Everything in museums, galleries, on roundabouts and village squares, and hanging over sofas. And Marina Abramovic
Through the local theatre's website, I want to order tickets. I click on the performance of my choice. Select a date. Select the desired number of tickets. Click on "to pay". And there I can choose from at least 3 options to pay less for my tickets. Five euros discount with a CJP or as a person over 65. Four euros discount with...
Rarely have I seen two female artists at a table more different from each other than Dominique Goblet and Leela Corman. Two female comic artists, on either side of Peter Breedveld who is flown in every year as a connoisseur of the comic genre at Writers Unlimited. Corman, a comic book artist as well as a dancer, writes her stories in a fairly recognisable style. Impressive stories, historically, like her latest...
Moshen Rastani (1958) grins broadly, looks at me penetratingly, gestures, and puts his hand on his heart. "What is happening now, here, between you and me, in this conversation. That's what matters to me. We meet face to face. We communicate. Through each other's faces, we can visit the other's secret world. Such a camera is just a tool to make that contact."
Rastani was thrown into photography by the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran war. He emerged as the uncrowned king of Iranian war and documentary photography with his beautiful, hushed black-and-white portraits. He also did reportage in Lebanon and Bosnia & Herzegovina, and captures everyday life in Iran in his ongoing Iranian Family Project. Together with eight compatriots and kindred artists, his work is now on show at Francis Boeske Projects.
Since the cuts, it has become a bitter necessity for many, cultural entrepreneurship. But what exactly that is, nobody knows at all. Even the government actually has no idea when talking about it. But, the government asks, so there must be an answer. In recent years, the Dutch art world has been flooded with self-proclaimed experience experts on cultural entrepreneurship....
Artists who don't want to make money from their work have a hobby. At a get-together, I spoke to Marit, a visual artist. At one point, she said: 'I don't need to get rich from my work, as long as I can make some money from it'. I hear that phrase very often. I've always shouted it myself. So crazy is...
Three calls. So that helps. When you have an exhibition to sell, in the middle of the Grachtengordel. According to the PR officer, no serious medium was interested in the exhibition. Now those art editors have a hard enough time as it is, so if something cannot be seen in one of the usual places, a journalist from De Volkskrant is not likely to...
Boymans is proud. The Rotterdam museum has been able to snatch up a very nice statue, for 123,000 euros less than the asking price. And all because they bought it via an option construction. Writes NRC. That option construction did cost 22,000 euros. Money they would have lost if the dollar rate had fallen instead of risen. It is already...
That it smells a bit like rotten fish in the Fifa offices is well enough known. The men's club of upstart youth team managers has refined its own revenue model considerably. So now it appears it is no longer just about beautiful women, cocaine, money and other things you put in brown envelopes, but about art. And then it gets interesting. According to a further...
Chris Nauta breaks through. The Amersfoort-based artist makes new clothes from old blankets, tents and other unlikely materials. She was prominent at Oerol and can count stars including Gregory Porter among her fans. 'My customers get a unique piece of art and reduce waste.' Chris Nauta is Central Netherlands' recycling artist. She makes winter coats from used blankets, brightly coloured bags from...
The bad news is: most myths about Carthage are nonsense. The good news is, the reality is at least as fascinating. Until 10 May 2015, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (RMO) in Leiden is showing the multifaceted history of a port city in present-day Tunisia, and once formidable rival of the Roman Empire. It simultaneously offers a glimpse...
,,I put discomfort in my artworks. I get that feeling when I walk through the city and see all those big buildings. The postmodern architecture with its megalomaniac mentality, and its decay, those depress me." From 29 November to 4 January, visual artist Peter Zuur is one of the exhibitors at the Pulchri Graphic Biennial, The Hague. Notably, his works...
For most artists, it is an ideal. Being represented by a gallery. Writers have their sights set on a contract with a publisher. Musicians eye labels eagerly and theatre-makers queue up for an impresario. Creators have a love-hate relationship with such intermediaries. Because while the average creative professional would be willing to spare a toe in exchange...
For fine art, you go to the museum, especially in Amsterdam and especially now that all the museums have reopened. But there is also another option: the opera. There you see visual art that doesn't fit in any museum, not even in the largest room of the Rijksmuseum. Take the Greek sculptor Jannis Kounellis. From today, his work is a...
This post should have been a video. I was planning to go into my garden with the ipad, to tell you, in the company of my dog Rufus, how important video is in contemporary art communication. And not a good, beautifully shot and rap edited video, but wonky, home-made, not very to-the-point video. Which is very personal though....
Wijbrand Schaap: 'Just one more point. Then we're almost through.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'Continue quietly, we have until half past five.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'We have a problem with real estate. A lot of inner cities are empty. Shop premises are empty, downtown office buildings are unrentable. What do the municipalities say? Put artists in them. Cost nothing, because for free rent they do...
23,000 signatures and a host of public meetings have caused Brett Bailey's impressive Exhibit B in London to be cancelled. The show, or rather, the event, has previously been seen with great success in the Netherlands, and garnered nothing but praise in Edinburgh too. We too went to see it, and we were impressed. In...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'The basic infrastructure was keelhauled by Zijlstra while it was not yet ripe. That, in its smaller version, now runs the risk of leading to further rigidity.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'That's a good observation. We are also working on that in our Culture Exploration. We are having a lot of discussions, which we are also taking out into the country. We are starting...
Wijbrand Schaap: 'Now on the role of cities. One of the reactions on our site is about the role of the randstad in cultural policy. Melle Daamen puts the primacy in the randstad, and goes further than the council in this.' Joop Daalmeijer: 'The council has no position yet.' Wijbrand Schaap: 'But there is something in the Culture Outlook. Cities form...
Vlindertje Smit and the service of what is dead It is an orderly, clean space, not unsociable, despite the pieces of horse bone that dominate the studio in their showcases. Visual artist Butterfly Smit prepares animals and parts of animals. Thinking back to the publicity storm that British artist Damien Hirst stirred up with his preserved-animal artworks, you might expect Butterfly Smit to...
John Jansen is squatting in front of his immense printer. Holding his breath, he very carefully places a piece of paper in just the right place. The inlay for the black metal band's new cassette Northward. Black typography on black board. Monk's work. He sighs with relief. "And so I have to do 88 of those. All by hand. Do you understand how many hours go into a tape like that?"
This is rather fantastic. The Tate Museum in London offers the opportunity to wander the halls at night, in the dark. To view everything on your own time. By controlling robots from your couch. Viewing artworks online in museums has been possible for a long time. We have the Google Art Project, we have our own Rijksmuseum that...
Like the rest of the internet population, artist Aram Tanis A photoblog. A stream of bizarre images found on the internet. With one big difference.
The difference is just an 'h'. But confusing it is. This week, the rock opera 'Oh That Sea' premieres in Zeeland. In a month's time, the spherical location performance 'Oh Die Zee' will launch in The Hague, just as the Zeeland show is having its final weekend. The performances are both also about the Odyssey, the classic Greek epic about a Greek hero who, after destroying the city of Troy, takes 10 years to return to his own city, where he then has to kill 100 more lovers of his wife.
About the same time as the train from Donietsk to Kharkov arrived in my mailbox yesterday, a press release from the Manifesta. Our cultural pride in St Petersburg. These weeks, the Dutch festival is organising an audio tour of Rimini Protokoll, the renowned highly political company from Germany. Oh. And, as a third item: there is a conversation tonight about what the Biennale is capable of in times of political turmoil.
For the past few weeks, academies across the country have been celebrating: a new batch of visual artists graduated and showed themselves to the world. Besides parents, grandparents and a few friends, a lot of art professionals descend on such a graduation presentation. Scouts, in the form of other artists, press, curators, collectors and gallery owners. All these people especially hope not to miss the new discovery and therefore try to be there as early as possible. In some cases, that is even before the artist graduates from the academy. If the talent does not develop as expected, it is a pity, but otherwise you are the discoverer. We join in for a moment, and sought out 22.
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