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    Artists Have Long Held Day Jobs to Make Ends Meet. A New Exhibition Makes the Case That Side Gigs Also Fuel Creativity

    Aspiring artists looking to break into the art world often hear a warning: “Don’t quit your day job.” But a new show at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin proves that even some of the world’s most successful artists have relied on other jobs to make ends meet—and that those day jobs can sometimes prove key to their central practice, rather than distractions from their primary calling.
    Featuring 75 works by major U.S. artists including Mark Bradford, Jeffrey Gibson, Jeff Koons, and Barbara Kruger, “Day Jobs” will be the first major exhibition to address the impact that day jobs have had on art history—demonstrating that while the gig economy might have seemed born of the 2010s, the side hustle is actually nothing new for artists.
    Before he became a pioneering California Light and Space artist, for instance, Larry Bell was a young painter working by day at a commercial framing shop in Venice Beach in the 1960s. Filling customer orders, Bell was one day struck by the beauty of the light hitting a pane of glass in a metal frame. A totally new direction for his work was born, and a burgeoning art movement.
    The jobs represented in the show are many, and wide-ranging. Some have an obvious connection to the art world—Andy Warhol, of course, got his start as a fashion illustrator. Other related careers featured in the show include graphic design, billboard painting, and furniture making.
    Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley (ca. 1956). Collection of the Brant Foundation, Greenwich, Connecticut, ©the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York, via Yale University Press.
    But artists have also worked at major companies such as Ford Motors and IKEA, and held demanding jobs such as ICU nurses and high-powered lawyers. Did you know, for instance, that Jeff Koons was once a Wall Street commodities trader? “Day Jobs” also highlights less glamorous careers, with artists who have moonlit as dishwashers, janitors, and nannies.
    Though these roles may appear to have nothing in common, exhibition curators Veronica Roberts (the Blanton’s former curator of Modern and contemporary art, and now director of California’s Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University) and Lynne Maphies (a former curatorial assistant at the Blanton) make the case they all can provide unexpected creative inspiration for the artists who hold them.
    Fred Wilson, Grey Area (Brown version), 1993. Collection of the Brooklyn
 Museum, bequest of William K. Jacobs, Jr. and bequest of Richard J. Kempe, by exchange 2008. Photo: ©Fred Wilson, courtesy of Pace Gallery.
    A day job can push artists in new directions as they learn about a new industry, get exposed to new materials or working methods, or even just shift their studio hours—Howardena Pindell was a figurative painter, until a curatorial assistant job at New York’s Museum of Modern Art meant she could no longer make art during daylight hours, prompting her to experiment with hole-punched paper scraps from her desk job, creating unique abstract works.
    Art museums, it turns out, often employ artists—at MoMA alone, Sol LeWitt was a receptionist, Dan Flavin was an elevator operator, and Robert Ryman was a security guard.
    Sara Bennett, TIANA, 25, in the library at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility (2019). Photo: ©Sara Bennett, courtesy of the artist.
    Rejecting the myth of the lone genius working alone in the art studio, art springing forth from the studio whenever inspiration strikes, “Day Jobs” looks at the ways that economic pursuits can help fuel the creation of great art. Could it be that quitting the day job to make art full-time isn’t the ultimate goal?
    “Day Jobs” will be on view at the Blanton Museum of Art, the University of Texas at Austin, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard., Austin, Texas, February 19–July 23, 2023.
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    Never-Before-Seen Paul McCartney Photos From the Height of Beatlemania Will Reopen London’s National Portrait Gallery

    Following a three-year closure for renovation, London’s National Portrait Gallery will Get Back this summer—and it’s debuting a series of never-before-seen Paul McCartney photos to mark the occasion. 
    The museum reopens on June 22 with the exhibition “Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm.” The show will bring together a series of portraits shot by McCartney on a 35mm camera in London, Liverpool, Miami, New York, Paris, and Washington, D.C. during the early, mop-top days of his band’s rise to global stardom.
    The event “will provide a uniquely personal perspective on what it was like to be a Beatle at the start of Beatlemania,” NPG director Nicholas Cullinan told the Guardian. “At a time when so many camera lenses were on the band, these photographs will share fresh insight into their experiences, all through the eyes of Sir Paul McCartney.”
    Long thought lost, the photos were recently rediscovered by the Let It Be songwriter, and in 2020, he approached the NPG about the possibility of a show. 
    “He said he’d found these photographs that he remembers taking but thought had been lost,” Cullinan recalled. “We sat down with him and began going through them. [It was] extraordinary to see these images—which are unseen—of such a well-documented, famous, and important cultural moment.”
    Paul McCartney, Self-portraits in a mirror. Paris (1964). © Paul McCartney.
    A monograph of the nearly 1,000 photos shot by McCartney will be published alongside the show in June. Both the book and tickets for the exhibition are available for pre-order now. 
    The same year McCartney contacted the NPG, the museum closed its doors for a £35.5 million ($45 million) renovation project. Popular portraits were sent out on loans and tours as the institution overhauled its galleries and redesigned its entrance.
    Now, as it prepares to open again, the museum is promoting several high-profile shows to lure visitors back. In addition to “Eyes of the Storm,” the NPG will open an exhibition of works by Yevonde, a 20th-century British photographer who pioneered the use of color in portraiture. Then, in November, the institution will re-present “David Hockney: Drawing from Life,” which opened for just 20 days in 2020 before increasing Covid-19 cases caused the gallery to close. 
    More Trending Stories:Debates About How to Interpret Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Art Are Raging. A New Show Is Proposing a Fresh Way of Reading ItArt Industry News: Hamline Professors Call for the University’s President to Resign Amid Furor Over Prophet Muhammad Art + Other StoriesMeet the Hot Young Collectors of Old Antiques at the Winter Show, Suspect George Condo Goes for $200 on an Auction Site, and More Juicy Art World GossipAmid a Feverish Market for Her Prismatic Paintings, Japanese Art Dynamo Etsu Egami Is Keeping a Cool HeadSee Scores of Unbuilt Frank Lloyd Wright Structures That Have Been Computer-Rendered With Incredible RealismAn Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don’t Think About It Too HardResearchers Used Facial Recognition Technology to Identify a Long-Lost Painting by RaphaelOops! A Swiss Museum Has Lost Two Old Masters Paintings That It Sent for Cleaning
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    ‘It’s a Mad Process’: Design Legend Marc Newson on Revitalizing the Chinese Art of Cloisonné for His New Works at Gagosian Paris

    Marc Newson is one of today’s most prominent designers. His Lockheed Lounge (ca. 1990), primarily made from fiberglass-reinforced polyester resin and aluminum, became the most expensive piece of design when it sold for £2.4 million ($3.7 million) at Phillips London in 2014.
    But the 59-year-old Australian-born, London-based designer is chiefly motivated by problem-solving, setting himself complicated challenges to do with techniques and materials. This trailblazing vision is on view in a new exhibition at Gagosian Paris from January 25–March 18.
    Marc Newson. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, courtesy of Gagosian.
    The intimate show brings together a variety of pieces made over the last few years. Most intriguing are a lounge sculpture and chair made from a cloisonné technique featuring dizzying patterns of small enamel circles. They were created in Beijing where Newson’s team built a factory to revitalize China’s centuries-old cloisonné method.
    Artnet News spoke to Newson at the preview of the exhibition.
    What sparked your interest in the cloisonné process and why did you want to recontextualize it in these new works?
    When I was at art college, I did jewelry and silversmithing, and was always aware of this cloisonné process. Like in a lot of my work, I had ambitious ideas to upscale things, to play with scale, and people would be scratching their heads about how you did it. I had this vision in my head, but we had no idea where and how we were going to do it, and whether the skills still existed.
    Marc Newson, Cloisonné White and Blue Chair (2022). Photo: Paris Tavitian, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Cloisonné was perfected by the Chinese five or six centuries ago in Beijing. But when I went to China, I couldn’t find anyone to do it, ironically. The process was almost dying out. People could do small pieces but not large ones. So we had to find certain individuals who could recruit and retrain people.
    We built this factory and got it up to a point where we could produce these crazy shapes which I don’t think they even could have done five or six centuries ago. There are 30 people executing steps along the way, doing the enamel and stuff. It’s a mad process.
    Marc Newson, Extruded Ribbon Console (2022), carved from a single piece of Azul Macaubas stone. Photo: Paris Tavitian, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Also on view is Extruded Ribbon Console, carved entirely from Azul Macaubas quartzite but resembling machine-molding. Why did you choose this material?
    It’s as much about what you don’t see as about what you do see. The conceit is that it’s as if you’ve taken a completely rigid material and bent it like plasticine which, of course, you can’t do with marble, but people think you can. I like creating the illusion that you can do something with material that you really can’t.
    How do ideas and knowledge gained from your industrial projects bleed into your sculptural projects and vice versa?
    I’ve always done work like this and, at the other end of the spectrum, I’ve always done work in aviation, designing office chairs or products for the luxury sector—luggage for Louis Vuitton, shoes for Nike, perfume bottles, or pens for Montblanc. Each of them teaches me different things [and] the variety is what really helps me to do what I do. For me, design is a problem-solving exercise. I’m a gun for hire.
    Marc Newson, Clear Surfboard (2017), an aluminum board that began as a prototype for surfer Garrett McNamara. Photo: Robert McKeever, courtesy of Gagosian.
    Your best-known piece is Lockheed Lounge. What problems did you want to solve when you made it?
    I did that when I was in my early 20s. I was able to respond to the challenge that I set myself in a very limited way. I had a vision of this amorphous object in a shiny metal, and the only way I could think to do it was to cover it in small panels. I wouldn’t do it like that anymore.
    A video produced by the Hour Glass shows that you own works by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and Italian artist Alighiero Boetti, who was connected to the Arte Povera movement. What genres do you collect?
    I’m not a huge collector; I have a few pieces. I love Wim’s work, he’s a friend, and I find it really funny and whimsical. I’m a big fan of everything that’s Italian—post-war, Arte Povera, and the design that started coming out of Italy in the 1950s and ’60s. It was an incredibly interesting, fertile moment in time. Alighiero Boetti and Lucio Fontana are among my favorite artists, historically.
    Marc Newson, Blue Glass Chair (2017), solid cast glass of quarter spheres. Photo: Jaroslav Kvíz, courtesy of Gagosian.
    When clients approach you, do you feel pressured to live up to a certain reputation? How does your sculptural work counterbalance that?
    [My sculptural] work allows me to be me and do things at my own cadence, although the pieces are difficult and complex. We do these sort of fun exhibitions in different parts of the world and can cherry-pick the [works] that we think will be appropriate.
    Marc Newson is on view at Gagosian, 9 rue de Castiglione, Paris, January 25–March 18, 2023.
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    Debates About How to Interpret Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Art Are Raging. A New Show Is Proposing a Fresh Way of Reading It

    Last fall, a few astute visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago noticed that the museum had quietly swapped out the wall text for Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s 1991 artwork Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Whereas a previous placard alluded to the artist’s late partner, Ross Laycock, who died from an AIDS-related illness the same year the piece was created, the new signage simply describes Untitled’s conceptual framework.
    “The erasure of Ross’s memory and Gonzalez-Torres’s intent in the new description is an unconsciable [sic] and banal evil,” read one Twitter user’s post, which was reshared on the platform thousands of times. Others online soon decried the museum’s supposed act of “erasure,” too, and some even postulated that it was part of a larger effort on the part of Gonzalez-Torres’s foundation to distance the artist’s biography from his work.
    “There’s no obliterating Felix’s biography. [There’s] no desire to, no reason to,” said Andrea Rosen, president of the Felix Gonzalez-Torres Foundation, when asked about the incident in a recent interview. Near the Art Institute’s label for Untitled, she pointed out, is a QR code that directs viewers to an audio guide describing the work’s connection to Laycock and the context of the AIDS epidemic. 
    Rosen was clearly rankled by the accusations of erasure. That she would feel that way makes sense: A former dealer, Rosen hosted one of Gonzalez-Torres’s first solo shows in 1990, and continued to represent him up to and beyond his death in 1996 from AIDS-related illness. For three decades now, she has been the foremost promoter of his work; their accomplishments are inseparable. (Rosen now co-represents the artist’s estate with David Zwirner.)    
    Still, she managed to find a silver lining. “It is crazy how Felix’s work continues to generate such meaningful and complex dialogue,” Rosen said. “Thank god!” 
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Indeed, what the incident at the Art Institute illustrated was the complexities and nuances inherent to Gonzalez-Torres’s work—and the intense personal connection to his story that many feel. 
    Those upset by the eliding of Laycock and AIDS from the museum’s wall label weren’t wrong. That’s the thing about Gonzalez-Torres’s work: It allows, even encourages, different emotional reactions. From his poetic billboards to his piles of candy, no artist was better at generating conceptual prompts that felt both personal and universal, both specific enough to grab you and open-ended enough for myriad points of entry. 
    Now, on the occasion of Gonzalez-Torres’s new exhibition at David Zwirner, where two installations conceived by Gonzalez-Torres have been realized for the first time, Rosen and the rest of her team are again thinking about the unique interpretability of the artist’s output. The show marks the formal introduction of the Foundation’s new Core Tenets—that is, a series of documents that outline the conceptual parameters of Gonzalez-Torres’s artworks. 
    Through Zwirner’s website, gallery-goers are provided with sheets of paper that look, at first glance, like contracts. That is what they are, in a way—contracts that define the rules of works on display, based on language from the artist himself. 
    “Each of the candy works is a unique artwork… The candy works, as with all manifestable works, exist regardless of whether they are physically manifest… The possibility for the work to be manifested with ease is an ongoing intention of the work,” reads some of the bulleted tenets for Gonzalez-Torres’s candy installations, one example of which (“Untitled” (Public Opinion) from 1991) is on view at Zwirner in two different parts of the gallery. 
    A page from the “Core tenets of Gonzalez-Torres’s candy works,” an in-process draft fromJanuary 9, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Printed on foundation letterhead, the documents are dry and rather dense. Each catalogues the works to which the stated tenets apply (there are 20 iterations on the “Candy Works” document, including Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)), and boasts a list of postscript annotations long enough to make David Foster Wallace blush. 
    So authoritative are the tenets that they almost feel like a direct response to the Art Institute controversy. Viewed through that lens, it is as if the documents are saying, “No, this is how you read Gonzalez-Torres.”
    But Rosen said that the project, which goes back years, is about doing the exact opposite. The idea, she explained, is to point to “what is stable within Felix’s work,” while also showing how individual installations fit within a broader corpus. 
    It’s a novel solution to the unique challenges of presenting and experiencing this particular artist’s creations. For those that already find Gonzalez-Torres too heady, the tenets may feel like more homework. 
    But then again, who really thinks that about him? The artist’s genius came through his ability to establish a set of conditions to which everyone—from academics to children copping a piece of candy—could relate on their own terms. To its credit, the Tenets project gets that people will bring to Gonzalez-Torres’s work the kind of intense attention that only comes through personal connection.
    Installation view of “Felix Gonzalez-Torres” at David Zwirner, New York, January 12 – February 25, 2023. Courtesy of David Zwirner.
    Rosen echoed this idea too, noting that the project “creates as much responsibility for people to understand the work as it does provide information.” Rosen went on, “It’s a way of becoming a kind of Felix thinker.”
    And it’s not objectivity the foundation is after. In addition to the tenets, Rosen also commissioned a handful of writers and curators to reflect on their own, highly subjective relationships to Gonzalez-Torres’s art in a series of audio essays that are available on Zwirner’s website.
    “The more subjectivity around Felix, the more diverse ideas around Felix—the better,” Rosen said.
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    The Winter Show in New York Dazzles Collectors and Browsers Alike With Its Troves of Rare Art and Antiques

    Widely regarded as the foremost art, antiques, and design fair in the United States, the annual Winter Show has returned to New York’s landmark Park Avenue Armory (January 20–29) in all its gleaming, glinting glory. Serious collectors and casual observers alike can browse the carefully curated booths of vetted works. 
    Last year, the Winter Show set up shop in the shell of the former Barney’s flagship on Madison Avenue—a clever, if temporary, move precipitated by pandemic concerns. For 2023, the New York fixture is back in the Armory’s vaulted vastness, where it has proffered historical treasures for 65 of the last 69 years. Once again, it aims to engage visitors with items spanning 5,000 years of human history, culled from galleries around the world—68 in all. 
    It’s an astounding array of works, ranging from vibrant contemporary ceramics and jewelry to gilded antiques and furniture of the more traditional variety, offering show-goers not only aesthetically appealing but historically significant art and objects through the centuries. 
    George II period Chinese red lacquer bureau on stand (Chinese, ca. 1750). Exhibited by Ronald Phillips LTD
    Every object on show is vetted to ensure the highest standards of authenticity and quality. “We have 120 experts in 30 fields, from antiquities and metalwork to European painting and textiles to 20th- and 21st-century design—to name just a few,” the fair’s executive director Helen Allen told Artnet News. The vetting committees change each year, she added, depending on the disciplines on display. “Our vettors are a combination of dealers, curators, restorers, and former auction-house specialists.” 
    Jean-Baptiste-Claude Odiot, The Madame Mère Inkstand Paris (1812). Exhibited by Koopman Rare Art.
    Asked whether she’s spotted any trends this year, either on the supply or demand side, Allen said, “There is definitely a big push to represent artists often overlooked in the contemporary market, and we are seeing a strong interest in this through focused presentations.” As an example, she pointed to exhibitor Robert Simon, who’s curated an exhibition of works by women artists from the Renaissance through the 20th century.
    Nestled in a darkened corner of “Heroines of the Brush” sits a small yet enthralling depiction of the Madonna and child by nun-artist Suor Plautilla Nelli, the earliest known woman Renaissance painter of 16th-century Florence. “Plautilla Nelli is a special interest of mine,” Simon told Artnet News, “having studied the artist since I was in graduate school and, rare as her paintings are, having had another about 15 years ago.” This one was acquired, he explained, after it recently emerged from a private collection in Tuscany, where it was thought to be an anonymous work. “But the style is unmistakably hers, and the attribution of the painting to Plautilla Nelli was confirmed by two scholars who have published on the artist.”
    Suor Plautilla Nelli (Florence, 1524–1588), Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Catherine, Ursula, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, exhibited by Robert Simon Fine Art. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    The 2023 edition brings 14 new exhibitors to the Winter Show. Among them, Eguiguren Arte de Hispanoamérica from Buenos Aires, Argentina, has displayed an impressive selection of antique Hispanic American art and equestrian silver. Imperial Art, hailing from Paris, specializes in pre-revolution French paintings and objets d’art. The centerpiece of its booth is a floor-to-ceiling royal portrait of King Louis XIV by the studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud. Pictured in his coronation robes, the Sun King commands fealty.
    Studio of Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV in Coronation Robes (ca. 1702). Provenance: Dukes of Noailles. Exhibited by Imperial Art.
    George Nakashima, conoid table and ten chairs (1969). Persian walnut, East Indian rosewood, American black walnut. Exhibited by Geoffrey Diner Gallery. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    They join returning exhibitor Geoffrey Diner Gallery, specialist in postwar art and design, particularly the designs of George Nakashima and Gio Ponti. The booth’s all-wood Nakashima table is an outstanding example of the artist’s experimentation with free edges and fissures. Hirschl & Adler Galleries of New York also returns with American and European paintings, such as those by Charles Willson Peale, who not only painted leaders of the American Revolution but participated in combat as well. And longtime exhibitor Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts greets visitors as they enter the Armory with three bronzes: Auguste Rodin’s miniature Pierre de Wiessant, a reclining figure by Henry Moore, and Jacques Lipchitz’s towering Lesson of a Disaster (1961–70). Standing at the front entrance, the latter’s depiction of a phoenix rising out of flames is an unambiguous reiteration of the fair’s message of revival.
    Auguste Rodin, Pierre de Wiessant, “Bourgeois de Calais,” (ca. 1905). Exhibited by Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts.
    Tiffany Studios, Rare Snowball Window (ca. 1905), exhibited by Lillian Nassau. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    Lillian Nassau, too, returns with a host of Gilded Age leaded-glass works by Tiffany Studios, as well as an intricate glass window attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright. Michele Beiny brings exquisite contemporary ceramics and antique porcelains from Meissen and Sèvres. A gold cast of German supermodel Veruschka’s lips—designed and cast by Claude Lalanne, manufactured by Milanese jeweler GianCarlo Montebello—beckons from the booth of Didier Ltd. The gallery is asking $200,000 for the one-of-a-kind 18-karat piece of jewelry, commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent in 1969 and published in Vogue in December of that year.
    Details of Claude Lalanne, Bouche (1969). Exhibited by Didier Ltd.
    Pennsylvania dealer Kelly Kinzle has rolled out a real showstopper, a limited-edition 1930 Commodore Roadster by Italian luxury car manufacturer Isotta Fraschini, which Kinzle compared to Rolls-Royce of England, its main competitor at the time. “It really takes the air out of the room,” he beamed, explaining that the car could reach 100 miles per hour, quite a feat in its day. Kinzle said his asking price is $1.45 million for this exemplary automobile, which features a Lalique hood ornament.
    Isotta Fraschini, body by Carrozzeria Castagna, 1930 Commodore Roadster. Exhibited by Kelly Kinzle.
    Medieval enthusiasts will want to stop in at Daniel Crouch‘s booth, where a volvelle astronomical calendar takes pride of place among rare books and antique maps. Crouch said it’s the only such calendar to have survived from the Middle Ages, hanging for over three centuries in the cloister of the San Zeno Abbey in Verona, Italy, where it would have been seen by all the monks several times every day. Crouch explained that the object has been dated to approximately 1455 using its own time-tracking rotational mechanisms—which, he noted, puts it within a year of the printing of the Gutenberg Bible. The stellar provenance befits its $1.5 million asking price.
    San Zeno Astrolabe, cloister of San Zeno abbey (ca. 1455). Exhibited by Daniel Crouch Rare Books.
    One must-see presentation is not for sale: The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), in partnership with East Side House and Bank of America, is showcasing treasures from two of its costume collections—the exquisite hand-tailored qipaos of Aileen Pei (stepmother of architect I.M. Pei) and the intricate opera gowns of the Chinese Musical and Theatrical Association, which promoted and preserved opera in New York’s Chinatown primarily in the 1920s and ‘30s, the golden age of Cantonese opera in the United States.
    Opera costumes exhibited by the Museum of Chinese in America. Courtesy of the Winter Show.
    In addition to wowing visitors with its worldly wares, the Winter Show serves another purpose: to support the East Side House Settlement, a community-based organization benefiting the children, families, and community of the Bronx and northern Manhattan. The fair will put all ticket sale proceeds toward this cause, which it has done since its founding in the 1950s.
    The Winter Show is on view at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, New York, January 20–29, 2023.
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    British-Ghanaian Filmmaker John Akomfrah Will Represent the United Kingdom at the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024

    John Akomfrah, the British-Ghanaian artist whose ambitious films and screened installations have tackled colonial legacies, climate change, and immigration, has been selected to represent Britain at the 60th Venice Biennale, set to open in April 2024.
    The nomination was announced today by the British Council, which has been responsible for the British pavilion at the Venice Biennale since 1937. 
    In a statement, ​​Akomfrah called the commission a “huge privilege and an [honor],” adding that “it is without a doubt one of the most exciting opportunities that an artist can be presented with.” 
    Akomfrah, 65, is widely regarded as one of the most influential video artists of his generation. 
    Born in Accra, Ghana, in 1957, the artist’s family fled to Britain when he was just four. In 1982, he was one of seven founding artists behind Black Audio Film Collective (BAFC), a group formed with the goal of increasing the representation Black British communities on screen. The collective’s first film, Handsworth Songs, won the BFI John Grierson Award for Best Documentary in 1986.
    Since then, Akomfrah has consistently turned to his chosen medium to explore topics that are both timely and universal in scope. Among the highlights are Mnemosyne (2010), a film about the experiences of post-war migrants living in the U.K.; The Unfinished Conversation (2012), a poetic portrait of the cultural theorist Stuart Hall; and Purple (2017), a 62-minute, six-channel video installation that explores the effects of changing climate patterns on human communities and natural ecosystems across the globe.
    John Akomfrah, Four Nocturnes (2019). © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy of Smoking Dogs Films and Lisson Gallery.
    Next year’s presentation will mark Akomfrah’s third turn at the Biennale, following, most recently, his presentation of the film Four Nocturnes, which was commissioned for the inaugural Ghana Pavilion at the 58th iteration of the show in 2019. The artist’s Vertigo Sea (2015) was also included in the Okwui Enwezor-curated main show in 2015.  
    Other artists to have represented Britain at the prestigious expo in recent years include Phyllida Barlow, Sarah Lucas, Cathy Wilkes, and Golden Lion winner Sonia Boyce. As with those figures, who were all over the age of 50 when commissioned, it seems the British Council panel of nominators prioritized Akomfrah’s long history of artistic triumphs. Though the list of Akomfrah’s recent accomplishments is impressive too: in 2017, he won the Artes Mundi prize, the U.K.’s biggest award for international art, while just this month, he was knighted as part of the King’s New Year Honours List for 2023.
    “John’s inspiring style and narrative has continuously evolved, revealing key ideas and questions about the world we inhabit,” Skinder Hundal, the British Council’s Global Director of Arts and the Commissioner of the British Pavilion, said of the artist’s nomination.
    “The quality and contextual depth of his artistry never fails to inspire deep reflection and awe. For the British Council to have such a significant British-Ghanaian artist in Venice is an exhilarating moment.”
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    With a Trio of Exhibitions in Paris, Philippe Starck Reflects on the Renewed Enthusiasm for His Radical Designs of the 1980s

    French designer Philippe Starck’s pioneering work from the 1980s, which unabashedly subverted classical forms, is spotlighted in a trio of exhibitions in Paris. They evince the zealous interest in Starck’s output from that decade, which led to his becoming a household name through industrial products such as the lemon squeezer, Louis Ghost chair for Kartell, and innumerable hotels and restaurants worldwide.
    Starck’s furniture pieces are included in the multi-disciplinary extravaganza “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs (through April 16) alongside furniture by fellow designers Martin Szekely and Elisabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti, as well as Jean-Paul Goude’s graphic photography of Grace Jones and fashion by the likes of Jean Paul Gaultier and Thierry Mugler.
    His work is also the subject of two gallery shows: “Ubik,” the title of Philip K. Dick’s science-fiction novel after which Starck named his agency, at Ketabi Bourdet (January 20–February 18) and another at Jousse Entreprise (March 10–25).
    Yet Starck, renowned for his radical and humorous vision, is bemused by the renewed enthusiasm for his 1980s production. “I’ll reuse the words of a friend: Getting older is awful,” he told Artnet News at Ketabi Bourdet’s preview. His attendance was a surprise for the gallery, which mounted the exhibition without his input.
    “I don’t think anything of the past; I’ve always thought about the future but never about the past,” continued Starck, whose fascination with futuristic forms and materials comes from his father, an aeronautical engineer. “I’m very happy to see all this here with all these charming people, but it doesn’t concern me.”
    Asked about the spike of market interest in his 1980s pieces, he added: “It’s completely artificial because they think that I’m going to die, so one must increase the market value. It’s normal speculation in the field of artistic creation.”
    “What’s interesting is that the pieces were made with nothing,” Starck recalled. “We had zero money, no one believed in us, there was no investment, we produced the pieces ourselves. It really was an incredible adventure.”
    Installation view, “Ubik.” Courtesy of Ketabi Bourdet.
    The show presents Starck’s greatest hits alongside rarer pieces and exemplifies how he invariably quashed conventions, such as the traditional four-legged chair. Among these pieces are the Pat Conley II armchair (1983), its seat gracefully sloping to the ground; the Dr Sonderbar armchair (1983) in stainless chrome metal, its ellipsoidal form standing on just three legs; the black, highly graphic chairs Miss Dorn (1982) and Wendy Wright (1986), and the neon Easylight (1979), reminiscent of Dan Flavin’s sculptures.
    Prices reach as high as €65,000 ($70,704) for the rare sofa Canapé Prince de Fribourg et Treyer (1987), which has been purchased by a Hong Kong-based foundation. Other pieces have been sold to younger buyers for whom the exuberance of the 1980s is a relative discovery, according to the gallery.
    “Starck is the designer who really embodied the 1980s through advertising and unrestrained craziness,” said Paul Bourdet, co-founder of Ketabi Bourdet. Bourdet started collecting Starck’s furniture in 2015 while working at Galerie Downtown François Laffanour prior to inaugurating his gallery with Charlotte Ketabi-Lebard. “I was really looking at who could be the next [designer] in the market after Jean Prouvé and Pierre Paulin,” he explained.
    Across the Seine in the 1980s exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs are pieces that pinpoint Starck’s institutional importance. Fauteuil Club (1983) was acquired during François Mitterrand’s presidency for the bedroom of his wife, Danielle, at the Elysée. Typifying Starck’s anti-bourgeois approach, Fauteuil Club upended the affluent association with classical armchairs by emptying the inside and embedding an aluminum-molded seat and two metal legs—eventually with just one.
    Installation view, “Années 80. Mode, design et graphisme en France.” Courtesy of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs.
    “Starck is the best-known designer [from the 1980s] because he popularized design; his father transmitted to him the idea that research was a mission and that one should create for the largest number [of people],” said Karine Lacquemant, the exhibition’s co-curator. “His journey remains emblematic, from his commitment to innovative design to his talent as an interior designer (Les Bains Douches nightclub)—marking the decade with his visionary spirit.”
    On the secondary market, it is Starck’s more recent works from the early 2000s and 1990s that have fetched the highest amounts. His auction record is for a black crystal chandelier, Lustre Zénith (2006), which sold at Artcurial in 2006 for €59,195 ($74,930).
    The prices of his works from the 1980s are still relatively affordable, according to Florent Jeanniard, co-director of design at Sotheby’s. “The pieces that didn’t encounter commercial success at the time and are rare today are among the most popular and sought-after works,” Jeanniard said. “These prices, to some extent, are still accessible, enabling a generation of new and young collectors to make acquisitions.”
    Philippe Starck, prototype of the Café Costes chair. Courtesy of Jousse Entreprise.
    Indeed, Jousse Entreprise’s show on Rue de Seine on the Left Bank will feature several prototypes made for specific commissions. On offer will be a 1984 prototype of the three-legged chair for Café Costes restaurant in Paris (priced at €70,000) and a 1988 prototype of a chair for the Royalton hotel in New York, besides the refined Phil Lizner bar stool for Manin restaurant in Tokyo.
    “I discovered Starck as a teenager and when I visited the Royalton in New York, I found it revolutionary because it was the precursor of boutique hotels,” said gallery director Matthias Jousse, who started collecting Starck’s works six years ago. “Starck is one of the only French designers known internationally, like Andrée Putman. What he made was very contemporary for its era [and] is still very contemporary in 2023.”
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    in Exhibitions

    An Extremely Intelligent Lava Lamp: Refik Anadol’s A.I. Art Extravaganza at MoMA Is Fun, Just Don’t Think About It Too Hard

    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is being touted as Artificial Intelligence’s triumphant arrival in the museum-art canon. So I went to see the splashy installation currently in the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-floor annex with a mission, to get a glimpse of what MoMA-approved A.I. art promises, or threatens, for the future.
    Born in Istanbul and currently based in Los Angeles, with a studio of more than a dozen people, Anadol was known for many years more for interactive public-art commissions than for work in museums and galleries. He boasts collaborations and support from the likes of Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Google. In the recent past, his stock has dramatically soared—which makes sense given the fact that his work engages with three trends that have lately shaken up the art conversation: immersive installation, NFTs, and generative A.I. “Unsupervised” combines a bit of each.
    Here is what you see at MoMA: A towering, high-res screen where abstract images morph hypnotically and ceaselessly. Sequences run a few minutes each, toggling between different styles of animation.
    The most crowd-pleasing of these simulates a seething, gravity-defying cloud of colorful fluid, the palette based on colors derived from the works in MoMA’s collection. New colors are constantly swirling into the image and taking over, the whole thing surging in and out restlessly, like a psychedelic, drugged-out ocean wave. The high-res screen renders the simulated rainbow gloop convincingly thick and dimensional.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
    While this mode is the most visually memorable, it is also the one that has the least clear connection to the ostensible Big Idea of the show. “Anadol trained a sophisticated machine-learning model to interpret the publicly available data of MoMA’s collection,” the show’s description explains. “As the model ‘walks’ through its conception of this vast range of works, it reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been—and what might be to come.”
    This premise is more directly enacted in the other two types of animation, which are also harder to describe. One evolves endlessly through blobby, evocative shapes and miasmic, half-formed patterns. Sometimes an image or a part of an image briefly suggests a face or a landscape but quickly moves on, becoming something else, ceaselessly churning. It looks like this:

    A third type of animation does much the same, but with jittery networks of lines connecting different key points as the art-inspired shapes define themselves. I’m not totally sure what these vectors suggest, but they give the image texture and atmosphere. It looks like this:

    Art History, Without the History
    You definitely can tell, in these latter two types of animation, that “Unsupervised” is manifesting art-like images specifically inspired by some constellation of works in MoMA’s collection. However, despite a screen that appears as punctuation between sequences displaying dense graphics and data about what you are seeing, the exact operation is never really clarified.
    The ever-new, synthetic images of Anadol’s “Unsupervised” are blobby and chaotic, and look exactly like what art made via Generative Adversarial Networks most often looked like before the breakthroughs of DALL-E and its A.I. ilk captured the imagination of the public last year: Woozy, semi-random, art-like visual outputs, with wispy, unresolved edges. They look a little bit like preliminary sketches for art you might have seen in the original data-set (or in the galleries)—if you squint.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    The effect is pleasant. What it is not is anything like what MoMA says it is: an experience that “reimagines the history of modern art and dreams about what might have been.”
    MoMA has spent recent decades trying to move beyond the formalist ideas of art that it inherited from its founding director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. with his famous graph of Modernism as a bunch of styles mechanically branching off of one another. Generally, contemporary art historians would insist on rooting meaning in culture and context. Abstraction means one thing when its Gee’s Bend Quilts, another when it is Abstract Expressionism, still another when it is Tibetan sand painting, and still another when you put a bunch of images into an A.I. blender and remix them.
    It’s striking to see MoMA tacitly let a new high-tech formalism through the door, one even flatter and less historical than Barr’s—as if the curators were so excited by the wonders of A.I. that they didn’t notice. What the endorsement of “Unsupervised” as an alternative-art-history simulator insinuates, for its audience, is that art history is just a bunch of random visual tics to be permuted, rather than an archive of symbol-making practices with social meanings.

    Dreaming… Reimagined?
    Describing his works that use A.I. to make generative art out of huge datasets like “Unsupervised,” Anadol speaks of them as akin to “dreams” or “hallucinations.” But the terminology, once more, mystifies what is going on.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    As Jorge Luis Borges once wrote, citing Coleridge, in dreams (I guess I have to specify here, in human dreams) emotional causality is reversed: “Images take the shape of the effects we believe they cause. We are not terrified because some sphinx is threatening us but rather dream of a sphinx in order to explain the terror we are feeling.”
    But there is no emotional text to Anadol’s endless animation at MoMA. At most, the installation conveys a generalized awe at the machine’s superhuman capacity of visual analysis. (The fact that the soundtrack is a kind of shapeless, droning synthesizer score that is almost a cliché in “futuristic” video work doesn’t help.)
    I sat through two hours of “Unsupervised.” I can’t think of a single image in it that evoked any feeling in me besides curiosity about what it might be referencing. As one might expect, they are just aleatory acts of syntheses and recombination of properties, expressing nothing about anything in particular except for the machine’s ability to do what it is doing.

    Mis-recognizing Dystopia
    I would contend that scraping away the ill-considered metaphors (e.g. reimagined art histories, dreaming) helps to better see what’s really happening in front of your eyes.
    This would be nitpicking, though, if it weren’t for the fact that these poetic readings of the technology are selling us on a certain style of thinking about A.I. as a creative proposition, at a time when A.I. text-generation and A.I. image-generation are being deployed so fast that society is racing against the clock to catch up with the implications (as if “move fast and break things” hadn’t been discredited as a motto).
    It is because Anadol has created such a purely decorative, cheerleader-ish style of A.I. art—so different than the critical lens that artists such as Hito Steyerl and Trevor Paglen have brought to the subject in recent years, with great impact—that he received so much support along the way from the tech giants. Indeed, his positivity is probably an unstated condition of that support.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pervasive and perverse rhetorical sleight of hand in the art-tech conversation. Call it the willful misreading of dystopia. You hear technologists reference artworks that are meant as sci-fi cautionary tales but, weirdly, purely as positive design inspiration, divorced from their prophetic moral or ethical substance. The recently trendy idea of the “metaverse,” which comes from Neal Stephenson’s grim take on virtual reality in Snow Crash, is an obvious example.
    Anadol is a notable dystopian mis-reader. When he refers to his works as “machine dreams” and “collective hallucinations,” he often says his inspiration is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. In a TED Talk, he describes having his imagination fired by the moment in that movie when the android Rachael realizes that her memories are not real, but implants. “Since that moment,” Anadol says, “one of my inspirations has been this question: What can a machine do with someone else’s memories?”
    Blade Runner is a melancholy work about the uprooted sense of self and collapsing sense of reality in a future where humanity and machine are no longer distinguishable. None of this seems to register with Anadol, just the idea that machine-generated memories are cool.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Ben Davis.
    Anadol’s first work that used A.I. to generate infinite new outputs based on a massive dataset was Archive Dreaming, executed in spectacular installation form in 2017, as an application of the experiments he had been engaged with at Google’s Artists and Machine Intelligence Program. It looked at 1.7 million documents and generated ever-new images based on them.
    In that same TED Talk, Anadol claims that Archive Dreaming was inspired by Borges’s famous short story The Library of Babel, which envisions a universe that is one never-ending library, whose books contain every possible combination of characters. But The Library of Babel was an intellectual horror story, a parable about the nihilism that results when all meaning collapses into nothing. When the inhabitants of Borges’s library finally realize the implications of the world they live in, they commit mass suicide!
    Keep that in mind when you are sampling the bottomless brunch of art-like A.I. imagery at MoMA.
    Mainly, the point is that these science-fiction references are mined in the most superficial way—very much as MoMA’s archive is sucked up into “Unsupervised” as context-free visual inspiration. As a result, this style of art feels emblematic of a moment in which a tech aesthetic of perpetually novel gadgetry is culturally dominant while the humanities, with their unprofitable baggage of historical and moral concerns, are being allowed to wither.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” at the Museum of Modern Art. Photo by Ben Davis.
    And Then There Are the NFTs
    Don’t get me wrong. “Unsupervised” is amusing enough on its own, if you look past the cloud of mystification. It’s a bit like an extremely intelligent lava lamp.
    But if it seems a little vacant, there is reason to suspect that MoMA is incentivized not to ask too much of it.
    With his background, Anadol was well-positioned to become one of the biggest stars of the NFT art scene during the crypto boom of 2021. In fact, his “Unsupervised—Machine Hallucinations—MoMA Dreams” line of NFTs based on MoMA’s collection is being sold on Feral File, the NFT marketplace from the well-respected art-technologist Casey Reas (one of Anadol’s former teachers at UCLA). “Ten years ago, when we asked, Can we mint machine memories and dreams in the blockchain of one of the world’s most inspiring archives? I wouldn’t have imagined that was possible,” Anadol enthuses in MoMA Magazine. “I mean it was a very Philip K. Dick idea, but I feel like we are, right now, truly doing it.” (Finally, a way for MoMA to help bring the happy world of Total Recall closer to reality!)
    MoMA itself gets a percentage of the sales of the digital artworks—17 percent of primary sales and 5 percent of secondary. Surely showing “Unsupervised” prominently at MoMA has to be considered as a great ad for the associated line of NFTs that sends profits back to the museum (you can see the spike of trade in them that coincides with the show opening on OpenSea). The curators have been promoting the show with conversations featuring both Anadol and Reas, where they talk as much about NFTs as about the installation.
    It may be that the exact same thing that makes this genre of work commercially appealing for people buying crypto-art—its untroubled techno-philia—is what makes it feel flat to me as an artistic statement. The suspicion that MoMA is incentivized to fast-track this kind of art is going to linger.
    Sadly, the melting of commercial and non-commercial borders strikes me as more prophetic of “what might be to come” in art than any of the images summoned up by the machine in the gallery.
    “Refik Anadol: Unsupervised” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, New York, November 19, 2022–March 5, 2023.
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