[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/galiciaartcenter.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tGood Morning!<\/p>\n
TEMPEST IN A TEAPOT.\u00a0<\/strong>Spain\u2019s\u00a0Galician Center for Contemporary Art<\/strong>\u00a0(CGAC) is in open revolt after the\u00a0regional government appointed\u00a0Eva L\u00f3pez Tarr\u00edo<\/strong>\u2014a high school art teacher and civil servant with no significant curatorial or international art world experience\u2014to lead the prestigious Santiago de Compostela institution,\u00a0El Pais<\/em>\u00a0reports. (It should be noted that she does have a PhD in Fine Arts.) The move drew immediate and widespread condemnation from more than 1,400 artists, critics, gallery owners, and academics across Spain, who signed an open letter warning that limiting the directorship to civil servants would \u201cimpoverish and politicize\u201d the center. Among those speaking out is\u00a0Susana Cend\u00e1n<\/strong>, a PhD curator and lecturer at the\u00a0University of Vigo<\/strong>\u00a0who confirmed she applied and called the selection process \u2018not based on professional merit,\u2019 while\u00a0Alberto Ruiz de Samaniego,\u00a0<\/strong>a professor, critic, and curator of the Spanish Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale, said on Instagram that competing CVs showed \u201cmore solid and recognized professional, academic, and international track records.\u201d Adding fuel to the fire: apparent errors in L\u00f3pez Tarr\u00edo\u2019s CV\u2014including a claim that she worked for the Laxeiro Foundation before it legally existed\u2014and the revelation that three of five members of the CGAC\u2019s advisory board have resigned in protest.\u00a0<\/p>\n LEAKY BOTTOM<\/strong>. The\u00a0New York Times<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0has revealed that\u00a0President Trump<\/strong>\u2018s contested, no-bid contract to paint the\u00a0Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool<\/strong>\u00a0blue allocated an inflated 20 percent profit to the construction company doing the job. Typically, government contracts ask for a 6 to 12 percent profit margin. The legally challenged reflecting pool paint job and leak repairs reportedly cost $13.1 million\u2014seven times the initial price touted to journalists\u2014and are being funded by entrance fees paid by visitors to national parks. Seven million dollars of\u00a0National Park Service<\/strong>\u00a0ticket sales are being used to pay for the pool, and a total of $67 million of national park pass sales is funding an array of Trump\u2019s monument projects in Washington, D.C. The looming 250th American anniversary deadline was used as justification for rushing the no-bid contract. While Virginia-based\u00a0Atlantic Industrial Coatings<\/strong>\u00a0appears to be working on the massive pool, Park Service documents reveal the company has yet to figure out how to stop it from leaking, with no completion date in sight. Meanwhile,\u00a0House Democrats<\/strong>\u00a0have introduced legislation to block Trump\u2019s planned triumphal arch near\u00a0Arlington National Cemetery<\/strong>, reports the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em><\/strong>. The bill faces opposition in Congress, but a poll showed 52 percent of Americans oppose the arch, versus just 21 percent in favor.<\/p>\n \n\tLast year\u2019s robbery of $102 million in crown jewels from the\u00a0Louvre<\/strong>\u00a0is set to be adapted into a film directed by\u00a0Romain Gavras<\/strong>, whose most recent film,\u00a0Sacrifice<\/em>, starring\u00a0Anya Taylor-Joy<\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Chris Evans<\/strong>, will be released on\u00a0Netflix<\/strong>\u00a0later this year. [Le Monde<\/strong>]\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tA fabled but long-lost\u00a0Leonora Carrington<\/strong>\u00a0painting,\u00a0Villa Pilar<\/em>, 1940, has surfaced and is heading to the\u00a0Freud Museum<\/strong>\u00a0in London for an exhibition about the artist\u2019s time at a psychiatric hospital outside Santander, Spain. [Artnet News<\/strong>]<\/p>\n Florentina Holzinger<\/strong>\u00a0followed up her headline-grabbing Venice pavilion exhibition with a set of bloody, endurance-testing New Testament\u2013themed performances in Austria over the course of a single day, titled\u00a0Whitsun Play<\/em>. [Monopol<\/strong>]<\/p>\n King Louis XVI<\/strong>\u2018s gilded 18th-century bed at the\u00a0Ch\u00e2teau de Versailles<\/strong>, incinerated by French Revolutionaries, has been painstakingly reproduced after years of research, thanks to clues from rare surviving royal textiles and written descriptions from the period. [Le Journal des Arts<\/strong>]<\/p>\n \n\tA\u00a0Caravaggio<\/strong>\u00a0painting of\u00a0Cardinal Maffeo Barberini<\/strong>\u2014depicted before he became pope\u2014recently purchased by the Italian state for about $34.5 million, is on display in Rome\u2019s Senate building through June 21, where it can be seen for free, before heading to the\u00a0Palazzo Barberini<\/strong>\u00a0collection. [Artribune<\/strong>]<\/p>\n TAMING OF THE ARTIST<\/strong>. \u00a0Is art dangerous? Philosopher\u00a0Daisy Dixon<\/strong>\u00a0thinks so and wrote a book about it:\u00a0Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art<\/em>. Meanwhile, Chinese dissident artist\u00a0Ai Weiwei<\/strong>\u00a0has written his own tome addressing similar questions, albeit from a different perspective, according to Nadia Beard for the\u00a0Financial Times<\/em><\/strong>. Dixon argues that art shapes our morals and can even \u201cseduce us into doing the most abominable things.\u201d But Beard highlights where this line of thought fails, noting its assumption that art is like an easily readable form of \u201cspeech\u201d that doesn\u2019t require highly nuanced interpretation.\u00a0Ai Weiwei on Censorship<\/em>, on the other hand, expresses very different fears: that artistic censorship will mean art could eventually fail to shape how we view the world at all. The risk of \u201comnipresent censorship,\u201d per the Chinese artist, is what happens as culture is pressured into consensus\u2014which \u201coften signals a lack of depth or a fundamental misunderstanding of its purpose,\u201d he writes. The two do appear to agree, however, that censorship is not the answer. For Dixon, so-called \u201cdangerous art\u201d must be faced and understood rather than cancelled. Yet she offers a foreboding, if vague, solution that raises more questions: \u201cDepraved art is a many-headed monster, but one that we must tame rather than slaughter,\u201d she writes. We\u2019ll just have to read her book to find out how taming art differs from censoring it\u2014and what exactly that would entail.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/galicia-spain-art-center-director-scandal-morning-links-1234787739\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/galiciaartcenter.jpg?w=1024″] Good Morning! Controversy has erupted in Spain over the appointment of a high school art teacher as director of the Galician Center for Contemporary Art. President Trump\u2019s no-bid contract to paint the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool blue and stop leaks granted an inflated profit to the construction company on the job. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1960259","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960259","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1960259"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1960259\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1960259"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1960259"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1960259"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n\t\tThe Digest\t<\/h2>\n
\n\t\tThe Kicker\t<\/h2>\n