COURTESY NASA
Exhibitions
Trixie Madell, a 9-year-old superfan of David Bowie (and scion of a mom who is a music supervisor and a dad who used to own the great record store Other Music) went to see the David Bowie exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum with a reporter from the New Yorker. She describes a video she remembers of some Low-era history thus: “Tony Visconti is, like, ‘Would you like me to put this through the Eventide Harmonizer? It fiddles with the fabric of time,’ and Bowie goes back to being Aladdin Sane.” [The New Yorker]
The Louvre lent some 50 artworks to the National Museum in Iran for what France24 called “the first major show by a Western museum in the country’s history.” As someone from the French institution said, “Our Iranian partners really liked the sphinx, but it weighs close to a tonne and was extremely complicated to put in place.” [France24]
The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver is starting something called the Octopus Initiative—”a program where local Denver artists create original works of art for a lending library that anyone in Metro Denver can borrow from for up to one year.” [303 Magazine]
The Future
The L.A. Times surveys ways that “Instagram is shaping the art world.” To wit: “Many emerging artists see the photo and video sharing app as a democratizer, helping artists who might not have representation from the most prestigious galleries or degrees from the most exclusive art schools get their work in front of big audiences.” [Los Angeles Times]
At the new Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden, a photo exhibition titled “Africa Is No Island” has been mounted “to encourage a dialogue about the contemporary African experience that transcends borders.” [The Guardian]
Martin Shkreli, the widely despised “pharma bro,” was ordered by a judge to forfeit $7.3 million in assets, including the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album he bought as well as what he claims is a Picasso painting and an unheard album by Lil’ Wayne. [AP]
The Past
Fifty years ago, Marcel Duchamp played chess with John Cage. Cage got whooped. [Hyperallergic]
The formidable art collection amassed by the proprietor of Mr. Chow restaurant in New York is now perusable in Mr. Chow 50 Years, a new book that is “part memoir, part restaurant guide and part coffee-table art book.” [The Daily Beast]
“Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’: A Visual Response to T.S. Eliot’s Poem” enlists work by Cy Twombly, Philip Guston, Paul Nash, Walter Sickert, and more for a “dense and many-layered” exhibition in England. [The New York Review of Books]
Artists
The British painter Celia Paul got the profile treatment from the New York Times on the occasion of work of hers figuring in the Tate Britain exhibit “All Too Human: Bacon, Freud and a Century of Painting Life” as well as a forthcoming solo show, curated by Hilton Als, at the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut. [The New York Times]
Ed Ruscha’s son, a musician named Eddie, got a good review in Pitchfork. About his sounds created with a robust collection of synthesizers, Philip Sherburne writes, “There are hints of African guitar, Hawaiian slack key, and Caribbean steel drums, and behind that, chimes, birdsong, and wordless sighs, all bouncing like the animated molecules in a chemistry-class film.” [Pitchfork]