#sebastian-smee

#sebastian-smee

Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.

Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.

What does it mean to subscribe to something? Whether we mean a belief or a magazine, the definition is complicated. I began subscribing to The New Yorker when I was a sophomore in college; more than 30 years later, I have yet to stop and I feel strongly that I never will. Yet during some of those years-okay, many of them-the weekly issues have piled up in my home and gone mostly unread between biannual days of bingeing and purging. If these reading habits could somehow be converted into digital clicks, the resulting "traffic report" might look like I don't want the product at all.

Sand Art is a game by Kory Jordan and published by 25th Century Games for two to four players ages 10 and up. It takes about an hour to play, and has you collecting resources and then coloring in a bottle, making art in a bottle out of sand, in case the name didn't give away the plot. Gameplay Overview: Sand Art has you gathering and mixing sand, which is used to fill your bottle.

There's a mildly amusing on-paper joke at the centre of manic art world comedy The Gallerist: what if someone was accidentally impaled on an exhibit but rather than report it, the corpse became part of the artwork? Sure, poking fun at the absurdity of modern art might seem a little dated and definitely a little too easy but maybe with a packed cast including Oscar winners Natalie Portman, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Da'Vine Joy Randolph, there could be a fun, fast-paced caper here?

thanks to its energetically mannered performances and director Cathy Yan's snappy pacing and flair for visual humor. So long as the film remains simple and funny - which it does for most of its 88-minute running time - it works. But how you respond to the picture will probably depend on how you respond to its out-there central performance by Natalie Portman as a brittle, possibly insane Miami gallery owner whose art-world affectations can only partly hide her exposed-nerve desperation.

The Washington Post has laid off Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic Sebastian Smee and made sweeping employee cuts across its Arts section in what's been described as a "bloodbath" at the Jeff Bezos-owned paper. All of the paper's staff photographers were also eliminated, raising questions about the future of the paper's visual strategy. Staffers began receiving layoff notices on Wednesday, February 4, after weeks of rumors of a mass downsizing.

Our perceptions of Seurat have usually been shaped by several vast canvases of Parisians enjoying life - who can forget Bathing, Asnières? - and the radical technique of painting he pioneered - often known as `pointillism' or `Neo-Impressionism'. Following the Impressionists and fascinated by new theories on optics and colour, Seurat placed pure dots of colour beside each other directly onto the canvas, so they melded together in the viewer's eye rather than blending them on a palette.

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday amid attacks on civil liberties and marginalized communities, museums and galleries in the nation's capital are opening exhibitions that question what it means to be an American.The National Gallery of Art presents 115 works in Dear America while other shows focus on individual artists such as Mary Cassatt and Nick Cave, all in the pursuit of exploring "Americanism" as a facet of education, expression, and aesthetics.

I take no pleasure in saying "I told you so." Really, I don't. But I was hardly shocked by this week's news that Tina Rivers Ryan, who was named editor-in-chief of Artforum in 2024 after the dumpster fire that was the magazine's handling of an open letter in support of Gaza, was stepping down (Daniel Wenger and Rachel Wetzler will step in as co-editors, scrapping the editor-in-chief title altogether).

In 2024, I made a vow to never base my art criticism on wall labels. My decision came after reading reactions to that year's Whitney Biennial. "If every label in 'Even Better Than the Real Thing,' the 81st installment of the Whitney Biennial, were peeled off the walls and tossed into the Hudson, what would happen?" asked Jackson Arn in the New Yorker. (He went on to suggest that the overall show would have been much better.)

Marah Al-Za'anin, an 18-year-old Palestinian artist, has transformed a tent in Gaza City's Al-Rimal neighborhood into a studio. Al-Za'anin can't have been more than 15 or 16 years old when the genocide began, but she continues to pursue her passion for art and uses her brother's phone as a light source while she paints and draws late into the night. (photo by Saeed Jaras/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)

I work outside, carving and shaping the stone. Outside my house, I have a table, an extension cord, and tools. It's very cold and I have to wear all my winter clothes. When it's too cold, I do the filing and finishing work inside after I shape it outside. I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to Eminem all the time; his albums are all my favorites. For drawings, I work at Kinngait Studios or at home on my kitchen table.

The South African culture minister, the right-wing populist Gayton McKenzie, has cancelled the project for South Africa's pavilion at the forthcoming Venice Biennale, proposed by the artist Gabrielle Goliath and curator Ingrid Masondo. Goliath and Masondo have appealed to the country's president and submitted a case to its high court to overturn McKenzie's decision. Ben Luke speaks to Charles Leonard, who has been reporting on this story for The Art Newspaper over the past few weeks.

Sprouting from the roof of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, artist Rose B. Simpson's newly installed bronze sculpture "Behold" has its gaze fixed on the cityscape before it. The Tewa of Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh artist, herself a mother, crafted a tender portrait of an interconnected parent and child that "asks us to be human with each other, to change our narrative through wonder, witness and a foundation in the soft warmth of our humanity," she said in a statement.

One recent weekday morning, the British painter Peter Doig arrived at a bonded warehouse-a cavernous brick building-about a mile south of the River Thames, but not subject to the import taxes of the United Kingdom. He buzzed through security and entered a windowless white room, where he settled in for a long day. Awaiting him were a series of etching prints that had been brought over from the United States to be signed by Doig before being put up for sale.