Good morning! It’s Monday, January 11.
Companies that sell tickets to art experiences are preparing for a post-covid world, the opening of François Pinault’s Paris museum has been pushed back, and curators are collecting artifacts from the U.S. Capitol siege.
The Headlines
EVEN AS NONPROFIT ARTS INSTITUTIONS SUFFER AMID THE PANDEMIC, “the for-profit industry around experiential or immersive art is investing hundreds of millions of dollars,” Zachary Small reports in the New York Times. Meow Wolf, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, has shed half its workforce, but is plowing ahead on a $158 million investment on new locations in other cities. And Superblue hasn’t even opened in Miami yet, but said it is planning venues elsewhere. Meanwhile, workers in various art fields are building a labor movement, Peter Marks writes in the Washington Post, advocating for higher wages and relief amid the current economic downturn. “With the word ‘artist,’ sometimes people think that they need to be signing up for a life of degradation and exploitation,” said one artist-advocate, adding that he hopes to give “artists more of a sense of identity as labor, and that the art they create is worthy of a living wage.”
SPEAKING OF ARTISTS, WE HAVE AN ED RUSCHA DOUBLEHEADER on our hands today. Sebastian Smee did a deep dive in the Post on Ruscha’s “12 Sunsets” project, a captivating interactive website that lets you cruise along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, viewing photographs that he and collaborators snapped of the entire 2½-mile stretch at various points over the past 40 years. It “somehow dissolves feelings of belatedness and nostalgia into a perpetual present that is banal, gorgeous and—always—heavily sign-posted,” says Smee. And over in the National Catholic Reporter, Menachem Wecker takes a look at Ruscha’s work through the lens of Catholicism. “I am a confirmed atheist today,” the artist told the Reporter , “but the church helped me get where I am.” Ruscha has a show opening at Oklahoma Contemporary next month (his first solo outing in the state of his youth) and in New York, Gagosian is hosting an exhibition of his recent paintings for a few more days.
The Drawing Table
This week’s New Yorker cover is a flag at half-staff, by Edel Rodriguez. [The Washington Post]
Gabi Lamontagne creates lush watercolors of New York bodegas. Here’s a portfolio of them. [The Guardian]
A drawing by Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons is up for auction. [Bleeding Cool]
The Digest
Trailblazing landscape architect Carol Johnson died at 91. Her projects included John F. Kennedy Park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [The New York Times]
The opening of François Pinault’s museum in the Bourse de Commerce in Paris has been delayed once more because of, yes, coronavirus restrictions. [The Art Newspaper]
Curators are collecting artifacts from the Capitol siege. [The New York Times]
A landscape painting by Winston Churchill could sell for half a million pounds at auction in March. [Daily Mail]
Billionaire immunologist and investor Timothy Springer is a big fan of Chinese scholar rocks. [The Art Newspaper]
Artist Chantal Joffe’s shared her current cultural highlights, which include, in London, the Artemisia Gentileschi at the National Gallery and Towpath Cafe, where porridge with walnuts is always on the menu. [The Guardian]
Artist Melanie Bilenker makes miniature portraits with strands of her own hair. [Vogue]
Blake Gopnik considers the history of affordable art multiples, inspired by exhibitions at Marian Goodman and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. [The New York Times]
Pioneering artist Wadsworth Jarrell, now 91, has a new book out about the AfriCOBRA movement he helped start in the 1960s. [The Plain Dealer]
Martin Herbert wrote on keeping up with the kids as a critic. [ArtReview]
Asked for advice on how to comment on work at an art opening, the “Miss Manners” columnist had this to say: “It is not hard to please artists—or any other creative people—with compliments. Any enthusiastic generality will do.” Got it. [The Washington Post]
The Kicker
A bonus Ruscha: here’s the business card that the young artist used in the 1960s, via the Archives of American Art.
Thank you for reading. We’ll see you tomorrow.