COURTESY METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
Big
ARTnews’s Andrew Russeth paid a visit to Vessel, the new “stairway to nowhere” rising up for Instagram opportunities in New York’s Hudson Yards. “How is it as an actual aesthetic experience? Very weird, and quite unpleasant, I am happy to report.” [ARTnews]
Jason Farago wrote an obituary for the dearly departed Okwui Enwezor. “Self-assured, peripatetic, and unfailingly dapper—he favored dark double-breasted suits and the occasional neckerchief, and once made the cover of Men’s Vogue in Italy—Mr. Enwezor never doubted that an African had every right to take the lead at Western art institutions.” [The New York Times]
A reporter in Pittsburgh wonders: Is it time to reimagine the Carnegie International? [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette]
News
At this year’s Venice Biennale, the Giudecca Art District will launch as the city’s first official art quarter, with 11 galleries and three national pavilions. [ARTnews]
The Prospect 5 triennial in New Orleans in 2020 named eight curators to its Artistic Director’s Council, all of whom will support the exhibition directors Naima Keith and Diana Nawi. [ARTnews]
A group of art-world professionals has reignited debate over a large painted mural in L.A.’s Koreatown that some have called offensive for what it evokes regardless of the artist’s intentions. [Los Angeles Times]
Art
The New Yorker profiled Peter Sacks, a literary critic and poet turned artist who “made his first painting at the age of forty-nine. In the twenty years since, he hasn’t written a line of poetry. Instead, he has labored over nearly a thousand works of art, mounting ten solo shows at increasingly prestigious galleries and becoming one of the most exciting painters in America.” [The New Yorker]
Sebastian Smee called “Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965-1975,” an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, a “must-see show. It’s an exhibition of miscellaneous work made by a diverse group of artists during the peak years of a war that changed everything—including art.” [The Washington Post]
Ginny Neel, daughter-in-law of Alice Neel and the organizer of a great survey show of the artist at David Zwirner gallery in New York, made a three-minute video about the work. [David Zwirner]
Misc.
The Washington Post profiled Arcadia Publishing, the Mount Pleasant, South Carolina-based enterprise behind a ubiquitous series of history books you will recognize (and should really like). “They’re available in bookstores, but you’re more likely to have noticed them in history museums, parks, diners, hardware stores and beauty parlors in small towns throughout America.” [The Washington Post]