OLD NEWS

HOW AQUATIC TURTLES SURVIVE BRUMATION by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/58hucjkb>
Imagine being a cold-blooded aquatic turtle, facing months of being submerged in the mud at the bottom of a pond where the water temperature hovers just above freezing and the surface is capped by a lid of ice. You would be roughly the same temperature as the environment around you and the supply of oxygen would be limited. How would you survive? Turtles adapt to these conditions by slowing their metabolism way down. The colder it gets, the slower the turtle’s metabolism, which in turn lowers their energy and oxygen demands.
The inactivity of brumation (winter dormancy) reduces, but does not eliminate, the need for oxygen. Turtles absorb oxygen from the water through skin that has lots of blood vessels. Areas well vascularized include their mouth, legs and cloaca (single opening for excretion and reproduction in birds, amphibians and reptiles). The term for this process is cloacal respiration.
If oxygen levels are extremely low, Snapping and Painted Turtles can switch to a temporary “no-oxygen” metabolism. However, this anaerobic metabolism creates lactic acid, which can cause a cramping sensation and can lead to death if it continues over a long period of time. To counteract this, Painted Turtles release calcium carbonate from their shells to neutralize the acid. (Photo: taken in early spring when this Snapping Turtle had just emerged from hibernation) _NaturallyCurious

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ALLOW
<https://tinyurl.com/kffh8yak> _DavidShrigley

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FRANCO VACCARI, ARTIST WHO EXPANDED PHOTOGRAPHY’S POSSIBILITIES, DIES AT 89
Franco Vaccari, an Italian conceptual artist whose experiments with photography expanded the medium’s possibilities, has died at 89.
Vaccari died just four months before his work was due to be surveyed in a retrospective held at Museion in Bolzano, Italy. Opening in March, the exhibition was being staged to mark what would’ve been Vaccari’s 90th birthday and is due to explore how the artist brought his work beyond art spaces, into the eye of the general public.
He often relied on viewer participation for the completion of his pieces, which he typically called “esposizioni in tempo reale,” or “exhibitions in real time.” The most famous of them, a work called Esposizione in tempo reale n. 4. Lascia sulle pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio, figured in the 1972 Venice Biennale and was mostly composed of a photobooth known as a Photomatic. Vaccari sat for the first picture, then asked his viewers to follow suit and forfeit their picture, which then was exhibited for others to see.
Following the success of that piece, Vaccari produced Photomatic d’Italia (1972–74), for which he asked visitors to some 1,000 Photomatic booths across Italy to perform a similar gesture, making for what he called a “private space immersed in public space.” Some 40,000 self-portraits resulted. Later on, Vaccari would state that pieces such as this one revealed photography’s inner workings “through techniques that were capable of short-circuiting the cumbersome presence of the ego.”
He staged his first “exhibition in real time” in 1969 with Esposizione in tempo reale n. 1: Maschere, for which he provided viewers with masks of George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who infamously advocated for segregation. Vaccari then asked viewers to wear those masks in a darkened room before periodically shining a flashlight at some of the attendees.
His art of the 1970s situated him more firmly within the Conceptualist movement. In 1972, he made 700 Km di esposizione Modena-Graz, for which he photographed a range of sights seen on the way from Modena to Graz, Austria, where he was to have a show. The piece translated Conceptualist techniques flowing in from the US—Ed Ruscha had photographed every gas station on the Sunset Strip in 1966—for an Italian audience.
Though Vaccari remained under-recognized outside Italy, his fans included some well-known curators. Okwui Enwezor included Vaccari’s work in his 2008 Gwangju Biennale, and Hans Ulrich Obrist featured a piece by the artist in a show co-organized with Christian Boltanski for the Monnaie de Paris in 2015. _ARTnews

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/4jnadyza> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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MARIA BALSHAW, DIRECTOR OF TATE SINCE 2017, TO STEP DOWN
<https://tinyurl.com/449fhk7z>
Maria Balshaw, the director of Tate, will step down from her post in spring 2026, the institution announced today.
Balshaw joined Tate in 2017 after a successful stint as the director of Manchester Art Gallery and the Whitworth Art Gallery. She replaced Nicholas Serota, who had held the Tate post for 29 years.
Balshaw said in a statement: “It has been an absolute privilege to serve as director of Tate over this last decade and to work with such talented colleagues and artists. With a growing and increasingly diverse audience, and with a brilliant forward plan in place, I feel now is the right time to pass on the baton to a next director who will take the organisation into its next decade of innovation and artistic leadership.”
During her tenure, Balshaw oversaw an eclectic programme, encompassing blockbuster shows such as The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (Tate Britain, 2019), Yoko Ono (Tate Modern, 2024) and Sargent and Fashion (Tate Britain, 2024). Next year, for her final Tate project, Balshaw will co-curate the largest-ever survey of the artist Tracey Emin at Tate Modern (Tracey Emin: A Second Life, 27 February-31 August).
A statement from Tate celebrated Balshaw’s work to diversify Tate’s collection and bring greater gender balance and geographical breadth to new acquisitions. It also noted that under her leadership, Tate’s membership reached 150,000, which it describes as the largest arts membership in the world.
Roland Rudd, the chair of Tate, said in a statement: “Maria has been a trailblazer at Tate. She has never wavered from her core belief—that more people deserve to experience the full richness of art, and more artists deserve to be part of that story.
As the home of British art and of international modern and contemporary art, Tate today reflects the audiences we serve and the artists who make up our nation. We engage a wider public than ever before through our own galleries, our digital channels, and our projects in other venues across the UK and the world.”
Balshaw’s departure comes against a complex backdrop at Tate. Earlier this year The organisation was poised to cut 7% of its workforce as part of an institution-wide push to reduce costs. Approximately 40 roles were cut via recruitment freezes, targeted restructures and voluntary exits.
This followed the publication on 3 December 2024 of its 2023-2024 annual report and accounts, which stated that for 2024-2025 the museum group would be operating on a deficit budget.
Meanwhile, more than 150 Tate workers walked out earlier this month in a dispute over pay and terms and conditions. The Public and Commercial Services Union told that its members at Tate report in-work poverty and mental and physical health issues linked to their work.
While Tate’s own research has shown that attendance by domestic audiences is close to 95% of pre-Covid levels, The Art Newspaper’s annual visitor figures report for 2024 showed that overall attendance was significantly lower than in 2019, a year of record highs. Tate Modern saw 25% fewer visitors than before the Covid-19 pandemic, Tate Britain was down 32% and Tate St Ives had a 37% drop in attendance.
After two decades of broadening the artistic canon, Tate Modern’s most overt collecting and programming priority today is in the field of Indigenous practices. This year, for its 25th anniversary, Tate Modern launched the first major exhibition of the Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray. A Tate source told that Balshaw “supported directors to create the programmes implemented”. _ArtNewspaper

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FIGURATIVE WORKS BY INIMITABLE MODERNIST PAINTER MILTON AVERY,
who always charted his own path.
First up: Milton Avery, "The Artist Constant," 1940
<https://tinyurl.com/mw2farmm>
The disturbingly masklike visage of the figure in Avery's "Belle Gross," 1943
<https://tinyurl.com/57y3pckv>
Now that's what I call a baby: Milton Avery, "Pink Baby," 1933
<https://tinyurl.com/47jpuj73> _MichaelLobel

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DON’T BLAME MARIA BALSHAW FOR TATE’S FAILINGS. by Jonathan Jones
<https://tinyurl.com/5n8bdfdv>
In the last nine years Tate has had some hits, but its misses have become embarrassing. Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is currently occupied by a feeble installation that would be weak in an ordinary-sized art space, let alone this gigantic one. It’s become genuinely hard to understand what Tate’s priorities are when it chooses artists for the annual Turbine Hall commission. And the Turner prize is even more mystifying. Once the stage of shocking, provocative art that engaged – whether they were for or against – a massive public, it has retreated into wilful obscurity, its trips around the UK starting to seem part of a studied wholesomeness. What’s the point of staging it in Bradford when the shortlist just exports the enigmatic tastes of a metropolitan elite?
Is Maria Balshaw, who is quitting her post as director of Tate, solely responsible for this? No, but perhaps she is courageously taking the blame and allowing the institution to reinvent itself as it needs to, fast. The achievements Tate stresses in its announcement of her departure centre on how she has “diversified” the collection, exhibition and audiences. But in that noble quest, there has been a loss of artistic ambition, aesthetic thrills, raw horror and beauty. Sometimes we really do want art for art’s sake and Tate has lost sight of that.
This is appallingly evident in the collection displays, which critics don’t often write about but visitors have to endure. Tate Modern’s galleries have slid into insulting incoherence, and in the last few years treasures like its Rothkos, Picassos and surrealists have often been out of view. The rehang at Tate Britain did get critiqued in 2023, with justifiable harshness, for it puts politics before art, patronising everyone with loftily proclaimed yet naive readings of British history – such as criticising baroque artists for not being Ranters or Hogarth for being heteronormative. I can think those things for myself. Or perhaps better things.
There have been some great Tate shows too, yet they were often marred by silly side battles. I was astounded by the superb Cézanne blockbuster in 2022. It didn’t worry me that contemporary artists were invited to make irrelevant, politically charged interventions – but in truth, when you are trying to understand what Cézanne is up to in paintings that pixelate the sunburnt rocks of Provence into cubism and abstraction, it doesn’t help to also have to work out what makes one of these stony landscapes colonialist. It would have baffled Edward Said.
<https://tinyurl.com/53tvccxa>
Yet since Cézanne and Rodin, the brilliant retrospectives of modern greats that used to grace Tate Modern – it began, back in the noughties, with the unforgettable Matisse Picasso – have thinned out. Tate brags about Leigh Bowery<<https://tinyurl.com/3h7wtc7z>> ! as a highlight of Balshaw’s time but this was a wasted opportunity: the great, unmissable exhibition would have been one that reunited all Lucian Freud’s portraits of Bowery.
So the critic moans and gripes and – guess what? – the public agree. People have voted with their absence. Presumably it’s the poor attendances at Tate’s museums that are behind Balshaw’s departure. But she should not be made a scapegoat by an institution that simply ploughs on regardless. Tate has made arrogant, crass choices to put ideology ahead of art, worthiness ahead of aesthetic pleasure and bad politics over thoughtful radicalism. It needs to change its ways, not just its boss. Otherwise, given that Penelope Curtis left Tate Britain after criticism in 2020 while its current male head seems impermeable to an even worse performance, this will look like another misogynist removal of a powerful woman. _GuardianUK

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SEE-THROUGH FRIONA, TX
<https://tinyurl.com/37dwy4vr> _RuralIndexingProject

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CEO OF CANADIAN NATIONAL MUSEUM DEPARTS AFTER ‘SERIOUS CODE OF CONDUCT BREACHES’
The CEO of a Canadian national stepped down on Thursday following a special commissioner’s determination that she had mistreated staff throughout her decade-long tenure, using slurs and misogynistic language to refer to senior leadership.
“In early December as the board was gaining a better understanding of the report—its timing, content and the expectations of government—the board confirmed CEO Marie Chapman’s decision to retire, and effective today, she has stepped away from her role,” Cynthia Price Verreault, chair of the Museum of Immigration at Pier 21’s board of trustees, wrote in a letter to stakeholders and staff on Thursday.
The Office of the Public Sector Integrity Commissioner released the findings of its investigations into Chapman on Wednesday night, as first reported by CBC. The report accused Chapman of “serious code of conduct breaches” that jeopardized the “confidence in the integrity of the public sector, and specifically the museum.”
Chapman was appointed CEO under former Canadian prime minister Stephen J. Harper was reappointed by the Trudeau government in 2016 and 2021. Her four-year contract expired in October, however the museum’s board of trustees had granted her a 90-day transitional term that would have concluded in January, according to the CBC.
The commissioner’s investigation, launched in 2023, centered around workplace misconduct that was reportedly so severe that some staff told investigators they had contemplated self-harm. Chapman was accused of violating the federal government’s core values by using her position to “strike fear into employees” leaving them too intimidated to report concerns. According to the report, Chapman referred to the senior leadership team—commonly abbreviated as SLT—as “sluts” in front of the public, other staff, and even a visiting foreign delegation. She also reportedly ranked female employees by age, commented that there were “no good-looking men” at the museum, and bestowed “hurtful nicknames” based on staff’s behavior or appearances.
In her response, Chapman challenged the report’s impartiality and denied fostering a workplace culture of fear and humiliation. She admitted, however, to calling the senior leadership team “sluts,” saying she considered herself part of the group and intended no disrespect. _ARTnews

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I KNOW I'VE SHOWN SOME INTERESTING IMAGES OF THE BACKS OF PAINTINGS,
but usually they look like this
(André Derain's Mountains at Collioure):
<https://tinyurl.com/mrx5zb2x> _‪PeterHuestis‬

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THE WORLDS OF ANALOGUE AND DIGITAL ART MAY BE SPLINTERING
Perusing the booths of Art Basel Paris in October, I noticed there was very little digital art on view. Even works made with the tools of mechanical reproduction were shunned, it seemed—just a few photographs and screens here and there. No algorithms. No large language hallucinations. No motion-sensing interactions.
Instead, the majestic halls of the Grand Palais were filled with art made by hand. I saw splattered paint, knotted rope, braided yarn, chiselled wood and filigreed metal. The objects flaunted their virtuosity. They were proudly, defiantly analogue.
Was this art as a last stand for humanity? In this year of feverish anxiety about artificial intelligence (AI), the art world seemed to be staging a rally for art created by flesh-and-blood people.
I was intrigued but not surprised. What I saw that day at the Grand Palais resonated with several threads in my new book, The Future of the Art World, a collection of dialogues with artists, curators, academics, patrons and art-business leaders. While reluctant to specifically predict the future in it (that would be a fool’s errand), I do lay out some plausible forward scenarios in my introduction to the conversations.
One of them is a kind of strategic retreat—or advance, depending on your view—whereby the art world, and especially museums, might transform into what I called an analogue sanctuary.
In this version of the future, the legacy art world would double down on what it has long done well. It would showcase rare and unique objects made by humans for humans.
The institutions of art, instead of co-opting new digital genres—building on what they have done, albeit at a glacial pace, with photography and video—might let digital spectacles splinter off into their own sub-industry, as theatre did vis-à-vis cinema nearly a century ago. Immersive and AI art, with their seemingly limitless thirst for large spaces, new skill sets and energy-guzzling technology, would carve out a parallel lane for digital productions.
The analogy for an analogue-first strategy comes from the watchmaking industry. Confronted by the spectre of its demise in the 1980s, when battery-powered watches flooded the zone, haute horlogerie scaled even higher. It circled the wagons around savoir-faire, inventing timepieces of mind-boggling complexity (and price) that celebrated classic materials and mastery. All in all, the strategy paid off, at least for the manufactures that survived.
I am not predicting that this is where the whole art world is headed. Next year’s global art fairs, for all we know, may be chock-a-block with human-machine collaborations. But the art world, at its best, functions as a bellwether, a keeper of the zeitgeist. And right now, as our culture, economy and politics disappear into digital screens, it seems to be sending a message. It is not unreasonable for art institutions and markets to support creativity that algorithms cannot touch.
I spoke with some of the leading protagonists of digital and AI-enabled art for my book, including Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst, Refik Anadol, Agnieszka Kurant, Michael Connor and Simon Denny. While clear-eyed about the downsides of AI, they rejected the view that machines are about to displace artists.
As Herndon put it: “AI models can simulate a kind of creativity that can produce new things, for sure. But the idea of that threatening human creativity is silly.” What I found, somewhat to my surprise, is that many trailblazing artists of the digital age are deeply committed to and protective of the art world’s institutional scaffolding.
To be clear: I am not advocating here for an escape into the analogue sanctuary. Quite the contrary. I believe that museums and galleries should engage with the best of these nascent forms of art-making, and that it is instructive to listen to those who are fluent in new creative languages. But we may find that, for the time being, the art world thrills to unique objects made by human hands. _András Szántó _ArtNewspaper

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TYPES
<https://tinyurl.com/yp28yy8c> _RabihAlameddine

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DADDY HAS BEEN WATCHING THE GULF’S MUSEUM BOOM AND THE VIEW IS WILD
<https://tinyurl.com/wpcrrb3p>
The Gulf’s museum boom reads less like a cultural renaissance and more like an oil money powered leaderboard for foreign advisers and brand names. Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are not simply building big shiny institutions with gravity defying roofs. They are importing an entire class of Western consultants, strategic advisers, collection whisperers and institutional elders to engineer their cultural future. It is a lucrative niche and also a clear signal that the region wants to fast track authority by borrowing the infrastructure that shaped New York and Europe. The result is a museum ecosystem that is enormous and ambitious but also deeply dependent on external expertise. It raises the question of whose stories are being presented and who gets to author the vision being sold to the world.
None of this feels accidental. The Gulf’s glow up is a meticulously planned soft power project where money and ambition are working at a scale the West can no longer match. These museums are not just institutions. They are cultural statements, global rebranding tools and aesthetic arms of state identity. Local artists and emerging curators are finally getting visibility but the scaffolding around them is clearly imported. Consultants are shaping narratives. Designers are shaping the spectacle. Market experts are shaping the acquisitions. The entire enterprise feels like a region that is not waiting for validation. It is buying the mechanisms that once provided it and bending them toward its own long term cultural goals.
And then there is Daddy Glenn Lowry. Newly emeritus after three decades at MoMA he has stepped seamlessly into the Gulf consultancy circuit advising on initiatives like the Islamic Arts Biennale and lending his institutional weight to projects that critics often describe as prestige construction with global ambitions. His involvement signals that the Gulf is not only collecting artworks and architects. It is collecting expertise. It is collecting authority. Daddy has been clocking this for a while. The old guard of Western institutions is now being exported to a region that has the capital and confidence to reshape the global art map. The Gulf is not just building museums. It is building a new center of gravity for taste and influence. And for better or worse the consultants are already packing their bags. _TheArtDaddy ·

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PIETRO LONGHI, LA CIOCCOLATA DEL MATTINO (THE MORNING CHOCOLATE), 1775-1780
<https://tinyurl.com/mvm4humt> _JesseLocker

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ARTIST ARRESTED AT ART BASEL
<https://tinyurl.com/2jukrtxn>
A performance artist from Luxembourg managed to turn a few scrawled lines of washable spray chalk into a night in jail during Art Basel Miami Beach—an outcome he claims was both unexpected and meaningful.
Thomas Iser was arrested last week after spray-painting the words “Sorry to disturb, art in progress,” in exaggerated graffiti-style lettering, on a window of the Miami Beach Convention Center during the United States’ largest art fair. He then invited his three-year-old daughter to add her own marks with a chalk pen. Police charged Iser with criminal mischief, a misdemeanor.
Iser later told that he knew an arrest was likely, though he said he was surprised officers “handcuffed [him] immediately,” and did so in front of his daughter. He has staged similar interventions around the world and has been detained for them before, which makes his stated assumption—that American police would wait for a more convenient or decorous moment—more than a little curious. In a video p, Iser said the child’s mother was filming the performance “a few meters away,” though when questioned, he told police he was alone with the child.
Iser framed the episode as “a performance about tenderness, freedom, and the invisible borders we carry.” He described the chalk writing as “a small act of love, courage, and playfulness,” emphasized that “nothing was damaged,” and presented the intervention as a gift to his daughter. “In a world where access to art often depends on privilege,” he wrote, “I wanted to give her her own place—even at the price of my own freedom.”
_ARTnews

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BACK TO THEIR ROOTS: A BRIEF HISTORY OF TREES – IN PICTURES
<https://tinyurl.com/3fva96a6> _GuardianUK