COURTESY PIXNIO
Jeans/Genes
“Jeans moguls” Maurice and Paul Marciano—the brothers behind the fashion brand Guess?—are opening a new museum in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles. The opening later this month will include work from their own collection along with a show for Jim Shaw. [Curbed LA]
The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, hired a neuroscientist to consider and maybe remake the museum-going experience. [Boston Globe]
Photographer Gregory Crewdson has signed on to direct his first feature film, with a story about a boy who is allergic to sunlight and with a producer who worked on La La Land. [Deadline]
Museums
The European Museum of the Year Award went to Geneva’s Museum of Ethnography. [Deutsche Welle]
The Guggenheim Museum has converted 200 more books to be perusable for free in digital form, including titles relating to Rothko, Picasso, Lichtenstein, Klimt, and Kandinsky. [Fast Company]
The National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa was given 197 works from the collection of Bob Rennie, including works by Rodney Graham, Damien Moppet, Geoffrey Farmer, and Doris Salcedo. [The Art Newspaper]
Artists
Bubble wrap paintings by Jef Geys on show at Essex Street gallery in New York suggest a new kind of pop art: “Every piece remains in the bubble from its previous exhibition. The works must remain in bubble forever. They can never be unwrapped.” [Contemporary Art Daily]
Shezad Dawood talks about Leviathan, “a cycle of 10 films that traces links from human activity to marine ecology and back again.” The beginning stages of it are being shown in Venice. [The Guardian]
Epochs
On American art during World War I. [New York Review of Books]
On the NEA and various ways that money goes in and out. [Open Secrets/Center for Responsive Politics]
Misc.
The New York Post weighs in on its picks for “the world’s hottest art spots,” with a strange range between choices like Israel Design Week and the Montana sculpture park and music center Tippet Rise. [New York Post]
In Scotland, a pineapple assumed new status as sculpture. [The Independent]