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☆ Why the Olympics’ Parade of Nations Is the World’s Costume Party
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-25 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Welcome back to the Olympics, and a five-ringed circus of sport and security, national pride and international sponsorship. This summer’s Games begin in Paris this Friday, with an uncommon opening ceremony: athletes and acrobats floating along the Seine for as many spectators as the antiterror police will allow. France is still processing its recent snap legislative election, which nearly brought the far right to power. The ceremony will be all about France’s openness to the world. Not all the local spectators will approve of the message.

Persons: ”, Emmanuel Macron Locations: Paris, France

☆ The Photographs That Made Trump an Incarnation of Defiance
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-14 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

If we had seen the attack on former President Donald J. Trump only through television footage, it would have appeared shocking, but also chaotic and muddled. Secret Service agents jump in. Blood running from Mr. Trump’s ear to his lips testifies to how close the former president had come to death. In the lens of the still camera, the horror of the attack was translated into embodiments of authority, defiance and near martyrdom. The American flag billowing behind Mr. Trump’s bloodied face in some of the photos may superficially recall a Romantic tradition of bloodied national heroes, real or allegorical.

Persons: Donald J, Doug Mills, Trump’s, John Singleton Copley’s, Peirson ” Organizations: Trump, Service, The New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, Secret Service Locations: France, Iwo Jima

☆ The Painter of Revolution, on Both Sides of the Atlantic
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-11 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On July 14, 1789 (exactly 235 years ago this Sunday), some idealistic Parisians stormed a not especially crowded prison. They set in train a three-pronged revolution: for individual liberty, for civil equality, and, last and rarest, for communal obligation. In the National Assembly of 1789 and the National Assembly of 2024, some questions never get a final answer. Guillaume Lethière (1760—1832) was a Neoclassical painter of mixed race who has never, until now, been the subject of a solo museum show. Born in the French Caribbean, almost certainly into slavery, he reached the summits of artistic achievement in Paris and Rome.

Persons: égalité, Guillaume Lethière Organizations: National Assembly, Clark Art Institute Locations: French Caribbean, Paris, Rome, France, Caribbean, Europe

☆ How Architecture Became One of Ukraine’s Essential Defenses
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-20 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When the German Army finally broke through in central Ukraine in September 1941, pasting up ordinances around Kyiv to announce a new occupying authority, they had only a few days’ calm. Less than a week after the occupation began, an explosion went off in a children’s toy store on Khreshchatyk Street — the capital’s grandest shopping boulevard, Kyiv’s equivalent of Fifth Avenue or the Champs-Élysées. Soon the city hall and the Communist Party headquarters crumbled. Walk through central Kyiv today, down the Khreshchatyk, past the grand Independence Square and the ritzy Tsum department store, and you can read the history of postwar and post-independence Ukraine in the subsequent architecture. When the city is a battleground, architecture becomes an act of defense and defiance.

Organizations: German Army, Communist Party, New York Times Locations: Ukraine, Kyiv, Russia

☆ At the Met, Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up in the Chemistry Lab
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-09 | by ( Vanessa Friedman | Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute announced its 2024 spring blockbuster show would be called “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” a lot of head-scratching ensued. Its curators seek to “reawaken” these items with a dash of technology and a soupçon of sensory overload: touch, smell and sound. Imagine the ghostly rustling of silk taffeta, the clinking of giant paillettes, brought back to life by scientists and engineers. It’s not your usual fashion exhibit. Vanessa Friedman, chief fashion critic, and Jason Farago, critic at large, debated the result.

Persons: frocks, It’s, Vanessa Friedman, Jason Farago Organizations: Metropolitan Museum, Art’s Costume Institute

☆ The Venice Biennale and the Art of Turning Backward
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

There is a sour tendency in cultural politics today — a growing gap between speaking about the world and acting in it. In the domain of rhetoric, everyone has grown gifted at pulling back the curtain. We are losing faith with so many institutions of culture and society — the museum, the market, and, especially this week, the university — but cannot imagine an exit from them. I’ve just spent a week tramping across Venice, a city of more than 250 churches, and where did I encounter the most doctrinaire catechism? It was in the galleries of the 2024 Venice Biennale, still the world’s principal appointment to discover new art, whose current edition is at best a missed opportunity, and at worst something like a tragedy.

Locations: Venice

They used to call this waterlogged city the Most Serene Republic, but there is nothing serenissima about the opening days of the Venice Biennale. The world’s longest-running and most extravagant festival of contemporary art opens to the public on Saturday after a preview biathlon of fine art and financial profligacy that has grown more hectic than ever. You exchange tips on shows not to miss. You judge, you gossip, you wash it all down with Prosecco. Have you seen the Uzbekistan pavilion?

Organizations: Venice Biennale, Prosecco Locations: Serene, Venice, Uzbekistan

☆ Berlin Was a Beacon of Artistic Freedom. Gaza Changed Everything.
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-06 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

She lived for a time in West Berlin. Fitting, then, that she would accept a prestigious guest professorship this year at a German art school. Rather than distill her thoughts about “this unbelievably tragic war” into the kind of public statement they seemed to want, she withdrew. “It did teach me that I didn’t really want to have that kind of sponsorship,” she concluded. The arts scene in Germany — and especially Berlin — has been turned upside down by Hamas’s attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, and the siege and bombardment of Gaza.

Persons: Laurie Anderson, —, “, ”, Anderson, Lou Reed, Berliner, fulminated, Berlin — Organizations: Germany — Locations: Germany, West Berlin, Israel, Palestinian, Berlin, Gaza

☆ When Richard Serra’s Steel Curves Became a Memorial
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-28 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

After the yelling, the hearings, the lawsuit, the dismantlement, Richard Serra entered the last decade of the last century with his mind cast toward the classics. The American sculptor, who died Tuesday at 85, got caught up in the Reagan-era culture wars with “Tilted Arc,” a 120-foot plate of curved Cor-Ten steel that sliced across Manhattan’s Federal Plaza. The work was finally removed — in Serra’s estimation, destroyed — in March 1989. “The central space is simply a regular ellipse, and the walls that surround it are vertical,” he would later recall. “I walked in and thought: what if I turn this form on itself?”

Persons: Richard Serra, Reagan, Yorkers, Street, San Carlo alle Quattro, Francesco Borromini that’s, “ Organizations: San Carlo Locations: American, Italy, Rome, San

☆ 700 Paintings, 45 Galleries: A Guide to the Met’s New European Wing
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-24 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Five years after the Metropolitan Museum of Art set off on a major renovation of its galleries for European painting, the super-prime real estate at the top of its grand staircase is open again. Down in the galleries, the Met’s designers have widened the rooms, rearranged the sightlines, shellacked the walls purple and blue. The curators have reassembled the whole painting collection for the first time since 2018, shuffled across 45 new galleries and bathed in beautifully tempered light. (When it comes to light, this New Amsterdam institution definitely leans more Dutch than Italian.) Duccio’s break-the-bank Madonna and Child, painted in Tuscany around 1300, now shares a case with Ingres’s painting of the same subject from 1852.

Persons: Beyer Blinder Belle, Truman, Bacon, Beckmann, Kerry James Marshall, You’ll Organizations: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Locations: New Amsterdam, Italy, France, Spain, zigzags, Tuscany

NEW YORK (AP) — The visceral documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” about Russia's early assault on the Ukrainian city, will soon reach its widest audience yet. After screenings in dozens of cities, “20 Days in Mariupol” will air on PBS stations in the U.S. beginning Tuesday. WHERE CAN I WATCH ‘20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL’? WHAT ARE CRITICS SAYING ABOUT ‘20 DAYS IN MARIUPOL’? Chernov and the AP team could only send limited footage and dispatches during their 20 days in Mariupol.

Persons: Mstyslav Chernov, Evgeniy Maloletka, Vasilisa Stepanenko, “, Chernov, Jason Farago, ”, “ It’s, Michelle Mizner, —, Lori Hinnant Organizations: The Associated Press, PBS, Sundance Film, wgbh, Rotten, New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, AP Locations: Mariupol, Ukrainian, U.S, Ukraine, russia, ukraine

The upheaval at Documenta is just one example of how Europe’s art world is being torn by debates about Israel and Gaza, as some institutions have moved to postpone the shows of artists who have criticized Israel. Documenta was initially staged in 1955 as the first large-scale exhibition in West Germany of the art of the European avant-garde. It was a direct response to the Degenerate Art Show, the denunciatory exhibition of modern art staged by the Nazis in Munich in 1937. Although the mural was taken down, it set off a monthslong debate in Germany’s art world about antisemitism, Palestinian activism and Germany’s relationship to formerly colonized countries. Hoskote said Documenta was one of the art world’s greatest events, partly because it had always been a forum for new ideas.

Persons: Documenta’s, — Simon Njami, Gong Yan, Kathrin, Inés Rodríguez, —, ”, Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger, Ranjit Hoskote, Anaïs Duplan, Ai Weiwei, ” Ai, Ai, Galerie Max Hetzler, Lisson’s, Claudia Roth, Documenta, Hoskote Organizations: Venice Biennale, Folkwang, Israel, Art Newspaper, Galerie Max, Berlin, Die Locations: Israel, Kassel, Germany, Gaza, Venice, India, Essen, Haitian, United States, B.D.S, London, Lisson, New York, Paris, West Germany, Munich, Nazi, Indonesia

☆ For Max Beckmann, Art’s Ironist, Crisis and Rediscovery
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-10 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Before the war (the First World War, I mean; with so many wars one can lose count), Max Beckmann was painting clean, traditionalist self-portraits and lush pictures of bathers by the sea. Otto Dix, Beckmann’s fellow ironist, enlisted at once and served in the artillery corps. “I have been drawing,” Beckmann wrote to his wife one evening, after a day caring for men who’d survived the trenches. Though he never served at the front, Beckmann had a nervous breakdown by the end of 1915. A revolution would come to Germany, as it had already come to Beckmann’s easel.

Persons: Max Beckmann, Matisse, Picasso, Ypres, Otto Dix, Beckmann’s, Franz Marc, Beckmann, Umberto Boccioni, Wilfred Owen, “, ” Beckmann, who’d, ” Organizations: Imperial German Army, Allies Locations: Flanders, Belgian, Verdun, Frankfurt, Germany

☆ Rothko, in Pain and Glory
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-04 | by ( Lyna Bentahar | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

You may recognize Mark Rothko’s paintings, even if you can’t recall the artist’s name: tall canvases of bold, floating blocks of color. 13,” “Red on Maroon,” even “Untitled,” are just as abstract as the paintings themselves. The Fondation Louis Vuitton art museum in Paris will host 115 of Rothko’s works in a blockbuster retrospective that runs through next spring. Rothko preferred to show his paintings in low light, and away from the work of other artists. The show mostly stays true to those wishes, though it gives space in the final gallery to one artist Rothko at least approved of: Alberto Giacometti, whose spindly, bronze sculptures of attenuated human figures appear alongside a set of Rothko’s black-and-gray paintings.

Persons: Mark Rothko’s, ”, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Jason Farago, Rothko, Alberto Giacometti Organizations: Fondation Louis, The Times Locations: Paris

☆ War Hasn’t Stopped the Kyiv Biennial. It’s Multiplied It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-03 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Like so many good things about Ukrainian culture, the Kyiv Biennial was born out of the Maidan Revolution, the 2014 democratic uprising that ousted the country’s Kremlin-backed president. Maidan ushered in a nationwide cultural renewal, and Kyiv enjoyed an explosion of activity in art, fashion and, especially, electronic music. That decolonial approach to the Soviet past has taken on profound new importance during the full-scale war. As Russia continues its direct assault on Ukrainian cultural heritage, Ukrainian authorities are ripping down statues and sanding away murals. The 2023 Kyiv Biennial does not want to show its Viennese public a calamity taking place “elsewhere.” It wants to demonstrate that we are all already facing threats to a common democratic future — and it is too late to duck the fight.

Persons: unloved, ” Cherepanyn, Steyerl, Wolfgang Tillmans Organizations: Kyiv Biennial, Kyiv Locations: Crimea, Soviet, Russia, Vienna, Ukraine, Dnipro, biennials

☆ Mark Rothko at Full Scale, and in Half Light
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-25 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Melt the world away, lose its details, dissolve its borders; it doesn’t sound like such an unwelcome prospect right now. The most substantial Mark Rothko retrospective in a generation has opened at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, and it is a show of monumental dispersion: a pull-out-all-the-stops blockbuster where life passes into vapor. From 1949, when his early figurative pictures finally liquefied into stains of translucent color, Rothko painted with no allusions, no particulars. A lot of people find his large paintings consoling, or seek the Romantic sublime in the depths of his reds and violets. “Behind the color lies the cataclysm,” he said in 1959 — a citation that rarely makes the auction preview catalogs.

Persons: Rothko, Fondation Louis Vuitton, ”, it’s, Frank Gehry Organizations: Fondation, Art Basel, National Gallery of Art, Whitney, Fondation Vuitton, Boulogne Locations: Paris, Washington, New York, Bois

☆ Blaise Cendrars at the Morgan: A Modern Match of Poetry and Painting
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Big Apple is a good place for reinvention, and the Swiss poet Frédéric-Louis Sauser had reason for a restart here in the spring of 1912. At 25 years old he’d washed up in New York Harbor, nearly penniless after trying his luck in Russia and Brazil. Henceforth he would be called Blaise Cendrars: a name for a poet of fire, a promise of ash (cendres) and art. “Blaise Cendrars: Poetry Is Everything,” at the Morgan Library & Museum, is one of the most appealing and eye-opening shows of the summer — a concentrated pop of free-spirited trans-Atlantic modernity, alive with rich color and typographical pyrotechnics. If you haven’t heard of Cendrars, you’re not alone; in an intro French poetry class you are more likely to encounter his good friend Guillaume Apollinaire, a more polished example of modern alienation and fractured style.

Persons: Frédéric, Louis Sauser, he’d, chucked, Sauser, ”, Blaise Cendrars, “ Blaise Cendrars, you’re, Guillaume Apollinaire Organizations: nickelodeon, First Presbyterian Church, Morgan Library & Museum Locations: Swiss, New York Harbor, Russia, Brazil, Greenwich Village, New York

☆ The Crossed ‘Signals’ of MoMA’s Largest Ever Video Show
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-06 | by ( Jason Farago | More About Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

I sure got my wish with “Signals: How Video Transformed the World,” which closes this weekend at the Museum of Modern Art — and which, screen for screen, hour for hour, stands proud as the most perplexing exhibition of the year. Maybe a dozen times since its opening in March I have ascended to MoMA’s top floor for this ambitious, irregular exhibition of video art, the largest this museum has ever put on. Given the recent subtropical weather here in New York, this final weekend might be ideal for wrestling with “Signals” in MoMA’s climate-controlled galleries. “Signals,” drawn from the museum’s collection by the curators Stuart Comer and Michelle Kuo, is decidedly not a history of video art. (Fair enough: Nauman had a major retrospective in these same galleries in 2018, and Jonas has one coming up next year.)

Persons: bafflement, ”, Stuart Comer, Michelle Kuo, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas, Nauman, Jonas, Nam, Paik, Orwell Organizations: “, Museum of Modern, I’ve, New Locations: New York, Paris

☆ How Hokusai’s Art Crashed Over the Modern World
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-22 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

One of the most influential figures in European modern culture never set foot in Europe. But a few years after his death in 1849, when the “black ships” of Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into what’s now Tokyo Bay, Japan’s markets were forcibly opened, and Hokusai’s woodblocks started to flutter over the ocean. In France, in Britain, and soon in America, a whole new kind of art would emerge: born in Tokyo, spanning the whole world. Beautiful and bloated by turns (but well worth the trip), it makes ample use of the MFA’s unparalleled collection of Japanese art. Here you will see more than 100 of Hokusai’s prints, paintings and manga — literally “whimsical sketches” of bathers and courtesans and birds and beasts, which Hokusai published in 15 best-selling volumes.

Persons: Katsushika, Matthew Perry, Hokusai’s woodblocks, Hokusai Organizations: Mount Fuji, Museum of Fine Arts, Mount, Fuji Locations: Europe, Edo Japan, what’s, Tokyo, France, Britain, America, Boston, American

☆ With Hannah Gadsby’s ‘It’s Pablo-matic,’ the Joke’s on the Brooklyn Museum
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-01 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Back then it was a voguish noun, borrowed from French, that described the unconscious structure of an ideology or a text. Soon, though, like so many other efforts to think critically, “the problematic” got left behind in this century’s great shift from reading to scrolling. These days we encounter “problematic” exclusively as an adjective: an offhand judgment of moral disapproval, from a speaker who can’t be bothered by precision. A whole cast of professional art workers — conservators, designers, guards, technicians — has been roped in to produce “It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby,” a small exhibition opening Friday at the Brooklyn Museum. Like the noun-turned-adjective “problematic,” this new exhibition backs away from close looking for the affirmative comforts of social-justice-themed pop culture.

Persons: Hannah Gadsby, ”, —, It’s Pablo, “ Nanette, riffed, “, Picasso, Gadsby, “ Nanette ” Organizations: Brooklyn Museum, Netflix, TED Locations: Spanish

☆ A Kurdish Turkish Writer on the Tensions Between Politics and Art
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-26 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The momentous Turkish presidential election, whose second round will take place on Sunday, has more than just geopolitical consequences; it is a watershed for culture as well. For the novelist Burhan Sönmez, who is part of the country’s ethnic Kurdish minority, the upheavals of the Erdogan years are only the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between Turkish power and Turkish art. Born outside Ankara in 1965, where his first language was Kurdish, he worked as a human rights lawyer but went into exile in Britain after a police assault. He has written five novels, including the prizewinning “Istanbul Istanbul,” “Labyrinth” and “Stone and Shadow,” newly out in English by Other Press. His novels delve into imprisonment and memory, with echoes of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jorge Luis Borges.

☆ Josh Kline’s Survival Art for 21st-Century America
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-28 | by ( Jason Farago | Emma Goldberg | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The real predecessor of an art of American consumer culture, with its shiny surfaces and its dirty undersides? It’s Jeff Koons — who also uses obviousness, directness and a proud anti-critical stance in the service of an “accessible” art. GOLDBERG Well, so much of Kline’s work says outright: What’s the point? can generate something really beautiful, then maybe Kline’s work is to generate something really human. FARAGO There’s an important work that’s not at the Whitney: a video called “Hope and Change,” which caused a minor sensation at the 2015 New Museum Triennial.

☆ ‘Rear View,’ a Show About Butts, Is Forward Thinking
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-20 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The four art dealers who trade together as LGDR have opened a gallery on East 64th Street with a preposterous inaugural exhibition — but before you take that the wrong way, remember the etymology. Preposterous, adjective: from the Latin prae-, meaning “before,” and posterus, or “coming after.” Something preposterous is turned the wrong way. …I had better stop; “Rear View,” with more than 60 paintings, sculptures and photographs of human figures facing the more interesting way, invites a preposterous amount of wordplay. Many of the artists in “Rear View” channel their backward glances through the classical ideal. Michelangelo Pistoletto, the Arte Povera artist, places a concrete copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos in a pile of trash.

☆ Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Jason Farago | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

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☆ Your Friday Evening Briefing
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-14 | by ( Matthew Cullen | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

And finally, not just your everyday calendar. A year has a simple definition: one trip around the sun. But it took many centuries for people to decide on the calendar we use today. And almost no one saw it but its owner. Brent Lewis compiled photos for this briefing.

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