Saturday 31 March 2018

Reading list, 31 March 2018

Having just come off two big loosely themed shows (the NGV Triennial and the Sydney Biennale), I'm feeling the need for a tightly curated show. I wish I could see Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body (1300-Now) at the Met Breuer, expertly reviewed here by Roberta Smith.

The Renshaw Gallery in Washington DC (the Smithsonian's 'craft' museum) has partnered with the Burning Man festival to re-present artworks made for the festival context to a different audience.

The Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro plans to deaccession a Jackson Pollock to fund maintenance, acquisitions and staffing; apparently this is the first proposed deaccessioning of this type in Brazil.

The Women Responsible for the Look of Your Next All-Day Cafe: the ever-sharp Kyle Chayka on how environments are being designed for future photography.

A retrospective on a story I've been following: ‘The vitriol was really unhealthy’: artist Sonia Boyce on the row over taking down Hylas and the Nymphs. Also, reproducing here in full a letter to the editor on this topic, by Mary Hayward:
The lessons of the Hylas affair are threefold. First, works in art galleries should not be arranged according to what the curators think they are about. The dividing line between telling visitors what they ought to think and telling them what they ought not to think (which is censorship) is narrow and easily crossed. Second, it is only in pornography that all adult women have big breasts. If the female figures in a painting have small breasts that does not mean that they are girls. At least three of Waterhouse’s nymphs have adult faces – and it’s supposed to be men who never look above the neck. Third, disrespecting someone’s work seemingly to promote your own is not a good idea. No one is going to write about Sonia Boyce again without mentioning the Manchester Art Gallery censorship row. Are they?


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