Against the backdrop of the out-of-touch wealthfest that is Art Basel Paris, there’s an image from the ongoing student protests in France that is seared into my mind: Marianne, the allegorical figure at the center of the Monument à la République in Paris, donning a fluorescent yellow traffic vest, an emblem of the earlier gilets jaunes movement. But this particular garment bears a message: “Police mutilate high schoolers.” It’s a reference to the gruesome injuries sustained by young protesters at the hands of French police, including a 14-year-old boy whose jaw was shattered by a tear grenade. In the footsteps of activists including Black Lives Matter protesters who tore down Confederate statues, today’s demonstrators are upending the symbolic power of their nation’s landmarks, Staff Writer Anna Lee and Associate Editor Phillip Pyle report today.
In the world of bizarre things that happen to artists, Laura June Kirsch’s story about the scammer who held her Wikipedia page hostage is up there. When the photographer got an email from a random sender offering to restore her profile, she found a group of “seemingly random, chronically online men” having a real-time conversation about whether her legacy was significant enough to warrant Wiki fame.
Read Kirsch’s opinion piece about the ordeal, and why she has embraced — with just a touch of irony — “being a woman not worth remembering.”
—Valentina Di Liscia, senior editor
The French Student Protesters Subverting Monuments Like It’s May 68
When students in France took to the streets in 1968 to protest the country’s crumbling education system and Gaullist government, they transformed public statues into participants in their cause.
After the May 2 shuttering of Paris Nanterre University, where anti-imperialist students began protests in late March that year, demonstrators took to the Sorbonne, where they hung portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and Chairman Mao Zedong from the 17th-century facade’s pillars and lodged red revolutionary flags into the statues of scientist Louis Pasteur and writer Victor Hugo. During a May 13 demonstration coinciding with a national general strike, other protesters climbed atop Léopold Morice’s “Monument à la République” (1883), which depicts Marianne, the personification of the French Republic, and staked out the artwork as a gathering ground for fellow protesters.
Today, student demonstrators in France are addressing many of the same issues at the heart of May 68, from underresourced schools to a worsening cost-of-living crisis. | Anna Lee and Phillip Pyle
MassArt Graduate Assistantships Provide Hands-On Experience to Launch Your Career
MassArt’s Graduate Assistantships support students’ interests and professional development beyond graduation.
News
- Dozens of galleries across Düsseldorf and Cologne sign a letter condemning the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party’s Düsseldorf faction for allegedly referencing Joseph Beuys and poet Heinrich Heine in the promotion of an upcoming event.
- A man dies by falling debris at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Arizona home.
- Artists, including John Akomfrah and Cornelia Parker, signed an open letter defending Sally Rooney after her books were banned in the UK for her Palestine solidarity. [New Statesman]
- You Hong-june, director of the National Museum of Korea, has resigned amid a scandal over the museum’s exhibition of a misattributed calligraphic work from his private collection. [Korea Times]
From Our Critics
Spirits Against the Patriarchy
An exceptional exhibition that brings together 17 women artists whose work emerges through spirit communication. | Eliza Swann
Ilana Savdie and Chaïm Soutine Shed the Skin
An exhibition pairing paintings by the two artists guides us through the chambers of our own minds and bodies. | Lakshmi Rivera Amin
“Costume Art” Is a Bad Look for The Met
The exhibition shapes a fashion canon based less on historical relevance than on the interests of those in charge. | Natalie Haddad
Opinion
The Rise and Fall of My Wikipedia Page
After a short entry about me mysteriously appeared, anonymous users who were seemingly men debated whether I was “credible enough” to justify my own page. | Laura June Kirsch
New Art Books from the Quarto Group
From art history to instruction, Quarto publishes visually-rich books for artists of all mediums and skill levels.
In Memoriam
Peter Nagy, Artist and Gallerist Who Shaped Two Art Scenes, Dies at 66
This week, we honor a fixture of New York and New Delhi art, a painter who folded the world into abstraction, and a champion of Denver’s scene.
Hyper Links
- Artist Irem Gunaydin’s lipstick intervention on the mirror of the bathroom at Art Basel Paris is all we really need to see from inside that fair.
- In Tehran’s Tajrish Square, a live performer donned a mask of Donald Trump and impersonated the tyrant — ehm, president — in a mock prison cell above rushing traffic.
- Michigan Senate hopeful Abdul el-Sayed owns a right-wing heckler at one of his town halls. Tommy, let this be what we radical leftists call “a teachable moment.”
- Imagine Emily in Paris, but if she had class awareness.
- Let’s end this on a feel-good note: Nigella Lawson is the feminist icon the Great British Bake Off didn’t know it needed. “I don’t approve of talking about food as naughty” has become one of her most quotable phrases — and we’re not even at pastry week yet!
Member Comment
—Butch Murphy on “Dear Art World, We Can Tell When You’re Using AI“
From the Archive
10 Questions for an Artist Who Grows Her Own Pigments
Ellie Irons explains how she mindfully harvests plants and transforms them into paints, a labor of love detailed in her how-to guide Feral Hues. | Lakshmi Rivera Amin
