OLD NEWS

LEAVING EARTH
<https://tinyurl.com/46np2jze> _NASA

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JAPANESE AQUARIUM DROPS 2026 VERSION OF FLOWCHART ILLUSTRATING THEIR PENGUIN RELATIONSHIPS.
Penguins, the way they waddle around and protect their eggs, are often thought of as cute, cuddly and romantic. But those who observe them for extended periods know they have a dark side. Two aquariums in Japan, Kyoto Aquarium and Sumida Aquarium, have been keeping obsessive tabs on their penguins, maintaining an updating annual flowcharts that visualizes all their penguin drama. They recently dropped their 2026 versions, and this year there are English versions!
Penguins are highly social species. They like being with others and, like humans, this can often lead to polyamorous and sometimes scandalous situations. Penguin drama can include serious crushes and heartbreaks but also adultery and egg-stealing. Penguins may even develop crushes on their caretakers. And these Japanese aquariums have it all charted in a flowchart that can be studied for hours.
The aquariums keep high-resolution versions of each. Here are the English version links for the Kyoto Aquarium <https://tinyurl.com/4r2wuswm> and the one for Tokyo’s Sumida Aquarium <https://tinyurl.com/mrbff4p2> , which has just been updated for 2026.
According to the aquarium’s caretakers, the penguin’s romantic escapades are fairly easy to observe. For example, wing-flapping is a sign of affection and couples can be seen grooming each other. Penguins who are getting over a break-up will often refuse to eat.
Someone needs to give these penguins their own reality TV show! _Spoon&Tamago

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SPARKLING
<https://tinyurl.com/d33z4kr3> _DavidShrigley

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DAVID GEFFEN GALLERIES: FIRST LOOK by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/bzy1101>
LACMA is holding media previews for its David Geffen Galleries. Some of my first takes on the museum's new permanent collection wing:
Zumthor's building. I'm OK with the concrete, I love Reiko Sudo's curtains, and the stairway isn't steep, it only looks that way.
In all Peter Zumthor has delivered on the promised experiential qualities. The Wilshire overpass melds city and museum, letting you hover just above the metropolis.
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The outer ("terrace") spaces, near the windows, rock. Many ceramic and sculptural works are shown on handsome casework tables without glazing. The result is nothing short of spectacular. The winsome little dog of ancient Colima, a popular favorite, inhabits your own space under perfect light. It's not like seeing it in a museum, it's more like having it in a sunny corner of your home.
(I just hope they know what they're doing. I'm less concerned about theft than the inquisitive fingers of the next generation of art lovers. It's said the tables' dimensions have been engineered for safety.)
<http://tiny.cc/mzy1101>
The enclosed "core" galleries, with the tinted walls, are deeply weird, in a good way. It's a museum setting unlike any other you've experienced. Call it Zen-like or Goth or Zumthoresque.
<http://tiny.cc/nzy1101>
The in-between "courtyard" galleries are hit and miss. In the right slant of light, with brightly colored art, they work. More often, they're left in murky shadow. It's hard for your eyes to adjust with the terrace galleries' sunlight in your peripheral vision.
<http://tiny.cc/ozy1101>
Glare is a problem for Elaine Wynn's great Bacon triptych and also for most of the works on paper and textiles outside the core galleries. The chrome curtains may help but don't eliminate the issue. There's even glare on some unglazed oil paintings, such as the big Hubert Robert park scene.
<http://tiny.cc/pzy1101>
The flipside of glare is silhouetting, when you view works against the blaring L.A. light. In most cases you can position yourself to avoid glare and silhouetting, but that's a distraction.
Govan's installation philosophy. Michael Govan decreed thematic and ever-changing displays of the permanent collection. As I said in a 2024 post, a thematic strategy works well enough at the Museum of Modern Art. But I was skeptical of how well it could work with LACMA's wider-ranging but far spottier collection.
I'm delighted to report that the 78 themes on view here are smart, interesting, and fresh. Introductory text panels don't talk down to the audience, and they can quote Barthes without sounding like pretentious AI. In fact, the themes are more art-wonk than populist ("The Evolution of Abstract Painting in Modern Korea"; "Indigenismo in Latin America"; "In Conversation: James McNeil Whistler and Japan").
<http://tiny.cc/rzy1101>
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There are contemporary pieces in almost every installation, even among archaeological objects. Mostly it works, as the themes often treat the persistence of artistic concerns across time. The Lauren Halsey Sphinx adds scale to LACMA's second- and third-rate collection of Egyptian antiquities. Incidentally, there's another monumental Halsey relief and a Tavares Strachan bust, both new to the collection.
It was said that the Geffen would have 2500 to 3000 objects on view. That was dialed back to "over 2000," and at the media preview Govan called it "2000 and counting." (Talk about your incredible shrinking museum.) In any case, these are respectable numbers for a U.S. art museum that's not the Metropolitan.
My biggest concern with the thematic philosophy is that it might leave too much of the best, most representative, and most interesting art off view. To be shown, an object must fit a theme, and this presumably leaves some worthy objects to fall between the cracks. I'll have to reserve judgment on this until I'd have a chance to see the installation in full.
<http://tiny.cc/xzy1101>
Here's one clunker they did find room for, Gustave Surand's St. George and the Dragon. It's a hoot, but it might work better at the Lucas Museum than LACMA.
I didn't expect to see Buddhist art in the Geffen, for that's in "Realms of the Dharma" in the Resnick Pavilion. But there's a truly amazing core gallery of Buddhist art, anchored by the museum's great collection of Tibetan furniture. There are also installations of Japanese art, with the Japanese Pavilion still closed.
<http://tiny.cc/30z1101>
Perenchio gifts and more. The collection has improved considerably since the East Campus was torn down. A big reason is the Perenchio gift of Impressionist and Modern art, being shown in full for the first time. Museums generally avoid organizing art by donor, but most are happy to make an exception for a temporary installation introducing a new gift.
The red tint in the Perenchio room is Venetian red, a velvety pigment associated with Titian but used by artists from Jan van Eyck onward. Zumthor's red rooms remind me of Matisse's The Red Studio, in which the artist used Venetian red to incorporate chromatically adventurous paintings into a gesamtkunstwerk.
<http://tiny.cc/80z1101>
Maria and Conrad Janis gave a collection of modern and folk art in 2024. This Hicks is the most significant early American painting that LACMA has acquired in decades.
<http://tiny.cc/a0z1101>
Being shown for the first time is this 18th-century Paraguayan cabinet, a gift of the 2022 Collectors Committee.
Loans. One of Govan's talking points was the possibility of securing long-term loans from large foreign museums. It's an appealing idea, but I didn't see much evidence of it. I noticed two ancient Egyptian pieces from the Brooklyn Museum. That's worth pursuing: Brooklyn probably has Egyptian antiquities in its storeroom that would outclass anything on the West Coast.
Navigation. It's not easy to find your way around. I suggest ignoring the "oceans" and focusing on the city views for navigation.
<http://tiny.cc/h0z1101>
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Here's a Geffen's-eye view of the Jeff Koons topiary.
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This is the least engaging view out the Geffen windows. Let's hope the trees will give the neighbors some privacy.
<http://tiny.cc/x0z1101>
Here's the reinstalled Calder mobile, commissioned by the museum for its 1965 opening on Wilshire Boulevard.
_LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4dndy8vb> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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HERE’S WHAT LACMA’S LAVISH NEW BUILDING LOOKS LIKE by Ben Davis
At long last, and with plenty of civic fanfare, the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is ready to welcome its first visitors to its decades-in-the-making new flagship building, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor.
You ascend via stairs or elevator to the concrete-and-glass galleries, which are held aloft, straddling Wilshire Boulevard. From the outside, its profile is both spacey and organic feeling.
Inside, Zumthor’s architecture sweeps you along like a river—but it’s a river with plenty of eddies. It’s meant to let you get lost in little detours. Even with three hours strolling around, I kept finding new pockets, and—as intented—occasionally also not knowing exactly where I was.
You are never far from a window, providing ever-present views and drenching much of the art in the California sun (softened by tinted windows and signature curtains). A myriad of interior galleries, some large and some quite small, break up the center of the long space. These plunge you into cool shadow. The alternation is honestly dizzying sometimes.
CEO and director Michael Govan’s vision includes using this revamped architecture to refresh the museum’s presentation of history. Contemporary art mixes in with classical sculpture. The exact degree of mixing varies from room to room (and curator to curator), but overall, the museum is trying very hard to make sure that you never feel stuck in time or place. There is a loose geographical organization—by oceans, not continents, supposedly—but you generally find yourself not knowing what is coming next.
The build-up for the Zumthor opening included plenty of criticism and second-guessing of the indefatigable Govan’s passion project. Now the public gets to see for itself. While I personally ponder what I have to say, here are some photos to give a sense of what we’re talking about.
<https://tinyurl.com/mvjmrau5> _artnet

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CHARLES WHITE, "POPE X," 1972
<https://tinyurl.com/mt87yddh>
Francis Bacon, "Landscape with Pope/Dictator," c. 1946
<https://tinyurl.com/2ucn7fbj>
Andy Warhol meeting Pope John Paul II, April 1980
<https://tinyurl.com/bdej5x2s> _MichaelLobel

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LIKE A CONCRETE AIRCRAFT CARRIER
<https://tinyurl.com/2sj9j7xn>
This concrete colossus is home to the new David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), a $724m mothership designed by the fabled Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. It is less a museum than a mighty piece of infrastructure, a 110,000 sq ft warehouse-cum-bridge, jacked up nine metres in the air and looming above the street with a brooding, muscular heft. Two decades in the making, and subject to tortuous years of delays, controversies and cost escalations – building on a tar swamp in a seismic zone is not straightforward
Zumthor’s daring building might have brought in the collections and the funds, but it comes with an unspoken cost. Lifting the whole thing off the ground and spanning the road – a piece of structural theatrics more than a necessity – required 15,000 tonnes of steel reinforcement, twice as much as all the metal in the entire Eiffel Tower. The concrete bill is equally eye-watering. For every sq metre of floor area in Zumthor’s building, there are two cubic metres of solid concrete supporting it – compared to an average of 0.3 to 0.6 cubic metres for a typical large concrete building. In total, 65,000 cubic metres of concrete were poured, almost double the amount in LA’s Sixth Street Viaduct <https://tinyurl.com/3pmbz955> , a huge bridge that stretches for more than a kilometre across roads, railways and a river. Perhaps the carbon footprint is fitting, given whose name is on the building. In a 2021 ranking by The Conversation, the project’s lead donor, David Geffen, was listed as the most polluting individual American, due to his use of yachts and private jets.
I put the carbon question to Zumthor. Do the ends justify the means? Was it worth the extraordinary environmental impact to create this audacious structure, which ultimately has less gallery floor space than the buildings it replaces? “The horizon of ‘concrete uses too much carbon’,” he says, putting on a whiny complaining voice, “this is a very small horizon. This building will still be there when people are talking about other things.”
The window behind him frames a view of La Brea Tar Pits , an archaeological research park where the fossils of ice age animals have been discovered, preserved in bubbling pools of tar. Below Zumthor’s flaring concrete cantilevers, a model of a woolly mammoth drowns in a lake of crude oil, as a mother and baby mammoth look on helplessly. _: Oliver Wainwright_GuardianUK

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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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V&A CENSORED CATALOGUES AFTER DEMANDS BY CHINESE PRINTER
<https://tinyurl.com/3hj4cfhm>
One of the UK’s leading museums has accepted demands by a Chinese firm that publishes its catalogues to remove images that fall foul of the country’s censorship laws.
The Victoria and Albert Museum has agreed to requests by the Chinese printing company to delete maps and images from at least two recent exhibition catalogues, according to documents released tafter freedom of information requests.
Like other prominent institutions, including the British Museum, Tate and the British Library, the V&A often uses Chinese printers because they can produce catalogues at half the cost of British or European companies.
But in doing so, they have to accede to censorship requests relating to any topics or images deemed sensitive by the Chinese government, such as Buddhism, Taiwan, Tibet, Tiananmen Square and pro-democracy activities.
The disclosures from the V&A lay bare the detailed scope of China’s censorship on museum publishers. They show how Beijing’s red pen even extends to historical maps and photographs on seemingly unrelated subjects such as Fabergé eggs and British Black music.
They also show the apparent willingness of a publicly funded UK institution to agree to Chinese suppression despite the problems it can cause in the production process.
For the catalogue of the Music is Black exhibition, the V&A wanted to use a 1930s illustration of trade routes of the British empire. But an email from the V&A’s Chinese printers sent last November said it had fallen foul of Beijing’s censorship body, the General Administration of Press and Publication or GAPP.
The email from the Chinese printers, C&C Offset Printing, said: “There is a map on p10 relates to China (there is China border here and we need to use the standard maps from Chinese Government) and GAPP rejected it. Our suggestion is to delete this map or use another image.”
It said: “We were aware of sensitivity around contemporary maps but it now clearly applies to historic maps too. As we have ordered the paper to the printer it is sadly too late to move print to Europe, so we’ve had to put back the schedule a week in order to find a replacement illustration.”
The V&A also agreed to pull another map it wanted to use for catalogue to a 2021 exhibition Fabergé: Romance to Revolution. It also removed a photograph of Lenin from the book because the Chinese printers said Lenin could be deemed “sensitive” by GAPP. _GuardianUK

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FOUSSA ITAYA, CAT FIGHT, 1962.
<https://tinyurl.com/4rm87wax> _RabihAlameddine

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ARTNET MAKES SIGNIFICANT LAYOFFS FOLLOWING CONSOLIDATION WITH ARTSY by Alex Greenberger
Following yesterday’s news that Artsy and Artnet had been brought under the same leadership, the latter online art marketplace has laid off dozens of employees.
Sources told that the layoffs particularly impacted Artnet’s editorial arm, Artnet News, one of the most widely read art publications in the US and Europe. Among the senior reporters who are no longer at Artnet News are Sarah Cascone and Eileen Kinsella, both of whom were on staff at the publication for more than a decade.
Andrew Russeth, who previously served as executive editor of ARTnews, will reportedly now serve as the interim editor of Artnet News, which has historically operated out of New York, London, and Berlin.
Also severely impacted, according to those sources, was the Berlin team that helps facilitate Artnet’s efforts to sell art online.
In addition to publishing news articles and vending art listed by gallery partners, Artnet runs a database that allows users to track the results of sales held at major auction houses across the globe. Available at a premium fee, that database is frequently used by industry insiders and market experts.
A spokesperson for Artnet and Artsy confirmed there were layoffs at both companies, but declined to provide specifics on how many workers were let go and in which departments.
“As part of bringing Artsy and Artnet together as one company, we made organizational changes to build one go-forward team, including the elimination of some roles both at Artsy and Artnet,” the companies wrote in a joint statement to ARTnews. “These were difficult decisions and were not made lightly. Artnet’s German entity is being wound down as a separate business decision. We’re providing all affected employees with termination agreements that include severance and support. We communicated directly with affected employees and are committed to treating everyone with respect and supporting them through the transition. We’re very grateful for the contributions of those impacted.”
Artnet has experienced a prolonged period of financial difficulty, with its CEO abruptly resigning in September of last year ahead of a general meeting. In the months beforehand, Beowolff Capital, a British investment firm run by Andrew Evan Wolff, acquired a controlling stake in Artnet. “The digital art market is ripe for accelerated innovation,” he said at the time. Back in May of last year, Artnet was valued at 65 million euros.
“As part of bringing Artsy and Artnet together as one company, we made organizational changes to build one go-forward team, including the elimination of some roles both at Artsy and Artnet,” the companies wrote in a joint statement to ARTnews. “These were difficult decisions and were not made lightly. Artnet’s German entity is being wound down as a separate business decision. We’re providing all affected employees with termination agreements that include severance and support. We communicated directly with affected employees and are committed to treating everyone with respect and supporting them through the transition. We’re very grateful for the contributions of those impacted.”
Artnet has experienced a prolonged period of financial difficulty, with its CEO abruptly resigning in September of last year ahead of a general meeting. In the months beforehand, Beowolff Capital, a British investment firm run by Andrew Evan Wolff, acquired a controlling stake in Artnet. “The digital art market is ripe for accelerated innovation,” he said at the time. Back in May of last year, Artnet was valued at 65 million euros.
Yesterday, Jeffrey Yin, the CEO of Artsy, was appointed the leader of Artnet as well. “Artnet was founded to bring transparency to the art world, and Artsy to make discovering and buying art more accessible,” Yin said in aa statement, saying that the two companies now had “the chance to do something unprecedented—bring together every constituency of the art world, from galleries and auction houses to collectors and institutions, on a connected platform for the first time.”
The announcement noted that “nothing is changing for partners or users,” though it contained little information on how the staffs of both Artnet and Artsy would be impacted. The two companies touted their reach in that release, claiming to draw 7 million monthly visitors in more than 190 countries. _ARTnews

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ELEVATED DOOR VAN BUREN, ME
<https://tinyurl.com/5s4awsnc> _RuralIndexingProject

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ZOHRAN MAMDANI TO SKIP THE MET GALA
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and first lady Rama Duwaji have been invited to the Met Gala — but won’t be attending,
New York City’s mayor is traditionally invited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the lavish event every year, but we’re told that Mamdani, 34, won’t be joining Condé Nast’s Anna Wintour and her coterie of celeb guests
“He’s not coming,” said a source. “And it would be foolish if he did … can you imagine? It goes against everything he believes in.”
Mamdani has said, “I don’t think that we should have billionaires.” _NYPost

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MAMDANI TO SKIP MET GALA
Mamdani and Duwaji do believe in fashion, as evidenced their sharp and pointed sartorial choices—see his custom Carhartt jacket and her vintage Balenciaga coat. _ARTnews

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FOUNDATION, A PROMINENT NFT PLATFORM OF THE 2021 BOOM, SHUTS DOWN
Add one more casualty of the collapsed NFT market to the list: Foundation, a curated Ethereum-based marketplace that rose to prominence during the 2021 digital art boom. On Wednesday, cofounder and CEO Kayvon Tehranian announced in an open letter
“Our goal in pursuing a sale was always to see Foundation live on—to find someone who would keep the platform running and serve this community going forward,” Tehranian wrote. “That’s no longer possible.” that the platform’s sale to digital art company Blackdove collapsed, leaving no viable way to keep operating.
Foundation has now started a “wind-down process,” which will see the infrastructure underpinning the NFTs and digital assets backed by the platform kept active for a “one-year window.” Tehranian urged users to start the process of migrating off the platform.
The closure caps a brutal stretch for NFT platforms. In January, Nifty Gateway, a marketplace acquired by leading crypto-exchange Gemini in 2019, announced it would cease operations. During the NFT boom in 2021, the platform reported $300 million in sales, boosted by a Sotheby’s partnership for a $17 million NFT drop by the artist Pak.
NFT sales have dropped by as much as 70 percent since the 2021 boom, according to crypto news site CCN. The value of major NFT series like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, and others, have also collapsed. Christie’s shuttered its digital art department last fall, and Sotheby’s drastically reduced its Metaverse team in 2024. _ARTnews

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FLYING OVER THE NORTH POLE OF MARS
<https://tinyurl.com/yzave3h6> _NASA