A fair that closed its own doors.
Art Basel Paris (@ArtBasel) ended its fifth edition at 7pm Friday and stays shut today and tomorrow, ahead of weekend demonstrations in central Paris after protests over the cost of living and school conditions turned violent last weekend. "This decision has not been taken lightly, and the safety of everyone involved in the fair remains our utmost priority," wrote director Karim Crippa. The Louvre and other museums are closed today too. The week had opened with big sales at the Grand Palais, among them Julie Mehretu's Rise of the New Suprematists (2001) at $7.8 million with White Cube.
Flowers that evolved to glow like the moon.
Anna Ridler (@annaridler) has won the second Prix Arts numériques of the Académie des beaux-arts (@AcadBeauxarts) and the Fondation Etrillard, €20,000, for Circadian Nocturne (2023), picked from 210 entries across Europe. First made for Times Square's Midnight Moment, the work animates night-blooming flowers with neural networks trained on thousands of botanical photographs she gathered with botanists, some of them flowers she grew in her own garden.
Home movies from another planet.
New Work: Raven Chacon opens today at SFMOMA (@SFMOMA), the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer's first West Coast solo show, through Nov 7, 2027. The Naming of Names, a seven-channel video installation, sets silent footage shot by travelers in Navajo Nation in the 1950s and '60s, from the Prelinger Archives, to subtitles from Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and his own field recordings and electronics, so the canyons where he grew up read as Mars.
Waiting, counted in coins.
The duo Brognon Rollin, David Brognon and Stéphanie Rollin, won the 2026 Prix Marcel Duchamp, France's top art prize, with €35,000. With the Centre Pompidou (@CentrePompidou) closed for renovation, the nominees show at the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, where their coin-pusher machines are filled with sobriety tokens like those given at Alcoholics Anonymous milestones. On view through Feb 7, 2027.
New on http://catalogue.gallery: a studio without a computer.
In a two-part interview with Anika Meier for Right Click Save (@RtClick_Save), Rafaël Rozendaal (@newrafael) looks back on 25 years of websites, Endless Nameless on Art Blocks and 81 Horizons on-chain, and explains why his computer now sits in the storage room next to his painting studio in New York. "I'm not saying I'll never make digital work again. This is just the period I'm in now."
And a history: in the fall of 1970, The Jewish Museum (@TheJewishMuseum) in New York showed Software, curated by Jack Burnham.
In Seek, by Nicholas Negroponte's Architecture Machine Group at MIT, a computer-guided magnet stacked cubes while gerbils knocked them over; Hans Haacke polled visitors on a time-shared PDP-8 and projected the results live; and Ted Nelson and Ned Woodman's Labyrinth gave the first public demonstration of hypertext.