COURTESY ABE BOOKS
Big Stuff
In advance of “Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends” opening at MoMA, Deborah Solomon has the story of the artist and his various interdisciplinary circles—with a great quote from Dorothea Rockburne: “My first thought was: Son of a bitch!” [The New York Times]
Kelly Crow surveys the many “trophy works” going on the block this week in closely watched auctions in New York. [The Wall Street Journal]
The FT takes stock of the recent confluence in New York of Tefaf and Frieze, finding much to like about both but, regarding the now six-editions-old Frieze, proffering “something of an identity crisis for an event that has yet to cement its niche in New York.” [The Financial Times]
Connoisseurs
An appreciation, by way of her majestic book Edie: An American Biography, of the oral-history stylings of the recently departed author Jean Stein. [The Paris Review]
Bookmaker extraordinaire Gerhard Steidl is profiled in the the New Yorker. [The New Yorker]
An intensely intriguing show in Los Angeles features among its many artists Thomas Kinkade and Marcel Duchamp. [Los Angeles Times]
Sotheby’s is selling some relics from the ‘30s/’40s-era cruise liner the Normandie, known as the lap of luxury for transatlantic travel before it caught fire and rolled over on its side at a Manhattan pier. [The New York Times]
Upstarts
“Chicano Art Wields A Sharper Political Edge In Post-Election California.” [NPR]
With her acting role in the TV show Girls now extinguished, Jemima Kirke is painting again—with a degree from RISD finding new use at her studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn. [W Magazine]
See some pretty wowing work by an artist whose medium is the blank white froth on top of lattes that turn into elaborate pictorial surfaces. [Grub Street]
History
An 80,000-square-foot former flour mill in Qatar will be turned into a new art exhibition and storage space by the Chilean architecture firm Elemental. [The Art Newspaper]
Behold an extremely enthusiastic appreciation of the 16th-century Dutch boxwood miniatures now at the Cloisters in upper Manhattan. Among its sentiments: “Any viewer should be prepared to gasp, ‘How did they do it? The tiny little sheep! The tiny little angels! The tiny little spears no thicker than horse hairs!” [The New York Review of Books]
Efforts in the Netherlands to return Nazi-looted art to its rightful owners is the subject of an exhibition called “Looted Art—Before, During and After WWII” and lots of active endeavors otherwise. [The New York Times]
Misc.
The new season of Aziz Ansari’s Netflix show Master of None has a scene involving a trip to the Brooklyn Museum to see Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. [Architectural Digest]
The Malibu home of famed music producer Rick Rubin is very, very awesome. [WSJ]