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The Headlines
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ARTIST AND ACTIVIST ALES PUSHKIN, whose work often targeted Belarus’s authoritarian president, Alexander Lukashenko, died in prison in the country, the Associated Press reports. His death, at 57, occurred under “unclear circumstances,” his wife, Janina Demuch, told the news agency, saying that he had not been sick. Pushkin’s endeavors included dumping manure outside Lukashenko’s office in 1999, for which he received a two-year prison term, and painting the leader in hell on a fresco at a church in the city of Bobr. He had been serving five years for “inciting hatred” and “desecration of state symbols,” for allegedly painting a Belarusian Nazi collaborator. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, an opposition politician now in exile, said that she was “heartbroken” and that “Pushkin has become another tragic victim of the Lukashenko regime.”
COMPETING VISIONS. In April, the Dallas Museum of Art announced that it had shortlisted six proposals for a $150 million-to-$175 million renovation of its Edward Larrabee Barnes–designed campus. Now those plans are on view at the museum, and the Architect’s Newspaper has the details—and renderings. The firms have some differences of opinion, it turns out. David Chipperfield Architects said in a statement that their “design concept originates from a profound sense of respect for the existing DMA campus,” while Diller Scofidio + Renfro said that that Barnes design “reflects the values of its time—aloof and sequestered from the everyday lives of Dallas citizens.” In the Dallas Morning News, architecture critic Mark Lamster is largely positive about the offerings, writing that there are “too many good options, not too few.”
The Digest
At least half of the 63 staffers that the Hong Kong Arts Centre had in mid-2022 have departed amid financial strain and allegations of institutional self-censorship. “Many are leaving because they cannot bear to stay on and just do programs with little meaning,” one former employee told reporter Enid Tsui. [South China Morning Post]
The Israel Museum is reportedly dysfunctional, with some staffers saying that its director-general, Denis Weil, has been “underperforming professionally and in personal relationships,” according to journalist Naama Riba. In a planned restructuring, Weil will become director and a new director-general subordinate to him will take some responsibilities of the museum’s departing deputy director. [Haaretz]
The Iranian painter Khosrow Hassanzadeh, who was born in 1963, and whose work used a Pop sensibility to address issues of politics, representation, and extremist violence, has died. [ArtReview]
Sotheby’s will sell fossilized skeletons of two prehistoric creatures later this month in New York. One is an aerial animal known as a pteranodon, which has a $6 million top estimate, the other is a marine reptile called a plesiosaur, which carries a more manageable $800,000 top estimate. [The Associated Press]
Long off-limits, the private Manhattan museum of the late real-estate magnate Sheldon Solow is now open to the public for four tours a month. Art historian and curator Robert Storr says that is not adequate. “It’s grudging—you need to make a place where people feel comfortable coming in,” he said. [The Guardian]
The Wall Street Journal has a scoop that Tesla employees were working on plans for something codenamed “Project 42,” a glass building nears its headquarters in Austin, Texas, that had features of a residence and could have involved a museum, some staffers believed. The secretive proposal sparked an internal probe. [WSJ]
The Kicker
THE PIQUED PAINTER. A Cambridge University historian, Ulinka Rublack, is arguing that German artist Albrecht Dürer painted himself prominently into a major altarpiece to get back at its commissioner, whom Dürer believed was paying him too small a fee, the Guardian reports. The 1500s work was lost in a fire, but a 17th-century copy survives. The artist included himself in paintings on other occasions, but here he is intriguingly situated, standing on a hill between the Apostles and Mary as she is assumed into heaven. Letters show Dürer telling the patron in question, Jacob Heller, that he needed more money for the work. “What do you imagine my living costs are?” he asked in one. The self-portrait “had to have been an act of revenge,” Rublack told the paper. [The Guardian]
Source: artnews.com