OLD NEWS

TUFTED TITMICE SINGING by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/dhyrvw2k>
The Tufted Titmouse’s song is a loud, clear, two-note phrase, repeated over and over up to 11 times in succession. “Peter-Peter-Peter” can be heard now, even though snow and cold temperatures are still with us. While titmice may pair up any time of the year, the singing of the males is a vital part of establishing territory and courtship. Females occasionally sing but not as loud or as often as males.
The Tufted Titmouse’s song is familiar, while its calls are more numerous and varied. Twelve different Tufted Titmouse calls have been identified. They range from the ‘chick-a-dee’ and ‘seet’ calls made in response to predators, to the hissing done by a female titmouse in a cavity, defending her nest.
To hear both songs and calls of the Tufted Titmouse, go to <https://tinyurl.com/2z2j3vj5> _NaturallyCurious

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LOOK
<https://tinyurl.com/4t2j27b9> _DavidShrigley

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DÓRA MAURER, HEADY FILMS AND EXUBERANTLY COLORED PAINTINGS, DIES AT 88
<https://tinyurl.com/4set9btc>
Dóra Maurer, a Hungarian conceptual artist whose output in multiple mediums explored how meaning shifts across time and space, has died at 88.
Maurer was one of the most important contemporary artists in Hungary. She is today best known for her works produced in the country while it was still under Soviet rule. Many of those famous works were produced in the 1970s, during a period when Maurer was producing photography and films that primarily featured the artist and her collaborators performing banal acts. One 1971 piece, titled Mit lehet egy utcakővel csinálni? (What Can One Do with a Paving Stone?), involved Maurer caressing, throwing, and toting around a paver. Given that the performance obliquely invoked the protests of May 1968 in Paris, during which students threw paving stones, the work has been read as a political gesture. But Maurer framed it in different terms, focusing on how one might create a narrative from seeing photographs of it.
“A paving stone is the material of fights—street fighting and so on—and what can you do with a paving stone? Here I made some examples of what I can do with the paving stone,” Maurer told. “It is ambivalent. You can consider it is as political. Mostly it is shown in women’s exhibitions, with which, as you know, I do not identify myself.”
Another series, from 1972, was called “Reversible and Changeable Phases of Movement” and involved arrays of photographs showing Maurer performing other gestures—throwing a ball in the air, for example. Presented in a grid, that piece’s photographs variously suggest her tossing the ball or catching it, depending on the order in which the pictures are viewed.
“Since 1969-70, my work has been based on change, shifting, traces, temporality from various perspectives,” she told “This means that the reversibility of changed meanings and the series of painted picture objects had the same root.”
Born in Budapest in 1937, Maurer was raised by her mother; her father died half a year before she was born. Living in a residential building with her aunt, Maurer was lured to ink sticks left behind by her father, a cartographer. She recalled “difficult” memories of the siege of Budapest in 1945 by Soviet and Romanian forces, and she said that she spent her childhood copying illustrations seen in books, instilling an interest in drawing that remained with her.
Unlike many in the West, Maurer did not have access to galleries willing to show her work—there were few in Hungary at the time that were not directly sponsored by the state, which dictated what kind of art could and could not be shown, she said in interviews. Still, during the ’70s, she made experimental films and managed to organize exhibitions of her own. (She stopped making films in the ’90s, due in part to all the energy needed to teach students at the Hungarian University of Fine Arts.)
During the ’80s, Maurer produced suck works as the “Handmade Fractal Paintings,” a series she began in 1988 that involved 3mm-wide lines that were arrayed to form grid-like spaces pulsing with color. Similar bright hues showed up in her “Overlappings” paintings, begun in 1999, which feature large squares of color that appear to fall atop one another, creating new tones in their intersections.
Maurer remained relatively obscure on the international scene until 2019 the year she had a Tate Modern survey in London. After that show, blue-chip galleries like White Cube began to exhibit her art.
Yet Maurer often bristled against the notion that she might be famous, telling in 2012, “I don’t want to be a star or suchlike. I’m not the type.” _Alex Greenberger_ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/mrzdy4f3> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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COLIN BAILEY ON GETTY'S CONTESTED WATTEAU by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/8y8z001>
In 2012 the Getty Museum bought The Italian Comedians, a painting that curator Scott Schaefer attributed to Watteau. Scholars have been split on the attribution, and the Louvre's 2024-25 Watteau exhibition showed the Getty painting as the joint work of Watteau and his follower Jean-Baptiste Pater. Now Morgan Library and Museum director Colin B. Bailey weighs in, in his review of the Louvre catalog for the New York Review of Books. Bailey contends that the Getty's Italian Comedians is entirely by Watteau. He writes:
"A second painting that Watteau made in London, also entitled The Italian Comedians—acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2012—remains controversial. A large canvas with five figures, it shows an engaging, boyish Pierrot, with blond hair and ruddy cheeks, holding out his hat in his right hand as if seeking a donation. To his left, a guitar-playing Mezzetin takes a bow. Harlequin, mustachioed and masked in black, can be seen hiding behind them. There is no question that the beautifully executed central figure of Pierrot is by Watteau. A preparatory drawing for this figure with his outstretched arm in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, shows the actor, but with a pinched and mean-spirited expression quite unlike the sympathetic clown in the finished work. Infrared reflectography has confirmed that Watteau initially followed his drawing and painted Pierrot with precisely the same face but altered the canvas as he completed it. The surrounding figures are not handled as suavely. The faces of the two actors at right are painted more broadly—they might have stepped out of a canvas by Frans Hals. [Guillaume] Faroult, in his discussion of the Getty picture, which he catalogs as “attributed to Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Pater and an anonymous collaborator,” expresses the hope that the “confrontation” with the Louvre’s Pierrot in the exhibition would help resolve the issue once and for all. In fact, as Alan Wintermute first proposed in 2012, seeing the paintings from the National Gallery of Art and the Getty in fairly close proximity made it possible to confirm that they are both by the same hand, undeniably Watteau’s alone."
For background, see Watteau Show Snubs "Italian Comedians" <https://tinyurl.com/mrk75kxx> and Paris Ponders a Watteau Puzzle <https://tinyurl.com/mr4cvrrr>
<http://tiny.cc/xy8z001>
<http://tiny.cc/2z8z001> _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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IS FRIDA KAHLO OVEREXPOSED?
Undoubtedly yes.
Is this one of the most resplendent paintings I've ever seen?
Also yes.
<https://tinyurl.com/54wmyjsa>
Also- come on,
how much more adorable could a painting get?
Frida Kahlo, "Self-Portrait with Monkeys," 1943
<https://tinyurl.com/yy8m25fy>
One more, because why not..?
Frida Kahlo, "Self-Portrait with Braid," 1941
<https://tinyurl.com/2s3j333k> _MichaelLobel

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36. ROMEYN BECK HOUGH, THE AMERICAN WOODS by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/k4dj86bv>
Romeyn Beck Hough was a physician-turned-botanist obsessed with a single, audacious idea: that a book about trees should be made of trees. For 25 years, from 1888 to 1913, he produced 13 volumes of The American Woods, each containing cardboard plates that held three paper-thin slices of a single species—transverse, radial, and tangential cuts—so fine they glowed when held to the light. A final volume was published posthumously by his daughter, and the complete 14-volume set comprises 1,056 slices of 354 different North American tree species. It was, and is, an unparalleled work of taxonomy.
<https://tinyurl.com/y3a3bp5r>
Hough’s initial impulse was entrepreneurial. He patented a veneer-cutting machine capable of slicing wood to extraordinary thinness, creating wooden cards thin enough to serve as Magic Lantern slides and strong enough to use as business cards. Then, inspired by volumes of European tree cross-sections, Hough set out to do the same for American trees. Each species was represented by three mounted sections, accompanied by text detailing its botany, habitat, and commercial uses.
In retrospect, The American Woods reads like an elegy. Hough presumably didn’t know he was making a before-image of the extent of American forests at the end of the 19th century. The American chestnut, once a keystone canopy tree, would be functionally erased within decades by blight. With some of the trees it documents now exceedingly rare, the series stands for woods in two senses—both the material and the forests themselves that once felt infinite. The books have become the specimens. _TheImpatientReader

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EGGLESTON’S DYE TRANSFER PRINTERS by greg
We have a couple of works that are dye transfer prints, which, it blows my mind to see how they’re made.
<https://tinyurl.com/88h552pw> _greg.org

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‘A JOYFUL DAY’
<https://tinyurl.com/4hxa8ss2>
The final piece of the central tower of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia has been laid in place, bringing the church to its maximum final height 144 years after work began.
After several days when it has been too windy to work, the upper section of the 17 metre-high four-sided steel and glass cross was winched into position at 11am on Friday, completing the tower dedicated to Jesus Christ. At 172.5 metres, the Sagrada Familia, to which the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí devoted the later part of his life, is Barcelona’s tallest building and the world’s tallest church.
As the Catalan and Vatican flags were raised, Jordi Faulí, the chief architect for the project, said: “It’s been a joyful day, wonderful for all the people who have made it possible.”
A ceremony to mark the completion of the tower – the tallest of 18 conceived by Gaudí – is due to take place on the centenary of Gaudí’s death in 1926 on 10 June, 16 years after the church was consecrated by Pope Benedict XVI.
<https://tinyurl.com/4jp4hkud>
The end to the building at the church is expected in about a decade with the construction of a striking south-facing facade.
It was nevertheless a day full of emotion for a city that has lived with Gaudí’s unfinished work for generations and, although there remains much work to do, the temple now defines the Barcelona skyline as much as the Eiffel tower in Paris or the Empire State building in New York.
For decades it was a building site open to the skies, where generations of stone masons and carpenters worked around the tourists who have ultimately funded the construction. It’s only in the past 15 years, since work began on the breathtakingly beautiful interior, that it has felt more like a church than a building site.
Here Gaudí’s geometrical designs have created an oasis of light, with delicate, tree-like columns tapering off to the roof, the white stone of the interior picked out in colours from the stained glass windows.
The basilica is loved and loathed equally by those who live in Barcelona. George Orwell described it as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world” and regretted the anarchists did not blow it up when they had the chance.
<https://tinyurl.com/383s3p7m>
The anarchists did, however, destroy Gaudí’s drawings and the plaster model, which years later was painstakingly reconstructed. In the late 1970s, Mark Burry, a New Zealand architect, adapted rocket design software to realise Gaudí’s design.
To those who claim the basilica is nothing like what was originally envisaged, Burry’s retort was that Gaudí’s geometry is so precise that should there be any deviation from his plan, the building would collapse.
It is, however, now the work of many hands. There are elements that jar, in particular the Passion façade, popularly known as Darth Vader façade, the work of the sculptor Josep Maria Subirachs, and yet overall it is unmistakably Gaudí’s work.
Aside from finishing the details of the main tower, three artists – Miquel Barceló , Cristina Iglesias and Javier Marín – have been commissioned to present designs for the Glory façade, which is expected to take a further 10 years to complete.
The Sagrada Familia is the city’s top tourist attraction, with about 5 million visitors a year and an annual income of roughly €150m (£131m), about half of which has so far been spent on construction.
_Stephen Burgen _GuardianUK

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HOPE SPORTSMENS CLUB HOPE, ND
<https://tinyurl.com/5ax3b355> _RuralIndexingProject

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CATS TO BLAME FOR OCTOPUS DEITY ENSHRINEMENT DELAY
<https://tinyurl.com/mvjcmy2a>
Hayasuhime Shrine in Oita prefecture is a rarity in Japan because it is dedicated to the octopus. When local sculptor Kousei Hashimoto was tasked with creating a new deity to be enshrined, he expected for it to be completed by the end of the year. But the neighborhood cats had different plans.
<https://tinyurl.com/y7z42ksf>
Hashimoto explained that, because the sculpture was made from cardboard, cats kept coming around and using it as a scratching post so he had to constantly make repairs. What’s more, he would find cats sleeping with it in order to keep warm during the cold winter months.
Although the deity was recently enshrined, Hashimoto may find himself with a never-ending job.
<https://tinyurl.com/443w5bnt>
According to legend, a giant octopus once guarded a sacred sword at the bottom of the nearby Hayasui Strait. The shrine, which is dedicated to this deity, is popular for praying for good fortune and safety at sea.
A popular ceremony involves donating a drawing of an octopus and praying for safety. During the period, worshippers must abstain from eating octopus in order for the prayer to work. For this reason, the main hall is also decorated with drawings of octopuses from past ceremonies, creating a surreal sight.
<https://tinyurl.com/2vcch6d9> _Spoon\&Tamago

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DREAM_MEGA - BONE TRADE
<https://tinyurl.com/3vvyvjnf> _PostPresentMedium

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SOUTH AFRICA DROPS OUT OF VENICE BIENNALE FOLLOWING LEGAL UPROAR
South Africa will not host a pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, the culture ministry confirmed on Friday. The fate of the pavilion had been in limbo since the start of January after the culture minister abruptly canceled the planned exhibition due to concerns over an artwork that included references to Gaza.
The announcement comes just two days after ousted artist Gabrielle Goliath’s attempt to overturn the South African government’s cancellation of her pavilion failed, after a high court judge dismissed her urgent application just hours before the biennial’s submission deadline. _artnet

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LAURA THERESA ALMA TADEMA, ANNA LEAFING THROUGH A PORTFOLIO OF PRINTS, 1874,
<https://tinyurl.com/bdzd97z2>

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IN CONGRESS DEPOSITION, BILLIONAIRE COLLECTOR LES WEXNER CLAIMS HE WAS ‘CONNED’
<https://tinyurl.com/4yjh49a6>
Les Wexner, the billionaire founder of L Brands and a major art collector, gave testimony to the US House of Representatives on Wednesday, in a closed door deposition from his home in New Albany, Ohio. In an opening statement to the House Oversight Committee, which is conducting an investigation into the Jeffrey Epstein case, Wexner said he had been “naive, foolish, and gullible” for trusting Epstein.
“I was naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein. He was a con man,” Wexner said in a prepared statement that was made available to media. “While I was conned, I have done nothing wrong and have nothing to hide.”
While Wexner’s testimony was not made public, Democratic lawmakers said that the 88-year-old retail magnate provided few new details and said that he could not remember key events. Primarily, he denied wrongdoing and said he had never witnessed or had knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct. He also rejected claims that he had sexual contact with Epstein victims.
The deposition comes several months after the Department of Justice released thousands of files related to the Epstein case, many of which involve Wexner.
While Wexner’s testimony was not made public, Democratic lawmakers said that the 88-year-old retail magnate provided few new details and said that he could not remember key events. Primarily, he denied wrongdoing and said he had never witnessed or had knowledge of Epstein’s criminal conduct. He also rejected claims that he had sexual contact with Epstein victims.
The deposition comes several months after the Department of Justice released thousands of files related to the Epstein case, many of which involve Wexner. As ARTnews‘s Alex Greenberger reported in December:
“One email from an FBI official that was released to the public this week referred to potential ‘co-conspirators’ who had worked with Epstein. While the email was heavily redacted, like other files released by the Department of Justice on December 23, the message clearly refers to Wexner, the namesake collector behind the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.” _ARTnews

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VESSELS MADE FOR SCREAMING
<https://tinyurl.com/bd3wrsht>
Babak Golkar, Time to Let Go, 2014
<https://tinyurl.com/3b8d8774> _RabihAlameddine

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EPSTEIN FILES REVEAL POSSIBLE DEALINGS BETWEEN LEON BLACK AND DOUGLAS LATCHFORD
Did billionaire art collector Leon Black buy Southeast Asian antiquities from the disgraced late British dealer Douglas Latchford? Documents in the roughly three million additional Epstein files from the U.S. Department of Justice suggest a connection between the two.
A spreadsheet in the files titled “Leon Black/ Narrows South East Asian Art Inventory” features a list of bronze and stone statues from the region, including their cost to Black and estimated value. The most expensive work, a $7 million Shiva, is described as 110 centimeters tall (43 inches) and dating to the year 1044. That’s reportedly a perfect match to a shiva statue from a “private collection” that Latchford featured in his 2004 book Adoration and Glory: The Golden Age of Khmer Art, written with American art historian Emma C. Bunker.
The list includes 12 works, pegging their estimated worth at $27.7 million. Black spent $23.85 million to buy them, according to the document, which dates to April 2014.
“While we were previously aware that Mr. Black collected Khmer sculpture, these materials provide substantially greater detail and raise serious questions regarding the scope and provenance of the works,” Bradley Gordon, a lawyer representing Cambodia’s restitution efforts, told
“Mr. Black owns a very small number of Cambodian works of art that were acquired through a well-regarded and highly reputable art dealer,” a spokesperson wrote in an email. “He never met nor acquired anything directly from Latchford. He also provided the Justice Department with all information related to these works nearly five years ago.” _artnet

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SALVADOR DALÍ AND PHILIPPE HALSMAN’S
photography series 💀
<https://tinyurl.com/2jrwd5an>
<https://tinyurl.com/3c9knnub>
<https://tinyurl.com/2rvw6f4e>
<https://tinyurl.com/3npt5ndw>
<https://tinyurl.com/55bwn7c9>
<https://tinyurl.com/363db9cb> _LoLo

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THE US DEPARTMENT OF HATE
The Siren is back for a fourth edition. Read, ponder, and rise up before it’s too late.
Coco Fusco, Noah Fischer, Pablo Helguera
February 20, 2026 — 2 min read
The editors of The Siren have been thinking about the parallels between our current political moment and the dystopian world of George Orwell’s novel 1984 for quite a while, but the escalating efforts by the Trump Administration to wage war against immigrants and silence critics compelled us to devote our latest issue to highlighting those connections. After witnessing the killing, torture, and forced expulsion of immigrants by federal agents, as well as the execution of US citizens and the criminalization of activists, we have no choice but to conclude that Orwell’s “Hate Week” has arrived. We’ve done our best to bring the perspectives of those who are under attack, and who have survived totalitarian regimes, to the foreground. Writers Junot Diaz, Enrique Del Risco, and Pamela Sneed shed light on the ways that authoritarianism is taking over our world. Political cartoonists hailing from Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, the Philippines, and the Americas offer their perspectives on the impact of tyrannical forces in our lives.
Read, ponder, and rise up before it’s too late!
<https://tinyurl.com/yntnbhjh> _Hyperallergic

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REDISCOVERED HANS BALDUNG GRIEN DRAWING
<https://tinyurl.com/rxwsvkxk> _ArtHistoryNews

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ANTS AS DEFENSE
Since plants provide essential resources for ants, the need to protect the plant and those resources is extremely important. Many myrmecophytes are defended from both herbivores and other competing plants by their ant symbionts.[7] Acacia cornigera, for example, is thoroughly guarded by its obligate ant partner, Pseudomyrmex ferruginea. <https://tinyurl.com/5dchzs9f> A single colony of P. ferruginea may contain more than 30,000 ants, and can tend multiple Acacia trees.[7] The soldier ants are extremely aggressive, patrolling the trees twenty-four hours a day. Any disturbance to the tree alerts ants, who then recruit more workers from inside the horn domatia. These ants defend the Acacia by biting, violently stinging, and pruning any trespassers. The ants keep the plant free from other insects, vertebrate herbivores, invading fungi, and other plants.
Ants collaborating to dismember an intruding ant <https://tinyurl.com/mkpbssv2> _Wikipedia