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The Headlines
BRIAN CATLING, the multidisciplinary artist and writer of inexhaustible invention, has died at 74, ArtReview reports. Catling’s long career included installations, performances (in which he was sometimes costumed as a cyclops), egg tempera paintings, poetry, and teaching, which he termed “an essential element of my imaginative spectrum.” Catling won fame late in life for writing The Vorrh , a wildly fantastical and dark trilogy of novels whose first volume was published in 2012. “The imagination is a muscle, one that increases with exercise,” he told the Guardian in 2018. “You have to tell it, ‘That’s not good enough, you’ve got to go further.’ I’ve always wanted more than one life. Inventing fiction, performing, they’re all ways of being someone else.”
Related Articles
PEDESTAL POLITICS. For nearly 25 years, the Fourth Plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square has been a site of ambitious public art displays by Yinka Shonibare, Katharina Fritsch, and many more. Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II earlier this month, there is now discussion of using the empty platform (originally intended for an equestrian sculpture of William IV) to hold a statue of her. Not everyone is sold on the idea. Prue Leith, the journalist and restaurateur (and Great British Bake Off judge) who led efforts to establish the contemporary art displays there, told the Guardian that she believes it is not “special enough for the Queen” and proposed a site in front of Westminster Abbey. One compromise being floated is for a fifth plinth to be constructed to continue the art program. Leith said that, “if there had to be an extra plinth it might work as long as it fits with the symmetry of the square.”
The Digest
Some Florida art museums, including the Tampa Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg, have closed to prepare for Hurricane Ian, which is bearing down on the state and currently expected to make landfall on Thursday morning. [The Art Newspaper]
Katharine Lee Reid, who led the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, has died at 80. She also served as deputy director of the Art Institute of Chicago and president of the Association of Art Museum Directors. [Cleveland.com]
Hot on the heels of announcing its collectibles-focused Department X, Christie’s said it is launching a platform called Christie’s 3.0 that will facilitate blockchain-based sales of NFTs. The effort is a partnership with Manifold, which facilitates NFT minting, and Spatial, a metaverse builder. [Coindesk]
The David Zwirner gallery is becoming the lead funder of the Drift, the zeitgeist-capturing literary magazine started by Kiara Barrow and Rebecca Panovka in 2020. In October of that year, Lucas Zwirner, the gallery’s head of content, wrote an essay for the publication on Minimalism. [ARTnews]
Designer and art patron Miuccia Prada has had one of the biggest fashion hits of the past year with the ultra-mini miniskirt she created for her Miu Miu line. For a story with Tyler Mitchell photos, Rachel Tashjian visited Prada at her Milan office, which has a Carsten Höller slide (that she said she has not used recently). [Harper’s Bazaar]
Curator Rachael Rakes has been tapped to organize the 2023 edition of the Seoul Mediacity Biennale. Rakes has previously been curator for public practice at BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands [The Korea Times]
The Kicker
SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME. Only six people are allowed to visit Michael Heizer’s just-finished City work in rural Nevada each day, and reservations are required, but that did not stop some intrepid skateboarders with the skate magazine Jenkem from trying to make an unscheduled visit —and skate it. “We heard about this weird art piece deep in the desert that looks like a giant skatepark,” one of them explains in a video that they shot. (He is not wrong!) Spoiler alert: They do not complete their mission. But the video still charms, and they managed to get in some skating nevertheless. [Jenkem via @kimmelman/Twitter]