OLD NEWS

SUPERNOVA REMNANT PA 30
<https://tinyurl.com/239wynjm> _NASA

>>>

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT’S ONLY PLANETARIUM RESTORED IN FLORIDA
<https://tinyurl.com/mrx2m3et>
Campus architects at Florida Southern College have updated the only planetarium designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright as part of a decades-long restoration project at the school, which was masterplanned by Wright.
The restoration included interior and exterior updates of the building, known simply as the Planetarium. The structure, which sits at one end of the Polk County Science Building, has been largely closed since 2004, when the projection system stopped working.
<https://tinyurl.com/2a9hbsar>
The renovation was guided by Jeff Baker, resident campus architect and a principal at MCWB Architects. Baker has worked on Wright projects at Florida Southern College (FSC) for twenty years and said the Planetarium has long been a goal.
“Since the outset of these overall restoration efforts, the college was always looking for an opportunity to restore the Planetarium, knowing full well its potential to excite and inspire audiences of all ages as they get a glimpse into the heavens and the great genius of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Baker told
<https://tinyurl.com/42wmfutd>.
Work on the exterior began in 2021. The team replaced the roof, flashings, failed stucco on upper portions of the facade and replaced over 280 hand-cast “textile” tiles that line the building’s perimeter.
The team then moved inside starting in 2023, where “decades of interventions since Wright’s death had dramatically altered the room”, according to Baker.
<https://tinyurl.com/y449feua>
The team updated the Planetarium’s technology and audio, repainting the walls from a deep blue, and paring down or removing insertions such as a computer closet built in the 1980s.
It also included working with local craftsmen to restore the original Wright-designed seating made of plywood and colored vinyl upholstery, and repositioning it to its rightful orientation.
<https://tinyurl.com/4c7raeft>
“The removal of the old computer closet retrieved the space as it was designed,” said Baker. “This removal allowed us to restore and reinstate all the seating in its original circular form, which we learned is a very rare survival in planetariums throughout the country.”
Other updates included reinstating the original paint and plaster, and restoring the floor in a “Cherokee Red” finish.
<https://tinyurl.com/4ty9rxsh>
It is one of thirteen Wright buildings built between 1938 and 1958, which the university has been updating since 2007.
Previous restoration work included updating the Waterdome, Wright’s largest built fountain, the Esplanades, monolithic covered walkways that traverse the campus and the towering Annie Pfieffer Chapel.
Baker said, like working on other buildings on campus, Wright’s “elemental” architecture proved to be the most challenging aspect of the project, as there are “no ‘poche’ spaces to hide modern building systems”.
“Frank Lloyd Wright spent his life conceiving architecture as a synthesis of art and structure,” he said.
<https://tinyurl.com/hb665zm4>
“At Florida Southern College, this is manifested in buildings that are elemental – the concrete floors are the ceilings for the rooms below, the concrete ceiling is also the roof above.”
“We believe we were able to devise methods to insert these systems in sensitive ways that meet the needs of the college yet allowed us to retrieve Wright’s vision for the space.”
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzrnyub>
The team completed the ongoing work through grants from institutions such as the J Paul Getty Foundation, which supported the preparation of the original Campus Heritage Plan in 2007.
The college has used the plan as a guide to update Wright’s buildings.
It is the only college Wright master-planned. FSC president Ludd Spivey commissioned the architect in 1938 and, deemed a National Historic Landmark in 2012, it is the largest single-site collection of Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in the world.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n6wra4n> _Ellen Eberhardt _dezeen

>>>

ARE
<https://tinyurl.com/3ra2dkxt> _DavidShrigley

>>>

SHOW ME ON THE PHOTO WHERE JORDAN WOLFSON RETOUCHED YOU by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/449rtjbz>
“An altered photograph of Felix Gonzalez-Torres?” What did he do?
The 1994 David Seidner portrait was published in an obituary/remembrance of Félix González Torres by curator Gerardo Mosquera, published <https://tinyurl.com/4mcvyjc8> in the May 1996 issue of Artforum.
<https://tinyurl.com/4ydbetz4>
The coloring, the higher-resolution texture of the t-shirt, the wider crop, all could be considered “altering” a photograph. But the most obvious alteration is the orientation: Wolfson straightened Felix out.
Whether this is the extent of the alterations, the mundanity of rotating a photo originally published—and, presumably, taken—upside-down soon becomes normalized and almost invisible. It’s easy to imagine Seidner standing over the artist on a bed, and taking the photo as it ran. But if that was the photo’s original orientation and not an Artforum editor’s conceit, it’s an orientation that’s basically been erased, not only by Wolfson, but by everybody. Wolfson’s just the one who acknowledges it. _greg.org

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yc42n5d2> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

200. BRUCE NAUMAN, PAY ATTENTION by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/v6kk25w3>
Is this really necessary? This urgent, maybe angry, maybe fearful message commanding us, pleading with us—or are we the ones shouting? Are we seeing it backwards because we are behind the words, looking out?
Bruce Nauman may have been channeling rage with this piece, as his biographer Peter Plagens speculated—hence the rough black lines scrawled in grease stick; hence the fact that Nauman didn’t reverse the text on the lithographic stone to make it read forwards once printed. Maybe so, and maybe his rage is just an artist trying to get people to look at his work. We all want recognition. But I read this piece as being up to something more ambitious. I think Nauman is exhorting us to be attentive to the whole world.
Two hundred objects into this project, it’s clear that everything—everything—is interesting. The inert stuff that surrounds us is in fact alive with hidden histories of people we’ve never heard of, people who will soon be lost to history, just as we will be. But they’ve left this thing behind, a souvenir of life. When we closely examine the thing, we realize what is always available to us, right here, right now: a more expansive, more generous understanding of our fellow travelers. And so the answer is yes. Yes, this is necessary. Nauman has cursed at us with backward text to break us out of our distraction, hoping we might see.
<https://tinyurl.com/2v5t3wpj> _TheImpatientReader

>>>

"ANYBODY'S AUNT," A 1953 SCULPTURE BY RICHARD STANKIEWICZ,
a now little-known postwar American sculptor
who nonetheless was a key figure in the postwar assemblage art movement,
and who was born this day in 1922
<https://tinyurl.com/38m24h7a>
Richard Stankiewicz, "City Bird," 1957
<https://tinyurl.com/3xepc2vx>
Richard Stankiewicz, "Seated Lady," 1954
<https://tinyurl.com/8x3aha62> _MichaelLobel

>>>

A VERY LARGE PAINTING FINDS A HOME
<https://tinyurl.com/47y3bahp>
Anselm Kiefer’s 2007 painting Schwarze Flocken is famously large—so monumental, in fact, that it has called for its own purpose-built space.
Kiefer’s 36-foot-tall artwork under timber beams and well-cut skylights, within a climate-controlled environment. _artnet

>>>

CHERYL'S DINER - 3
<https://tinyurl.com/uby444p3> _ON&ON/Jeff Weiss

>>>

SCULPTURE IN PIECES by Mary Beard
<https://tinyurl.com/3khhpyn3>
Many of the tributes to Anne Carson, the latest Nobel prizewinner in Literature, have emphasized her fascination with the fragment. Her PhD thesis (published as Eros the Bittersweet in 1986) revelled in the pleasure of the poetry of Sappho, most of which survives in just fragmentary snatches. And her translation of Sappho, If Not, Winter is full of square brackets, “[…]”, proudly highlighting the gaps.
Carson certainly wasn’t the first to celebrate the “gappiness” of Sappho. Think of Ezra Pound’s Sapphic version, which read just: “Spring… / Too long… / Gongula…”. But she was the first, I think, to bring this into a more narrowly academic agenda. When I was a student, our essays on Sappho tended to lament what had been lost, and to wonder how we might best fill those gaps. Now students are more likely to follow Carson in emphasizing the almost erotic pleasure of these incomplete, alluring bits and pieces.
And – in a predictably (post-)modernist way, you might want to argue – the fragment flourishes in other areas of classical and historical study, too. I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago the new exhibition, Broken, at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence (which will be moving, with some additional exhibits, to Washington DC next year). In truth this show deserved more than the few words I gave it, when I made it a quick contrast to Philip Colbert’s Lobster exhibition at Pompeii. <https://tinyurl.com/2j5uhxap>
Broken is very much in the Carson vein. I haven’t yet seen it fully installed, but eighteen months ago I got to see the show taking shape, from the inside, when I was working at the National Gallery in DC. It is a haunting display, exploring many different varieties of fragmentariness – from the accidentally broken to the war-damaged and the never finished. So, expect plenty of stray hands and feet, victims of iconoclasm, and statues eaten away by the elements – from across the world, not just classical. And expect to be asked to think about how seeing things in pieces _TimesLiterarySupplement

>>>

HONOR BOX MANSFIELD, SD
<https://tinyurl.com/2fmfnp4p> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

MELTING RON DESANTIS STATUE UNVEILED TO CALL OUT HIS INACTION ON CLIMATE CRISIS
<https://tinyurl.com/63b6pdmp>
A life-sized statue of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, was unveiled and promptly began melting in front of an audience in Tallahassee in a symbolic protest at his rejection of action on the climate crisis.
The silvery statue, revealed to an audience of onlookers last week, melted away to show a skull under DeSantis’s face. The structure was cast from solid gallium, a metal that melts at 85.6F (29.8C), which is below summertime high temperatures frequently reached in Tallahassee, Florida’s capital.
The environmentalists behind the statue-based protest said it was a fitting monument to DeSantis’s eight years as Florida governor, which comes to an end in January.
<https://tinyurl.com/3h3742fs>
The Republican has frequently criticized what he has called a “radical climate agenda”, blocking the ability of Florida municipalities to slash planet-heating pollution and even erased terms such as “climate change” and “greenhouse gas emissions” from Florida state law.
This law has hindered the ability of state agencies to even mention a climate crisis that poses an outsized threat to Florida. In classrooms, meanwhile, state education regulations are also ensuring the steady elimination of any reference to climate change.
“I am not a global warming person, I don’t want that label on me,” DeSantis, who unsuccessfully ran to become Republican nominee for US president in 2024, said in 2018.
<https://tinyurl.com/335z5je9> _GuardianUK

>>>

MOUTH OF HELL (DETAIL), FROM THE OFFICE OF THE DEAD;
Hours of Catherine of Cleves, Illuminated by the Master of Catherine of Cleves; Utrecht, ca. 1440
<https://tinyurl.com/5xj5vnw2> _JesseLocker

>>>

DAMASCUS ROOM ON VIEW by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/45fc101>
After months of delay, the 18th-century winter reception room from Damascus is now open to LACMA visitors in the David Geffen Galleries.
Acquired in 2014, the Damascus room is the museum's only period room. Given the Geffen's changing displays, it has been reconstructed with an armature to facilitate installation and deinstallation. However, the room was not ready for the Geffen's opening this spring, and work dragged on for six months.
The Damascus room is the centerpiece of the Geffen installation "Mediterranean Crossings." More on the room's history here. <https://tinyurl.com/4xafy2fc>
<http://tiny.cc/95fc101> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

>>>

GEORGIA O'KEEFE, LADDER TO THE MOON, 1958
<https://tinyurl.com/4s85mzdb>
Vincent van Gogh, Sketches of a Man with a Ladder, Other Figures, and a Cemetery, 1885
<https://tinyurl.com/52wtd6xc> _RabihAlameddine

>>>

NATIONAL MUSEUM CHIEF OFFERS RESIGNATION
<https://tinyurl.com/4s7rbfrj>
You Hong-june, director of the National Museum of Korea, offered his resignation on Wednesday, following controversy over the inclusion of a scroll from his private collection in the museum's recent exhibition, "The Korean Table: Food, Nature and Life."
According to the National Museum of Korea, You announced his resignation, saying he takes “full responsibility for all the criticism.”
“The deep trust that the public has placed in the National Museum of Korea and the values built by its staff over the years have been undermined in an instant due to my personal mistake,” You said in a statement.
You said stepping down was the "right course of action to restore the museum's tarnished reputation."
"Although my 15 months in office were brief, it was the greatest blessing of my life to have had the honor of protecting the value of our cultural heritage," he added, asking the public to "show unwavering support for the museum."
The resignation offer came two days after You apologized for the third time during the National Assembly's annual audit by the Culture, Sports and Tourism Committee over the display of an artifact related to a pro-Japanese collaborator in the museum's special exhibition on Korean food.
The calligraphy scroll, known as "Ilbansigukeun," was initially attributed to Park Won-geun, an independence activist, but was later revealed to have been written by a pro-Japanese collaborator, Park Jung-yang, during Japan's colonial rule of Korea (1910-1945).
You apologized, saying there had been an issue during the verification process. He faced further criticism after it was disclosed at an annual audit that the artifact was from You's personal collection. _KoreaHerald

>>>

ART BASEL PARIS OPENS BEHIND ANTI-RAM BARRIERS
_Artforum

>>>

ART DOES NOT FUNCTION LIKE OTHER COMMODITIES, SO WHY IS IT BEING PRICED LIKE ONE?
<https://tinyurl.com/yyyyy259>
The global art market grew 4% last year, to $59.6bn. It is the figure everyone repeats, but it is close to useless, because it combines two markets moving in opposite directions. Works above $10m fell 44% in the first half of 2025 and are down 72% from the 2022 peak; not one lot sold above $50m, against 13 in the first half of 2022. Dealers selling below $250,000, meanwhile, reported sales up 17%. The top is in retreat, the bottom expanding, and the aggregate describes neither. Anyone trained in commodities knows the mistake: you never publish one price for a market that trades in grades. That the flagship research leads with it is a clue about who the research is for.
Strictly defined, Art is not a commodity: a painting is unique and unsubstitutable, and its price may never settle at any “correct” level—the economist William Baumol argued in 1986 that art behaves like a floating crap game, because nothing forces its price toward a fundamental. He was right, and the concession is smaller than it sounds. Art behaves like a commodity everywhere that matters—in how it is supplied, hedged, financed and traded—and the market has built an entire apparatus that treats it as one.
Oil had every excuse that art now has
Crude oil in the early 1970s looked exactly as unanalysable as art is said to be now: hundreds of non-comparable grades, sold at prices posted by a few powerful sellers through relationships rather than exchanges. With no benchmark and no public record of what anything traded for, its supply was managed by a cartel, Opec (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). Then the infrastructure arrived: futures markets in the 1980s, and a reporting agency, Platts, that gathered the day’s real bids and trades and published an assessed price, turning a private trade into a public one by method alone. Oil did not become legible because its nature changed; rather, someone built the layer that made it legible—a feat that art has not achieved.
The parallels are clear. A gallery that sets a price, keeps it private and offers it selectively is running a posted-price market, as the oil majors did before 1980. An estate metering an artist’s work, or a gallery choosing who may buy and cutting off quick resellers, is doing what Opec does with a quota. A third-party guarantee is a written option; when a guaranteed lot sells to its guarantor, the reported hammer is not a clearing price but the exercise of a hedge. And the most honest number in any commodity market—how much offered supply failed to sell—is the one art buries. The buy-in rate is the clearest demand signal available, and it never leads the report; the record lot does.
None of this makes art a commodity. It fails the definition at its root—fungibility—and no pile of structural matches repairs that. What the parallels capture is structure, not definition, and structure is what finance operates on: a market plumbed like a commodity can be financed like one even though it is not one. The parallels do not prove art is a commodity—they explain how it came to be treated as one.
Commodified on a different plane
The market could not make a painting fungible, so it wrapped the painting in instruments that are. Lending against art turns a unique object into collateral. Funds pool works so a share is interchangeable, though no two holdings are. Fractional platforms slice a canvas into tradable shares. None of it makes a painting a commodity; all of it makes claims on paintings behave like one — as finance has always done with unique assets. But every instrument needs a valuation to function, and the wrapper inherits no anchor the object never had. A credentialed appraisal profession exists, but an appraisal is a point-in-time opinion, not a continuous market price, and it says nothing about who owns a work, in what fractions, against what liens. That record does not exist at all.
Hot property: Lisa Brice’s After Embah (2018) sold for £5.4m last year at Sotheby’s © the artist; courtesy of Sotheby’s
Which is how you get Inigo Philbrick. Between 2016 and 2019 he built a business on these very instruments and defrauded collectors and lenders of more than $86m in what the FBI said was the largest art fraud in US history. Philbrick’s was not a valuation fraud—the works involved had plausible values—but an ownership one: he sold more than 100% of individual works to multiple buyers and pledged the same pieces to lenders who knew nothing of each other, because nothing existed to tell them. The prosecutor’s diagnosis was exact: he exploited “the lack of transparency in the art market”. Philbrick is the prosecuted extreme of a quieter, legal exposure sitting in the market every day—the loan against a stale appraisal, the claim written against an ownership no one confirmed.
The markets the index cannot see
The cost is highest where data is thinnest. Bonhams’s live Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern art sale last November made £3.2m and set multiple records; its online sale in February took $287,000, with two in five works unsold. Same house, same department, months apart. Read the first and the market booms; read the second and it fails; read the buy-in rate across both and you learn the truth: demand concentrated among committed buyers, not the broad market the record implies.
The capital behind this fast-growing regional market is, at one remove, hydrocarbon revenue on a lag; an analyst who can model that holds a forward indicator on a market most researchers cannot see at all. African art tells a subtler version: Sotheby’s has folded these artists into its premier sales rather than a separate category, and in the main room they reach prices the niche never produced—the South African painter Lisa Brice set a record at £5.4m in March 2025. That is a re-rating, not a rally.
None of this is a market waiting to be discovered. The capital has already arrived, without the price infrastructure that would let a lender, insurer or fund verify what it is underwriting. The missing layer does not gate the money, it gates the safety of money already in motion. If anything, the opacity selects, deterring the disciplined and leaving the field to those willing to write claims against unconfirmed marks. Financialisation is not being prevented by the absence of infrastructure, it is racing ahead of it.
There is a reason the market’s own research does not say this. The institutions producing the flagship studies also lend against art, manage collections, and insure and audit it. Nobody whose revenue depends on volume leads with a buy-in rate, and the most-cited index, Mei Moses, is owned by Sotheby’s. Independent research exists, but none yet combines independence with private-market coverage, transparency and segment detail.
So the claim is not that art is a commodity. It is that art is being financialised faster than it is being made legible—the apparatus treating it as a commodity has outrun the infrastructure that would verify its marks. The notion that art lies beyond economics has always served those who prefer it not examined too closely. It is superb public relations. But it has never been an argument. _Faustine Jean-Louis _ArtNewspaper

>>>

A NEW LUNAR CRATER: MCGETCHIN
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8p8ayr> _NASA