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Culture of France

The culture of France and of the French people has been shaped by geography, by profound historical events, and by foreign and internal forces and groups. France, and in particular Paris, has played an important role as a center ofhigh culture since the 17th century, first in Europe, and from the 19th century on, worldwide. From the late 19th century, France has also played an important role in cinema, fashion and cuisine. The importance of French culture has waxed and waned over the centuries, depending on its economic, political and military importance. French culture today is marked both by great regional and socioeconomic differences and by strong unifying tendencies.

Language

The Académie française sets an official standard of language purity; however, this standard, which is not mandatory, is even occasionally ignored by the government itself: for instance, the left-wing government of Lionel Jospin pushed for the feminization of the names of some functions (madame la ministre) while theAcadémie pushed for some more traditional madame le ministre.

Obasanjo condemns supremacy tussle among Yoruba Obas

Samuel Awoyinfa, Abeokuta

A former President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, has condemned the rivalry for supremacy among Yoruba monarchs, which has recently pitted two prominent traditional rulers against each other.

 Obasanjo, who spoke when the new Olubadan of Ibadanland, Oba Saliu Adetunji, paid him a courtesy visit at his Presidential Hilltop residence in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital, on Thursday, described the supremacy battle as “a distraction, which could result in a setback.”

He noted that good governance and the welfare of their subjects should be paramount in the mind of the traditional rulers.

Mahmoud Hawari Named Director of New Palestinian Museum

Mahmoud Hawari, a research associate at Oxford University’s Khalili Research Center, was appointed the new director of the 37,000-square-foot Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, which will open its doors in May, Gareth Harris of the Art Newspaper reports.

A visiting academic at the British Museum and a director of several archaeological excavations at sites such as Khirbat al Mafjar in Jericho, Hawari said, “This will be a museum that overcomes political and geographical borders, and links Palestinians together, at home and in exile, wherever they may live.”

According to a museum spokesperson, Hawari is replacing former director Jack Persekian who stepped down in December over differences in management.

The $30 million institution will feature the history and culture of Palestine from 1750 to the present. Designed by Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based architectural firm, the building was constructed on property owned by Birzeit University.

“It has been very difficult to construct a museum under the Israeli military occupation, but the building will be ready on time,” the acting director, Omar Al-Qattan, said. Al-Qattan is the chairman of the London-based AM Qattan Foundation, which is one of the museum’s main funders.

Carl Fredrik Reutersward (1934-2016)

Swedish modern artist Carl Fredrik Reutersward has died at the age of 81, Daniel E. Slotnik of the New York Times reports.

Born in Stockholm in 1934, Reutersward studied art in Paris with the painter Fernand Léger and at Stockholm’s Royal Institute of Art. Director of Stockholm's Moderna Museet, Daniel Birnbaum, said Reutersward played a key role in establishing modern art in Sweden.

The artist, who was friends with the Beatles’s John Lennon, was inspired to create his iconic sculpture of a knotted Colt revolver after Lennon was killed by Mark David Chapman in 1980. Titled Non Violence, the work became an international symbol for peace. Reutersward originally placed the sculpture in Strawberry Fields in Central Park. Today replicas of the work can be found in more than thirty cities around the world including a version of the sculpture that stands outside the headquarters of the United Nations in New York.

Xavier Veilhan to Represent France at 2017 Venice Biennale

Nicholas Forrest of Artinfo reports that Xavier Veilhan will represent France in the 2017 Venice Biennale. The announcement was made by Audrey Azoulay, France’s minister of culture and communication, and Jean-Marc Ayrault, the minister of foreign affairs and international development.
Veilhan, who lives and works in Paris, is a sculptor who works in a variety of media, but is most well known for his angular, figurative works in metal.
Veilhan was chosen for his Merzbau Musical proposal, an homage to Kurt Schwitters’s proto-installation work Merzbau, which was created in his Hanover home between 1923–37, but was eventually destroyed due to an Allied bombing during World War II. Veilhan’s work will be a recording studio with various kinds of musical instruments, some made specifically for the project.
The commissioners for French pavilion are the Swiss critic, publisher, and historian Lionel Bovier, and artist Christian Marclay.

Artists Space Leaves Greene Street Location after Twenty-Three Years

The executive director and curator of Artists Space, Stefan Kalmár, announced yesterday that the nonprofit exhibition space will be leaving its current location at Thirty-Eight Greene Street, which it has occupied for the last twenty-three years, after the closing of artist Lukas Duwenhögger’s retrospective, which ends June 5, 2016.
Artists Space negotiated a buyout of its lease due to their landlord’s plans for a penthouse renovation. Though a new location has not yet been found, Artists Space will continue with its programming at Artists Space Books & Talks at Fifty-Five Walker Street.
Artists Space, along with several other arts organizations—Light Industry, Electronic Arts Intermix, Anthology Film Archives, Bidoun, Printed Matter, Danspace Project, Storefront for Art and Architecture, ISSUE Project Room, The Kitchen, Primary Information, Participant Inc, Recess, Sculpture Center, White Columns, and Triple Canopy—are working with a group of art historians, activists, and collectives on an exhibition which will analyze the repercussions of gentrification in New York since 2000.

Nora Khan and Christiane Paul Given Thoma Foundation’s Arts Writing Awards in Digital Art

Alex Greenberger of Artnews has written that Nora Khan and Christiane Paul have been given the Thoma Foundation’s awards for art writing in digital art.
Khan, an emerging digital-arts writer and contributing editor at Rhizome, has been given $20,000; $5000 of which is a grant that will go towards a new project.
Paul, an associate dean and associate professor at the New School’s media studies department, as well as an adjunct curator of new media arts at the Whitney—whose new book, A Companion to Digital Art, is being released this week—has been given a $40,000 award; $10,000 of which is a grant that will go towards a new project.
Omar Kholeif, one of the members of the Thoma Foundation’s awards committee, in addition to being the Manilow senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, said “Their diverse practices as authors on digital art and culture complement each other beautifully; together they suggest a speculative future history for our joint field of practice—one that is inclusive and historically rigorous and generous to the community of digital art and art history more broadly speaking.”

Recipients for 2016 Doris Duke Performing Artist Awards Announced

Creative Capital and the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation have announced this year’s recipients of the Performing Artist Awards. Each awardee—in the fields of theatre, jazz, and dance—will receive $275,000 in “flexible, multi-year funding as well as financial and legal counseling, professional development activities and peer-to-peer learning opportunities provided by Creative Capital.”
The awardees are:

Italy Allocates Over $1 Billion for Cultural Heritage Sites

The Italian government announced yesterday that it has earmarked over $1 billion for restoration and construction projects at thirty-three museums, monuments, and archaeological sites throughout the country, Hannah Mcgivern of the Art Newspaper reports.
Culture minster Dario Franceschini has called the funding the “biggest investment in cultural heritage” in the country’s history. The “one billion for culture” campaign will provide much needed support to the archaeological sites of Pompeii, Campi Flegrei, and Herculaneum. Naples’s National Archaeological Museum will receive over $20 million and its Capodimonte Museum will be given over $30 million to improve exhibition spaces. The Uffizi galleries will use over $40 million of the funding to execute a plan to modernize its facilities that was formulated in the 1960s. Among the many other heritage sites benefiting from the culture campaign is the city of L’Aquila, which is still recovering from an earthquake which devastated the area in 2009.

Artist Atena Farghadani is Released from Iranian Prison

Atena Farghadani, an Iranian artist who was sentenced to twelve years and nine months in prison for drawing a satirical cartoon criticizing proposed laws that would restrict women’s reproductive rights and also outlaw vasectomies for men, was released today, the Cartoonists Rights Network International reports.
The artist was first arrested in August 2014 for posting a drawing that depicted members of parliament with animal faces on social media. She spent three months in Evin prison where she was put in solitary confinement for the majority of her detainment and was only released after settling a substantial bail. Farghadani was arrested again in January 2015 for creating a video detailing the beatings and nine-hour interrogations she was forced to endure in jail. She was then charged with undermining national security, insulting the Iranian president, members of parliament, and authorities, and for spreading propaganda against the Islamic Republic, and received a twelve-year sentence. During this time she protested her brutal treatment by prison guards by going on a hunger strike. She eventually went into cardiac arrest and was hospitalized in February. Farghadani was also forced to take pregnancy and virginity tests and was subjected to a number of other abuses before being released. Authorities had charged her with “indecency” for shaking her lawyer’s hand last June.
Last month, Farghadani’s attorney Mohammad Moghimi successfully negotiated a reduced sentence of eighteen months with an appeals court, as reported by artforum.com. Farghadani was released after only serving one year of her original sentence. She said she still wants to live in Iran and continue her work as an artist.
While grateful to those who protested her imprisonment, such as Amnesty International who repeatedly demanded that she be freed, Farghadani also expressed her concern for the other prisoners still being detained unbeknownst to the public and without anyone to fight for them.

Turkish Police Censor Public Art Piece in Istanbul

The artist Işıl Eğrikavuk, who was commissioned to create a new work for YAMA, a public art installation series screened on top of an Istanbul hotel, alleges in a statement on Facebook that her animation about women’s voices in public spaces was first removed for “insulting religious views,” and later that the work was a source of “visual pollution,” according to local authorities. Works for YAMA are typically projected on an about nineteen by twenty-nine-foot screen located on top of Istanbul’s Marmara Pera hotel.
Eğrikavuk’s work, prepared in collaboration with YAMA’s curator Övül Durmuşoğlu, is titled Time to Sing a New Song and consists of a short animation of a woman’s emoji face slowly turning into an apple. It was supposed to be on display from sunset to sunrise everyday between April 23 to June 30 of this year, however three days after the opening on April 26 officers from Beyoğlu Municipality apparently came to the hotel and put a stop to the exhibition. The artist learned from Durmuşoğlu that there had been a complaint about the video, for “insulting religious views,” and subsequently also was told that the video was causing “visual pollution,” in a violation of a local Urban Design Regulation, and had to be shut off.
Other artworks shown on the rooftop screen as part of this public art series have not been taken down or deinstalled prematurely, according to reports available at this time. For more on the artist’s work, see Kate Sutton’s Pick on her show at Egeran Galeri in Istanbul.

More Than 200 International Galleries Converge for Frieze New York

More than 200 international galleries from thirty-one countries are gathering on Randall’s Island Park this week for Frieze’s twenty-fifth anniversary edition. Curators Fabian Schöneich, Cecilia Alemani, Tom Eccles, Jacob Proctor, and Clara M. Kim are curating artist commissions, special projects, and talks this year.
“Frieze New York has become an unmissable moment in the calendar for collectors, artists, curators, students, and art enthusiasts, not to mention the best moment in the year to celebrate the great city that hosts the fair,” said Victoria Siddall. Siddall is serving as director for the first time, after Matthew Slotover and Amanda Sharp stepped down.
Returning to the fair this year are its specially curated Spotlight, Focus, and Frame sections which are featuring solo presentations, emerging artists, and works from thirty-three galleries that are making their Frieze debut.
For this year’s Frieze Projects, curator Cecilia Alemani has commissioned nine site-specific pieces including giant inflatable balloons, a professional pickpocket, and a futuristic car, which, according to Alemani, will “create an enchanted atmosphere by invading a highly realistic setting with objects, actions and moments that appear too strange to believe.”

São Paulo Biennial Releases Artist List for 2016 Edition

The thirty-second edition of the São Paulo biennial has released a list of its participating artists. Curated by Jochen Volz, the festival will also feature the contributions of co­curators Gabi Ngcobo, Júlia Rebouças, Lars Bang Larsen, and Sofía Olascoaga, and will center on notions of “uncertainty” and “entropy.”
Artists are creating a number of projects emerging from local residencies: The Instituto de Botânica de São Paulo will be host to a garden of edible and endangered plants, initiated by artist Carla Filipe, for example. Iza Tarasewicz, meanwhile, is studying the presence of Polish mazurka folk dances in Brazil.

The full list of artists is as follows:

Danish Politician Contacts Police Over Art Exhibition Presenting Terrorists as Martyrs

An art exhibition scheduled to open in Copenhagen at the end of the month has come under fire for associating suicide bombers with the likes of Joan of Arc and Socrates, reports Le Figaro.
The exhibition, whose theme is martyrs throughout history, will feature images of Foued Mohamed-Aggad, one of the assailants at Paris's Bataclan concert hall. His inclusion, along with brothers Ibrahim and Khalid el-Barkraoui, who blew themselves up as part of the attacks in Belguim earlier this year, raised alarm with a local politician who decried the exhibition as “encouraging terrorism.” Contacting the police, Diego Gugliotta—a member of the ruling Venter party—also took his concern to Facebook writing, “Representing suicide bombers as heroes could encourage others to take the same path and join a terrorist organization.”
The exhibition's organizer, Ida Grarup Nielsen, a member of the artist collective The Other Eye of The Tiger, said the stories of these men would be told from their point of view. Each man is “the hero of his own story,” she told the press.
The Copenhagen theater where the exhibition is to be held is no stranger to controversy. In 2012 a troupe of local actors performed a play about the 2011 massacre at an Oslo youth camp carried out by Norwegian terrorist, Anders Breivik. The new exhibition is scheduled to open on May 26.

Real Estate Mogul Aby Rosen to Pay $7 Million in Unpaid Taxes on Art

New York attorney general Eric T. Schneiderman announced yesterday that a $7 million settlement was reached with Manhattan real estate developer and art collector Aby Rosen for failing to pay taxes on $80 million worth of artwork, reports Charles V. Bagli of the New York Times.
Schneiderman said, “We are committed to rooting out tax abuses wherever we find them, especially in the art world, where the difference can be hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars in lost tax revenue.”
According to the attorney general’s office, art dealers are exempt from paying taxes on works that are for resale. If Rosen is signing a resale certificate for artworks he bought, but is using them for his own enjoyment or to bolster his real estate brand by exhibiting the works on his properties then he must pay taxes on them. One such work is Daimen Hirst’s the Virgin Mother, 2005, which can be found at Rosen’s Old Westbury estate on Long Island. The sculpture, which is valued at approximately $2.5 million, is one of 200 works that are involved in the tax dispute. According to Rosen, his contemporary art collection is worth “well over $500 million” and consists of more than 800 works.
Schneiderman believes that “law-abiding New Yorkers should not be stuck footing the bill for those who fail to pay their fair share.” He also announced the findings from a separate tax evasion investigation involving art dealer and director of a New York–based Gagosian Gallery Victoria Gelfand. The attorney's general office concluded that she had not paid taxes on thirty-one different works purchased between 2005 and 2013. The law firm representing her said that she intends to sell the works and that she disagrees with the attorney general’s position that once the art is displayed in one’s home the art dealer should be required to pay taxes. Deirdre A. McEvoy with the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, said that Gelfand “wanted to do the right thing,” so she paid a $210,000 settlement to the state.

$34 Million in Art Goes Up In Flames When Fire Ignites at Artist’s Home

Artist Rosemarie Trockel’s personal art collection, valued at around $34 million, was destroyed on Monday after a fire broke out at the German artist’s home in Cologne, the Kölnische Rundschau reports. The artist is currently on vacation, and was not home at the time.
A housekeeper had discovered the fire, which started in the basement. A spokesperson for the police said that even though the fire was contained to the lower level of the house the damage from the smoke was severe. The cause of the fire remains uncertain, but police believe it may have been an electrical fire. Art casualties include works by Andy Warhol as well as the sixty-three-year-old artist’s own sculptures. A spokesperson from Trockel's gallery, Sprüth Magers, said, “We are relieved that nobody got hurt.”

Mahmoud Hawari Named Director of New Palestinian Museum

Mahmoud Hawari, a research associate at Oxford University’s Khalili Research Center, was appointed the new director of the 37,000-square-foot Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, which will open its doors in May, Gareth Harris of the Art Newspaper reports.
A visiting academic at the British Museum and a director of several archaeological excavations at sites such as Khirbat al Mafjar in Jericho, Hawari said, “This will be a museum that overcomes political and geographical borders, and links Palestinians together, at home and in exile, wherever they may live.”
According to a museum spokesperson, Hawari is replacing former director Jack Persekian who stepped down in December over differences in management.
The $30 million institution will feature the history and culture of Palestine from 1750 to the present. Designed by Heneghan Peng, a Dublin-based architectural firm, the building was constructed on property owned by Birzeit University.
“It has been very difficult to construct a museum under the Israeli military occupation, but the building will be ready on time,” the acting director, Omar Al-Qattan, said. Al-Qattan is the chairman of the London-based AM Qattan Foundation, which is one of the museum’s main funders.

Youths vandalize historic site

Israeli pupils on their Passover vacation threw a paint-filled 'color party' at the 1,300-year-old Ashdod-Yam citadel; the Israeli Antiquities Authority: Contact us within 48 hours to clean it and avoid a police complaint.

Youths on their Passover vacation vandalized the archeological site Ashdod-Yam citadel, it was discovered on Wednesday. The Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) issued a request that those responsible contact them within 48 hours to undo the damage; otherwise, they intend to file a complaint with the police.

The youths vandalized the 1,300-year-old citadel with paints on Tuesday as part of a "color party." At their festivities, they threw paint over each other and the site and left litter at what is considered one of the most beautiful locations in the south. 

Pictures that the youths shared of their "color party"

Ulay Returns to Perform in New York After Decades-long Hiatus

Ulay & Jaša (all photos courtesy the artists)

This month marks Ulay’s return to New York as a performer after 30 years, with a site-specific installation and three-day performance at Kustera Projects Red Hook during Frieze Week. Curated by Mitra Khorasheh, Cutting Through the Clouds of Myth is the German artist’s one-time-only collaboration with the Slovenian multidisciplinary artist Jaša and promises “a series of actions, an intimate happening, an experiential installation, a language of communication,” as a release describes cryptically.
The pair is keeping the event shrouded in mystery. Ulay’s performance on May 7 is titled “Water Mark” and does have some connection to water, Ulay confirmed to Hyperallergic, emphasizing his ongoing focus on the element. (His website Earth Water Catalogue compiles water and water-related works by various artists.)