OLD NEWS

NUDE BASEBALL PITCHING PHOTOGRAPHED BY EADWEARD MUYBRIDGE, 1887:
<https://tinyurl.com/ydvxf2yt> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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THE SCULPTURES HAVE HAD A TENDENCY TO DISINTEGRATE by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/yxz3c2uu>
John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures are some of my favorite works of art in existence, partly because they are crumbling before our eyes. The pace at which they will cease to exist is fascinating. What could possibly be done to thwart it? Nothing? What’s being done? Nothing?
Yesterday a Chamberlain foam sculpture that belonged to Seth Siegelaub sold in Philadelphia. It was $11,520, which was within the estimate, but whatever. It feels impossible to say what it is worth [sic], but that’s not so interesting. A bottle of wine or a superbowl ticket could cost that much, and it’s tedious to hear about.
The point here is, this is an artwork whose fate is known, and finite, and whose condition is extraordinary. From Freeman’s [emphasis added because holy smokes]: “As noted in the catalogue raisonné, because of the vulnerability of the material to light and air, the sculptures have had a tendency to disintegrate. Piece has yellowed with age and is crumbling throughout, as expected. There is an approximately 5 inch wide crater and some other, smaller areas of loss. Scattered surface soiling and hairs throughout. Areas of discoloration throughout, possibly inherent to medium. Inscribed with inventory number “Dwan 1990” and “G SS-15″ in ink. Please request additional images.”
I am not an uptight person, not easily grossed out or shocked, I’m pretty go with the flow, I think. Until I read the phrase, “hairs throughout.” Did I request additional images? Oh, absolutely.
Because hairs throughout notwithstanding, these disintegrating, crumbling sculptures demand to be seen in the round, from every possible angle. And they reward that exploration by almost always refusing to disclose how they were made, or what their constituent parts–a block of foam and a cord—began as. This opacity is often missing in Chamberlain’s car part sculptures, which somehow reveal their sources more readily.
Plus they stay bent. With these foam chunks and a lasso, I feel like Chamberlain executed a virtuosic sculptural gesture, and froze it, trapping a tension inside. Have any of them ever been released and unfurled? Have any been rebound? Refabricated?
These extraordinary, ephemeral sculptures, made of a simple, even banal operation that is nonetheless unspecifiable, unknowable, unrepeatable, are all disintegrating. How many are already gone? What is being done to study and document and understand them while they still survive? It’s like waiting until someone’s in hospice to ask for their oral history. There should be an international mission to scan and model and record Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, systematic experiments to repeat the form and fold and tension of their wrapping, mapping the choreography, building the vocabulary, live performances by Chamberlain re-enactors. So much that could be done before they…
Too bad no one’s gonna do any of that for an $11,000 sculpture. _greg.org

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SHARE
<https://tinyurl.com/mtwhf9y2> _DavidShrigley

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AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WOMEN AT THE GETTY by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/bxw0101>
In 2024 the Getty Museum purchased a French Renaissance manuscript <http://tiny.cc/exw0101> combining two key texts on the role of women in late medieval Europe: Giovanni Boccaccio's Concerning Famous and Noble Women and Christine de Pizan's The Book of the City of Ladies. The manuscript has just gone on public view, for the first time at the Getty or anywhere else, in "Beginnings: The Story of Creation in the Middle Ages"
The manuscript's two authors treat their subject from opposite perspectives. Boccaccio offers mini-biographies of women, ancient and modern (that is, medieval), who succumb to moral failings. Christine's text is a rebuttal faulting Boccaccio's reliance on stereotypes of vain, weak, and scheming women. Christine was perhaps the first professional woman author in Europe, and her book is the first in the Getty collection known to have been written by a woman.
<http://tiny.cc/lxw0101>
The manuscript is opened to miniatures of Boccaccio Writing His Book and The Creation of Eve, both by Étienne Colaud. These only hint at the book's scope. The manuscript has 108 one-column miniatures split lopsidedly between 105 for Boccaccio and 3 for Christine. All are perusable in hi-res on the Getty site <http://tiny.cc/pxw0101> . It's clear from the page layout that the two texts were intended to go together. Only one other manuscript pairing the two texts is known.
The manuscript's words were copied about 1470, leaving room for the miniatures. A late-fifteenth century coat of arms implies that the book's text was commissioned by the La Marck-Bouillon family. About 45 years later, Étienne Colaud (active 1512–1540), his workshop, and the Master of François de Rohan added the miniatures. The provenance has been traced from 1811 to the present. A private collection (from 1946) sold it to the Parisian dealer Les Enluminures in 2024.
<http://tiny.cc/rxw0101>
<http://tiny.cc/sxw0101>
Hypermnestra had one job: to behead her husband on their wedding night. Her 49 sisters went along with the murderous scheme, while Hypermnestra opted for a nonlethal honeymoon. Boccaccio cites her as an example of how women can't follow directions.
<http://tiny.cc/txw0101>
Christine laments the mansplaining of history, in an early depiction of a facepalm. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yfwt9p5h> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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WHAT'S DAVID HOCKNEY'S BEEF WITH ABSTRACTION, ANYWAY? by Carter Ratcliff
<https://tinyurl.com/mpzr6fad>
I was going to write about art during wartime (a variation on the Talking Heads’ Life During Wartime) but I have decided to put that off until next week. The war with Iran will still be going on, no doubt; and, anyway, someone is always waging a war somewhere in the world. If there is a problem with art during wartime it is always there to be addressed. I am dropping the subject for now because I want to respond to something I just found online: an anti-abstract painting remark by David Hockney, that indefatigable representationalist. In a Times of London piece about his current show at Serpentine North, Hockney tells the reporter that “there’s much too much abstract painting being done now.” As far as he is concerned, painters have been grinding out much too much of the stuff for a very long time. Among the paintings in his exhibition is a picture of a Rothko-like canvas standing on—or levitating above—a tabletop. “I did that,” explains Hockney, “because they made a book of Rothko’s paintings and when you see a whole book … Well, Francis Bacon said when he committed suicide, ‘I’m surprised it took so long.’” Hockney seems to believe that abstract paintings are so absurdly empty that when he approximates the look of a Rothko, he reveals the emptiness and absurdity of every abstraction ever painted. His demeanor is cheery, even as he dismisses one of the most important developments in the history of the medium. Bacon’s tone was less kind. The art critic David Sylveter once told me that Bacon had a nickname for Jackson Pollock: “the old lacemaker.”
Photography, Hockney says, “can’t replace painting at all, but painting has to be of something.” The trouble with abstract paintings is that they aren’t about anything. Rothko disagreed. “There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing,” he and Adolph Gottlieb declared in a letter to the editor of the New York Times, in 1943. Moreover, “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless.” Rothko and Gottlieb were writing to defend paintings of theirs that had “befuddled” the Times’s art critic despite the unmissable, if ambiguous, figures they contained. What Hockney and abstraction’s myriad other detractors cannot abide is Rothko’s belief that his “tragic and timeless” subject matter came through full force only when his figures dissolved into luminously dark rectangles of color. Only with images untethered to any definite subject could he offer us convincing “intimations of mortality,” or so he said in 1958. Many, of course, have not been convinced. In a Hockneyesque spirit we might ask: if Rothko had not issued his statements, would themes of tragedy and mortality hover around his mature paintings? I doubt it. Yet I don’t feel that these canvases are about nothing. What, then, are they about? And how can we know? We can’t. If we let them, Rothko’s statements will guide our interpretation of his imagery, but they do not have the power to inject it with subject matter. So where does that leave me and everyone else disinclined to join Team Hockney? How do abstract paintings manage to mean anything?
<https://tinyurl.com/yne8j62r>
Whenever I puzzle at length about the meaning of abstraction I return to a moment when I was standing in a grade school cafeteria looking up at a blackboard. I was in kindergarten and still figuring out the function of things like parentheses. On the blackboard a left-hand parenthesis curved across its large surface. I could see how it framed a list of menu items. More than that, I saw how beautiful it was. This judgment was not the upshot of a detached formal analysis. I had sensed the grace and confidence of the gesture that produced the parenthesis. Its beauty brought to mind the idea of a graceful person—or our neighbor’s Irish Setter, whose inveterate leaping and twirling was wonderfully elegant. She didn’t just look beautiful. She had a beautiful, if frantic, way of being,
When we perceive creatures, objects, textures, spaces, and light we do not merely register facts. Our perceptions imbue the perceived thing with feelings, qualities, meanings. And this happens even when we can’t name what we are seeing or hearing or touching. Incapable of experiencing anything neutrally, we live in a world saturated with significance. So, if you let it happen, the interplay of form, color, and pictorial light in a maroon Rothko will draw you into a current of strong feelings and vast but elusive meanings. It may even persuade you that the human condition is timelessly tragic, especially if you have a personality as saturnine as Rothko’s. If not, the painting’s effect on you will be different. Only if you are dogmatically opposed to abstraction will you say that it has no effect and is therefore meaningless.
I don’t know why Hockney thinks abstraction is empty. I do know that the landscape paintings in his Serpentine North exhibition do not rely on subject matter for their value, as charming as his trees and hedgerows and half-timbered houses are. It is true that over the past century critics and curators have often favored abstraction over representation, a fact of art-world life that troubles Hockney. It’s also true that his paintings generate their deepest value from something they share with abstractions: the emotionally and intellectually lively relationships between their pictorial elements. For abstraction and representation are not utterly different from one another. They are different ways of realizing the same set of pictorial possibilities.
<https://tinyurl.com/3tzeennc> _CulturalCapital-Art,Politics,andEverythingElse

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/4bubysmz> _CarolinaAMiranda

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INSTITUT RESTELLINI’S AMEDEO MODIGLIANI CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ TO RELEASE NEXT MONTH
<https://tinyurl.com/5haw54rh>
After over 40 years in the making, Institut Restellini’s Amedeo Modigliani catalogue raisonné will finally release next month.
To say the publication is a labor of love for Marc Restellini, Modigliani scholar and founder of the Institut, would be an understatement. At six volumes and over 2,000 pages, with 100 works newly confirmed as authentic, half of which are already in major museum collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the catalogue raisonné seems poised to redefine the field of authentication, or at least Restellini hopes so.
“I would like our approach to become the standard,” Restellini told. “I hope that with this catalogue people will see what can be achieved. My hope is that after this catalogue, people will say, ‘This is really the right method.’”
Restellini’s team combined various scientific analyses—including spectrometry, carbon 14, infrared, and X-ray imaging—with stylistic evaluation and extensive document research to get as close to a guarantee of authenticity as possible. An explanation of the methodology takes up an entire volume of the catalogue.
“I would like our approach to become the standard,” Restellini told ARTnews. “I hope that with this catalogue people will see what can be achieved. My hope is that after this catalogue, people will say, ‘This is really the right method.’”
Restellini’s team combined various scientific analyses—including spectrometry, carbon 14, infrared, and X-ray imaging—with stylistic evaluation and extensive document research to get as close to a guarantee of authenticity as possible. An explanation of the methodology takes up an entire volume of the catalogue.
“Someone can imitate a style or try to model their work after a certain type of paint, but no matter how brilliant they are, they can never know the exact chemical composition of each pigment used in an authentic Modigliani,” Restellini said. “We now have a great deal of scientific data on around 50 percent of the corpus of the catalogue raisonné because of the scientific analyses we have conducted. That means we have information covering every period of the artist’s life—every year, and almost every month. When we analyze a work today, we can determine not only whether the pigments match the period of the artist’s life, but also whether they correspond to Modigliani’s palette. If we find an unusual pigment, that immediately becomes very problematic.”
According to Restellini, when he started the project in 1985, it was unheard of to use such methods in catalogues raisonnés. Now, he said, the pendulum has swung the other way.
As for the new hot trend in authentication—artificial intelligence—Restellini is not impressed. He said that he has tested three such systems, which all authenticated a work he knew to be fake. AI, he added, is useful for analyzing and organizing documents, but not actual authentication. _ARTnews

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ED RUSCHA, "THE MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES," 1984
<https://tinyurl.com/bdfth5vc> _MichaelLobel

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60. GEORGE WASHINGTON’S DENTURES by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8y5tcu>
This tall man of legendary strength had a mouth in constant pain. He lost his first tooth at 24, and by his inauguration in 1789, he had only one natural tooth remaining—and that was pulled during his presidency. His letters and journals1 are full of references to his suffering: aching teeth, inflamed gums, ill-fitting dentures. The dentures distorted his appearance, pushing out his lips and cheeks in later portraits, including the one on the dollar bill. He took laudanum for the pain and avoided public speaking.2
Contrary to fable, they were not made of wood. They were made of real teeth, animal and human. We know Washington purchased some teeth from his slaves; we don’t know if he carried any of those particular teeth inside his head. In 1784, Washington paid several unnamed slaves 122 shillings for nine teeth. They could not have meaningfully refused. The discomfort is both physical and moral.
Why are we so fascinated by Washington’s teeth, his one obvious physical frailty? Washington’s dentures are unimaginable to us, with our veneers, our bacteria-zapping lasers, our carefully calibrated bleaching to make our teeth white, but not too white. Perhaps it’s the barbaric connection to slaveholding. Perhaps it’s also because these crummy old dentures are tangible evidence that his life was full of small daily humiliations and discomforts that otherwise get sanded down in the retelling. They are evidence of his naked humanity. _TheImpatientReader

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VENDING MACHINE LA CROSSE, WA
<https://tinyurl.com/3verwd64> _RuralIndexingProject

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WHO CREATED THE BOOK OF KELLS?
<https://tinyurl.com/mkx3weex>
The Book of Kells is misleadingly named. It credits the Irish abbey that safeguarded the work, not the site where the mesmeric illuminated manuscript was created, which remains unknown. In fact, while it’s generally accepted that the work arrived at the Abbey of Kells at the beginning of the 9th century, its precise origin has been the subject of scholarly debate for the past two centuries.
For much of this time, the leading candidate has been St. Columba’s monastery on Iona, an island off the west coast of Scotland. The theory runs that Ionian monks fled to Kells—manuscript and relics in tow—at the end of the 8th century in response to devastating Viking raids. Iona, however, lacks the physical archaeological evidence to prove it produced a manuscript such as the Book of Kells, which used nearly 200 calfskins to depict the four Gospels of the New Testament and is estimated to have taken 75 years to complete.
In recent decades, the monastery at Portmahomack, on the northeastern coast of Scotland, has been thrust into the vacuum. Excavations carried out at the site between 1994 and 2007 uncovered evidence of a sophisticated vellum workshop, the monks’ preferred writing surface. Researchers found bone pegs for stretching hides, pumice stones for scraping hides, fire pits for producing a soda ash that dehaired hides, and even the large stone tank in which the hides were soaked. The discovery was major: Portmahomack remains the only early medieval vellum workshop to have been found in Northern Europe.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw4ayrf6>
A recently announced project could add further evidence to Portmahomack’s case. The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland has issued a grant of £2,779 ($3,700) to Thomas Keyes, a master craftsmen, to build a replica of the washing tank and produce vellum using the same methods as the Portmahomack monks of the 8th century. This will involve the aforementioned scrubbing, scraping, and stretching of hides using historically accurate tools, but one key element will be producing lye, which was used to clean and prepare the animal skins. Lime is not found locally and one theory is that monks created the alkaline solution using seaweed instead.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bpxvfpu>
The project, though potentially historically significant, is far from glamorous, Keyes said. It begins with moving rocks, digging a big hole, damming a stream, and tinkering with a culvert to make sure the right amount of water flows into the tank. Next, there’s the hides (taken from stillborn animals) and producing the lye, which offers potentially compelling proof for the Portmahomack theory of the case. The Book of Kells, which has been held by Trinity College Dublin since the 17th century, bares small pock marks from bacteria that ate into the hide while being soaked and this doesn’t happen with a lye made from lime, as was used at monasteries in Ireland, Iona, and northern England.
“The theory that the Book of Kells was made at Portmahomack is already well supported by the circumstantial evidence,” Keyes said over email. “For me, it’s now about getting into the granular detail and working out firstly specifically how each step of the process was carried out and secondly how each process could be used as evidence, either for or against the theory.”
Keyes has already tested out seaweed lye and the challenge now, he said, is seeing if he can control temperature fluctuations in the water to match the skill of Portmahomack monks 1,200 years ago. Doing so will give a sense of the scale and pace of production and hint at one of the burning questions surrounding the Book of Kells: just how long did it take to make?
<https://tinyurl.com/5fumwesb>
The Belfast-born craftsman, who first learned letter art as a graffiti artist in the 1990s and began experimenting with vellum through processing roadkill, has considerable experience emulating Medieval manuscripts. He previously created four reimagined pages from the Book of Kells from scratch. To do so, Keyes mastered Ireland’s insular script and replicated tools found at Portmahomack including vellum, writing instruments, and inks—oak bark for black, lead oxide for red, and a specific lichen for purple.
_Richard Whiddington _artnet

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ATTRIBUTED TO FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES, THE COLOSSUS, 1808
<https://tinyurl.com/mrka3fd6> _JesseLocker

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UKRAINIAN OFFICIAL CALLS FOR RUSSIA TO BE BANNED FROM BIENNALE AFTER DRONE STRIKE
For months Russia and Ukraine have been trading deadly drone strikes, and over the last couple of days Russia launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. A March 24 Russian strike in the historic center of the city of Lviv damaged a 17th-century Bernardine monastery that includes a church devoted to St. Andrew, designed by Italian architects in a Mannerist style.
Founded in the late Middle Ages, the historic center of the city was named a World Heritage Site in 1998; per UNESCO, it was “preserved virtually intact … along with many fine Baroque and later buildings.” The organization added it to its List of World Heritage in Danger in 2023.
While not naming the perpetrator, UNESCO released a statement Wednesday saying it is “deeply alarmed” by the strike, noting that cultural property is protected under the 1954 Hague Convention and the 1972 World Heritage Convention.
Russia’s participation in the upcoming edition of the Venice Biennale has come under major scrutiny, and the latest strike gave Ukrainian minister of foreign affairs Andrii Sybiha occasion to put pressure on the event’s organizers, who are welcoming a Russian pavilion for the first time since the country’s war in Ukraine began. The European Union has even said it could pull funding from the show if the pavilion goes ahead.
“Don’t look away, @la_Biennale,” Sybiha wrote on X. “This is the ugly face of barbaric Russia—destroyed UNESCO World Heritage in the protected center of Lviv. This is the barbarism you wish to normalize at the Biennale. Get real!” _ARTnews

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LOOKING AROUND
<https://tinyurl.com/4bwxkv69> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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FOLLOWING SHUTDOWN OF AI VIDEO PLATFORM SORA, DISNEY OUT OF $1 B. DEAL WITH OPENAI
In a surprise move, OpenAI will shut down its Sora AI video app, just months after it was first launched.
A source familiar with the matter tells The Hollywood Reporter that Disney is also exiting the deal it signed with OpenAI last year, in which it pledged to invest $1 billion in the company and agreed to license some of its characters for use in Sora. _ARTnews

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MUYBRIDGE'S 'BOWLING IN CRICKET' IS A COMPLETE HOOT.
<https://tinyurl.com/yx3w768u> _‪PeterHuestis‬/‪IanHarrison