OLD NEWS

WHO BENEFITS FROM WOODPECKERS’ HARD WORK BESIDES WOODPECKERS? by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5kfwph>
As mentioned in a recent post, this is time of year when woodpeckers are excavating nesting cavities. Once a woodpecker’s young are raised and have fledged, the entire family abandons the cavity, but its usefulness is far from over. As shelters, cavities are prime property for all kinds of animals — they are off the ground and thus easier to defend from predators and they provide protection from the elements.
Because woodpeckers typically excavate a new cavity every year and rarely reuse an old one, many species of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians and insects have access to ready-made homes. A multitude of species of wildlife rely on the holes left behind by woodpeckers for nesting, roosting, and shelter. Squirrels, owls, salamanders, wood ducks, bats, nuthatches, grey treefrogs, mergansers – animals incapable of making their own cavities – benefit from the weeks of work that woodpeckers devote to creating them. _NaturallyCurious

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UNAFFECTED
<https://tinyurl.com/2t4vy6xk> _DavidShrigley

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‘I WANTED MY WORK TO BE SHAMELESS’ 93-YEAR-OLD JOAN SEMMEL
<https://tinyurl.com/39y9rrtv>
On a life-revivingly sunny day in New York, light pours into the SoHo studio of the 93-year-old painter Joan Semmel. She’s lived in the floor-through railroad apartment since 1970, and she works out of a high-ceilinged room overlooking Spring Street, dominated by a decades-old snake plant. A loft stuffed with canvases occupies one side of the carpeted room, while the other wall displays four recent paintings that will appear in her upcoming show, Continuities,
Each vibrant piece evokes elements that have long connected Semmel’s process – gesture, doubling, transparency and abstraction – and features the same model she’s used for more than 50 years: her own nude body. She has maintained that these are not self-portraits, and for much of her career they lacked heads. Semmel bursts into laughter while recalling her surprise when people asked how she felt about “being naked out there. I’m not, that’s a painting,” she says. “It’s a construct, but it’s not me.”
The works in Continuities were made during Semmel’s 10th decade and her depiction of sagging skin and flopping breasts is exuberant and unabashed. “Obviously, I age,” Semmel says. “If I’m going to do something authentic, it’s going to show that.” In Here I Am (2025), the figure appears alone, seated in a molded-plastic Eames armchair just like the ones in Semmel’s dining room. She appears to gaze into the distance, present, but not quite.
<https://tinyurl.com/4f6saz39>
Spring is Semmel season in New York; she’s also the subject of a retrospective. A standout in that show is the monumental triptych Mythologies and Me (1976), which places one of the works from her Self Image series between parodies of a Playboy centerfold and De Kooning’s Woman. It was a response to a gallerist who balked at the idea that a nude could be considered a political statement. “How was I different from either one of these images that are given to me as a way I’m supposed to be?” she says. “I painted my answer.”
The gallery showed the painting, but the museums wouldn’t touch it. Now, those same institutions are clamoring for contemporaneous pieces. “It’s strange because they always want that work that nobody would show,” Semmel says. “While I’m glad that it’s still relevant for me, professionally, I had hoped that we’d be in some other place, culturally.” Semmel bristles when the conversation turns towards the right’s agenda to roll back gender equality: “If we start getting into my frustration with the political situation today in the States, it will be a whole interview.” Though her health prevented her from joining a recent No Kings demonstration, she was heartened that people were taking to the streets.
“I’m happy that there are younger women now who seem to understand that they have to fight for what they want,” she says. “It’s really important for women to understand that their lives are at stake. Seriously, we’re almost at The Handmaid’s Tale.”
<https://tinyurl.com/dj4jdpj6>
Semmel grew up in the Bronx, New York, and studied painting at Cooper Union, the Art Students League and Pratt. Semmel’s marriage brought her young family to Madrid, where she spent most of the 1960s making abstract expressionist paintings that were exhibited around Spain and South America. Semmel’s time overseas made her acutely aware of the systemic restrictions imposed upon women by a patriarchal, conservative and Catholic culture.
Divorce was illegal in Spain, so Semmel returned to New York in 1970. Now a single mother of two, Semmel quickly fell in with New York’s SoHo art community, spending her days painting and evenings debating the issues of the day at the neighborhood watering holes. “There was a great deal of activity amongst the women,” she says, and Semmel joined artists such as Anita Steckel, Judith Bernstein and Hannah Wilke in feminist agitation groups that confronted gender and racial disparities in the art world.
Semmel’s political involvements ran parallel with a stylistic shift, and she embraced figuration. “Everything in my life had shifted around, so it was a natural change,” she explains. Semmel began making large-scale oil scenes of heterosexual couples having sex, their naked bodies rendered with expressive brushwork and bold, nonrepresentational colors. She aimed to create an “erotic visual language” that liberated the nude from academia and pornography and gave women a sense of sexual agency. “I was trying to get to a place where one could accept oneself without needing to conform to standards given to us from advertising, media and fashion, which essentially exist to please men,” Semmel says. “I wanted to create work that would be shameless.”
In 1973, galleries weren’t chomping at the bit to show these works, so Semmel rented her own storefront on Prince Street. “I wasn’t able to get anyone to take the risk, so I did it myself. It was my FU moment,” she says with a chuckle. “It was not a thing that was looked upon with favor at the time; it was an announcement that you couldn’t get a dealer. But I never regretted it.”
<https://tinyurl.com/94vwr63n>
After initially picking up a camera to take source images for her Erotic series, by 1974 Semmel turned the lens on herself. “I didn’t want to objectify another woman,” she says. “I wanted a real body, not an idealized form.” Before the “male gaze” entered the discourse, Semmel’s highly realistic Self Images <https://tinyurl.com/mryubay9> were foreshortened and cropped, recasting flesh into landscape as the subject appeared to observe herself.
“The Self Images started way back before selfies,” Semmel says, and she has often inserted cameras and mirrors into compositions. “You’re looking at me while I’m looking at you,” she says. “I like to play with who is viewed and who is the viewer.” For the Continuities series, an assistant snapped photos of Semmel as she walked along the empty wall of her studio, occasionally incorporating light and shadow.
Recently, physical limitations have led Semmel to adjust her ambitious scale and preference to paint while standing. But her capacity to work is undiminished, and she continues to paint at least one piece a month. She’s already thinking about her next exhibition. “I don’t really get blocked, I’m too compulsive,” Semmel says. “If I don’t work, I’m not happy.” _Quinn Moreland _GuardianUK

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/yc5rd6ps> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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DALÍ’S AMBER VARNISH MAY HAVE CAUSED THIS PAINTING TO DECAY by Vittoria Benzine
<https://tinyurl.com/5eajs8d2>
The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1946) is the only painting Salvador Dalí ever entered into an art contest—to feature in the Hollywood production The Private Affairs of Bel Ami. While his take on the art-historical scene did not make it on to set (Max Ernst‘s did), the work is still notable for bearing Dalí’s Surrealist hallmarks, as well as his undergirding spirituality.
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (RMFAB) has owned the painting since 1965. They’ve since noticed it doesn’t look quite fit for the silver screen. For starters, parts of Saint Anthony have become transparent, or roughly textured. Their experts recently joined an international expert cohort to study whether Dalí created those effects intentionally, and just how they came about.
The crew gathered at the RMFAB to try a wide range of imaging techniques on the artwork. Beyond the figure St. Anthony, areas of inquiry included the rock he’s gripping, an angel in the distance, and the Spanish palace of El Escorial.
In some cases, their efforts were as simple as comparing older photographs of the work with newer ones. From this, the team determined that the work’s degradation transpired predominantly before it entered RMFAB’s collection
<https://tinyurl.com/278unwaj>
Macro-X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy revealed that Dalí painted this work using strontium yellow, Ceruleum blue, cobalt blue, various chromium-based greens, carbon black, earthy pigments, lead white combining cerussite and hydrocerussite, and zinc white. The work’s degradation appears to cluster around areas where the zinc white pigment has migrated, as a result of its binder malfunctioning. Digital microscopy confirmed disruptions in the paint films in such areas
“Not all areas containing zinc white are affected,” the new study noted. “Only those zinc-white-rich paint layers that are superimposed over lead white-containing layers display visible signs of deterioration.” In his 1948 book 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship, Dalí prescribes this very method, deeming zinc white the color with which “you will achieve the most absolute whites in your picture.” But chemically speaking, this approach causes problems.
Strangely enough, the researchers also detected a layer of chlorine covering the artwork—which, based on its materials, came from elsewhere. The team hypothesizes this happened as Saint Anthony sailed to Europe 1947.
Dalí also extols amber as a varnish in 50 Secrets. Calling the liquid “sublime,” he noted its “unique advantage of integrating itself completely and as by a consubstantial consequence with your last overpainting without ever needing to be removed even if it should become necessary to repaint over it.”
Alas, according to the study: “Natural resins, while offering desirable optical and mechanical properties, are also known to exhibit complex and sometimes problematic aging behavior in the presence of certain inorganic pigments.” That includes zinc white—explaining why areas with the inorganic pigment have proven problematic. Dalí may have even gotten a bad batch.
With the puzzle somewhat solved and the artwork deemed stable, Saint Anthony is back on view at the museum.
_artnet

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HOW YOUR EMAIL FOUND ME.
<https://tinyurl.com/38yrmyr9>
Roser Bru Llop's "Inventario de Valljejo," 1982 _CarolinaAMiranda

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74. AIR JORDAN by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/vnnnbm9d>
The shoe refused to be white. The NBA had always required that players’ shoes be white, and that they match their teammates. In 1984, Michael Jordan stepped onto the floor in his rookie season wearing a radical shoe in red and black that looked nothing like the league had ever seen. The Air Jordan deliberately broke the rules, and Nike paid the $5,000-per-game fine on behalf of its superstar. It was pure American myth-making: our love of rebellion explicitly designed into the object. Nike even made a commercial <https://tinyurl.com/2p9rpadm> spelling it out.
The shoe arrived at a pivotal moment when hip-hop, basketball, and break dancing were remaking American culture from the bottom up. The Air Jordan landed in the middle of that convergence like a signal flare. What Nike stumbled onto—or understood with cold clarity—was that the shoe packaged things we had always found irresistible: blackness, excellence, and the forbidden.
And it could be yours, be anybody’s, for $65. The shoe was designed around his foot, his style of play, so wearing it felt less like buying a product than borrowing a power. The shoe is the sacred relic, and Michael Jordan the saint. Capitalism transforms holy objects that traditionally were scarce—had required a pilgrimage to visit—into something endlessly reproducible. But the fact that the Air Jordan is ubiquitous, that millions of them exist, in no way undercuts their mystical bond with the player. When we wear his shoe, we carry a portable fragment of his greatness. _TheImpatientReader

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RALPH GOINGS, "COFFEE AND DONUT", 2005,
<https://tinyurl.com/9jtvunmm> _RabihAlameddine

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SPIRALING ON BLKNWS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/4cb8t4t5>
I’ve been trying to keep up a pace here, but it is taking me longer than I expected to put some thoughts together about Kahlil Joseph’s 2025 film, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. When David Naimon, who hosts Between The Covers, had asked me about it on Bluesky, I thought I knew all I needed from the original 2018 video installation, and from the post-production and distribution wrangling that swirled around its adaptation into a feature film.
<https://tinyurl.com/4r96ts54>
But BLKNWS the film is both recognizable, and also totally new. It is what it began as, and it has become something else entirely, encyclopedic and personal, autobiographical and universal, historic and contemporary. Joseph and his producer Onye Anyanwu opened BLKNWS up to collaboration—Naimon’s initial teaser was about the spectacular list of contributors and cameos—and they opened the film’s structure, or rather, took on a structure—the spiral—that opens, loops, and expands.
<https://tinyurl.com/44vz4p83>
Maybe the logical thing to do is to follow their lead, and spiral, just blog about BLKNWS from now on, and take occasional note of how it turns and returns periodically to the compass points marked here before. _greg.org

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IN HIS SERIES "I GOT UP,"
the artist On Kawara sent postcards to friends or colleagues
every day for nearly 12 years,
following the same format down to placement of text
<https://tinyurl.com/ycyzuk8h> _MichaelLobel

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LEE KRASNER AND THE MARKET CORRECTION QUESTION by The art daddy
Feminist Click Rage Bait and an Unhinged Comment Section
This week ARTnews reporter Daniel Cassady published an essay on Lee Krasner and the so-called market correction question, and I’m sorry but the numbers analysis is cute. Very neat, very clean, very digestible. But it’s also doing that thing where it mistakes tidiness for insight. We have seen this exact framing before. The same thing was said about Joan Mitchell for years and then the market decided to care and everyone acted like they discovered her. So yes, the numbers are cute. That does not make this take particularly interesting.
What’s actually wild is that this is all being said about Krasner, who is literally the subject of a blockbuster show this fall at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and we’re still getting surface level comps analysis like this is some niche correction story. And Daniel doesn’t even touch the art historical component, which feels like a pretty major omission here. Krasner is not a lagging asset class. She is foundational to Abstract Expressionism and her career cannot be separated from the fact that she spent years propping up Jackson Pollock while her own work took a back seat. Managing him, stabilizing him, maintaining the conditions for his myth while her own practice was structurally deprioritized. That is not a footnote. That is the framework.
<https://tinyurl.com/5n99jktb>
And this is where I’ll flex my grad level work in gender studies for a second, because what’s happening here is not just a market lag or a delayed correction. Misogyny is baked into how value gets assigned over time. The canonization of Pollock as the drunk genius and the simultaneous marginalization of Krasner as “the wife” is not just narrative, it is infrastructure. The market did not accidentally undervalue her. It valued her exactly as the culture understood her.
So when we get these tidy breakdowns of auction comps and selective scarcity without acknowledging that, it reads less like analysis and more like avoidance. You cannot talk about Krasner’s market without talking about the gendered conditions that produced it. Otherwise you are just describing symptoms and calling it a diagnosis.
And honestly, you don’t even have to look that far for proof, just read the comments. Within seconds it devolves into people insisting Jackson Pollock was the “real revolutionary,” dismissing Lee Krasner as secondary, and confidently declaring that misogyny has nothing to do with it. Which is almost too perfect. Because what you’re watching in real time is the mythology reassert itself. Visibility becomes proof of originality, market success becomes proof of importance, and suddenly the entire structure that elevated Pollock gets rewritten as merit.
And the Janet Sobel debate is the clearest example. People are bending over backwards to argue influence doesn’t matter if the man became more famous, which is exactly how these hierarchies get maintained. It’s ahistorical, it’s lazy, and it’s the same logic that built the gap in the first place. So when the analysis stays at the level of numbers and avoids this entirely, it’s not neutral, it’s reinforcing it.
And then there is the current moment, which makes all of this even more obvious. The market is weird, the economy sucks, and buyers are behaving accordingly. Everyone wants a “sure thing,” which means when collectors say they want a Krasner, what they actually want is a very specific, legible Krasner that feels safe at a price that does not exist. That is not demand. That is risk management in a wig.
So yes, the numbers are there. Love the numbers. But this kind of take feels like feminist click rage bait dressed up as market analysis. This is not just a market story. It is a structural one that the market still has not fully reckoned with, even now.
_Theartdaddy

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? STITZER, WI
<https://tinyurl.com/bdevehsa> _‪RuralIndexingProject‬

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HOW DID A 16TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN BASIN END UP AS A SACRED OBJECT IN WEST AFRICA?
<https://tinyurl.com/4utcwv7w>
Mystery surrounds where a huge northern European brass basin decorated with figures of lions was made and how it then reached the West African kingdom of the Asante centuries ago. Known as the Aya Kese (the great brass basin), it was said by Europeans to have been used to hold the blood of human sacrifices. The ceremonial basin, just over a metre in diameter, was looted by British troops in 1896 in what is now Ghana. Owned by London’s National Army Museum, it is temporarily on display at the British Museum.
British Museum curators believe the basin was made in England, Germany or the Netherlands and most likely dates from the 16th century. By the early 18th century, and possibly well before, it had reached the Asante (or Ashanti) kingdom and then became a sacred object in the royal mausoleum complex. The Asante king, Prempeh I, wrote in 1930 that the Aya Kese had originally descended from heaven on a gold chain, after a great thunderstorm. The truth is probably more prosaic: it most likely came on a trading ship that sailed from northern Europe or Portugal around the coast of West Africa.
The basin’s rim is decorated with a series of knobs, but what is most distinctive is a group of four small sculpted lions. These beasts were used in European decorative art over many centuries, so an examination of the sculptures has so far not helped in dating or establishing where they were made. It is probably just chance that the sculpted lions ended up in the Asante empire, at a time when the animals still roamed in the territory’s northern areas of savanna.
In 1930 Prempeh I, who was ill and nearing the end of his life, formally asked the British authorities to return the Aya Kese to the royal mausoleum. He sent a five-page “History of the Bantama Brass Pan”, in which he wrote that “all souls of Ashantis are within it”. The Asante king commented that “the allegation that human beings were killed in the brass pan is not a fact”. Despite his entreaties, the restitution request was refused by the British government.
After his return to England, Baden-Powell kept the Aya Kese until 1913, when he donated it to the Royal United Services Institute, a centre for the study of defence and security. In 1963 the organisation transferred the basin to the National Army Museum, at the time at Sandhurst, now in London. The museum’s website now records that it “seems unlikely” that the brass basin had been used to collect the blood of beheaded sacrificial victims.
Although enemies may not have been killed in the pan and their blood may not have been stored there, Tom McCaskie, a professor of African Studies at the University of Birmingham, records in a recent academic paper that the Asante “did perform ritual killings (‘human sacrifices’)”. McCaskie is among those who feel that the Aya Kese should be restituted to Kumasi. He regards it as “an integral part of the Asante past… with vibrant meaning for Asante people today”.
<https://tinyurl.com/2kx6mk7m> _Martin Bailey _ArtNewspaper

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FRANCISCO DE GOYA, SO-CALLED "HALF-DROWNED DOG" (PERRO SEMIHUNDIDO), C 1819–1823,
<https://tinyurl.com/34j9np8p> _JesseLocker

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WALKER ART CENTER SEVERS TIES WITH RESTAURANT FOR LAYING OFF WORKERS IN FAVOR OF QR CODES
Cardamom, a beloved restaurant at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, is no more following a controversial decision by the eatery to lay off its front-of-house workers and institute a QR code ordering system.
The museum said on Thursday that such a move “does not align with our core values.”
“We are committed to creating a welcoming environment for all of our guests at the Walker,” director Mary Ceruti said in a statement. “While we do not oversee the restaurant in our museum, our vision has always been to have a full-service dining option within the Walker to complement the museum experience.”
She said that the museum leadership was “caught by surprise” by the layoffs, and that the Walker and Cardamom had “decided to part ways.”
Operated by chef Daniel del Prado, Cardamom has been open at the Walker since 2021. For its part, the restaurant said the decision to lay off 16 hosts and servers was motivated by shifts impacting its industry.
“The restaurant was never profitable,” a Cardamom spokesperson told a local NBC affiliate, saying that the eatery was “not immune to the continuing challenges for restaurants in Minneapolis.” _ARTnews

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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