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The Scream’s price tag should make us all despair

May 4, 2012

Jonathan Jones

The art market has reduced Edvard Munch’s harrowing insight into the human condition to a saleable plaything

I used to like The Scream. Its sky of blood and zombie despair seemed to say so much, so honestly. Munch is a poet in colours. His pictures portray moods, most of which are dark. But sometimes on a spring day on the banks of Oslofjord he can muster a bit of uneasy delight in the world. Right now, I would rather look at his painting Ashes, a portrayal of the aftermath of sex in a Norwegian wood, or Girls on a Pier, whose lyrical longing is fraught with loneliness, than at Munch’s most famous epitome of the modern condition…..

The Guardian


Globe to Globe – Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre

May 4, 2012

Many of the world’s greatest directors, over six hundred actors from all nations, and audiences from every corner of our polyglot community, will assemble to celebrate the stories, the characters and the relationships, which are etched into all of us. Shakespeare is the language which brings us together better than any other, and which reminds of our almost infinite difference, and of our strange and humbling commonality. And above all there are the plays themselves, plays which have travelled far and wide, and which on their travels have midwifed new theatre cultures, spread light and laughter, and helped nations, new and old, to define themselves. A Globe beside the Thames is where many of these plays began their extraordinary journey. Another Globe beside the Thames is delighted to be bringing these plays, dressed in the clothes of many peoples, back home …

 

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Iraq in Venice

May 4, 2012

Iraq in Venice, six exiled artists show their work on a world stage

IN A country where a litre of water costs more than a litre of fuel, it isnt hard to see why art isnt a priority.

The irony and Alan Yentobs latest film for the BBCs Imagine series was full of it is that Iraq was once the cradle of civilisation.

Dictatorship, destruction and despair, particularly in 35 years of Saddam Husseins rule, have squeezed the life out of people and out of their culture…..

The Examiner

Britain’s Proms: music for everyone in Olympic UK

April 21, 2012

Reuters) – In London’s Olympic year, the BBC Proms is mounting an olympian effort to attract audiences to its 92-concert summer season, and to be sure they can get there amid the crush of athletes and hundreds of thousands of fans flooding the city.

“It’s an international musical festival which happens to take place in the UK,” Proms director and BBC Radio 3 controller Roger Wright said at a news conference on Thursday launching the 118th Proms season.

The Proms open on July 13 and run until early September, providing a rich feast of concerts, chamber music, opera, musicals, world music and, most famously, the flag-waving, singalong pageantry of the Last Night of the Proms…..

Reuters

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde

April 21, 2012

Dr Jekyll and a not so wicked Mr Hyde: how a portrait of evil was toned down
Robert Louis Stevenson deleted “certain appetites” to make his creation Mr Hyde less sinister, an edited draft of his novella to be displayed at the British Library reveals.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is one of English literature’s most famous stories: the enduring classic of a man’s transformation into a monster, first published in 1886. Now the manuscript for the novella is to go on show, revealing its transformation as Stevenson toned down his more explicit ideas.

The most complete draft of the novella – Stevenson burned a first draft because his wife was so alarmed by it – is covered with corrections. Reading between its chaotic lines shows how Stevenson deleted details such as the sexual connotations of Jekyll becoming “in secret the slave of certain appetites”…..

The Guardian

Jean Cocteau’s Murals in Notre Dame de France, London

April 3, 2012

Battle to save Cocteau’s hidden legacy from vandals and decay

Restorers are working in a little-known French church in central London to save works of art by the celebrated filmmaker Jean Cocteau which are threatened by pollution and “vandalism”.

Cocteau, who died in 1963, was well known in the UK as a director during the 1950s for works including Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. He also wrote poetry, novels and plays. But his paintings are little known in Britain.

The murals in Notre Dame de France, a Roman Catholic chaplaincy close to Leicester Square, are part of a series of five sets of works carried out by the director, and the only ones in the UK.

The church was rebuilt after the Second World War, and Cocteau agreed to paint the murals in 1960 following a request from the French ambassador…..

The Independent

EYE, the new film museum

April 2, 2012

EYE, the new film museum, opens on April 5th with

Found Footage: Cinema Exposed.

The exhibition and accompanying film program reveals how artists and filmmakers utilize the virtually inexhaustible reservoir of moving images that can be found in film archives, on Internet, TV and DVD. This found footage serves as raw material with which they make new works and give new meaning to existing moving images. The participants include Douglas Gordon, Bruce Conner, Aernout Mik and Matthias Müller. Found Footage: Cinema Exposed is curated by Jaap Guldemond, Director of Exhibitions at EYE.

The exhibition presents fifteen works of art and installations. In total, it takes up an area of 1200 m2 and can best be described as a landscape of freestanding projection screens, monitors, flat screens and 16mm projections in which the rattling projector is also a component of the work. The exhibition Found Footage: Cinema Exposed begins with American filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933-2008), who started making films without using a camera as long ago as the late fifties. Via artists such as Douglas Gordon(1966) and Matthias Müller (1961), renowned for their appropriation of footage from well-known feature films, the visitor is acquainted with the work of Italian duoGianikian/Ricci Lucchi (1942) that rearranges, slows down and adds color to fragments from early, silent cinema. The visitor also encounters home movies rescued from the hands of garbage collectors by Pablo Pijnappel (1979), TV Décollages by Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell (1932 – 1998) and the installations specially designed for the exhibition by Aernout Mik (1962) and Christoph Girardet (1966), using footage from the EYE’s own collection. Other participating artists include David Claerbout, Anri Sala, Bill Morrison and Joachim Koester.

EYE Film Institute Netherlands

 

Art museum news

March 30, 2012

 


Swedish museum opening delayed until May
The opening of Bildmuseet, the new art museum building in the northern Swedish city of Umea, has been postponed from March to 19 May. “It [has taken] longer to install all the necessary technical… MORE

More art museum news from The Art Newspaper

The restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne

March 30, 2012

The Louvre uncovers restoration of Leonardo da Vinci’s last work Saint Anne.

The 18-month-long restoration of the painting that Leonardo laboured on for 20 years until his death in 1519 will go a long way to raising “Saint Anne” to its place as one of the most influential Florentine paintings of its time and a step towards the high Renaissance of Michelangelo.

The cleaning has endowed the painting portraying the Virgin Mary with her mother Saint Anne and the infant Jesus with new life and luminosity. Dull, faded hues were transformed into vivid browns and lapis lazuli that had visitors awestruck.

“It’s unbelievable, so beautiful. Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue!” one visitor, Odile Celier, 66, said on Wednesday.

The exhibit brings together some 130 preparatory drawings and studies by Leonardo and his apprentices – something curator Vincent Delieuvin likened to “a police investigation” – tracing the painting’s conception and revealing to experts today the entire development over the last 20 years of Leonardo’s life…..

The Telegraph

National Theatre Live

March 28, 2012

 

 

 

 

The best of British theatre broadcast live to cinemas around the world.

National Theatre Live

The World Shakespeare Festival

March 23, 2012

The World Shakespeare Festival (WSF) is a celebration of Shakespeare as the world’s playwright and we hope you will come and join us.

Produced by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in an unprecedented collaboration with leading UK and international arts organisations, and with Globe to Globe, a major international programme produced by Shakespeare’s Globe, it’s the biggest celebration of Shakespeare ever staged.

Almost 60 partners are coming together to bring the Festival alive.  Thousands of artists from around the world will take part in almost 70 productions, plus supporting events and exhibitions, right across the UK, including London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Newcastle/Gateshead, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland and online.

Over one million tickets are on sale. It runs from 23 April to November 2012 and forms part of London 2012 Festival, which is the culmination of the Cultural Olympiad, bringing leading artists from all over the world together in a UK-wide festival this summer.

The World Shakespeare Festival

Brian Sewell – Tracey Emin

March 20, 2012

Emin’s skill has been usurped by celebrity

Brian Sewell

A scrupulous art critic must admit that it was with a groan that he greeted the first news of Tracey Emin’s exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, with a groan that he read the premature ejaculatory articles and with a groan that he wandered through this retrospective celebration of unmediated autobiographical relics and self-centred sentimentality.

In the years since Charles Saatchi brought her to the fore in his Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997, I have said very little of Miss Emin; at that he exhibited her Tent, to the interior of which she had patchworked the names of “everyone I have ever slept with”, a thing of puerile simplicity, and, two years later, he acquired the tumbled bed that was her notorious installation for the Turner Prize, a squalid relic of concupiscence and misery reconstructed in self-pity. Neither had much to do with art, both justified my contempt for the parading of herself that were the works of her earlier hang-out years, and I thought that even our insane contemporary art world would have enough common sense to let her fade into obscurity. She did not. She became instead, largely through the amused but sceptical interest of the popular press, a very public figure, cunningly exploiting ignorance, irascible emotion and raw sex to draw attention to herself…..

London Evening Standard

Michel Houellebecq The Map and the Territory

March 16, 2012
Ancient Curse

By Ben Jeffrey

The Map and the Territory is the fifth novel by the French misanthrope and provocateur Michel Houellebecq. At this stage in his career, there is a checklist of flaws that any balanced reviewer is more or less obliged to go through when discussing Houellebecq’s work, so let me get those out of the way. The outlook in these novels is caustic and limited; the world they represent is most often vile when it isn’t sickeningly dull; life is an ordeal of disappointment, spurious pain, and loneliness, occasionally relieved by moments of erotic joy (but joy that eventually becomes misery, because it cannot be preserved). The books take rather too much satisfaction in pandering to racial and sexual bigotry, made worse by the fact that this pandering seldom seems to serve any genuine artistic purpose and comes off instead as a rote effort to offend…..

N+1

Sotheby’s

March 16, 2012

ALICE GREGORY

I spent the summer after graduation reading novels in McCarren Park. I had been warned that nobody was hiring and was secretly relieved because this meant it wasn’t entirely on me to have a legitimate job. I could copy-edit and babysit and transfer money from my savings account to my checking account in prudent but relentless $50 installments. It was fun so long as it was warm out, but by late September it was too chilly to read outside, and I was running out of money.

A classmate from college set me up at Sotheby’s, a company I knew little about. In my interview, I told my future boss that I had never been able to imagine an idea that could be best expressed by painting it. “But,” I added, making exaggerated eye contact, “appreciating art doesn’t mean you can send effective emails. I can write. I can make your job easier for you.” This is the best thing to say in an interview if you are young and unqualified to do anything other than maintain a personal blog. I started three weeks later…..

 N+1

A Lost da Vinci Masterpiece?

March 13, 2012

Have Art Experts Discovered a Lost da Vinci Masterpiece?

In 1505, the city of Florence commissioned its treasured artist, Leonardo da Vinci, to paint a sprawling fresco depicting the city’s victorious battle with the Milanese in 1440. Da Vinci, who was known to detest war, eventually abandoned the project, leaving the scenery of military men on horses to vanish forever. Or so they thought.

Teaming up with a few scientists, art historians are claiming that they may have uncovered evidence of da Vinci’s lost fresco, concealed by another painting in Florence’s city hall, Palazzo Vecchio, MSNBC reports. The project, known to some as “Lost Leonardo,” sparred debate in the art world over whether it still existed — and if researchers should drill holes into Giorgio Vasari’s historical fresco, “The Battle of Marciano,” to see if their theory could be proven right…..

Time Magazine

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton

March 10, 2012

Book Review: Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton
Reviewed by José Teodoro

“I’m an atheist,” the great Aragónian filmmaker Luis Buñuel famously declared. “Thank God.” Besides being a conspicuously agnostic, characteristically mischievous aphorism, I think Buñuel’s words have been so often quoted because we all understand that any position on spiritual belief is always going to be made in alignment with or in opposition to God. Or god. Or gods. Theism is the standard; atheism the aberration.

But it’s an aberration gaining renewed traction in the 21st century (Anno Domini). In 2007, the late Christopher Hitchens published his manifesto for the New Atheism. God Is Not Great is an incisive, on-all-fronts attack on the legacies of the world’s dominant religions, but its wholesale dismissal left even some fellow non-believers skeptical. Is there really nothing of value to be gleaned from religion? Need we throw out the baby Jesus with the holy water?….

National Post

Damien Hirst and Money

March 10, 2012

Damien Hirst: ‘I still believe art is more powerful than money’

Damien Hirst has gone from mouthy YBA to global brand over the past 25 years – and become the world’s richest living artist on the way. Here he talks about money, mortality and his first retrospective in Britain.

When Damien Hirst was looking though his archive recently, in preparation for his forthcoming retrospective at Tate Modern, he came across some film footage of an interview he did with David Bowie in the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 1996. “I’m sitting on a big ashtray talking bollocks,” says Hirst, laughing. “At one point, Bowie says, ‘So what about a big Tate gallery show, then?’ And I say, ‘No way. Museums are for dead artists. I’d never show my work in the Tate. You’d never get me in that place.’”

He grins ruefully and shakes his head. “I was watching it and thinking, ‘Jesus Christ, how things change.’ Suddenly, I’m 46 and I’m having what they call a mid-career retrospective. It doesn’t seem right somehow.”…..

The Guardian

 

‘Room 237′ A Film on Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

February 21, 2012

Cracking the Code in ‘Heeere’s Johnny!’

WHEN “The Shining” was released in 1980, many viewers, including the critic Pauline Kael, left theaters mystified by what they had just seen. Expecting a standard frightfest based on a Stephen King best seller, they got an unexplained river of blood surging out of hotel elevators, a vision of cobwebbed skeletons and a weird guy in a bear suit doing something untoward with a gentleman in a tuxedo.

Three decades on, scholars and fans are still trying to decipher this puzzle of a film directed by Stanley Kubrick. To them it’s only ostensibly about an alcoholic father, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) going more than stir crazy while his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny, try to cope in an isolated hotel, the Overlook. Mr. Kubrick was famously averse to offering explanations of his films — “I have found it always the best policy to allow the film to speak for itself,” he once wrote — which has led to a mind-boggling array of theories about just what he was up to…..

New York Times

How Stanley Kubrick Kept His Eye on the Budget, Down to the Orange Juice

February 21, 2012

Nothing revealed Stanley Kubrick’s singular intelligence — nor his endearing humor and humanity — more than budgetary decisions. He wore his producer’s hat as ingeniously as his director’s one, confounding expectations.

Before he arrived in New York for the opening of 2001, stories of his obsessive genius preceded him. He had a pilot’s license, but wouldn’t fly after monitoring the control towers at various airports, finding their safety inadequate. He knew the best dental procedures and rumors spread that he had an open telephone to the dentist’s office when a family member underwent treatment….

Moviefone

Remain in light: Mulholland Dr. and the cosmogony of David Lynch

February 21, 2012

As our ten-yearly poll to find the Greatest Film of All Time gets ever closer, B. Kite considers David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. in the light of the Vedanta-inspired spiritual philosophy that underpins all the director’s work

Despite the accusations of incoherence sometimes made against them by critics who ought to know better, the films of David Lynch seem to share a remarkably consistent cosmogony that can be sketched as follows: the soul originates in light and unity and has its home there. Although this unity can never in fact be divided, the soul takes on the guise of individual identity, or separateness, and enters the theatre of the world. Once in place, it often forgets its origins and mistakes its role for its being or, in dim intervals of recollection, believes itself so soiled by violence or dark multiplicities of desire that it imagines itself isolate, forever drifting, alone and homeless. But that is the ultimate illusion, and the bleakest. The soul’s essence remains untouched and untouchable, and after however many cycles of rebirth its eventual homecoming is assured, has happened, is perpetually happening. It only remains for the soul to wake up in order to realise it never left. Nearly every Lynch film has a happy ending…..

Sight and Sound

Jean Vigo: Artist of the floating world

February 21, 2012

The sole full-length feature made by Jean Vigo, L’Atalante was a bridge between the surrealism of 1920s French cinema and the poetic realism of the 1930s. Graham Fuller makes the case for its inclusion in S&S’s forthcoming ‘Greatest Films of All Time’ poll

Jean Vigo’s great work about a pair of troubled newly-weds and the crusty old mate with the Hapsburg jaw and unfettered imagination who travels with them aboard the Normandy freight barge L’Atalante was based on a one-page scenario by Jean Guinée. This was the pen name of Roger de Guichen, who had been intrigued by the sight of a woman helming a barge on the Seine, and had named his fictional vessel after a frigate commanded by one of his ancestors in the Seven Years War. Following the banning of Vigo’s Zéro de conduite in 1933, the director’s supportive producer Jacques-Louis Nounez sent him Guinée’s scenario hoping it would deter him from the kind of radical experimentation that had illuminated Vigo’s scabrous 42-minute satire of boarding-school life….

Sight and Sound

Ebooks and literature

February 21, 2012

Books That Are Never Done Being Written
Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse
By NICHOLAS CARR

I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I’d written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon’s site. The whole process couldn’t have been simpler.

Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different versions of what appeared to be the same edition. But I also knew that the readers would be oblivious to the alterations…..

The Wall Street Journal

A video interview with Robert Franzen

February 21, 2012

Meet the Writers (B&N)

New York exhibition reviews from ArtForum

February 21, 2012

New York Exhibitions

Artforum

Who Destroyed Classical Civilization?

February 21, 2012

by Emmet Scott

For centuries scholars assumed that the civilization of ancient Rome, the civilization we now call “classical,” was destroyed by the barbarian tribes of Germany and central Asia who, during the fourth and fifth centuries swarmed into the Empire and destroyed the political power of the Eternal City. The migrations of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns, were held responsible for reducing Europe to an economic and cultural wasteland, and initiating the long period of backwardness we now call the “Dark Ages.”

This was the view that prevailed till the sixteenth century, at which point, in the wake of the Reformation, a new suspect was added: the Christian, or more accurately, the Catholic, Church. According to this idea (one that remains strikingly popular in the English-speaking world), Christianity was corrupted beyond recognition after the time of Constantine and from the fourth century onwards a power-hungry Church hierarchy, in cahoots with the Imperial authorities, kept the population of Europe in subservience and ignorance, effectively completing the destructive work of the Barbarians…..

New English Review

Cars, car parks and cities

February 21, 2012

Between the Lines

That prized garage space or curbside spot you’ve been yearning for may be costing you—and the city—in ways you never realized. A journey into the world of parking, where meter maids are under siege, everybody’s on the take, and the tickets keep on coming.

By Dave Gardetta

Anyone scanning Disney Hall’s debut calendar in the fall of 2003 would have noticed the size of that first season’s schedule, 128 shows in all. That’s a weighty number for a new hall—one might have assumed it was chosen by venue management wanting the gravitas of a world-class chamber’s arrival or perhaps seeking a broad spectrum of music that could reflect the diverse city. Those guesses would have been wrong. Disney Hall had been built atop Parcel K, a county-owned square of land on Bunker Hill that long had sat empty, awaiting development. For decades Parcel K served a prosaic function: It was a parking lot. Commercial landowners like parking lots; they generate cash until better economic conditions arrive, and blank space can be converted into a more profitable moneymaking device—typically a building. The practice is called “land banking.”Yet before an auditorium could be raised on K, a six-floor subterranean garage capable of holding 2,188 cars needed to be sunk below it at a cost of $110 million—money raised from county bonds. Parking spaces can be amazingly expensive to fabricate…..

Los Angeles Magazine


Lucian Freud dismantled the established conventions of portrait painting

February 21, 2012

Lucian Freud Portraits
National Portrait Gallery, 9th February-27th May

A parent on bedside watch might have had the notion. A certain kind of photographer, too—the kind obsessed, for instance, by isolated fragments and strange magnifications. But among established portrait painters, the idea that the soles of a woman’s feet might testify to her person as eloquently and forcefully as her face feels unique to Lucian Freud.

The picture I’m thinking of is “Annabel Sleeping,” a portrait Freud made of one of his grown daughters in the late 1980s. It shows a woman, lying asleep on a bed, wearing a sky-blue dressing gown.

What makes it unusual, as a portrait,  (and Freud thought of almost all of his pictures of people—and animals, too—as portraits) is that the subject is completely turned away from us. Not only are we not shown her face, we can’t even see the shape of her head. The closest we get is a spray of unkempt dark brown hair emerging from behind foetally hunched shoulders. The only parts of her body that are actually exposed are her ankles, her toes, and soles of her feet…..

Prospect Magazine

Freud: the last great Enlightenment thinker

February 21, 2012

Sigmund Freud is out of fashion. The reason? His heroic refusal to flatter humankind.

Writing to Albert Einstein in the early 1930s, Sigmund Freud suggested that “man has in him an active instinct for hatred and destruction.” Freud went on to contrast this “instinct to destroy and kill” with one he called erotic—an instinct “to conserve and unify,” an instinct for love.

Without speculating too much, Freud continued, one might suppose that these instincts function in every living being, with what he called “the death instinct”—thanatos—acting “to work its ruin and reduce life to its primal state of inert matter.” The death instinct provided “the biological justification for all those vile, pernicious propensities [to war] which we are now combating.”

To be sure, Freud concluded, all this talk of eros and thanatos might give Einstein the impression that psychoanalytic theory amounted to a “species of mythology, and a gloomy one at that.” But if so, Freud was unabashed, asking Einstein: “Does not every natural science lead ultimately to this—a sort of mythology? Is it otherwise today with your physical sciences?”….

Prospect Magazine

Forgotten Berlioz: Roméo et Juliette

February 15, 2012

A homage to love, Shakespeare and the symphonic form, Berlioz’s symphony should be recognised as a triumph of drama, formal coherence and lyric beauty.

At a time when Hector Berlioz’s music is played more often than ever before, when performances of the Symphonie Fantastique, Les Nuits d’été, The Damnation of Faust and even the Requiem have become almost commonplace events, and his magnum opus The Trojans has at last been recognised as what Donald Tovey called “one of the most gigantic and convincing masterpieces of music-drama”, it’s odd that a work as beautiful and eventful as the dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette should still be in need of special advocacy…..

The Guardian

The 62nd Berlin Film Festival

February 8, 2012

The public programme of the Berlin International Film Festival shows about 400 films per year, mostly international or European premieres. Films of every genre, length and format find their place in the various sections: great international cinema in the Competition, independent and art house inPanorama, films for young audiences in Generation, new discoveries and promising talents from the German film scene in Perspektive Deutsches Kino, avant garde, experimental and unfamiliar cinematography in the Forum, and an exploration of cinematic possibilities in Berlinale Shorts. The programme is rounded out by a Retrospective as well as an Homage, which focuses on the œuvre of a great personality of cinema, curated by the Deutsche Kinemathek – Museum für Film und Fernsehen

Berlin Film Festival Website

Antoni Tapies, Catalan painter and sculptor, dies at 88

February 8, 2012

Catalan painter and sculptor Antoni Tapies, one of the world’s top contemporary art figures, died Feb. 6 in Barcelona. He was 88.

A statement from the government of his native northeastern Catalonia region confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.

Born in Barcelona in 1923, Mr. Tapies was one of Spain’s main exponents of abstract and avant-garde art in the second half of the 20th century. His work has been displayed in major museums across the world.

Mr. Tapies — who won many awards, including the 2003 Velazquez Prize, Spain’s top art award — was known for sprawling, abstract works that sometimes featured discarded everyday materials and graffiti-like scrawls…..

 

Washington Post

Citizen Philosophers

February 6, 2012

Teaching Justice in Brazil

Carlos Fraenkel

Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast. She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met.

Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. And they study philosophy two hours each week because of a 2008 law that mandates philosophy instruction in all Brazilian high schools. Nine million teenagers now take philosophy classes for three years…..

Boston Review

Howard Hodgkin, Yayoi Kusama and Andrea Zittel

February 4, 2012

Howard Hodgkin, Yayoi Kusama and Andrea Zittel – the week in art
Hodgkin’s impressive Mughal art collection explodes with untamed colour, much like his own work, while a Japanese icon hits the spot at Tate Modern.

Exhibition of the week: Visions of Mughal India: The Collection of Howard Hodgkin.

The painter Howard Hodgkin has one of the world’s finest collections of Indian art from the Mughal period and here, for the first time, he shows the entire visual feast to the public. In the early 16th century the Mughal emperor Babur extended his rule from Afghanistan into northern India. He and his dynasty were Muslims, and they brought the traditions of Islamic art into India. Manuscript illumination and miniature paintingswere arts that reached superb heights in Persia from the 13th century onward. In India, the Mughal rulers imported such skills as they delighted in superbly detailed portraits, fantastic scenes from legend and history, and the depiction of nature in scintillating colours.

Hodgkin has said he does not look for particular iconographic or historical topics in this rich artistic territory, just for “great art”. And he should know how to recognise it…..

The Guardian

 

£160m Cézanne: Highest price ever for a painting

February 4, 2012

£160m Cézanne: Highest price ever for a painting as Qatari royal family trumps world dealers for The Card Players

One of Cezanne’s best-loved paintings has sold for £160million, the highest price ever paid for a work  of art.

The Card Players, one in a series of five works depicting French peasants playing cards, was bought by the Gulf  kingdom of Qatar.

The ruling royal family beat two of the world’s top art dealers to win the masterpiece…..

Leonard Cohen’s Old Ideas album

February 2, 2012

Leonard Cohen’s new album Old Ideas is unexpected delight, says Bernadette McNulty.

Being invited to an exclusive first listen of an album at a record company playback is usually a poisoned chalice, especially if the musician themself will be present. While you sit in a windowless room, being bombarded by unfamiliar songs blaring at you at cinematic volumes, innate human politeness dictates that under the watch of the star and their publicists, you betray no opinion on your face but delight…..

 

There was no need for such artifice though yesterday when Leonard Cohen arrived in London to unveil his latest album Old Ideas. Entering the Mayfair hotel like a genteel gangster in his trademark double-breasted dark charcoal suit, he politely doffed his fedora to the audience. “Don’t worry,” he said with a mischievous smirk before the music began, “I’m not going to sit facing you.”


The Telegraph