OLD NEWS

LOIS DODD, "MOON RING", 1982,
<https://tinyurl.com/5x962mj2>

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PIERRE HUYGHE
<https://tinyurl.com/msbtf7te>
Go up the concrete stairs, cross the concrete floor and mind the concrete pillars. People are groping about in the darkness, waiting for their eyes to adjust, though most give up and start navigating by the light of their smartphones, trying to find Pierre Huyghe’s new work without quite realising they are already in it. Huyghe’s Liminals is more than just a film projected on a towering screen in a gutted power station. It is a quantum experiment, a mythological journey and a terrifying vision, set to a shifting thrum of gut-wobbling vibrations, a sizzling aural rain of dancing particles and sudden ear-splitting crackles which ricochet everywhere. You can’t always tell what’s happening on the screen and what’s happening in the cavernous space around you.
<https://tinyurl.com/ya36wfhu>
I could feel the vibrations even on the street outside, looking up at the brooding hulk of the defunct 1950s power and heating plant that once serviced the socialist paradise of postwar East Berlin. Now the home of the world’s most famous techno venue, Berghain, it also hosts a queer sex club, dark spaces and bars, while the plant’s former boiler room, the Halle am Berghain, with its columns and suspended coal chutes, has currently been taken over by the LAS Art Foundation to stage a number of exhibitions, including Huyghe’s Liminals.
Light comes and goes on the screen, never quite enough to let you sense the volume of the space you have entered. Distances are hard to gauge. A delicate hand emerges on the screen, not quite in colour, not quite in black and white. There’s a body here that’s almost human, in a bleak, desiccated landscape utterly devoid of life. It might as well be Mars. A female face with short cropped hair appears: except there is no face, just a yawning dark cavity scooped out between chin and brow. This is more than disconcerting. Suddenly everything tilts and there’s a roaring, flickering abyss opening up, and we see the same figure tiny and distant on the rim of an even greater, all-consuming void. Globs of light turn in space and are gone again. There is a great deal of aural and visual interference and everything hangs for a moment on the brink of total collapse. These anomalies and glitches in space and time are to do with Huyghe’s engagement with quantum mechanics, and the conversations he has been having, through the LAS Foundation, with physicists and philosophers. Artists often read or misread philosophy or science – whether it is Martin Heidegger or Werner Heisenberg – as if it were poetry, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
<https://tinyurl.com/3jh5vys3>
Watching Huyghe’s more or less human character navigate an entirely indifferent world is a painful experience. They seem all too human, as the camera homes in on their dirty hands and mottled skin, their cuts and grazes, their breasts and a caesarean scar, their vulnerable nakedness, made somehow more awkward and unsettling by being coded female. Sometimes going on hands and knees, sometimes walking purposefully, sometimes as inert on the ground as a beached fish, sometimes furrowing the ground with their head, or hitting their forehead against the earth, sometimes sitting and contemplating their hands with the eyes they don’t have; the sounds of scurrying and crawling, of granular sifting and the displacement of small stones make the whole thing both believable and extremely abject. Is this a person or an avatar? At one point they approach a gnarly outcrop of rock and penetrate the void in their head with it, moving back and forth, a cyclical, rhythmic motion that is both bizarre and awful to watch. Is this to do with Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle? Search me. At another point the figure’s hands become unnaturally malleable, their fingers curling and twisting the wrong way and becoming peculiarly attenuated.
The camera dwells on shapes in the rocks, on shadows and silhouettes. I see a human profile here, a pair of lips and a whole face there, accidental gargoyles staring back, not unlike Willem de Kooning’s sculptures, or Francis Bacon’s painted heads. Seeking out expressions, we project them on to the inanimate. Something else shimmers in the murk, but it is less likely gold than a turd. I also thought of Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, and of endlessly crawling through mud, and good old-fashioned existential dread. Speaking with Huyghe after spending an hour in Liminals, he said it was good to take one step towards cliche, but never two.
<https://tinyurl.com/muf9avwc>
So much of this new work relates to earlier sculptures and films by the French artist. I thought of the macaque monkey, dressed as a waitress and wearing a female, human mask in his 2014 film Untitled (Human Mask), set in an abandoned restaurant near the Fukushima nuclear exclusion zone, and the concrete replica of a 19th-century reclining nude sculpture by Max Weber, with its head encased in a live beehive, as part of Huyghe’s Untilled at Documenta 13 in 2012.
What’s on the screen and what’s happening in the space around me get confused. What is happening in the here-and-now of Liminals relates back to Huyghe’s earlier work, an entire world becoming more rounded with each new work. This is deliberate on Huyghe’s part. For all the talk of quantum mechanics, of the collapse of the wave form, of waves and particles (which is how we’ve always been thinking about light) what seems to me to matter here is a kind of porousness, between past and present, things and images, insides and outsides. One of the reasons the artist wanted to show at Berghain was to echo the activities elsewhere in the building, the bodies dancing, people desiring and craving and losing themselves in music and in sex, in spaces that are both limitless and bounded. Liminals has lodged in my head, and won’t go away. How alive it all is, how unhinging. _GuardianUK

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TIME
<https://tinyurl.com/4uyrt55z> _DavidShrigley

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19. THE TACO TRUCK by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/ycxp7sp4>
Most people have forgotten about the terrible storm that devastated Houston in 2017. Hurricane Harvey dropped an astonishing nine trillion gallons of water onto the city, destroying neighborhoods and lives. But something beautiful emerged from the calamity. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: people put their differences aside and truly pull together in a disaster. Volunteers from all over the country came to help. And during the worst days, the taco trucks came out to feed people.
It’s the same story everywhere. From Midwestern tornadoes to last year’s fires in Los Angeles, the trucks always show up.
Taco trucks emerged in the 1970s in Los Angeles to bring food directly to customers without the need for brick-and-mortar spaces. They are mostly beloved now, but that’s not always been the case. Ironically, the characteristics that irritate their opponents are the very things that allow the trucks to improvise care on the fly: park first, negotiate later, feed a lot of people, and hang the bureaucracy. By design, they are nimble and mobile. In disasters they feed whomever is there, without ceremony—emergency responders, volunteers, devastated people who have lost everything. In that brief exchange of food, looking someone in the eye and being seen in return, the essential humanity of both sides is restored. On any regular day, a delicious, simple, inexpensive meal on a paper plate is a gift. In the midst of catastrophe, it’s grace. One of those moments reminding us that we are all in this together. _TheImpatientReader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/p8e9j5zt> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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"AS OUR CELEBRATED ARCHITECTS SIGN OFF, WE SHOULD RESIST THE URGE TO REPLACE THEM"
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7vcdf6>
Our focus on charismatic or otherwise exceptional people means that we overlook the inherently group-oriented and gregarious nature of architectural practice.
The "starchitect" was a figment of media attention, drummed up to answer our interest in celebrity, and our exaggerated expectations of what might be achieved without the help of other people. It belongs to a deluded, more decadent age. An age of "great men", and "free credit". Of "upward mobility", and the slim possibility of being "self-made".
Some 30 years on, wearied by austerity, and wise – occasionally – to hype, we know that if stars appear to twinkle, it is largely owing to the atmospheric fug through which we see them. Architecture has become so distorted by the mechanisms of publicity and preferment that all but a few players go unnoticed, and under-served.
On consideration, the very idea of starchitects seems frankly antisocial. The share of skills and influence in the industry was always more nebulous than reports led us to believe. But for some reason the myth of pure creative autonomy, and attribution, is something we can't seem to kick.
Frank Gehry was one of only a few architects ever to excite any interest outside architecture itself. You didn't have to know much about architecture to enjoy his work.
Like all great art, you could like it for the wrong reasons. But the more you learned, the better you realised he was, and in ways that often complicated that early enjoyment.
Gehry was the architect's starchitect. His early work proves the guarantor of his later credit. We welcome the reminder in Johan Dehlin's superb photographic study of the houses <https://tinyurl.com/mrybs4x4> , that he was blessed – long before Bilbao – with an instinct for articulate form.
In a recent essay on these projects in his book Dirty Old River, Tom Emerson locates Gehry's genius in his having enlisted ordinary construction methods to extravagant ends. It is this ability to draw on the skills of other people, to delegate, to give instructions, or – in AI parlance – prompts, that is key to Gehry's great contribution.
At a slant to the industry standard, he sought always to make his work intelligible, and managed to do so without diminishing its magic. Crucially, he made "Architecture" available to those who build it.
Cutting through the puff and clamour since his death, we see the occasional tribute which tells of a genial, unpretentious person. An architect who, in spite of the persistent efforts of his apologists, dismissed claims of exceptional insight, and repeatedly made public the debt he owed to technology, and those who could wield it for him.
Like all great architects, Gehry knew that you can't go it alone. Buildings are like babies – it takes a village, as they say, to raise them.
The larger part of an architect's time is spent not in the throes of creative inspiration, but coordinating the work of a growing list of consultants. Emails, essentially. We are not, as the humble brag holds, generalists. Properly speaking, we collect specialists – as the lengthening credits on each new project will attest.
There may be avenues in professional life which allow for some measure of self determination. A career in architecture is no longer one of them.
Architectural practice today has more to do with delegation than design. Consequently the press, the public, your competitors, even your colleagues, have such a hand in how things go, that in most cases your work will only be as successful as others want or allow it to be.
This might sound less than favourable, particularly to those who entertain the common and highly marketable delusion that they can have a decisive influence in their own success. But for those of us who aspire to a more cooperative, less competitive working life, there's encouragement in it: architecture entails company.
The established model of the architect as independent creative genius has had its day. Rather than lament that fact, we should embrace it.
The new architect is among other things, more sociable. They acknowledge the importance of putting together teams of people in diverse ways more capable than they are. More than this, they create the appropriate conditions for those people to flourish, and contribute in a meaningful way to the production of good work.
Such is our weakness for individuals, and so phobic our attitudes to anonymity, that we routinely misallocate the credit for said work. We cleave to the idea of authorship, and overlook the thousand minor contributions made by others. We still believe that the greatest achievements are made by exceptional people, in flight from compromise.
But we should resist this tendency, because the flip side is something more open and equitable. We must keep in our minds the idea of confederacy, or common aim. Of shared purpose. We must get wise to the eminently and ideally collaborative nature of architecture. We must learn to revere projects, not persons.
_Matthew Bovingdon-Downe_Dezeen

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CHUCK CLOSE, "PHIL," 1976
<https://tinyurl.com/3vr6f9h4> _MichaelLobel

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GUGGENHEIM MUSEUM REVEALS 2025 ACQUISITIONS,
New York’s Guggenheim Museum has revealed the 39 works that it acquired last year,
<https://tinyurl.com/36juvsrj>
<https://tinyurl.com/4pbvwntd>
<https://tinyurl.com/hcbnhuk9>
<https://tinyurl.com/yv78df7t>
<https://tinyurl.com/yzv6nj6w>
<https://tinyurl.com/mub25hmf>

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NUTZ DEEP II NORTH SPENCER, WI
<https://tinyurl.com/3rcuvw7w> _RuralIndexingProject

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PERSISTENT LOW ATTENDANCE AND FUNDING CUTS ARE FORCING US MUSEUMS TO THINK LOCAL
Among the museum directors paying keen attention to the ruling, on 3 December, that all federal grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) would be reinstated, the director of the Seattle Art Museum Scott Stulen heaved a sigh of relief. In 2025, the Pacific Northwest’s leading art museum saw all its federal funding cut. That represented the loss of an annual income stream, he says, of between $300,000 and $400,000.
Stulen’s museum has an annual operating budget of $42m, so the federal funding cuts were not life-threatening. But, as he puts it, they did hurt. “We filled holes as we could, with the hope that we would get reimbursed in the future.”
That hope appears to have been well-founded, but wider economic uncertainty and shifts in visitor—and donor—patterns are growing concerns. Of the 511 museum directors the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) surveyed in its National Snapshot of United States Museums, published in November, one in four said their bottom lines were weaker than in 2019. Federal funding accounts for just 3% of average museum income. The larger factors contributing to directors’ unease are the impact of the affordability crisis and where audiences are choosing to spend their dollars—whether as visitors or donors.
Over 50% of the AAM survey’s respondents reported fewer visitors than in 2019 and 29% reported “declines tied to weakened travel and tourism and/or economic uncertainty”. This, of course, varies hugely from state to state.
For museums whose attendance has always tracked more local than national or foreign, things are looking good. The Toledo Museum of Art’s director and chief executive Adam Levine says attendance is now 50% higher than immediately after lockdown, and exceeding pre-pandemic levels. “The caveat is that we are a free museum,” he says. Before Covid-19, attendance was measured in the aggregate, whether someone had come to see the art indoors or to walk their dog in the sculpture garden. Since lockdown, the museum has counted in a more granular way, so that 50% increase pertains specifically to gallery visitation.
Attendance at the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) is also 13% higher year on year, though it is still lagging by 7% compared with before the pandemic. The museum’s president and director James Rondeau ascribes this “almost exclusively” to sluggish recovery of international visitation. “Despite slower international tourism, those declines have been offset by significant growth in domestic tourism,” he says, “which has recovered in full, as well as important gains in local Chicago attendance. Paid local attendance is actually higher than it was pre-pandemic.”
In Seattle, meanwhile, where businesses across the board are bearing the brunt of the ongoing Canadian pullback in US travel, with numbers down by 50%, according to Stulen the museum’s attendance is actually back up to 2019 levels, even though tourist numbers account for 15% of the Seattle Art Museum’s overall attendance.
So, too, in New York. In early December, visitor numbers at the Museum of the Moving Image for 2025 were on course to exceed 2019 total visits, despite the downturn in international tourism to the city. “The most significant growth has come from local and regional visitors, reflecting a strategic focus on broader New York-area communities rather than on longhaul international tourists,” says Aziz Isham, the museum’s director.
Patchy attendance, the AAM’s report shows, is compounded by growing financial strain. Nearly one third of respondents cited downturns resulting from less travel and tourism, as well as “economic uncertainty”. These dynamics impact museums in two ways.
First, museums across the country underscore the urgency of rising operational expenditures. Stulen, who sits on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors, says labour costs are up by 20%, building materials by 15% and shipping by as much as 30%. The expense of doing business has many institutions “treading water”, he says.
Second, individuals are being impacted by the affordability crisis just as much as institutions are. As a free museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) does not rely on visitor numbers in terms of ticket sales, though attendance does affect grant opportunities. In 2025, CAMH was one of many museums to see its National Endowment for the Arts funding cut. Amid the whiplash, Melissa McDonnell-Luján, who is CAMH’s co-director with Ryan Dennis, says they thought the federal funding cuts might spur an uptick in individual philanthropy or membership, but that has not happened. “That’s been a surprise,” she says.
Stulen points to changes in how visitors are choosing to spend their money. “We’re seeing it on the lower income levels,” he says. “People are coming on free days, and maybe not coming as frequently as they were before.”
The data bears this out, according to Joanne Hsu, an economist who heads up the University of Michigan’s Surveys of Consumers, conducted since 1946. In early December, 47% of consumers said high prices are weighing down their personal finances, a figure Hsu describes as “really high”. She says more people are cutting back on expenditure, or stopping it altogether, than in 2022. Dale Berning Sawa_ _ArtNewspaper

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THIS GESTURE MEANS: I AM READING, F*CK OFF.
<https://tinyurl.com/ycka277v> _‪DanielBellingradt‬

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HARD CHOICES:CAN YOU STILL HACK BEING A CONTEMPORARY ART CURATOR? by Chen & Lampert
You landed a desirable museum job as a contemporary art curator in the mid-2000s and quickly became a power broker on the scene. Back then you sashayed into openings, boogied at afterparties, waltzed through studio visits, and grooved with young artists. A couple decades later, you have two grade-schoolers, a mortgage, and limited energy to discover what is happening in Bushwick. Can you still do your job without going out raging every night? Take this quiz to find out if you are still plugged in or ready for hair plugs.
1. You try to reference a contemporary artist in a panel talk but instead blurt out:
a) Seth Price
b) Charlie Kirk
c) Luigi Mangione
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2. A junior curator suggests a survey exhibition of artists born after 2000. You think:
a) Maybe my kid can be in it
b) Are you familiar with a similar show that I curated in a basement in Providence in 2002?
c) FML
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3. You run into an artist you worked with 15 years ago who says, “You changed my life.” You think:
a) Who are you?
b) Yup, I sure did
c) Please, will you change mine?
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4. Your babysitter cancels an hour before a must-see Dimes Square poetry reading. You:
a) Drink chamomile tea and read them Eileen Myles at bedtime
b) Bring your kids and post pics of them reading The Whitney Review
c) Watch on Instagram Live while hiding from the kids in your Zoom closet
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5. To catch up on the latest art news and conversations, you:
a) Read Artforum
b) Read Spike
c) Read the 50 articles a week that Alex Greenberger writes for ARTnews
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6. To keep up with the latest trends in cutting-edge music and performance you go to:
a) Issue Project Room
b) “Abasement” at Artists Space
c) The guy who bangs on a bucket with a stick on 14th Street
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7. At a studio visit, the artist hands you a VR headset. You:
a) Immediately leave
b) Make a joke about entering the Matrix that only you laugh at
c) Use it to try and log into your Criterion account
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8. You’ve been asked to join a curatorial advisory board for a Gen Z artist-run space. You:
a) Rally collectors to buy tables at the annual benefit
b) Get your nipples pierced and microdose ketamine GHB eye drops
c) Poke out your eyes with a hot iron stake
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9. The young artist you are talking to has schmutz on their cheek. You:
a) Lick your finger and wipe it off
b) Cross their name off the biennial list
c) Quickly switch partners in your bisexual polycule
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10. At an afterparty, a gallerist hands you a drink ticket. You:
a) Order a V8 with a prune juice sidecar
b) Pass it on to a poor young artist who is six drinks deep
c) Mace the gallerist for soliciting you without consent
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SCORES
10–16: Continue to glom on to your 20-something-year-old assistant and their cool friends for as long as possible. Their fresh ideas will inspire you to new heights (or nadirs) of plagiarism. The real question is: Would anyone actually pay attention if you had an original idea?
17–23: Like so much contemporary art, you have nothing in particular to say. You’ve made it this far without anyone noticing there’s very little there there, so keep doing whatever it is you do for the next couple decades, and this indifference will pay off in some hard-to-imagine way.
24–30: You’ve seen and shown it all—and will continue to do so without pain and suffering. Art still excites you in a way that is admirable and, frankly, frightening. Your love of art and artists, old and young, will see you through until you are eventually pushed out by vengeful but indebted Gen Alphas. _ArtInAmerica

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KOBAYASHI KIYOCHIKA, "WINTER MOON-KINRYUZAN FROM THE BANKS OF THE SUMIDA RIVER", 1915,
<https://tinyurl.com/4ndrb7js> _RabihAlameddine