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The Headlines
THE CLIMATE FIGHT. Two men with Just Stop Oil Belgium who last week staged a climate protest involving Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (ca. 1665), glue, and soup at the Mauritshuis Museum in the Hague, the Netherlands, were sentenced to two months in prison with one month suspended, the Guardian reports. The group said in a statement, “Isn’t it ironic that climate activists who nonviolently oppose the mass slaughter of life on Earth are being condemned?” Meanwhile, Just Stop Oil in the U.K., which is an independent entity, said that it will pause its actions until Friday so officials can consider its demand that no new oil and gas licenses be granted, the Evening Standard reports. If the authorities do not respond, “we will escalate our legal disruption against this treasonous Government,” the group said in a statement.
LIVING WELL IS THE BEST REVENGE. Artist Mariko Mori has designed a home and studio for herself on Japan’s remote Miyako Island, which is near Taiwan, and Architectural Digest has a spread of photographs. “The ocean is almost like an aqua green or emerald,” Mori said. “It’s a beautiful palette of blue and blue-green.” Conceived with Ring Architects and Oak Structural Design Office, the building includes a space for tea ceremonies, which is part of the artist’s practice. AD also has a feature on the Manhattan home of Andrew Bolton, the curator in charge of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and his partner, fashion designer Thom Browne. On the walls are works by Georges Rouault, Duncan Grant, and Édouard Vuillard, and there’s furniture by George Nakashima, Claude Lalanne, and Diego Giacometti.
The Digest
Harry Bates, the renowned architect who created a bevy of elegant modernist homes on the East End of New York’s Long Island, died on Tuesday at 95. Critic Paul Goldberger once described the structures that Bates made later in his career with a younger design partner, Paul Masi, as “fresh, sharp and original.” [The New York Times]
Artist Ryder Ripps, who worked with Ye (formerly Kanye West) at various points in the 2010s, said that he heard the rapper and designer praise Hitler and discuss antisemitic conspiracy theories. Ye reportedly paid a settlement to one employee who said they witnessed him using antisemitic language. Ye has denied the claims. [NBC News]
An annual report from UBS and Art Basel on the state of the art market found that demand remains strong among the wealthy for art. Between 2020 and 2021, imports and exports of art climbed about 40 percent each. [ARTnews]
The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has tapped a team of three to organize the next Taipei Biennial: curators Freya Chou and Reem Shadid and writer and educator Brian Kuan Wood. The exhibition is scheduled to open in November of 2023. [ArtReview]
Google has been developing A.I. technology that generates images from text, but is releasing its features slowly, because of “the real risks that this technology can pose if we don’t take great care,” said Douglas Eck, a principal scientist at the company. Some critics have argued that such applications can promote misinformation and infringe on the copyrights of artists. [Bloomberg]
Archaeologists believe that the effects of climate change may be speeding up the rate at which Namibia‘s prehistoric rock art is deteriorating. Efforts are being made to study and document the material, some of which has been dated back 30,000 years. [Reuters]
The Kicker
THE GRAND TOUR. New York magazine critic Jerry Saltz has a new book out, Art Is Life: Icons & Iconoclasts, Visionaries & Vigilantes, & Flashes of Hope in the Night, and on Wednesday night he delivered a lecture at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. As is his wont, Saltz has been posting regularly on Instagram about his trip. “Anything is better than writing,” he writes in one post, “so I seem to love basically everything I do any time I am not working.” Hear, hear. [@JerrySaltz/Instagram]