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Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Trump's blue suit at Pope Francis funeral's fumes mourners as he makes ‘major blunder' while paying respect at funeral
President Donald Trump's decision to wear a blue suit instead of the customary black one infuriated mourners attending Pope Francis' funeral. It is estimated that some 200,000 people gathered in Rome to honor the late Pope at the burial mass held in St. Peter's Square. The procession started at 10 a.m. local time on Saturday, and luminaries from all over the world assembled in the square in time. They included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his wife, Melania, and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his spouse, Victoria. Melania's black dress and veil contrasted with Trump's conspicuously blue suit as he was seen praying homage at the pope's coffin. At home, mourners quickly noted that the US President was the sole male dignitary not dressed in somber apparel. 'Just watching the Pope's funeral. Trump is the only one not wearing a dark suit. No respect,' one person wrote on social media. 'President Trump at Pope Francis' only one in a blue suit!!' another commented. 'Is Trump the only leading person wearing a bright blue suit for Pope Francis' funeral? To be noticed?' a third user wrote. 'Trump looks like the only leader of a country in attending not wearing a black suit,' one more noticed. 'Trump can't even be bothered to wear a black suit to the Pope's funeral! And not capable to sit up straight in his chair! Put to shame by the rest of the worlds royalty and leaders!' the fourth user commented. '#Trump. Where is Vance to tell Trump that he really should have worn a black suit,' the fifth user added. Also Read: No, Vatican did not snub Trump: US President, Melania get 'front-row' seats at Pope Francis's funeral Meanwhile, mourners claimed that Trump made a 'disrespectful blunder' during the funeral service. Trump and his wife Melania approached the coffin for a brief moment of prayer and contemplation like other guests at the ceremony. 'Trump and Melania - the only two stepping over the rug where Pope Francis coffin sits when paying respect, jeeeezzz!' one X user wrote, as per Irish Star. 'OK, so I'm not the only person who noticed Trump and Melania stepping on the rug. I'm sure they were given instructions to stay off the rug. But, nooooo!' another added. Prince William and Prime Minister Keir Starmer were among the other attendees who were seen staying faraway from the rug, as per the outlet. The Art Newspaper says that guests should not walk on the carpet underneath the coffin. This is due to the fact that the carpet denotes a hallowed area and represents holy ground.
Hindustan Times
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
Trump's blue suit at Pope Francis sparks outrage: Mourners blast him for ‘major blunder' while paying respect at funeral
President Donald Trump's decision to wear a blue suit instead of the customary black one infuriated mourners attending Pope Francis' funeral. It is estimated that some 200,000 people gathered in Rome to honor the late Pope at the burial mass held in St. Peter's Square. The procession started at 10 a.m. local time on Saturday, and luminaries from all over the world assembled in the square in time. They included Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump and his wife, Melania, and UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and his spouse, Victoria. Melania's black dress and veil contrasted with Trump's conspicuously blue suit as he was seen praying homage at the pope's coffin. At home, mourners quickly noted that the US President was the sole male dignitary not dressed in somber apparel. 'Just watching the Pope's funeral. Trump is the only one not wearing a dark suit. No respect,' one person wrote on social media. 'President Trump at Pope Francis' only one in a blue suit!!' another commented. 'Is Trump the only leading person wearing a bright blue suit for Pope Francis' funeral? To be noticed?' a third user wrote. 'Trump looks like the only leader of a country in attending not wearing a black suit,' one more noticed. 'Trump can't even be bothered to wear a black suit to the Pope's funeral! And not capable to sit up straight in his chair! Put to shame by the rest of the worlds royalty and leaders!' the fourth user commented. '#Trump. Where is Vance to tell Trump that he really should have worn a black suit,' the fifth user added. Also Read: No, Vatican did not snub Trump: US President, Melania get 'front-row' seats at Pope Francis's funeral Meanwhile, mourners claimed that Trump made a 'disrespectful blunder' during the funeral service. Trump and his wife Melania approached the coffin for a brief moment of prayer and contemplation like other guests at the ceremony. 'Trump and Melania - the only two stepping over the rug where Pope Francis coffin sits when paying respect, jeeeezzz!' one X user wrote, as per Irish Star. 'OK, so I'm not the only person who noticed Trump and Melania stepping on the rug. I'm sure they were given instructions to stay off the rug. But, nooooo!' another added. Prince William and Prime Minister Keir Starmer were among the other attendees who were seen staying faraway from the rug, as per the outlet. The Art Newspaper says that guests should not walk on the carpet underneath the coffin. This is due to the fact that the carpet denotes a hallowed area and represents holy ground.
New York Times
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Nigerian Sculptor Reflects on All the Land Contains
When Otobong Nkanga appeared on the Art Newspaper's 'A Brush With…' podcast, the host, Ben Luke, asked which piece of art she would choose to live with, if she could choose only one. It's a question he asks every guest. Most people pick historical masterpieces, a Turner, say, or a Giotto. Nkanga chose a stone. Two years ago, Nkanga was announced as the 2025 winner of the Nasher Prize, honoring her work in sculpture. It follows that Luke's immediate reply was: 'Because you could sculpt it?' 'No,' she said quickly. 'Because it would contain all what I need.' The first time I spoke with Nkanga, in a video interview, it was three weeks before the opening of her Nasher Prize exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas (which runs through Aug. 17). The award comes with a $100,000 prize, one of the art world's biggest. When we spoke, though, she was home in Antwerp, Belgium, packing her bags to head across the Atlantic, and she still didn't know exactly what she would be showing. Her plan had been to not ship anything ahead of time and instead make all new pieces, on site. 'I want to try out and see if I can make it happen,' she said. 'It's much more riskier in a way. I have such a short time to put everything together.' The serenity and tangible warmth with which she spoke belied how high-stakes a moment this was. Over the past 20 years, the Nigerian-born Nkanga, 50, has explored the idea of rock, and by extension the land that sheds it, as both a living entity and a container in a shape-shifting body of work. Her exhibitions almost always take the shape of a site-specific installation or performance, often both at once. She has planted galleries with fields of pebbles, printed poetry and images on limestone and worn a crown of malachite through the streets of Berlin. In a 2013 performance titled 'Taste of a Stone: Itiat Esa Ufok,' she balanced on one leg atop a boulder in a courtyard in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, carrying a potted Queen of the Night plant on her head. It is precisely the way she has exploded the notion of what sculpture can be that caught the Nasher Prize judges' attention. As Briony Fer, an art historian and member of the jury, stated in a news release at the time she won the award, 'Otobong Nkanga maps urgent global problems but does so in subtle, enigmatic and probing ways. The intense and productive way in which she presents formal and material questions is what marks out her huge contribution to sculpture right now.' The second time I spoke with Nkanga, also via video, she was wearing bright red overalls that matched her crimson glasses, sitting on the white oak floor of the Nasher's Renzo Piano-designed building. At her side, two assistants were helping her cake a long loop of thick rope with glue and dried aromatic plants, in sections: things like roasted coffee, sassafras bark and corn silk. 'We have to do the transitions to make sure that the colors are moving from one tone to another, slowly shifting,' Nkanga said. Once fully dried, the rope was to be hung from the ceiling by two particularly dark sections. The effect would be that of room-size incense sticks. The rest of the loop would flow across the floor, like a contour line on a topographic map. Elsewhere in the room, Nkanga had been excavating what looked like miniature open-pit mining holes in boulders of red Palo Pinto County sandstone. And she had painted a temporary wall in seven thick bands of earthen claylike colors. A sense of the ground and groundedness was pervasive. Nkanga sourced her materials from the Americas, many locally; she was thinking about the red earth of Texas and Mexico, of ingredients that spoke to the movement of people and food from beyond the Rio Grande and the trade wars between the United States and other countries. Nkanga had also brought on board a Texan soap maker, Trang Nguyen, for a new iteration of her 'Carved to Flow' series. She first worked on this project for Documenta 14, in 2017, which took place between Athens and Kassel, Germany. She worked with Vis Olivae, a soap maker based in Kalamata, Greece, to produce the soap 'O8 Black Stone,' using ingredients from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and North and West Africa. With proceeds from sales of that soap, she created the Carved to Flow Foundation in Akwa Ibom, Nigeria. For the Nasher, she and Nguyen are producing two new soaps: a rust-color bar dotted with poppy seeds, called Red Bond, and Salt Rock, a pale chalky bar, made of lye, pumice powder and sea salt. As production continues throughout the show, the soap will progressively fill the space, 2,000 bars, wrapped in custom packaging printed with poems Nkanga has written. Exhibiting at the Nasher comes with peculiar constraints, because Piano's building itself is an artwork to protect. You can't make holes in the oak floorboards or drill in the Travertine marble walls. For Nkanga, though, just doing the show at all came with questions. 'Coming to America this time, it just feels a bit different,' she said. She has been thinking a lot about what it means to work in the United States at this time, given the political shifts. Nonetheless, she said she felt it was important to make work that could 'open up other possibilities and to create also spaces of rest, spaces for reflection and spaces to trigger other ways of existence and to open up other worlds.' 'It's good to be able to do this work,' she added. 'Especially with many exhibitions being canceled, money being taken out, language, different groups of people being targeted.' Nkanga's work has often dissected how colonization affects people and places. When Nigeria, her home country, was colonized by the British, as she told the art historian Akin Oladimeji in 2024, 'We gave access to the core and the being of who we were. And the access to our lands, prodding, digging, taking out extracts, and the access to our bodies to check to see are we normal or not.' Her insistence on acknowledging the connection between the living and the land provides a powerful counterpoint to so much of the art long made about land in America. Robert Smithson, known for so-called earthworks like 'Spiral Jetty' (1970), wrote, in his 1968 essay, 'A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,' of being conscious of geologic time and prehistory in order to 'read the rocks' he worked with — and decried how 'social structures confine art.' Nkanga, by contrast, said that her work was a 'constant grounding back into reality': a reminder that amid all that earth and rock and wind and water, there are, and always have been, people and other living things. Thinking about the ways in which governments and companies extract from the land without regard for whomever or whatever lives on it, Nkanga said, 'It's so important to constantly remind us that we do not exist without air, that we do not exist without water, that we do not exist without trees.' She is the first to admit that, in winning the Nasher Prize, she's following a roster of extraordinary artists, name-checking the past winners Doris Salcedo, Theaster Gates, Senga Nengudi and Nairy Baghramian. 'When I heard, I was like, 'Really?'' she said, recalling the moment she learned she had won. 'I'm not thinking about the power of the work, I'm thinking about making it. But then at moments like this, you realize that it actually has a vibration that is touching different people.' The heightened state of awareness under which Nkanga works often leads her, like piano wire under tension, to sing. When she's stuck in the studio, or waiting for a mechanical Jacquard loom to finish weaving a tapestry, she'll get up and dance. She loves, loves, loves to sleep. Sometimes she cries, and, she said, 'I'm always grateful when it's a tear, because it means it's getting out.' The parallel between these elements of her daily practice and her broader stance in prepping for this show is instructive: She's forging ahead with the exhibition, a means to expel doubt and instead give it wonderful shape. Three-quarters of an hour into our first conversation, I was struck by the power of this resolve. 'What keeps you going?' I asked. She was quiet for 12 long seconds then, with a faint, heavy sigh, she said, 'because there's so much to do.' 'There is a certain trying to understand the world and your place in it and why certain things are the way they are,' she continued. 'But it's not only looking at what's not going right in the world — it's also looking at it in its sheer beauty.'
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Musician Who Died in 2021 Resurrected as Clump of Brain Matter, Now Composing New Music
Art can outlast the artist — but what about their artistic impulses? A new art installation project in Australia, titled "Revivification," raises this question with a very literal interpretation of "impulse": using his DNA, the team behind the project have performed a quasi-resurrection of the late experimental American composer Alvin Lucier, creating a sort of brain that continuously composes music on the fly with its errant electrical signals. "Revivification is an attempt to shine light on the sometimes dark possibilities of extending a person's presence beyond the seemed finality of death," the team, comprising three artists and a neuroscientist, told the Art Newspaper. At the center of the piece is an "in-vitro brain," grown from blood that Lucier, who passed away in 2021, donated in the final years of his life. Housed in a plinth, it's grown on top of an electrode mesh that connects it to twenty large brass plates placed around the room. Visitors can listen as the brain fires off electrical pulses that trigger a transducer and a mallet behind each plate, striking them to produce sound. "When you look down into that central plinth, you're crossing a threshold," Nathan Thompson, an artist and the creator of the project, told the Guardian in a recent interview. "You're peering down into the abyss and you're looking at something that's alive – just not in the same way as you." To create the "mini-brain," researchers at Harvard Medical School used Lucier's white blood cells to derive stem cells, the foundational building blocks of the body which possess the ability to develop into any type of cell or tissue, such as that belonging to a particular organ. For the project, the team chose to program the stem cells to grow into cerebral organoids, resembling the cells of a developing human brain. Of course, lab-grown creation doesn't amount to anything like human consciousness. Still, it is on some level an extension of Lucier, responding to the world around it: in addition to generating sound, the cerebral organoids receive sound picked up by microphones in the gallery, mediated as electrical signals. "The central question we want people to ask is: could there be a filament of memory that persists through this biological transformation? Can Lucier's creative essence persist beyond his death?" the team said, per the Art Newspaper. Lucier eagerly participated in this experiment. As the Guardian notes, he was the first to innovate the use of brainwaves to create live music, attaching electrodes to his head to pick up brain signals that were amplified into a loudspeaker. "When I told Lucier's daughter Amanda about the project, she laughed," Guy Ben-Ary, one of the artist collaborators, told the Guardian. "She thought, this is so my dad. Just before he died he arranged for himself to play for ever. He just can't go. He needs to keep playing." More on brains: Scientists Intrigued by Man Whose Brain Turned Into Glass
The Guardian
26-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Two Van Gogh paintings to be shown in London for first time
Two Vincent van Gogh paintings created in the months after the Dutch artist mutilated his ear will reportedly be exhibited in London for the first time. The works, The Courtyard of the Hospital at Arles and The Ward in the Hospital at Arles, will appear at the Courtauld Gallery from next month, the Art Newspaper reported. The paintings are the only works created by the post-impressionist of the hospital in Arles in southern France, in which he stayed. The pieces were bought in the 1920s by the Swiss collector Oskar Reinhart and upon his death became part of his 200-strong collection in Winterthur, near Zurich, which until recently had been prohibited from lending. The museum in Reinhart's villa, Am Römerholz, opened to the public in 1970 but is temporarily closed for building work, so the paintings are to go out on loan to the Courtauld for the exhibition Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection from 14 February to 26 May. The pair of Van Goghs were started in the second half of April 1889, at a time when the artist was sleeping in the hospital but allowed to paint during the day. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion The exhibition will open with a selection of major paintings by artists who preceded the impressionists, including Goya's highly charged Still Life With Three Salmon Steaks, Géricault's moving A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank and Courbet's provocative The Hammock. Last year, the Courtauld narrowly escaped a fire in the wider Somerset House complex in central London. The gallery, home to works including Van Gogh's 1889 self-portrait showing him with a bandaged ear, was not directly impacted by the fire and was able to reopen shortly after the blaze was brought under control.
