OLD NEWS

WHAT DO YOU FEED A COLLEGE OF HUNGRY CARDINALS?
Bernard Picart, "Inspection of the Food for the Conclave"
<https://tinyurl.com/23q6kudt> _JesseLocker

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WHO WAS JOAN SHOGREN by Verity Babbs
<https://tinyurl.com/2y66u8cw>
Joan Shogren graduated with her degree in chemistry from California’s San José State University (SJSU) in the early 1950s, and began working as a secretary in the department. It was there that she would create some the world’s first computer-generated art.
Born in 1932 in Mount Vernon, Washington, she was artistically inclined from a young age, working as a professional photographer while she was still in high school. An obituary in 2020 described how “she was a whirlwind of activity, an ultra-organized administrator and an almost magical problem solver.” She worked across various media throughout her life, working as a graphic designer for local businesses, and was even known for a knack for origami.
<https://tinyurl.com/2dawc2ag>
In 1963, while working at SJSU, Shogren posited a theory that computers could create art if only they knew the “rules.” She discussed this with graduate student Jim Larson and the assistant professor of chemistry at the college, Ralph Fessenden. In a May 3, 1963 article for the Spartan Daily, the student newspaper, Shogren explained that “such items as proportion, balance, and a centre of interest are what we ask the computer to work with.” Fessenden translated Shogren’s “laws of art” into computer code on an IBM 1620 computer, resulting in some of the world’s first works of computer art, two decades before this kind of art making exploded in the 1980s.
The same article explained the process of the creation of the artworks, noting that when the design is first printed out “they look something like an income tax table—an array of closely-spread numbers,” and that the numbers are later assigned a corresponding color. Later, an artist—typically the senior chemistry major Marvin Coon—would paint the “squares, rectangles, distorted areas and triangles” accordingly. Asked whether the produced art had “potential,” Fessenden replied that his wife had hung one in their living room and then “went out and bought a new slip-cover and began to refurbish the house… so I guess there’s money in it for somebody.”
Shogren exhibited a series of the artworks she spearheaded in May 1963 at the campus bookstore, an exhibition that holds the title as the very first public display of computer art anywhere in the world.
<https://tinyurl.com/2byvxm3r>
An article in the San Jose Mercury News on April 17, 1966 also covered the story, with the headline “Brace Yourself Picasso… Computer’s Invading Art World.” The column was disparaging of what Shogren’s innovation would mean for the art world, opening, “I thought I heard Michelangelo or Van Gogh turn over in his grave and groan. But it really wouldn’t matter—it couldn’t change things one paint speck.” The author, Vicki Reed, anticipated many of today’s cultural critics debating the place of AI art when she said that “art simply never again will be a personally-human expression” thanks to Shogren’s invention.
Like critics of the use of AI in art, Reed commented on the high speed at which Shogren’s artworks could be created: “and the avant guard [sic] ‘Master’ quickly whipped up and spewed forth a couple 100 formulas—faster than Whistler could have screamed, ‘Mother, stop rocking your chair.'”
Two decades after their breakthrough, Shogren was approached by Californian computer software company T/Maker to create the first clip art. These iconic images (in categories including “animals,” “things,” and “presidents”) were released in 1984 for Macintosh computers under the name “ClickArt.” The process of creating these images was not easy, with the co-founder of T/Maker, Heidi Roizen, describing it as “almost like needlepoint,” because Shogren had to design each picture pixel by pixel. To add to the complexity, Roizen said, “For the first product, we could not even buy Macs (because they had not yet been shipped, nor even introduced) so we had to borrow Macs for Apple and Joan had to sign a nondisclosure agreement and promise not to show the Mac to anyone.”
<https://tinyurl.com/2bhsx6v2>
Shogren’s contributions to the development of computer art have been historically overlooked, absent entirely from the touring exhibition “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960-1991” in 2024. In an online exploration of his aunt’s work, Shogren’s nephew Brad Fregger laments his lack of success at having a Wikipedia page created to celebrate her success, saying that the website “essentially said that there was no proof that Joan was a significant player in creating the first public showing of computer art in the world.”
ClickArt was surely a forerunner for the digital images we use every day, so, remember to thank Joan Shogren the next time you send an emoji or pop a meme into your group chat. _artnet

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TOLD
<https://tinyurl.com/27g2lsot> _DavidShrigley

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GETTY BUYS: TIEPOLO PHILOSOPHER, DALOU ORGY & FRIEDRICH ON THE BEACH by William Poundstone
<http://tiny.cc/as0j001>
The Getty Museum has recently acquired a fantasy portrait by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo; a high-relief plaster roundel, Bacchanal, by French sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou; and a drawing by Caspar David Friedrich.
Giovanni Domenico [Giandomenico] Tiepolo—son of the more famous Giambattista Tiepolo—began assisting his father at age 13. In the ceiling paintings of Würzberg and Madrid, his work is almost indistinguishable from dad's. Giandomenico began taking private commissions at 20. While the family business was selling lofty, airborne allegories, the son is now most appreciated for gritty or buffoonish subjects with a hint of irony. A Bearded Man Wearing a Turban is one of a group of imagined likenesses of grizzled men that are usually identified as philosophers. It was auctioned at Christie's New York in Jan. 2024 for $945,000.
Ultimately the subjects of such paintings are probably to be identified with the bearded, exotic-dress figures of Giambattista Tiepolo's etching series, Scherzi di Fantasia. That doesn't answer many questions, for the etchings' subjects and meaning have always been an enigma. Giambattista produced a series of painted character heads similar to the etchings. Giandomenico in turn did etchings of his father's paintings and his own character paintings.
The Chicago Art Institute <https://tinyurl.com/2d3pfzxl> and the Minneapolis Institute of Art <https://tinyurl.com/259ajtcb> each have a Giandomenico philosopher, close in size to the Getty painting (about 24 by 20 in). The San Diego Museum of Art has a smaller Head of a Philosopher assigned to Giambattista. It is not always easy to distinguish the son's work from the father's, and most of these paintings, including the Getty's, were formerly attributed to Giambattista. Giandomenico's philosophers, with scribbled highlights to denote hair and drapery, are often compared to Fragonard's fantasy portraits, made at about the same time.
Giandomenico Tiepolo was the most prominent artist missing in the Getty's collection of 18th-century Venetian painting. The museum has four drawings by Giandomenico, including two from his Punchinello series.
<http://tiny.cc/4u0j001>
<http://tiny.cc/6u0j001>
<http://tiny.cc/d41j001>
Aimé-Jules Dalou produced monuments for Paris' parks. The Getty's sculpture of four lusty imbibers is a plaster reduction of a large marble Bacchanal for a fountain in Jardin des Serres d'Auteuil. The composition dates from 1879, when Dalou was in exile in Britain. That first version, in painted plaster, <http://tiny.cc/f41j001> is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Dalou returned to the subject several times, creating versions in various sizes and media.
<http://tiny.cc/q41j001>
Attorney and collector Charles Auzoux commissioned the Getty sculpture for the dining room of his Normandy home in 1899. Measuring 45 inches in diameter, it was the cover lot <http://tiny.cc/u41j001> of a 2022 auction of Auzoux's collection at Artcurial, Paris. It went for 183,680 euros. The buyer was Agnews Gallery, London, which sold it to the Getty two years later.
<http://tiny.cc/051j001>
In 1993 the Getty became the second U.S. museum (after the Kimbell) to acquire a painting by German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich <https://tinyurl.com/2cyaznp6> . The Beach at Wieck Near Greifswald is a presentation sheet in pen and ink. The inscription, added by fellow artist A.V. Endres, records that Friedrich gave him the drawing "in memory of him during my stay in Dresden in 1821." The sheet is 8-5/6 by 7-3/8 in. Sotheby's New York auctioned it this February 5, on the eve of the Met's Friedrich show, for $720,000.
The ships are adapted from drawings in a sketchbook made during an 1815 trip to Greifswald. The composition recalls several Friedrich paintings of seaward views with ships, such as The Stages of Life <https://tinyurl.com/2aopuc7j> (1835). Sotheby's catalog copy proposes that "the beached boat can be read as an allegory of the passing of time, a life's journey completed. The two poles in the foreground, between which nets can be hung to dry, here take on the appearance of an old man’s crutches…"
The Friedrich will appear in a drawing installation this October. The Tiepolo is undergoing conservation, and the Bacchanal is now on display in gallery W103, next to sculptures by Carpeaux (Dalou's teacher) and Rodin (a friend turned bitter rival). _LosAngelesCountyMuseumOnFire

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14,906 – 14,910 DAYS by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/26pvwflt>
In the post at __artbooks__ it says On Kawara wrote this “personal chronology” on stationery from the Downtown St Louis Holiday Inn, “some time between October 16 and 20, 1973.” The timing is based on the assumption that he didn’t just grab the stationery for later use, but instead wrote out this list while he was staying in St. Louis. It’s also possible that another sheet stapled under this one—these are photocopies, and were not known to the One Million Years Foundation that handles Kawara’s estate—continues with all the places he’d been, ending with Pittsburgh and Indianapolis, the places he’d visited before arriving in St. Louis.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bunoqyc>
In mid-October Kawara and his wife Hiroko Hiraoka were barely a week into a three-month road trip across the United States, making art along the way: Date Paintings, I Am Still Alive telegrams, I Got Up postcards, and I Went maps. The postcards for the four mornings he woke up in the St Louis Holiday Inn were all sent to Sol Lewitt. Between the postcards and maps in the On Kawara Database <https://tinyurl.com/ym365oen> at Tama Art University and Duncan MacLaren’s extraordinary reverse-engineered narrative <https://tinyurl.com/28ofz96f> , it’s possible to reconstruct the form of Kawara’s life, if not the substance.
This chronology, sort of an I’VE BEEN, is only loosely related to the I WENT project. Every day from June 1, 1968 through September 17, 1979, Kawara traced the path he traveled on a photocopy of a local map. It hints at broader documentation of his life alongside his work, if not for it. But it also shows Kawara looking back, a perspective that rarely surfaces in an art practice so thoroughly grounded in the moment of its making.
<https://tinyurl.com/26d9e8fu>
It reminds me of a glimpse into the evolution of Kawara’s project that I read recently on MacLaren’s page reconstructing the first year of the Date Paintings, 1966. Among the photos of Kawara’s 13th St studio I’d seen many times before, is this image of the large <https://tinyurl.com/2cskgb8x> st date painting to-date, Sept. 20, 1966. McLaren points out, though, that Kawara does not record making a painting on the 20th, nor on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, or 24th. Yet there one is.
This giant painting, then, was perhaps the first one Kawara could not finish in a day. And so it was almost nine months into his project, and only after completing and photographing his biggest painting ever, that Kawara decided a Today Series painting must be made on the day, or it had to be destroyed. _greg.org

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/24b78ova> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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WHEN MODERNITY GRABBED POETRY BY ITS HEELS by Michael Glover
<https://tinyurl.com/2dga5s5z>
What does poetry look like? It usually makes shapes on a page. Often these shapes are regulated — so many beats to a line. It often divides itself up into relatively small and boxy visual units called stanzas or strophes. It has been like that for millennia.
From the 17th century on, much poetry written in England was defined by a 10-beat line called iambic pentameter. In the 19th and 20th centuries, dramatic changes to the way poetry was made and thought about took place. The old rules began to break down under the hectic pressures of modernity. Other rules began to shoulder their way into the drawing room. Baudelaire wrote great prose poetry in prose — poeme en prose. The American poet William Carlos Williams talked of the line as breath; the length of a line could relate to a single out-breath.
<https://tinyurl.com/27cym3wz>
A key player in all of this change to the way poetry was looked at, written, and thought about was a didactic shouter of a man called Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founder of an Italian movement called Futurism. This all began in 1909. Futurism is much about art, but experimental poetry played a key role in its development, too, as we discover when we visit the exhibition Breaking Lines at the Estorick Collection in north London, the only public museum in the city wholly devoted to 20th-century Italian art.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bmqskso>
Marinetti’s fervent wish was to foster, create, and bellow about the headlong dynamism of his present moment, with its speed and its giddying mechanization. The past was a heap of smoldering ruins, best ignored altogether. The destructive force of the First World War could help to wipe the slate clean. A part of this revolution had to do with the re-fashioning of poetry, that ancient discipline. Marinetti grabbed poetry by the heels and shook it until its teeth rattled.
<https://tinyurl.com/2basnz5x>
Marinetti’s wish was to free verse from its shackles of tradition. Syntax could go — as could any vestige of reasoned argument. Feeling, intuiting the swing, sway, and pressures of life, with all its tumult, its blare, its bounce, and its heave, were what really counted. And so it is no surprise that the walls of this exhibition should be showing off such words as these: ZANG TUMB TUMB scrABrrRrraaNNG — which are snatched from an experimental poem written by Marinetti himself.
<https://tinyurl.com/2d2dot4a>
To present these words sequentially, as if part of a sentence, after the politesse of a colon, is not to do them full justice. The fact is that when we look at them on the wall, they are not walking in a straight line at all. They hang around each other. They swoop and they dive and they swing, often curvaceously. Not a single font articulates them, but several. They are not book-bound, but aerial, words in flight. Their sounds are a key to their impact — the entire exercise is a riot of onomatopoeia. In fact, these are not so much words as sounds. It is, in short, something of a crazed word-cum-soundscape. Its mood is feverish.
<https://tinyurl.com/2y6gheva>
Poetry was on the mood, leaping off the wall, something of a street marauder. And it has kept on running and running, for dear life.
<https://tinyurl.com/23kd5p7m> _Hyperallergic

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NEVER FORGET THE ELEPHANT SCULPTURE
made of almonds
that California contributed
to the World's Fair in 1904.
<https://tinyurl.com/2bftqloy> _CarolinaAMiranda

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SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART LAYS OFF 29 WORKERS
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) laid off 29 full- and part-time staff members in a 7.5% reduction to the institution’s total employees, the institution announced today, May 7.
The SFMOMA Union said that 26 of the eliminated positions were represented by the unit and alleged that the museum gave no notice ahead of the layoffs. The museum claimed that union members were offered “enhanced [severance] packages” as stipulated by their collective bargaining agreement.
SFMOMA eliminated nine filled part-time and 20 full-time positions and cut 13 unfilled positions, according to an announcement published on the museum’s website. A museum spokesperson told that both union and non-union staff were let go from across the museum, but did not specify the exact numbers included in those categories. The spokesperson said that no departments were completely eliminated.
The museum cited “financial challenges to SFMOMA’s operating model,” including a $5 million structural deficit exacerbated by a post-pandemic drop in tourism, as catalysts for the cuts, and claimed that the pandemic “altered attitudes toward social gathering and cultural engagement in lasting ways.” On Monday, the nonprofit Visit California predicted a 0.7% decline in the total number of visitors in the state from last year’s figures and a 9.2% decline in international tourists.
In March, the museum received the largest corporate grant in its history for a single exhibition — $1.5 million from Google’s philanthropy offshoot for a Ruth Asawa retrospective, which the institution acknowledged in the layoff announcement as producing “strong gains.” Last month, SFMOMA pulled in a reported $3.7 million in donations at its annual fundraising gala, Art Bash, which usually raises upwards of $2 million.
Other popular San Francisco museums, including the Asian Art Museum, the de Young, and the Legion of Honor, were considering layoffs in March in response to a mandate by the former mayor asking city departments to reduce general expenses by 15% to address an overall deficit of $876 million. Some of the layoffs would most hurt security personnel.
Museums across the country have reported similarly abrupt layoffs — nearing 10% of their total workforces _Hyperallergic

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SUZANNE DUCHAMP, FRENCH DADAIST PAINTER, YOUNGER SISTER OF MARCEL.
<https://tinyurl.com/2dqckg32> _#WomensArt

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JUDGE ISSUES INJUNCTION IN LEGAL CHALLENGE TO IMLS DISMANTLING
A United States district court chief judge in Rhode Island issued an order on May 6 granting a preliminary injunction in the case brought by the Rhode Island attorney general and 20 other state AGs against the Trump administration for its attempt to dismantle the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and other congressionally mandated government agencies.
The decision, by John J. McConnell, Jr., stated that Trump’s executive order “violates the Administrative Procedures Act (‘APA’) in the arbitrary and capricious way it was carried out. It also disregards the fundamental constitutional role of each of the branches of our federal government; specifically, it ignores the unshakable principles that Congress makes the law and appropriates funds, and the Executive implements the law Congress enacted and spends the funds Congress appropriated.” _artnet

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A REPUBLICAN-LED HOUSE COMMITTEE HAS PROPOSED GIVING $257 MILLION IN FEDERAL FUNDING
to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The allocation would be about six times more than its usual government funding of $43 million. Democratic Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine responded in a statement that “we need transparency on how this money would be spent and assurance it’s not being used to reward loyalty or bankroll pet projects under the guise of cultural investment.” _ARTnews

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HELEN FRANKENTHALER AND ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATIONS WILL FUND ARTS PROJECTS HIT BY NEA CUTS
The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation are stepping up to replace some $800,000 in funding to 80 visual arts programs that was lost due to sudden cuts the Trump administration made in February to promised grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). _artnet

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PHOTOGRAPH OF ALCATRAZ BY GORDON PARKS, 1957:
<https://tinyurl.com/227dsc3u> _MichaelLobel

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SOTHEBY'S POSTPONES AUCTION OF GEMS LINKED TO BUDDHA
Auction house Sotheby's said on Wednesday that it had postponed the auction of a collection of hundreds of jewels linked to Buddha's corporeal relics after India's government threatened legal action and demanded the jewels be returned.
The sale of the collection, known as the Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha Mauryan Empire, Ashokan Era, circa 240-200 BCE, has drawn criticism from Buddhist academics and monastic leaders.
India's government said in a May 5 letter to the auction house that the relics constituted "inalienable religious and cultural heritage of India and the global Buddhist community. Their sale violates Indian and international laws, as well as United Nations conventions."
The auction was due to take place on Wednesday morning at Sotheby's headquarters in the Asian financial hub.
Sotheby's said in an emailed statement that in light of the matters raised by India's government "and with the agreement of the consignors, the auction ... has been postponed. This will allow for discussions between the parties, and we look forward to sharing any updates as appropriate."
Notice of the gems sale had been removed from its auction house on Wednesday and the website page promoting the auction was no longer available.
Sotheby's had said in February that the 1898 discovery of the relics at Piprahwa in northern India ranked "among the most extraordinary archaeological discoveries of all time".
India said that the proposed auction "offends the sentiments of over 500 million Buddhists worldwide," adding that the sale violated core Buddhist ethics and disrupted "sacred tradition." _Reuters

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WOODCRAFTS KENT, MN
<https://tinyurl.com/2ywwgexx> _RuralIndexingProject

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AMID MAJOR MARKET SHIFTS
“There’s no doubt we are in a difficult moment,” art advisor Candace Worth told this week. “There’s so much unpredictability. The general sentiment among the art-buying public seems to be that they don’t want to spend above a certain price point until they feel a little more confident about what’s going on, globally, financially, politically.”
Worth noted that the market environment is influenced also by what came before it—as in, the boom in buying that accompanied the years just before and after the pandemic. The unstable economy is a factor, but there is also a buying “hangover.”
“People bought so much art at such a steady clip over the last five to seven years,” she said “Now they are looking at, in some cases, dropping values, rising storage costs. And they start to ask themselves, ‘What am I doing with all this? Do my kids want this art? Am I donating it?'” _ARTnews

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WHAT DO YOU FEED A COLLEGE OF HUNGRY CARDINALS?
"Manner of Carrying Food Supplies to the Conclave,"
<https://tinyurl.com/2chn3tlm> _JesseLocker