Category: visual

With mainstream institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum diversifying to engage wider and more representative publics, what becomes the role of so-called culturally specific institutions—like El Museo, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art—that were born out of efforts to compensate for such museums’ deficiencies?

In order to get their algorithm to produce a legitimately classical-looking portrait, Obvious’s members say they fed it a training data set of more than 15,000 portraits created between the 14th and 20th centuries. Using these images, the algorithm was able to “generate” new images similar to the ones it had been fed. These new portraits were then presented to another algorithm (the “adversarial” part of the GAN acronym) that was trained to distinguish between images produced by humans versus those by machines—a Turing-like test for artworks—until the generated portraits could fool this discriminator into thinking they were “real,” too. Since the announcement, many in the traditional art world have been losing their minds over this new movement, which Obvious has christened “GAN-ism.” But other artists making work via AI think the hype about what the technology can do on its own is premature.

Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s immersive installation DAU, scheduled to open on October 12 as part of the Berliner Festspiele, was to include a mini-East Berlin, complete with a checkpoint requiring papers, bounded by a replica of part of the barrier that once divided East and West Berlin. The city government says that it has refused permission for the project because there’s not enough time to build it safely, but many locals argue that they’ve had quite enough of walls, thank you.

When the show opened at the Serralves Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto last week, 20 of the 179 works intended for display were mot on view. “One day after the opening, on Friday, João Ribas, the museum’s artistic director, announced his resignation, and an open letter has circulated accusing the institution of censorship. The Mapplethorpe Foundation, in response, has pushed back against that claim.”

Jason deCaires Taylor’s suite of sculptures, called the Coralarium and touted as “the world’s first intertidal srt gallery” by the resort off whose beach it’s installed, was demolished last week amidst an election campaign which the incumbent president, who had been railing against Western influences, lost.

Coming to the Met at a time when nearly every aspect of the universal museum is coming into ethical question, Hollein has to confront daunting challenges including the re-evaluation of the colonial era, the advent of transformative technology, the changing nature of modern information consumption, the fusion of contemporary art with global capital, and the foregrounding of issues of identity in the cultural agora. It’s a sign of the times that the most frequently heard knock against the well-liked Hollein is that he is a white European male.

Naeem Mohaiemen has two films in this year’s big art prize. He says, “I wanted to take the documentary form and jar it slightly. There’s an unmooring. I want people to figure it out by themselves, but it’s OK if they don’t.”

Michael Iwanowski walked 1200 miles in as straight a line as he could from Cardiff, where he lives, to his home village, Mokrzeszów, in Poland. He documented the journey on Instagram, of course. What did he find? “My experience was so overwhelmingly positive that it has made me question everything I read in the media about the hardening of attitudes that Brexit has supposedly provoked.”

Artist Arlene Shechet has a public artwork featuring a “rare project with a ceramic piece — ‘Low Hanging Cloud (Lion)’ — that weighs more than a ton.”

João Ribas was the artistic director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal, for only eight months before he resigned to protest the museum’s removal of 20 photos from the Mapplethorpe show that he commissioned and curated. “The museum also restricted select rooms of the exhibition to those aged eighteen and older against the wishes of its curator, who told Público he ‘was no longer able to continue to lead the institution.'”