Institutional Seizures
The New York Times queried 21 arts institutions that have received funding from members of the Sackler family—whose fortunes has been fattened by the rise of Oxycontin and other morally troubling drugs—and did not get much in the way of response. The headline raises a question: “Should museums vet donors?” [The New York Times]
James Levine, the legendary conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, has been suspended because of accusations of sexual abuse. A police report from last year came to light over the weekend, and the Met Opera moved to suspend him after additional allegations surfaced, the New York Times reports. [The New York Times]
Fairs
As parts of the art world head to Florida this week for Art Basel Miami Beach, the Art Newspaper has a rundown of satellite fairs there, with issues of climate change, pollution, and labor in mind. [The Art Newspaper]
The 2018 edition of the Independent fair in Brussels will be curated by Vincent Honoré of the Hayward Gallery in London. Under his watch, according to ARTnews, the fair promises more of an emphasis on performance art and time-based work. [ARTnews]
Exhibitions
The New York Review of Books has a big review of the David Hockney show now on view at the Met in New York. “There is an inspiring buoyancy to Hockney’s act,” writes Julian Bell. “Here is an artist who reckons he can get marks to perform however he pleases.” [The New York Review of Books]
A Lynda Benglis show at Blum & Poe gallery in L.A. “moves us in ways we don’t fully understand and connects us to processes that are bigger than all of us—and that have been going longer than humans have been on the planet,” according to the Los Angeles Times. [Los Angeles Times]
On the occasion of 25-year survey now on show at Tate Britain, Jenny Uglow takes to the New York Review of Books to call the work of Rachel Whiteread “calmly paradoxical, domestic but monumental, tactile but detached, nostalgic but austere.” Her reverie continues: “objects and dwellings from everyday lives are lifted to a different sphere, a dance in space.” [The New York Review of Books]
Muses
For 4Columns, Maggie Nelson wrote about Fred Moten’s Black and Blur, a new book that “carves new pathways through art and thought, which, in turn, re-makes and multiplies the possible relations between them.” Among the book’s subjects that Nelson cites: Patrice Lumumba, Glenn Gould, Miles Davis, Lord Invader, Charles Mingus, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Theodor Adorno, Benjamin Patterson, Thornton Dial, Masao Miyoshi, Mike Kelley, Jimmie Durham, Theaster Gates, Charles Gaines, Wu Tsang, and Bobby Lee. [4Columns]
The New Yorker has a great consideration of A. R. Ammons, the “great American poet of daily chores,” on the occasion of a new two-volume anthology published by Norton. Among his poetic feats is the fact of having written a homespun epic on a long roll of adding-machine tape. [The New Yorker]
Pitchfork devoted its special Sunday review slot to Lou Reed’s enigmatic album Metal Machine Music, which continues to puzzle, bemuse, and enchant decades after its release in 1975. [Pitchfork]
Museum News
The New York Times has a profile of Patrick Charpenel, the new director of the embattled El Museo del Barrio in the Bronx. “I will try to avoid idealizing our histories and our cultures,” he says. “I would instead like to talk about the tensions, contradictions and complexities.” [The New York Times]
Vice reports that the president of Poland has been approached by protesters upset over a video by Artur Żmijewski that was filmed in a former concentration camp. But “to read this film as an insult to the victims of the concentration camps we feel is to misinterpret it,” the former director of the Krakow Museum of Contemporary Art has said. [Vice]