Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Dec 2, 2022

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Times Literary Supplement @TheTLS December 2, 2022 issue features Craig Raine on Lucian Freud; @NessaCarey on genetic engineering; @AnaAliciaGarza on vagrancy; @lindseyhilsum on the sacking of the Kherson Art Museum; @irinibus on gluttony; poems by @ColeHenri and Hugo Williams – and more.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec 5, 2022

Coney Island.

The New Yorker – December 5, 2022 issue:

Yam Karkai’s Illustrations Made Her an N.F.T. Sensation. Now What?

The illustrator Yam Karkai sits in a chair.

World of Women confronts the limits of selling cartoon avatars on the blockchain after the crypto bubble burst.

Is Mick Herron the Best Spy Novelist of His Generation?

Portrait of Mick Herron with his head in the room, alongside a smaller version of him sitting in a chair.

In his “Slough House” thrillers, the screw-ups save the day—and there’s a very fine line between comedy and catastrophe.

How Hospice Became a For-Profit Hustle

A hospice room wrapped in the middle of string tied by 2 large hands.

It began as a visionary notion—that patients could die with dignity at home. Now it’s a twenty-two-billion-dollar industry plagued by exploitation.

International Art: Apollo Magazine – December 2022

Apollo Magazine – December 2022 issue:

  • A very proud Mary in Florence
  • The fantasies of Henry Fuseli
  • Art in the time of the AIDS crisis
  • Can contemporary art be funny?

Plus: reframing the Fitzwilliam Museum, a brief history of mulled wine, what’s next for NFTs and, in reviews: the triumph of the Tudors, ways of seeing at the Wellcome Collection and the unfashionable art of Ruskin Spear

The fetishistic side of Henry Fuseli

You enter a troubling parallel universe in Henry Fuseli’s drawings of women: a place of exaggeration and highly sexualised imagery, where his subjects engage in role-play and the theatrical and erotic and idiosyncratic collide. It’s an inventive, private realm: not one of the drawings in the Courtauld’s fascinating exhibition was displayed in public during the artist’s life. 

The Frenchman who wanted to photograph the world

In the early 20th century, Albert Kahn dispatched photographers to more than 50 countries – and the magical results can be found in the Paris museum that bears his name

Top New Art Exhibitions: ‘Anselm Kiefer – Exodus’

ANSELM KIEFER – Exodus

November 19, 2022–March 25, 2023
Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles

Gagosian is pleased to announce Exodus, an exhibition of new work by Anselm Kiefer in New York and Los Angeles, opening on November 12 at 555 West 24th Street, New York, and on November 19 at Gagosian at Marciano Art Foundation, 4357 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles.

The large-scale paintings on view in New York and Los Angeles employ a wide range of materials including paint, terra-cotta, fabric, rope, wire, found objects, sediment of electrolysis, and metal—including copper and gold leaf. Mixing the abject and the exalted, these works are imbued with gesture, a sense of metamorphosis, and alchemical symbolism.

Kiefer’s syncretic approach to materials extends to his understanding of history, literature, and mythology as forces that inform the present. In this new body of work, he incorporates inscriptions in Hebrew from the book of Exodus, with thematic references to its narrative blended with a diversity of other sources. Full of symbolic thresholds between peoples, places, and times, the paintings are metaphysical allegories that meditate on loss and deliverance, dispossession and homecoming.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

This week: as the exhibition Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia opens at the Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavik, Ben Luke talks to Masha Alekhina, one of the founding members of Pussy Riot, and the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, one of the co-curators of the show.

As protests continue across Iran, Aimee Dawson, The Art Newspaper’s acting digital editor, speaks to Shirin Neshat, the artist whose work expressing solidarity with women in Iran was recently installed outside the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.

And this episode’s Work of the Week is by the Puerto Rican artist Gabriella Torres-Ferrer. Their 2018 sculpture—called Untitled (Value Your American Lie)—is part of a major new show at the Whitney Museum in New York, exploring art in Puerto Rico in the five years since the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Maria in 2017.

Velvet Terrorism: Pussy Riot’s Russia, Kling & Bang, Reykjavik, until 15 January 2023. Pussy Riot: Riot Days, National Theatre of Iceland, Reykjavik, 25 November. Proceeds from the concert and the exhibition go to supporting Ukraine. You can hear an in-depth interview with Ragnar Kjartansson from 2020 on our sister podcast A brush with… on the usual podcast platforms.No existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, until 23 Apr 2023. 

Museum Exhibits: ‘Objects Of Desire – Surrealism And Design 1924 – Today’ (2022)

Dezeen – Curator Kathryn Johnson explains the story behind surrealism and its impact on design in this video Dezeen produced for the Design Museum about its latest exhibition.

Titled Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design 1924 – Today, the exhibition features almost 350 surrealist objects spanning fashion, furniture and film. The exhibition, which was curated by Johnson, explores the conception of the surrealist movement in the 1920s and the impact it has had on the design world ever since. It features some of the most recognised surrealist paintings and sculptures, including pieces by Salvador Dalí, Man Ray and Leonora Carrington, as well as work from contemporary artists and designers such as Dior and Björk.

the Design Museum – “Surrealism was born out of the horrors of the first world war, in a period of conflict and uncertainty, and it was a creative response to that chaos,” Johnson said in the video.

Previews: Times Literary Supplement – Nov 25, 2022

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The November 25, 2022 @TheTLS , features Olivia Laing on Kathy Acker; @emilytwrites on self-help and philosophy; @MElizabethLowry on Henry James’s golden age stories; @TobyLichtig on The Doctor; @MirandaFrance1 on Mariana Enriquez; @henryhitchings on slow journalism – and more.

Preview: London Review Of Books – Dec 1, 2022

Adam Shatz · 'You think our country's so innocent?': Polarised States of  America · LRB 1 December 2022

London Review of Books (LRB) – December 1, 2022:

‘You think our country’s so innocent?’

Adam Shatz on the US Midterms

‘This is what Biden and his advisers are counting on: a grinding and volatile battle with a weakened Trump and his increasingly unhinged movement in 2024.’

World Cup Misgivings

David Goldblatt

There is no way to offset the fact that a gigantic dose of hydrocarbon wealth is being used to stage an immensely carbon-intensive spectacle, in a place that is already getting hotter faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. In the narrowing window of opportunity that remains, can we justify burning this much of our carbon budget on international football?

Regicide Rocks

Clare Jackson

Act of Oblivion, the title of Robert Harris’s novel, refers to the Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity and Oblivion, introduced to the Convention Parliament in May 1660 and given royal assent on 29 August.

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Nov 28, 2022

Hokusai's Great Wave looms over the New York City skyline.

The New Yorker – November 28, 2022 issue:

Journey to the Doomsday Glacier

Two people looking out at a layer of ice from the inside of a helicopter.

Thwaites could reshape the world’s coastlines. But how do you study one of the world’s most inaccessible places?

Climate Change from A to Z

An animated series of drawings showing different effects of climate change.

The stories we tell ourselves about the future.

An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life

For low-lying islands like Kivalina, climate change poses an existential threat.

THE BLADE RUNNERS POWERING A WIND FARM

In West Virginia, a crew of five watches over twenty-three giant turbines.