The Tate Britain is currently showing an exhibition of paintings and photography, paired together using an Artificial Intelligence program that evaluates works based on algorithmic patterns and logic systems, and assembles galleries based on that information.  “The team have created and trained a ‘brain’ to a point where it is simulating certain human attributes and unleashed it online – and it is creating a gallery,” says Tony Guillan, the producer of the IK prize.  “Without knowing it, it has created subjective meaning. By asking the question ‘how do computers work and think?’ you ask the exact same question of humans.” (more…)

Lisa Cooley is closing her Lower East Side gallery after eight years.  “Although this chapter is ending, another one is right around the corner—more sustainable, more rewarding, and more interesting. In my mind, this change will continue and extend the direction of the recent gallery program,” Cooley said in a statement.  “Stay tuned. I hope to show that growth can be about ideas, not just about scale, and I look forward to seeing everyone in person soon.” (more…)

Ed Ruscha is the subject of a short documentary created by MoCA TV and narrated by Owen Wilson, exploring the artist’s body of work and ongoing engagement with Los Angeles, in conversation with commentary from a group of the artist’s contemporaries.  “He looks out directly, without any beauty or mystery, although the paintings are great to look at,” artist Ed Moses says. (more…)

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (code poem) (2016), via Public Art Fund

The Public Art Fund’s The Language of Things, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, takes on a challenging prompt this summer, seeking to communicate with the public through works that utilize language and linguistic themes in one of the most congested and sonically dense spaces in the city, just outside of City Hall downtown.  Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake in language” further deepens this show’s proposed dialogue, looking at complexities of language as a utilitarian, communicative tool, to emphasize Benjamin’s conclusion that “it is in the nature of each one to to communicate its mental contents.” (more…)

Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (2006), courtesy MoMA PS1

Currently on view at MoMA PS1, Cao Fei presents her first ever solo museum exhibition in the United States.  The artist’s practice, while rooted in video, performance and photography, takes on a sort of ever-shifting, fluid mode of inquiry into the modes of reality and fantasy in the 21st Century, underscoring human desire’s inextricable links with its economic and material bounds.  Presented here, the show’s slowly unfolding range of interests, from bizarre diorama work to her several year engagement with Second Life, to a series of intuitive and empathetic portraits of modern subcultures, traces the Chinese artist’s ability to navigate multiple modes of understanding and existence in the face of an increasingly mechanized modernity.

Cao Fei, RMB City: A Second Life City Planning (2007-2011), Courtesy MoMA PS1

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Quick Light (Installation View), all images courtesy Serpentine Gallery

Quick Light, an exhibition of recent paintings by American artist Alex Katz has taken over the Serpentine Galleries in London this summer, showcasing the artist’s expressive range and signature style through September 11th, 2016.  The exhibition centers in particular on Katz’s landscape paintings or “environmental landscapes,” which seek to envelope the viewer in a single encounter with the sublime.  Large-scale canvasses, often depicting human and natural forms, fill the gallery space, a particularly well-selected body of work that addresses both the artist’s long history and the unique grounds of the Serpentine itself (more…)

Richard Prince is being sued again over his Instagram portraits, this time by makeup artist and model Ashley Salazar, whose decorated selfie appears in a new series of Prince’s work.  “I think the facts will show that people perceive Richard Prince’s work to be different—the audience is different, the purpose is different,” says Prince’s lawyer Joshua Schiller. (more…)

Ai Weiwei has been banned from the Yinchuan Biennale due to his “political sensibility,” Artforum reports.  “Censorships in communist regions have been present since the existence of the power,” Ai said in an Instagram post.  “Yet it still comes as a surprise to me for an ‘international art biennale,’ with over a hundred international artists and a foreign curator participating, to remove a single artist for the reason of defending human rights and freedom of speech. This shows what we face is a world, which is divided and segregated by ideology, and art is used merely as a decoration for political agendas in certain societies.” (more…)

The New York Times has a piece interviewing museum-goers with their takes on various pieces from the Met Breuer collection, with responses ranging from knee-jerk critiques to detailed, thoughtful reflections.  “He was probably drunk,” one viewer says of an early Picasso. (more…)

Keith Sonnier, Ba-O-Ba Fluorescent (1970), via Art Observed

Celebrating the forty year history of its residency at the school building in Long Island City, MoMA PS1 has launched an impressively expansive exhibition reflecting on the history and continued vitality of the alternative art spaces movement in both its impact on the history of 20th Century art, as well as its resonance in the field today.  Culling together a diversely focused but attentively arranged group of artists, FORTY presents a series of studies on the voices of the 1970’s New York art community, and its broader connections to the changing face of contemporary art during the era. (more…)

Marco Barrera, Gaze (Exchange Rate) (2016), via Art Observed

The current group show at Moran Bondaroff is a swirling, surreal exercise in sculptural gesture, compiling a trio of uniquely-motivated artists whose works play on the intersection of materials, contexts, and conceptions of the human body.  The show, which brings together new works by artists Agathe Snow and Marco Barrera in conjunction with a series of historical works by the Irvine, CA-based artist George Herms, emphasizes connections in the capability for everyday objects to escape their quotidian bounds by way of addition and juxtaposition.

Eternal at Moran Bondaroff (Installation View), via Art Observed

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Former Qatar Museums employee Mikolai Napieralski has published an article on Quartz this week, pointing to the end of the country’s oil-boom, a drastically slashed budget, and increasingly conservative leadership as causes for the decline of the Qataris’ presence in the art market.   “These days, the organization is a shadow of its former self, and its international staff—and ambition—are long gone,” he writes.  “And that $250 million Cezanne and the $300 million Gauguin? Your guess is as good as mine.” (more…)

Comedian Vic Reeves will explore the history and legacy of Dada for the BBC this season, exploring the movement on the one hundredth anniversary of its founding.  Martin Creed and Terry Gilliam will join Reeves on the program,  where he will also recreate one of the group’s performances.  “It was the Dadaists who proved the most important (artists),” Reeves said of the movement’s impact on the 20th Century and beyond. (more…)

The LA Times reports on the recent California court ruling that the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena does not need to return works to the family of dealer Jacques Goudstikker, after Goudstikker’s firm abandoned claims to the work during the years following the war.  The article also notes that Marei von Saher, Goudstikker’s daughter-in-law and plaintiff in the case, is also the daughter of a Nazi party member, further complicating the situation.  “The court’s decision is based on the merits,” said a statement from the Norton Simon, “considering the facts and law at the heart of the dispute.” (more…)

Steve McQueen is set to be honored with a British Film Institute Fellowship, making him the youngest filmmaker to ever receive that distinction.  “I first walked into the BFI library and cinema 28 years ago,” McQueen says.  “To think that I will now be a fellow and honorary member, with such a distinguished list of people, is mind-blowing. I’m humbly honored.” (more…)

The New York Review of Books takes a closer look at Lucian Freud’s sketchbooks, unfinished paintings and smaller works, a selection of which are currently on view at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and traces the artist’s process in relation to his life and work.  The piece also reflects on Freud’s close relationship with the institution. (more…)

An article in the Smithsonian notes the increased inclination towards the recreation or replication of famed works, galleries or exhibition spaces, as well as the use of digital restoration techniques, and questions how these new modes of experiencing art shapes the viewer’s experience.  “If this happens too often, with simulacra so much more convenient to experience, the real version can slump into disrepair and eventually become abandoned,” writer Noah Charney laments.  “Then we may be left with the body, but risk the loss of the most important thing to those who truly know and love art and history: the soul.”  (more…)

Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery is drawing fierce criticism after showing a selection of works by Armenian artist Ivan Aivazovsky, on loan from institutions in the annexed region of the Ukraine.  “Due to the gross violation by the Russian Federation of all norms of international law, including those stemming from its occupation of part of the territory of Ukraine, our state is deprived of any kind of oversight over the preservation of cultural property on the temporarily occupied territories, especially those that are an integral part of the museum fund of Ukraine,” the Ukrainian cultural ministry said in a statement.   (more…)

SculptureCenter has announced a strong fall program this week, continuing a focus on female artists. The season is of particular note for the first NYC solo exhibitions for Aki Sasamoto and Cosima von Bonin, with the former presenting a “cycle of performances articulating the stream of consciousness and associations.” (more…)

Tom Wesselmann is the subject of a profile in the New York Times this week, tracing the course of his career and his ongoing interests in the mechanisms of pop culture and art history. Of particular note is the artist’s body of self-criticism, published under the pseudonym Slim Stealingworth. “Wesselmann was aware of a relationship between scale and eroticism. Too big a scale and eroticism decreases — perhaps because it is too hard to relate to a 15-foot woman,” he writes of his own compositions. (more…)

Three quarters of artifacts seized in smuggling raids at the borders of Syria have been identified as fakes, Syria’s antiquities chief Maamoun Abdulkarim says, allaying some fears over illicit digging and sale of artifacts from the country by extremist groups.  “I hope the originals are stopped and the fakes go to the market place,” Abdulkarim says. (more…)

Agnes Martin, Falling Blue (1963), via Art Observed

Currently on view at LACMA, Agnes Martin’s ambitious and expansive retrospective has touched down on American soil, giving the late artist her first major museum exhibition in the U.S. since 1992.  Previously on view at the Tate Modern in London, the show studiously wends its way through Martin’s career, beginning with a series of New York School paintings from the late 1950’s that not only makes a strong case for her inclusion among the pantheon of the city’s great post-war painters, but equally hints at the artist’s later work.  Even as her early work traces similar interests in space and the expressive capacity of color and form, a distinct focus on line and space makes her pieces here particularly noteworthy, with delicate yet careful attention paid to the interactions between each mark, and the qualities of weight and gesture that her minimal selections imply.

Agnes Martin, With My Back to the World (1997), via Art Observed

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Despite previous assurances that the Brexit vote would not affect arts funding, organizations in the UK are being told to expect delays in grant applications. The news leaves many awaiting needed funding for new hires and expanded projects in the country.  (more…)

A two-month investigation by the UK’s Museums Association has found no breach of the code of ethics for museums accepting sponsorship money from companies like British Petroleum, drawing criticism from protestors and activists. “No interaction between BP and a cultural institution takes place in an ethical vacuum,” Art Not Oil said in a statement. “When it comes to fossil fuels, we urgently need to go beyond ‘standard practice’, both in our cultural institutions and in society.” (more…)