The Saudi artist Ahmed Mater is suing watchmaker Swatch for using one of his works to sell a luxury timepiece.
Paris
Posted inIn Brief
Angered Archaeologists Allow Thousands to Enter the Louvre for Free
On Thursday about 100 peeved archaeologists took over the lobby of the Louvre in Paris, blocking the ticket booths for nearly five hours and allowing visitors to enter the museum without paying admission.
Posted inArt
Getting Lost in David Altmejd’s Hall of Mirrors
PARIS — Young New York-based Canadian artist David Altmejd’s remarkably ambitious retrospective exhibition of sculpture at the Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris played pithily with many current intellectual strands.
Posted inArt
Falling for Niki de Saint Phalle
PARIS — I have never particularly admired French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle’s overly familiar and obvious Nanas (French slang for “broads”) — the gaudy, plump, joyous everywoman figures that made the artist’s case for female affirmation.
Posted inArt
The Darkness Behind Niki de Saint Phalle’s Colorful Beauties
PARIS — Niki de Saint Phalle was half French, half American, and bilingual, but who was she? Certainly not merely the sculptor who made those fat girls, the Nanas, though they remain her most famous works.
Posted inIn Brief
‘The Simpsons’ Join in Tribute to ‘Charlie Hebdo’
Last night The Simpsons joined in with a two-second tribute that cast the family’s eternal baby, Maggie, in the a hybrid role that combined Marianne, the national symbol of the French Republic, and Cosette from Les Misérables.
Posted inOpinion
A Response to the ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Attack, from an Arab, Artist, and Frenchman
I was sitting in my office on Wednesday morning when I learned with surprise, stupor, and fear of the horror of the Charlie Hebdo attack.
Posted inNews
Four Cartoonists Among 12 Dead in Attack on French Satirical Magazine
Four of France’s most highly regarded cartoonists are among the 12 people murdered in an attack at the Paris office of the magazine Charlie Hebdo on the morning of January 7.
Posted inArt
The Oulipo Group’s Generative Word Games
PARIS — Members of the Oulipo movement play with generative poetic combinations and permutations. Their interests lie at the conceptual nexus of algorithmic art software and remix culture at large, combining all forms of hypertext hybrids, experimental word swarms, and shared authorship projects.
Posted inIn Brief
Jeff Koons Accused of Plagiarism in Paris, Again
A second sculpture by Jeff Koons is conspicuously absent from his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou after a photographer’s widow complained to the art star and the museum’s administration that “Naked” (1988) constituted copyright infringement.
Posted inArt
On His 100th Birthday, a Conference Considers William Burroughs’s Humanist Legacy
PARIS — With determined indeterminacy, young Mathilde Louette initiated a perplexing but hip four-hour English-language celebration of William S. Burroughs’s 100th birthday on December 12 in Paris, where the writer lived, on and off, between 1958 and 1966.
Posted inArt
Bertus Jonkers, Sculptor of Mini Metropolises
One of the strange, miniature cityscapes that Dutch artist Bertus Jonkers spent much of his life building is among the star attractions in Sous le vent de l’art brut 2: De Stadshof, an outsider art exhibition in Paris.
