Bodybuilder and Mapplethorpe Model Lisa Lyon Dies at 70, Billionaire Collector Bernard Arnault Talks Succession, and More: Morning Links for September 18, 2023

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The Headlines

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS. Amid the ongoing war in Ukraine, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee has added sites in the cities of Kyiv and Lviv to its List of World Heritage in Danger. Those sites include the 11th-century St. Sophia’s Cathedral in the former and the latter’s medieval section, the Washington Post reports, noting that the historical center of Odessa was placed on the list earlier this year. Not added to the list, which aims to garner international support for protecting historical places, was the city of Venice, despite experts recommending its inclusion because of flooding and mass tourism, Reuters reports. The city recently passed a measure to charge day trippers a fee on certain days next year. The Art Newspaper reports that Italy’s minister of culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano, responded to the news by declaring that “common sense has prevailed,” terming the call to include Venice “an unnecessary, purely political maneuver without any basis in objective fact. Venice is therefore not in danger.”

LISA LYON, the award-winning bodybuilder, dancer, kendo competitor, and performance artist who posed for striking photos by Robert Mapplethorpe, died on Friday at the age of 70 of cancer, Penelope Green reports in the New York Times. Lyon was also shot by Helmut Newton and Lynn Davis, acted in various films (including the 1986 horror comedy Vamp), and in 2000 entered the International Fitness and Bodybuilding Federation Hall of Fame. Her collaboration with Mapplethorpe began in 1980 after the two met at a party. As an artist, Harrison Smith writes in the Washington Post, Lyon “turned her body into a living sculpture while performing at art galleries and museums.” Her aim across all her work, she once said, was to present a woman’s body as “neither masculine nor feminine, but feline.”

The Digest

Artist Firelei Báez, the Dominican-born, New York-based artist known for elegant, alluring paintings that address history and mythology, has joined Hauser & Wirth. Báez, who has surveys on tap in Denmark and Boston, was previously with Kavi Gupta in Chicago and the James Cohan Gallery in New York. [ARTnews]

The Denver Art Museum nixed a touring show of ancient Greek art from the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida, over the lack of provenance information for some works, sparking a debate over museum policy. An MFA curator who was subsequently dismissed has been supported by some peers and patrons. [The New York Times]

Only 28 percent of U.S. museum workers are satisfied with the opportunities they have for career advancement (compared to 48 percent of workers), according to a survey of around 2,000 of them by the advocacy group Museums Moving Forward. About two-thirds are considering a job change. [The Art Newspaper]

For the first time, billionaire art collector Bernard Arnault, the 74-year-old CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and his five children gave an interview to an international newspaper. Who will succeed him? “It’s not an obligation, nor inevitable, that a kid is my successor,” he said. [The New York Times]

Miami Heat forward and art collector Kevin Love is the latest celebrity tapped by Sotheby’s to organize one of its  “Contemporary Curated” sales. The auction, on deck for September 28, will feature works by Cindy Sherman, Cy Twombly, Ernie Barnes, and many more. [FanNation and Observer]

A CLOSE LOOK AT TWO GREATS. Speaking of Ernie Barnes, in T: The New York Times Style Magazine, Adam Bradley has an in-depth report on how the artist became a beloved figure among Black Americans decades before the art world took an interest. “His work is really about joy and positivity,” dealer Ales Ortuzar, who co-represents his estate, told T. “Those are two things that have traditionally been dismissed in the art world.” And in the Financial Times, Jackie Wullschläger has a luminous essay about writing (this is rather astonishing) the first English-language biography of Claude Monet.

The Kicker

THE PAPAL ESTATE. The inimitable John Waters—film director, writer, actor, art collector, artist, and the list goes on—is the subject of a just-opened retrospective at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles titled that is after his infamous nickname: The Pope of Trash. The Pink Flamingos creator gave a characteristically wisdom-filled interview to the L.A. Times that touches, among many other things, on the value of shocking people. Said Waters: “Everybody can be disgusting—it has to be disgusting and funny.” Words to live by. [LAT]