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Maurizio Cattelan, the man who taped a banana to a wall and watched it sell for $6.2 million, says his work has always been serious — the trouble is that people stop at the joke (The Guardian). Today’s stories keep making his point: things filed under “decorative” turn out to be structural the moment someone tries to remove them.
Public television, for instance, is not just programming. Stations are hardwired into FEMA’s alert system, and when Congress defunded them it also cut the infrastructure for evacuation orders and weather warnings in rural counties (The Hollywood Reporter). Nobody planned for the culture budget to be the emergency budget. It was anyway.
The Bauhaus closed in 1933; it still matters enough that the far-right German party AfD is running against it in Saxony-Anhalt this month (AP). The Trump administration is now threatening to pull artifact loans and grants unless the Smithsonian drops its “ideological agenda” (The Washington Post). Cleveland Orchestra musicians, meanwhile, have authorized a strike over pay, injuries — and a voice in artistic direction (Ideastream).
And the one time art got taken entirely too seriously: Vancouver police broke into a gallery to rescue a sculpture whose feet were sticking out from behind a counter (Vancouver City News).
All of our stories below.