Other Biden appointees included the artist Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, the curator Nora Halpern, the actors George Clooney, Jennifer Garner and Kerry Washington, the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, the screenwriter and producer Shonda Rhimes and Steve Israel, a former US representative for New York.
The inclusion of Begum adds a further political layer to the work: in 2023, India’s National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) removed significant sections of Mughal history from school textbooks under the guise of “rationalising” the syllabus.
It’s pulled in less compelling directions by the broad caricatures who now populate the edges of the story, including a marriage-crazed blonde hottie Mo humors until he can’t, and a recently green-card-approved friend whose gun collection seems considerably more expansive than his English-language vocabulary.
With examples including rebellious colonists’ proud adoption of “Yankee Doodle” as their anthem—the song was initially sung by British troops, to make fun of supposedly unsophisticated locals—and the emergence of blackface minstrelsy, Zelnik shows how white settlers used playfulness and humor to position themselves as the rightful owners of the land, to the exclusion not only of foppish Brits but also of Indigenous and Black Americans.
Hauser & Wirth also had strong opening day sales, selling more than a dozen pieces, including a landscape painting so geometric as to almost feel hallucinatory by Jeffrey Gibson for $100,000 and the 38-year-old artist Avery Singer’s Poker Players (study) for $575,000.
(Administrations at Trinity, Oberlin College, Brown University and many others have similarly rejected proposals to divest funds from companies with business interests in Israel.)
Krulik said applicants send in images of items for appraisal and get a ticket, but in-person viewing is necessary to determine if an artwork isn’t a reproduction or an oleograph, a print textured to resemble an oil painting.
In 2018, an anonymous Op-Ed in the New York Times, “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” described internal efforts to curb the President’s impulses, and became a book the following year, “A Warning.” The author eventually revealed himself as Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security.
The non-selling show, called Eye Contact: An Invitation to the Pinault Collection, is set to run from 22 January to 28 March, coinciding with the art world's migration to Los Angeles for the annual Frieze fair starting on 20 February.
A double-sided portrait by the folk portraitist Ammi Phillips from around 1815, found in a storage unit in California before being submitted to Christie’s via its public website, is a highlight of its Important Americana auction on 24 January (est $40,000-$80,000).
In 2002, then Vancouver mayor Philip Owen issued a civic proclamation to designate 3 November as “Joe Average Day”, acknowledging his efforts to fight homophobia and assist Aids charities such as A Loving Spoonful.
Pippa Shirley, a member of the reviewing committee, says: “The panels have much to tell us about links between artistic workshops and practices, the trade in precious materials, patronage and taste, not to mention the connection to the highly significant Fairhaven collections.
