Category: visual

Said Emanuel Macron last week in a speech given in Burkina Faso, “Africa’s patrimony must be celebrated in Paris but also in Dakar, Lagos, and Cotonou. This will be one of my priorities. In the next five years, I want the conditions to be created for the temporary or permanent restitution of African patrimony to Africa.”

“While climate change imperils humanity’s future, it also imperils its past. A new study out in PLOS One quantifies that in alarming detail: Just in the southeastern United States, a sea level rise of one meter would inundate thousands of archaeological sites, from Native American settlements to early European colonies.”

This is the second substantial round of layoffs since the Speed reopened in March of 2016 after a huge renovation project, with a price tag of $60 million. The first round of layoffs came in August 2016, just five months after the Speed’s reopening, when seven employees were let go.

There are budget problems, and the museum is about to close for seven months for renovations. How will El Museo stay connected and current? New executive director Patrick Charpenel “said he would organize panel discussions and publish books to ‘open a bridge of knowledge’ about the cultural contributions of Latinos and to explore subjects like immigration, exclusion and diversity.”

Avram Finkelstein: “For public discourse to pierce through the churning perpetual motion machine of the American commons, it needs to come in bursts. Manifestos don’t work. Sentences barely do. You need sound bites, catchphrases, crafted in plain language. The poster is exactly that, a sound bite, and vernacular to the core. The poster perfectly suits the American ear.”

Artists who supported Pussy Riot and their anti-Putin stance were also arrested – and now one member of the punk group has curated a show of those artists’ work. Masha Alyokhina: “A lot of things happening inside prison walls stayed inside prison walls, and we should break this wall because it’s violence, it’s tortures, it’s murders which are happening there.”

Whoa: “Each battery-powered light, called a ‘Pixie,’ is nestled on a diamond-shaped wooden plaque, and contains a microprocessor that sends signals to other Pixies in the forest. Each microprocessor is equipped with certain ‘behavioral rules’ that tell the Pixies how often and how quickly they should send signals to surrounding Pixies.”

His claims seem shady to many in Germany, including the German minister of culture. “‘Exhibitions aimed at confronting Nazi wrongs are more necessary than ever at the current time,’ said Hagen Philipp Wolf, a spokesman for the German culture minister Monika Grütters. ‘It is therefore beyond regrettable that the planned exhibition about the life and activities of the Jewish art dealer Max Stern and the history of his persecution in Düsseldorf is not now taking place.'”

The signatories include art historians like Lucy Lippard and Hal Foster, and artists as well, in the wake of the final meeting of NY’s Mayoral Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers. “These monuments are an affront in a city whose elected officials preach tolerance and equity. … We encourage the Commission to seize this opportunity to make a brave, even monumental, gesture that will resonate for generations to come, rather than a politically expedient fix that will be easily absorbed — and quickly forgotten — by the status quo.”