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The Headlines




BRIAN CATLING ,  the multidisciplinary artist and writer of inexhaustible invention, has  died at 74 ,  ArtReview  reports. Catling’s long career included installations, performances (in which he was sometimes costumed as a cyclops), egg tempera paintings, poetry, and teaching, which  he termed  “an essential element of my imaginative spectrum.” Catling won fame late in life for writing  The Vorrh  , a wildly fantastical and dark trilogy of novels whose first volume was published in 2012. “The imagination is a muscle, one that increases with exercise,”  he told  the  Guardian  in 2018. “You have to tell it, ‘That’s not good enough, you’ve got to go further.’ I’ve always wanted more than one life. Inventing fiction, performing, they’re all ways of being someone else.”




PEDESTAL POLITICS.  For nearly 25 years, the  Fourth Plinth  in London’s Trafalgar Square has been a site of ambitious public art displays by  Yinka Shonibare ,  Katharina Fritsch , and many more. Following the death of  Queen Elizabeth II  earlier this month, there is now discussion of using the empty platform (originally intended for an equestrian sculpture of  William IV )  to hold a statue of her . Not everyone is sold on the idea.  Prue Leith , the journalist and restaurateur (and  Great British Bake Off  judge) who led efforts to establish the contemporary art displays there, told the  Guardian  that she believes it is not “special enough for the Queen” and proposed a site in front of  Westminster Abbey . One compromise being floated is for a fifth plinth to be constructed to continue the art program. Leith said that, “if there had to be an extra plinth it might work as long as it fits with the symmetry of the square.”




The Digest




Some Florida art museums, including the  Tampa Museum of Art  and the  Museum of Fine Arts St. Petersburg , have closed to prepare for Hurricane Ian , which is bearing down on the state and currently expected to make landfall on Thursday morning.  [The Art Newspaper] Katharine Lee Reid , who led the  Cleveland Museum of Art  and the  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts  in Richmond, has died at 80. She also served as deputy director of the  Art Institute of Chicago  and president of the  Association of Art Museum Directors .  [Cleveland.com] Hot on the heels of announcing its collectibles-focused  Department X ,  Christie’s  said it is launching a platform called  Christie’s 3.0  that will facilitate blockchain-based sales of NFTs. The effort is a partnership with  Manifold , which facilitates NFT minting, and  Spatial , a metaverse builder.  [Coindesk] The David Zwirner gallery is becoming the lead funder of the  Drift , the zeitgeist-capturing literary magazine started by  Kiara Barrow  and  Rebecca Panovka  in 2020. In October of that year,  Lucas Zwirner , the gallery’s head of content, wrote  an essay  for the publication on Minimalism.  [ARTnews] Designer and art patron  Miuccia Prada  has had one of the biggest fashion hits of the past year with the ultra-mini miniskirt she created for her  Miu Miu  line. For a story with  Tyler Mitchell  photos,  Rachel Tashjian  visited Prada at her Milan office, which has a  Carsten Höller  slide (that she said she has not used recently).  [Harper’s Bazaar]




Curator  Rachael Rakes  has been tapped to organize the 2023 edition of the  Seoul Mediacity Biennale . Rakes has previously been curator for public practice at BAK in Utrecht, the Netherlands  [The Korea Times]




The Kicker




SKATEBOARDING IS NOT A CRIME.  Only  six people are allowed  to visit  Michael Heizer ’s just-finished  City  work in rural Nevada each day, and reservations are required, but that did not stop some intrepid skateboarders with the skate magazine  Jenkem  from  trying to make an unscheduled visit  —and skate it. “We heard about this weird art piece deep in the desert that looks like a giant skatepark,” one of them explains in a video that they shot. (He is not wrong!) Spoiler alert: They do not complete their mission. But the video still charms, and they managed to get in some skating nevertheless.  [Jenkem  via  @kimmelman/Twitter]