OLD NEWS

HOW BIRDS STAY WARM by Mary Holland
<https://tinyurl.com/an322272>
Birds that don’t migrate have many strategies for surviving the brutal cold weather much of the Northeast is going to experience this weekend. Most birds will try to find food late in the day, to sustain themselves through the night. Fluffing up feathers is a common practice to increase insulation, as is shivering to generate heat. A few birds, including Black-capped Chickadees, go into a state of torpor, when their body temperature of 107°F drops down to around 86-90°F. The lowering of their metabolism conserves precious body fat. Some birds, such as Eastern Bluebirds, huddle together in insulated roosts. Others, including American Goldfinches and Northern Cardinals, grow extra down feathers for the winter. Many birds seek shelter in tree cavities and conifers where they are protected from the wind.
The pictured Pileated Woodpecker was seen on a sub-zero day, clinging to a sunny spot on the trunk of a White Pine tree after filling itself with dried grapes from a nearby vine. It spent several minutes shivering before tucking its head under its wing where it was sheltered from the wind and cold. _NaturallyCurious

>>>

HANDSOME
<https://tinyurl.com/2t2ztykv> _DavidShrigley

>>>

17. FIDELIA BRIDGES, BIRD’S NEST IN CATTAILS by Rainey Knudson
<https://tinyurl.com/y5xtucvb>
Fidelia Bridges was 15 years old when she suddenly lost both her parents in 1850. Her ship-captain father had died three months prior in Portuguese Macau (present-day China). In an awful coincidence, the news of his death arrived a few hours after his wife also died at home, never knowing that her husband had preceded her in death. Bridges and her siblings became destitute orphans within a matter of hours.
In the abrupt collapse of every structure that had explained her world, Fidelia found her way through her devastation with drawing. She located the guide wire of close attention to nature and followed it for the rest of her life. Hers were no grand landscapes, no vistas of river valleys, but narrowly observed studies of birds, flowers, and even weeds and poison ivy. It was almost an existential practice, observing life continuing to live, painting small natural truths that were indifferent to human catastrophe.
Here, like Dürer before her, she unlocked the complexity and unlikely beauty in a clump of grasses. Her cattails bound messily together by a bird’s nest are elegant in their asymmetry, the detail breathtaking. She painted it like an Old Master portrait, spare against a plain background. And though there is no bird in this picture, the nest itself is a promise of new life.
Fidelia made her living as a nanny, and later by selling her work and illustrating books and greeting cards. A gardener and conservationist, she was attentive to nature to the end. _TheImpatientReader

>>>

THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/jka48ukc> _LisaAnneAuerbach

>>>

HOW ‘ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT’ VIDEOS LED TO ARTIST ANTHONY LISTER’S RAPID ACQUITTAL
The jury’s verdict came back in a minute. Not guilty on all counts. For prominent Sydney barrister Margaret Cunneen SC, who represented acclaimed street artist Anthony Lister, it was a moment of profound relief and vindication after a lengthy trial that saw her client cleared of multiple serious sexual assault charges.
Lister, 44, a pioneer of Australia’s street art movement, had pleaded not guilty to nine charges, including five counts of sexual intercourse without consent.
He faced two trials in all, maintaining his innocence from the day he was arrested on charges relating to offences said to have occurred over a six-year period involving five women.
During his trial, Ms Cunneen argued in her closing address to the jury that the accusers retrospectively reframed consensual sexual encounters as non-consensual due to personal regret, social pressures like the “MeToo” movement, a desire for career advancement, jealousy, or a need to explain their past in a more sympathetic light.
She argued that in one case it was “transactional”.
One accuser said: “Well, I couldn’t imagine hanging out with him if I didn’t think it would have some sort of benefit on my career”.
Ms Cunneen admitted that when she first took on the case on June 6, 2024, the police “fact sheet” looked “extremely damaging”.
However, a deep dive into the evidence, largely thanks to Lister’s own meticulous record-keeping, painted a very different picture.
“Anthony had not thrown away anything from his life,” Ms Cunneen explained. “Had he been a person who clears out or deletes scenes from his messages or photographs, he would not have been able to establish he was innocent of these offences, but because of his own records, which in every case were far more extensive than the records of the complainants, he was able to show the court that these allegations were simply untrue.”
Ms Cunneen said the defence presented evidence that directly contradicted the complainants’ accounts, often through their own forgotten or deleted communications.
“In virtually every case, each complainant had forgotten about the existence of videos showing at least sometimes, a great level of enthusiastic consent,” Ms Cunneen said.
“Messages between the parties at the time showed a snapshot of the state between Anthony and particular women, and so that put it into context in ways that can’t be criticised or contradicted.”
She cited a striking example: “We had one woman who said, ‘I wouldn’t have even been hanging around with him unless it could do something for my career’ or, ‘well, I just went along with all the sex, sex things, because I thought it would give me opportunities in my career’.”
Another complainant, Ms Cunneen said, had “completely left out of her account, having gone to Anthony’s hotel room when in another city when they happened to be there together and writing affectionate messages after that”.
When asked about this, the woman reportedly said, “Oh yes, that was the nicest memory I ever had, Anthony,” despite it postdating the alleged sexual assault.
Furthermore, Ms Cunneen alleged that this same complainant, when asked why she didn’t provide these messages to police, said, “I didn’t think that that was relevant.”
She said police at Surry Hills police station were telling people to “come forward if you’ve got something to say about this fellow”.
“We’re in a very different world when people are encouraged and told how brave they are and courageous, and that they are doing this to help others, and this will save others. They are encouraged to get on some sort of crusade.”
\Ms Cunneen said she had argued before the court that there was a theme in the Lister case of people looking back and thinking “Oh I wish I hadn’t”. _NEWS.COM.AU

>>>

LIONS CLUB WATER FOUNTAIN COSMOS, MN
<https://tinyurl.com/2pc7mu2v> _RuralIndexingProject

>>>

DAVID DIAO HAS THE FLOOR by greg
<https://tinyurl.com/57ev4rxm>
never really thought of David Diao as an sculptor, and though it really does feel like it belongs on the floor, technically, this unwelcome mat IS painted. Wright put it in their Chicago sale, but there’s nothing in Chicago in Diao’s 1990s exhibition history, so maybe it comes from a Chicago collector. Even with no info, it really does feel like it captures the moment right now.
<https://tinyurl.com/5afn6x55>
But it still barely cracks my top five floor-related Diao works. In the early 2000s, Diao made a series of works called Perfect Arrangement, paintings exploring the found composition of Philip Johnson’s detailed schematic for positioning the furniture in the Glass House. He showed the works at Tanya Leighton in Berlin in 2008-09, and she brought one of the breakouts to Art Basel in 2015.
<https://tinyurl.com/zwckdhsw>
Perfect Arrangement at 1/4 Scale, 2005, is an edition with the floorplan cut into a 30 x 40 inch sheet of industrial felt. So rather than being a mat, it represents a carpet. And it very much goes on the wall._greg.org

>>>

IN ADVANCE OF THIS WEEKEND: GEORGE BELLOWS, "A MORNING SNOW—HUDSON RIVER," 1910
<https://tinyurl.com/3r87r5cy> _MichaelLobel

>>>

LONG-HIDDEN LEONARDO MURAL OPENS TO THE PUBLIC
<https://tinyurl.com/4bm5wh2d>
As Milan prepares to host the 2026 Winter Olympics, the city is briefly unlocking access to an elusive Leonardo da Vinci work: a vast, unfinished wall and ceiling painting hidden for centuries inside the Sforza Castle, which is normally concealed behind scaffolding as it undergoes restoration.
The painting, begun around 1498 and long obscured by plaster, has only recently been re-evaluated as a genuine work by the Renaissance master. According to historic letters from the Duke of Milan Ludovico Sforza, the room was painted in 1498 by Leonardo and his workshop, who sumptuously decorated its walls and domed ceiling with designs of intertwining vines over a pergola, a canopy created by 16 trees, and monochromes of roots and rocks. However, in 1499, Milan was seized by France, causing Sforza—and the artist—to flee.
For the next several centuries, the castle was used for military purposes and the walls of the Sala delle Asse were painted over, the memory of the painting lost. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that traces of the original paint were found. Subsequent restoration efforts throughout the 20th century revealed the mural in full, but its tempera paint remains fragile. Restorers are now using Japanese rice paper with demineralized water to remove salts that have seeped into the walls to clean the surface of the painting.
The artist, after all, was a favorite of the Duke’s, having painted the Last Supper at Milan’s Santa Maria delle Grazie around the same time.
<https://tinyurl.com/mw6sjpts> _artnet

>>>

CLAUDE LORRAIN MASTERPIECE BARRED FROM LEAVING THE U.K.
<https://tinyurl.com/mrx4k72w>
The painting Landscape with Rural Dance was made in Rome in around 1640 and features merry, music-making shepherds amid a rustic, pastoral idyll with a castle in the middle distance. “Renowned as one of Claude Lorrain’s masterpieces, the scene draws on popular poetic themes of an idealized location removed from urban life,”
For centuries, the Lorrain painting has hung at Woburn Abbey, a stately home north of London that belongs to the Duke of Bedford and began welcoming members of the public in 1955. The decision to sell off the landscape has been billed as a “strategic move” that will help fund the completion of a major renovation project that is set to be unveiled this summer.
<https://tinyurl.com/487cp4dk> _artnet

>>>

CULTURAL TRENDS I’M WATCHING by Ben Davis
This is the first piece I’m posting in 2026, so I thought I would post quick thoughts on a bunch of trends and topics that are disconnected—things that are on my mind, that I think are worth commenting on, that are significant when it comes to the pieces that make up the overall vibe, but that I am worried I won’t have enough time to draw out in full.
I’m going to go from the very serious to the trivial. Here we go.
Kinky Sex.
One bet I had for last year is that there would be a focus on sex and kink. My thinking was: A background conversation about how mainstream culture had become desexualized would meet the reaction to political correctness, and bounce off the feminist debate about “kink shaming,” thus finding some kind of outlet. This seemed a simple triangulation, providing a sense of forward cultural movement while also fitting the contours of the terrain. Here are the signs: the “indie sleaze” revival (mostly just chatter), Man’s Best Friend <https://tinyurl.com/2s3bea73> , and The Housemaid, but also artist Mindy Seu’s lecture-performance A Sexual History of the Internet <https://tinyurl.com/yc4xs4wk> , photographer Anna Sampson’s Other Intimacies <https://tinyurl.com/uun93smt> , and artist Sarah Meyohas pivoting to the erotic art-house short film Medusa <https://tinyurl.com/yc2we42j> .
Jolie-laide Figuration.
This one really is me thinking out loud, but something I am looking out for. The current mega-mainstreaming of cosmetic surgery, looksmaxxing, and A.I.’s conjuring of virtual people from distillations of what’s popular have created a climate where a generic attractive look is more aggressively dominant than ever. I’m looking out for forms of figuration that accentuate the flaws, tics, and quirks that give actual faces and bodies character. Neither the push toward unreal beauty standards nor the celebration of unconventional beauty in art are new; but just as one intensifies, you would expect more from the other.
Betting on Baskets.
Ceramic <https://tinyurl.com/mr466xzu> and glass art have had major and escalating cachet in museums. Textiles and quilting have also been a main trend recently as part of a general heightened emphasis on craft as art, a largely positive collateral effect of reconsidering who and what had been left out of the traditional histories (I talked about this with curator Elissa Author in 2024). I don’t expect any of this to go away, but these trends are years old now, and the aperture might open on other craft fields with deep benches of creators who haven’t gotten their dues. Maybe there’s a basket wave? Jeremy Frey’s creations, for one, are hard to deny. He won a “Genius” grant last year <https://tinyurl.com/4s7bwvn8> .
…Vinyl?
I keep meaning to write about this, but also I can’t decide about it. I’ll probably never have time to get around to it, given everything. So, I’ll put it here. There has been a vinyl record revival since 2020, tapping into nostalgia for physical media. Museums (MASS MoCA), non-profits (White Columns), and galleries (Corbett vs. Dempsey) have started putting out vinyl recently. Painter Peter Doig made vinyl records central to his current “House of Music” exhibition at the Serpentine in London. This is very hipster, very trivial, yeah, but the vinyl vogue seems to naturally connect with what art institutions have—or hope—to offer as their comparative advantage in this moment: kind of retro but in a way that feels newly relevant, physical and also durational… Interesting or not? _artnet

>>>

BROCCOLI, OGONQUIT, MAINE, PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER FINK, 1960S:
<https://tinyurl.com/52cudua3> _‪PeterHuestis‬

>>>

MAJOR NAPA MUSEUM LISTS ESTATE FOR $10.9 MILLION AMID FINANCIAL STRUGGLES
<https://tinyurl.com/9rykemvn>
The di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa has listed its 217-acre estate for $10.9 million, less than a year after announcing a plan to boost revenue through event rentals.
Executive Director Kate Eilertsen told that listing the property was a necessary step to give the 28-year-old museum some options to stabilize its finances and keep its collection intact.
<https://tinyurl.com/2ffm7wya>
She added that the Wine Country museum is also exploring other money generators like touring exhibitions and new membership programs. Charging admission to its free satellite gallery in San Francisco, which opened in August in the Minnesota Street Project, is also a possibility.
“Our priority is to make sure that the collection stays together and that we are able to do exhibitions and loans from our permanent collection,”
<https://tinyurl.com/rke7tetj>
But even if the property sells, that doesn’t mean the museum wants to leave its home off the Sonoma Highway.
“A high priority for us is that we make a deal with the Napa Land Trust or Open Space District to turn the upper half into a hiking trail,” explained Eilertsen, who said the di Rosa has been in talks with both entities. “They were enthusiastic about keeping the sculptures there, and if that happens it will allow us to have probably two years worth of time to figure out how we can build more money and make the lower half of the property more successful as a business.”
Last spring, the di Rosa announced it was reducing staff as it refocused its event program, with a new emphasis on hosting weddings.
Indeed, in October, the Napa campus was a backdrop for the four-day wedding of former Sausalito Mayor Melissa Blaustein and longtime San Francisco arts philanthropist David Saxe. In leiu of gifts, the couple asked guests to donate to four of their favorite Bay Area arts institutions, including the di Rosa. Eilertsen said the wedding raised more than $13,000 dollars in donations — not including rental fees from the couple — and gained new members. _SFChronicle

>>>

FAIRFIELD PORTER HAWKWEED (1968)
<https://tinyurl.com/4695jfuv> _RabihAlameddine

>>>

TATE’S TURNER AND CONSTABLE GOT ME THINKING ABOUT MARXIST ART HISTORY
Loan exhibitions are so expensive these days I’d almost forgotten the pleasure of walking through a show with room after room of masterpieces. Tate Britain’s Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals is a proper blockbuster. Do what you must to see it,
My only advice would be: give some of the labels a miss. Turner is treated well. But poor Constable! Here, the artist who made it his life’s mission to represent the “truth” of the landscape is cast as an anti-democratic reactionary. Tate repeats the accusation first made against Constable by Marxist art historians in the 1980s, that as the son of a rich miller and landowner, he helped the British elite craft a false image of rural life to avoid showing the reality of the poverty created by their grip on the land. “The basis of his social harmony,” said John Barrell of Constable in his famous book The Dark Side of the Landscape, “is social division.”
Thus, the exhibition’s labels tell us, for example, that Constable’s selective view of the world “gives little sense of the agricultural unrest and hardship of the period”. Hung just feet from this label, however, is Constable’s Stour Valley and Dedham Church (around 1815), in which two labourers are literally shovelling shit. This is somehow explained as a coded reference to marital fertility.
As I was muttering to myself about the excesses of Marxist art history, a woman came up to me in the exhibition. She was Russian and wanted to explain why Constable meant so much to her. Growing up in the Soviet Union, she had seen Constable, the miller’s son, presented as a democratising truth-teller of rural life, the painter who helped art break away from aristocratic idealisation. And she was glad to find, she said, that all the wonderful Constables around us confirmed that view. So perhaps the Marxists were right after all—the Russian ones, that is. _Bendor Grosvenor _ArtNewspaper

>>>

PIETRO BEATO(?), TWO PHILOSOPHERS, 1630-1649
<https://tinyurl.com/5n7fr53c> _JesseLocker

>>>

STUDIO MUSEUM EVACUATES VISITORS AFTER “SPRINKLER EMERGENCY”
<https://tinyurl.com/2kphfbzv>
Two months after its festive opening, the Adjaye Associates-designed Studio Museum in Harlem evacuated visitors today following a messy "sprinkler emergency" in its gift shop. The museum will remain closed through the weekend, a spokesperson confirmed.
A museum visitor who asked to remain anonymous told that staff instructed guests to leave the museum this afternoon, January 23, as water poured from the ceiling near the gift shop.
A spokesperson for the Studio Museum confirmed that a sprinkler was damaged during preparations for the upcoming storm and cold front, causing a flood in the gift shop below. No artworks or galleries were affected.
_Hyperallergic

>>>

THIEVES STEAL DUTCH MUSEUM’S ENTIRE SILVER COLLECTION
A museum in the eastern Dutch city of Doesburg has been hit by thieves who lifted its entire silverware collection in the early hours of Wednesday morning. According to museum staff, more than 300 “irreplaceable” objects were stolen, valued at tens of thousands of dollars.
At approximately 4:30 a.m. local time, two men forced entry into the Doesburg Silver Museum, housed in the 13th-century Martini Church. CCTV footage shows the duo using a crowbar to prise open a door and shatter display cabinets before making off with the loot. Among the silver was a treasured collection of mustard pots assembled by the museum’s founder, Martin de Kleijn.
“Only the ceramics, which were on temporary display, were left behind,”
Sietske Annevelink-Schurer, a member of the museum board, said that the collection spans 1700 to 1920 and was once used by some of the wealthiest individuals in Europe. “They were used by the elite, on their beautifully laid tables,” she said. Many of the mustard pots were lined with glass or ceramic to protect the silver from mustard’s corrosive properties. _ARTnews

>>>

WHY ARE SO MANY NEW YORK GALLERY SHOWS THIS WINTER ABOUT SAVING THE TREES?
<https://tinyurl.com/38acxckx>
In 2022, the trend spurred Wallpaper to ask: “Tree art is putting down roots: branching out or barking fad?”
The arboreal turn is more than just a referendum on saving the trees. It’s also about the value of listening to the earth at all when doing so can feel quietly radical.Many of these shows went on view as the Trump administration continued to repeal measures intended to protect the environment. (Just this month, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency made the decision to stop tracking the health effects of air pollution.) These exhibitions feel like an implicit response to all that. But it is notable, too, that these exhibitions are not only by Americans—they are by artists from Asia, Latin America, and Europe as well. The call to save the trees is a cross-national one, then. It’s also a call to save the world.
_Alex Greenberger _ARTnews

>>>

SAN FRANCISCO COYOTE SWIMS TO ALCATRAZ
It was a late Sunday afternoon like any other on San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island. The day was winding down, and Aidan Moore, a guest relations employee for Alcatraz City Cruises, was at the dock of the tourist attraction helping visitors disembark. Suddenly, one of the tourists approached him, wide-eyed: They had just seen a coyote swimming to shore, something that has never been recorded before.
“I didn’t believe them to start with,” Moore, who has been working on the island for the past two and a half years, told over the phone. But the guest insisted they had the video to prove it. They held up their iPhone to show him the screen, and sure enough, there it was: a coyote paddling through the water and eventually reaching the craggy coast on the southern edge of the island near the Agave Trail, panting and shivering.
Moore said he never got the guest’s name, but asked them to AirDrop the video to his phone. He then called in the sighting over the radio to the park rangers on site, who went to the trail to look for the animal. By then, it had already disappeared.
“I suspect he fell into the water chasing something and was swept away,” Moore said. _SFGate