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Sunday, December 22, 2024 |
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Jason Farago: Art for our moment |
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An installation view of sculptor El Anatsuis abstract In the World but Dont Know the World (2019) at the Haus der Kunst art museum in Munich, March 25, 2019. Culture, like climate, demands assessment at global scale and if art has any objective in the Anthropocene, its to dissolve our ecocidal self-absorption and find our reflections in the lives of those unlike us. Laetitia Vancon/The New York Times.
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NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Greta Thunbergs denunciations, Gov. Jay Inslees presidential run, Getty wildfires, Greenlandic buyout offers: This year, at last, the immensity of the climate crisis fully broke into public consciousness. Culture, like climate, demands assessment at global scale and if art has any objective in the Anthropocene, its to dissolve our ecocidal self-absorption and find our reflections in the lives of those unlike us.
1. Sun & Sea (Marina)
Their names are Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte and these friends from Kaunas, Lithuania, the immensely deserving winners of the Golden Lion at this years Venice Biennale, created an unforgettable performance whose even temper cloaked an ecological sucker punch. In Sun & Sea (Marina), an opera staged continuously on an artificial beach, bathers sang blithely of package holidays and disposable water bottles, and faintly sensed that the seasons are coming unstuck. In November, Venices worst flooding in half a century shuttered the Biennale and inundated Saint Marks Basilica, just as the populist-led regional government rejected a raft of climate measures. But some of the Lithuanian pavilions sand has been recycled, to bulk up an island disintegrating into the lagoon.
2. Okwui Enwezor
Some deaths feel like the end of an era but the example of Okwui Enwezor, the most significant curator of the last 30 years, will govern for decades over the global art world he helped forge. In exhibitions like the ravishing El Anatsui: Triumphant Scale, which opened at the Haus der Kunst in Munich just before his death in March, the Nigerian modeled a broader artistic discourse nourished by politics, economics and current events, and affirmed that African artists are the equals of anyone. Now it seems self-evident that an exhibit with new art only from the U.S. and Europe is provincial. That is because of Okwui, who in art and in life made cosmopolitanism an ethical duty.
3. MoMA Turns South
Among the inaugural offerings at the larger, nimbler, hardly perfect, much improved Museum of Modern Art, the most important is Sur Moderno: a stupefying showcase of more than 200 midcentury abstract works from Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina and Uruguay. These gifts from the collector Patricia Phelps de Cisneros make essential viewing on their own; when they later get integrated into MoMAs refreshed collection displays, they will reshape a museum approaching fluency in Spanish and Portuguese.
4. Monumental Journey: The Daguerreotypes of Girault de Prangey
The Metropolitan Museum of Arts exquisite exhibition of these architectural images of the 1840s including the first photos taken of Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem was one of the finest shows of early photography Ive ever seen. Its intertwined themes of technology, colonialism and wanderlust still resound in the time of Google Street View.
5. New Old Masters ...
Three museums reclaimed undersung heroes of European art of the 15th and early 16th centuries. Brussels Center for Fine Arts, known as Bozar, brought out the paintings, prints and tapestries of the all-media monster Bernard van Orley; the Palazzo Reale in Milan revived Antonello da Messina, the Sicilian savant; and the National Gallery of Art in Washington went to bat for Verrocchio, the artistic paterfamilias of Medici Florence. Add to these a new show of the Renaissance women Sofonisba Anguissola and Lavinia Fontana, at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, and old canvases are looking mighty fresh.
6. ... and One Reborn
The Musée du Louvres Leonardo da Vinci took a decade to organize, with loans uncertain until opening day. But curators Vincent Delieuvin and Louis Frank pulled off a benchmark achievement in cobwebs-clearing, which sloughed off celebrity and conspiracy and returned Leonardo to us as a genuine artist. The very archetype of a scholarly blockbuster.
7. Matthew Barney: Redoubt
Barneys return to his birth state of Idaho inspired his greatest film since the Cremaster cycle, infused with a new agility thanks to intrepid dancer and choreographer Eleanor Bauer. His freer gaze on American exceptionalism and environmental degradation was also channeled into electroplated etchings and ambitious multimetal sculptures, now at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.
8. Lee Ufan
In Beacon, New York, the Dia Art Foundation has been undertaking a quiet but considerable broadening of its collection and made its most profound new addition this summer, with an impeccable new display by Lee Ufan, Koreas most significant sculptor. In the company of Lees delicate contrapuntal arrangements of sand, rope and boulders, Dias American and German all-stars suddenly seemed a bit ponderous.
9. Christodoulos Panayiotou
If you think institutional critique is a joyless enterprise, two heart-stopping shows by this Cypriot artist reveal the romance in mining the museum. At the Camden Arts Center in London, Panayiotou took the doors off their hinges and replaced window panes with pink glass to equate two sundered islands: his own Mediterranean homeland and Brexit-divided Britain. And at the Musée dOrsay in Paris, he evoked the wreckage of time through the most subdued gestures, like a Rodin installed backward and a carpet exhumed from the museums trash.
10. The Paris Fire Brigade
History tumbles toward oblivion, yet still heroes rush in. The blaze that engulfed Notre-Dame on April 15 came much closer than first acknowledged to annihilating the 850-year-old cathedral. It stands, roofless but intact, thanks to the 600 lionhearted firefighters and engineers who risked their lives for the worlds cultural patrimony. The motto of Europes largest fire department befits our ecological era: Sauver ou périr, save or perish.
© 2019 The New York Times Company
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Today's News
December 9, 2019
McNay Art Museum focuses on Minimalism, debuts never-before-seen prints
A $120,000 banana is peeled from an art exhibition and eaten
Heard Museum in Arizona launches new exhibition series with Maria Hupfield
Lebanese donor hands Nazi artifacts to Israel, warns of anti-Semitism
Caroll Spinney, Big Bird's alter ego on 'Sesame Street,' is dead at 85
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac presents an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Imi Knoebel
Rubell Museum opens in new home
Lovers in Auschwitz, reunited 72 years later. He had one question
Unexpected delights
Mutli-channel video installation pays tribute to Ugo Rondinone's late husband, John Giorno
Rising US rap artist Juice WRLD dies at 21
Tracing lost New York through postcards
Donald B. Marron, financier, art collector and philanthropist, dies at 85
Philharmonie de Paris opens an exhibition of works by Pierre & Gilles
Pace Gallery opens an exhibition of Chinese artist Li Songsong's most recent works
Jason Farago: Art for our moment
Sotheby's to offer a bespoke Rolls Royce Phantom customized by Mickalene Thomas to benefit (RED)
"Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words," a new exhibition, offers intimate view of seminal figure's life
MEI Art Gallery opens one of the first exhibitions of contemporary Kurdish art in the U.S.
Exhibition presents historical 19th century paintings alongside 20th century photographs
First UK solo exhibition of work by Meryl McMaster on view at Ikon
Yang Jiechang celebrates 30 years of collaboration with the galerie Jeanne Bucher Jaeger
Kunsthalle Osnabrück presents Celebration Factory by Filip Markiewicz
Exhibition invites audiences to enter the fantastical worlds of six artists
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