Marina Abramovic.
Via Wikimedia Commons.
VIEWERS CHOICE
Art historians voiced their concern that Marina Abramović’s upcoming performance art piece at the Serpentine Gallery, for which she will do nothing inside the gallery for 512 hours—the piece is titled 512 Hours—draws too heavily on a similar piece by performance artist Mary Ellen Carroll. As Coline Milliard noted, the upset experts feel that Abramović ought to credit Carroll’s oeuvre in order to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
CODEBREAKING
Parmigianino‘s exquisite mannerist portrait Schiava Turca (circa 1531–34) is currently the subject of a single-work exhibition at the Frick Collection, where Ben Davis paid it a visit and discovered the key to its enigmatic composition in a series of concentric rings emanating from the Pegasus emblem at its center.
CRITICAL
Alexander Forbes visited the 2014 Berlin Biennale, which opened this week, finding curator Juan Gaitán’s focus on archives and collections as organizing principles and his inclusion of art world outsider to be—though enjoyable and refreshing—tired and uninspired.
STATS
A British study revealed that artists have been disproportionately affected by budget cuts and funding shortfalls. The figures are not promising, Alexander Forbes reports: A full 71 percent of artists who have shown in public galleries in the last three years did not receive payment of any kind for their work.
WHAT THE FEAST?
The Norwegian performance artist Alexander Selvik Wengshoel claimed to have eaten his own hip. Regarding its flavor, he remarked: “It had this flavor of wild sheep,” he told The Local, “if you take a sheep that goes in the mountains and eats mushrooms.”
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