Iranian Composer Pardoned for Writing Song Adopted by Protestors, Sicilian Town Looking for New Museum Director, and More: Morning Links for September 24, 2024

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The Headlines

IRANIAN COMPOSER PARDONED. Iran has pardoned musician Shervin Hajipour, whose song “Baraye” (“For”) became the anthem for protests following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini. She died in police custody after being arrested for improperly wearing her headscarf, reports CNN and The Associated Press. On Monday, the Grammy Award winner announced on social media that his case was “completely dismissed,” freeing him from a three-year, eight-month sentence. He’s among 2,887 other prisoners who were also pardoned or had their sentences commuted. Hajipour’s song features quotes from Iranians describing why they were protesting against their government. It begins: “For dancing in the streets,” “for the fear we feel when we kiss.”

GOOD TRIP? Stolpersteines, the little brass plaques on the sidewalks of European cities engraved with the names of Holocaust victims, also called “stumbling stones,” are polarizing Dutch people, reports Euro News. Initiated by German artist Gunter Demnig, stolpersteines not only commemorate Jews, but others persecuted by the Nazis. However, a debate has irrupted over whether 45 Dutch political prisoners, including communists and Christian and Jewish activists who were gassed by Nazi soldiers at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in 1942, deserve stolpersteines. In the town of Haarlem, stumbling stones are “specifically for Jewish people who were deported,” a spokesperson for the town mayor told The Guardian. Other Dutch towns, however, have established stolpersteines for non-Jewish resistance to Nazis. The debate has dredged up the contentious history of how Dutch police and security services colluded with German invaders by handing over lists of radical and left-leaning political opponents.

The Digest

The Sicilian town of Aci has put out an ad for a new director of the Civic Museum of the Norman Castle of Svevo, but there’s a catch. The future director must be highly qualified… and willing to work for free. [The Art Newspaper]

Photographer David LaChapelle has teamed up with Christian Louboutin and France’s national synchronized swim team for Paris Fashion Week. [WWD]

Christie’s has unveiled its new Hong Kong HQ on the top three floors of a centrally located, recently developed office building called The Henderson. It’s the third major auction house to expand in the city. [ArtAsiaPacific]

On Saturday, Tibetan groups protested outside Paris museums, accusing them of “erasing Tibetan culture.” The protests follow an editorial in Le Monde by researchers who allege the Musée Guimet and the Musée du Quai Branly are caving to Chinese pressure to remove the name “Tibet” from museum texts, and replace it with terms such as “the autonomous region of Xizang,” a Chinese designation of Tibet recently enforced by a 2023 law, or the “Himalayan World.” [Le Journal des Arts]

Paintings by Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, which were restituted to the legal heirs of dealer Grégoire Schusterman, a victim of Nazi persecution, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s in Paris on October 18. [Le Figaro]

Reviews are in for the Turner Prize’s 40th exhibition at Tate Britain, and they run the gamut. The Times’ calls it “once the enfant terrible of art prizes, it now feels dated and desperately struggling to be down with the kids.” Or there’s The Guardian’s more measured praise for “several arresting moments, in a show filled with cultural collisions, shifts in register and wildly divergent intentions. Business as usual, then.” [The Times, The Guardian]

The Kicker

TO STUDY, OR NOT TO STUDY. A recent conference hosted by the Art Students League unpacked pressing questions from artists, such as: “Is an MFA worth getting today?” and “Could starting your own artist collective, or going to some of the more well-connected, educationally focused artist residencies, do the trick instead?” Artnet News covered the September 19 talk (which included some of its current and former writers as moderators) and has reported on key takeaways from experts on the merits of graduate degrees, as well as what some of the top artist residencies in the US offer. Their answer to most of these looming questions? In a nutshell: It depends and don’t quit your day job…. helpful.