Hive Mind Photos

Corinne Vionnet, “Makka” (Photo: Hyperallergic)

Have we been here before? Will we all be in this same spot again soon? Smeary visions of famous destinations, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Colosseum to the Hollywood sign, Corinne Vionnet’s aggregate compositions provoke a puzzling, often beautiful feeling of déjà vu. As in Impressionist paintings, Big Ben resolves amid splotches; Yosemite Valley looms with familiarity. Only the iconic structures clarify out of the gauze, while figures fold into the blur, ghosts in the mist. Yet in the haze there’s an invitation to go on imagining. I may have personally only visited four of the 18 locations on display in Vionnet’s Danziger Gallery exhibition, but I could envision myself in all of them, an unseen face in the crowd or perhaps the one behind the camera, lining up my own personal shot.

In 2005, just as Flickr and other photo-sharing sites where coming into being, Vionnet began to comb the internet in search of repeated, similar-looking photos of the same site, sets she would then layer by the hundreds into hazy composites. Early on, she noticed a trend in how amateur travel photographs were being constructed, and by extension how leisure and reality were being conceived.

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Jeremy Polacek
Hyperallergic

Van Gogh in Borinage

A day’s work … Vincent van Gogh’s Evening (after Jean-François Millet), 1889. Photograph: © Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This summer the Grand-Place in the Belgian city of Mons will be transformed into a blaze of yellow, a field of 7,500 sunflowers celebrating the city’s turn as European capital of culture, and the peculiar man who spent 18 months living in the area and failing at yet another chosen career.

This time his failure marked a turning point in the history of art: sacked as a preacher and evangelist working in the Borinage, a tough coalmining region, Vincent van Gogh decided that his future lay in art.

In 1880, not yet even a failed artist, he was living in Cuesmes, a village on the outskirts of Mons in southern Belgium. Images of the battered landscape, poor simple houses and grinding hard work he witnessed would stay with him for life. The Borinage inspired one of his first major works, The Potato Eaters, and its sootily dark palette, though it was not painted until 1885, after he had left the region.

Van Gogh in the Borinage, open from 25 January at BAM, the Beaux Arts Mons gallery, will include scores of paintings by Van Gogh and other artists who inspired him. It will bring together for the first time his early versions – made from prints – of works by Jean-François Millet, whose paintings of peasant life he greatly admired, and his paintings of the same subject made years later in the last months of his life when he was in the asylum at Saint-Rémy.

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Maev Kennedy
The Guardian

Atemporality

Michael Williams’s “Wall Dog” 2013, part of MoMA’s “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” exhibition. (Courtesy CANADA)

What sets so-called atemporal painting apart from painting that might be less kindly characterized as derivative or regurgitative? In her catalog essay for “The Forever Now,” a 17-artist exhibition which opens at the Museum of Modern Art on December 14, curator Laura Hoptman traces the definition of atemporality to sci-fi novelist William Gibson, for whom the term captures “a new and strange state of the world in which, courtesy of the Internet, all eras seem to exist at once.” While some might lump such a phenomena under the larger banner of postmodernism, Hoptman does not. “Unlike past periods of revivalism, such as the appropriationist eighties, this super-charged art historicism is neither critical nor ironic; it’s not even nostalgic. It is closest to a connoisseurship of boundless information, a picking and choosing of elements of the past to resolve a problem or a task at hand.”

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Scott Indrisek
Blouin ArtInfo

Masterful Food

An example of ‘edible art’ is proof of what top chefs already know – a culinary masterpiece has to look the part as well as taste delicious. Psychologists found that a salad (left) tasted better when arranged to resemble Painting Number 201 (right) by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky

Forget fresh ingredients, expensive wine or quality spices, culinary masterpieces have to look the part to taste delicious.

It’s a concept that gourmet chefs have long exploited, and now scientists in Oxford have provided evidence to back up the claim.

In a recent study, psychologists found that a salad tastes better when arranged to resemble a work by the Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky.

So much so, that diners are willing to pay twice the price they would for a more rustic salad, thrown together with the same ingredients.

Franco-Columbian chef and one of the authors of the study, Charles Michel, designed the salad resembling the abstract artwork, Painting Number 201, to explore how the look of food affects how it tastes.

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Ellie Zolfagharifard
Daily Mail

Artists and Cinema

Loose grasp of technique … Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio. Photograph: BFI/Allstar/Allstar/BFI

Years ago, I was asked to write a screenplay about JMW Turner for Peter O’Toole (who was not going to play Turner). Sadly, the film never happened. It might have been a chance to redress the fact that most films about artists set in the past come badly unstuck when it comes to recreating the actual practice of drawing and painting. Peter Greenaway, in The Draughtsman’s Contract, took trouble to provide authentic 17th-century costumes and architecture, yet the draughtsman’s drawings – central to the plot – are embarrassingly late 20th-century in style. Likewise, Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio indulges in painterly oil-sketching procedures unthinkable in Caravaggio’s time.

When I, and some of my colleagues on the Turner’s House Trust, were consulted by Mike Leigh and his team for the film Mr Turner, we found them already steeped in the artist, his life and times. They were well-read, stimulating to talk to, not really in need of much guidance from us. And watching the finished film was a strange mixture of the comfortably familiar and the utterly strange: Turner and the early 19th century bursting fresh and fully formed from creative minds, quite different from those of art historians and museum curators.

As everyone knows, Leigh is an idiosyncratic director. His methods are inscrutable, he keeps his cards close to his chest. He seems to enter into a mystic pact with his actors who join him in a passionate attempt to get as close to their subject as possible, to identify with characters and events as though they were reliving them not as mere imitators but as incarnations of those people and events. Stanislavsky is only the starting point as far as Leigh’s method is concerned. As for plot, that emerges out of the white heat of this debate.

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Andrew Wilton
The Guardian

Female Tagging in Bogota

“El Beso de los Invisibles” mural, to which Zas contributed

Here, where graffiti is classified as a violation rather than a crime, street artists do not have to hide. Bright murals, often uncompromisingly political, cover public walls, as well as those of home and business owners who, understanding the value (cultural and financial), allow their own properties to be used as a canvas.

In late 2011, the police shooting of teenage artist Diego Felipe Becerra provoked such an outcry that the city’s authorities issued a decree relaxing laws against graffiti and giving artists permission to work on certain public walls — as well as private ones, with building owners’ permission. Now, street artists are able to work more freely. That doesn’t mean it’s always easy, though, and working as a woman brings its own set of challenges. The small core group of working women streets artists in Bogotá includes Lik Mi, Zas, Bastardilla, Ledania, Hera, Fear, Zurik, Yurikauno, and Lili Cuca. Opinions on the significance of their status as women in a male-dominated field vary among them. Here are some thoughts from three.

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Karen Gardiner
Hyperallergic

Caravaggio’s Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy

Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy. ‘I know a Caravaggio when I see one,’ said Mina Gregori. Photograph: La Repubblica

One of Italy’s most eminent art historians has claimed to have solved a centuries-old mystery after identifying a previously unknown painting in a private collection as a “magnificent” Caravaggio masterpiece.

Mina Gregori, 90, president of the Roberto Longhi foundation of art history studies in Florence and author of several books on the baroque painter, said she was 100% sure she had found the original Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy.

“I have become a connoisseur,” she said. “And I know a Caravaggio when I see one.”

A number of elements had combined to give her complete certainty, she said, that the oil on canvas she was presented with this year was the real thing.

There are several different versions of the Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, and until now the one thought most likely by art historians to be the 1606 original was lying in a private collection in Rome.

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Lizzie Davies
The Guardian

LA Invests

Work progresses on The Broad museum in Los Angeles, which will share a block with the Museum of Contemporary Art and Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Photograph: Matt McClain/Washington Post

The 32-metre-long escalator tube isn’t finished yet and the museum’s intricate outer shell is still being assembled, but when Joanne Heyler walks out on to the top floor of The Broad, a contemporary art museum set to open in downtown Los Angeles next year, she can’t resist smiling.

“It never fails to take my breath away,” said Heyler, The Broad’s founding director.

The Broad, sharing the Grand Avenue block with the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art (Moca) and Frank Gehry’s shimmering Walt Disney Concert Hall, is not just a $140m building. It’s at the core of a cultural boom in a place once famous for training artists – and then sending them off to New York to build careers. Long the centre of the movie industry, the region is now becoming a magnet for artists, dancers, musicians and museum leaders.

“We used to always be the wild stepchild out in the desert,” said acclaimed abstract artist Mark Bradford, a Los Angeles native. “Now, we’re being adopted. We’re seeing people coming here to build much larger, bigger galleries and private museums. Things you used to only see in the east.”

About 12km west of The Broad (pronounced “brode”), the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences is raising $300m as part of a plan to open a movie museum in 2017 on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (Lacma) campus. Big donors for that project include music mogul David Geffen and director Steven Spielberg.

Earlier this year, the museum lured Kerry Brougher, the chief curator of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, to be its director. Lacma has a grand plan of its own, a $650m redesign of its campus that would stretch over Wilshire Boulevard.

And Hauser & Wirth, the contemporary art powerhouse in London, Zurich and New York, is hanging up a shingle in Los Angeles.

“People used to complain that people went to New York to buy what they could buy in LA,” said Kathy Halbreich, the associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I don’t think that happens anymore. I think there’s a recognition that the city matters, that the people aren’t just there for the weather. You see a level of ambition that’s been ratcheted up.”

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Geoff Edgers
The Guardian

Gehry in France

The building boasts an auditorium, a stepped waterfall a restaurant and art galleries. Photograph: Justin Lorget/ Justin Lorget/Corbis

When architect Frank Gehry unveiled his plans for a museum shaped like a massive glass cloud in the heart of Paris it looked little more than a few squiggles on a piece of paper.

Even Gehry, whose celebrated works are often cited as among the most important in contemporary architecture, had difficulty finding words to describe what he hoped to create.

“It’s a cloud of glass – magical, ephemeral, all transparent … it’s not stodgy,” he told the Guardian back in 2006.

On Friday, Gehry’s glass cloud – which has also been nicknamed The Iceberg, but is officially the Louis Vuitton Foundation – was unveiled.

As promised, the massive glass, metal and wood structure – commissioned by Bernard Arnault, president of the French luxury goods group LVMH and France’s wealthiest man – appeared to float ethereally over one of France’s oldest parks, the Jardin d’Acclimatation.

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Kim Willsher
The Guardian

The Complex Relationship with Outsider Art

Jack Napthine’s Untitled 2013. Photograph: Jack Napthine/Art Unlimited, Geelong

The art of Jack Napthine is a powerful mix of boldly outlined locks, light bulbs and snatches of text; Julian Martin’s thick pastels give a dense velvety texture to his drawings; and Terry Williams’ soft sculptures of fridges, helicopters and video cameras are flamboyant and witty.

They’re all talented artists whose art is shown and collected in Australia and beyond and whose creations are currently part of Everyday Imagining: New Perspectives on Outsider Art at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne. But a few decades ago, their careers would have been unthinkable. In all likelihood, they would have spent their lives in institutions for the intellectually impaired.

Outsider art was a term coined in 1972 by British art historian Roger Cardinal. It was a roughly equivalent but more inclusive coinage for art brut (raw art), a 1940s label by Jean Dubuffet for work by inmates of insane asylums, which the French artist described as “unscathed by artistic culture … and the conventions of classical or fashionable art”.

Today, as well as including artists with disabilities or mental illness, the term is increasingly applied to others on the margins of art and society: the homeless, ethnic minorities, migrants, folk artists, the self-taught. Outsider art is hot – art fairs dedicated to the work of the marginalised draw large crowds and big bucks. The flagship exhibition of Massimiliano Gioni’s 2013 Venice Biennale was entitled The Encyclopedic Palace after the work of self-taught Italian outsider artist Marino Auriti.

But while examples of creativity unscathed by artistic fashion can be exhilarating and inspiring for artists and collectors, it’s a salient feature of most outsider art that the people applying the label are invariably on the inside – gallerists, academics, psychologists and artists who are art-school or university trained.

There has long been a fear of including the self-taught in the world of high art, says James Brett, founder of the Museum of Everything, a peripatetic collection of unclassifiable and undiscovered art that has taken up residence at London’s Tate Modern as well as Selfridges department store.

Brett is one of the speakers at Contemporary Outsider Art: the Global Context, a conference taking place in Melbourne from 23 to 26 October. “Being called an outsider artist is a badge of pride if you’ve been labelled as marginal elsewhere,” he says. There are many more art-makers than those who society labels artists, he adds. “Insider” art, with all its rules and gatekeepers, is only a small subset of a much larger world of creativity.

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Fiona Gruber
The Guardian