Are we really still debating the topic of literary men?
Plus, the Letterboxd of art galleries.
Hello. Since the last time we spoke, I’ve started making my way through Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel, The Oppermanns. It is set in Germany, in the same year that it was published—meaning that it was written contemporaneously to the rise of the Nazi regime. It is chilling and prescient. In case you missed it, I (finally) published mini reviews of the books I read from February through April yesterday. I’ll share May book reviews later this month.
Yesterday, I saw ABT principal (soon to be Wiener Staatsballett principal) Cassandra Trenary’s photography show, “Embodied” at Privy Gallery on the Lower East Side; much like her quality of movement, the dancer’s photography is precise yet daring. She has a smart eye for framing and a lovely ability to suffuse backstage images with a dreamlike feel. This portrait of Calvin Royal III was one of my favorites as was this photo of Lauren Bonfiglio in Twyla Tharp’s “In the Upper Room.”
That evening, I saw Ballet Hispánico’s production of Carmen.maquia, choreographed by Gustavo Ramírez Sansano in 2012. This is a modernist “Carmen,” with dancers all dressed in white, save for our titular heroine in black (perhaps a bit too on the nose). Where the dancers of Ballet Hispánico shine is through the expressions of their upper bodies as they contort and convulse to reflect the inherent drama of the story; however, this is done, sometimes, to an effect that is so self-serious that it slips into the melodramatic, as in an opening scene with Don Juan in an apparent pantomime of the story we are about to see play out. I hoped for more moments of explosive passion. Instead, the choreography was at times constrained by the progression of notes in Bizet’s score, unable to surge past their arbitrary boundaries. Amanda Ostuni, as the titular Carmen, carried the role with arresting confidence and a Rube Goldberg-like flow in her intricate pas de deuxs with Omar Rivéra’s Don Juan. Carmen.maquita is fun and often funny—intentionally or not; the women who form a gossipy Greek chorus of sorts are a real highlight with their sometimes audible squawking—though it ends, somehow, without the shock that such a story demands.
This week I am off to Nice for a few days and then the Netherlands for a week. I’ll be seeing much art in my travels, and I will keep you updated on all my goings-on. For now, the news:
Indigenous art is finally getting its due, at least at the Metropolitan Museum of Art which this week revealed its newly renovated Rockefeller Wing. By all accounts, the redesign and rehang is a success. Closed in 2021 for the remodel, the Rockefeller Wing houses the Met’s collection of Oceanic, African, and ancient American art. While this wing was previously cloistered—quite literally shadowy and cramped—it is now open and accessible, with its 1,726 objects newly contextualized.
The Met’s history with indigenous art began in 1982, when the museum took in the collection that Nelson Rockefeller had amassed for his 1957 “Museum of Primitive Art”—which the New York Times notes was originally going to be called the much more suitable “Museum of Indigenous Art,” until that idea was rejected “for fear people would confuse ‘indigenous’ with ‘indigent.’ (!)
While that original Michael C. Rockefeller Wing—named for Nelson’s son, an ethnologist who drowned at 23 while researching in New Guinea in 1961—may have seemed like an afterthought to museum guests who passed it while it was entrenched on the side of the stately Greek and Roman galleries, the new design gives the diverse and impressive collection its fair due. While the gallery does show ancient artifacts, it also incorporates contemporary works into sections devoted to the explorations of specific cultural art traditions. Most interesting is the way the Met worked with the Kwoma people of Papua New Guinea to reimagine a Ceremonial House Ceiling that was commissioned in 1975, hiring several descendants of the original artists to work on it. The newly installed piece is smaller than the original—several panels that were deemed too spiritually significant for outsider consumption were removed—and soars overhead in a new, windowed space.
What’s also exciting is the way that this wing will seamlessly flow into the forthcoming redesigned Tang Wing for modern and contemporary art. This is a push against the segmentation of traditionally “othered” artists, and within the confines of the Rockefeller Wing itself, different cultures are show in conversation with one another. “With sculptures unevenly arrayed amid a maze of walls and vitrines, these galleries are prismatic and pleasantly dizzying,” writes Alex Grenberger in ArtNews. “You can view peoples separated by centuries and geography refracted through one another, warping the conventional flow of time and space.”
A new exhibit in Melbourne at the Potter Museum of art similarly celebrates and recontextualizes indigenous art. “65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art,” will run through November 23. Co-curator Judith Ryan told The Art Newspaper that the exhibit brings indigenous art into the nation’s cultural canon where it has long been ignored. “The failure to recognize Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander visual culture as art is closely tied to the fact that the original inhabitants of Australia were not counted in the census until 1967,” she said. The exhibit explains the racist policies and history of eugenics within the country in addition to explaining the spiritual and ritual significance of many indigenous artworks that Ryan says have often gone overlooked in museums.
The other exciting museum opening that happened this week is the V&A’s East Storehouse, which we mentioned last week. It seems like it’s a hit! V&A East deputy director Tim Reeve told Frieze that he hopes this innovative move—to make the museum’s vast collection far more publicly accessible—is a shift in the right direction that other organizations can learn from. “National organizations, museums and cultural institutions are often seen as exclusive environments where only the tip of the collection iceberg is visible,” he said. “I think that can make the public feel skeptical about, or somewhat disengaged from, collections such as ours, which are simply held in trust. The more you open up the collection—the more you make it physically and intellectually transparent—the better.”
This isn’t the first museum of its kind. Art Depot Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen opened in Rotterdam in 2013. I plan to go on Sunday.
Moving the V&A’s 250,000+ objects took a full 12 months of packing and trucking to their new home. The collection itself is arranged according to three themes: Collecting Stories (explaining why items are in the V&A’s collection), Sourcebook for Design (inspiration for contemporary artists and designers), and The Working Museum (a look at how a museum like the V&A really operates).
I am sad to miss a special event at the V&A East Storehouse on June 19: English National Ballet will perform, in front of the world’s largest Picasso—Two Women Running Along the Beach—a production of Bronislava Nijinska’s Le Train Bleu, a one-act ballet about a party in the French Riviera, which was first presented in 1924. The piece faded into relative obscurity after the Ballet Russes stopped performing it in 1925; it hadn’t been performed for more than 60 years when Oakland Ballet restored it in 1989.
Luckily, there is always exciting dance happening in different parts of the world. Houston Ballet just put on a reimagined Raymonda, reworked by artistic director Stanton Welch, which will run through June 8; New York City Ballet principal Chun Wai Chan stars as love interest Jean in four out of six performances with soloist Danbi Kim as the titular Raymonda. Principals Karina Gonzáles and Angelo Greco take on those roles the remaining shows.
In Kharkiv, dancers are performing again, despite ongoing Russian attacks on the city. How? The Kharkiv National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre has converted its theater basement into a performance space, where an audience of 400 can safely watch dancers, away from the scream of missiles. The company Opera East performed the 20th century ballet Chopiniana in the space in April, Reuters reported. “An artist cannot exist without the stage, without creativity, without dance or song,” artistic director Antonina Radiievska said. “It’s like a rebirth.”
And in New York, City Ballet just wrapped its spring season with its production of Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night Dream. It is worth reading Gia Kourlas’s lovely piece for the NYT about the kids who make the production so magical.
Apparently Igor Levit’s marathon performance of Erik Satie’s “Vexations” isn’t all that impressive because a St. Petersburg pianist, Ruslan Ishdavletov allegedly just finished a 60-hour piano marathon. The only question is: why?
Quick Elgin marbles update: A new book, Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters, and Their Friends Framed the Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles of the Parthenon by A.E. Stallings catalogues different “takes” on the marbles by both artists and politicians. (Boris Johnson, the Wall Street Journal says in its review of the book, “true to form, has argued with equal conviction both to return the Marbles and to keep them in Britain.”)
Can augmented reality revive the art market? I am not convinced. But several gallerists told The Art Newspaper recently that it could, at least, be beneficial in some regards, helping potential buyers “see” a work of art in their home or have a virtual studio visit with an artist. This is beneficial on an accessibility level, but the thing is that people who have the funds to buy fine art usually aren’t really struggling with this kind of accessibility. “I cannot imagine a day where in my lifetime these collectors could be convinced to use this technology over taking a trip to Venice to see the work and meet the artist in person,” said Martin Murphy, the incoming department head of game art and virtual reality development at Ringling College of Art and Design.
What could get more people going to galleries is the pressure—and rewards—of social media. The app gowithYamo, which is currently only available in the U.K., is positioning itself as the Letterboxd of art galleries. Basically, a social component makes it compelling for people to visit galleries, share their reviews, and follow other art-lovers on the platform, much like Letterboxd functions for cinephiles. The app also encourages users to participate in “challenges,” which may involve exploring curated guides or visiting a certain number of a particular type of exhibit. “The idea is to make engaging with art more interactive, playful and goal-oriented. We wanted to encourage users to explore more exhibitions, discover new spaces and push themselves beyond their usual go-to spots,” managing partner Nathalie Brough told The Art Newspaper.
gowithYamo isn’t the only app trying to make gallery visits more exciting and accessible.
is developing an app specifically for the New York City gallery scene (currently in beta testing), as is Showrunner.Sequoia Capital just led a $100 million investment in the indie streaming service and production company Mubi, which the Financial Times says will help it build out its global distribution network and invest in new films. Not sure having Sequoia on the cap table will be a net good for the future of independent film but we’ll see!
If men put as much energy into writing good books as they do taking about the so-called disappearance of the literary men, I bet I’d never have to hear about this alleged problem again. In any case, I was late to news about Conduit Books, a new U.K.-based press that plans to focus on publishing male authors, which writer Jude Cook announced in late April. Maybe you missed it too?
Anyway, early in May he wrote in The Guardian defending his philosophy. He said: “After 3,000 years of patriarchy, no one is pretending men are hard done by or not represented in the arts. But there is the pressing problem of what young men read, especially given the current political climate. There are liberal and progressive narratives addressing fatherhood, masculinity, working-class male experience, and negotiating the 21st century as a man, that are simply not getting published.” Really? Are you sure? Who is writing them? Can you give examples?
I am all for measures that attempt to tear down the manosphere, but I’m not sure that the problem, as Cook quite sees it, truly exists. Luckily, The Guardian tapped a few more writers to respond. Author Anne Enright pointed out that there were more men named Paul than women on the 2023 Booker shortlist than women and said that misogyny, not men, has gone out of fashion. Author Le Robson added that “publishing is too amorphous to determine these patterns with real authority, and certainly no one could read enough to decide if the dominance [of women writers] is legitimate.” And author Sarah Moss drilled down to the root of the problem:
I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction: mostly rational, quantifiable truths about science, history and politics, though also sometimes travel and life writing, almost always by men. If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.
In other news, Trump said that he has fired Kim Sajet, the director of the National Portrait Gallery because she is “highly partisan” and supports DEI initiatives. As The Art Newspaper points out, it’s unclear if Trump and his administration have the power to fire Smithsonian employees because it is not a government agency.
Why do we remain obsessed with the simple style of Shaker furniture? A new exhibit at Germany’s Vitra Design Museum explores this question. It may be because we, as the Shakers were, are ready for the end of the world. Edwin Heathcote writes in the FT: “What drove [the Shakers] was a sense of urgency: a belief in the imminence of the second coming and the establishment of paradise on earth. But their solution for how to live in what they believed to be a short moment was to do so in the calmest, most organised [sic] manner possible.” Curator Glenn Adamson told him that perhaps we, too, are feeling the same.
Paris’s Centre Pompidou will open its first outpost in South America, The Art Newspaper reported. The museum will open in late 2027 near Iguaçu falls in Brazil, close to the borders of Argentina and Paraguay. The center will purportedly host exhibitions and other cultural productions relevant to these three countries. It will also help the Parisian institution to cover its mounting renovation costs. Its New Jersey outpost is still in the works.
The 2026 Venice Biennale will go on following late curator Koyo Kouoh’s full vision and theme, titled “In Minor Keys.” Upon the announcement, curator Marie Helene Pereira, a collaborator of Kouoh’s, said that minor keys, in music, “hold the cadencies melodies and silences of resonant walls that gather and create together a polyphonous assembly of art, convening and communing in convivial collectivity, beaming across the void of alienation and the crackle of conflict,” ArtNet reported.
One way to revive a decimated, yet naturally beautiful landscape: turn it into an artistic hub. That’s a heartening lesson about the Japanese island of Naoshima, which, in 1989, began its revitalization with the launch of an art initiative from billionaire Sōichirō Fukutake. Today, it is one of the greatest hotspots for contemporary art, attracting more than 500,000 visitors annually, the BBC reported. “It was my conscious intention to build a kind of heaven on Earth—the very first paradise that harmonizes art, nature and the local community,” said Fukutake in a 2018 interview. But the intention wasn’t to make it a place for tourists. Fukutake’s son, Soichiro, told the BBC the goal was really, to “revitalize the region through art and help locals feel a renewed sense of pride in their hometown.” It seems to have been a job well done. ▲