OLD NEWS

JAN VAN KESSEL, DRAGONFLY, TWO MOTHS, SPIDER AND BEETLES WITH WILD STRAWBERRIES. 1650S
<https://tinyurl.com/bdcwsn3bf> _RabihAlameddine

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AN ODE TO BÉLA TARR, 1955–2026
<https://tinyurl.com/3s2es4un>
Let’s begin at the beginning – not in the sense of Béla Tarr’s birth on 21 July 1955 in Pécs in the southwest of Hungary, but a typical beginning to one of his later films, the five made between 1988 and 2011 in collaboration with László Krasznahorkai that established him as one of cinema’s great masters. Because a Béla Tarr opening shot, typically lasting several minutes, is an emphatic statement of narrative, aesthetic, tonal and philosophical purpose.
Take the magnificently take-no-prisoners start of the seven-hour-plus Sátántangó (1994), in which an unbroken seven-minute take calmly observes unsupervised bovines emerging from a barn, an opportunistic bull mounting a bored-looking cow (presumably unplanned, but with comically perfect timing). The camera then tracks slowly – very slowly – leftwards, following the animals as they amble through what appears to be an otherwise deserted farming village, the black-and-white cinematography emphasising the textures of rusting metal, wood and mud, as we’re invited to spend a few minutes thoroughly exploring the space in which the human-driven action will eventually play out. It comes as a shock to catch up with Krasznahorkai’s source novel and clock the adjective ‘yellow’ in its opening sentence. I was one of around one hundred people who braved a Sátántangó all-nighter at the vast BFI IMAX in the summer of 2024, an experience I’ll never forget.
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Or there’s the opening of Werckmeister Harmonies (Werckmeister harmóniák, 2000). Over the course of ten similarly uninterrupted minutes, some drunken, shambling barflies are choreographed by a wide-eyed visionary (Lars Rudolph was cast specifically because of the intensity of his gaze) into a working scale-model of the solar system and its irregular oval orbits. This entire sequence could be cut without affecting the film’s central narrative about a mysterious ‘Prince’, his gigantic stuffed whale, and the massed fanaticism that their visit engenders, but it establishes the overarching world-out-of-joint theme long before we get to the mid-point discussion of how Andreas Werckmeister’s equal-tempered musical scale is responsible for the world being out of kilter today.
Equally emphatic was Tarr’s attitude towards his work; in just over three decades, he made eight films, announced that he’d said everything that he wished to say, and simply stopped. Not for him the post-‘retirement’ life of an Ingmar Bergman, expanding his filmography for two full decades after his official swansong Fanny and Alexander (1982). And unlike Krzysztof Kieślowski, who died not long after announcing his own retirement, Tarr stuck around for nearly fifteen years after the February 2011 premiere of The Turin Horse (A torinói ló), enjoying life as a peripatetic film guru until his death, earlier this week, on 6 January 2026. He even ran his own Sarajevo-based film school, although he preferred to call it a ‘workshop’ and his students ‘colleagues’, echoing his collaborative approach to his own films.
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They’re often described as ‘films de Béla Tarr’ as if they’d sprung from a single brilliant mind – often a misapprehension when it comes to films, but auteurists gotta, um, auteurist. But the onscreen credits usually credit Tarr’s editor wife Ágnes Hranitzky as co-director, a detail elided by rather too many Tarr commentators. The Man From London (A londoni férfi, 2007) is ‘a film by’ the pair of them, Sátántangó and Werckmeister Harmonies are each ‘a film by László Krasznahorkai, Ágnes Hranitzky and Béla Tarr’, while the more expansive authorship attributions at the start of Damnation and The Turin Horse span half a dozen names.
Because, for all the evident loftiness of Tarr’s artistic ambition, at base his films are about small, close-knit communities, the thread that directly links the more internationally celebrated work to the scrappier, John Cassavetes-inspired Family Nest (Családi tűzfészek, 1979), The Outsider (Szabadgyalog, 1981) and The Prefab People (Panelkapcsolat, 1982). He told Hungary’s independent Partizán channel in 2023, ‘I still consider myself an anarchist’, and he loves his characters in all their misshapen squalor, while sharing their instinctive opinion that external forces of any kind are something terrifying and apocalyptic.
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This is explicitly dramatised towards the end of The Turin Horse, via another extended take in which a father and daughter hesitantly venture beyond the onscreen horizon and are so horrified by what they see on the other side that they come straight back to their isolated shack with its familiar potatoes and palinka. Born a year before the abortive Hungarian uprising of 1956, Tarr lived through János Kádár’s ‘goulash Communism’, Viktor Orbán’s growing authoritarianism, and the financially devastating period of turbo-capitalism in between, so it’s little wonder that his films so frequently show people clinging to reassuring certainties. After all, we don’t have many left in this increasingly mad world.
<https://tinyurl.com/3e63d45e> _Michael Brooke _ArtReview

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SUN
<https://tinyurl.com/33hf5ae4> _DavidShrigley

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7. THE INDIANA JONES BOULDER by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/4fu754k7>
It’s the anti-Sisyphus. In the old Greek myth, the condemned man must push a boulder uphill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down just as he reaches the summit. For Indiana Jones, it’s the opposite: a man runs for his life from a giant ball of rock.
In both stories, gravity itself, not the boulder, is the real antagonist. Both heroes—one pushing, one running—are doing something seemingly impossible, fighting against the fundamental directionality of the universe. And even more cruelly, their respective catastrophes seem impersonal, because gravity is indifferent to their struggle. It’s just physics doing what physics does.
Perhaps that’s why these stories resonate so deeply, why we still commonly use the word “Sisyphean” to describe tasks like finishing laundry or reading email. Perhaps that’s why an 18-second clip from a 1980s action/adventure movie has entered our visual lexicon, becoming an essential piece of cinematic grammar. We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed by forces beyond our control, of wondering why is this happening to me? When the unreasonable, yet implacable, answer may be: no reason. Life is just hard sometimes.
But—is that the reason? If we were ready to believe that life is just hard and there’s no meaning, we wouldn’t continue to tell heroes’ stories about their grit and their refusal to give into inertia. Their unshakable belief in their quest, even when it feels like the universe is indifferent or hostile. We borrow their faith, telling ourselves: never give up.
<https://tinyurl.com/4nff98dw> _TheImpatientReader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/2ex5pjaz> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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UNCOVERING THE SECRETS OF HENRI ROUSSEAU’S PAINTINGS
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If you’ve ever tried to puzzle out what’s happening in Henri Rousseau’s haunting “Sleeping Gypsy” (1897) at the Museum of Modern Art, then you’re already familiar with the artist’s extraordinary ability to tantalize viewers. That painting of a lion and a slumbering woman is on view in Henri Rousseau: A Painter’s Secrets at the Barnes Foundation, now in the company of nearly 60 more works — many equally mesmerizing.
<https://tinyurl.com/5ymhsxka>
Self-taught, self-confident, and inscrutable, Henri Rousseau was "a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma," to crib Winston Churchill’s famous characterization of Russia. He began painting before retiring as a toll collector for the city of Paris in 1893. It was at this point that he became a professional, though impoverished, artist.
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The title A Painter’s Secrets is not a ploy. Curators Christopher Green and Nancy Ireson freshly contextualized many artworks in the light of his personal story, and conservators conducted revelatory technical studies that, among other findings, exposed areas of long obscured, nuanced color. The grumpy-faced baby in “The Family” (c. 1892–1900) is enlarged in the catalog to underscore Rousseau’s shrewd observational skills.
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Visitors with a deerstalker mindset may experience frissons of amazement when scrutinizing the paintings in the galleries. It’s startling to discover the top section of the four-year-old Eiffel Tower in the distant background of “Sawmill, Outskirts of Paris” (1893–95), one of the small works that the enterprising painter sold to his neighbors. Other surprises are eerie. Sheltered within a barely visible structure in “Carnival Evening” (1886), a disembodied head spies on a pair of costumed revelers.
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“Rousseau is not so much a storyteller as a story-giver,” Christopher Green notes in his catalog essay. Will the naked damsel with knee-length blond hair in the Barnes’s “Unpleasant Surprise” (1899–1901) be rescued by the hunter shooting at the ferocious bear about to maul her? Will the beautiful flute player in the Musée d'Orsay’s “The Snake Charmer” (1907) be able to keep the venomous serpents at bay? Green suggests that Rousseau’s fondness for unresolved scenarios may explain why he became important to the Surrealists.
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It was Rousseau’s fellow artists who initially recognized his genius. An ambitious painter, he courted official patronage in vain. Picasso, who both admired and gently mocked Rousseau, first discovered his work in 1908, when he came across the “Portrait of a Woman” (1895) in a bric-a-brac shop selling canvases for reuse. Framed on one side by voluptuously patterned, cinched drapery, his model stands on a balcony in front of an enfilade of potted flowers, overlooking a distant mountain range and a delicately colored sky. Unsurprisingly, Picasso bought it and kept it until his death.
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If A Painter’s Secrets kindles your interest in Rousseau, peruse the exhibition’s weighty catalog. However, if you prefer to read up on the painter’s life and work in relation to the origins of the avant-garde in France prior to World War I, scare down a copy of Roger Shattuck’s The Banquet Years (1961).
<https://tinyurl.com/49vnfk3p>
While you’re at the Barnes, you can find other works by Rousseau from the permanent collection in nearby galleries, installed unchanged since 1951 as components of founder Albert Barnes’s provocative art ensembles. _Hyperallergic

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JACOPO LIGOZZI, JERBOA, C. 1580-1600,
<https://tinyurl.com/a2jb234t> _JesseLocker

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MORE US ARTISTS FORCED TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN SHOWS AS CULTURE BUDGETS SHRINK
When the Dominican American artist Lucia Hierro
began developing a new commission centred on a 7.5ft-tall monobloc chair—an homage to a ubiquitous object in Latin American and Caribbean diasporic life—she envisioned an ambitious installation that would be both playful and politically incisive. What she did not anticipate was the financial precarity that would follow. Fabrication alone would cost between $35,000 and $40,000, far beyond what the commissioning institution was able to support.
“I would never profit from this work—that’s not the point,” Hierro says. “But it shocked me that even with a confirmed institutional commitment, there was simply no path for the project to happen unless I found the funds myself.”
Her dilemma is increasingly the norm rather than an exception. Across the US, artists report being called on to subsidise budgets for museum exhibitions, public commissions and even acquisitions. In some cases, opportunities evaporate entirely when the artist and organisation are unable to raise the money needed for production.
“We all know how incredible these opportunities are for artists to have their work acquired by a museum—they’re game changers,” says Kathryn Mikesell, Fountainhead’s director. “But a lot of these opportunities are underfunded for the artists.”
Public support for the arts has been destabilised at every level since the start of Donald Trump’s second term as president. After the rescission of National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and Institute of Museum and Library Services grants last year, small to mid-size organisations—particularly those serving communities of colour, rural regions and local arts ecosystems—lost core operating support. Several states, including Florida, have also slashed cultural funding. The cuts’ impacts are cascading upward into the museum sector.
The compounding pressures—loss of federal and state arts funding, legislative assaults on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, censorship of LGBTQIA and race-related content, escalating housing costs in cultural hubs—have produced a new landscape in which artists’ material needs are increasingly indistinguishable from their artistic needs.
“We’re seeing requests not just for project support but for immigration lawyers, healthcare, end-of-life preparation and legal protection,” Ishii says. “The instability is emotional, financial and existential.”
The gap between some museums’ public rhetoric and on-the-ground economics is telling. “Historically, museums have defined their mission around stewardship of objects, not stewardship of artists,” she says. “Their accountability structures prioritise preservation, acquisition and scholarship. Supporting the labour of living artists has never been built into the financial architecture.”
“You absolutely cannot assume that an artist that you’re seeing exhibiting has means beyond simply sustaining their life,” Mikesell says. “I had one artist tell me, ‘I felt bad about applying for [Forum], because I have a lot of opportunities. But the fact is, I don’t have the means to do this on my own.’”
Faced with systemic instability, residencies and non-profit funders are becoming de facto support structures for museum programming. _ArtNewspaper

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GREEN BUILDING MCCLUSKY, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/2tvuz8kx> _RuralIndexingProject

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HARD TRUTHS by Chen & Lampert
My artist talent agent has been working hard pursuing a brand collaboration that will take me to the next level, and he landed an offer from a top-tier fashion brand to do an athleisure line based on my painting. I’m totally psyched, but there are easy-to-Google articles about the parent company’s investments in weapons and prisons. It’s unfortunate, but like my agent said, what massive enterprise isn’t complicated these days? It feels like a waste to throw away this chance to expand my platform over things that are out of my hands. Shouldn’t the focus be on the good I can do once I’m in that position?
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Your agent couldn’t be more right: The whole world has gone haywire. Suddenly, it’s become a moral problem to receive ACH transfers from multinational lifestyle brands. You wanted a collaboration to level up, but now that it’s happening, you’ve discovered that your new overlords are doomsday manufacturers who also sell workout clothes. Their brand is namaste and death. Your art and signature will soon adorn ass-gripping leggings made from parachute remnants that were sewn together by children in a mustard-gas factory. Fast fashion and total annihilation, all under the same corporate umbrella that has brought you in from out of the rain.
We just laid it on extra thick to highlight the obvious: The brand you’ve longed to work with is involved in evil. This could have easily been assumed, but it only required Wi-Fi and Grok to find proof. Let’s be clear: Signing with them means you are putting your career ahead of your conscience. There are no ethical bombs or good prisons. It would be one thing if you truly had no idea about their entanglements, but becoming a social warrior after the fact is dubious, and your cooperation in this collaboration will lead to a nefarious merch drop.
Who is the guilty party here: the ignorant customer standing in line for hours to score a BPA-free water bottle made by arms dealers, or the insightful artist who, knowingly and willingly, allies with a warmonger to fabricate organic jockstraps? Take ownership of your complicity to blight humanity in the name of art, yoga pants, and profit. You know more than you wish you did about what is going on upstairs, and yet this information doesn’t stop you from seeking justifications for moving forward. That’s the problem with knowledge: Sometimes it prevents you from getting rich. _ArtInAmerica

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VINCENT VAN GOGH, STANDING MALE NUDE SEEN FROM THE FRONT, 1886
<https://tinyurl.com/ycy6em23> _RabihAlameddine

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‘THE DARK SIDE OF COLLECTING: BOOK REVEALS UGLY HISTORY OF ART’S GREAT COVETERS
The concept of pĭ was coined in 17th-century Ming China to describe the mental condition of obsessive art collectors among the Mandarin class of scholarly bureaucrats. It signified a sort of illness, yet one whose sufferers were nonetheless admired for their chutzpah and nobility of vision. Obsessiveness, however peculiar, was deemed to be their saving grace, as opposed to those collectors driven by fashion and profit, who appeared greedy and vapid by comparison.
In A Noble Madness, the US-based British historian James Delbourgo examines this paradox as part of a bracingly internationalist inquiry into how the image of collectors, down the centuries, has radically evolved—if not necessarily improved. Delbourgo, a leading expert on the life and career of Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose eclectic collection helped to establish the British Museum, contends that “underneath their veneer of reason and civility, collectors are febrile, volatile and warped”.
He opens with the case of Gaius Verres, Sicily’s Roman governor in the first century BC, who was prosecuted by Marcus Tullius Cicero for indiscriminately looting the Mediterranean island. Cicero spoke of Verres’s “singular and furious madness”, noting that he was no collector, but rather plundered out of compulsion and was unable to appreciate anything he stole. Ancient looters eventually gave way to 16th-century idolators, such as Cardinal Albrecht of Brandenburg, who assembled an enormous collection of holy relics that he believed would reduce his time in purgatory.
The shifting sands of collecting habits
What Delbourgo does so well is trace the shifting sands of collecting habits: each historical epoch has its own codes of behaviour, which are constantly in reaction to what has gone before. For instance, the devotion of Cardinal Albrecht gave way to the magus-collectors of the 16th and 17th centuries, such as Rudolf II of Habsburg, who rejected the austerity of the Reformation by dedicating themselves to objects aligned with esoteric knowledge, scientific curiosity and aesthetic transcendence. “Rudolf,” Delbourgo writes, “embodied the first stirrings of the modern idea that collectors are people who cannot face reality and prefer to lose themselves in a world of make-believe.”
But Delbourgo is as interested in the lives of fictional collectors as he is in those of flesh and blood. Ironically, several of the literary ones such as Sylvain Pons in Honoré de Balzac’s Cousin Pons (1847) or Jonathan Oldbuck in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) have markedly more moral depth and heroic qualities than their real-life counterparts. The case of the Elgin Marbles is revelatory of a certain type of collector-looter who came to wield power over large swaths of the globe, placing the cultural treasures of others in museums as trophies of conquest and symbols of civilisational superiority.
This rotten state of affairs ushered in the first stirrings of the decadent collector, soon to be embodied in literature by Jean Des Esseintes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s dyspeptic À rebours (1884) and Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s eponymous novel (1890). Channelling Wilde in all the best ways, Delbourgo captures this self-defeating form of collecting with impeccable sophistry: “The decadent thing to do was perish in a supernova of sophisticated spite.”
But occasionally one yearns for a little more depth in Delbourgo’s depiction of the tastemakers and trendsetting collectors of the 20th century whose names still resonate today. This is notably the case with female collectors such as Gertrude Stein and Peggy Guggenheim, who embraced Modern art at a time when their male counterparts were still hesitant or downright dismissive. What can we learn from their bold embrace of the new? And how has their legacy reshaped the collecting world today? It is hard to know, as Delbourgo has refrained from interviewing any contemporary billionaire collectors whose shadowy world remains conspicuously out of bounds.
Instead, Delbourgo relates an experience he had several years ago, at a symposium organised by the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island, where he attended a talk by Evan Beard, an executive at U.S. Trust, part of America’s private wealth management operation. If you want to become a collector, Beard advised, “don’t buy what you love, buy what makes you slightly uncomfortable”. This bloodless approach to collecting, which contrasts so starkly with the passion-driven impulse of historical and fictional collectors, may make you wonder: if this is the endgame, was it worth all the trouble in the first place?
_Tobias Grey_ArtNewspaper

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THE GREAT POP ABSTRACTIONIST STUART DAVIS WAS BORN ON THIS DATE IN 1892.
Composition, 1935,
<https://tinyurl.com/3hep7csk> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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THOUGHTLESS AND MALICIOUS’
While the world was dealing with horrific news about an ICE agent fatally shooting an American civilian in the streets of Minneapolis on Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s administration was withdrawing the US from 66 international groups, conventions, and treaties, including 31 United Nations-affiliated organizations. Several of them are devoted to arts, culture, historic preservation, and freedom of expression.
The withdrawal was announced in a presidential memorandum that stated that these organizations were “contrary to the interests of the United States.” The president had asked the Secretary of State Marco Rubio to conduct a review in a February 2025 executive order. Rubio asserted that many of the organizations are “dominated by progressive ideology.”
In addition to organizations devoted to climate change, counterterrorism, sustainable development, justice and the rule of law are cultural bodies such as the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA), the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, the Freedom Online Coalition, and the UN Alliance of Civilizations.
The ICCROM and the IFACCA did not immediately answer requests for comment.
Reactions varied depending on whether they were coming from Trump’s critics or his allies. _ARTnews

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GEORG FLEGEL, TWO TULIPS, 1630
<https://tinyurl.com/yn5a692m> _RabihAlameddine