No. 7 Ceramic Art Research Base - Phase One / Atelier cnS - ArchDaily

The latest on the student protests in France, the art world’s AI problem, one-on-one with Rosana Paulino, and Beer With a Painter featuring Melissa Brown. The subway car rattles, shakes, and screeches as it tunnels us from Brooklyn to Manhattan underneath the East River. I hold on tight to a pole, while my eyes are fixed on an ad for the Broadway musical Les Misérables. My social media feed shows me only looting and vandalism in France, painting a violent picture of the largely peaceful student protests. Panicking, the art world’s blue-chip class shuts down Art Basel Paris early and flees the city. The Louvre also closes to protect its treasures. Loot a little and they throw you in jail; loot a lot and they let you open a museum. I get to a benefit dinner for an art residency held in a former bank. A peppy auctioneer asks the who’s who to open their hearts and wallets. Paddles go up and down, and a donation ticker on a big screen climbs to astronomical numbers while I admire the building’s huge stained-glass skylight.

The literary power couple is a historically seductive concept. Two writers sharing a life, their private and creative worlds entwined, each becoming witness to and critic of the other’s work. Think Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne. Or, less auspiciously, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Now, into this illustrious company steps a new pair: the novelist Marlon James and the biographer Nicholas Boggs, whose books have each been shortlisted for one of Britain’s most prestigious literary awards – James for the Booker prize and Boggs for the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction. Between them, they have produced two formidable books, each the culmination of years of work, and each concerned with the lives of Black queer men whose stories have often been overlooked. “I’m not sure what to do with it,” James says, when I ask how they feel about the inevitable impending “literary power couple” label. “I have all these romantic notions that we were like Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne or something – I don’t know. What do you think?” He turns to Boggs, who laughs. “It’s all very new,” he says.