HANNES GROBE/COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
Around the World
TripAdvisor, the online home for travel-related listings and reviews of scintillating restaurants and weird hotels, came out with its list of the “Top 25 Museums” in the world. Nabbing the top honor is the Met in New York, with some surprises in the cast that follows. [TripAdvisor]
The Vienna Contemporary art fair opens today with some choice work by Hungarian artists whose covert actions under communism stand to be a hit “at a fair that is emerging as an important locus for central and eastern Europe.” [The Art Newspaper]
Heavy/Light
A deep appreciation of paperweights as objets d’art, with digressions including a stop at a gallery show in Bushwick, remembrance of an auction at Christie’s, and consideration the paperweight-appraising eye of Truman Capote. [The Paris Review]
The New Yorker aims its monocle at “the pissing figure in art.” [The New Yorker]
Look
Chuck Close gave a video tour of his mosaic portraits—of figures including Lou Reed, Cindy Sherman, and the artist himself—in the recently opened 86th Street subway station on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. [New York Daily News]
Movie critic A.O. Scott reviews the new Vincent van Gogh biopic Loving Vincent by way of two questions posed as a thought experiment: What if his paintings, with their wild colors and vibrant brush strokes, had been able to move? And what if the bullet that killed him had been fired by someone else?” [The New York Times]
Chicago (and Dallas)
“Sculptor Michael Rakowitz recreates looted artifacts using Iraqi food packaging”—and they’re on show now at the MCA in Chicago. [Chicago Magazine]
Theaster Gates was awarded $100,000 and named as the Nasher Sculpture Center’s first American laureate. [D Magazine]
In the Field
In Omaha, Nebraska, “fiber art meets feminism” in an interactive project by local artists Victoria Hoyt and Camille Hawbaker. [Omaha World-Herald]
Read a report from the month-long, science-fiction-inflected Lofoten International Arts Festival in a Norwegian portion of the Arctic Circle. [Frieze]
And More
On Eileen Myles, “the Instagram artist of our time” (and author of a new “dog memoir”). [Los Angeles Review of Books]
The fight against New York City’s notoriously racist and regressive “Cabaret Law”—which since 1926 has disallowed dancing in establishments without a city-granted license—seems to have found a proponent in Mayor Bill de Blasio, who is in favor of repealing legislation that has haunted the Big Apple’s nightlife scene for decades. [NPR]