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5 days ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
Is it a bar? Is it a sculpture? When it comes to François-Xavier Lalanne’s Ostrich Bar, it’s both. Masterminded by the French artist in 1965—at the height of his and his wife Claude’s popularity—the piece embodies his whimsical and surrealistic flair, without lacking in utility. The functional sculpture features two porcelain ostriches gripping a long metal shelf by their beaks; at its center sits a white egg.
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1 week ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
For a few years now, Lupe Fiasco has been visiting public artworks around the MIT List Visual Arts Center campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, armed with an iPad and microphone. Stopping at selected pieces, he’s made beats and crafted raps—some odes and others responses to the works. An Alexander Calder structure is memorialized as “a siren in the silence of the culture”; the orbs on an Antony Gormley sculpture inspire wordplays on bonds and electrons.
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1 week ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
“For the writer of fiction,” Flannery O’Connor once reflected, “everything has its testing point in the eye.” Writing, to her, didn’t just call on emotion and thought; it required “sense-impression” on the part of the author—on what and how she sees.
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1 week ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
When Georgia O’Keeffe settled in Abiquiú, New Mexico, in the late 1940s, she set about making a crumbling 18th-century compound her home. She spent four years restoring it, preserving its traditional adobe structure and treatments, while installing picture windows to invite in natural light and adorning it with bones, shells, and rocks she’d scavenged.
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1 week ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
In 1868, Hungarian writer Karl-Maria Kertbeny, in a letter to his fellow journalist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, coined the term “homosexual” to describe same-sex attraction. He was writing to argue against the criminalization of private sexual acts—a cause he somewhat shared with Ulrichs, best known as the first gay man to openly defend homosexuality. But Kertbeny’s coinage, which publicly debuted in an 1869 pamphlet, would ironically create thorny issues of its own as it echoed through the ages.
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2 weeks ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
When TEFAF New York opens next week, expect Gagosian—and its superstar artist Anna Weyant—to deliver a gem of a booth. The gallery is showcasing a fresh body of work by Weyant in a booth especially designed to complement her new intimately scaled paintings of jewelry. From opalescent pearls to dainty gold chains, these objects have been rendered by the Canadian painter with her signature playful, precise illusionism.
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2 weeks ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
For centuries, William Shakespeare‘s marriage to Anne Hathaway has not been viewed as the most joyous of unions. He was 18 when he wed the pregnant 26-year-old Hathaway—an age gap that has led many to assume it was a forced marriage—before apparently abandoning her in Stratford-upon-Avon to make his name in London. Among the scant evidence of their relationship, too, is Shakespeare’s will, in which he leaves his wife his “second best bed,” a bequest believed to be a slight. Not anymore.
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2 weeks ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
How prized was Tyrian purple in ancient times? Highly. In fact, so popular and sought-after was the dye that traces of its production—clumps of pigments, remains of workshops—have surfaced in archaeological digs, attesting to the demand for the royal shade. A recent dig at a coastal village in Israel has borne out yet more evidence of the pigment’s manufacture—this time at an industrial scale.
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2 weeks ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
Martha Stewart—cookbook author, television personality, media mogul, and OG influencer—has just added another feather to her cap: art curator. The lifestyle icon has lent her creative eye to a sale of contemporary art for Joopiter, the auction platform founded by Pharrell Williams. Titled The Contemporary Take: A Look With Martha Stewart, the auction features nearly 50 artworks by today’s leading artists, handpicked by Stewart especially for the Spring season.
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2 weeks ago | 
news.artnet.com | Min Chen
“It’s always been clay,” Alex Matisse told me of his choice medium. The material suits him: he’s a trained potter and a co-founder of East Fork, a ceramics company rooted in tradition. Yet what’s striking isn’t just his devotion to clay, but how the medium has enabled him to forge a path beyond the long shadow of his family name. “I never wanted to paint. I never wanted to draw. I wanted to stay far, far away from that world,” he said over a video call. “I had a chip on my shoulder about it.
