188-Year-Old Mystery of Photography’s First Human Subjects Solved

Nested in a natural lava cave in Mexico City’s Pedregal de San Ángel region, a sprawling, mosaic-laden domicile was once home to Juan and Helen Fowler O’Gorman, an architect and artist, respectively. The pair designed the icon of modernist Mexican architecture, called Casa Cueva, in 1954, although it was largely destroyed after the couple sold the home in 1969. At Museo Jumex, Álvaro Urbano presents an homage to the innovations of Casa Cueva, drawing on its gardens and the legacy that Helen left behind, particularly through her 1961 book titled Mexican Flowering Trees and Plants. Written and illustrated while she lived at Casa Cueva, the rich volume documented a variety of the region’s native specimens. For Urbano, these vegetal renderings became the basis of a new body of metal sculptures.

Dispatches from open studios events across town and the Tompkins Square Dog Halloween Parade. I generally spend a decent amount of time in Gowanus, but weaving through the neighborhood’s streets and buildings for Open Studios on Saturday really demonstrated how the stretch of water has shed its sardonic designation of “Lavender Lake” and turned into a bizarro landscape of glimmering apartment buildings. The canalside Whole Foods is one thing, but the “luxury” high-rises boasting an “iconic” view of the waterfront in its funky fluorescence are still a head-scratcher for me. Now, I’m neither a chemist, an architect, nor a physician, but I’m willing to bet that everyone probably would have benefitted from waiting for water remediation and sewage overflow prevention efforts to be completed instead of developers speedrunning the area’s sublimation from a Superfund site with a petering industrial profile to a bunch of towers offering studio apartments starting at $3,200/month. Unless there’s a large band of civilians seeking front-row seats to Gowanus’s next poonami … Because they’re literally installing permanent picnic tables and reclining deck chairs along the banks of the canal.

The fair keeps 'getting more and more traction,' a dealer said. Everyone is here. The post Art Basel Paris Comes Out Swinging With $100M-Plus Modigliani, Big-League Sales appeared first on Artnet News .

What’s the vibe in Paris, you may be asking? While the detritus of the weekend’s protests marks many of the city’s arrondissements, the art world is proceeding with business as usual, with events and openings going on as planned Monday night and Tuesday, culminating in the opening of Art Basel Paris’s Avant Première preview at 3 p.m. Around 10 minutes before opening, only a short line had formed to enter the Grand Palais, the architectural marvel that is home to Art Basel’s French fair. It was an indication that this year’s affair seemed a bit less busy than last year’s debut of Avant Première, the ultra-VIP event that now precedes the fair’s regular VIP opening days. That early observation proved all too true throughout the following four hours: aisles were full but navigable, and the blue-chip booths were brimming with buyers. The fair and the galleries had seemingly edited down their lists of VVIPs to only the most serious of collectors.

Institutions, especially well-resourced museums, foundations, and cultural organizations, have no excuse for relying on generative tools instead of paying writers. Reading art writing shouldn't feel like this. (edit Valentina Di Liscia/Hyperallergic; video Getty Images, photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

'I like the paradox of an object that has such a strong physical presence, yet whose image is almost entirely made up of whatever surrounds it,' says the french designer, who has spent more than a decade of his practice reworking the mirror through different forms and materials. sofia lekka angelopoulou October 20, 2026 9 min prefer designboom on googleThe mirror as an object to look and to be looked at ‘The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place,’ said Michel Foucault in a 1967 lecture, explaining that in a mirror you see yourself where you are not, ‘in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.’ He then called it a heterotopia as well, since the mirror does exist in reality, where it ‘exerts a sort of counteraction’ on the position you occupy. No other object in a house behaves this way, since everything else in a room is looked at while a mirror hands the room back with its viewer inside it. That duality, between what the object looks like and what it does to whoever stands in front of it, has given the mirror an unusual position in design.