OLD NEWS

SKUNK CABBAGE MARAUDERS by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/89asvdhb>
Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) is one of the earliest flowers to emerge in the spring due to its ability to create its own heat (a process called thermogenesis). The maroon, speckled spathe (a hoodlike modified leaf or bract) and the flower-bearing, nob-like spadix within the spathe appear before the green leaves.
All parts of the Skunk Cabbage plant contain calcium oxalate crystals which cause a burning sensation when ingested. Because of this, Skunk Cabbage is considered inedible, at least by most humans. There are, however, several creatures which are either unaffected by the crystals, or are simply hungry enough to tolerate them. The flowering parts of the pictured remains of a Skunk Cabbage were probably eaten by a hungry black bear or snapping turtle emerging from hibernation, or possibly a muskrat or Canada goose. _NaturallyCurious

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REGRET
<https://tinyurl.com/4mzbyc6f> _DavidShrigley

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YOU CAN BECOME AN ARTWORK
<https://tinyurl.com/uu3dsn38>
Sometimes making art can be straightforward, nothing more than a person standing on a box for a minute, striking a pose, and having their photograph taken.
These are the instructions for Piero Manzoni’s Magical Base (1961), his playful conceptual machine that turns living, breathing bodies into works of art. By quite literally placing the everyman on a pedestal, it flipped the ready-made on its head, blurred the boundary between artist and audience and anticipated the Actionist art of the coming decade.
Magical Base is set to be reactivated
The activation stops short of issuing certificates of authenticity (or signing bodies themselves) as Manzoni did for many of his Living Sculptures of the early 1960s. Debuting in Milan in 1961, the conceptual barb was one of Manzoni’s final gifts to the art world; he would die two years later. Across more than 70 living sculptures in which Manzoni signed a participant’s body (though occasionally he only marked a limb), the Italian questioned the assumption that art must be a permanent object, while critiquing the art market’s fixation on the artist’s hand as a creator of value. Another riff on this theme, Artist’s Shit (1961), saw Manzoni fill 30 cans with his own excrement and set their value to the price of gold.
This exploration began in the late 1950s with Manzoni’s Achromes, that removed color and narrative (and eventually the canvas itself) in works of unlikely materials such as fur, velvet, and bread. “ _artnet

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mvftn4pv> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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70. MOONSHINE STILL by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/3zk8fmv7>
We romanticize the American moonshine still—its hand-hammered copper pot, coil of tubing, and thumper keg, all assembled away from prying eyes. We associate it with the hollers of Prohibition-era Appalachia, but the centuries-old technology was already widespread in the colonial period. In 1794, five years into George Washington’s presidency, he rode again at the head of an army—not against the British, but against moonshiners in western Pennsylvania. The Whiskey Rebellion was a violent uprising against the first federal tax on a domestic product.
This wasn’t just an ideological clash. The tax fell hardest on small farmers west of the Appalachians, where transportation costs were high and markets were distant. They couldn’t compete with large Eastern distillers. The homemade moonshine of cash-poor frontier farmers provided much-needed income during desperate times. More than that, they exchanged the whiskey itself as currency, operating a parallel economy on the frontier.
The army’s arrival put the tarring-and-feathering to rest, and the tax remained until 1802. But the culture of resistance it provoked never ended. Small, custom-built copper stills became family heirlooms, a physical inheritance of independence.
And the story folds back on itself: in the years after the Rebellion, one of the biggest whiskey producers in the country was Washington himself. At Mount Vernon, his distillery produced 11,000 gallons in 1799. It was one of the estate’s most profitable enterprises—and one, their website carefully notes, that paid the federal tax. _TheImpatientReader

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THE SEA GIVETH
<https://tinyurl.com/2yakmsma> _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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THE CHINATI CHAMBERLAIN FOAM CONSERVATION PROJECT by greg
It’s [checks watch] and the world has not yet ended. So to take our minds off of the calamities, let’s return to the state of John Chamberlain’s foam sculptures, which are all disintegrating irreversibly.
<https://tinyurl.com/w2vtvpmw>
In 2005 Marianne Stockebrand organized the first show of the foam sculptures at Chinati. Rejected by the market and largely unknown, Stockebrand tracked down 30 of the 84 then known. Most were made in 1966-67, and a few more through 1981. I’ve seen the number 100 mentioned since. “Chamberlain looped cord or rope around a bunch of plain or painted urethane foam,” Christopher French wrote in Glasstire in 2006. “Tightening the cord, Chamberlain created all manner of dynamic tension, which he occasionally heightened by further cutting or tinting. The result is a fluid, intuitive origami that transforms a quotidian industrial material into evocative abstractions.”
<https://tinyurl.com/yx5h8wed>
“They have a playfulness and immediacy, and seem necessarily related to the human body, and somewhat sexual,” Gavin Morrison wrote more frankly for the Nasher, which received the 1970 sculpture on the cover of the Chinati catalogue. Chamberlain knew they wouldn’t last. “The only factor in this that people might shudder at in terms of maintenance is the fact that it deteriorates faster than cell tissue. The material evokes a relativity, so that humans reject it if it deteriorates faster than they do.”
<https://tinyurl.com/32zrsupk>
Chamberlain, of course, made other works of foam that are also “somewhat sexual”: the F—–G Couches. The orgy-sized ones are called Barges. Dia has one, and Chinati has one, too.
<https://tinyurl.com/47hp84de>
Chamberlain made Barge Marfa in 1983, when he and Donald Judd created a permanent installation of metal sculptures. It’s made for lounging and watching videos.
<https://tinyurl.com/ycxbjx25>
Despite its material fragility, it gets regular, even heavy, public use. The Chamberlain Estate has offhandedly, but not yet officially, rejected the possibility of refabricating a couch or barge, by which they apparently mean replacing the foam. Yet Chinati replaces the draped and tucked canvas cover every year.
<https://tinyurl.com/3h96t4s9>
These insights come from Project Report: Documenting John Chamberlain’s Barge Marfa (1983) –A Photogrammetry-Based Approach to Documentation as Preservation <https://tinyurl.com/2raf9f8k> , a remarkable document published in 2022 by Shelley M. Smith, who was then conservator at Chinati. Without the current possibility of replacing the foam, Smith and her colleagues decided to measure, monitor, and protect it from excessive deterioration. Working through the early COVID lockdown, Chinati and a photogrammetry firm in California set up a remote scanning and documentation system, and built a high-res, 3-D model of the Barge.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ws7m73b>
Looking at the model, the biggest issue seems to be compression on the side most people climb onto. The Barge has non-frictional layers and padding over the raw foam blocks, and without UV damage, the biggest issue seems to be compression. Would they not want to at least rotate it periodically, and even out the wear? The barge was too big and fragile to relocate during a renovation of the Chamberlain building, so they built a little house around it. But still, couldn’t they rotate it in place?
Anyway, besides monitoring compression, Chinati’s approach to conserving the Barge includes placing a non-frictional textile layer between foam and canvas to minimize abrasion. The coverings themselves minimize UV damage. None of this is applicable in any way, unfortunately, to conserving the sculptures, which are exposed and uncovered, but not handled. But the photogrammetry, structural analysis, and monitoring could be directly useful, even imperative, for these more vulnerable objects. Is anyone doing this? No single sculpture owner would go through all the legwork Chinati did, but if it was plug & play, and you just sign up to have your sculpture scanned, who would refuse? _greg.org

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THIS JOHN CHAMBERLAIN FOAM SCULPTURE SOLD FOR $11,520 YESTERDAY BTW. i
lamented the mysteries these disintegrating sculptures are still withholding,
and showed the pic to my wife, and she was like, oh we saw those in marfa,
i don't like them. they're what you clear out of a rec room, gross. lol rip _gregorg

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LOUISIANA STATE MUSEUM REACCREDITATION DECISION DELAYED UNTIL JUNE 2027
The Louisiana State Museum (LSM) system is conspicuously missing from a list of US museums
recently reaccredited by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM). LSM, which was last accredited in 2011, has had its status is under review and anticipated an update regarding its reaccreditation last month, according to the minutes of a December meeting of its executive committee.
Low morale, fast staff turnover: why the credibility of Louisiana’s ten state museums is at risk
<https://tinyurl.com/449u4ykr>
The LSM system, comprising ten museums spread across the state—including the New Orleans Jazz Museum, the Louisiana Civil Rights Museum and several historic houses—has faced lawsuits, public controversy and an unfavourable audit in recent years. Its collections are property of the State of Louisiana and include paintings by Gertrude Morgan, the musician Louis Armstrong’s first cornet and bugle, and an extensive collection of Mardi Gras memorabilia, among other artefacts of cultural heritage.
Rebecca Mackie, the director of LSM, confirmed in an email to The Art Newspaper that its “application for reaccreditation was tabled until AAM’s June 2027 meeting”, elaborating that “the tabling decision gives the museum an opportunity to… clarify aspects of its governance and operational structure [and] strengthen coordination, accountability and implementation across its statewide system of sites”. _ArtNewspaper

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METAL SIDING PARKER, SD
<https://tinyurl.com/25k474v2> _RuralIndexingProject

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THE LONG LEGAL SAGA BETWEEN ARTIST RYDER RIPPS AND THE BORED APE YACHT CLUB IS OVER
A long-running legal saga between Yuga Labs, the parent company of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and artist Ryder Ripps and his business partner Jeremy Cahen, has finally ended, with the parties reaching a settlement on Tuesday. While the terms of the settlement are confidential, the parties disclosed that they agreed to a permanent injunction against Ripps and Cahen using any trademarks or images owned by Yuga Labs.
The lawsuit stemmed from Ripps’s quest, at the height of the NFT craze in 2022, to prove that the founders of Bored Ape Yacht Club had threaded their NFT series with racist imagery, pointing to the accessories the Apes wear, including Prussian helmets and safari hats, which Ripps contended were tied to alt-right culture. Further, he argued that the BAYC symbol of a white Ape skull resembled a Nazi Totenkopf emblem. Yuga Labs, for its part, repeatedly denied these claims, and emphasized the diverse backgrounds of its founders and primary funder, music mogul Guy Oseary.
The next step in Ripps’s quest to take down BAYC was to launch his own NFT collection, titled RR/BAYC, whose smart contracts contained the same URL embedded in BAYC smart contracts. The accompanying images were identical to BAYC’s Apes
Naturally, Yuga Labs sued Ripps, and his partner Cahen, alleging false advertising, trademark infringement, and cybersquatting. The case wound its way through the federal court system, with a district judge ordering Ripps and Cahen to pay Yuga Labs as much as $8.8 million in damages and attorney’s fees. That ruling came in October 2023 before the case went to trial. Ripps and Cahen successfully appealed, with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals overturning the decision last July and determining that a trial was necessary to determine if Ripps’s NFTs actually infringed Yuga’s trademarks. Ripps, Cahen, and Yuga Labs have been in settlement conferencing over the last several months, likely trying to avoid a costly trial.
In the end, it seems, Ripps just needed to wait out the craze. Since raising $450 million at a $4 billion valuation in 2022, Yuga Labs has watched its NFTs tank in value, with Futurism reporting in February that Justin Bieber’s BAYC NFT, purchased for $1.3 million, is now worth only $12,000, a 99 percent drop in value. Yuga Labs has gone through several rounds of layoffs, and is hardly the darling of the tech world anymore, which has moved on to AI startups. _ARTnews

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ONE OF THE LOVELIEST DRAWINGS OUT THERE.
Anonymous, French, 16th century,
Interior with a Man Writing on a Long Table
<https://tinyurl.com/yneym467> _JesseLocker

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ART WORLD, MEET THE NEW ERA OF PAY-TO-PLAY
<https://tinyurl.com/3ajn4pyw>
I see this grid of dollar-eyed, dollar-tongued emojis every time I close my eyes and soon you might too!
One way to write the history of the Internet is to chart when and how its manipulators have powered up. Ten years ago, niche opinions were already being supersized through manufactured follower counts and bought impressions. Now, as a minor scandal in the music industry just revealed, specialty agencies are being paid to engineer virality for artists by creative-directing thousands of TikTok posts from hundreds of semi-real accounts built by networks of trained collaborators.
The pay-to-play virality game makes a surprising amount of sense for a certain tranche of 21st century artists, some of whom could capitalize on it soon—if they haven’t already.
You can’t spell ‘virality’ without a-r-t
Despite the art world’s default toward ivory tower opinions, there are a few cases where massive popularity online has helped living artists cross over from mass appeal to the rarefied gallery and museum world. Some names worth considering here are…
--KAWS, who eventually leveraged the rabid fandom for his collectible toys and illustrations into a spot on the roster at Skarstedt, as well as solo shows at SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Yuz Museum in Shanghai, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
--Beeple, who built a mania for his absurd 3D renderings and NFTs into major projects with Art Basel, major works sold through Christie’s marquee evening auctions, and pieces exhibited at institutions ranging from Hong Kong’s M+ and Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum to Crystal Bridges and LACMA.
--MSCHF, the VC-backed, edgelord art-and-design collective that started showing at Perrotin in 2022, had its first institutional survey at the Daelim Museum in Seoul the following year, and continues to hijack the internet with everything from comically oversized red boots to crowdsourcing the fate of cattle.4
But these artists now all exist on the art-industry-approved half of a longer continuum. The other half—call it art-industry agnostic, if not art-industry antagonistic—contains the likes of…
--Sunday Nobody, a pseudonymous conceptual prankster who has gotten tens of millions of social views for projects like sinking a bronze monument to a Spongebob character underwater to stymy future archaeologists… but who claims to want to steer clear of gallery shows forever.
--Niclas Castello, the guy who put that $23m golden cube in Central Park for a day in in 2022.
--Anyone who has ever briefly touched meme heaven by planting a satirical sculpture of Trump or some other public figure in a prominent location under cover of darkness or the ignorance of security guards (or both).
What’s the difference between the two halves of the continuum? Buy-in from the small but influential ecosystem of art industry insiders.
KAWS has been a longtime, very serious collector of museum-grade artwork; some of his holdings were just shown at the Drawing Center last year. His secondary market also took off in part after the Mugrabi family, a force of nature in the high-end resale market for decades, started buying, selling, and advocating for his work over the past 15 years, including with his eventual dealer.5
Beeple became besties with Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, the respected and ultra plugged-in curator of Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museum. He’s also widely known to work with Loïc Gouzer, the former Christie’s-wünderkind-turned-private-dealer and auctioneering upstart. (Becoming the third most-expensive living artist off a deep-pandemic auction stunner didn’t hurt, either.)
Similarly, MSCHF only broke into the gallery world after connecting with Emmanuel Perrotin, whose program is largely built on the tightrope between mass appeal and art world credibility. Case in point: KAWS showed with him before jumping to Skarstedt, and the gallery also reps Daniel Arsham, an artist who seems to react to every conceivable opportunity for a brand collab like a bear that just caught the scent of a pie cooling on some cabin’s window ledge. _Tim Schneider_TheGrayMarket

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WHILE WE'RE ON THE SUBJECT OF ARCHES: IN 1917, WITH WWI RAGING IN EUROPE,
Marcel Duchamp, John Sloan & others broke into NYC's Washington Square Arch,
climbed to top, & declared Greenwich Village an independent republic—
as memorialized in Sloan's "Arch Conspirators" (Duchamp at left, Sloan at right)
<https://tinyurl.com/49sd9vvs> _MichaelLobel

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JOSH KLINE, GIRL, WE KNOW NYC IS EXPENSIVE. by TheArtDaddy
For the past week and a half, the art world hasn’t been able to shut up about an essay by Josh Kline in October on rising rents in New York and what that means for artists. But one of the main things people are not touching is that gentrification and the cyclical cannibalization of small to mid tier galleries, and now even larger ones, is not new. This is not a revelation. This is urban living. And that is where the essay starts to feel thin.
October is an academic journal. That matters. It was founded by Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson in 1976 and has long positioned itself as a site of rigorous theoretical engagement. Which makes the essay’s approach feel especially light. The argument leans heavily on anecdotal benchmarks and surface level metrics, Zillow as methodology, without seriously engaging the deeper frameworks that have long shaped this conversation.
There are a handful of references to Karl Marx, but citation is not the same as analysis, girl c’mon. There is no meaningful engagement with Richard Florida’s creative class. Florida’s concept situates artists and cultural producers as key drivers of urban economic development, often catalyzing neighborhood transformation and rising property values. This process frequently results in their own displacement as cities capitalize on the cultural capital they produce. There is also no engagement with the decades-long relationship between artists and urban redevelopment.
To be clear, the rising cost of living is real. It is affecting artists and non-artists alike across every major city. That is obvious. But stating the obvious is not the same as analyzing it.
The issue is not that Kline is wrong. The issue is that the frame is too narrow for the moment we are in. Because what is at stake right now is not just rent. It is how the United States structurally regards the arts. Public funding remains limited and inconsistent. Cultural labor is undervalued. Institutions are increasingly risk averse. At the same time, artists and activists are operating in a political climate that is actively constraining expression, where funding, visibility, and support are all under pressure.
We are watching money for the arts get cut, contested, or quietly redirected. We are watching institutions pull back from risk. We are watching artists face backlash for work that is critical, political, or even just not easily absorbed into the market. These conditions shape what gets made, what gets shown, and who is able to continue working at all.
And that precarity is not abstract. It looks like artists operating at or just above the poverty line. It looks like people working multiple jobs to sustain a practice. It looks like an entire ecosystem of small to mid tier galleries, project spaces, and studios being squeezed at every level.
More importantly, Kline does not point to meaningful solutions, or even seriously engage with attempts that already exist. There are models. There have been interventions.
Take Theaster Gates, whose work has long centered on reimagining creative space and community infrastructure. Or, more recently, Creatives Rebuild New York, a massive post pandemic program that attempted to directly address the precarity of artistic labor.
CRNY was not just a grant. It functioned as a kind of experimental infrastructure. Through its Artist Employment Program, hundreds of artists were placed in paid, two year roles within community organizations. Its Guaranteed Income program provided monthly payments to thousands more. And crucially, it also supported residencies and workspace models, often placing cohorts of 20 to 30 artists into shared studio environments through partner organizations.
In other words, there have been attempts, not perfect ones, but real ones, to intervene in the exact conditions Kline is describing.
Which raises the question. What does it mean to write about a structural problem without fully engaging its history, or its existing experiments. And more importantly, what does it mean to reduce a systemic crisis to rent when the instability of artistic life in the United States has always been about something much larger.
Because at a certain point, the issue is not awareness. It is depth. Yes, New York is expensive. Yes, artists are being pushed out. Yes, the system is unsustainable. None of this is new. None of this is surprising. And none of this, on its own, moves the conversation forward.
For an essay positioned within a journal like October, the expectation is not just observation. It is rigor. It is context. It is an ability to situate the present within a longer history and a broader set of conditions. Right now, the discourse is catching up to a reality artists have been living through for decades. Writing the most obvious thing in 2026 is not the same as offering insight.
The question is not whether artists can afford New York. The question is what kind of system continues to produce these conditions? And why does it remain so difficult to imagine, fund, or sustain alternatives? Until these questions are taken seriously, we are not analyzing the problem. We are just describing it. _TheArtDaddy

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WHAT I REALLY LIKE ABOUT JOSH KLINE’S ESSAY
are the utopian possibilities at the end. Combine and restage the ’90s Midwestern art rock and present-day radical Indonesian anti-art collective scenes in Philadelphia – why not? That would be fantastic. I have often thought, walking through the side-streets of, say, Heidelberg, that one small group of strange, ambitious people with a free building of their own could really change culture. I have dreams about places like this all the time. _DeanKissick

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INSTITUTE OF MUSEUM AND LIBRARY SERVICES SAVED FROM DEFUNDING
The American Library Association, together with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees–the nation’s largest union of cultural workers– has reached a favorable settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice, thwarting the Trump administration’s plan to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).Institute of Museum and Library Services Saved from Defunding
According to an April 9 press release from the American Library Association (ALA), the settlement ensures the agency will continue awarding grants, conducting research, and supporting the operation of libraries and museums. The agreement also requires that previously terminated grants be reinstated, staff reductions reversed, and that the administration refrain from further action against IMLS. _ARTnews

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THESE SEEDS CAN WALK!
<https://tinyurl.com/865dj46e> _BBC