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Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura
By Ashley Yu
The Top 50 Most Powerful Artists Released
The second edition of the Observer’s Arts Power 50, is a list of the most revolutionary and influential artists, curators, or gallery owners who are re-energizing the dynamics of the art world. Art, or at least art that mattered, has always been at the forefront of radicalizing, challenging, and pioneering social norms. In our unstable times, we need it more than ever. Arts Power 50 is here to celebrate those who are making a change. Notable names include: Decolonize This Place, Nan Goldin, and the curators of Desert X.
One of the most well-known names in the list is Shahidul Alam--the Bangladeshi photojournalist and social activist--named 2018 Time Person of the Year after being held as a political prisoner for criticizing the Bangladeshi Prime Minister. The Rubin Museum in New York will hold Alam’s first exhibition in American this November.
A surprising candidate on the list is Jim Carrey, who,for the past two years, turned from acting to drawing political cartoons . Last October, his cartoons were exhibited at the Maccarone Gallery in response to Trump’s presidency and the Republican Party, calling the president “a New York sewer rat” in an interview with The Observer. While Carrey continues to receive more and more recognition for his cartoons, his feuds are getting more and more heated. Just this last week, and as surreal as it gets, Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter criticized the actor for his hypocrisy in an anti-fascist cartoon.
Courtesy of Pinterest
Jimi Hendrix’s White Guitar Next To A Greek Marble Statue in The MET
Ready to rock out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next to a marble bust of Aristotle? As of April 8, the MET will be hosting its latest exhibition “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock and Roll” that can be found right in the middle of their Classical Arts Hall.
Organized in partnership with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, musical instruments used by pop culture’s most beloved rock artists dating back from the rise of the Blues, to the British punk scene, up to the modern sounds of 2017. Featuring over 130 drum kits, electric guitars, synthesizers, and other instruments, the MET’s director Max Hollein described these instruments in a press release as “the tools that made one of the most significant movements of the 20th century.”
From the burnt remains of Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, to Jerry Lee Lewis’ piano from “Rapper’s Delight”, even to Lady Gaga’s 2014 electronic piano, each instrument encapsulates the emotion and aesthetic of each individual artist’s zeitgeist that helped shape them as much as they shaped the cultural era. This exhibition is one of the many ways that Hollein aspires to modernize the museum for a larger audience, including displaying sculptures of contemporary artists on the museum’s steps.
Jimmie Durham (Visual Artist, Berlin/Rome)-Konferenz Foto: Stephan Röhl. Courtesy of Wikipedia
Winner of Venice Biennale Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement: Jimmie Durham
Venice Biennale veteran, Jimmie Durham, is the recipient of the prestigious award at this year’s Venice Biennale, “May You Live in Interesting Times.” American-born and Berlin-based, Jimmie Durham is a widely acclaimed sculptor that appropriates everyday materials and has risen to fame in recent years. Although there has been much controversy over his unofficial, self-proclaimed, Cherokee status, the sculptor is known for his art that address the Native-American identity in a post-colonial society.
The curator Ralph Rugoff joked that is was about time that the 78-year-old artist was given the Lifetime Achievement Award, while also praising his work that is “at once critical, humorous, and profoundly humanistic.” Anne Ellegood, the senior curator at the Hammer Museum where he organized his 2017 retrospective said that Durham’s “insatiable curiosity, profound commitment to human rights, and cosmopolitanism in all his life choices have provided the roots and foundation from which his work...has flourished.”
Durham first appeared in the Venice Biennale in 1999 and has since been exhibited extensively and internationally, including the 1992 and 2012 exhibitions in Kassel, 2003 and 2014 Whitney Biennials, 2016 MAXXI Rome, and in 1993 at the Palais des Beaux-Art in Brussels.
Bryan Bedder/Getty for ICP
35th Annual ICP Infinity Awards Winners
Since 1985, the ICP Infinity Awards annually celebrates the major contributions, emerging artists, and photographers in the field of photojournalism, publishing, art, and fashion photography. With the impressive roster of previous award-winners, including Richard Avedon, Roy DeCarava, and Cindy Sherman, recognition via the accolade is one of the most coveted markers in an artist’s life.
Received with a standing ovation at the ceremony that also coincided with her birthday, 89-year-old fine art photographer, Rosalind Fox Solomon, received the Lifetime Achievement Award. From her documentation of AIDS victims and their lovers in 1987 to the images of tumultuous race relations and racial violence in Northern Ireland and South Africa through the 80s, her portraits are heralded as a beautiful combination of intimacy and socio-political awareness.
Photographer Dawoud Bey, whom Musée Magazine interview in our latest issue RISK, was the recipient for the Art category. His artistic career began in 1975 and has since been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums, including the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, and the Whitney Museum. Inspired by Roy DeCarava, his most notable images, mostly from The Birmingham Project and Harlem, U.S.A, evoke contemporary discourse on African-American history and national identity.
The two other awards, Critical Writing/Research and Emerging Photographer, go to prolific writer Zadie Smith and photographer Jess T. Dugan. Meanwhile, Bangladeshi photographer and 2018 Time Person of the Year, Shahidul Alam conducted a special presentation for the night.
You can read more about Musée’s coverage of the ICP Infinity Awards here.
Anna Delvey in the New York courthouse, Friday April 5. Photo: Courtesy Eileen Kinsella.
Anna Delvy’s Art Foundation Con Continues
With an ongoing New York Supreme Court trial, Anna Sorokin, aka Anna Delvey, continues to take the stand for fraud in drumming up $22M for her contemporary art center and social club. Not unlike the hilarious scam of FYRE Festival, pitched to wealthy socialites, the Anna Delvey Foundation enlisted numerous influential artists and collectors to be part of her scheme. From the list of 49 witnesses to be called to the stand, it has yet to be determined who was conscious of Delvey’s dubious intentions.
As of last week, several banking executives testified against Delvey, confirming that she lied about her assets and net worth for the Foundation that was to built on Park Avenue. With failed background checks, false information, and fabricated letters from nonexistent accountants, it is unsurprising that she was arrested for grand larceny and theft of services in 2017, facing up to 15 years imprisonment if convicted.
With an intensely planned scam that involved scamming CitiBank for $89K and the myth of her German heiress past, the high-profile trial has generated much media attention to this ridiculous case, with news outlets hysterically focusing on her court outfits and the rumor that she hired a personal stylist for her appearances.
