OLD NEWS

AT THE CANYON’S ENTRANCE,
seven rival gangs of Navajo tour companies were waiting.
Inside the mountain, all of the guides were telling the white man
about the different color profiles of the Apple versus Samsung Galaxy cameras,
and how to use the new iPhone 16 color spectrum. _DeanKissick

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ERASED CAGE SCORE, 2025 by greg
In 1995 Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake organized In A Different Light, one of the first exhibitions of 20th century art exploring the queer experience, at the Berkeley Art Museum.
The first section of the show was “Void,” with works “suggesting blankness, absence, and loss.” And the first work on the checklist—which I uploaded to the Internet Archive because it was somehow not there before—is David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”.
It’s one of the works which “suggest the emptiness of what might be called a state of ‘pre- being’ that precedes the birth of a new identity. Seen negatively, such works evoke the repressive alienation of the ‘closet.’ Seen in a more positive light, they represent a blank slate of unlimited possibility.”
Cage’s original score for 4’33” was dedicated to Tudor, who performed it in 1952. It was made in traditional Western musical notation, with a tempo and length to indicate the duration of each of the work’s three movements. Tudor gave the score back to Johns when he was preparing another copy, this time in graphic notation, which he dedicated to Irwin Kremen. Then Tudor’s copy was lost, and so Kremen’s copy, from 1953 is the earliest surviving score. David Platzker acquired it for MoMA in 2012.
Larry Solomon’s 1998 essay on the history of 4’33” <https://tinyurl.com/2479kkzp> does a pretty good job of tracking Cage’s various editions, but not Tudor’s. James Pritchett’s website <https://tinyurl.com/2a2nzs5h> is a clearer exploration of 4’33” and its origins, and related works.
<https://tinyurl.com/29h3v6lg>
Tudor’s reconstruction of the original 4’33” score seems related to the differences introduced in published versions. It measured 60 quarter notes at 4/4 time to be 2.5 cm, or roughly 1 inch of score, so the first 32 seconds of the 33 second movement fit on one 9.3-inch wide page. I think that makes Tudor’s score ten pages long. [Somehow Edition Peters needed the Getty’s help to recover this reconstruction for inclusion in the current, Cage Centennial edition of 4’33”. And they still reduced the page size and mooted Tudor’s calculations.]
In their discussion of the show in for their AAA oral history, recorded in 2016, Blake recalls various aspects of the show, and mentions “Void” also containing a piece by Bay Area artist “Rudy Lemcke who had erased a—John Cage’s score for 4’33″.
Lemcke has made a lot of Cage-inspired work, particularly in Cage’s chance-operations texts and mesostic poems, but also involving the score of Perilous Night (1944), Cage’s pivotal chance-related composition for prepared piano, which also coincided with Cage’s pivot from his wife Xenia to Merce Cunningham. But I can’t find any mention of Lemcke doing an erased Cage score. And Lemcke’s work on the exhibition checklist, right next to Tudor’s, is Untitled (Performance Score for Percussion), 1977, which sounds related to a different series Lemcke was working on over several years.
I’ve reached out to confirm, but if an Erased Cage Score doesn’t exist already, it must be realized immediately, because it sounds absolutely obvious and fantastic. [a few minutes later update] Lemcke confirms that though Cage was an influence on his early work, and particularly his exploration of chance operations and graphic notation, the work shown at Berkeley was not 4’33” related, and he has not erased a Cage score. So now I will.
It would complete the circle, or perhaps spiral outward, from Rauschenberg’s early influence on Cage, who felt the White Paintings of 1951 gave him permission to write “the silent piece” he’d been contemplating for several years already. And the painting Rauschenberg gave to Cage, which he then overpainted black when he was crashing at Cage’s apartment.
From a more limited vantage point, this could have been seen as Blake misremembering, when it is clear that artist prophets walk among us, and they were manifesting Erased Cage Score into being. It should not have taken this long. _greg.org

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HOW
<https://tinyurl.com/2bk6bgmh> _DavidShrigley

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I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST IDENTITY POLITICS!
<https://tinyurl.com/286w2d82>
It has been said that identity politics is killing art. Because all art now has to be a statement about wherever it is the artist has come from. So that audiences can understand the detail of their trauma. How art might convey such details – its textures, tones and medium – is now largely irrelevant: only what it says and the artist who said it is important. But has identity ever shaped art? Really? And can we ignore the hows and still call something art? Looking back to the pioneers of art history, it would seem identity is only ever something imposed upon the artist, pinning the meaning of their art to a specific and narrowing view.
Piero della Francesca, for example, approached painting as only a mathematician from a papal town could, entangled with issues of geometry and ‘staying with the trouble’ of Christianity, at that point a sect struggling with factionalism that had established itself north of the Mediterranean. His canvases depict the people of his region with a sense of grace, labouring as they were under a nascent capitalism; his paintings of the local cosmology bring its deities to a human level, with the same baggy eyelids and zoned-out expressions. He drew on the ecology of his home village to populate the backgrounds of his paintings, enacting a subtle spatiotemporal displacement, with his most famous work depicting a couple, who were into supporting the arts and spearheaded his community, as pallid giants, facing each other as they stood towering over a vast open valley – symbolic of their interconnected relationship with nature. Here, his portraits weren’t foregrounding identity so much as interplanetary relationships in the microcosm of the Tuscan Apennines during the 1470s.
Goya’s so-called Black Paintings were a pure expression of emotional turmoil, transforming his experience of PTSD into allegorical figures that allow us to glimpse the range of his inner life. One long-limbed and wily man clutches a smaller human body, gnawing on its bloodied arm. The larger figure’s face looks back at us as if surprised to be caught in the act of late-night cannibal snacking, with a hint of self-pity, a cry for help: he can’t stop scoffing this treat. Made in the intimacy of Goya’s own dining room, the works are a portrait of mental health in crisis and a call for the care needed in times of strife. Some have interpreted this as the Roman god Saturn devouring his own son; Goya, though, transforms myth into a relatable fable of how humanity is literally eating itself. Perhaps this, he suggests, is our way of ‘making kin’. Goya, too, worked beyond identity, exploring universal themes of trauma and hunger.
<https://tinyurl.com/2cmp86n7>
And then we have the profound vision of Picasso’s Blue Period, an extended, years-long body of work that addressed humanity’s place within the Anthropocene. These works might appear as individual portraits and scenes, but each of these people are subsumed within the wider body of the work, where faces and individual stories don’t matter. With each painting a subset of the larger vision, the blue tint of the canvases creates its own new ‘blue’; it could be the blue of the sea, in which they are all drowning, or a holistic vision of a blue planet that these people inhabit. The paint itself becomes symbolic of water, a layer washing over every canvas, his work imaginatively crossing the oceans to extend a watery hand of solidarity to the islands of Guam and the Philippines that Spain had just relinquished, as all part of one planet. His geological vision in deep time marks it as one of the earliest, if not the earliest, ecological gesamtkunstwerk.
Even the YBAs, ever represented as brash individualists, were more concerned with issues of sustainability and historiography than those of identity. Tracey Emin’s tent, hand-stitched with the names of all those with whom she was close, is a roll call of multiple epistemologies and ways of knowing. What’s in a name? she asks. The portable housing mechanism of the tent itself also references climate emergencies and displacement, embodying a ‘carrier bag of fiction’ approach to the art object. And: the tent is empty. Just as the artist’s unmade bed as an installation becomes a symbol of a bed – becomes everyone’s bed – it seems this has always been the role identity plays in art. The artist might make the bed, but we lie in it. Who’s in the bed with you is up to you. _Steven Piel _ArtReview

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EDWARD HOPPER, ROOFTOPS, 1926
<https://tinyurl.com/26ecr435> _MichaelLobel

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THE BUTTER THIEF (249 WORDS) by Rainey Knudson
https://tinyurl.com/28mg46vg
In one version of the story, Krishna’s mother catches the mischievous baby stealing butter. She says, “Krishna, you stole the butter,” and he replies, “I didn’t steal the butter.” She places the butter pot on a high shelf, but he is wily and resourceful, and he gets the pot down on the floor again. She comes in, and the baby is sitting with the pot, laughing and dripping in butter, butter everywhere, and he sees her and says, “I didn’t steal the butter!” And she smiles at him and relents, saying, “No, Krishna, you didn’t steal the butter.” She sees his pleasure, the deliciousness of his experience, and her love for him knows no bounds.
The story is explained to me thusly: the mother’s love is God’s love. Can this be? That God (let’s call it the Infinite, since “god” is such a fraught term)—that the Infinite shows love through indulgence? Through letting our playful baby selves get away with mischief? No, the Infinite shows love through agony, though grimly sacrificing its child. How else did Western Civ come to dominate the world over the last 2,000 years? By driving ourselves relentlessly, by telling ourselves that pleasure is suspect and weakness is sin, by not telling ourselves stories about god-as-mother indulging the baby god in his delicious pleasure in the world.
And I am fascinated that the Infinite—that the mysterious notion of unconditional love—can have so many infinite interpretations carried in the hearts of our species. _TheImpatient\Reader

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THE MOUNT WASHINGTON POST
<https://tinyurl.com/27nhvhkk> _LisaAnneAuerbach

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JEFFREY EPSTEIN’S TASTE IN ART WAS JUST AS TWISTED AS YOU’D THINK by Ben Davis
<https://tinyurl.com/24wk3nlw>
Jeffrey Epstein’s art is back in the news. This time, the spotlight comes via a somewhat odd New York Times story yesterday spotlighting “previously undisclosed photos and documents showing how he lived in his later years.”
The photos show that Epstein kept cameras in his bedrooms, and also that he proudly displayed photos of himself with Donald Trump and other notables. The financier and sexual predator also framed a hand-drawn map of Israel by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and a dollar bill from Bill Gates saying, cryptically, “You Were Right!”, along with lots of photos and memorabilia proving Epstein knew famous and powerful people. These details were for the most part previously known, just not illustrated.
(Side note: Where exactly the new photos in the Times piece came from is not clear—a fact of some frustration to readers in yesterday’s story comments section. “I’m afraid there’s not a whole lot I can say because of the need to protect sources who provide us with information,” reporter David Enrich tells an angry reader in the story’s comment section. “The one thing I feel comfortable sharing is that we published this information as soon as we were able.”)
The most striking image in the Times story is the lead photo of a sinister hanging artwork. It is a sculpture of a woman, clad in an actual wedding dress and clinging to a rope, evidently hung near the staircase in Epstein’s Upper East Side abode. It is likely the “life-size female doll hanging from a chandelier” described in previous reporting.
<https://tinyurl.com/25kpgr9y>
What to make of this work of art? What does it mean?
In general, Epstein’s art collecting remains a small if symbolically important enigma within the much larger morass of unresolved mysteries around him. One of his longtime art dealers once remembered him spending $200,000 or $300,000 on decorative objects and paintings. Yet in an accounting statement from 2022, the Epstein estate valued his collection of “artwork, collectibles and furnishings” at only $338,804.
To you or I, that is a grand sum. To a person who owned multiple lavish homes and properties—the Manhattan property alone had 40 rooms!—this is not much at all. The estate was paying $15,000 a month just to store his art, meaning whatever value could be recouped was rapidly being eaten up.
Let’s review the greatest hits of Jeffrey Epstein taste, gathered from the numerous stories and reports on his properties. Here are a few of the most emblematic:
—Rows of prosthetic eyeballs, each individually framed, reportedly manufactured for injured English soldiers
—From the same 2003 Vanity Fair profile: a “nearby twice-life-size sculpture of a naked African warrior,” artist unknown
—A taxidermied tiger, giraffe, and dog. In some reports, the latter was shown with fake dog feces
—A chess set featuring pieces modeled off of his own staff in sexy attire
—Per the above-linked story in Bloomberg: “Five oversize, bent architect’s pencils, each cast in bronze,” priced at $10,000
—A photorealistic mural depicting a prison scene with Epstein himself in the middle, artist unknown. About which, he liked to tell guests that it was there to remind himself where he could end up
—A 15-foot artwork, described as “either photo or painting of a naked girl,” hung in Epstein’s massage room, artist unknown. It was described as “artistic” not “pornographic,” in testimony by one of his victims. In general, paintings and photos of nude women and girls get mentioned often
<https://tinyurl.com/yxp2v6w5>
—A truly queasy painting by Damian Loeb, Little Miss Pink Tomato (1995), depicting a pre-teen beauty pageant, that Maria Farmer, one of his victims, remembers him purchasing
—At his New Mexico ranch, a large painting of a girl reclining atop a lion, artist unknown. “It was huge—at least 5-by-5, 6-by-6—in the main house, at the bottom of the stairs in the basement near the laundry,” a contractor told Fox News. “We would talk about how creepy it was, this strange painting with nothing else around it.” (This may or may not be the same artwork as the “a huge, Oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lionskin,” mentioned by Vanity Fair.)
—At his Palm Beach house, a painting of a nude woman, seen from behind, by Limor Gasko. As Annie Armstrong noted, it was sold last February in an online auction as “Jeffrey Epstein Commissioned Art.” It went for $8,500
—Also from the Palm Beach house, a print or poster featuring an artistic black-and-white image of a nude model luxuriating in bed, by British photographer Laurence Sackman
—Also from Palm Beach, something that appears to be a sculpture fragment or mannequin of the lower half of a nude woman
—At his island, Little St. James, “a portrait of Epstein and the pope” (probably referring to John Paul II), artist unknown, according to Business Insider
—Epstein’s most infamous artwork: an oil painting of Bill Clinton clad in a blue dress and red high heels. This was by student Petrina Ryan-Kleid (whom I spoke to back in 2019), purchased from her thesis show at the New York Academy of Art. Called Parsing Bill, it was meant as a comment on how politicians become associated with scandalous narratives, with the dress intended as a reference to Monica Lewinsky. But to Epstein watchers—and, one imagines, to those who saw it at his house—it might suggest that he had dirt on Clinton
<https://tinyurl.com/y2chmsv9>
—A painting by Kees van Dongen, Femme Fatale (c. 1905), which hung at one point behind Epstein’s desk. This is the priciest artwork I know of mentioned in connection with Epstein. The Fauvist image of a woman in a hat baring her left breast at one point hung behind his desk, with the figure once described by Christie’s as “so blatant in her exhibitionism that she becomes a caricature of seductiveness.” A version sold at the auction house for $5.9 million back in 2004. What happened to Epstein’s Femme Fatale is unknown. On its own, its price is many times more than the estate valued his entire collection in 2022. But as we will see, it would not be out of character for Epstein to have had a fake
—A painting “in the manner of Jean Dubuffet” in his foyer. Vanity Fair wrote that Epstein “coyly refuses to tell visitors who painted it”
—“A Max Weber or something like that” (that would be Max Weber, the minor Cubist painter.) It was mentioned by his former art advisor, who also said the canvas was fake.
—Some “underaged Rodins”—whatever that means—per the same advisor, who suggested that these were also fake
—A 16th-century sculpture of the Madonna that Epstein traded with artist Andres Serrano for a portrait Serrano had done of him for his show “Infamous,” just three months before Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. From everything I’ve seen, this minor Renaissance work is an outlier. As Serrano himself said in describing his encounter with Epstein, “He wasn’t a good collector. He had bad work.”
Taken together, what you get are four overlapping themes: 1) sick jokes, 2) decor you might broadly call “bordello chic,” 3) design objects that could be passed off as art-like, and 4) fakes or probable fakes.
When it comes to themes 1) and 2), one of Epstein’s art dealers, Leah Kleman, told Bloomberg, simply: “He is big into shock value.” As for themes 3) and 4), his former art advisor Stuart Pivar offered this theory to Mother Jones: “He was amused to put one over on the world by having fake art. He thought that he was seeing through the fallacy.”
<https://tinyurl.com/29jbjlh7>
The “hanging woman” sculpture seen in the Times story basically fits in the Venn diagram where all these four themes overlap. It’s a kinky/shocking conversation piece. But it’s also, I think, meant to evoke edgy contemporary art, without actually being by any real identifiable artist. (If anyone reading knows who did it, let me know!)
For comparison, consider Tony and Heather Podesta’s installation of Louise Bourgeois’s The Arch of Hysteria <https://tinyurl.com/2dfthayz> (1993) in their home—a contorted, headless woman’s body hung by a rope from her navel. The latter became a piece of “evidence” for online sleuths taking up the Pizzagate conspiracy starting in 2016.
Years after his death, Jeffrey Epstein remains an unsettling enigma. He lived as if he were very wealthy, and yet it’s still a mystery exactly where his money came from. He surrounded himself with fakes and freakish art, even though he was intimates and deeply linked with major art collectors like Les Wexner and Leon Black, who were very conscious indeed of art’s role as a status symbol and social signal.
It cannot be that Epstein thought he was fooling such people. He must have assumed that they would know exactly what the art he surrounded himself with suggested: that he was from a moral and aesthetic universe where different rules applied. I imagine you were supposed to look at a sculpture like that hanging bride, register everything that was off about it, and think, “this guy can get away with anything.” _artnet

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STU’S CAFE ARLINGTON, MN
<https://tinyurl.com/29qjl4ae> _RuralIndexingProject

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CLEARING, HOTHOUSE GALLERY FOR NEW TALENT, WILL SHUTTER AFTER 14 YEARS
Tastemaking gallery Clearing has closed its doors after 14 years in business, according to an post from its founder, Olivier Babin. “It was not an easy decision,” the post says.
Clearing is shuttering its New York space on the Bowery and its Los Angeles branch in Melrose Hill. “Until the very end, we hoped to turn the corner,” the post says. “But with no viable path forward, we are closing today because we can no longer operate at the standards we’ve always held ourselves to—for our artists, our teams, and our entire community.”
Babin started out as an artist, and opened Clearing out of his studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in 2011, before adding a space in Brussels in 2012. The first was known for finding and cultivating future market superstars In 2020, the gallery followed rumors of gold out West, and opened a space in Beverly Hills, later relocating to Melrose Hill, a gallery enclave. Along the way, Ancart remained a “spiritual partner” of the gallery along with actual partner, Lodovico Corsini.
It seems that Babin was fighting to keep the gallery open to the very end. One week ago, I went to Babin after hearing rumors of Clearing’s demise, following the departure of the gallery’s director, Susanna Chachko, which she announced on her private account. He told me over text: “Rumors are rumors of course and recent ones of CLEARING closing actually originate from 3 weeks ago when you commented on our space to be occupied by a pop up. The gallery is NOT closing anytime soon it’s just bored summer chatter.” _Annie Armstrong_artnet

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A NAVAJO LED US ON A TOUR OF A MYSTIC SLOT CANYON.
Before we set off, he said,”I’m going to tell you which filter to use; it is called, “Vivid Warm.’”
And then he showed everyone where to find it. _DeanKissick