provide some insight into why polling continues to show Trump as the likely GOP presidential nominee; that is, his role in the insurrection isn’t hurting him. Among his base, it appears to be helping cement his image as a martyr unfairly targeted by the DC establishment. 

SpaceX, the space flight company owned by Elon Musk, illegally fired eight employees after they criticized Musk’s social media behavior, a new complaint from the National Labor Relations Board alleges.

The complaint stems from a June 2022 open letter that was shared on the company’s internal chat system in which the fired employees called on SpaceX to “swiftly and explicitly separate itself” from its owner because of Musk’s increasingly erratic and inflammatory social media posts. The letter also claimed that SpaceX had failed to uphold its zero-tolerance sexual harassment policy, as well as its “No Asshole” policy. Now, after a yearlong investigation, the NLRB has found evidence of at least 37 labor violations. 

“Elon’s behavior in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us,” the letter stated, according to a report by The Verge. “As our CEO and most prominent spokesperson, Elon is seen as the face of SpaceX—every Tweet that Elon sends is a de facto public statement by the company.”

Nine employees were terminated shortly after the letter’s release. (The NLRB’s complaint involves eight of them.) According to reports from the Associated Press, five employees were fired one day after the letter was sent, while the remaining four were terminated weeks later. 

 The new NLRB complaint adds to the growing labor complaints surrounding Musks’s companies. In February 2022, Tesla employees filed a racial discrimination lawsuit against Tesla, with one Black employee claiming to hear racial slurs at least 50 to 100 times a day. As my former colleague, Edwin Rios wrote: 

Martha Diamond, a painter who gracefully pictured New York from all its many vantage points, died on Saturday at 79. A representative for David Kordansky, her gallery, said she died of a long illness.

Skyscrapers, scaffolding, reflections of tall buildings in glassy windows, and distinctive features of the Manhattan skyline were among the many subjects that Diamond regularly depicted. Rather than painting them naturalistically, however, she rendered them expressionistically, allowing their forms to smear and blur as she depicted the city through her own lens.

“Diamond is a New York visionary,” wrote the poet Bill Berkson in a 1990 profile of her for Artforum. “Her pictorial embodiments of the stuns and implosions of urbanity are best understood in the company of those painters of Manhattan across whose surfaces the arguments between representation and abstract form are deflected by the urge to nail down the forces that contend at just about any intersection.”

Because her paintings’ subject matter was so straightforward, many critics noticed a tendency among viewers to disregard them as flat or easy to take in. That, of course, was hardly the case.

“Ms. Diamond’s whole approach to painting is deceptively simple, full of hidden skills and decisions that only gradually reveal themselves, along with a good deal of humor and very little pretension,” New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in a laudatory review of one of her shows.