Fine Arts News

This platinum-engraved sapphire disk, part of a set illustrating Earth's biodiversity, will be housed in the Earth Chamber of the MoonArk. It's designed by Mark Baskinger with Matt Zywica, Maggie Banks, Christie Chong, Bettina Chou, Adella Guo, Natalie Harmon, Deborah Lee, Deniz Sokullu and Carolyn Zhou.

DNA from a genetically modified goat, a spritz of perfume, sculptures so small you need a microscope to see them.
They're all headed for the moon.

The MoonArk is a sort of eight-inch-tall portrait of humanity, with more than 200 artists and designers contributing to it. There's space reserved for it on one of the privately-funded Moon missions competing for the Google Lunar Xprize.

Lowry Burgess, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and the MoonArk project lead, holds up one of his contributions, a vial full of red liquid. A drop will go in the Ark.

It's human blood — "all artists' blood," Burgess says.
Specifically, 33 artists' blood, all mixed together. Some of the artists are pretty famous, he says, but he won't namedrop.
He's doing the same thing with a mixture of water from some of the world's rivers.
All told, there are hundreds of items in the Ark. Burgess says each one is like a word in a poem.
"A poem is like a bell ... every word in a poem rings and makes all the rest of the other words ring," he says. "So in this, everything that's there is making something else ring. So the totality is meant to hum together."

The MoonArk features four chambers — Earth, Metasphere, Moon and Ether — surrounded by an aluminum exoskeleton. Here, a 3-D rendering shows the Metasphere Chamber.

You may have realized that this is conceptual art, where the idea is more important than any traditional aesthetic.
Or you can think of it is as a time capsule, with its contents open to interpretation.
Burgess sees it as a cultural outpost in space waiting to be discovered.
"We're desperately hoping that whoever opens it is perhaps a little more evolved than we are," he says.
Unlike some earlier space art, like the Golden Records on the Voyager craft floating beyond the solar system, the Ark will stay in one place.
But Mark Baskinger, one of the artists on the project, says the point is not to conquer.
"We think it should be different than sticking a flag in the soil and claiming territory ... maybe we're leaving breadcrumbs for someone else to find their way back here," he says. "It's an attempt to communicate forward in time — it's an attempt to communicate outward."
Other artists are just interested in the collaboration — some don't even really care about space or who finds it.
And while some of the artists are prone to intellectualizing, others will let themselves get a little emotional.
Dylan Vitone's contribution includes ordinary text messages between him and his wife.



One of the murals in the Metasphere Chamber, "Texts to Elaine," features personal photographs Dylan Vitone sent to his wife over a five-year period.

"Cynical me is critiquing the way we broadcast our life. The sentimental me is kind of celebrating this thing that's really important for me and trying to give it more meaning than it actually has," he says.
A copy of the Ark will stay here on Earth to be exhibited.
But in space, weight is money, so the team has had to be innovative with materials. The Ark's four chambers will weigh less than six ounces.
I pick up one of the aluminum outer shells. It's so light it almost feels flimsy, but it's designed to last hundreds of years.
"It's funny — you touch this and your fingerprints are on it," Vitone says. "Your fingerprints are going to the moon."
Suddenly, the moon is personal.



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Gustav Wentzel (Norwegian, 1859-1927)
From Vaga 1908

On a typical day at the Capitoline Museum in Rome, a visitor might expect to see classical nude statues like this:



A picture taken on Tuesday shows a visitor walking past an ancient Roman marble statue at Rome's Capitoline Museum. F

But this was the scene before Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and visiting Iranian President Hassan Rouhani held a news conference this week at the museum:



Wooden panels cover statues on Monday inside the Capitoline Museum. A decision to cover up nude statues to avoid offending Iran's visiting president is drawing ridicule.

Out of apparent concern about offending Rouhani, white wooden boxes covered up many of the collection's ancient nudes.
It's a mystery who made the decision to cover up the art. As NPR's Sylvia Poggioli tells our Newscast unit, "The question everyone's asking is, on whose orders?"

"Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said neither he nor Renzi authorized the cover-up, which he called 'incomprehensible,' " Sylvia adds.

Citing local media, Reuters reports that "the Iranian embassy had asked for the statues to be covered and officials in Renzi's office had agreed without consulting their bosses."

But Sylvia says that "Rouhani denied that specific requests had been made."

"I know that Italians are a very hospitable people, a people who try to do the most to put their guests at ease, and I thank you for this," Rouhani said during his trip, according to The Associated Press.

The visit comes days after the European Union and the United States lifted an array of sanctions against Iran, after Tehran reached certain benchmarks on shrinking its nuclear program.

The art cover-up is drawing outrage and ridicule from local publications. Here's what left-leaning daily La Repubblica had to say, according to Reuters: "Covering those nudes ... meant covering ourselves. Was it worth it, in order not to offend the Iranian president, to offend ourselves?"

The BBC says Italy also opted to not serve wine at official meals because of Iranian laws regarding the consumption of alcohol — "a gesture France, where Mr. Rouhani travels next, has refused to copy."

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Before it moved to the Museum of Fine Arts, Frida Kahlo's Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) belonged to the family of American industrialist Jackson Cole Phillips, who purchased it from Kahlo in 1929.

Up until recently, there were only 12 works by celebrated Mexican artist Frida Kahlo in American public collections. Now, there's one more on display at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia) is the first painting Kahlo ever sold, and it's been in the same family ever since.

Kahlo is known for her fantastical self-portraits, but Dos Mujeres shows two other women.

"They were her maids [who] worked in her house during her childhood, we believe," says Rhona MacBeth, conservator of paintings at the MFA. "We're still finding out more about them."

They're indigenous Mexicans — one has olive skin and Indian features, and the other is paler with a gold hoop in her ear. They stand against dense, green foliage dotted with fruit and butterflies. According to MacBeth, this painting takes us back to the beginning of Kahlo's career, following a violent car crash that left her spine and pelvis permanently damaged.
"Her terrible accident was in 1925; this was only 1928," MacBeth says. "And she really only started painting seriously after the accident, so she's 21 years old at this point."

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Ahead of a press conference with Premier Matteo Renzi and Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, wooden panels were erected around some Roman statues in Rome's Capitoline Museums.

Another cover-up is in the news.
Italy's Premier Matteo Renzi and Iran's President Hassan Rouhani held a press conference inside Rome's Capitoline Museum this week to announce $18 billion in new business between their countries, now that sanctions against Iran are ending.
But some of the celebrated ancient statues the presidents had to pass on their way to their press conference were boxed up, a little like dim-sum take-out, by large white panels. Inside those boxes were famous statues, including the Capitoline Venus, of gorgeous stone gods and goddesses who do not bother with earthbound clothing.

Someone - no one has claimed credit - ordered the nude figures to be covered so as not to risk offending the president of Iran, a country where women cannot risk showing so much as their ankles. Iranian women must walk around cloaked almost as completely as those statues.

It's not clear who ordered the concealing of the statuary. But outrage over the cloaking has brought about a rare coalition in Italy.
Gianluca Peciola, of a left-wing party, called it, "a shame and mortification for art and culture."
Luca Squeri from the center-right Forza Italia said, "This isn't respect, it's cancelling out differences and it's a kind of surrender."

The columnist Michele Serra wrote in La Repubblica, "The problem is that those statues — yes, those icons of classicism and models of humanism — are the foundation of European and Mediterranean culture and civilization ... To not offend the Iranian president," he wrote, "we offended ourselves."



Pope Francis (L) welcomes Iranian President Hassan Rouhani for their private audience on January 26, 2016, at the Vatican.

Lots of people pointed out that Pope Francis didn't cover the Vatican's unclad angels and cherubs when he received President Rouhani.

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The Knoedler & Company art gallery, shown here in 2010, had been in business since before the Civil War. The gallery permanently closed its doors in 2011.

The New York art world was shocked when the city's oldest gallery abruptly closed its doors more than four years ago. A few days later, news broke that Knoedler & Company was accused of selling paintings it now admits were forgeries for millions of dollars each. The gallery and its former president face several lawsuits by angry collectors and the first trial began this week.

The forgeries at the center of the scandal look like masterpieces by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other prominent abstract expressionists. They were good enough to fool experts, and even Ann Freedman, then-president of Knoedler & Company, says she was duped.

Her lawyer, Luke Nikas, says, "Ann Freedman believed in these paintings. She showed them to the whole art world. She showed them to experts. And she has piles and piles of letters from all of these experts informing her that the works are real."

Nikas says Freedman even bought some of the paintings for her own personal collection. But the plaintiffs in this case and other pending lawsuits say Freedman overlooked glaring problems with the paintings' backstories. The art dealer who sold the paintings to the gallery, a woman named Glafira Rosales, pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges in 2013. According to Freedman, Rosales told an elaborate story involving a European collector (known only as "Mr. X") who bought the paintings with cash in the 1950s, when he was having an affair with an assistant at two top New York galleries.

"It's quite a tale, and people bought it," says Amy Adler, who teaches art law at New York University. "I suppose the temptation would be there — not just for buyers, but, yes, even for sellers — to think they'd happened upon these magnificent, undisclosed masterpieces."

In the end, Rosales admitted to selling Knoedler 40 counterfeit paintings over more than a decade. The plaintiffs argue that Freedman knew — or at least should have known — that something was amiss. It's hardly the first time an art dealer has been accused of deliberately looking the other way.

Ken Perenyi is a professional art forger who wrote about his career in the book Caveat Emptor. "From over 30 years' experience with art dealers," he says, "I would say there most certainly are individuals out there in the trade that will turn a blind eye."

Perenyi faked thousands of 18th- and 19th- century paintings, and sold them to auction houses and art dealers. He says, "I've seen paintings of mine turn up in dealers' catalogues that they had to know about it and they chose to buy it and sell it anyway."

A lot of these people were very sophisticated business people ... but they bought art based on sort of magical, romantic stories. It's the kind of transaction they never would have engaged in had it been a regular business deal.

Amy Adler, professore of art law at New York University


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Singer-songwriter Walter Martin.

Walter Martin is best known for his music. He found success with the band The Walkmen, and before that, in the mid-1990s, he was with the group Jonathan Fire Eater.
But Martin wasn't always pursuing his music full-time. At one point, he'd been on track to be a fine arts buff — studying for an art history degree, working in a museum and holding down a handful of other odd jobs.
That past life helped inspire his new solo record, a concept album about his time in the museum world called Arts + Leisure.

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Interview Highlights

On the difference between writing collectively for a band and writing for himself
When writing collaboratively, especially in a band, that's all your oldest friends and family. It's a very different thing because you're a gang and you're trying to create a collective personality. And so when you write words for that, that's not necessarily your soul you're expressing. You're creating something that you and your gang believe in. And when you do it on your own — or, at least, when I do it on my own — I just want to be myself. And I want to express things that I feel about anything — you know, art or love or whatever. Anything.
On how — as a kid — he fell in love with John Singleton Copley's 1778 painting Watson and the Shark, which inspired a song on the album



John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark, a 1778 oil painting. It depicts the rescue of Brook Watson from a shark attack in Havana, Cuba.

On why he's not comfortable talking about fine art in a serious way
I remember, as a young person, feeling like art was definitely a little bit untouchable — that it was sort of something for museums or for teachers and professors. It took me a while to realize that it was sort of for everybody, you know? ...
The most important feelings that I have about art — it sounds kind of corny, but — are things that are inexpressible. And sometimes at a Christmas party, I'll have a couple of glasses of wine and feel like I can express those feelings — and I think I embarrass myself because I feel them very passionately.
But communicating them to someone else is, for some reason, tricky for me. And I'd rather have it sort of implied in the songs.


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"Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them." ~ C. S. Lewis

...indeed... "Looking out the Window" 1908 ~ Carl Vilhelm Holsoe

"Market Symphony" is a new audio installation at the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibition layers sound from a market in Lagos, Nigeria. The speakers are installed on enamelware trays which are often used in markets.

To people who live in big cities, the sound of honking, the whir of traffic, the howl of street vendors and the clang of construction can just be background noise.
But for Nigerian sound and video artist Emeka Ogboh, the city is his palette — his symphony of sound. And his compositions can whisk the listener to another time and place.



Artist Emeka Ogboh was commissioned by the museum to create a site-specific audio installation.

"There are stories in the soundscape," he says. "There are stories from the city. You can tell more about the city from just listening to the soundscape. And that's what happened. I started finding it really interesting."
Ogboh recorded hours of sounds to pull a listener through the song of the bustling Balogun open-air market in the Nigerian megacity of Lagos.

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Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem poses in front of "Generation Kill," a piece made with rubber stamps, digital print and paint, at the opening night of his exhibition titled Al Sahwa (The Awakening) at Ayyam gallery in Dubai in 2014.

Abdulnasser Gharem doesn't have the background you might expect for a successful artist – let alone one famous for edgy work from Saudi Arabia. He was once a lieutenant colonel in the Saudi army. He went to high school with two of the 9/11 hijackers.

But his first major art work sold for a whopping $842,500 at a Christie's auction in Dubai. It's a glittering dome symbolizing the Dome of the Rock, set on its edge, capturing a dove.

In Saudi Arabia, a new generation of artists is pushing boundaries amid a growing art scene. Art galleries and daring visual artists, all unheard of just a few years ago, are thriving. Contemporary artists like Gharem have become a critical voice in the conservative kingdom, where open calls for reform are a criminal offense.

Gharem says he doesn't care about fame. "I must focus on my own mission," he says with an exasperated laugh at the suggestion that he is the highest selling artist in the region. "I want to play my own role in the society, which will make me happy, and I can see the result."

In his busy Riyadh workshop, musicians play traditional music in the kitchen; a photographer is arranging images on a white wall in the next room. Here, Gharem, 41, gives young artists the help and guidance he never got.
"When I was struggling as a kid, I want[ed] to see the museum, I want to see the real paintings, I want to talk to the artists, how they are thinking," he says.

The Internet opened him to the larger art world as a young artist. He started an art foundation in 2013 with the money he earned from his first sale. Gharem took more than a dozen young artists to London last year to display their work, and this year, he and a group of young Saudi artists will launch an art tour across the U.S.

There is plenty of talent in Saudi Arabia, he says. "But the problem is they don't know how to deal with it. They don't have a strategy, they don't have even the guidance, what to do? So, that's my mission, you know."


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