Tag: art

British gallery may lose prized £500,000 Renoir over claim Seated Nude is Nazi loot seized from original Jewish owners

A British gallery may be forced to give up a prized £500,000 Renoir after claims it could have been seized from its original Jewish owners by the Nazis.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Manchester Art Gallery is now treating the Impressionist painting – known as Seated Nude, from around 1897 – as a potential looted or ‘spoliated’ object.

The gallery has been approached by claimants who believe they may be the rightful owners of the oil painting.

If their claim of ownership is proved, the gallery could be forced to hand over the artwork.

Details of the investigation are included in a document obtained by the MoS under freedom of information laws.

It states: ‘This painting is under investigation as a spoliated object, which means it may have been stolen from or sold under duress by its Jewish owner during the period of Nazi power in Europe.’

Both sides agree that the artwork was once the property of Richard Semmel, a German-born Jewish art collector and entrepreneur.

Semmel and his wife Clara, who fled Germany for Holland in 1933, managed to arrange for the sale of about 70 of their artworks to pay for their living expenses.

It is believed the Renoir nude was offered up for the sale but did not sell.

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Shahzia Sikander Sculpture Beheaded at the University of Houston

A Shahzia Sikander statue at the University of Houston was vandalized following previous protests by right-wing groups.

The 18-foot-tall bronze monument to women and justice was beheaded in the early morning on July 8 while the campus was experiencing harsh weather and power outages due to Hurricane Beryl.

Footage of the vandalism was obtained by campus police, according to the New York Times, which first reported the news.

“We were disappointed to learn the statue was damaged early Monday morning as Hurricane Beryl was hitting Houston,” Kevin Quinn, the university’s executive director of media relations, said in an email to ARTnews. “The damage is believed to be intentional. The University of Houston Police Department is currently investigating the matter.”

The female figure, whose braided hair forms a pair of horns, wears a lacy collar in allusion to similar ones worn by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court justice.

The sculpture was installed in a plaza at the University of Houston after five months of display to critical acclaim at Madison Square Park in New York City. But when it traveled to Houston, it drew criticism from the anti-abortion Christian group Texas Right to Life, which called for a campus-wide protest “to keep the Satanic abortion idol out of Texas.” The University of Houston responded by cancelling a planned opening and artist talk, as well as choosing not to show an accompanying video work also by Sikander.

It’s worth noting that Sikander’s artist statement about the work contains no mention of Satanism. “The rams’ horns are universal symbols of strength and wisdom,” Sikander told Art in America earlier this year. “There is nothing Satanic about them.”

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Public Art Portal Intended to Dismantle Argument For Borders Needs a Border to Protect It

The Portal, a public art installation intended to demonstrate how borders hinder human affinity and connectivity, now needs a border and 24/7 security to protect it from undesirables.

Oh, the irony.

The continuous live video feed, which allows Dubliners and New Yorkers to see each other and interact, has been beset with a deluge of anti-social behavior, including people flashing their private parts and engaging in other lewd, drunken and offensive behavior.

That wasn’t the intention of the artist behind the project, with Lithuanian Benediktas Gylys asserting that, “Portals are an invitation to meet people above borders and differences and to experience our world as it really is – united and one.”

“The livestream provides a window between distant locations, allowing people to meet outside of their social circles and cultures, transcend geographical boundaries, and embrace the beauty of global interconnectedness,” he added.

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The Curious Case of the Man Who Bought Most of Hunter Biden’s Overpriced Art

How did the Central Intelligence Agency get threaded into the Hunter Biden scandal? We don’t know, but they interfered with federal investigators looking into Hunter Biden’s activities. A whistleblower has come forward alleging that Langley blocked investigators from interviewing attorney Kevin Morris, who is not just a crucial Hunter Biden ally but the primary purchaser of his overpriced art. Mr. Morris paid Hunter’s tax bills, helped subsidize his opulent lifestyle, and seemingly had the protection of the CIA. 

Morris is a big Democratic Party donor, so protection from the Biden Department of Justice wouldn’t be unusual, but the CIA? Mr. Morris appears to be a jack-of-all-trades character within the Biden orbit. Law professor Jonathan Turley, who disclosed that he was threatened with a lawsuit by Morris, broke down this intriguing tale. Morris was not just a money man for the crack-cocaine-addicted son of the president, he was also an attack dog, reportedly organizing hit campaigns against the enemies of the Biden family. Look, when someone loans your son over $6 million, you better believe there’s going to be some ironclad protections for that individual (via Turley): 

The New York Post has created a stir in Washington with its report that a whistleblower claims that the CIA reportedly blocked federal investigators from interviewing Kevin Morris, the entertainment lawyer who has subsidized the expenses and bought the art of Hunter Biden. 

[…] 

He’s Hunter’s confidant, art patron, business partner, and his lawyer. 

Now there is a suggestion that we might have to add CIA asset or protected person. 

The unnamed whistleblower told the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee that the “intelligence agency stopped IRS and Justice Department investigators from interviewing Morris in August 2021.” That has led Oversight chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) to demand answers from the CIA on whether two DOJ officials were summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. to discourage their interviewing Morris. 

Given the allegations of special treatment by the Justice Department (including blocking efforts to interview Hunter or search Biden properties), this latest report is obviously quite serious. One would expect that the CIA would simply say that no such meeting related to the Hunter Biden investigation occurred. Instead, the agency responded that it “does not obstruct investigations.” The spokesman added   “CIA does not comment on specific investigations. We can say that CIA cooperates with law enforcement partners and does not obstruct investigations. CIA also fully and routinely cooperates with our oversight committees and will continue to do so.” 

Hunter met Morris when he attended a political fundraiser as a major donor. 

Soon thereafter, he warned Biden associates that Hunter’s unpaid taxes raised political problems during Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential run. 

He later proceeded to pay off Hunter’s taxes and to subsidize his lavish lifestyle. 

He also took an apparent lead in planning public campaigns against the critics of the Bidens, reportedly pushing a scorched-earth approach to attack potential witnesses and accusers. 

[…] 

Most recently, it was revealed that, despite accounts of buyers flocking to buy Hunter’s overpriced art, it was Morris all along who bought most of the pieces. 

How the CIA would fit into any of this is anyone’s guess. 

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Race Alarmist: Michelangelo’s Creation of Man Is ‘White Supremacist’

Robin DiAngelo, the woke white author of White Fragility, has called Michelangelo’s painting of the creation of man in the Sistine Chapel an icon of “white supremacy.”

DiAngelo recently spoke with Jalon Johnson on his “Not Your Ordinary Parts” podcast, in which she slammed Michelangelo’s portayal of God creating Adam as “white supremacist.”

“The single image I use to capture the concept of white supremacy is Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel God creating man,” she said, “you know, where God is in a cloud and there’s all these angels and he’s reaching out and he’s touching — I don’t know who that is, David or something — and God is white and David’s white and the angels are white.”

“That is the perfect convergence of white supremacy, patriarchy, right?” she added.

“I was raised Catholic so I saw many images like that as a child,” DiAngelo continued. “So I’m sitting in church and I’m looking up and I see these images. I don’t think to myself ‘God is white’ but in a lot of ways that’s power. I don’t need to. God reflects me.”

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AI-generated art cannot be copyrighted, rules a US federal judge

United States District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell ruled on Friday that AI-generated artwork can’t be copyrighted, as noted by The Hollywood Reporter. She was presiding over a lawsuit against the US Copyright Office after it refused a copyright to Stephen Thaler for an AI-generated image made with the Creativity Machine algorithm he’d created.

Thaler had tried multiple times to copyright the image “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine,” which would have listed the author as the creator of the work and Thaler as the artwork’s owner, but he was repeatedly rejected.

After the Office’s final rejection last year, Thaler sued the Office, claiming its denial was “arbitrary, capricious … and not in accordance with the law,” but Judge Howell didn’t see it that way. In her decision, Judge Howell wrote that copyright has never been granted to work that was “absent any guiding human hand,” adding that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement of copyright.”

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Did a dose of LSD spawn some of cinema’s greatest films?

Federico Fellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, attributes much of his success to a single dose of LSD he took in the summer of 1964 ​“during a time of creative crisis”. According to a recent study looking into how this experience influenced his work, the dose was administered by Dr Emilio Servadio, one of the most prominent Italian psychoanalysts of the time. It induced a trip so intense that the filmmaker later needed sedative medication to put it to an end.

Fellini took part in the psychotherapy session directly after he had finished working on his masterpiece 8 ½, and before he started writing his next film Giulietta degli Spiriti. The talking therapy that occurred after the LSD dose was recorded with a magnetophone. The tapes have never been found by researchers, but in an interview with the BBC a year later, Fellini explained how the experience stimulated his creativity by altering his perception of colour and allowing him to perceive colours in an entirely different light.

“The doctor gave me an explanation and I agree with him,” he told a reporter in 1965. ​“He said that an artist lives always in the imagination so the barrier between sensorial reality and his imagination is very vague… I saw colours not like they normally are – we see colours in the objects, you know; we see objects that are coloured. I saw colours detached from the objects. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of the colours in a detached way.” Fellini’s work after the acid trip was later praised for having ​“supernaturally brilliant colours”.

Fellini’s perception of time was also altered during his trip, which was was reflected in his work post-LSD trip – the authors of the study said his films started to incorporate plots involving ​“puzzling and disorienting flashbacks”. The filmmaker was also said to have had epiphanies during the trip involving space and perception of self, both of which were apparent in his subsequent work. ​“The world depicted in his post-LSD movies includes major changes in the perception of space, time and others,” the study concluded.

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Hunter Biden’s bong-smoking lawyer Kevin Morris, who paid first son’s $2M tax bill, ALSO spent fortune on his art – along with California Dem donor Elizabeth Hirsch Naftali, who Joe appointed to prestigious heritage board

Hunter Biden’s paintings have been bought by a top Democratic donor and the lawyer who has caught smoking a bong during a visit from the First Son last week, a bombshell new report has revealed.

Despite a White House promise that all purchasers’ identities would be kept a secret, two names have been revealed: Los Angeles-based real estate investor and Democratic donor Elizabeth Hirsch Naftali and Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris. 

In July 2022, eight months after Hunter’s exhibition opened in New York City, Joe Biden appointed Naftali to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. It’s not clear whether she had already purchased the art at that time.

Hunter’s Hollywood ‘fixer’ lawyer Morris was seen smoking on the balcony of his Malibu home last week and loaned the president’s son $2million to help him pay back taxes.

When Hunter Biden first announced he would make a high-dollar foray into the art world, the Biden team promised the identities of those who purchased Hunter’s art would remain anonymous. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised an ‘absolute wall’ between his duties as president and his family’s business dealings. 

In 2021, Hunter made his debut at a ritzy New York art gallery, where the sticker price clocked in on some of his amateur pieces at $500,000. 

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Pilgrims Are Flocking to This Psychedelic Temple

UPSTATE NEW YORK has been the birthplace of many Great Awakenings. In the 1820s, religious fervor so swept the region it became known as “the burned-over district.” In the 1960s, Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook became ground control for the East Coast psychedelic movement. “By the time we got to Woodstock,” sang Joni Mitchell, “we were half a million strong.”

More than five decades after Woodstock, in Wappinger Falls, Alex Grey and his wife, Allyson Grey, are trying to use art to get back to the garden. Under the full June moon earlier this month, the Greys opened the bronze, 700-pound doors of Entheon, a temple-museum hybrid dedicated to advancing visionary art, and a message of ecological unity. 

“Humanity’s materialistic worldview must transition to a sacred view of oneness with the environment and cosmos,” Alex tells me after the celebration where soap heir David Bronner, who funded part of the museum, billowed about in his purple robes like a psychedelic Medici. It is a message Americans heard before — in the indigenous language of animacy, and in the prose of Alan Watts, who wrote that the individual is not, contrary to our common perception, a separate “ego inside a bag of skin,” but more like a wave coming out of the ocean. 

As psychedelics return from the outlaw regions of the culture, arriving alongside the climate crisis, the gospel of interconnectedness is spreading again, this time through the mycelial tendrils of the internet. Alex Grey, demure and snowy-haired at age 69, is not entirely sure why he has become such a popular progenitor, but he nevertheless has: On Instagram, he is one of the most famous living visual artists in the country, with 1.4 million followers — more than Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama combined. 

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AI Artist Creates Satanic Panic About Hobby Lobby

People on social media are sharing pictures of what they think are Satanic-seeming displays from Hobby Lobby stores and vowing never to shop there again much like many people refuse to drink Bud Light or shop at Target for bigoted reasons. Aside from the fact that Americans are currently eager to boycott any company that feigns tolerance at marginalized people, there’s one big problem with these Hobby Lobby store pictures: They’re not real. 

These pictures of Satanic merchandise on the shelves of Hobby Lobby were made by Jennifer Vinyard using the AI image generating tool Midjourney. That didn’t stop people from credulously sharing the photos on Facebook and TikTok as if they were real and expressing their shock and horror that Hobby Lobby, which bills itself as a Christian company, was selling giant statues of Baphomet.

Vinyard, an Austin-area pharmacist in training, generated the pictures with Midjourney and posted them to her personal Facebook, Reddit, and an AI art group on Facebook on June 5. The public post in AI Art Universe went viral and, as of this writing, has been shared more than six thousand times. The post gained more than 100 comments before the page shut them down.

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