BEST
In a conversation with artnet News, Whitney Biennial co-curator Christopher Lew offers a spirited defense of artist Dana Schutz’s contested painting of the disfigured corpse of Emmett Till: “I don’t think there is any blame to be laid, period.”
We’ve gotten some new glimpses of the radically dark pigment Vantablack, which eats lasers and flattens reality. Also this week in Vantablack news, in the latest installment of an ongoing feud, artist Stuart Semple sells his own super-dark artist material, which is available to all artists—unlike Vantablack, to which Anish Kapoor has the exclusive rights.
Ai Weiwei fans living in New York will be thrilled to know about an ambitious outdoor project the Chinese artist is undertaking with the city’s Public Art Fund.
Planning some museum visits this spring? Don’t miss these 25 must-see shows.
She wasn’t just Rodin’s girlfriend and muse—Camille Claudel was an artist in her own right, and now she’s getting her own museum.
Julian Stanczak. Image via Cleveland Institute of Art’s “The Masters Series” on Vimeo.
WORST
In a case that pitted an art dealer against Hollywood royalty, Perry Rubenstein has pleaded no contest to charges of defrauding Michael Ovitz in a sale of two Richard Prince paintings.
Also this week in art and crime, Robert “the cook” Gentile, whom investigators have long had their eye on in the investigation of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, pleaded guilty in an unrelated guns charge, which he says is just a way of pressuring him in the museum investigation.
New Yorkers lost a chance to see the offerings of the first-ever Iranian gallery slated to participate in the AIPAD photography fair, taking place this week; Ag Galerie dropped out due to President Donald Trump’s executive order on travel and immigration from six majority-Muslim nations.
Julian Stanczak, one of the leading Op artists, died this week at age 88.