These radical women artists shocked – and made the city cool

Two stars for the final season of the Royals drama

The all-important milestone is upon us: it’s 211 days until Euro 2024!

But seriously, the current England squad is full of ridiculous talents and a fair few figures who divide opinion – not least Gareth Southgate himself. So today, Marcus and Luke try and make sense of it all!

They pick their best England XI for next summer and answer your questions about the biggest challenges Southgate faces. Don’t miss it!

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October 19 – November 18, 2023

September 16 – December 22, 2023

Contemporary Art Daily’s 15 Year Anniversary!
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Over the last 15 years, perhaps our greatest joy has been the kindness and support we’ve received from artists. Contemporary Art Daily arose from a desire to know more about artists working now, and the support and encouragement we’ve received from so many of the artists we most admire has been the fuel driving all of our efforts. We’ve used that fuel to create Contemporary Art Library, which gives the public access to nearly 700,000 images, documents, and videos documenting recent art history. Just in the last two weeks, we’ve added a selection of closed/paused spaces whose legacies will live on within our archive, and a comprehensive chronology of the work of the brilliant artist Lin May Saeed as part of Contemporary Art Quarterly.

In that spirit of gratitude for the artists we’ve learned from, we’re honored to announce our new Artist Committee. We’re grateful to have the ongoing advice and support of Richard Aldrich, Darren Bader, Kerstin Brätsch, Michaela Eichwald, Michelle Grabner, Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys, David Hartt, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, J. Parker Valentine and Amy Yao.

We’re ultimately here because of you! Thank you for being here over the years and learning about artists alongside us. Advertising alone is not enough to cover the costs of doing this important work, so we need your help. In order to maintain this small organization, it’s crucial that we raise $150,000 in this landmark year. Please make a tax-deductible donation here to help us reach our goal.

We’d like to thank everyone, the artists, art spaces, supporters, and friends who have made it possible for our small non-profit organization to survive for so many years. Without your help, we wouldn’t have been able to go 15 years without missing a single day, or creating Contemporary Art Library. We hope to continue to be of service to the international art community.

In my earliest childhood memories—the big blur we will call the gear shift between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a distant star. Fuzzy, soft, a blurred edge that feels so far away in the way that childhood always feels so far away. Schenectady, the city I was born in, is a small upstate city between the rivers Mohawk and Hudson. Home of the perfect 12345 zip code. The location of the General Electric Power headquarters. Girls wearing low-rise jeans to rent VHS tapes at the Hollywood Video on Balltown Road. Street names: Brandywine, McClellan, Union, Glenwood Boulevard, Nott, Van Vranken. A white clapboard church hovering atop a hill on a rural route—I used to take modern dance classes there. An ice-skating rink next to an Air Force base where the pilots flew to Antarctica, always flying so low when they went over my house. NXIVM ladies planning their volleyball trips to Lake George. My parents knew the exact address of where the Unabomber’s mother and brother lived, in a historic district called the Stockade. And as for me, I do not remember when I first registered that Kurt Vonnegut lived in Alplaus, a small hamlet in Schenectady County, named after the Dutch expression aal plaats, which means “a place of eels.” (There were no eels that I am aware of.) I think it was in high school. I think my hair was cut short. I think it was when I was a virgin. I think it was when I got a job as a bookseller at the Open Door on Jay. I think I was probably sixteen.

I already loved Kurt when I found out that for a few years after World War II he lived an eight-minute drive from the house I grew up in. As a teenager in Schenectady, I read not all but most of his books. It was because of my father, who also loved Kurt. He gave me a copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and it was the first time that I fell in love with a novel, because it was brutal and hilarious and weird and terrifyingly sad. Slaughterhouse-Five is set in Dresden and Luxembourg and Outer Space and also Ilium, New York. Ilium, it is argued by most Vonnegut readers and scholars, is probably Schenectady. It appears in several of his other books. Player Piano, Cat’s Cradle, and a few different short stories. Here is how Ilium is referenced, in one passage of the Slaughterhouse-Five: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium. He was rich as Croesus, something he had never expected to be … In addition he owned a fifth of the new Holiday Inn out on Route 54 and half of three Tastee Freeze stands.”

Billy Pilgrim is the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five and a guy who will live in a human zoo later in the novel. Unlike Billy Pilgrim, Kurt Vonnegut did not own a lovely Georgian home. He was there, in Schenectady, because he got a job at General Electric’s corporate campus, working in the publicity department. Working at GE got him into writing science fiction. “There was no avoiding [writing science fiction],” he said in an interview, “since the General Electric Company was science fiction.” During his time at GE, he wrote Player Piano, his first novel. His thing is that he wanted to just do that full time. Write books. But he wasn’t ready to do that full time yet, thus the job. So Vonnegut moved into the house, not far from the GE campus, in Alplaus, a middle-class hamlet on the Alplaus Creek and Mohawk River. 

In August, I decided to drive to the house for the first time. I did this with my father, because he was the one who gave me Slaughterhouse-Five, and also because he’s now semi-retired and agreed in advance that it would be “funny,” and “cool,” to accompany his twenty-seven-year-old daughter on a “reporting trip” four miles down the road from his house. “Did you know he lived in Schenectady before you moved here?” I asked my father. “No, I don’t think so,” he responded. Out the window: my former elementary school and preschool, the Chinese Fellowship Bible Church, anonymous corporate campuses, new housing developments that when I was a kid were huge, empty fields.

The FA Cup first round reached its conclusion last night. So today, Pete decided to bring the magic of the cup into the studio, quite literally…

Donny’s joined on the show by Marcus, Luke and Jim who all have to listen to his travel advice for Malta and – erm – Horsham, before Marcus finally puts Pete in detention for slagging off Harry Maguire. Plus, Luke explains why John Stones could be one of England's best-ever defenders.

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Joaquin Phoenix stars in 'a proper, old-fashioned historical epic'

Breathing new life into your wardrobe doesn't have to mean new purchases