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CHARLES VICTOR GUILLOUX, L'ALLÉE D'EAU, 1895
<https://tinyurl.com/2azkx2y6> _RabihAlameddine

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WHY IT’S MADNESS TO MOVE THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY TO BRITAIN by David Hockney
Some things are too precious to take a risk with. Moving the Bayeux Tapestry is one of them. It is nearly a thousand years old, the most complete narrative work of art in Europe, and remember it is very long, more than 70 metres in length. It is fragile, which makes it madness to think of moving it. It is too big a risk.
I first saw the tapestry in 1967 and have seen it more than 20 times in the last three years. And it is beautiful as well as historically important. Backed on linen, the colours and the marvellous needlework make it not just vulnerable, but it will be put in jeopardy if it is moved to London, as the British Museum plans an exhibition there. I think it should not be uprooted from where it has been kept safe for so many centuries, and I will explain why. I have been a risk-taker in most things I have done, but I never see any advantage in being reckless.
First, a history lesson. It is fundamental to our island story. The tapestry was created in the 1070s after the Norman Conquest and was commissioned by Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was the half-brother of William the Conqueror. Made in Canterbury, it is a display of events leading up to and including the Battle of Hastings. It illustrated King Edward the Confessor and William of Normandy’s claim to the English throne and the Norman invasion, and Harold’s death. The 58 narrative scenes have been observed in Bayeux for nearly a millennium, and it has survived political upheaval and wars, and now faces an unnecessary conservation ordeal with the British Museum.
https://tinyurl.com/yeyn9bvcM
I note that this beautiful work, which is more an embroidery than a tapestry, has no shadows and no reflections, which is the same as traditional art from India, Persia, China and Japan. It was not until the camera came in as an artist’s aid that these things emerged. Use both eyes, not just one – ie a camera. The tapestry has a natural and timeless way of observing in art. That is what I suggest the British Museum does, literally. Look at what it plans to do, as history is in its hands.
The British Museum sent someone to see me to explain why they want to bring the tapestry to London. I am not sure they had worked out how to transport it. The person who came had not read my book Secret Knowledge, which explains the development of art and perspective, and the Bayeux Tapestry is a key part of that; it is historic and important.
Moving the Bayeux Tapestry across the Channel for an exhibition would involve significant risk. I have looked into this. The linen backing is weakened by age, and the wool embroidery threads are vulnerable to stress. Rolling, unrolling, or hanging it in a new way can cause tearing, stitch loss and distortion of the fabric. Uneven tension is causing structural strain. Even minor mishandling could cause irreversible damage. It has survived so far like a miracle, being hidden away for 300 years until it was displayed permanently in the 1800s.
The tapestry is acclimatised to tightly controlled conditions in Bayeux. Sudden changes in temperature, humidity or light exposure can lead to fibre contraction or expansion or colour fading.
Wool dyes are highly light-sensitive. Increased exposure during exhibition and transit accelerates fading and fibre degradation.
Conservation ethics generally favour minimal display time for such textiles. Each stage – packing, unpacking, mounting – introduces new handling. The more unlikely risks are theft, fire, accident or activist protests. Even with high security, risk is never zero.
Modern museum practice is meant to prioritise preservation over access. While moving the Bayeux Tapestry to the UK might have vanity and symbolic educational value, the physical and environmental risks are substantial. Any damage would be irreversible, and even successful transport could shorten the tapestry’s lifespan.
Rolling up something that has been hanging in the same place for hundreds of years could, in seconds, lead to damage. This is not like the Mona Lisa, which is easy to move and which once went to America on a ship (but it is not 70m long and can be packed in a simple case). To what end? The vanity of a museum which wants to boast of the number of visitors. Is it really worth it? I think not.
I suggest it stays, and there is a proper debate about it being moved. Make an identical copy. It is not difficult. It would look fantastic. It is also not as if the tapestry is inaccessible to anyone in London. It is just six hours away by car. But if it is moved, it should take a lot longer as it would have to go by lorry and train and at a snail's pace to stop potential vibrations and jolting.
I have been told it is insured for £80m. That is meaningless. It is priceless. And it is now safe and open to anyone to see it. Why does a London museum, which prides itself on conserving and preserving great art, want to gamble on the survival of the most important art image of scale in Europe? It is madness. I am not afraid to speak up for art. It is something that has defined my life for more than eight decades. Love life. Use two eyes. _IndependentUK

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AGAINST
<https://tinyurl.com/2vm4yvzn> _DavidShrigley

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11. WILSON BENTLEY SNOWFLAKE PHOTOGRAPHS by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/3um3usrn>
Our universe can feel overwhelmingly chaotic. But it also reveals itself to be patterned, generous, and infinitely inventive, if we pause to look.
Take snowflakes, which fall unnoticed by the billions every winter. Their hexagonal shape is determined by the hydrogen bonds in water. They are symmetrical because, in frozen water’s crystalline structure, molecules naturally arrange themselves like tiles following a pattern. Most astonishing is the fact that the whole complex, beautiful structure arises spontaneously, literally out of thin air, as the snowflake tumbles through the winter clouds.
But it requires uncommon dedication and attentiveness to see how a flake of ice contains a complete, unique expression of universal law, briefly incarnated, before it’s gone.
Wilson A. Bentley was born on a farm in 1865 in Jericho, Vermont, where he lived all his life. Jericho was in Vermont’s “snowbelt,” with annual snowfall sometimes exceeding 120 inches. Although raised to be a farmer, Bentley developed an interest in snow crystals after he received a microscope for his fifteenth birthday. In 1885, Bentley made the first successful photograph of a snowflake. He was 19 years old.
His devotion bordered on the monastic, working for decades through blizzards, sometimes all night, in temperatures below zero in unheated spaces. He would carefully capture a snowflake on a tray of chilled black velvet, quickly position the flake using a feather, and take a photograph before the flake melted or sublimated. Over nearly 50 years of winters, he produced thousands of spectacular images that still fascinate.
<https://tinyurl.com/5fxkpjt8> _TheImpatientReader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/tcbmce74> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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UNTITLED EKPHRASTIC POEM ON JULIAN DASHPER
Julian Dashper played his sculpture The Warriors, a/k/a drum set, that one time at Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery. Each beat sounded his faith in modern art. The snare drum shouted Wassily Kandinsky, who thought orange was the Angelus prayer. The kick said Kenneth Noland: concentric rings in Robin’s egg, white, and yolk. The red dot and silver-ringed tom – a bang for Jasper Johns. The Warriors was also Julian’s rugby team. He would see them reach the Grand Finals in 2002 but not in 2011. Warriors’ superstar Ruben Wiki visited him in hospice care. I hope he offered these words: “And at the hour of our death, Amen.” The last time I saw Julian, he sat on a red-and-blue striped couch in my living room, holding forth like Barnett Newman. I never heard The Warriors.
<https://tinyurl.com/mt9z834n> _David Raskin_NewWorldWritingQuarterly

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DAVID HAMMONS, INJUSTICE CASE, 1970
<https://tinyurl.com/crr2ubzb> _MichaelLobel

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HILTON ALS ON JOHNS’S LITTLE GUYS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/yc422ndc>
I really wished I’d seen the show of Jasper Johns drawings when I went deep on the little stick figures motif. Perilous Night, a 1990 watercolor, was the earliest of several works in the show in which the little guys appeared.
And I REALLY wish I’d gotten the catalogue immediately, because I just picked it up this afternoon, and Hilton Als had this to say about the stick figures in Perilous Night:
The right side of this watercolor and ink on paper is a replica of a score by John Cage, a close friend of Johns for many years. Cage wrote “Perilous Night” in 1943 and 1944. A composition for a prepared piano, it’s an angry piece whose strong rhythms speak to us emotionally—he was going through a difficult time with his then wife, the surrealist artist Xenia Cage—even as we understand that Cage is asking questions about what the piano can and cannot do. Who’s to say? In Johns’s piece, the sheet music floats against an abstract field made up of vertical shapes that reach up, up, up toward the top of the page. On the bottom of the work, a strip of green field. Three little stick figures stand on that green, gesticulating. Who are they? What are they? Fallen notes from Cage’s score?(Johns doesn’t render the notes in Cage’s score; all we see are traces of notes.) Or are those tiny figures from Johns’s and Cage’s past? Johns’s Perilous Night is an exercise, too, in depth—an experiment that challenges Johns’s famous flatness. One image tells us about another: the sheet music leads us to the abstraction, and the abstraction leads us to that little strip of green. It’s a work that’s giddy with possibility, a kind of “what if” piece. What if I put a little green here? And figures there? What happens to the work? To the eye? To the eye of the ideas? _greg.org

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KOONS BLOOMS
<http://tiny.cc/9rpx001>
The installation of Jeff Koons' Split-Rocker at LACMA appears to be complete. Pineapple express rains followed by 80-degree January temperatures have the 37-foot high vegan sculpture in early bloom. _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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‘BIGGER AND LOWER’: BULL IN DUTCH PAINTING ONCE HAD MUCH LARGER TESTICLES
<https://tinyurl.com/4yywxsxw>
The Bull by Paulus Potter is one of the star paintings at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, a bucolic image of animals and a farmer.
But new research suggests the painting has unexpected hidden depths: conservators restoring the artwork say the bull’s testicles were originally much larger, and appeared to have been halved in size by the artist to respect 17th-century sensibilities.
“We found that Potter made lots of changes as he worked,” said Abbie Vandivere, a paintings conservator at the museum. “[The bull’s] balls were bigger and lower, his whole back end was shifted – but, indeed, the balls are the biggest change.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2trava43>
The surprise emerged when a team of conservators, who have been working for 18 months to restore the painting, made X-rays to understand how Potter created his composition of farming life. Looking at his initial painting, and consulting cattle experts, they found there were indeed contemporary breeds with “giant, pendulous testicles”.
While Potter may have made the changes to portray a younger bull, the working theory is that the naked truth was considered unfit for polite society in 1647.
<https://tinyurl.com/422zz4xb> _GuardianUK

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THE END ZONE SALEM, SD
<https://tinyurl.com/3scsrxkh> _RuralIndexingProject

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THE LACE MAKER, 1662.
Seems so quiet, but you know her bobbins are clicking away.
By Caspar Netscher,
<https://tinyurl.com/yysb8wh9> _Dr.PeterPaulRubens

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A HOUSE IN PLAYA BRAVA
<https://tinyurl.com/48hbsvwc>
was designed by Argentine architect Ricardo Gomara
<https://tinyurl.com/57t8ntjb>
in the 80s
<https://tinyurl.com/7xpnvj5r> ‪Brutalismbot‬

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A MAN, A PHONE, AND ABSOLUTELY NO POINT: HAPPY BIRTHDAY JEFF by The art daddy
Jeff Magid has become the unofficial human pop-up ad of the art world: under-informed, overconfident, and impossible to close. He arrives mid-scroll, uninvited, hijacking attention before you’ve even remembered why the app was opened. This past weekend, in what I can only assume marked a near-50th birthday, he commemorated the occasion by filming himself in motion, speaking into his phone with the urgency of someone convinced wisdom activates once the step counter starts ticking. What follows resembles thinking without the inconvenience of reflection—a stream of half-formed observations delivered with total certainty and zero proof that any of it deserved public release. There’s no skip function, no mute option, and no indication that consent was ever granted. It isn’t commentary so much as autoplay: a self-promotional interruption that insists on itself and leaves behind the distinct irritation of time you’ll never get back.
The birthday Reel does exactly what his content always does. Jeff smiles, performs casual gravitas, and radiates the confidence of a man who believes recording himself automatically generates meaning. Meanwhile, behind him, the world continues without consultation. A woman speed walks past with the urgency of someone escaping a five alarm fire. She does not acknowledge him. She does not slow down. She yawns. This yawn is not dramatic or symbolic in any elevated sense. It is basic. It is physiological. It is the body responding honestly to boredom. The yawn is the thesis.
Like the Daddy that I am, and after a poll, because even dragging men should involve community consent, Art Daddy followers requested a Jeff b-day essay. Not a clapback. Not a feud. An essay. What follows is not really about Jeff as an individual, but more about a familiar art world archetype: the male art influencer who mistakes proximity for participation and assumes that speaking near art counts as engagement.
<https://tinyurl.com/3fyyetz9>
For those who don’t know who Jeff Magid, is or why Daddy is always irritated, he is a former poker player turned art collector, which is usually code for money first and curiosity never. We can safely assume he comes from wealth. His life reads less like an art world trajectory and more like an extra on Vanderpump Rules who keeps wandering into scenes without a mic.
He was once linked to actress and model Emily Ratajkowski, a relationship that appeared to involve him being present and her dissociating the entire time. Jeff claims to have graduated from Brown, which Daddy is still independently confirming. His formal art world résumé includes exactly one lazy byline under his own name at ARTnews, and Daddy is fully convinced he paid them to let him write it. Rumor has it he enjoys flipping art, there is a Reddit thread about it if you feel like ruining your afternoon, and he has also apparently been a music producer, which somehow explains everything. To be clear, art collectors are art collectors, but every serious one I’ve met is deeply knowledgeable about the work they acquire and the worlds they move through. This does not appear to be the case here, though we have yet to meet, and I genuinely dread the day I encounter Jeff speed walking down a New York sidewalk with his iPhone on record, explaining nothing with absolute confidence.
Jeff likely imagines himself a modern-day flâneur, and to be clear, this is not an indictment of the nineteenth-century concept. The flâneur observed. He lingered. He absorbed the city with patience and attentiveness. Jeff, by contrast, has been flooding my feed for months filming himself mid-stride, visibly out of breath, offering half-baked observations with the confidence of revelation. He speaks as though insight naturally emerges the moment a man begins walking and talking at the same time. There is an unshakable belief that movement equals meaning, that if the body is in motion the thoughts must be going somewhere important.
What he practices is not flânerie but cardio content: a performance of thought rather than thinking itself. The city becomes a backdrop, not something engaged with, and reflection is replaced by breathless urgency. The walk does not sharpen perception; it merely legitimizes the monologue. The result is not observation but narration—an ongoing insistence that presence alone constitutes depth
Jeff’s entire aesthetic is activity without arrival. He is always walking but never landing anywhere, always speaking but never finishing a thought. His videos are dimly lit, poorly framed, and structurally incoherent, yet delivered with the authority of someone who assumes that saying something out loud turns it into an idea and is on a TED Talk stage. He does not edit because editing would require reflection, and reflection might introduce the uncomfortable realization that not every thought needs an audience.
What makes this unsettling is not Jeff himself but the scale at which this behavior is rewarded. Nearly ninety thousand people follow him. This is influence. And that influence is built on vibes masquerading as expertise, confidence unburdened by knowledge, and the cultural permission routinely extended to men who talk at length about things they openly admit they do not fully understand.
Jeff is very clear about one thing. He is not an art world expert. He says this often, usually right before explaining the art world. He disavows expertise while performing authority, a maneuver that allows him to speak confidently without ever being accountable for accuracy. This is not humility. It is a liability waiver disguised as transparency.
Despite repeatedly insisting he is not an expert, Jeff spends an extraordinary amount of time instructing viewers on fairs, institutions, cities, hierarchies, and taste. He positions himself as a guide, a translator, a decoder of culture, while loudly insisting he should not be held responsible for what he decodes. He wants the benefits of authority without the inconvenience of being right. Even though he thinks he always is.
This contradiction is not accidental. It is the business model. By disavowing expertise, Jeff avoids being wrong. By performing authority, he accrues power. If a take lands, it sounds informed. If it collapses, he was never an expert to begin with. It is the rhetorical equivalent of posting with comments turned off.
This becomes especially clear in a Reel from last month when Jeff shared his Basel prep and casually revealed that his approach involved Arthur Analytics and just vibing. Arthur Analytics is not introduced as a method or a framework but as a brand name meant to quiet doubt. It functions like a designer logo stitched onto an otherwise empty outfit. The implication is not that research has been done but that sounding adjacent to research should be enough.
https://tinyurl.com/bp6unvte
What Arthur Analytics actually does is beside the point. What matters is what Jeff believes saying it does. It signals seriousness without requiring thought. It gestures toward rigor without demanding interpretation. He never explains what data he is looking at, what questions he is asking, or how any of it shapes his thinking, because the data is not there to be engaged. It is there to be mentioned. Analytics become a prop. Say the name and authority is supposed to materialize.
For someone who insists he is not an art world expert, organizing fair strategy around Arthur Analytics is an especially funny choice. It allows him to outsource judgment while continuing to narrate conclusions. It creates plausible deniability while maintaining the appearance of insight. At a certain point the content stops being confusing and starts being embarrassing.
Jeff does not engage with art history, criticism, labor, or power. He does not situate himself within conversations that existed before his phone camera. He does not acknowledge the economic or institutional structures shaping what he consumes and comments on. Instead, he reduces the art world to a sequence of walk and talks, flattening complexity into something that can be delivered between crosswalks.
And yet he is rewarded. This is the actual issue. The influencer economy privileges men who sound certain over people who are careful. It amplifies confidence, not competence. It does not ask whether someone understands what they are saying, only whether they are saying it consistently.
Jeff Magid is not evil. He is representative. He is the predictable outcome of an ecosystem that replaced critique with content and analysis with vibes. He represents a generation of men who believe occupying space equals contributing to it, that visibility equals value, and that speaking equals thinking.
Harmlessness is not innocence either especially when tens of thousands of people absorb their understanding of the art world through this lens, nuance disappears. Labor becomes invisible. Artists become lifestyle accessories. Institutions become scenery. Criticism becomes something you walk past while talking about yourself.
This is why the birthday Reel matters. While Jeff narrates himself, the city opts out. The woman yawning behind him is not rude. She is correct. She is late for something real. He is early for nothing. The Reel captures the gap between his self perception and his actual impact.
Jeff believes he is narrating culture. At best, he is interrupting it. New York does not pause for him. The art world is not waiting for his takes. The city continues faster, smarter, more tired, and entirely unconcerned.
And on his birthday of all days, Jeff received the clearest review of his work to date. Not in the comments. Not in a duet. Not in an essay. But in a yawn. A woman mid stride opting out of the performance entirely. The body choosing boredom over participation. The nervous system declining to engage. It is the most honest response his content has ever received. A yawn in dissent.
My social media crusade against Jeff Magid is not rooted in obsession, but in refusal. Refusal to let men like this occupy cultural space uncontested. Refusal to pretend that repetition equals relevance or that proximity to art constitutes engagement with it. This is not about silencing him. It is about naming the dynamic and moving on. The crusade lives in the comments, in the polls, and in the collective eye roll of those of us who actually work in this world and are tired of watching it flattened into vibes for content. If Jeff Magid is a symptom, then this is the diagnosis delivered publicly, deliberately, and without ceremony. _TheArtDaddy

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PEOPLE IN GREENLAND RESPONDING THE THE US
(Inuit wood and bone sculpture from Greenland, c. 1900 or earlier):
<https://tinyurl.com/dkrshwrd> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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STOLEN LOUVRE JEWELS WERE LAST SEEN IN A PARKING GARAGE
There has been a breakthrough in the case of the $102 million heist of the Louvre jewels in Paris. Investigators say they have traced the thieves to an underground parking garage where they temporarily stashed the imperial jewels. The surveillance footage of the location marks the last confirmed sighting of the trove, which has now been missing for nearly three months.
Less than an hour after the brazen daylight robbery on October 19, surveillance footage at a garage in Aubervilliers, a suburb of Paris, recorded two of the four suspects handling some the jewels, according to police. This new evidence, helps establish the suspects’ movements and actions on the day of the heist ahead of their upcoming appearance before a Paris investigating judge. But the current whereabouts of the valuable jewels remain a mystery. _artnet

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JAN MANKE, ROW OF TREES, 1915
<https://tinyurl.com/2kbachsm> _RabihAlameddine