‘I was always interested in painting. As a teenager, in the early 2000s, I attended a government-led cultural institution for the intellectual development of youths, with campuses throughout Iran. Several great Iranian filmmakers and artists came out of it. Our teacher told us about a book called Drawing Method Vol.1 (1974) written by the Iranian artist Mohsen Vaziri-Moghaddam....
Meet the alleged money-laundering, sanctions-evading Lebanese collector with a penchant for expensive art, blood diamonds, and, possibly, Hezbollah Little is known about Nazem Said Ahmad, the Lebanese businessman and high-profile collector, but one thing that’s certain is that he has liberal tastes in art, bought a lot of it, and wasn’t quiet about it. Before...
Few people would have predicted that a loquacious drama about a woman foreign service professional would have been Netflix’s next big hit. But everyone is talking about “The Diplomat” – for good reason. The series, starring Keri Russell as the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, debuted at No. 1 on the streaming charts. Critics...
Hollywood screenwriters have gone on strike. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) seeks higher pay, upfront fees from streaming services, better working conditions and reassurance that studios won’t use artificial intelligence programs to generate scripts. The last WGA strike, 15 years ago, led to permanent changes in the entertainment landscape, such as the rise of...
German playwright Heiner Müller once dubbed Paris Bar the ‘hell of Berlin bars.’ Müller lived in the Communist East, but had documents that allowed him to pass between East and West when the Berlin Wall still divided the city. In the 1980s, he was a regular at Kantstrasse 152. Then as now, Paris Bar felt...
For the fifth installment of Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou’s series of interviews on iconic exhibitions in commercial galleries, the curator-duo talk to gallerist Jeffrey Deitch about the Vanessa Beecroft performance that launched his New York gallery in 1996. Pierre-Alexandre Mateos and Charles Teyssou: You launched your gallery on Grand Street in New York in 1996 with a celebrated performance...
It’s hard to resist the cheery, familiar music and vocals of The Barber of Seville. One of the most beloved operas and certainly among the most familiar, Barber is a perennial crowd pleaser; but any worthy company that stages it knows not to be lazy about the production. Barber calls for quality performance, enjoyable, and...
Wherever he goes, Guadalupe Maravilla plays a childhood game called tripa chuca, or ‘rotten guts’. Two people take turns connecting numbers on paper by drawing lines that cannot touch, creating a map that tracks how they charted a path in relation to each other. Maravilla played tripa chuca throughout his journey from El Salvador to the United States in...
In the first interview in a new series dedicated to artists’ work beyond art, we (Art Basel) speak to Yto Barrada about her vision for The Mothership, a community-led research center grounded in the Moroccan landscape. Artists don’t just make art. Over a decade ago, this realization led to the launch of ‘The Future of Art Practices:...
Contemporary art has found its footing in the home of Salone del Mobile When contemporary art and Milan come up in conversation, many observers point to one seminal event that put the city on the art world’s radar: Expo 2015. Before the world’s fair, Milan’s two leading creative industries – fashion and design – routinely...
