Can New York sustain as many art fairs as its calendar currently has? As New York Art Week dragged into its second week yesterday, I—and I’m sure I’m not alone—began to wonder. With Frieze and its satellites behind us, this week brings Independent and TEFAF New York, which both opened to VIPs Thursday.

With a 1 p.m. start-time, TEFAF, the US iteration of the Dutch fair in Maastricht, was bustling and crowded by the start of its second hour. Perhaps that might have more to do with the fact that aisles were so narrow that navigating them was an obstacle in itself, or the fact that TEFAF’s booth architecture feels so intrusive that you forget you’re standing in one of New York’s architectural gems, the Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory.

And that doesn’t even begin to get us to what is actually on view. While TEFAF prides itself on presenting objects from antiquity to today in all forms—visual arts, design and furniture, and jewelry—this edition appeared lackluster. Add to that the fact that the fair’s floral arrangements, a signature of TEFAF, were also rather drab, lacking in the abundance of tulips that marked the fair’s arrival in 2016, where the flowers defied gravity and the champagne and oysters were flowing. (There were oysters Thursday but they too lacked the panache of the days of yore.) But as the day drew to a close, I did receive a few self-reported sales reports from galleries, so there’s that.

Below, the best of what’s on view at the 2024 edition of TEFAF New York, which runs through Tuesday, May 14.

A is for ABC book. An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children, a new book by Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker, is an alphabetical sequence of lavishly illustrated, crisp lyric essays that takes readers on a tour of gardening, past and present, and serves as a teaching tool for children to learn about flora while practicing their letters. But at its roots, An Encyclopedia is a postcolonial excavation of the tyrannical alphabetization that has formed America since its origins. As the historian Patricia Crain writes in The Story of A: From The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter, her investigation of the alphabet’s chokehold on American letters, “The alphabet is the technology with which American culture has long spoken to its children and within which it has symbolically represented and formed them.” Teaching children how to use the alphabet might seem like a natural, lawful neutral activity: here are the building blocks that create our communication system. But alphabetization as the default mode for organizing subjectivity—“As easy as ABC”—is a recent, and surprisingly problematic, phenomenon.

B is for Bible. The New England Primer, the first reader designed for the American colonies and the foundational text for schoolchildren in the United States before 1790, presents the alphabet via Biblically themed and morally didactic rhyming couplets: “In Adam’s Fall / We sinned all,” the A ditty goes, and the letters march on a mostly tragic journey from there, with dour little images that illustrate each couplet. Today, ABC books do lots of things. Many use the genre to provide a parade of content: A is for activist; R is for Rolex. Alphabet books aimed at adult audiences often satirize the genre. The Cubies’ ABC, from 1913, skewers Futurist artists in alphabetical order, shooting them down in doggerel: “B is for Beauty as Brancusi views it. / (The Cubies all vow he and Braque take the Bun.) / First you seize all that’s plain to the eye, then you lose it; / Next you search for the Soul and proceed to abuse it. / (They tell me it’s easy and no end of fun.)” ABC books sometimes even undercut the well-trodden form itself, with a wink or some wishfulness. Michaël Escoffier’s Take Away the A: An Alphabeast of a Book! suggests an alternate universe for a world without each letter: “Without the D, Dice Are Ice” depicts dice clinking in drinking glasses. Kincaid and Walker’s Encyclopedia embraces all these modes, from instructive to subversive to lyric to sly. Here, A is for apple, but it’s also for “Apple and Adam, too,” and “also for Amaranth.” A gets three entries; S, T, U, and W each get two; the rest get one. The rule seems to be that there is no rule, bucking the alphabet’s insistence on pattern.

Colored in the new book’s title gives a jump scare. Segregation leaps to mind. But the chromatic anachronism colored is also a literal description of the book, with its densely saturated, Crayola-bright pages and Walker’s deft watercolors.

In 1924, amid the wreckage of the Great War, French poet André Breton railed against the values of the world as it was and could never again be, one ruled by realism and rationality. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his Surrealist Manifesto. Revelations of the soul or society weren’t coming in the daytime. Only “the omnipotence of dreams,” he wrote, could liberate humanity. True or not, the ferocity of his belief inspired a century of strange poetry, paintings, sculpture, and more.

To mark the centennial of Surrealism, museums have once again measured the influence that the movement exerted—and still exerts—on art making. From an exhibition of Surrealist works by Caribbean and African Diasporic artists to a show of Surrealism from Eastern Europe, we’ve rounded up the dedicated programming worth catching worldwide.

Thebe Magugu is setting up house.

The South African designer has opened his first retail location in Johannesburg, but Magugu House is more than just a store. Set on a 32,000-square-foot plot in the upscale suburb of Dunkeld, the house and garden will also host exhibitions and events. 

Built in 1931, the home on leafy Bompas Road has been in the same family for three generations. It’s been converted to house both public spaces and the brand’s offices, in addition to an atelier for small custom productions. 

The ground floor, painted in signature shades of pistachio and terracotta, has a showroom, fitting room, reception room and two small art galleries showcasing the latest installment of Magugu’s Heritage capsule collection, alongside the project he did with Valentino as part of U.S. Vogue’s dress-swap initiative.

A nook in the entrance hall displays the book tote bearing the brand’s signature sisterhood emblem which he designed as part of his capsule collection for Dior.

To look upon Camille Claudel’s Torso of a Crouching Woman is to be shocked by it. Though the figure lacks a head, arms, and left knee, she is stolidly centered. The burnished bronze figure writhes, pulling the skin and tendons taut across the delicate bones of her back. The attenuated surface, animated by the innumerable minuscule movements required to maintain the figure’s equilibrium, trembles with life. The absence of the left knee, lower thigh, and upper shin exposes the figure’s breasts and abdomen; her bottom rests on the back of a sudden ankle. Despite the violence of the cleaved limbs, the sculpture radiates tenderness.

The work, one of 58 in the Getty Center’s recently opened exhibition on Claudel, transcends its fragmentary parts. After all, what woman has not been broken apart and yet endured? The figure’s plight and posture inevitably recall the anguish and desperation experienced by the artist as a 19th century woman determined to transcend the limitations of her time.

Claudel’s life story has often superseded her work. The best-known parts were both astonishing and tragic: her tumultuous relationship with her mentor, Auguste Rodin, who was both twenty-four years her senior and already a world-renowned sculptor, and her decades-long confinement in a mental hospital until her death. And much has been written about Claudel’s fraught familial relations and the immense mental and physical strain that she endured in order to make art at a time when women were primarily considered domestic property. However, curators Anne-Lise Desmas at the Getty Center and Emerson Bowyer at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the show initiated, furnish Claudel with a new story, deftly resurrecting the arc of her life and the revelation of her creative output.

The Getty show spans her oeuvre, from early portraits of her beloved brother to the bronze commissioned by the French state just before her internment, Wounded Niobid. In each, one can see both her prodigious natural facility and the distillation of her singular vision after years of self-discipline and study. From an early age, Claudel displayed an aptitude for sculpture and an intuitive feeling for light and shade. At 17, she was accepted to the Académie Colarossi–one of the few French art institutions to admit women–and by 20, was the principal assistant at Rodin’s rue de l’Université studio. 

To love Rodin’s exquisite hands is to love Claudel’s, both literally and metaphorically. Not only did Rodin model Claudel’s hands in many works, she herself fashioned many of the hands, feet, and heads included in some of his most monumental commissions, like The Gates of Hell, ostensibly a scene from Dante’s Inferno and The Burghers of Calais, a commemoration of French heroism. At the Getty, a striking selection of disembodied appendages and miniature heads demonstrate her anatomical acuity and an uncanny ability to imbue inanimate material with life. This ability is never more striking or haunting than in Study of Left Hand, a 10-inch black-bronze hand, its curved index finger hovering above the knuckles poised to extend toward the unassuming viewer an accusatory point. One can hardly imagine the innumerable times that Claudel, in acquiescence or resistance to her fate, held out her hands. She offers them again now. 

In March, the politerati were atwitter over what appeared major news: Longtime political operator, lobbyist, wheeler-dealer, and (pardoned) felon Paul Manafort was in talks to join Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. This seemed an odd move, given all of Manafort’s schemings over the years. A more recent Manafort business venture—unknown to the public—raises further questions about him and his attempt to return to the Trump fold. According to documents obtained by Mother Jones—including a memo written by Manafort—two years ago, Manafort was trying to orchestrate a $250 million deal to create a streaming service in China in a project that he asserted was blessed by the Chinese government and that was partnering with a Chinese telecommunications firm sanctioned by the US government. 

On Friday morning, the Washington Post, which obtained the same documents, broke the news of Manafort’s involvement in this endeavor. 

Manafort was Trump’s campaign manager for part of 2016—until Trump dumped him after allegations emerged that Manafort had pocketed $12.7 million in undisclosed cash payments a few years earlier from a pro-Russia political party in Ukraine. (His lawyer denied he had received this money.) Two years later, as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal, Manafort was found guilty of and pleaded guilty to assorted financial crimes related to his consulting work in Ukraine, including bank fraud and conspiring to defraud the United States. He was sentenced to more than seven years in federal prison and sent off to the hoosegow. (He was released to home confinement during the Covid pandemic.) In 2020, a bipartisan report from the Senate Intelligence Committee declared Manafort a “grave counterintelligence threat,” revealing that during the 2016 race he had repeatedly passed Trump campaign inside information to a former business associate who was a “Russian intelligence officer” and a “Kremlin agent.” In his final weeks in the White House, Trump pardoned Manafort. 

In the years since Trump cleaned his slate, Manafort has mostly maintained a low public profile. During part of that stretch, he privately endeavored to facilitate a huge deal in China. Emails and memos show that in May 2022 Manafort was working with a privately-held Hong Kong-based company called Standard Huaxia Limited to set up a new streaming company in China dubbed Doorways. Manafort and his colleagues were looking to raise an initial $25 million for the project that Manafort noted was seeking $250 million. 

A memo written (according to its meta-data) by Manafort described Doorways as a firm that would distribute in China “several kinds of content covering the entire spectrum of intangible products related to culture, including music, television and film entertainment, news and education.” You can read the full document below.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.

THE HEADLINES

COOPER UNION PROTESTS. Students, faculty, and alumni of New York’s Cooper Union art and design school staged a walkout on Thursday to protest the school’s ties to Israel, reports ARTnews’ Tessa Solomon. They join other actions which are increasingly spreading around global campuses, and at art schools such as the Rhode Island School of Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Demonstrators called for a “full disclosure” of the Cooper Union’s investment portfolio and divestment from any businesses connected to Israel, in addition to any weapons manufacturers. They also demanded a process be enacted for removing school board members via a vote by faculty, students, and alumni, and said a study abroad program at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem should be shut down.

CRUSHING IT. Apple apologized Thursday for an advertisement titled “Crush,” about its latest iPad Pro model, showing symbols and tools of artistic creativity, such as paint and musical instruments, being smashed by an industrial crusher in an animated video. Then the crusher reveals the new iPad model. “Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” the company told Ad Age Magazine. The ad has already been seen over a million times on Apple’s YouTube channel and was shared by Apple CEO Tim Cook on social media. However, criticism was swift online, with actor Hugh Grant summing it up in his comment on X: “the destruction of the human experience courtesy of Silicon Valley.”

THE DIGEST

At art fairs, gallerists sometimes heed the not-so-invisible hand of the attention economy, mounting big, gauche presentations that seem designed to be photographed first and appreciated second. But spare, unflashy art can thrive at a fair, too, and the newly opened edition of Independent New York offers solid proof of that.

This year’s Independent, which opened its preview at Spring Studios in Tribeca on Thursday, is alive with energy in more than a few of its booths, but the jolts that the fair offers are largely gentle. That’s a good thing.

There are no artistic stunts and no mega-galleries at this fair, whose 77 exhibitors are predominantly mid-size operations. As has been the case in the past at Independent, which this year turns 15, the emphasis is on glossy, sleek art with an international flavor.

The fair is guilty of aesthetic conservatism—the vast majority of the work on view is painting, and much of it is fairly apolitical this time around. Then again, that’s the case for every art fair. This one, at least, has its pleasures. There’s a plethora of pieces by under-recognized and dead artists, and generally, there are few stars or market phenomena among the living, which means that there is new talent waiting to be noticed.

Below are eight of the best artists on view at Independent, which runs through Sunday.

It was heartbreak for Aston Villa last night – but at least Matty Cash isn’t in the throes of a zombie apocalypse.

Marcus, Luke, Jim and Andy reflect on Olympiacos’ ascent to Mount Olympus with the Europa Conference League trophy and wonder if Bayer Leverkusen will ever lose again after they broke the European record. There’s also a huge weekend in the title race to get stuck into, Fulham’s owner appearing in a wrestling match, and Nobby Solano’s return to the north-east! 

Plus, Wayne Rooney completes his journey to becoming Luke’s all-time favourite Top Bloke. Join us!

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!

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, and email us here: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

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

Vermont is poised to pass a groundbreaking measure forcing major polluting companies to help pay for damages caused by the climate crisis, in a move being closely watched by other states including New York and California.

Modeled after the EPA’s Superfund program, which forces companies to pay for toxic waste cleanup, the climate superfund bill would charge major fossil fuel companies doing business within the state billions of dollars for their past emissions.

The measure would make Vermont the first US state to hold fossil fuel companies liable for their planet-heating pollution. “If you contributed to a mess, you should play a role in cleaning it up,” Elena Mihaly, vice-president of the Conservation Law Foundation’s Vermont chapter, which is campaigning for the bill, said in an interview.

If passed, the bill will face a steep uphill battle in the courts. But supporters say the first-of-its-kind legislation could be a model for the rest of the country. Four other states are weighing similar initiatives. Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-VT) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) also attempted to include a federal version in the infrastructure bill passed in 2022, though it was omitted from the final draft. (The measure would have raised $500 billion.)