SANCTUMSOLITUDE/COURTESY CREATIVE COMMONS
Frenchness
Linda Yablonsky makes the Parisian scene in advance of FIAC, including a stop to check out the exhibition “Picasso 1932: An Erotic Year.” Her appraisal: “You think you’ve seen enough Picasso? Trust me, you haven’t.” Other highlights include photos of a disquieting jacket on Camille Henrot and Cindy Sherman chowing down on a French dessert. [Artforum]
Donald Trump biographer Tim O’Brien has talked about what he perceives as a fake Renoir in the president’s collection. There are two incarnations of the French artist’s painting Two Sisters (On the Terrace), it seems—and the Art Institute of Chicago insists its version is the only one created by Renoir’s hand. [Chicago Tribune]
Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky was charged with property damage after, in the throes of protest, he allegedly started a fire at a central bank building in Paris. [The New York Times]
Mania
About the mania surrounding Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad, Los Angeles Times reporter Deborah Vankin has a theory: “Blame it on Katy Perry. Or maybe Adele.” [Los Angeles Times]
Sanford Schwartz appreciates Eugen Gabritschevsk, a little-known Russian-born artist who stayed in a psychiatric hospital in the middle of the 20th century, and “the marvelous, and elusive, visual poetry he often attained.” [The New York Review of Books]
The Future
“Are White Hipsters Hijacking an Anti-Gentrification Fight in Los Angeles?” A look into the brimming battles over propriety in the gallery-strewn L.A. neighborhood of Boyle Heights. [The Guardian]
Two galleries—one in London and the other in a decentralized digital sphere—are taking a blockchain and cryptocurrency approach to wheeling and dealing, in an effort to lure potential buyers buoyed by Bitcoin wealth. The co-founder of one of them, Maecenas, says, “By turning masterpieces into tokenized tradable assets, Maecenas democratizes access to fine art by letting a much wider audience invest in multi-million dollar artworks which would otherwise be out of reach.” [Bitcoin Magazine]
Big/Small
Did Marcel Duchamp have a camera obscura in mind when creating his eternal mystery work Étant donnés? The artist Serkan Ozkaya thinks so. For her part, writer Jillian Steinhauer struggled to see a visage thought to be summoned by a recreation of Ozkaya’s own staging: “The largest mass seemed to be a dragon flying through the air; below it, a wide mouth stuck out its tongue. I could not see a face.” [The Paris Review]
Photographs by David Yeo focus on a enticing subject: extremely small animals. [The Guardian]
And More
Carolina A. Miranda takes in the temporary pop-up project ProyectosLA, which brings nearly two dozen galleries from Latin America to a 20,000-square-foot site in Los Angeles. [Los Angeles Times]
Fowl play has come to haunt a “Bird of the Year” competition in New Zealand after Instagram trolls took to calling the kiwi a “fat flightless f**k” and attributed unseemly aspects to innocent gulls and the white-faced heron. [New Zealand Herald]