COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
Gender Imbalance
A study on gender imbalance reported by the Art Newspaper found that “works by women fetch on average 47.6 percent less than those by men at auction.” The economist who led the study said, “Our research adds to the mounting evidence of discrimination towards women that is systemic in so many industries.” [The Art Newspaper]
The New York Times Magazine has a big feature with numerous notable women writing about sexual harassment in the workplace. It also includes original art by Ina Jang, Tracy Ma, Rachel Perry, Weronika Gesicka, Paula Scher, Amber Vittoria, Olivia Locher, and Sarah Illenberger. [The New York Times Magazine]
Art
An exhibition at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan is showing eleven of Lucio Fontana’s Ambienti Spaziale (“spatial environments”) reconstructed in collaboration with the Lucio Fontana Foundation. “Several Ambienti incorporated fluorescent paint and ultraviolet light; others were built with dozens of neon tubes,” Forbes reports. [Forbes]
“The idea was to try and see through the artist’s eyes,” the curator of the Swiss Institute in New York said of “SI: Visions,” an idiosyncratic series of short documentaries made by artists on a variety of topics. Artists featured so far include Ian Cheng, Nancy Lupo, and Herman Chong, with more to come by Amy Yao and Rachel Rose, according to the New York Times. [The New York Times]
For the New York Review of Books, Jenny Uglow muses on Modigliani on the occasion of exhibitions at Tate Modern and the Jewish Museum in New York. A sample: “His days were drowned in absinthe and hashish—when drunk, he yelled wild bursts of Dante and Villon and Ducasse’s mad, ferocious Chants de Maldoror (a favorite of the Surrealists a decade later). Friends watched him explode with violence or hurl himself against a wall in despair. But oh, how he worked.” [The New York Review of Books]
Christmas Songs
“Is this the strangest Christmas cover ever?” the BBC asks of a version of the song “Silent Night” by the legendary German art-rock band Faust along with Natalie Sharp (a.k.a. Lone Taxidermist), and a cement mixer. [BBC]
Pitchfork has a rundown of the endearingly strange and surprisingly stirring Christmas music of John Fahey, an acoustic guitarist who may well have been the best to have ever lived. [Pitchfork]
Photos
Here’s an interview at the New Yorker with the photographer who took the picture that accompanies the magazine’s much-discussed short story “Cat Person,” which has become a sensation online. The close-up picture of a discomfiting kiss was commissioned by the magazine and shot by the Israeli-American photographer Elinor Carucci. [The New Yorker]
A bewitching photo gallery at the Guardian showcases the work of Nicholas Hughes, whose pictures address “man’s relationship to the environment, examining the space between the world people inhabit and that which nature claims as its own.” [The Guardian]
Cowboy Poetry
The Paris Review has a spirited appreciation of cowboy poetry and the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada. “I love cowboy poetry, but cowboy poetry is far more than poetry alone,” writes Carson Vaughn. “Cowboy poetry is performance art, adorned by all the accouterments of cowboy fashion, authentic or not, better on the stage than on the page.” [The Paris Review]