An aerial view of the Great Pyramid of Giza (bottom), built by the pharaoh Khufu, showing its proximity to the Grand Egyptian Museum site (top). Credit: Amir Makar/AFP Via Getty

Egypt is building a $1-billion mega-museum. Will it bring Egyptology home?

Fra Angelico, The bust of a cleric, c. 1447-50 (Photo: Royal Collection Enterprises Limited 2024 | Royal Collection Trust)

Why bother looking at drawings when paintings are so much bigger, more colourful, and, well, finished? If you’re on the side of the sceptics, a new exhibition at the King’s Gallery is your tonic, guaranteed to persuade you that drawings are so much more than workings-out that have escaped the wastepaper basket. With around 160 works on paper by more than 80 artists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the Carracci brothers, as well as less familiar names, this exhibition of works from the Royal Collection is the most expansive survey of Renaissance drawings to have been mounted in the UK.

Drawing the Italian Renaissance review: This will delight Da Vinci and Michelangelo fans

Rosario de Velasco

Edited by Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber. 304 pp. incl. 240 col. ills. (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2024), £45. ISBN 978–0–87633–304–4.

For art historians interested in understanding the contributions of women artists to twentieth-century art, this is a most welcome publication. It accompanies a travelling exhibition dedicated to the work of the Spanish artist Rosario de Velasco (1904–91), which opened at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.[1] Curated by Toya Viudes de Velasco, the artist’s great-niece, and Miguel Lusarreta, it follows the museum’s retrospective of the realist painter Isabel Quintanilla (1938–2017) and is part of wider efforts in museology to recover forgotten women artists.[2] Sometimes such ‘rescue’ missions tend towards overblown and superficial narratives of female artistheroes. Fortunately this is not the case with Rosario de Velasco. 

The Burlington Magazine

Museum shows can be death for street art. Osgemeos look alive and well.

Sebastian Smee | Yahoo | 1st November 2024

Apart from rare examples like Keith Haring, graffiti artists just don’t get art world attention. Brazilian duo Osgemeos seem another exception to this rule. Their art comes out of 1980’s hip hop and comprises intricate drawings, paintings and sculptures. So, what allows them to straddle the street art / fine art divide? Their art is original but also “twee and repetitive”, prone to nostalgia for 1980’s-style graffiti. This writer found Osgemeos’ appeal came from elsewhere: “discernment is not the point: exuberance is.

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I think that is the most important fact of politics right now. It has been the subject of many, many of our episodes this year. But it is interesting, I think, that the policy issues on which there once seemed so little room for compromise are now so much more open. From free trade to antitrust, from health care to outsourcing, from China to unions, there is suddenly a lot more overlap in at least the language of the two parties.

Not always a policy, but the language. And sometimes the overlap really is substantive. The Trump administration — it really was a break with the Obama administration on China. But the Biden administration was not a reversion to where Obama’s was. The Biden administration — it took what Donald Trump did on China, and it went a lot further.

What does that tell us? In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the New Deal order, which ran from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the neoliberal order, which stretched from the ’70s to the financial crisis. And I wonder if part of what is unsettling politics right now is a random moment between orders, a moment when you can just begin to see the hazy outline of something new taking shape and both parties are in internal upheavals as they try to remake themselves, to grasp at it and respond to it.

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Some excerpts; Last month, I was in Dubai for a reporting trip and met a Palestinian American woman named Alaa’ Odeh at a dinner party. In our conversation I did something I’ve never done before: urge someone to vote for a particular candidate. Odeh said she felt genuinely torn. Could she support Kamala Harris given the Biden administration’s unstinting support of Israel, whatever the cost to civilians in Gaza? Surely, As I was leaving the dinner, we exchanged details and promised to keep in touch.

Over the past few weeks, I keep going back to that moment as the horrors in Gaza and Lebanon have escalated. A year into the war, Israel is undertaking a pitiless siege of northern Gaza, halting the already anemic flow of humanitarian aid while relentlessly attacking hospitals, crumbling apartment buildings and schools used as shelters by the displaced, asserting that Hamas fighters are hiding among medical workers and other civilians.

Meanwhile, the gyre widens in the Middle East. A growing number of scholars are coming to share the view that the slaughter in Gaza meets the legal definition of genocide. South Africa was back at the International Court of Justice this week, submitting some 750 pages of evidence to support its genocide claim against Israel.

“The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands told Al Jazeera.

Last week I reached out to Odeh, the Palestinian American woman I had met in Dubai.She told me that in the end she had decided not to vote. Many people in her life, she said, were voting for Jill Stein, but she decided against it.

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The “Forrest Gump” stars were game to reunite with Robert Zemeckis for the technical experiment of “Here.” De-aging? A static camera? They weren’t fazed.

It’s not exactly a “Forrest Gump” sequel, but the new movie “Here” does reunite the stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, and the filmmakers — the director Robert Zemeckis, screenwriter Eric Roth, composer Alan Silvestri — of that 1994 Oscar-winning favorite. Like the earlier film, the new one also travels across decades, with an unheard-of perspective.

In this case, though, the viewpoint is the camera’s: “Here” is filmed almost entirely from one locked-off shot, with a camera positioned in what becomes the living room of a century-old New England home. There are no cutaways or traditional close-ups; no montages or wide-angle transitions. It’s an experiment in cinematic formalism, inspired by Richard McGuire’s ambitious, genre-expanding 2014 graphic novel of the same name.

“It really is about, why do we remember the moments that we remember?” Wright said.

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