French Students Take to the Monuments

One will open early—and close early—in advance of the demonstrations. Everyone is monitoring the situation. The post Will Paris Art Fairs Shutter for Saturday’s Protests? Watch This Space appeared first on Artnet News .

Showrunner Jonathan Glatzer wanted the tagline of his latest TV creation to be: “We’re so fucked.” He laughs. “Sadly it got rejected by the network. Hey, maybe I can use it for season two!” The show in question is The Audacity, his darkly comic drama about AI tech titans. Instead, it went with the more PG tagline “Move fast and break people” – a twist on “Move fast and break things”, the Facebook motto coined by Mark Zuckerberg. The Audacity promises to do for tech bros what Succession did for legacy media. Considering Glatzer is a former writer on Succession, that is no empty threat. This acerbic and all-too-timely Silicon Valley satire follows CEO Duncan Park (played by Billy Magnussen), the obscenely wealthy founder of a data analytics company. He’s a self-proclaimed “inventor of the future” who also happens to be a morally bankrupt man-baby. “Duncan is worth about half a billion,” says Glatzer. “Naturally, that’s not enough. He desperately wants to be a billionaire and ascend to what we call ‘God Mountain’. But he’s no God.”Like Succession, The Audacity’s scripts are liberally spiced with baroque swearing.

To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter. Ahead of planned protests in Paris and calls to demonstrate at the Grand Palais, where Art Basel is held through Sunday, the fair would not confirm at this stage whether it will have to close over the weekend.

Bridget Jones author Helen Fielding has launched a comedy writing prize in the name of her most famous creation, aimed at unearthing funny new voices from the north of England. The Bridget Jones prize for northern comedy writing will go to the funniest self-contained, first-person prose of 1,000 words. The format echoes the anonymous diary columns in the Independent that first brought Bridget to readers in the mid-1990s. Fielding, who grew up in Yorkshire, wrote the original columns and four Bridget Jones novels, as well as co-writing the blockbuster film adaptations starring Renée Zellweger. She said Bridget’s humour was drawn from the people she grew up with: “laughing together at our mess-ups; bringing the fancy and pretentious down to earth”. “There are lots of famous northern comics,” she said. “But this prize is for the comic voices of people who aren’t famous: just living their lives being quietly hilarious.”Writers living in the north who have neither been published nor signed with an agent are eligible to enter.

Those thus far unaware of Shovel Dance Collective’s bracing approach to folk should probably note that their third album is not much interested in breaking newcomers in gently. Everything in Readiness kicks off with a three-song suite that lasts more than 10 minutes and takes you, via a series of dramatic sonic jump-cuts, from a grinding one-note drone to a reel that seems to split the difference between trad folk fiddle-playing and the punishing squall of the Velvet Underground’s Black Angel’s Death Song. It then leaps to Tally Ho! Hark Away!, which sets a hunting song first collected in the late 1940s over a blast of what might best be described as ecstatic noise. It’s genuinely hard to work out what instruments are involved in the clattering arrhythmic chaos behind the vocal – there’s definitely a heavily distorted guitar in the mix – but the effect is weirdly euphoric rather than claustrophobic: a kind of purgative release after the mounting weirdness of the preceding reel. The artwork for Shovel Dance Collective’s Everything in Readiness.

Pia Camil: Bestia★★★★☆All sorts of secret, shocking things happen behind closed doors, but they probably pale in comparison to what’s happening behind the saloon-style screens in Mexican artist Pia Camil’s debut UK exhibition. Swing them open and you’re greeted with eye-popping paintings of lust and sexual freedom. A demonic, fanged creature humps away at a blindfolded woman in one, a blue-skinned being with a curly little pig’s tail performs cunnilingus on another. Everywhere you look there are bodies writhing in ecstasy, hair being pulled, stilettos being pressed into bare skin. Most of the time when you see sexual art these days it carries a big political message about exploitation and abuse, but this is the opposite: this is about the joy of sex, about liberation through desire, about a feminist reclamation of eroticism. In the middle of the room, a huge inflatable sculpture of Lady Godiva inflates and deflates, rises and falls, over and over. The whole show is like all your favourite erotic surrealists put through a Mexican art filter.