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Art Basel Post-Mortem
More than 82,000 people attended Art Basel Miami Beach this year, Bloomberg reports, meaning that attendance was up 6 percent this year. Among those many attendees were Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, and Leonardo DiCaprio. [Bloomberg]
Issa Rae attended Art Basel for the first time this year, Vogue reports, and guess what? She liked it. “I’m just looking for untapped talent,” the comedian said. “I’m trying to build my art collection.” Take note, young artists. [Vogue]
Protests
Following orders from Madrid officials to repatriate medieval artifacts from the neighboring Spanish state of Aragon, police entered the Catalan Museum of Lleida yesterday, BBC News reports. For locals, the artifacts being shown in the museum were symbols of Catalonia’s independence, and protests broke out when the police began moving the objects. [BBC News]
In a new open letter published by the Guardian, over 100 actors, directors, artists, musicians, designers, and writers have spoken out against Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Among the letter’s signees are artist Molly Crabapple, actress Tilda Swinton, and writer Angela Davis. [The Guardian]
The music, art, and technology festival Moogfest decided to put only female, trans, and non-gender-conforming acts in the first round of announcements for its line-up this year. One has already dropped out of the festival, so was it a good idea, or does this year’s all-female line-up tokenize the women involved? The Outline investigates. [The Outline]
Fire
Swiss tycoon Maurice Alain Amon has accused his estranged wife, Tracy Hejailan-Amon, of trying to burn some works in his art collection, Page Six reports. According to his account, Hejailan-Amon nearly set fire to works by Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, and others, causing the pieces to be permanently damaged. [Page Six]
The Talent
Elisabeth Lebovici is the winner of this year’s Prix Pierre Daix, the Pinault Collection announced yesterday. She won €10,000, or about $11,800, for a book she wrote about AIDS, art, and activism in the late 20th century. [Press Release]
Jon Seydl will be the new director of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s Krannert Art Museum, Cleveland.com reports. He is currently the director of collections and curator of European art at the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. [Cleveland.com]
Big Little Changes
Scientists have analyzed a 2nd-century Egyptian painting in the American National Gallery of Art’s collection, the University of California Los Angeles reports. Through the process, which the scientists call “macroscale multimodal chemical imaging,” they were able to tell how the paint was applied and what materials were used. [Press Release]
Algorithmic art is perhaps nothing new—George Nees and Brian Eno are among its best known proponents—but it seems poised to change the art world once again, according to Slate. It’s not without its downsides, however, as artists may end up having less control over how their finished artworks look. [Slate]
For a section called “Micro-Revolutions” in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes on work of Takahiro Iwasaki. Scwhartz notes that the Japanese sculptor is able to take a close look at the world by making its structures smaller, and in doing so he reminds us how easy it would be to destroy his petite images of progress. [The New Yorker]