Art Photos mixed

A new cybersecurity law in China, which came into effect in June, is likely to push artists into deeper levels of self-censorship. In the first week of its implementation, authorities used the law to target celebrity gossip on social media platforms WeChat and Weibo. Sixty accounts were closed down, including that of the popular film blog Dushe Dianying. Younger users of social media platforms “are feeling nervous for the first time”, says Xu Wenkai, a Shanghai- and Berlin-based media artist and blogger who goes by the name Aaajiao. The new law requires companies to prohibit anonymity and to monitor and report on their employees’ activities online, according to the international organisation Human Rights Watch. The Cyberspace Administration of China said in a statement that the intention is to protect “national security, the public interest, as well as the rights and interests of citizens”.
The law specifically targets corporate accounts on the social media platform WeChat, which allows users to send messages and make payments, among other functions.

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The Whitechapel Gallery is to stage the first major London retrospective of photographs by Thomas Ruff this autumn. Organised by the institution’s director, Iwona Blazwick, the survey will include examples of all the German artist’s key series—from his billboard-sized portraits of friends shot in Düsseldorf in the 1980s to his exquisitely coloured photographs derived from Japanese manga.“This is an artist who changed the language of photography,” Blazwick says. “His entire oeuvre is very complex, but there is one central theme running through it: what is photography?”

Early on, Ruff’s portraits cemented his reputation on the international art scene, but he rarely turned the camera on himself. The Whitechapel exhibition (27 September-21 January 2018) will include the only works to depict the artist: L’Empereur (1982), a sequence of eight images that show Ruff slumped over two chairs. At the same time, a selection of his colossal portraits from the 1980s will go on show at the National Portrait Gallery.


Thomas Ruff's Porträt (P Stadtbäumer) (1988) (© the artist)


Thomas Ruff's press++21.11 (2016) (© the artist)

Astronomical imagery has played a key part in Ruff’s 40-year career (after finishing high school he was faced with the decision of becoming either a photographer or an astronomer). In addition to his Sterne (stars) series (1989-92)—photographs taken by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory—the retrospective will feature photographs of the surface of Mars taken by Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Other series to go on display include studies of suburban homes, a group of works based on negatives (conceived after Ruff realised his children had never seen a negative) and pixelated images derived from*photographs taken from the internet.

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The city of Bradford is honouring its most famous artist son, David Hockney, by opening a permanent gallery in Cartwright Hall today (7 July) dedicated to the veteran painter. The launch of the Hockney Gallery, which will house the artist’s early sketchbooks and family photography albums, marks his 80th birthday on Sunday (9 July).



The new space will house the largest collection of work dating from Hockney’s time as a student at Bradford School of Art (1953-57), before he moved to London in 1959. Early series of prints such as The Blue Guitar (1977) and A Rake’s Progress (1961-63) will also go on show.

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The Oklahoma City-based Hobby Lobby is known to most Americans for its refusal to pay for health insurance that includes female contraception, but last week the arts-and-crafts vendor gained still more infamy when it was slapped with a complaint from federal prosecutors in Brooklyn that the company bought 5,500 artefacts illegally smuggled out of Iraq in December 2010.*The complaint alleges that Hobby Lobby's $1.6m purchase was rife with "red flags", not least among them the decision to go ahead with the sale despite the fact that in-house counsel advised the company's president Steve Green, that the objects' shady provenance might indicate that they were looted from Iraq.

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The Bangladesh-born, London-based artist Rana Begum says she has never been a particularly avid user of social media, but began to use Instagram as a way to “keep up to date” with exhibitions and what other artists were up to, especially after having children. “It is a great way to discover artists and feel connected to the art world,” she says.Occasional Geometries (15 July-29 October), which opens this weekend at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) near Wakefield, has been primarily selected by Begum from the Arts Council collection. But the exhibition also includes works by artists that Begum discovered on Instagram, such as Nicky Hirst and Charlotte Moth. Hirst’s work in the exhibition, Instagram Feed (2016), is taken from–and named after–the social media platform. The images are taken from her feed and then organised under different hashtags, in this case #drawing63 and #abstract63.

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The Hive by Peter Stewart

For an exhibition on the Impressionists in London, Tate will be reassembling six of Monets views of the Houses of Parliament. This is the first time so many from the series have been brought together in Europe since 1973.

The show, Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile (1870-1904), is due to open at Tate Britain in November and then travel to the Petit Palais in Paris next year. The exhibition will begin with Monet and Pissarro fleeing the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 to come to London.

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A Manhattan federal court judge yesterday rejected the request of Richard Prince, the Gagosian Gallery, and Larry Gagosian to dismiss the copyright infringement lawsuit of photographer Donald Graham. Graham alleges that Prince unlawfully used his photograph Rastafarian Smoking a Joint (1996) when he enlarged an Instagram post of it for his New Portraits show at Gagosian in 2014. Four other lawsuits have been filed by other photographers alleging the defendants infringed their work in the same exhibition. Yesterday’s ruling was the first decision to address the copyright issues and the case will be closely watched for its interpretation of fair use for images posted via the social-media app.

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Tate Liverpool is honouring its art handling manager, Ken Simons—who has been at the institution since it opened in 1988—in a special way. As he prepares to retire, Ken will present an exhibition of 30 works drawn from the Tate collection “Ken’s Show: Exploring the Unseen (2 April-17 June 29108), in the ground floor Wolfson Gallery, includes some of his favourite works, many of which he has previously installed in the galleries,” a Tate statement says. Ken’s preferred pieces include Light Red Over Black (1957) by Mark Rothko, J.M.W. Turner’s Snow Storm, Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) and Equivalents for the Megaliths by Paul Nash (1935).

Ken says he has got to know the works personally. “It is through this hands-on interaction and curating this show that I learnt and understood much more about artists’ exploration of space,” he says (could this start a tradition, we wonder, whereby dedicated front-of-house*staff turn their hand to curatorial matters?).

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The Italian government can proceed with a plan to create a new archaeological park around the Colosseum in Rome, the Council of State has ruled. Italy’s top administrative court has also unblocked the international selection process for a new director to oversee the ancient amphitheatre and its surrounding monuments, including the Roman Forum, Palatine Hill and Domus Aurea. The decisions of 24 July overturn a challenge by the mayor of Rome through the Lazio regional administrative tribunal (TAR) on 7 June.

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