OLD NEWS

MALE WHITE-TAIL YEARLINGS STARTING TO DISPERSE WHILE FEMALES REMAIN by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/3npczs9s>
Pictured are a doe and her two yearlings who were grazing on the first green shoots of spring grass. While fawns are weaned around 2 to 4 months of age, they remain with their mother through the fall and winter to learn foraging and survival skills. When males are a year to a year-and-a-half old they disperse, establishing new ranges as far away as 20 miles. Female yearlings often remain with their mother for up to two years, departing when she gives birth in the spring. _NaturallyCurious

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HORRIBLE
<https://tinyurl.com/mrjr7n9v> _DavidShrigley

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THOMAS ZIPP, ARTIST WITH A PUNK SENSIBILITY, HAS DIED
<https://tinyurl.com/fk9a3y67>
With a zeal for immersion, Zipp reimagined site-specific art as a kind of psychological theater, filling gallery spaces worldwide with multilayered, scenographic installations. Populated by objects and emptied of people, these environments alluded to fields such as religion, medicine, politics, and history, but viewers were asked to make their own meaning from it all, with each encounter yielding a personal constellation.
Across painting and sculpture, Zipp favored a palette that recalled injuries: scorched umber, ash white and gray, and copious black. Dadaism—a radical, anti-war movement that employed shock and absurdity to challenge social conventions—was a defining influence on his art. He often paired unlikely historical figures: Otto Hahn, the Nobel laureate known as “the father of nuclear chemistry,” and the 15th-century Protestant monk Martin Luther, whose legacy of division Zipp provocatively compared to that of Adolf Hitler.
Though influenced by Dada, he was never entirely deferential to the movement. In his 2008 show “White Dada” at London’ Gallery, his Dada-like compositions incorporated defaced images from textbook entries on electroconvulsive therapy and non-recreational drugs, suggesting art’s own capacity to sterilize and repackage the radical spirit.
He elaborated on his critique of medical practices for his 2013 event, in which he transformed the Palazzo Rossini into an uncanny psychiatric hospital. The work’s title, Comparative Investigation about the Disposition of the Width of a Circle, drew on lyrics from David Bowie’s “The Width of a Circle” and Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra—which both explore the transcendence of human mortality—in service of its central concern: 18th-century psychiatry and psychoanalysis battles on hysteria. The “circle” referenced in the title evokes the disquieting arc of the spine seen in seizures.
Zipp exhibited widely in his lifetime and occasionally opened exhibitions with performances from his various musical projects. _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/nhzmjcs9> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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LICHTENSTEIN BOMB LOVING by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/ycswyxpr>
In 1965 Roy Lichtenstein was one of over 400 artists who submitted a 2×2-ft artwork to be installed on Mark di Suvero’s Artists’ Tower of Protest, an anti-Vietnam war pop-up monument which was installed on a vacant lot on the corner of Sunset and La Cienaga in LA. The Peace Tower, as it came to be called, was criticized and attacked, and when the owner of the lot refused to extend the Artists’ Protest Committee’s three-month lease, the Tower was dimantled, and the paintings were sold off, wrapped in brown paper, in an anonymous fundraiser.
Though no museum wanted the Peace Tower itself, Lichtenstein’s painting, Atom Burst, of a mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb, found its way to the Museum of Modern Art in Fort Worth by 1968. For some reason they don’t have a photo of it online, but Pioneer Works does. [Me, I signed away all proceeds from selling my blood plasma and my second born child to the Lichtenstein Foundation when I clicked on the painting’s Google result. At this point it’d probably be less hassle to post an Alamy stock photo<https://tinyurl.com/yeytrbhs> of it.]
<https://tinyurl.com/2w5exsy7>
Meanwhile, I guess Roy liked the mushroom cloud enough to make another one for himself. Atomic Landscape (1966) stayed in the artist’s family until last year, when the estate sold it for $1.636 million.
It matters that it’s more a seascape. The images of massive mushroom clouds in the ocean, devoid of the devastation a nuclear bomb would wreak on a city, make it look kind of awesome. Lichtenstein only painted a mushroom cloud twice, but he made over 150 artworks of explosions; the man LOVED to interpret a cartoon explosion. One of the last ones he made was an explosion-shaped trophy for the New York State Governors’ Art Award <https://tinyurl.com/32xbp6bw> in 1996. [Fun fact: After being asked to make more for 1997, the Lichtenstein Foundation writes that, “The New York State Council on the Arts confirms that the artist then tacitly agreed to have it reproduced annually.”]
Anyway, when the possibility of deranged despots using nuclear weapons in a failing war of belligerence is now not close enough to zero for disinterested discourse, aestheticizing their destructive power seems like a not such a great idea. _greg.org

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BRUCE NAUMAN, "SHIT AND DIE," 1985
<https://tinyurl.com/f5kf3cty> _MichaelLobel

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KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY:
<https://tinyurl.com/9edbfv85>
In his recently published biography of Johannes Vermeer, the UK art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon outlines how the patrons Maria de Knuijt and her husband Pieter Claesz van Ruijven commissioned most of the Dutch Old Master’s works. The couple’s daughter, Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven, died on 16 June 1682 in the house known as the Golden ABC that she had shared with her husband, a printer named Jacob Dissius, on the Great Market Square in Delft. A notary clerk visited the house in 1683 in order to list Magdalena’s personal possessions—and discovered a wealth of Vermeers.
Extract from Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Magdalena’s collection, now become Jacob’s, contained not only pictures by Vermeer: besides the 20 by his hand, 21 others are listed. But the notary’s clerk did not trouble to name the artists responsible for them, other than in one instance, that of the marine painting by Jan Porcellis, which was hung together with an anonymous landscape beside 11 Vermeers in the front room. No doubt the clerk took his lead from Magdalena’s widower, who must have been his guide through the house.
All this was not just out of the ordinary. It was unique. Many remarkable private art collections were formed in the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, but such collections were invariably larger and more eclectic than that housed within The Golden ABC. None was built around the work of a single painter. Magdalena’s parents had moreover owned most of Vermeer’s paintings. The 20 pictures in her death inventory amount to nearly two-thirds of his known production.
The collection was not only unique in its nature but unique in the way it was cherished and preserved. As long as it remained within the family of its original owners, it was never broken up or diminished by part sales. For reasons that remain unclear, following Magdalena’s death Jacob was obliged to share her estate with his father, Abraham: a ruling to that effect was made by the commissioners of the High Court of Holland on 18 July 1684. As a result six of Vermeer’s paintings became the property of Dissius the elder. It is not known whether Abraham Dissius ever took physical possession of those six pictures, or was merely content with nominal ownership of them. But Jacob got them back from his father, either by purchase or inheritance, and kept them at The Golden ABC together with the others, for the rest of his life. At the time of his death in 1695 he had ensured that the collection was still intact. Only then was it dispersed.
Documentary evidence shows that Vermeer began working for the Van Ruijven family in about 1657, when he was in his mid-20s. For the next 13 years he painted almost all his pictures for that family, and afterwards more or less gave up painting altogether. His relationship to his patrons was like none other that we know of in his time, just as his paintings are unlike any other Dutch pictures of the period. It is reasonable to assume that this is not a coincidence. There is another aspect to the mystery of Vermeer: namely his place in art history, or rather his lack of one until the mid-19th century. No other Old Master as highly regarded as he is today was ever forgotten for as long. This would surely never have been the case had he not painted nearly all of his pictures for one family, and had that family not kept them so close. For some 40 years, unless a person happened to know Pieter Claesz van Ruijven or Maria de Knuijt, Magdalena Pieters van Ruijven or Jacob Dissius, it would have been difficult to know much about the work of Johannes Vermeer.
So no wonder he was never as famous as Rembrandt, Frans Hals, Gerrit Dou, Frans van Mieris or Aelbert Cuyp; no wonder that his name was left out of the biographies of Dutch artists compiled in the 17th and 18th centuries; and no wonder that [the 19th-century art critic] Théophile Thoré, who rescued Vermeer from obscurity, described him as a man risen without trace. The pattern had been set early: for most of his life, and for two decades afterwards, his art had been kept out of public view, apparently with his willing cooperation.
_Gareth Harris_ArtNewspaper

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STRAND TWIN THEATER GRAFTON, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/3ypz22cu> _RuralIndexingProject

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DIEBENKORN "OCEAN PARK" HEADS BANNER YEAR FOR MOCA ACQUISITIONS by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/3ag1101>
MOCA has released a list of the 158 works (by 106 artists) acquired in calendar year 2025. They include a magisterial Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park painting plus works by artists recently featured in MOCA exhibitions (Olafur Eliasson, Paul Pfeiffer, Henry Taylor, and Takako Yamaguchi, among others).
A 1991-1992 window in the tax code favored donations of appreciated art. This resulted in a spike of gifts to museums nationwide, many of them partial gifts allowing the donors to keep the art on their walls for decades hence. At that time Lenore and Bernard Greenberg anonymously pledged their Diebenkorn Ocean Park to MOCA. The gift was completed last year, along with the donation of their drawing collection to the National Gallery of Art.
Diebenkorn had a studio in Santa Monica's Ocean Park neighborhood from 1967 to 1988. The Greenbergs' Ocean Park 131 has been shown at MOCA just twice, in 1992 and 2010. As the museum's first Diebenkorn painting, Ocean Park 131 fills a major gap in the post-war holdings. MOCA still doesn't have a de Kooning, but the absence of West Coast great Diebenkorn really stung.
<http://tiny.cc/8ag1101>
Also in that tax-efficient year 1991, Laura-Lee and Robert Woods promised a trove of postwar works. Now fully entering the MOCA collection are paintings by Josef Albers, Morris Louis (two large canvases), John McLaughlin, Ed Moses, and Ross Bleckner.
<http://tiny.cc/bag1101>
<http://tiny.cc/eag1101>
Laura-Lee Woods (1926-2025) named this McLaughlin as the favorite painting in her collection.
<http://tiny.cc/hag1101>
A group of five paintings and mixed-media pieces by Llyn Foulkes span the artist's career.
<http://tiny.cc/iag1101>
Takako Yamaguchi's Magnificat #3—auctioned at Christie's for $227,000 in 2024—offers context for the artist's more recent works in MOCA's 2025-2026 focus show.
<http://tiny.cc/kag1101>
Henry Taylor's earliest body of work is the "Camarillo drawings" of patients as the state mental hospital where the artist worked. Anonymous donors bought 21 of these portraits out of the MOCA-organized "Henry Taylor: B Side."
<http://tiny.cc/mag1101>
<http://tiny.cc/sag1101>
<http://tiny.cc/vag1101>
Paul Chan's "Bathers" reimagine Cézanne and Matisse's sensuous subjects as muffler-shop balloon-dancers. La Baigneur 2, a headless wraith clutching an American flag, seems to say something about the attention economy's confederacy of dunces.
<http://tiny.cc/0bg1101>
<http://tiny.cc/3bg1101>
<http://tiny.cc/4bg1101>
<http://tiny.cc/7bg1101>
<http://tiny.cc/8bg1101>
One of the break-out works in "Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968," Twenty-Six Seconds is an oil-on-linen painting of successive frames of the Zapruder film.
One of the break-out works in "Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968," Twenty-Six Seconds is an oil-on-linen painting of successive frames of the Zapruder film.
<http://tiny.cc/dbg1101>
Ali Eyal's Look What I Remember is a remixed memory of the artist's childhood in Iraq. Occupying a bald spot in a vortex of hair/vegetation is a drone's-eye view of the farm of the artist's uncle, destroyed by U.S. bombs. Eyal found that the farm's details linger in a Google Maps image. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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JORIS HOEFNAGEL, TWO MICE,
<https://tinyurl.com/4napbzdd> _JesseLocker

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67. MOON PIE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4z9e536d>
In 1917, the Moon Pie arrived in a Southern world centered around the country store: barrels of salt and beans, hanging meat. North Carolina chef Mildred “Mama Dip” Council remembered how people told time by the length of a shadow and everybody knew everybody. The food was loose and perishable; nothing sealed or standardized.1
The Moon Pie was none of those things, but it fit right in among the barrels. The snack became the basis of the 10-cent lunch—a nickel Moon Pie, a nickel RC Cola—for coal miners and field hands. As one of the first standardized, shelf-stable items in the country store, the Moon Pie marked the beginning of the end of that world.
Over a century later, the Moon Pie is everywhere. The formula—two graham crackers, marshmallow filling, chocolate coating—proved so exportable that the South Korean Choco Pie, a direct knockoff, now trades on the black market in North Korea. The Moon Pie is Mobile, Alabama’s signature Mardi Gras throw, with 500,000 pies tossed annually from floats, and the city drops a giant Moon Pie down a building every New Year’s Eve. The snack cuts across economic status, cuts across race. It’s “the only thing nobody has anything against,” as a Mobile city councilman put it.
Mythic and ubiquitous, this pillar of southern food culture is still made by the same family-owned bakery in Chattanooga that invented it in 1917. And unlike most things that old, the Moon Pie doesn’t feel like a throwback. _TheImpatientReader

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KANYE WEST IS GOING TO REOPEN THE STRAIT OF HORMUZ,
<https://tinyurl.com/2xb43dx8> _DeanKissick

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A DEDICATED RUTH ASAWA SPACE IS COMING TO SAN FRANCISCO
<https://tinyurl.com/4386muzn>
The space, an extension of the artist’s family-run estate, Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. (RAL), will open in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood with an exhibition curated by two of Asawa’s daughters, Addie Lanier and Aiko Cuneo — both of whom have spent 20 years working on RAL.
<https://tinyurl.com/ybavfamh>
Referencing the artist’s practice of omitting titles for individual works, Ruth Asawa: Untitled will include a variety of rarely exhibited looped wire sculptures for which the artist is best known, as well as cast artworks, paperfolds, watercolor paintings, and drawings on paper and copper foil.
<https://tinyurl.com/mryr9rsz> _Hyperallergic

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JUST LEARNING THAT DFW HAS A SOL LEWITT
<https://tinyurl.com/57fnnbkd> _CarolinaAMiranda

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REPRESENTING ISRAEL AT THE VENICE BIENNALE, RESPONDS TO CALLS TO BE EJECTED
The artist set to represent Israel at the Sixty-First Venice Biennale, has issued a reply to the participating artists and curators demanding the country’s exclusion over its sustained bombing of Gaza.
“As an artist, I do not support cultural boycotts,” “I believe in dialogue and exchange, especially in challenging times. Art thrives on openness, and any narrowing of that space diminishes it. Embracing diverse perspectives enriches the discourse around art and society, and for this reason my commitment to dialogue has deepened in recent years.”
The Romanian-born Israeli sculptor plans to present an installation titled Rose of Nothingness, an inky reflective pool. He said that the work is intended to remind viewers that “life, like art, is not created by accumulation or excess, but by listening to what is absent, to what is still becoming.”
Hundreds of artists, curators, and cultural workers have been pressing for Israel to be ousted from the event over what Human Rights Watch has cast as the country’s “acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians in Gaza.” Many have expanded that call to include “current regimes committing war crimes,” among them Russia and the US. _Artforum

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DREAM VISION; A NIGHTMARE (1525), BY ALBRECHT DÜRER,
who died #onthisday in 1528.
The watercolour and accompanying text
describe an apocalyptic dream he had on the night of 7-8th June 1525.
<https://tinyurl.com/vb232w6d> _PublicDomainReview

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THE BUSINESS OF KAWS
<https://tinyurl.com/5zntp85v>
As KAWS has risen from a street artist to a global phenomenon over the past few decades, he has shown an uncanny ability to connect with a wide variety of people. Younger buyers clamor for his $50 Uniqlo T-shirts, celebrities place orders for far pricier custom material, and trophy-hunting collectors shell out millions for paintings.
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is currently hosting a survey of the artist’s work—the final stop on a three-museum tour—that offers evidence of his business acumen, presenting a portrait of an artist intent on building a diversified operation while making canny moves to bolster his artistic credibility.
As part of the show, the artist, whose real name is Brian Donnelly, designed 1,000 KAWS-branded memberships that were priced at $300 each and included a complimentary KAWS figure and limited-edition KAWS cards. “This is a genius play,” the collector Ronnie Pirovino said, arguing that the 51-year-old artist is allowing SFMOMA “to truly benefit from the audience that will attend the show.”
Museums are hungry for that enormous audience, but KAWS also benefits from institutional approval, which can help with the complicated task of sustaining an artist’s market over the long term.
In the auction realm, KAWS has had a truly wild ride. In 2019, when his 2005 painting The Kaws Album—the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as a Simpsons cartoon—went for a record $14.7 million at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong, auction houses sold a whopping $112.9 million of his art. Last year, his auction total was just $7.72 million, his lowest result in a decade.
Just as his market was soaring in 2019, KAWS stopped working with dealer Emmanuel Perrotin, who reps market stars like Takashi Murakami and Maurizio Cattelan. “Considering all the pressure, this collaboration has come to an end,” Perrotin said, rather cryptically, at the time.
KAWS chose instead to work with Skarstedt, a far more staid outfit that specializes in rarefied secondary market work. (One of its New York locations currently has on view a Édouard Vuillard, a rather different figure from KAWS.)
Even amid his auction decline, KAWS has arguably become a more popular figure around the world, and the multifarious nature of his operations means that he may be thriving. (Artists, in most cases, do not receive a cut of auction sales anyway.)
Attendance numbers underscore KAWS’s current reach. SFMOMA clocked 106,000 visitors to its show as of mid-March, four months into its run. That’s short of the total for its recent Ruth Asawa retrospective (174,000), but KAWS has drawn the most visits from children and teenagers since a 2019 Andy Warhol show, the museum said.
<https://tinyurl.com/3dbzuzpk>
The museum was looking for something to fill the slot after Asawa, Daryl McCurdy, SFMOMA’s curatorial associate for architecture and design, told me, “so there was some big shoes to fill.” The show was already built, and so they went for it. “People just love KAWS,” she said. “It was kind of a no-brainer.”
What has given KAWS such staying power? His relatable cartoon-like companions and characters are instantly recognizable, and he regularly draws on characters from mainstays like the Smurfs, the Simpsons, and Sesame Street, which resonate with all ages.
“He poses the characters in these ways that are very general, but also very emotive,” McCurdy said. “The seated, crouched-down Companion covering its eyes? That’s heartbreaking,” McCurdy said. It’s titled Separated and is intended as a commentary on children being separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Another ingredient of KAWS’s success: He partners with companies and artists with enormous cultural cachet. Over the years, he has collaborated with mass-market brands like Nike and Uniqlo, as well as luxe labels like Christian Dior and and Comme des Garçons. He’s also done album covers for Clipse and Kanye West (in his less controversial days). The SFMOMA show includes, in a vitrine, a gold figure, bedazzled with jewels, that KAWS created for rapper Kid Cudi.
<https://tinyurl.com/muz95bb5>
When KAWS’s auction results were peaking in 2019, some critics and detractors saw a bubble. Back then, advisor and writer Josh Baer told me: “If you want to tell me that his market is great, just prepare to take one or two zeroes off in 20 years when you prepare to sell. It’s that kind of art.” When I checked in with him recently, he stood by his prediction, writing: “Whoever bought . . . the Simpson work is probably doubting that purchase.” (He was referring to the record-setting KAWS Album, the $14.1 million Beatles–Simpsons mashup.) _Eileen Kinsella _artnet

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ACCURATE TO DESCRIBE A KAWS SHOW AS A "NO-BRAINER"!
<https://tinyurl.com/yked6j2v> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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JOSH KLINE WROTE THE ESSAY THAT THE ART WORLD CAN’T STOP TALKING
In 2011, Andrea Fraser wrote that “what has been good for the art world has been disastrous for the rest of the world.” Fifteen years on, Fraser’s words still ring true. But finding the words for why is not always so easy, and maybe that is the reason a recently published essay on the subject, by artist Josh Kline, has taken the New York art world by storm, becoming the subject of social media posts issued by artists, critics, curators, and even dealers.
Titled “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art” and published by October, Kline’s essay is a despairing portrait of the city’s art scene. It functions both as an elegy for a lost New York art world of the 2010s—the one that raised Kline as an artist who became known for work about technology’s ability to exacerbate inequalities—and as a blistering critique of all the privilege required to find success here. The piece has gone viral, which is not something that happens often with October essays anymore.
“The first step towards a cure is admitting you have a problem,” Kline, an artist who had a mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum in 2023, writes. “Contemporary art in twenty-first-century America is sick with problems.” He goes on to diagnose quite a few of them, tackling subjects such as the rising cost of rent, the systemic power imbalances woven into the art market and museums, and the role of artist-run spaces. As Kline notes, these issues are particularly pronounced in New York, where he is based.
“New York City itself now constitutes a core problem in American art,” Kline writes. “The answers for younger artists are likely not in New York and not in the American art industry, for which the art of the present and the art of the future are not as important as the art of the past.”
JK: If we don’t understand the world we’re living in and where it comes from, we can’t build a better one. This goes for both geopolitics and the industry we work in. I know I’m not the only one in our field who feels like the contemporary art of 2026 (at least in the US) isn’t what they signed up for—a never-ending conveyor belt of market-oriented painting exhibitions rolling through Manhattan galleries as the world burns.
I have a friend who’s represented by one of the mega-galleries who now works at his dining room table.

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WAYNE THIEBAUD, BIRD, 1979.
<https://tinyurl.com/y8zj7t3x> _RabihAlameddine

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ALBRECHT DÜRER, STUDIES OF A TREE BULLFINCH, C.1500
<https://tinyurl.com/ycxvtxts> _RabihAlameddine