RE:ARTISTE

05/08/2026

It’s not a satanic altar - it’s the exhibition ‘Russian Imperative” at the Manege Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Some people still think that art and politics are not connected - but they always are. As a society, do we clearly distinguish art from propaganda?..

Back to the exhibition: the central sculpture is a monumental bas-relief titled “Russian Soldier”. The exhibition explores the Russian soldier as a symbol of steadfastness and service through art, spanning history from the formation of the Russian state to modern times.

Speaking about the 2026 Venice Biennale: for foreign audiences, the Russian government presented a different kind of cultural propaganda - a combination of folk performance with electronic music. More information about the criticism, accusations of deception, and the related protests can easily be found online.

05/07/2026

Studio visit with Gyan Shrosbree💥 “Fluorescent beauty and the feminine gaze,” — about the artist’s solo exhibition in 2023.

Color, fun, and good vibes only - Gyan will be at the Two Coats of Paint art residency till May 10.

Follow the artist:

05/07/2026

“The People’s Artist” competition, associated with Johnny Depp, benefits The Art of Elysium. It operates as a for-profit, “pay-to-vote” competition run by Colossal Management LLC. It’s not a traditional juried art contest. It’s a “pay-to-play” marketing scheme designed to generate THEIR revenue through extra votes.

This is a pay-to-vote online ‘competition’ operated by a for-profit marketing company. This is not the same as institutional selection, curatorial review, or professional peer recognition.

The vote requests are flooding the feed and inboxes. Instead of gaining visibility you are risking to be marked as spam.

04/24/2026

▪️ America’s art world, like its government, is a gerontocracy captured by boomers.

▪️ Finding ways to reopen contemporary art to artists who aren’t rich is part of a larger battle to redistribute political agency to the majority of the population and restore a democratic society.

▪️ Opportunities in our field are often dependent on chance encounters at industry networking events like openings, public programs, and gallery dinners - not to mention at the bars, clubs, and restaurants that industry workers frequent. The pressure on artists to be present in New York to get a professional career going cannot be overstated.

▪️ Art fairs are the most conservative venue for presenting and selling art. They are unapologetically commercial.

▪️ Many curators and museum administrators are completely unaware of just how serious the crisis in the art market is, and they continue to expect the artists they work with to simply donate their time, labor, and art.

▪️ The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) stopped making direct grants to individual artists in the 1990s in the wake of political controversies. After that, federal funds went to organizations and institutions, some of which are grant-giving organizations.

▪️ This leaves three ways that American artists can support their art practices. The first is to be born rich: Artists with generational wealth don’t have to work as hard to support themselves and can afford to take risks in their work that others can’t.

📖 Source: Josh Kline’s essay, ‘New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art’.

04/20/2026

Great energy at the Open Studios event - artists, exhibitions, night market 💥

In this post:___
@049.fm and










If we missed or mistagged someone, please mention them in the comments 🙏🏼🫱🏻‍🫲🏾🫶🏼

04/10/2026

Book [re]launch, ‘Post Human’, by Jeffrey Deitch. A talk at the New Museum: Massimiliano Gioni, Jeff Koons, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Jeffrey Deitch.

04/09/2026

Hyperallergic: “A new opinion piece by writer and art critic Aruna D’Souza responds to Josh Kline’s claims that NYC is no longer sustainable for artists :

“I’m throwing my lot in with those culture workers and local policy-makers I see trying to make a change, rather than lamenting a problem that we’ve been staring at for at least two decades, and throwing up our hands.””

Plus Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first retrospective in 25 years, Larissa Pham’s debut novel about an artist and her predatory mentor, and the art collective reclaiming spirituality in art history.

04/04/2026

Whitney Biennial 2026: a few sound installations including the one about surveillance, by Cooper Jacoby:
“The Estate sculptures take the form of door intercoms. Each one is equipped with a camera that monitors its surroundings. Cooper Jacoby has embedded reactive Al models in the sculptures that he trained on social media posts from now-deceased people in creative fields, allowing the work to speak from simulated memories. The LED screen on each sculpture counts the years, days, hours, and minutes since the death of the respective individuals.”

Other featured artworks:

🦗 Oswaldo Macia, Requiem for the Insects, 2026
The artist “makes sculpture by shaping space with sound and smell. Here he immerses visitors in a symphony playing from speakers hidden inside glass megaphones that spiral down from the ceiling. Paintings loosely modeled after eighteenth-century naturalists’ field sketches form a backdrop for Requiem for the Insects.”

📻 José Maceda and Aki Onda, Ugnayan, 1974/2026
“Artist and curator Aki Onda presents Ugnayan (1974), music for twenty radios composed by José Maceda.
Maceda wrote a fifty-one-page score, created separate reel-to-reel recordings of singers and musicians playing gongs and Filipino bamboo instruments, and worked with radio stations across Manila to play the tracks simultaneously. Blanketing the city in sound waves, Maceda’s composition returned music from the concert hall to everyday life.”