Round-Up: Ancient discoveries, wilderness art and Koons strikes again

Art Spiegelman comments on Israel, archaeologists unearth a rare tomb in Greece and Jeff Koons is still making everyone crazy. There are all kinds of terrific essays floating around out there on everything from race, the media and wilderness. Saddle up and ride, it’s the Round-Up:

— Let’s begin with where the wild things are: critic Jen Graves of the Stranger has a wonderfully nuanced essay about Susan Robb, an artist whose project explores the meaning of wilderness in a hyper-connected age. If you read only one link today, make sure it’s this one. (Incidentally, a piece of this project is on view at the Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.)

— Turning to politics: Comics artist Art Spiegelman, the author of the Holocaust memoir “Maus” and former New Yorker staffer, produced a collage for the Nation magazine on Israel, which he describes in a Facebook post as “some badly battered child with PTSD who has grown up to batter others.” The comments aren’t pretty.

— Plus, a pair of searing, worthwhile stories about how whites view blacks: a story in the New Yorker about a crime study that shows the ways in which whites overestimate crimes committed by blacks and Latinos, and an op-ed in the Guardian about a controversial review of a book about slavery.

— There is a dust-up in the desert over the demolition of a Modernist building in downtown Palm Springs designed by architects Donald Wexler, Richard Harrison and Philip Koenig.

— And, it looks like lack of air conditioning has warped a work on wood panel by Raphael at the Galleria Borghese in Rome. (h/t Bloody Red Carpet)

— Speaking of Italy: a new report says that Italy is one of the countries that is doing the least to help identify items looted by the Nazis during World War II.

— There’s an insightful essay in the Awl by John Herman on “Take” journalism, which he describes as the “we should have something on this” impulse of so many media outlets today. Makes me glad to do the kind of blog I’m doing — where I can take time to do stuff like pick up the phone and report. (P.S. The GIFs that accompany this story are pretty priceless.)

— On to the good news: archeologists in Greece have found a tomb dating to around 325 BC that may be connected to the reign of Alexander the Great. The discovery includes marble caryatids and a pair of sphinxes. (Hyperallergic)

— Citylab has a good piece on why public transit decision makers should be required to ride the systems they govern. All of this makes me wonder how many people overseeing L.A.’s Metro system drive instead of ride.

— Architecture critic Mark Lamster reviews Tadao Ando’s addition and revamp at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. In the process, Lamster gives us plenty to think about on the purpose of museums in general. (Hint: It’s not about the art.)

— Locally sourced: Karrie Jacobs has a story about a Houston house made almost entirely from American-made materials.

— Nigerian poet and curator Okwui Enwezor will be the first African to head up the prestigious Venice Biennale next year. The Wall Street Journal serves up a profile.

— Mega art dealer Larry Gagosian is now serving sushi. Sort of. (ARTnews)

— And since we’re on the subject of money and art: critic Eric Gibson is not exactly enamored with the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum, describing an “atmosphere of cold calculation.” For that matter, neither is Jed Perl of the New York Review of Books, who goes further: “The Koons retrospective is a multimillion-dollar vacuum, but it is also a multimillion-dollar mausoleum in which everything that was ever lively and challenging about avant-gardism and Dada and Duchamp has gone to die.” Makes me think I need a sequel to my Koons poem.

— Totally related: The Broad Foundation has recently acquired a work by Koons that emits a “deafening, belligerent sound.” Because that’s just what the Broad collection needed — more Koons.

— In L.A., the migration east continues: Alternative art space LAXart is leaving its Culver City digs for Hollywood.

— Critic Carol Cheh has a piece over at Art21 that examines the legacy of L.A. Olympic murals (aka all those paintings on the 101).

— Speaking of murals: This 1970s Sheriff’s Department video about gangs in Los Angeles features a lot of views of vintage L.A. murals, including Willie Herrón’s Mercado Hidalgo mural in City Terrace and “Moratorium: Black and White Mural,” painted by Herrón and Gronk at Estrada Courts in Boyle Heights. (Both of these, incidentally, are still going.) Ironically, the “Black and White Mural” is used to illustrate a doc about gang violence, yet the mural explicity protests police brutality.

— Cue the Pac-Man music: Kill Screen thinks you should drop whatever you’re doing and watch this Japanese documentary series about the history of the sound of video games. Episode 1 is up and it is indeed pretty dang rad.

— And, I leave you with a pretty awesome stop-motion animation of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.” (@Studio360show)