In June 2015, the Berlin-based performance artists Eva & Adele released a Swatch at Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale. It is pink and gold, and is titled Futuring, the artists’ term for “designating a time unfinished, caught up in the process of developing and revealing itself, challenging people to take an active role in shaping their own future. Futuring is also the principle of the artists’ performance, the unquestioned freedom of sexual self-determination that EVA & ADELE themselves represent.” [via]
A numbered, limited edition of 585 was released in Venice, and an unnumbered, unlimited, but otherwise identical version was released everywhere else.
After Adele’s years-long legal battle to have her birth certificate issued in her proper gender, the pair were married in 2011. Eva, the shorter of the two, passed away in May 2025.
We saw signs for a circus in Provence, and so we went. With basically no online presence, le Cirque Dawson seems to advertise its tiny, roving spectacle exclusively on telephone poles a few villages ahead of their circuit. It was a good show, worth every centime. The heat and the sweat made the juggling act truly suspenseful.
When, after the trained goat, they brought out a raised platform with lights embedded around the edge, and the juggler reappeared, shirtless, and started doing handstands on an evergrowing tower of chairs, it didn’t take much effort to make the connection.
Imagine actually staging a balloon show in the Grand Palais, and deciding what the grandest, vastest art space in the world really needs is five, little Christmas ornament satelloons suspended over a field of temporary sheds, each containing its own Museum of Ice Cream-style balloon instagram spectacle. Does that feel insufficient? Yes? Should we add a light show turning them into disco balls? Should they rise and sink in sync to music? Should they invite Bella Hadid? It’s like, confronted with the central faiblesse of the aesthetic experience, Hyperstudio could only think to keep adding to it.
screenshot of Erwan Franck’s youtube video of visiting Euphoria, a balloon-themed spectacle at the Grand Palais in Paris
Look, I am fully aware that a sporadic series of blog posts over 18 years is no way to realize a 100-foot wide aluminum sphere sculpture exhibited in one of the most prominent art venues in the world. I get that. I’m glad the Grand Palais was at least aware.
But this is not just about me and my balloon. Kusama has been showing inflatable immersive environments for years, and she is not here in the Balloon Museum’s Euphoria. LVMH was fine to put dots all over their stores, but apparently did not see fit to underwrite her obliteration of and in the Grand Palais.
Martin Creed’s Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space, 2024, inside a pathetic greenhouse at the Grand Palais, as part of the Balloon Museum‘s instagram show, Euphoria
And then there’s Martin Creed, an Old Master of the contemporary balloon arts. For the Grand Palais he made, of course, Work no. 3883: Half the air in a given space (2024). And the space they gave was inside a f’ing greenhouse. The Balloon Museum was really given the biggest space in Paris to stage an exhibition of the most important balloon-based artwork of the age, and said, “Half the air in a given space? Sure thing, I give you an Amazon box with a balloon in it.”
In 1995 Larry Rinder and Nayland Blake organized In A Different Light, one of the first exhibitions of 20th century art exploring the queer experience, at the Berkeley Art Museum.
The first section of the show was “Void,” with works “suggesting blankness, absence, and loss.” And the first work on the checklist—which I uploaded to the Internet Archive because it was somehow not there before—is David Tudor’s 1989 reconstruction of the score for John Cage’s 4’33”.
It’s one of the works which “suggest the emptiness of what might be called a state of ‘pre- being’ that precedes the birth of a new identity. Seen negatively, such works evoke the repressive alienation of the ‘closet.’ Seen in a more positive light, they represent a blank slate of unlimited possibility.”
Cage’s original score for 4’33” was dedicated to Tudor, who performed it in 1952. It was made in traditional Western musical notation, with a tempo and length to indicate the duration of each of the work’s three movements. Tudor gave the score back to Johns when he was preparing another copy, this time in graphic notation, which he dedicated to Irwin Kremen. Then Tudor’s copy was lost, and so Kremen’s copy, from 1953 is the earliest surviving score. David Platzker acquired it for MoMA in 2012.
the first movement of John Cage’s 4’33” in David Tudor’s 1989 reconstructed score, 12.5 x 9.3 in., via James Pritchett
Tudor’s reconstruction of the original 4’33” score seems related to the differences introduced in published versions. It measured 60 quarter notes at 4/4 time to be 2.5 cm, or roughly 1 inch of score, so the first 32 seconds of the 33 second movement fit on one 9.3-inch wide page. I think that makes Tudor’s score ten pages long. [Somehow Edition Peters needed the Getty’s help to recover this reconstruction for inclusion in the current, Cage Centennial edition of 4’33”. And they still reduced the page size and mooted Tudor’s calculations.]
Lemcke has made a lot of Cage-inspired work, particularly in Cage’s chance-operations texts and mesostic poems, but also involving the score of Perilous Night (1944), Cage’s pivotal chance-related composition for prepared piano, which also coincided with Cage’s pivot from his wife Xenia to Merce Cunningham. But I can’t find any mention of Lemcke doing an erased Cage score. And Lemcke’s work on the exhibition checklist, right next to Tudor’s, is Untitled (Performance Score for Percussion), 1977, which sounds related to a different series Lemcke was working on over several years.
I’ve reached out to confirm, but if an Erased Cage Score doesn’t exist already, it must be realized immediately, because it sounds absolutely obvious and fantastic. [a few minutes later update] Lemcke confirms that though Cage was an influence on his early work, and particularly his exploration of chance operations and graphic notation, the work shown at Berkeley was not 4’33” related, and he has not erased a Cage score. So now I will.
It would complete the circle, or perhaps spiral outward, from Rauschenberg’s early influence on Cage, who felt the White Paintings of 1951 gave him permission to write “the silent piece” he’d been contemplating for several years already. And the painting Rauschenberg gave to Cage, which he then overpainted black when he was crashing at Cage’s apartment.
From a more limited vantage point, this could have been seen as Blake misremembering, when it is clear that artist prophets walk among us, and they were manifesting Erased Cage Score into being. It should not have taken this long.
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.
Claes Oldenburg, Soft Fur Good Humors, 1963, fake fur, filling, enamel paint on wood, posted by @toytheatre via @octavio-world
When I saw these 1963 Claes Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors on @toytheatre via @octavio-world‘s tumblr the other day, I thought they were perfect. But then I found out, from Barbara Rose’s 1969 MoMA catalogue, that they’re too small, just 19 x 9 1/2 x 2 inches each, barely the size of a placemat.
Claes Oldenburg’s too small Soft Fur Good Humors, 1963, as illustrated in the catalogue for Oldenburg’s 1969 exhibition at MoMA, curated by Barbara Rose
Oldenburg said that the inspiration came from seeing the fake fur at a fabric store, so maybe this is all he could get. Within a couple of years, though, he recognized that a Good Humor Bar sculpture should be bigger. He proposed one for the middle of Park Avenue, where the Pan-Am Building eventually went. Too big, tbqh.
Claes Oldenburg, Colossal Monument for Park Avenue, Good Humor Bar, 1965, liberated from p*nterest
In 1972, Oldenburg’s friend Michael Crichton commissioned Oldenburg to make a 3.6m tall version of his 1970 Soft Alphabet Good Humor Bar print, which, frankly, seems like a mistake, both in scale and subject. It looks like when you pop leftover mac & cheese out of the Tupperware. I hope he was handsomely paid, as was whoever sold it to Crystal Bridges.
Claes Oldenburg with Floor Cone, 1962, on top of his car at Dwan Gallery in LA in 1963, image via the artists’ studio via MoMA, Floor Cone is now at MoMA, obv
No, I think these Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humors should be at least as big as a sleeping bag, but not too big to fit on the roof of your VW. Floor Cone is 3.5m, almost the same size as the Crystal Bridges one, but good. And on the floor.
If each Oldenburg Soft Fur Good Humor was roughly the size of the raft in Titanic. So depending on where you come down in that debate, four on the floor could fit between four and eight people. They would have roughly the same presence in a room as a Chamberlain F*****g Couch. Or two.
This feels like a needed corrective in the material record and a worthwhile work to realize.
Being Pontus Hultén must have been absolutely amazing, the king of all he surveyed. He was the founding director of at least three modern art museums and one of the most influential figures in 20th century art. A groundbreaking curator, a friend to major artists, and a stone cold crook.
Hultén made the first re-creation of Tatlin’s lost Memorial to the Third International for an exhibition at the Moderna Museet, which, great.
With permission from Duchamp, Hultén made exhibition copies of Duchamp sculptures, including the first copy of the Large Glass, for the Moderna Museet in 1961, which Duchamp signed as recognized copies on his visit to Sweden. No problem, but watch this space.
But then in 1990, after Warhol’s death, Hultén had 105 more Brillo boxes made in Malmö, which he said were made in Stockholm in 1968. He donated or sold these boxes all over the place until his death in 2006, based entirely on his association with Warhol, and his own assertions of authority. He sold 40 to Duchamp dealer Ronny van de Velde with certificates of authenticity saying they were from 1968. But Warhol never authorized these, and he definitely didn’t do it after he was dead. It turns out many people in the Swedish modern art world knew Hultén’s Brillo racket. Not OK.
An entire investigation and report on the various fabrications of Brillo boxes was conducted by the Warhol Foundation in 2010, which declared all the Hultén boxes to be Hulténs, not Warhols. (This, after Hultén got the Warhol Authentication Board to approve and add 94 1968-I-mean-1990 Stockholm/Malmö boxes to the catalogue raisonné in 2004.) Shady, a bummer for a few collectors, but kind of hilarious.
up, down, front, back: Duchamp’s 1920 sketch for Rotary Glass Plates, jacked by Pontus Hultén in 1960 from Yale University Art Gallery.
But in 1960 Pontus Hultén also straight-up stole at least four Duchamp drawings from Yale University Art Gallery. Katherine Dreier had donated Duchamp’s 1920 sculpture Rotary Glass Plates to Yale in 1941 as part of the Société Anonyme. Hultén visited the sculpture for what Yale’s extraordinary provenance note for this sketch on an envelope of the Rotary Glass Platessays was to consider it “for inclusion in an exhibition.”
What he was doing was studying how to refabricate it. The 1961 exhibition, Movement in Art, for which Hultén and Ulf Linde fabricated all the Moderna Museet’s Duchamps, including a Rotary Glass Plates. [Actually, Linde made the Large Glass; Hultén made Rotary Glass Plates with Per Olof Ultvedt and Magnus Wibom.]
After some engineering professors restored it in 1999, Yale turned on Rotary Glass Plates for a two-day Duchamp/Johns symposium in 2000. image: Yale Bulletin
Yale writes that “Hultén reportedly removed the sketch, along with three others, from the artwork’s storage box.” I think it illustrates how to clamp the painted glass plates to the central axle on which they rotate. Hultén apparently gave the sketch to Linde as a birthday present, and his widow, along with Duchamp scholar Paul B. Franklin, returned it to Yale in 2018. No word what or where the three others are, but Yale clearly has some idea.
Marcel Duchamp? Rotative Plaques Verre, 1920/1979, a purchase by the Centre Pompidou
The kid of MOCAT painting Free Palestine on her mural at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, image: Bruce Guthrie via NPR
The Museum of the Contemporary American Teenager (MOCAT) is an art and culture program initiated by a teacher in Montgomery County, MD, which operates at American University, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian.
For this year’s Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the National Mall, MOCAT artists painted a mural of teen life and teen issues. It included protest signs that mentioned the climate crisis, the immigrant crisis, the gun crisis, and Free Palestine. One of these was anti-Semitic hate speech, a Smithsonian official told the teen artist, who is Jewish, and who disagreed.
MOCAT Mural with Smithsonian Tarp, Folklife Festival 2025, image: Léda Pelton via NPR
The next day, the MOCAT crew arrived on the Mall and found their entire mural covered with tarps by the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian said they were doing it to protect the kids from angry mobs, which the kids said, “maybe we are not the problem in that situation.” The Smithsonian said the mural violated the no politics policy MOCAT had agreed to, though the document they cited was only distributed two days after the festival began. The MOCAT folks want the mural for educational purposes, but the Smithsonian claims ownership of it, so I guess it was a work-for-hire situation. Or work-for-exposure.
This all happened at the beginning of July, but only hit NPR the other day. So I feel like we should have a lot more clarity over what happened and why. What we do know is that in the three weeks since, Israel has continued starving and killing Palestinians in Gaza while governments in the West throw a tarp over it and walk away.
Love is the Message, the Message is Death is considered one of Arthur Jafa’s key works. Dating from 2016, it represents for the artist the affirmation of an African American identity, one of solidarity and confidence, while also showing and denouncing the violence that it has often faced.
It includes a piece of music titled Ultralight Beam from Kanye West’s album The Life of Pablo, which was released that same year. This composition, which combines gospel and R&B sounds, is an ode to spirituality, reconciliation, and the search for light, and it was praised as such by critics and a very wide audience upon its release. Arthur Jafa specifically chose this song for the values of hope and peace that it promotes.
Pinault Collection condemns Kanye West’s recent statements and actions in the strongest possible terms.
Are there others I have just not noticed? I confess, I had not looked. In any case, additional disclaimers will be documented here as they turn up.
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%.”
Barnett Newman’s Uriel, 1955, 8 x 18 ft, installed at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021 by the grace of its new owner, and photographed there by blogger Tocho T8
“There is one more story that properly belongs to the period of Newman’s hardest struggles. In 1968, during the social and political events and dialogue, the publisher of Horizon Books asked Newman if he could publish a volume of his essays, notes, and statements. Newman replied that he would prefer it if Horizon would republish Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist, and that he would write an introduction, in the hope of making a contribution to the dialogue going on within the Left. Horizon agreed, and in Newman’s introduction he allowed himself only one small personal digression:
In the ’40s, when artists got together of an evening, there was always someone who insisted on playing surrealist games. I recall one evening when everyone in the room had to say what destroyed him. I remember what I said. I said that I felt destroyed by established institutions. I was surprised to hear one of the artists present say that what destroyed him were people. He was perhaps wiser than I, for I had to go through that Darwinian lesson. Looking back, I think we were both right, because only those people practice destruction and betrayal who hunger to accept completely the values of the establishment in which they seek a place. It’s the establishment that makes people predatory.
Uriel was purchased in 2021 by Ken Griffin, in a deal organized by James Meyer and Iwan Wirth, for an undisclosed nine-figure price.
In the late 1940s, anthropologists came into the sights of the anticommunist crusades known as McCarthyism. The AAA formed a committee to protect the individuals targeted by the McCarthyist witch hunts, but it was quickly undermined by the ultraconservative anthropologist George Peter Murdock, who got himself appointed as chair.2 Murdock denounced his own colleagues in a letter he wrote to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Thanks to David Price’s (2004) historical research, we now know the identities of ten of the twelve anthropologists Murdock betrayed: Irving Goldman, Jules Henry, Melville Jacobs, Alexander Lesser, Oscar Lewis, Richard Morgan, John Murra, Morris Siegel, Morris Swadesh, and Gene Weltfish. All but one was Jewish, and all were involved in antiracist activism, either by public writing, speaking, and broadcasting or by political advocacy and direct service (e.g., Gene Weltfish wrote an antiracist pamphlet with Ruth Benedict that was mass distributed and adapted in a union-produced short film; Richard Morgan, an archaeologist, was an NAACP member and active campaigner against race-restrictive real estate covenants in Columbus, Ohio).
The McCarthyists and FBI also persecuted Black scholars, including W. E. B. Du Bois and St. Clair Drake, along with many other white anthropologists, such as Robert Armstrong, Cora Du Bois, Kathleen Gough, Jack Harris, Ruth Landes, Ashley Montagu, Philleo Nash, Marvin Opler, Paul Radin, Jerome Rauch, Earle Reynolds, Vera Rubin, Bernhard Stern, and George Stocking. Many lost their jobs and left anthropology. Many suffered distress, humiliation, and often financial ruin. Armstrong and Swadesh emigrated from the United States. Their examples spread fear, leading other anthropologists to censor themselves and steer clear of activism. This is undoubtedly part of why antiracist causes were largely “silenced” in US anthropology for years to come (Price 2004, 64, 71–75, 79, 110ff., 344–45; 2019, 15; see also Maxwell 2015; Stocking 2006, 129–31, 158–82).3
Remembering this can help us grasp the importance of preparing now to protect our fellow anthropologists, this time skillfully, from the neo-McCarthyist attacks being launched today against antiracist initiatives and teachers in US schools, universities, and companies. [paragraphing added to lure people to read it]
Look, I understand how reporting works, and why it’s being covered the way it is, because that is how the story got out, and that is who has gone on the record.
But as shocking and admirable as it seems that Amy Sherald canceled her retrospective’s appearance at the National Portrait Gallery, that is not the really important part.
The important and frankly dire thing is that the NPG, and the Smithsonian’s chancellor Lonnie Bunch, attempted to join Trump’s extremist movement to erase trans representation. They sought to censor one of Sherald’s paintings, of a trans woman posing as the Statue of Liberty, remove it from the exhibition American Sublime—organized by SFMOMA and moving in a couple of weeks from the Whitney to, well, not the NPG now, so who knows?—and replace it, somehow, with a video of people debating or reacting to the painting? The painting they would refuse to show? And letting people decide for themselves whether trans people should exist?
The quote being attributed to Bunch, via Sherald, is that they didn’t want to “provoke” Trump by showing a work. So instead they join him by censoring it. This comes just weeks after Bunch and the board of regents also acceded to Trump’s calls to review Smithsonian exhibitions for unapproved ideologies. Like, I guess, the applicability of “with liberty and justice for all” to trans people.
Project 2025 calls for a takeover of the Smithsonian and the removal of Bunch, saying he’s not the right man for the job. Maybe he’s trying to prove to them that he is their guy after all. This immediately calls the resignation of NPG director Kim Sajet into question, too. When did all this censorship conversation go down? Why was Lonnie Bunch even weighing in on single artwork decisionmaking?
Sherald did the right thing when she needed to, exercising the power she has in the context where she has it. Every one of us should do the same. But what matters on a larger scale is that faced with the same situation, the people at the Smithsonian Institution betrayed their mission, their principles, trans people, and all of us.
The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, course pack edition, 2025, 11 x 8.5 in.
A full one third of it is an auto-generated, unedited index, but at least it’s getting out there. People who don’t call it Kinko’s have no idea that it didn’t used to cost $30 to print a document.
The Second Deposition of Richard Prince, softcover edition, 2025, 9 x 6 in., 120pp
…aaand the third Second Deposition of Richard Prince just arrived.
Mel Ramos, The Phantom, 1962, oil on canvas, 49 x 43 in., in SAAM’s collection
I don’t think about Mel Ramos too much, tbh, but when I do, it’s not his superheros that come to mind. Which is too bad, because, like, this painting of The Phantom from 1962 [1962!] is kind of fantastic. It feels like Ramos could have gone in a variety of directions from it, but opted for cleavage.
It looks like it really sucked to be The Phantom, slumped dejectedly in your flagstone armchair with your skulls, in your darkest room, being blasted by the light of what must have been the biggest TV you could get into your lair in 1962.
Mel Ramos, The Trickster, 1962, 44 x 50 in., oil on canvas, did not sell at Bonham’s in 2013
The Trickster, also from 1962, and on an identically sized canvas, turned sideways, feels like he just knocked off the jewelry store next to Wayne Thiebaud’s bakery. [Not only did The Trickster not sell when it came up at Bonhams in 2013, the lot right before it, a Warholian silver disaster-style diptych of Iwo Jima by Bruce High Quality Foundation, sold for $122,000, so the expectation, the illogic, and and the letdown must have been intense.]
1962 really was just cooking, painting-wise. 15 years after I first read it, I still marvel at Ivan Karp’s stories of how unsettling it was in 1962 to discover Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Rosenquist all making similar kinds of cold, numb, paintings from comics and commercial imagery.
But Ramos wasn’t hanging out in the backroom at Castelli in 1962; when he made these he was 27 and teaching art in a high school in Sacramento. Today would have been his 90th birthday. What a world. [thanks to Peter Huestis for the birthday heads up]
