Arsenal board hold emergency meeting

In an internal meeting held on Thursday, Arsenal’s board members reportedly discussed the possibility of an accelerated pursuit of West Ham United’s captain, Declan Rice.

According to Arsenal Informer,  the meeting revolved around the Englishman’s potential as the new face of the Gunners, with key figures envisioning him as a critical addition in the upcoming transfer window. Tim Lewis, Edu Gasper, and Vinai Venkatesham were among the key personnel present during the discussion.

Declan Rice is him pic.twitter.com/SK7fOcq2Pz https://t.co/mRPlWeCWpX

— 𝑩𝒂𝒏𝒌𝒔 ✪ (@AfcBanks_) June 23, 2023

The signing of Alex Rúnarsson has been widely regarded as one of the worst transfer decisions made by Arsenal since Mikel Arteta took charge.

The Iceland international struggled to adapt to the club from the outset and has subsequently been sent out on loan on multiple occasions.

Arsenal is now actively seeking to offload him, and according to a report from Sport Witness, Anderlecht has expressed interest in acquiring his services.

The Belgian club is in search of a new goalkeeper and has identified several options, including Alex, as potential targets.

If the deal materialises, it would be a positive development for both Arsenal, who are eager to trim their squad of underperforming players, and Alex himself, as he would have the opportunity to begin afresh at a new club.

The Harvard Art Museums has announced a new free admission policy, which administrators have hailed as a “significant expansion” of public access to its collections, exhibitions, and research in a press release on Friday. The policy will remain in place permanently.

“Art is for everyone, and the Harvard Art Museums will now be free to all visitors,” university president Lawrence S. Bacow said in a statement. “This initiative ensures that every visitor to our campus will now have the opportunity to view and engage with the phenomenal collections in our care at the Harvard Art Museums.”

Most university-affiliated museums are free for all visitors, making Harvard Art Museums—until now—an outlier in that respect. According to a statement from Bacow’s office, it took several years for the university to secure enough funds to ensure the expensive upkeep of the collection, as well as the salaries of its staff. The endowment was finally promised thanks to a contribution from the Estate of David Rockefeller.

The museums, which underwent a major revamp around 2015, are important hubs for research and conservation, and display objects from the Harvard’s collection that spans Ancient Greece to Postwar America. Among the collection standouts are a series of Mark Rothko murals commissioned by Harvard in the 1960s, materials from Bruce Nauman’s studio, and a prodigious group of drawings by Netherlandish, Dutch, and Flemish Masters.

“We are seeing that lowering that barrier of admission has made a difference [in reaching the Greater Boston community],” Harvard Art Museums Director Martha Tedeschi told WBUR. “And we’re looking forward to just eliminating that completely so that our local audience increasingly begins to just feel this is a place for them,” she continued. “We’ve been practicing this now for about a year and a half, and we know how it changes us, so we’re excited.”

Indian artist Nalini Malani has been awarded this year’s Kyoto Prize, Japan’s highest private award, which carries a $700,000 purse.

Malani is among India’s first video artists, though her practice has extended to include theater, installations, paintings, and drawings. She is being recognized for her “phantasmagorical spaces with approachable art forms” as well as her “pioneered artistic expression that brings the voices of the voiceless to more people,” per the press release.

“She is active globally as a non-Western artist, contributing greatly to current trends reconsidering Western-centrism in art,” the release continues.

Malani, who came to India as a refugee during the partition of India and Pakistan, studied art in Mumbai and Paris, before returning to India, wherein she began to address the country’s socio-political issues in her work.

The Kyoto Prize, commonly called Japan’s Nobel, is an annual grant aimed at recognizing lifetime achievements in the arts and sciences across three categories, including advanced technology, basic sciences, and arts and philosophy. The award is endowed with 100 million yen ($695,290) per category.

The estate of Douglas A.J. Latchford, an art and antiquities dealer who was accused of selling ancient artifacts stolen from Cambodia, has agreed to hand over $12 million and a 17th Vietnamese bronze statue to settle a civil lawsuit brought by the U.S. Government, according to the New York Times.

In 2019, federal prosecutors from the Southern District of New York alleged that Latchford had “built a career out of the smuggling and illicit sale of priceless Cambodian antiquities, often straight from archaeological sites” and forged documents in order to sell the artifacts.

Latchford’s daughter, whom the Times reports is identified in court documents as Julia Copleston, inherited an “undetermined amount of money from her father” and more than 125 artifacts suspected to have been looted from Cambodia after his death in 2020. She has since agreed to return the objects to Cambodia, as well forfeit “tainted proceeds” from the sale of looted works.

“The late Douglas Latchford was a prolific dealer of stolen antiquities,” U.S. Homeland Security special agent Ivan J. Arvelo said in a statement. “His complicity in numerous illicit transactions over several decades garnered him millions of dollars in payments from buyers and dealers in the United States, of which as part of this agreement, $12 million will be rightfully forfeited by his estate.”

The Cambodian government has been central to the restitution debate in recent years and has gone to great lengths to require works from museums and institutions that have been looted from religious and archaeological sites. Among those institutions is the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where Cambodian officials believe dozens of looted works are on display or in storage, many of which were sold or gifted to the museum by Latchford. 

One of Tarik Kiswanson’s newest sculptures, Nest (2022), is an ovoid fiberglass resin form, larger than a human, its shape reminiscent of eggs and cocoons, and also seeds; Kiswanson notes that the Greek roots of the word “diaspora” come from spreading seeds. Especially as a polyglot—he speaks Swedish, Arabic, English, French, and Italian—the artist likes having, as he puts it, “something so dense or layered that it produces things outside of your body and boundary.”

Kiswanson was born in Halmstad, Sweden, in 1986, to Palestinian parents. When his father arrived from Jerusalem in 1979, he was one of only a handful of Arabs in the city, and the Swedish administration naturalized their original surname, Al Kiswani, to the chimeric Kiswanson. He grew up not in the posh part of the city where rich Swedes have summer houses, but in the housing projects along with other second-generation immigrants from places including the former Yugoslavia, Vietnam, and Iraq. The Paris-based Kiswanson finds it annoying when people assume he is a refugee because of his Palestinian heritage, because the exiling happened before he was born. He said he is “moving between these realms of cultures, identities, languages and the enormous anxiety I feel when I don’t fit into society’s black and white.”

Kiswanson’s earlier works centered on his family, “to understand who I was, where I was coming from,” he said. “To understand I don’t really come from anywhere.” One example, Grandfather’s Cabinet (2014), is a skeletal reconstruction of his grandfather’s filing cabinet, which his family took with them when they fled Jerusalem. Kiswanson re-created the shape using strips of brass, between which he poured silver melted down from family heirlooms (such as a spoon and a necklace) to seal the strips together. “All of my family history is embedded in the seams,” he said.

Later, he began focusing on the experience of fellow second-generation immigrants, collaborating with preteen youths whose parents had likewise emigrated. In the film The Fall (2020), a boy named Mehdi, who was born in Belgium to Moroccan parents, plays with a pencil until it drops, then tilts his chair back until it too falls to the ground. The whole sequence was shot on a Phantom camera, which can record thousands of frames a second, and is slowed down throughout to keep Mehdi suspended in the state of instability; it cuts out and re-loops just before Mehdi’s head hits the ground, such that he doesn’t have time to be afraid, even though he knew before filming that it would hurt. This in-between state, which Kiswanson called the “floating condition of existing, detached and removed from one’s own heritage, culture, country, family,” is where he likes to work. That is partly why he has more recently moved into abstraction, as it’s not specific to any culture or time.

This is a busy year for the artist. Solo exhibitions opened at Museo Tamayo in Mexico City and Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in April. Another will open at Salzburger Kunstverein in Austria in July, as will a group show at the Centre Pompidou in Paris next fall, featuring Kiswanson as a finalist for the Prix Marcel Duchamp. Even as he enjoys his success, he feels it hard-won, after years of waiting for the art world to catch up with the fuzzy way he presents identity in his art.

On July 11, 1903, a long narrative poem called “The Miner’s Song” by Karl P. Effield appeared in the Natal Mercury, a weekly newspaper in Durban, South Africa. Effield—who claimed to be from Boston—was actually none other than the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, then a high school student in Durban. This was the first of Pessoa’s English-language fictitious authors to appear in print—the beginning of Pessoa’s unusual mode of self-othering. The adoption of different personae allowed him to go beyond a nom de plume, and take on unpopular, controversial, and even extreme points of view in both his poetry and prose.

While in South Africa, where Pessoa lived between 1896 and 1905, he sent another work to the Natal Mercury under the name of Charles Robert Anon, attempting without success to publish three political sonnets about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Pessoa’s early fictitious authors wrote in English, French, and Portuguese—the three languages he continued to use until he died, at age forty-seven. These first invented writers, which he would go on to call “heteronyms,” composed loose texts mostly in the form of first drafts; but others, like Bernardo Soares (whom Pessoa created around 1920) or the major heteronyms (Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis in 1914), produced a very solid body of work. By the time Pessoa was twenty-six years old, he had already invented a hundred literary personae.

Alberto Caeiro was the central fictitious figure of Pessoa’s literary universe. Born in Lisbon on April 16, 1889, Caeiro died of tuberculosis in 1915. Pessoa said that Caeiro poetically arrived in his life on March 8, 1914—which in a famous letter to the Portuguese literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro he described as a “triumphal day.” The poet and novelist Mário de Sá-Carneiro was one of Pessoa’s closest friends in Lisbon, and Caeiro (perhaps a pun on Sá-Carneiro’s name) seems to have come into being as a joke: “I thought I would play a trick on Sá-Carneiro and invent a bucolic poet of a rather complicated kind,” wrote Pessoa in the same letter. Caeiro’s “death” seems to have been influenced, in retrospect, by Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in Paris on April 26, 1916. As Pessoa wrote in the review Athena in 1924, “Those whom the gods love die young.” By that time, he had produced the body of poems for which Caeiro would be remembered—The Keeper of Sheep.

Counterpath Press’s series of now thirteen computer-generated books, Using Electricity, offers a refreshing alternative to the fantasia of terror and wonder that we’ve all been subjected to since the public release of ChatGPT. The books in this series present us with wide-ranging explorations into the potential interplay between human language and code. Although code-based work can be dauntingly hermetic to the noncoder, all computationally generated or mediated writing is the result of two fundamental decisions that remain in the hands of the human author: defining the source text(s) (the data) and choosing the processes (the algorithms or procedures) that operate on them. A text generator like ChatGPT uses brute force on both sides—enormous amounts of text vacuumed from the internet are run through energy-intensive pattern-finding algorithms—to create coherent, normative sentences with an equivocal but authoritative tone. The works in Using Electricity harness data and code to push language into more playful and revealing imaginative territory.

Many of Using Electricity’s authors mobilize computational processes to supercharge formal constraints, producing texts that incessantly iterate through variations and permutations. In The Truelist, Nick Montfort, the series editor, runs a short Python script to generate pages of four-line stanzas comprising invented compound words. “Now they saw the lovelight, / the blurbird, / the bluewoman facing the horse, / the fireweed.” The poem is a relentless loop—repeating this same structure as it churns through as many word combinations as it can find. Rafael Pérez y Pérez’s Mexica uses a pared-down, culturally specific vocabulary and a complex algorithm to generate short fairy tale–like stories. One begins, “The princess woke up while the songs of the birds covered the sky.” The skeletal story structure swaps different characters and actions as the variations play out. It’s like watching a multiversal performance of the same puppet show.

I find that often I am not reading these works for meaning as much as for pattern, which is at the heart of how computation operates. Allison Parrish’s fantastic Articulations brings us frighteningly deep into the core of computational pattern searching. Drawing from a corpus of over two million lines of poetry from the Project Gutenberg database, she takes us on a random walk through “vector space.” Put simply, this is the mathematical space in which computers plot similarities between different aspects of language—the sound, the syntax, whatever the programmer chooses. The result is a dizzying megacollage/cluster-mash-up of English poetry in which obsessive and surprising strings constantly emerge—a vast linguistic hall of mirrors. “In little lights, nice little nut. In a little sight. In a little sight, in a little sight, a right little, tight little island. A light. A light. A light. A light. A light.”

Many of these works are indebted to the wider traditions of procedural, concrete, conceptual, and erasure poetry, while making use of code’s unique possibilities for play, chance, variation, and repetition. Stephanie Strickland’s Ringing the Changes draws its mathematical ordering process from a centuries-old practice of English bell ringing. In Experiment 116, Rena Mosteirin plays a game of translation telephone by running Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” through multiple languages in Google Translate and back into English.

In a Guardian essay published Friday, South Korean student Noh Hyun-soo explained his decision to eat the banana that constitutes Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019).

Hyun-soo made headlines when he visited Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art on April 27 and chose to interact with the Cattelan sculpture in a decidedly unusual way. He wasn’t the first to consume this work—artist David Datuna also did so during the debut of Comedian at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2019—but his stunt provoked a new level of fascination with the piece.

When Perrotin gallery premiered Comedian four years ago, the piece sold for $120,000. Composed of little more than a banana duct-taped to a wall, the piece was ultimately removed from Perrotin’s Art Basel booth due to safety concerns. Earlier this month, Cattelan won a copyright infringement lawsuit that centered around the work.

Cattelan’s art regularly provokes controversy, with past works involving a kneeling miniature Hitler and a sculpture of the Pope felled by a meteorite. But, in his Guardian essay, Hyun-soo said that he didn’t know much about Cattelan prior to eating the banana.

“I’m not familiar with Cattelan’s work, other than the banana,” Hyun-soo wrote. “I think Comedian can be considered a work of art, apart from the ridiculous price. But there will be different opinions. I’ve never met him, so I don’t really know what he thought of my eating the banana, but I read an article in which his response was ‘no problem at all’.”

Pride Month is here, and while the celebrations go on as they always do, this year’s have been shadowed by a wave of trans- and homophobic incidents as well as by a spate of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation coming out of Republican-controlled statehouses. Elements on the right seem bent on forcing the LGBTQ+ community back into the closet, but unfortunately for them, they’re too late: Whether it’s in the courts or at the polls, they’re unlikely to succeed in the long run.

The spirit of Pride continues, as does the vital place of queer people in American society and culture. And there is no better evidence of that than the current slate of institutional exhibitions by LGBTQ+ artists across the country.

Below are 12 shows we recommend by a variety of artists working in multiple mediums who keep the rainbow flag flying high and proud.