Is Dolce & Gabbana un-cancelled?
Arts & Culture News for the week starting 11/11/24
Hi everyone,
I have been writing frantically all this week. I may have even clogged your inbox a bit, but don’t worry I don’t see myself having enough inspiration, motivation, and time all at once ever again. This isn’t to say that I’ll disappear. I won’t. This is the start of a new era, mark my words.
Today I’m trying out a new format. I haven’t seen anybody talk about what’s happening in art & culture & museums specifically, so I took it upon myself. Enjoy. And don’t forget to catch up on my latest articles (selfies and the Pope helloooooo so interesting). I will also be sharing a round up of the exhibitions and gallery openings I went to this month - it’s gonna be great so stay tuned. And I’m planning interviews, so stay tuned for that too (and if you wanna be featured reply to this email or dm me).
Anyway let’s get into the weekly news roundup, if you like it let me know ok?! I need a tiny bit of feedback otherwise it feels like I’m just screaming into a void (which is cathartic to a certain extent but it gets pathetic after a while you know what I mean?).
Kisses,
Ginevra
Arts & Culture News for the week starting 11/11/24
Saudi Arabia wants to build a futuristic city it can’t afford. The kingdom’s ambitious $500 billion Neom project, a centerpiece of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 plan, is struggling - costs have soared, timelines are slipping. On top of that, the recent ousting of CEO Nadhmi al-Nasr follows reports of his management style, who reportedly maintained horrid working conditions. “I drive everybody like a slave, when they drop down dead, I celebrate. That’s how I do my projects” he said in a meeting. Despite its oil wealth, Saudi Arabia is struggling to fund the portfolio of megaprojects tied to its economic diversification goals, which includes but is not limited to: a $30 billion luxury resort cluster, a vast entertainment district near Riyadh, and futuristic buildings like a cube-shaped skyscraper. Critics argue that the kingdom’s vision is now being scaled back, with analysts suggesting only a fraction of the projects will likely be completed. Mohammed bin Salman remains hopeful.
Sofia Coppola will be hosting a ball at The Paris Decorative Arts Museum to celebrate the centenary of the 1925 International Exhibition of Decorative Arts. I love this. Time to rewatch Marie Antoinette.
The Vatican jumps on the AI bandwagon with the launch of a digital model of St. Peter’s Basilica. This move reflects a growing trend in the cultural space, I wrote about it here.
“The project is being launched in anticipation of the 2025 Jubilee - when 30 million pilgrims are expected - and it intends to improve visitor flow and identify conservation needs.
On top of the creation of the ‘digital twin’ and the digital exhibition on the website, all the data collected for the project is being leveraged to develop a Minecraft Education module and two ticketed immersive exhibits ahead of the Jubilee.
Cultural institutions worldwide are embracing digital advancements to remain relevant and engage visitors.”
Italian authorities have dismantled a major Europe-wide network of art forgers and dealers, seizing over 2,100 counterfeit works attributed to artists like Gustav Klimt, Andy Warhol, and Banksy. The operation, coordinated with European agencies, uncovered fakes being sold through auction houses and private dealers, with a potential market value of €250 million ($265 million). Thirty-eight suspects are under investigation, though no charges have been filed.
Nadia Lee Cohen shot Kim and Kourtney Kardashian for Skim’s collaboration with Dolce & Gabbana. I love Cohen, but this campaign isn’t doing it for me. Maybe it’s the trying too hard to make D&G happen again (did we all collectively forget their racism, homophobia, and more racism?), or the fact that Kim and Kourtney look like bad, shiny, and smooth caricatures of Sophia Loren, or the whole ‘degraded’ Italian setting. Something’s off.
and what's with the stray cats?
The British Museum received it’s largest donation to date: 1,700 pieces of Chinese ceramics worth around 1 billion pounds ($1.27 billion). The museum will use the donation to “hold one of the most important collections of Chinese ceramics of any public institution outside the Chinese-speaking world, numbering 10,000 objects”, CNN reports. Once again, the BM keeps unapologetically stashing other people’s stuff.
Guggenheim Bilbao will have a new director. Miren Arzalluz, currently the director of the Paris Fashion Museum-Palais Galliera, will take over in April 2025. Arzalluz was born in Bilbao and has worked as the “director of a public institution to promote the Basque language and contemporary culture”. Juan Ignacio Vidarte is stepping down after 30 years!
Artwork of the week
Ulu's Pants, Leonora Carrington (1952) Eggs appear often in Carrington’s work as symbols of fertility and the universe’s interconnectedness. "The Egg is the macrocosm and the microcosm, the dividing line between the Big and the Small," she wrote in Down Below (1943), a memoir of her experience in a Spanish Sanatorium.
I love that, it resonates deeply. The egg, in Carrington’s view, holds a poetic duality: a biological egg and an egg with a shell containing layers of potential, waiting to come to life. Both literal eggs, both figuratively containing universes and endless possibilities.
Carrington’s literary career, though lesser-known, brought the egg from her painted oeuvre to her written one. In 1970, she wrote Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg, a play set in an apocalypse where only one woman remains: an "enormously fat old lady of 80, the ex-madam of a brothel," now the last hope embodied by an egg. Playwright and producer Joanne Pottlitzer, who collaborated with Carrington in the mid-70s, shared that: “Leonora believed that it is the woman’s role to exorcize the violence from man and the world in order to create more whole human beings (man and woman, often androgynous) and a better world.”
In the mid-70s, Pottlitzer set out to produce the play, even getting it approved by Guggenheim’s director, Thomas Messer. Sadly it never saw the stage due to lack of funding and the full script was never released.
What a shame if you ask me. Opus Siniestrus sounds like such a poignant, avant-garde piece, so prescient in its themes, the imagery of the last egg amidst a barren world so quintessentially Carrington.
Thank you for reading, talk to you soon!