MIKA VAISANEN/COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
Jay-Z performed in the U.K. in front of a 40-foot Jeff Koons Balloon Dog. [Spin]
Behold the story of the return of the KLF, the out-there English art/music/etc. group that ended its surprisingly prominent reign in pop culture by burning £1 million in cash in 1994. Their latest offering is 2023: A Trilogy, a “piece of dystopian metafiction” that some readers might even classify as a novel. [The Guardian]
A developer in London resurrected a lost Banksy work, Snorting Copper, which was hidden beneath a coat of paint on the side of a building. [The New York Times]
Art and Protest
Here’s a chronicle of a thoughtful, searching visit with Leslie Scott-Jones, who organized an art show under the aegis of Black Lives Matter in Charlottesville, Virginia, the day the violence broke out. [C-VILLE Weekly]
Museums
Christopher Knight lays into the Berkshire Museum’s plan to sell off 40 of its most notable paintings to fund future operations. “Norman Rockwell, for one, is unlikely to have donated one of his finest paintings so that it could be sold off some day to pay the Berkshire Museum light bill,” Knight writes. And then: “Here’s an idea: Don’t sell the art. Do close the museum.” [Los Angeles Times]
Holland Cotter checked out “Found: Queer Archaeology; Queer Abstraction” and a permanent-collection show at New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art—“a museum that both stretches ‘gay’ and resists ‘normal,’ and for that it’s invaluable.” [The New York Times]
In San Francisco, Charles Desmarais surveys a show of Filipino art recently acquired by the Asian Art Museum in an effort to correct for institutional collections owing too much to what private collectors happen to accumulate and then leave behind. [San Francisco Chronicle]
Out There
In the Chianti region of Italy, “Art of the Treasure Hunt” features art by Marina Abramović, Oscar Tuazon, Kiki Smith, Jannis Kounellis, and others scattered among beautiful vineyards. (Does that provide grounds for an Under the Tuscan Sun pun? You betcha!) [Wallpaper]
Artist Matthew Day Jackson has teamed with two gallerists/curators/artists to start Paradem Capital, a collective with an aim to bring art to the gorgeous Wild West environs of Jackson Hole, Wyoming. [Jackson Hole News & Guide]
Notices
Art historian William C. Agee looks at the Guggenheim Museum’s Brancusi show and considers how “a younger generation of artists reaped sustained inspiration from Brancusi, seeing in his single, unitary shapes with no extraneous parts a way to a new abstraction.” [The Wall Street Journal]
Barry Schwabsky, art critic at The Nation, holds forth on Robert Rauschenberg at MoMA. [The Nation]
Skin Deep
“Look at those fonts! X-rated film posters of the ‘60s and ‘70s—in pictures.” [The Guardian]
A fundraising campaign is underway to bring back Physique Pictorial, a “classic beefcake magazine” started in 1951 by photographer Bob Mizer that aimed “to showcase his black-and-white homoerotic portraits of bodybuilders in g-strings.” [Logo]