OLD NEWS

LOOKING AROUND 2
<https://tinyurl.com/yeyrtfay>
For the past decade I have been searching for places
where I can see 360 degrees to the horizon
and not see or hear any sign of a human presence. _ON&ON / Jeff Weiss

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PAINTER CRISELDA VASQUEZ SAYS ICE DETAINED HER FATHER
<https://tinyurl.com/4npaz4bx>
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained the father and portrait muse of California-based Chicana painter Criselda Vasquez, the artist said in a post.
“My father and one of his workers were detained by ICE while simply on their way to work,” Vasquez wrote on April 3. “Our entire family is heartbroken, and my mother is completely devastated.”
The family has not publicly named Vasquez’s father. Vasquez noted in her post that he had been in the United States for over 40 years now.
Vasquez said that her father had been “racially profiled on his way home from work, and taken by Immigration authorities,” on Tuesday, March 31, adding that he had been pulled over and arrested right outside of a neighbor’s home.
“My family and I have since made contact with him and know which detention facility he is being held in,” Vasquez said.
“What I want the public to know about my father is that he is a devoted husband, parent, and grandfather, and the hardest-working, most selfless person I know,” Vasquez continued
“He has become a role model not only to his four children, all of whom are United States citizens, but also to many people he has come across.”
“My father’s hard work, dedication, and sacrifices will never be forgotten and will continue to be a long lifetime inspiration to me and my family,” Vasquez said.
Vasquez depicted her father in her celebrated 2017 painting “The New American Gothic” (2017), a reimagining of Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” (1930) featuring both of her parents, originally from Mexico, holding cleaning products and a hoe. The Lucas Museum for Narrative Art in Los Angeles acquired the painting in 2021. In an earlier statement about the work, the artist had said that she sought to depict the “plight and the plight of many in my community.”
<https://tinyurl.com/45m73mpt> _Hyperallergic

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WHAT
<https://tinyurl.com/3k2c59c3> _DavidShrigley

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72. ORION CAPSULE by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/7f8wvxtb>
The Artemis II mission gave us all a shared moment of awe, a respite from the wreckage of the news. The astronauts trained together for three years in preparation, part of which involved huddling in a cramped simulator of the Orion capsule, directing cameras at a giant inflatable moon. They trained in photography and practiced their responses. What does it mean that their message of wonder and shared humanity was not purely spontaneous? That their spectacular photographs, and indeed the entire story of their mission, were carefully crafted? Does that matter?
It’s tempting to say yes. But stories have always been shaped before they’re told. The bards who sang the great ancient myths repeated and refined them for generations before anyone wrote them down. A myth is not diminished by repetition. On the contrary.
Our space agency—arguably the most technologically advanced arm of the government—understood that image-making and storytelling are essential to its work and built those things into the mission. Myth-making is central to our species’ very survival because it feeds our desire to continue to exist. What followed the moon images was the culmination of the hero’s journey: a cone of metal returning through fire, back to water, back up in the air. There and back again.
And the moon itself still inspires wonder because the fragrance of its past importance still clings to it.1 We don’t fully know why we still look up at the night sky, but we do. At our beautiful, changeless, and ever-changing moon. _TheImpatientReader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/35n7nkw4> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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CALIFORNIA SCIENCE CENTER COMPLETES CONSTRUCTION OF NEW BUILDING HOUSING ENDEAVOUR
<https://tinyurl.com/v9z3jch7>
The California Science Center announced Monday that construction has been completed on its new Samuel Oschin Air & Space Center, bringing the highly anticipated expansion one step closer to its public debut.
The culmination of a master project plan adopted in 1993, the sleek 20-story, 200,000-square-foot new building rising over Exposition Park will nearly double the museum’s exhibit space and anchor a $450-million campaign to permanently house the retired space shuttle Endeavour.
At the heart of the new addition is Endeavour itself, displayed in a vertical “ready-to-launch” configuration that’s never been replicated with real hardware outside of a NASA or Air Force facility. The display includes rocket boosters from manufacturer Northrop Grumman and a massive external fuel tank from NASA.
A veteran of 25 missions from 1992 to 2011, Endeavour arrived in L.A. in 2012 during a widely watched journey atop a modified Boeing 747, followed by a slow procession through city streets. For over a decade, the retired orbiter was exhibited horizontally in a temporary, tent-like structure known as the Samuel Oschin Space Shuttle Endeavour Display Pavilion.
In early 2024, Angelenos watched as the shuttle was carefully lifted and placed into its final upright position in an intensive overnight operation.
<https://tinyurl.com/2a24mxvt> _LATimes

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THE NONSENSE INDUSTRY IS TURNING EVER MORE COMPETITIVE.
It is becoming harder and harder to make a good living spouting pointless nonsense. _DeanKissick

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DER SCHWERBELASTUNGSKÖRPER UND DIE
SCHWEBELASTUNGKÖRPERAUS-SICHTSPLATTFORM by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/25c3muxd>
So a nazi-aping fascist’s monomaniacal proposal to build an arch on swampy riverfront is in the news. In 1941 Hitler’s architect Albert Speer got approval to build a giant triumphal arch on a main axis of a redesigned Berlin, and quickly built the Schwerbelastungskörper, or heavy load-bearing structure, to test the ability of the marshy soil to support such a ridiculously large structure. It was built with forced labor from captured French soldiers.
The Heavy Load-Bearing Structure is a cylindrical pressure body made of solid concrete 14 meters high, with a diameter of 21 meters. Its 11-meter diameter concrete base extends 18 meters deep. The 12,650 ton weight was calculated to approximate one of the arch’s four base legs.
The war diverted resources and attention from the arch and the redesign of Berlin, and the HLBS was left behind. Scientists and soil management technicians used the structure for data collection until 1983—postwar analysis showed the ground was too soft to have supported Hitler’s arch without major intervention, btw. And it became a historical monument in 1995, “the only tangible example of National Socialist urban planning.”
<https://tinyurl.com/fzucdmsn>
Now there is a visitor information center, monthly tours, and a Schwer­belastungs­körperaussichts­plattform, a Heavy Load-Bearing Structure Viewing Platform, which looks exactly like what a visitor center for a useless nazi concrete plug should look like. _greg.org

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KATHLEEN GILJE'S "SANT’ORINALE (SAINT URINAL)," 2017
<https://tinyurl.com/ynt5eb9t> _MichaelLobel

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MUSEUM ACQUISITIONS ROUND-UP
<https://tinyurl.com/3bmryh>
Andy Warhol in an apron with his Big Shot Polaroid camera in the Factory (1970s) by Ronnie Cutrone
More than 400 stereoscopic slides depicting Andy Warhol and other figures inside the Factory have been donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art . The slides, which create the illusion of 3D images, were taken by the artist Ronnie Cutrone (1948–2013), who joined Warhol’s studio as an assistant in 1972. Cutrone soon began photographing Warhol and visitors to the Factory—Georgia O’Keeffe, Bruce Nauman, Debbie Harry, Mick Jagger and David Hockney among them. After Cutrone left Warhol’s studio, he became a successful artist in his own right, his brightly coloured neo-Pop paintings depicting characters such as Donald Duck and Felix the Cat.
<https://tinyurl.com/56cavt6n>
This solid-silver relief, standing more than a metre tall, is believed to be the last known work by the virtuoso silversmith Luigi Valadier (1726-85). Valadier was renowned in 18th-century Rome and beyond. Commissioned by royalty, aristocracy and popes, his ornate works traverse the Baroque, Rococo and Neo-Classical styles”. Heike Zech, the deputy director general of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, calls this “courtly showpiece” a “significant testament to European cultural history”.
<https://tinyurl.com/3hu4web8>
Package on a Luggage Rack (1962) by Christo
Christo and Jeanne-Claude had a special relationship with Paris. It was there that they met in 1958 and lived until 1964. The city also hosted numerous projects of theirs, including the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in 1985 and, posthumously, the Arc de Triomphe—which drew six million visitors in 2021. Now, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation has donated 14 of the couple’s works to the City of Paris and Paris Musées. Some go to the Musée Carnavalet-Histoire de Paris, and the remainder to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris—including this early Christo piece, Package on a Luggage Rack, which complements the museum’s already substantial collection of New Realism works. _Anna Brady_ArtNewspaper

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HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE, TO CLOSE AFTER 51 YEARS
Hampshire College, a liberal arts college in Amherst, Massachusetts, will close after 51 years in operation, becoming the latest school of its kind to shutter amid financial difficulties.
Though small in scale, the college has had an outsize effect on the art world, with its art department graduating a number of painters, sculptors, and photographers who went on to achieve fame in the years after their undergraduate education there.
The alumni list includes Christina Quarles, a painter; Math Bass, a painter and Every Ocean Hughes, an artist who has staged exhibitions and performances
Non-artist alumni of the college include filmmaker Ken Burns, actress Lupita Nyong’o, and the writer Eula Biss. _Alex Greenberger_ARTnews

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HARD TRUTHS: by Chen & Lampert
I fired my gallery of 25 years after they refused to release me from a contract that forbade me from selling my work anywhere else in the United States for two years. I was their top-selling artist for a while and tried negotiating, even offering a cut of sales, but they still refused. Leaving them was incredibly hard and felt like committing career suicide; but since then I’ve been doing great and am free to sell my work anywhere! But alas, there’s a new problem. I discovered that they damaged over $50,000 worth of my work and lied to the insurance company to avoid paying the claim. The gallery owner who made millions in sales off me is now acting like I am a pariah. He has also brought in other artists to copy my work. Does that seem normal, and am I at fault here?
---
Be very careful, as “normal” and “fault” are triggering words. Is it normal to live in a capitalist society that values creative expression only as a salable commodity? Whose fault is it that insolvent artists without gallery representation must knock off copies of your work to survive? The scenario you’ve described is unacceptable, but not uncommon. Every time we hear about someone getting screwed by the sheisty art world it reminds us that selling out a show is inextricably tied to liquidating your heart.
But hang on: You fired your gallery? Usually it’s the gallery who dumps the artist. Quitting or leaving makes more semantic sense, but perhaps you rightly fired them because, as it turns out, you can prosper solo. If they made millions off you, then presumably you did okay despite being restricted from selling elsewhere. Maybe you realize in retrospect that you never should have entered into such a restrictive arrangement, so feel blessed that it has ended. Think of that damaged art and the $50,000 as a token kill fee for being able to live without bad bosses.
While we are highly litigious, we are not lawyers and cannot say with certainty that you have a copyright case. You may have a lawsuit if your former exclusive gallerist is selling knockoffs, but unless they are signing them with your name, it may very well be their own bad creative work. Other artists ripping you off is no doubt atrocious, but we live in a postmodern world where appropriation, homage, and being a copycat are all muddled concepts. It sucks to be cucked, but maybe this will propel you to start making work so boldly ugly that no one will dare give it a second look. You’ll win, in a way. _ArtInAmerica

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I KNOW I SPEAK FOR EVERYONE ON HERE
when i say that nothing gets me more amped
than going to a company’s About page and reading sentences like
“We bring this human-centric creative philosophy to life
by seamlessly connecting Brand Experience, Customer Experience, and Commerce.”
YES!
THIS IS WHAT CIVILIZATION HAS BEEN STRIVING TOWARD FOR MILLENNIA!
TO MY ANCESTORS:
WE FUCKING DID IT! _TimSchneider

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HOW US MUSEUMS ARE ADAPTING TO A NEW ERA FOR TECHNOLOGY-BASED ART
<https://tinyurl.com/3cutjbdm>
Canyon, a new institution dedicated to moving image works along with sound, performance and other forms of art, will open this autumn at 200 Broome Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, in 40,000 sq. ft of reworked commercial office space. It was founded by the entrepreneur and video collector Robert Rosenkranz.
The institution’s multimedia scope stems from the ever-shifting nature of contemporary art. In the 100 years since avant-gardists like Marcel Duchamp to Dziga Vertov first got behind a camera, the labels used to describe what they created have multiplied in keeping with the technologies they used to make and show it: experimental film, video art, new media, time-based work, moving image, screen-based work, durational work and digital art. And as each successive generation of technology became obsolete, artists have continued to tap their wider potential.
For museums, this rate of change poses significant exhibition and conservation challenges, but curators, collectors and acquisition committee members highlight that these are outweighed by the relevance this art has to contemporary daily life. “I’ve heard people refer to Nam June Paik as digital art,” says Cass Fino-Radin, Canyon’s vice president for art and technology. “It really is just inseparable from contemporary art writ large.”
Accelerating relevance is not the only factor. Work that takes hardly any space at all to store is increasingly attractive to museums bursting at the seams with paintings and sculptures.
Pioneering conservation
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The Berlin-based Julia Stoschek Foundation recently held the first major US presentation of pieces from its collection at the Variety Arts Theater in Los Angeles, featuring works by artists including Marina Abramović and Douglas Gordon.
“For a long time, video art played a marginal role in the art world—curatorially acknowledged, but structurally underestimated,” says Julia Stoschek. “It was often considered difficult, secondary or impractical.” Today, she says, “time-based media are widely understood as central to contemporary artistic practice, even if market structures are still catching up to what artists and institutions have already recognised”.
<https://tinyurl.com/4ppnym9r>
She started her namesake foundation in 2017 to make the collection accessible and foster conservation and research. “Time-based works need an institutional framework that can hold technical knowledge, installation logic and documentation over decades, not seasons,” Stoschek says. “The foundation’s work is increasingly international and collaborative, which is particularly visible in the current Los Angeles project.”
Canyon will neither be home to Rosenkranz’s video art collection nor, for the time being, acquire any work of its own. Rather, as its director Joe Thompson (who was the founding director of Mass Moca) explains, it will extrapolate from Rosenkranz's long-established way of showing works he owns within his home and bring into the public museum that sense of domestic comfort and hospitality. The museum will not necessarily have a curatorial department either.
“There’s so many great shows around the world that never touch ground in New York,” Thompson says. “The reason for that, particularly for shows that are rich in media that have large spatial requirements, is that the timescale of most of the major museums in New York City is four or five, sometimes six years.” He wants his team to be able to turn things around much more quickly. “We’re going to work in the 18-to-24-months range, staying a little bit loose-limbed.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3e99hr>
Not having a collection has not stopped Canyon from thinking seriously about conservation. Fino-Radin conducted a field study in 2025 and found an overwhelming need across US museums for a specialist, independent nonprofit lab; now they are heading up the Canyon Media Arts Conservation Center. It is not just that museums need technicians for hire, Fino-Radin says, “It’s about community-building and facilitating knowledge exchange and knowledge sharing.” This applies to the formats on which the works are kept as well as the machines and display systems by which they are exhibited.
Acquisition logics
Video and time-based media do not have much of a secondary market yet. They are also categories that many commercial galleries shy away from. Collectors focused on these media, like Stoschek and Rosenkranz, are outliers—and they are really invested in the works’ longevity.
In spring 2025, the French collectors Isabelle and Jean-Conrad Lemaître bequeathed the collection they had accumulated over 30 years to the Musée d'Art Contemporain (Mac) in Lyon. The entire museum was mobilised to take reception of the works, 170 pieces in total, amounting to several million euros in value. Matthieu Lelièvre, the Mac’s head of collections, says the entire bequest (save on film piece by Tacita Dean) fit on two large hard drives.
“Video art does not fall within an economy the way a Brancusi might, where the set value of the work dictates that those inheriting the collection must sell it at auction to share out the money,” Lelièvre says. “Fundamentally, the Lemaîtres’ approach speaks to their knowledge of the medium and its place in the market, its evolution and also an awareness of the role they themselves have played in that evolution.”
The Lemaîtres were avid supporters of young artists. Some they bought from early on—their first acquisition was Gillian Wearing's Boytime (1996)—are now in their fifties, and they are not all famous. Often, in buying a first edition of a video, they were enabling the artist to finish the work. A current exhibition at the Mac, Regards sensibles [Sensitive Gazes], will give visitors a sense of the collection, which Lelièvre describes as “the most beautiful in France, and one of the best in the world, in private hands”.
Digitisation, in the case of the Lemaître collection, has already been done. Some artists sold their works on DVD; others, in multiple formats (reels of film, USB keys, digital Betacam tapes, HDCam tapes, hard drives), along with detailed protocols of how they should be exhibited. That shifting technological landscape has been accompanied by significant changes to privacy law, meaning consent from whomever an artist shot in the 1990s won't have been obtained the way current legal frameworks require. Any conservation work therefore starts with contacting all the artists.
“I worry about the things that haven't been shown in a decade or more, and maybe the artist is reaching the final era of their career, and it might be your last moment to exercise that knowledge with the artist standing right next to you,” Fino-Radin says.
Domain expertise
In May 2025, the master recordings of more than 200 of artist Bill Viola's moving-image works were donated to the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, an institution specialised in long-term preservation for film. Gordon Nelson, an assistant curator for the digital collection at the George Eastman Museum, points out that Viola’s oeuvre encompasses the history of video art technology from the early 1970s until the mid-2010s. The institution is now painstakingly backing up the digitised files onto its storage system. This exacting process points to another conservation challenge: with anything digital, the potential for it to be copied is ripe.
<https://tinyurl.com/4d447yx8>
As a backup method, the museum uses Linear Tape-Open (LTO), a digital tape format that, Nelson says, extracts a lot of metadata automatically and enables them to copy the work in a very ethical way. “It takes a sort of digital fingerprint of the file, which enables us to track it,” he says. “Thirty years from now, someone will be able to tell if that’s the exact data that we captured initially. Once you write a tape, it goes on to a shelf. It’s not online. It can’t get a virus. It’s as close as we can get to a feeling of relief that the object is backed-up using the best system we have available to us.”
The collector and tech entrepreneur Craig Hollingworth, who founded the Anarchy Art Club, has sat on the Tate's North American acquisition committee for nearly four years. He says every set of works the committee has considered in that time has included a digital element.
“If you’re a huge museum and you’re fighting off donations each year of various paintings from donors that want their legacy to live on, that would be quite a big headache,” Hollingworth says. “Digital art is quite appealing because it doesn’t need to be stored in a way that a traditional painting might.”
Lelièvre concurs: “It’s a potential response to the storage crisis: we’re all panicking because our reserves are full.”
This wide-ranging category of time-based and moving-image art, then, is not just of the moment but also points to the future. To Hollingworth’s mind, as artificial intelligence slop floods our phones and attention spans, the value of screen-based work “made by human hands” is only going to increase. Institutions like Canyon are being built specifically to show and secure that work. _Dale Berning Sawa _ArtNewspaper