Category Archives: Reviews

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

March 24, 2023: This week: Art Basel Hong Kong bounces back. After cancellations, delays and two years of restricted fairs, the fair has returned to something like pre-Covid normality.

So, as other Asian art centres like Seoul and Singapore become increasingly influential, what is the atmosphere like in Hong Kong? Gareth Harris, chief contributing editor at The Art Newspaper, joins us to discuss the fair, the M+ museum and more. It is becoming increasingly clear that social media corporations have become self-appointed cultural gatekeepers that decide which works of art can freely circulate, be pushed into the digital margins or even banned.

Our live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist Emma Shapiro and Elizabeth Larison, the Director of the Arts & Culture Advocacy Program at the National Coalition Against Censorship, about the issue and a project to counter this tendency, called Don’t Delete Art. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Naabami (thou shall/will see): Barangaroo (army of me), a photographic project by Brenda L. Croft, in which she depicts fellow First Nations women and girls.

The work is part of The National 4: Australian Art Now, a survey across multiple venues in Sydney. One of the show’s curators, Beatrice Gralton, tells us about Croft’s epic series.Art Basel Hong Kong, until 25 March.Visit Don’t Delete Art: dontdelete.artThe National 4: Australian Art Now continues until 23 July. 

Culture: New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023

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The New York Times Magazine – March 26, 2023:

The Age-Old Food Fight That Beats an Italian Town to a Pulp

A color photograph of screaming men dressed in chess-themed uniforms. Orange pulp and blood is scattered on their faces and shirts.
The orange throwers are organized into nine teams, each with a different flag, logo, captain and uniform.

Every winter, Ivrea erupts into a ferocious three-day festival where its citizens pelt one another with 900 tons of oranges. (Yes, oranges.)

The orange throwers are organized into nine teams, each with a different flag, logo, captain and uniform.

I Went on a Package Trip for Lonely Millennials. It Was Exhausting.

Rosie Marks for The New York Times

On traveling to Morocco with a group-travel company that promised to build “meaningful friendships” among its youngish clientele.

Sections

I’m Lost All the Time. So I Went on a Labyrinth Vacation.

A color photograph of a hedge maze arch.
The Parc del Laberint d’Horta, in Barcelona.Credit…Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times

The dizzying joys of maze tourism, in Barcelona, Paris and Chenonceaux.

The Parc del Laberint d’Horta, in Barcelona.Credit…Joakim Eskildsen for The New York Times

Seeking the Spirited, Mystical Jamaica Tourists Don’t See

A photographer’s journey through her native spiritual landscape of Jamaica, where Christian and Afro-centric traditions blend.

Preview: History Today Magazine – April 2023

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HISTORY TODAY MAGAZINE – APRIL 2023 ISSUE

The First Folio

Shakespeare’s First Folio in the library of Durham University, 1950s.
Shakespeare’s First Folio in the library of Durham University, 1950s.

The stage has a short memory, print a long one: 400 years since its first publication, Shakespeare’s First Folio is the reason we remember him.

American Moppets

 Teleradiola "Belarus-5" in an ordinary Soviet house.
 ‘The ‘Belarus-5’ in an ordinary Soviet house,’ photographed in the 1960s. 

Americanised globalisation and the new world of Russian business in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, a version of the satirical puppet show Spitting Image arrived on Russian television. A Muscovite once told the story of his father, who took great care to record every episode on VHS.

Culture/Society: Monocle Magazine – April 2023

Monocle Magazine (April 2023 issue) – What’s in store for retail? Monocle’s Retail Survey checks out the global benchmarks in shopping, while our spring Style Directory rounds up the labels, designers and products on the radar of the sharpest dressers.

Magazine | Monocle

EDITOR’S LETTER – Bricks-and-mortar retail, from tiny independent shops to giant malls, can shape and inspire the community around it. Andrew Tuck finds Monocle’s Retail Survey reflecting what we’ve always believed: that in-person experiences are the most valuable. There’s plenty more too.

Research Preview: Science Magazine – March 24, 2023

Science Magazine – March 24, 2023 issue: This color-enhanced scanning electron microscopy image shows Ti2CCl2 MXenes grown by chemical vapor deposition. The two-dimensional layers of this material grew perpendicular to the substrate and then folded into microspherical structures. Ion intercalation between two-dimensional MXene sheets has potential for energy storage and other applications.

A new pandemic origin report is stirring controversy. Here are key takeaways

Workers in hazmat suits carry rubbish bins at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market
Workers disinfected Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in March 2020, but not before a Chinese research team collected samples there that would reveal the presence of SARS-CoV-2–susceptible mammals.

Virology database cuts off—and then reinstates—scientists who found and analyzed data collected 3 years ago by team in China

Earth at higher risk of big asteroid strike, satellite data suggest

Image with rings showing crater width on map of Kazakhstan
If Zhamanshin crater in Kazakhstan is 30 kilometers wide (red ring) instead of 13 kilometers (black ring), as a new study suggests, the impact that made it would have been far more fierce.

“It would be in the range of serious crap happening.

At a basic level, humanity’s survival odds come down to one thing: the chances of a giant space rock slamming into the planet and sending us the way of the dinosaurs. One way to calibrate that hazard is to look at the size of Earth’s recent large impact craters. 

Previews: The Economist Magazine – March 25, 2023

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The Economist – March 25, 2023 issue:

The world according to Xi

Even if China’s transactional diplomacy brings some gains, it contains real perils

A lesser man than Xi Jinping might have found it uncomfortable. Meeting Vladimir Putin in Moscow this week, China’s leader spoke of “peaceful co-existence and win-win co-operation”, while supping with somebody facing an international arrest warrant for war crimes. But Mr Xi is untroubled by trivial inconsistencies. He believes in the inexorable decline of the American-led world order, with its professed concern for rules and human rights. He aims to twist it into a more transactional system of deals between great powers. Do not underestimate the perils of this vision—or its appeal around the world.

Central banks face an excruciating trade-off

They have to choose between financial instability and high inflation. It wasn’t meant to be that way

Mandatory Credit: Photo by SHAWN THEW/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock (13840861r)US Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell concludes a press conference following a Federal Open Market Committee meeting at the William McChesney Martin Jr. Federal Reserve Board Building in Washington, DC, USA, 22 March 2023. Powell announced a 0.25 percentage point interest rate increase.Powell announces a 0.25 percentage point interest rate increase, Washington, USA - 22 Mar 2023

The job of central bankers is to keep banks stable and inflation low. Today they face an enormous battle on both fronts. The inflation monster is still untamed, and the financial system looks precarious.

The trouble with Emmanuel Macron’s pension victory

The way a wise policy was forced through will have political costs

TOPSHOT - A firefighter holds a bin as he stands next to a burning pile of rubbish in front of Opera Garnier during a demonstration a few days after the government pushed a pensions reform through parliament without a vote, using the article 49,3 of the constitution in Paris on March 20, 2023. - The French government survived two no-confidence motions in parliament on March 20, 2023 but still faces intense pressure over its handling of a controversial pensions reform. (Photo by Christophe ARCHAMBAULT / AFP) (Photo by CHRISTOPHE ARCHAMBAULT/AFP via Getty Images)

Any French president who asks his fellow citizens to retire later does so at his peril. When Jacques Chirac tried in 1995, crippling strikes made him shelve the project; 18 months later voters sacked his government. Piles of rubbish were left to rot on the streets, as they are today on the boulevards of Paris. Bin collectors have joined strikes against the decision by the current president, Emmanuel Macron, to raise the minimum pension age from 62 to 64. So it was with some relief that on March 20th his minority government narrowly survived two no-confidence votes, opening the way for his reform to enter the statute books.

Exhibition Views: Manet/ Degas, Musée d’Orsay Paris

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Musée d’Orsay (March 23, 2023) – Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917) were both key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s. This exhibition, which brings together the two painters in the light of their contrasts, forces us to take a new look at their real complicity.

Edgar Degas’s Édouard Manet et sa femme (around 1868-69). Manet was unhappy with the “deformation” of his wife Suzanne’s features and cut her face out of the painting

Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art
Edgar Degas’s Édouard Manet et sa femme (around 1868-69). Manet was unhappy with the “deformation” of his wife Suzanne’s features and cut her face out of the paintingKitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art

 It shows what was heterogeneous and conflicting in pictorial modernity, and reveals the value of Degas’s collection, where Manet took a greater place after his death.

A comparison of artists as crucial as Manet and Degas should not be limited to identifying the similarities in their respective bodies of work.

Edouard Manet’s Madame Manet au piano (1868)© Musée d’Orsay, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Patrice Schmidt

Admittedly, there is no lack of analogies among these key players in the new painting of the 1860s-80s when it comes to the subjects they imposed (from horse races to café scenes, from prostitution to the tub), the genres they reinvented, the realism they opened to other formal and narrative potentialities, the market and the collectors they managed to tame, and the places (cafés, theaters) and circles, whether comprised of family (Berthe Morisot) or friends, where they crossed paths.

Manet / Degas

From March 28 to July 23, 2023

Special Report: Insert Coin – The Rise Of Video Gaming

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The Economist – Special Reports (March 25, 2023)

Ready, player four billion: the rise of video games

As video games move from teenage distraction to universal pastime they are following the path of other mass media, says Tom Wainwright

Battles over streaming break out for video games

Streaming subscriptions have revolutionised music and television. What will they do to games?

Africa: Somalia Is Facing Its Worst Drought Ever

ABC News In-depth (March 23, 2023) – Somalia is one of the most dangerous places on earth. Almost two decades of conflict with the al-Qaeda backed terrorist group al-Shabaab has taken a huge toll on the country. Now Somalia is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years.

“People say that this is the worst drought in 40 years, but that’s wrong,” says Adam Abdelmoula, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Somalia. “This is the worst drought in Somalia’s history, period.”

A map of Somalia.

With the world distracted by the war in Ukraine, the crisis is escalating away from the public gaze. This week on Foreign Correspondent reporter Stephanie March and producer/cinematographer Matt Davis travel to Somalia where makeshift camps have become home to more than a million hungry children and their families.

There, they meet mothers with babies who have walked for days without food and very little water. They hear incredible stories of courage and survival in a landscape that is unforgiving and unsafe. And they also face their own safety problems when their security team worries al-Shabaab has been told of their whereabouts.

As the Somali government fights back against al-Shabaab, another threat, which they have no control over, is driving the extreme weather: climate change. In the midst of this turmoil, the Foreign Correspondent team meets extraordinary people who are determined to make their story one of survival.

READ MORE

Research Preview: Nature Magazine – March 23, 2023

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nature Magazine – March 23, 2023 issue: One of the main hurdles to putting autonomous cars on the road is how to ensure the reliability of the artificial intelligence that replaces the human driver. Evaluating the safety of an AI driver to the level of a human in a naturalistic environment would require testing across hundreds of millions of miles — something that is clearly impractical. 

South Pacific plankton go berserk after minor cyclone

The biggest phytoplankton bloom ever recorded in the South Pacific Ocean was triggered by a small but lingering storm.

Planet or failed star? A mysterious object blurs the line

A body classified as an exoplanet has been shown to nurture thermonuclear fusion of heavy hydrogen — a trait of objects called brown dwarfs.

Gigantic map of fly brain is a first for a complex animal

Fruit fly ‘connectome’ will help researchers to study how the brain works, and could further understanding of neurological diseases.