Till painting under fire at NY museum

9-inch marble statue could sell for $3mn at auction

A man looks at a model of planet Earth as he visits an exhibition in the House of Brandenburg-Prussian History in Potsdam, eastern Germany. (AP)

NEW YORK, March 25, (Agencies): An abstract painting of lynching victim Emmett Till on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York was the subject of a weeklong protest by a black artist who decried the canvas as “an injustice to the black community” because it was painted by a white woman.

Parker Bright spent several days this week standing in front of the painting by Dana Schutz, who used historic photographs as inspiration for her depiction of Till, a 14-yearold black Chicago boy killed by white men in Mississippi in 1955.

Till’s mother insisted on an open-casket funeral to show the world the mutilated body of her son, and Jet magazine published photos of his corpse. The brutality sparked outrage that helped galvanize the civil rights movement.

In an interview published Thursday in Artnet News, Schutz said that when she made the painting last year, it was a response to “a summer that felt like a state of emergency.”

“There were constant mass shootings, racist rallies filled with hate speech, and an escalating number of camera-phone videos of innocent black men being shot by police,” she said. “The photograph of Emmett Till felt analogous to the time: what was hidden was now revealed.”

Bright, who engaged onlookers in conversations about “Open Casket,” argued in a Facebook Live video that “Schutz doesn’t have the privilege to speak for the black people as a whole or for Emmett Till’s family.”

“No one should be making money off a black dead body,” he said, demanding that the curators remove the painting from the biennial exhibition.

Bright’s protest found supporters online. A Berlin-based British artist, Hannah Black, sent the biennial curators a letter lambasting Schutz for using “black pain as raw material.” She called on the museum to destroy the painting.

Whitney curators Mia Locks and Christopher Y. Lew, both Asian American, defended their inclusion of Schutz’s “unsettling image” in the show.

“By exhibiting the painting we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history.”

Locks said any attempt to shut down a conversation about art “is a dangerous and slippery slope and feels to me like an affront to the belief in art and the capacity of art to hold all those complexities.”

Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney museum’s chief curator, said the museum took pains to publicly acknowledge the controversy.

Schutz, who didn’t respond to interview requests from The Associated Press, said in a statement provided by the museum that “Open Casket” was an effort to “engage with the loss.”

“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America. But I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. I thought about the possibility of painting it only after listening to interviews with her,” she wrote.

She dismissed accusations of trying to profit from Till’s killing, pledging that the painting “was never for sale and never will be.”

The controversy was the subject of false news reports. Several websites circulated a bogus letter purporting to be from Schutz calling for the painting to be removed.

Whitney patron Robyn Autry, an AfricanAmerican professor of sociology who came to see the painting from Connecticut, said viewing it was painful because of the subject material, but “artists can do what they want. That has to be the case. But then people will respond to it however they will respond to it.”

Elias Schultz, a 20-year-old student from New York, said it’s important to let everyone be heard.

“I don’t think that Schutz is doing any harm by bringing more attention to the story of Emmett Till,” she said.

The 2017 Whitney biennial exhibition is on view until June 11. It features the work of 63 individuals and collectives, about half of whom are female artists and about half are non-white.

NEW YORK:

Controversy

Also:

She’s small but mighty — and she could be worth more than $3 million.

Christie’s announced Friday that a 9-inch-tall marble sculpture, called the Guennol (gwehnAHL’) Stargazer, will be auctioned on April 28 in New York.

The statue of a female idol from ancient Turkey dates to around 3000 to 2200 BC.

It’s thought that the idol was related to fertility. About 15 nearly complete idols survive. The auctioneer says this one — like most — has a neck injury, suggesting it was ritually “killed” at the time of burial.

It has button-like eyes; a vertical, carrotshaped nose; a pear-type torso; and no discernible chest.

The work, from a private collection, has been on loan at The Metropolitan Museum of Art at various times.

HONG KONG:

As visitors sip champagne at Hong Kong’s Art Basel event this week and take selfies with replicas of deceased leaders Fidel Castro and Mao Zedong, a more urgent issue is rumbling through dealers exhibiting how big an impact China’s capital controls will be in the coming year.

Over the past six months, Chinese buyers

In this photo provided by Christie’s is the 9-inch-tall marble sculpture called the

Guennol Stargazer. (AP)

have faced larger constraints to get money out of the country, as the government increases scrutiny on capital outflows and steps up measures to bolster its yuan currency.

Typically, Chinese collectors had circumvented restrictions by using methods including underground banking but galleries attending Art Basel and Hong Kong’s Art Central exhibitions said getting money out of the mainland had become much harder.

Hong Kong-born Pearl Lam, who runs her own contemporary art galleries around Asia, said China’s capital controls had prompted many galleries to allow customers to pay in installments but the repayment periods had sometimes been stretched to up to three years with others not able to pay at all.

“A lot of us have got into problems because somewhere in the middle they cannot pay. So the problem is after you take a certain percentage and then they cannot follow up. What do you do? You cannot sell the painting,” Lam told Reuters in an interview.

Chinese buyers have been a huge boon to the global art market despite slowing sales in 2016, accounting for 20 percent of global sales by value according to an Art Basel Market report released on Wednesday. The global art market achieved total sales of $56.6 billion in 2016.

Buying through private dealers rather than via auction houses has also been increasingly common but non-payment and late payment remain crucial issues in the Chinese market, the report said, citing an average of 40 percent of dealers forced to accept payment terms beyond two months.

Hong Kong is a key centre for art transactions due to the absence of tax and an independent currency which is pegged to the US dollar. However the number of mainland buyers attending the fairs this week in China’s special administrative region was notably less, dealers observed.

Often wealthy Chinese customers have assets outside China which they can use to pay for the artwork but China’s restrictions on capital have become more blatant over the past few months, said Charles Fong, a gallery manager at Parkview Art Hong Kong.

“We can feel it. It has become tighter and more and more people have started asking to pay in installments.”