I think I made the mistake of listening to Dia’s 2025 Steve McQueen Bass Symposium while driving, instead of watching it. Now as I scrub back through to find various salient points again, I realize how integral so many of the images and video clips are. And above almost all, it’s just wild that the symposium was held in the Dia Beacon gallery surrounded by Warhol’s Shadows.
There’s so much to flag here in all three speakers’ talks: Solveig Nelson talks about Bass as a work of cinema—light and sound—and in the context of McQueen’s other artworks. This brings in Exodus (1992/97), one of McQueen’s instantly sublime films, but also some generative discussion of Derek Jarman’s Blue. I know I was driving, but when I say I was seated…
Then Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa goes deep on the interrelation between Bass and the works of Black artists in the galleries above, particularly Cameron Rowland—with shoutouts to Melvin Edwards and Senga Nengudi—and to the aggro video of Bruce Nauman.
And then Michael Veal zooms out, deciphering the linguistics of bass and African talking drums. I’m two hours in—I was not going to sit in the car for the 35-minute audience q&a, but I didn’t want to wait to post.
W.E.B. Du Bois, data visualization of the rural vs urban distribution of Black American populations in 1890, c.1900, via Smithsonian
I’ve been trying to keep up a pace here, but it is taking me longer than I expected to put some thoughts together about Kahlil Joseph’s 2025 film, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions. When David Naimon, who hosts Between The Covers, had asked me about it on Bluesky, I thought I knew all I needed from the original 2018 video installation, and from the post-production and distribution wrangling that swirled around its adaptation into a feature film.
A contemporary drone shot of Spiral Jetty, 1970, via SLTrib
But BLKNWS the film is both recognizable, and also totally new. It is what it began as: a non-linear edit of the people, events, and ideas that constitute Black history, culture, and experience in the thin form of a cable news channel. And it has become something else entirely: encyclopedic and personal, autobiographical and universal, historic and prophetic. Joseph and his producer Onye Anyanwu opened BLKNWS up to collaboration—Naimon’s initial teaser was about the spectacular list of contributors and cameos—and they opened the film’s structure, or rather, took on a structure—the spiral—that opens, loops, and expands.
Maybe the logical thing to do is to follow their lead, and spiral, just blog about BLKNWS from now on, and take occasional note of how it turns and returns periodically to the compass points marked here before.
So you’re telling me Steven Soderbergh’s taut new thriller stars Ian McKellen as the once-great painter and Michaela Coel as “a respected fine art blogger”? I am seated, as they say. I am simply too seated.
Matt Zoller Seitz’s exciting review of The Christophers sent me to find the trailer, which seems fine and taut, but frankly, a little bit trailery.
The post-screening conversation with McKellen and screenwriter Ed Solomon, which took place Monday evening, at Lincoln Center, however, is good. McKellen invokes painters like Hockney, Freud, and Bacon when discussing his character Julian Sklar, who’d made it big in the art world of 60s London. He talked, too, about Soderbergh being a POV character in the film, just one of the many exceptional aspects of his production method. Solomon discussed the crucial decision to not really show too much of the unfinished masterworks at the heart of the plot. [Artnet had some chats with the artists who painted the props.]
NEON, the film’s distributor, as experience with emotionally turbulent films that revolve around paintings, having distributed Portrait of a Lady on Fire in 2019. But that Artnet piece reveals we are on the precipice of a week of astroturfed art-based PR, and I am wary. Little more than an hour from now, a panel of the film’s principals will convene at Sotheby’s HQ, “one of New York’s most significant spaces at the intersection of art, architecture, and the art market,” moderated by Andrew Goldstein. “RSVPs are subject to approval.”
The campaign moves Friday from the Breuer frying pan to the Fyre Festival of art spaces, WSA, Water Street Associates, the former AIG headquarters supposedly transformed into a low-rent, high-luxe creative hub. Sir Ian will be interviewed by Jerry Saltz. Solomon will talk with Ajay Kurian who will also moderate the evening’s climax: a panel on artist-assistant dynamics with Ian Cheng, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Martine Syms.
The only thing left is Steven Soderbergh talking about his own painting. So far, that is not on the agenda.
Look at me not cropping the clunky credit caption via Gagosian via Christie’s
When I saw this giant eye staring out from the lot at Christie’s, with barely a five-figure estimate, I was sure it was some random photo, ancillary merch. But no, it is the entire video installation, one of the greatest works of the 21st century.
If the price of art meant anything at all, Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), 2003, should be like $10 million, easy. That one of the edition of just seven is coming up for auction in the first place is wild. Look at that exhibition history. So many institutions, is there even another copy in private hands?
But with an estimate of just $20-30,000? That is completely bonkers. Is this really who we are as a culture/economy? Do the people with so much money really value this artwork so little?
Douglas Gordon’s Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), 2003, installed where it was made, at Gagosian 24th st, in 2003, image: Studio lost but found via Gagosian via Christie’s.
Srsly, seeing Play Dead at Gagosian, in the gallery where it was made, remains one of the most amazing video art experiences I’ve ever had. It should be installed on life-size screens everywhere. [And, again, it has.]
What’s even more extraordinary than Houston dealer/curator/collector/trustee Janie C. Lee [RIP] owning this piece, is that she apparently bought it from someone else, in 2006. Who TF would unload it so quickly? Some bootlegger, I assume [if so, hmu]. Anyway, while serving on the board of the Menil, Lee was one of the forces behind the creation of the Menil Drawing Institute. And the proceeds of her Christie’s sale will benefit the MDI. So really, you all have no excuse for abiding by this low estimate. Screw anonymous phone bidding; we need to name and shame the underbidders.
[half a day of outrage later update]: OK, it might be the case that this is a single-channel, monitor-based edition of a larger work. The show at Gagosian was titled, Play Dead; Real Time. The press release mentions three works, but does not name them. The stills are captioned, Play Dead; Real Time (Other Way), and are described as a “DVD on monitor” in a “dimensions variable” edition of 7. The installation shot is not captioned. MoMA’s edition of the work, Play Dead; Real Time, does not mention an edition, but is described as a “three-channel” work with two projectors, two screens, and a monitor. Crucially, the videos are different: “19:11 min., 14:44 min. (on large screens), 21:58 min. (on monitor).” Which all differ from (Other Way), which is 23:44. When the work [sic] was installed at Tate in 2013, it was titled, Play Dead; Real Time (this way, that way, the other way), implying that each screen was different. And indeed they were: the two projections move clockwise or counterclockwise and fade to black in between elephant tricks; the monitor work transitions by zooming in and out from the elephant’s eye. The monitor video’s duration is 23:44. If this is indeed a domestically sized element/variation of a larger installation, it should still be priced at between $1 and 3.333333 million, at least.
Director/actor Xavier Dolan responds in le Monde to the refusal by Wim Wenders and the jury of the Berlinale to criticize or even comment on the German government’s support for Israeli genocide in Palestine, and Wenders’cowardly declaration that artists and filmmakers “have to stay out of politics”:
Pour certains artistes-citoyens, comme Patti Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon ou Liam Cunningham, prendre la parole est, au-delà du droit acquis, un devoir − dans certains cas, il s’agit même d’un destin. Pour eux – pour moi aussi –, se taire, penser que notre éducation, notre situation, notre métier n’ouvrent pas droit à la parole politique, c’est perdre sa voix. C’est renoncer à l’absolue nécessité du dialogue.
Dans une époque de surdité et d’aveuglement, l’art impose l’écoute de la communauté. Il la rend visible et, en même temps, lui rend la vue. Il illustre ses griefs, ses complaintes, pose pour elle ses questions, en cherche les réponses à coups de peintures, de chants et d’images. Il organise et tend au bien, au soin de la société. Il n’a jamais été et ne sera jamais – au grand dam des faux dieux, des élus égocentriques et des bandits qu’il affiche et dénonce – apolitique.
For certain artist-citizens – Patti Smith, Mark Ruffalo, Spike Lee, Susan Sarandon, Liam Cunningham – speaking out is, beyond an acquired right, a duty. In some cases, it is a destiny. For them – for me, too – to stay silent, to believe that our education, our circumstances, our craft do not entitle us to political speech, is to lose one’s voice. It is to renounce the absolute necessity of dialogue.
In an era of deafness and blindness, art compels the community to listen. It makes the community visible, and in doing so, restores its sight. It illustrates its grievances, its laments, poses its questions for it, and searches for answers in strokes of paint, in song, in images. It organizes and tends toward the good – toward the care of society. It has never been, and will never be – much to the dismay of the false gods, the self-serving elected officials, and the bandits it names and condemns – apolitical.
When Derek Jarman’s Blue premiered in the UK in September 1993, it was broadcast simultaneously on TV (Channel 4), and radio (BBC 3). Channel 4 produced a booklet of the film’s text in a letterpress edition of 2,000 [plus, perhaps, a limited edition with a signed monochrome screen print?], which was available for £3. Radio listeners could request a blue postcard to stare at during the broadcast.
The beautiful booklet is everywhere all the time. The postcard, not so much. Examples have been included in various Jarman-related exhibitions, but I suspect very few ever made it into the wild. There could be a swag closet at Basilisk Productions absolutely stuffed with unsent Blue postcards, or maybe they were used to take phone messages with a silver Sharpie. Anyway, I got one, and it’s sweet. A little glossy.
Though I once agonized over the correct aspect ratio for a Blue print, I never considered the postcard. It is A5, 148 x 210 mm, or √2:1, a ratio that has absolutely nothing to do with any screen, and everything to do with the ISO216 paper size standard. Whatever the original aspect ratio might be, it seems the correct ratio is whatever the format demands, whether film, video, radio, or print.
Agnolo di Cosimo, aka Bronzino, Portrait of Ugolino Martelli, 1536-7, oil on panel, 102 x 85 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin via
I swear I saw someone posting Bronzino’s portrait of Ugolino Martelli on Bluesky this morning, and then posting about how the book on the table is The Iliad, in Greek, and how it’s open to Book IX, The Embassy of Achilles.
But after the flash of enlightenment that followed, and the wave of recognition crashed over me, and the swell of JLo redemption began to lift me up, by the time I switched tabs and actually found the scene in the 2015 thriller The Boy Next Door, where murderous stalker orphan high school student Ryan Guzman gives next door neighbor single mom one-night stand high school English teacher Jennifer Lopez a first edition of The Iliad that he bought at a garage sale for a dollar, the scroll had reloaded, the Bluesky posts had vanished, and no amount of searching could retrieve them.
And so I was like, great, now *I* have to be the guy to host this on *my* platform. But as I tried to screenshot it, the scene crumbled before my eyes. Because actually, there is no shot of Guzman/Iliad/JLo, or even Guzman/Iliad, just out-of-frame books or disembodied hands. Was it a problem with the prop? The coverage? Is that even Guzman’s hand in those reshoots? Is that even JLo?
The more I looked, the more I knew, the stupider I became. And NOW I began to worry, and to trace backwards, and to wonder, where the madness started to creep in? Was it at the very beginning? Was it when I saw a bound copy of The Iliad and thought, huh, what’s the deal with that?
It feels like I’ve fallen into Foucault’s Pendulum, and the undiscovered truth we all mocked so smugly since 2015, that JLo was right, was, for those with eyes to see, sitting there all along. The Iliad turns out to have been first published in Florence, Martelli’s home, in a year I cannot, for entirely other reasons, bring myself to mention on this internet, but suffice it to say our Ugolino’s grandfather Luigi d’Ugolino Martelli, who bought that sculpture of David, might have gone to the Iliad book launch party at the Medicis’.
Incredible. MoMA will close the latest installment of its film preservation series, To Save and Project, with a mountain of never-before-seen footage from Andy Warhol and The Factory. There were more than eighty 100-ft rolls of exposed black & white film in Warhol’s archive that had never been developed. Turns out it includes several Screen Tests, material from the shoots of several films [including, I guess, the shot above, of Jack Smith in Batman Dracula], some explicit goings-on from the Factory, and Warhol around town in 1964. Tickets for the February 2nd screening will be released for members on Jan. 19th.
Little Plume (R) and his son Yellow Kidney (L), in their lodge with an analog clock, 1911. Curtis removed the clock from published versions of the photo. via wikimedia
The general contours of Edward S. Curtis’s decades-long struggle to produce his 20-volume photographic epic, The North American Indian, are not the issue, though much of the details hit differently now than they did when I was a dewy-eyed child. This 2012 Smithsonian article does a fine job of laying out the top-line WTFs, like destroying his glass negatives to keep his wife from getting them in the divorce. And selling his $75,000 Kwakiutl restaged documentary to the American Museum of Natural History for $1,000 during WWI.
But what I was not prepared for Curtis’s Hollywood era.
In 1920, a broke 52-yo Curtis moved to Los Angeles, where he shot celebrity portraits, and took promotional film stills for his friend Cecil B. de Mille. Here is a hand-colored portrait of Anna May Wong, which sold at Christie’s in 2002.
I don’t know who that Barry Diller-looking guy is blocking him, but Charles DeRoche, who played Rameses, clearly did not have final edit on this photo. Also DeMille and Theodore Roberts as Moses. photo: Edward S. Curtis, via CHS
This is the only one that has the filmmaker in it; the rest are all posed or captured moments of the world of the film. But this one, too, of course, feels staged.
Curtis may have dismissed his commercial and commissioned work, but it still embodies his process, techniques, and aesthetic choices. Curtis has been criticized for his staging and manipulation of his North American Indian images, for the romanticization and exoticizing of his subjects, and for ignoring the active oppression and cultural violence Indigenous people were experiencing throughout his project.
The Hollywood work feels like a perfect lens for recognizing what’s going on in photographs, Curtis’s or otherwise.
In 1951 Philippe Halsman had seven nude women sit in the form of a human skull for a portrait he made of fascist cuddlebuddy Salvador Dalí. One of those women, the one seated on the center left, I believe, was Olga Bogach, who I happened to interview in 2007, at the encouragement of some relatives were looking to buy her apartment.
I later edited the interview and uploaded it to YouTube, where it sits quietly to this day. I just watched it again, though, and do like the fascinating story, of course, but also the moral nuances that pop up throughout. As Joan Didion did not say, we tell ourselves stories in order to sell our co-ops.
[The apartment deal didn’t happen for several nontrivial reasons, not the least of which was Olga’s complicated relationship with the co-op board, some of whom, it sometimes seemed, were thwarting a sale in order to get her apartment for themselves, on the cheap. But that is like five tangents from here.]
Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Skull), 2000, gelatin silver print, 14 x 11 in., ed. 14/20, selling rn at Sotheby’s
The Halsman/Dalî connection was a surprise, because Piotr Uklanski’s own co-ed, self-portrait re-creation, Untitled (Skull) (2000), was an inadvertent guest at our wedding. Or at least the wedding party we had at Passerby, that overflowed into Gavin Brown’s Enterprise while Piotr’s show was on. Except for a sculpture that was a puddle of water in the center of the floor, which we mopped up, the rest of the show stayed. On one wall behind the dessert table was a giant, framed photo of Mt Vesuvius. But mounted on the main wall was a life-sized version of Untitled (Skull). Piotr’s outstretched arms and placid face—and a tangle of torsos and asses—all blend perfectly into every. single. photo. And not even like the background; our photographer shot black & white, and it often really did feel like these folks were right there, celebrating with us.
One of the few prints to turn up from the much smaller (14 x 11 in.) edition is finishing at Sotheby’s as I type this. It was great to see it again, and for a minute I did think of going for it. But then I figured, nah, let someone else have a chance; besides, we have like 300 pictures of it already.
Well the most popular grave in the Cimitière de Montparnasse is not Chaïm Soutine’s, Samuel Beckett’s, or even Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beauvoir’s—though they’re close. It’s Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda’s.
And while the gleaned potatoes and pine cones and even the prayer flags are chill, I cannot get past the number of people who kiss the headstone with big cheesy red lips, or write on it with lipstick.
It reminds me of the woman who kissed the Twombly in Avignon, who was like, I couldn’t control myself, it’s an act of love. And honestly, people should be able to control themselves at least this much.
Salman Toor, Portrait of Zohran Mamdani, 2007, collection: his parents, image: IG/Amitav Ghosh
In 2007 Salman Toor was a 24-yo student at Pratt when he made this portrait of Zohran Mamdani, who was then 14. Amitav Ghosh posted the pic on instagram after Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in NYC, which he celebrate with Mamdani’s parents, Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair.
From Artsy’s report, it sounds like the study was created in preparation of a larger family portrait. Toor is asked to do the corny thing of seeing the future in this portrait. Inshallah he wins, of course, but I do not go for this portraiture sorcery.
On the other hand, if you were to ask me if this looks like the portrait of a kid who told his mother to reject the offer to direct a Harry Potter movie and instead keep working on adapting a Jhumpa Lahiri novel about grieving over the loss of a far away family member, I would say “Absolutely, nailed it, 1000%.”
Dia has released a video about Walter de Maria and his work there. It’s specific in many interesting ways. If someone is polishing the top of Vertical Earth Kilometer in Kassel, we don’t hear about it, but there are interviews with the longtime caretakers of Dia’s permanent De Maria installations in the US: Bill Dilworth (New York Earth Room); Patti Dilworth (Broken Kilometer) and Robert Weathers (Lightning Field). Bill Dillworth died in December 2024, and the project is dedicated to his memory. [h/t Chris Nanos]
Related, somehow not previously: In 2023 Jeffrey Weiss wrote about the history, changes, and poetics of De Maria’s Earth Room after it had been removed, renovated, and remade. HVAC and new windows substantively changed the character of the work and the visitor’s sensory experience of it. But the implications extend far beyond questions of aroma, humidity, or ambient sound, toward permanence, aesthetic and the nature of the art experience.
[later that day update]: @octavio-world’s post adds new context: the Dilworths both left/retired in 2023, after the renovation/alteration, and were replaced by a rotation of minimum wage workers. So while extolling both the primacy of the physical experience of De Maria’s works, and listening to the singular people who have experienced it, that connection was broken. I mean, yay oral history, but that feels like an important thing to have omitted from the story, especially when it makes it sound like a memento mori and not a corporate/conservatorial decision.
[update: I’d had the Dilworths’ name spelled right, then I changed it after doublechecking a quote, and seeing it spelled wrong in the video captions. I’ve changed it back. Dia could do the same. Thanks for the correction.]
Screencap from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), from a gif by @bladesrunner
Imagine an internet retail revolution that not only created online shopping, but that brought digital shopping into the physical world. The mp3 store. The gaming store. The stock footage store.
Sturtevant, Simulacra, 2010, single channel 16:9 video, installation view at Matthew Marks, 2022
The stock footage store.
Imagine a bustling day in 2009 or ’10 at the iStockVideo store in Paris, in the old BHV, the department store where Duchamp bought his readymades. Under the high ceiling a long table arrayed with great horned owl footage. A chic but cantankerous Sturtevant and a cheery, slightly sheepish Spike Jonze both rummaging through the tablets, realizing each other’s presence when the reach for the same clip. They look up, Jonze smiles, says, “Pardon” in his downtown French, and pulls back his hand. He casually peruses his way to another clip.
Installation view of Simulacra, 2010, from Sturtevant: Memes, at Freedman Fitzpatrick, 2019, via CAD
Imagine in that world, as in ours, Sturtevant opens a show at the Serpentine in 2013. Spike Jonze’s Her, 2013, was released in France on March 19, 2014, and Sturtevant died on May 7. Imagine this 89 year old Deleuzian, in what would be the last few weeks of her life, going to the cinema to see the movie about the guy in love with his bot. In that world, as in ours, she just opened a show at the Serpentine with a video wall of owl footage. She sees this scene of Joaquin Phoenix on the sidewalk.
installation view of Rock & Roll Simulacra, Act 3 (2013) in Leaps Jumps & Bumps, 2013 at the Serpentine Galleries, image: Jerry Hardman-Jones
Does she then remember that fleeting encounter, years earlier, at the owl clip shop? Is the question I’d rather consider than the one this world has presented me when tumblr’s algorithm presented this gif to me because it thought I “looked interested.”
