Act Up campaigners protest against the David Wojnarowicz retrospective at the Whitney
Although the retrospective paying homage to the New York-based artist and AIDS campaigner (d.1992) has been praised by critics, members of Act Up have denounced the backward-looking vision of the fight against AIDS, which is still ongoing.
Distributed pamphlets explained:
“AIDS is not history. The AIDS crisis did not die with David Wojnarowicz… We are here tonight to honor David’s art and activism by explicitly connecting them to the present day. When we talk about HIV/AIDS without acknowledging that there’s still an epidemic including in the United States—the crisis goes quietly on and people continue to die.” Read further via ArtForum.
Photo courtesy of Alan Timothy Lunceford-Stevens.
Delacroix exhibition most visited in the Louvre’s history
The exhibition dedicated to Eugène Delacroix came to an end on July 23, after having attracted 540,000 visitors in four months, making it the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history. With 5,100 visitors per day, the exhibition still did not quite see a daily visit rate as high as the 2003 Leonardo da Vinci exhibition (5,454 visitors/day) or the 2006 Ingres exhibition (5,200 visitors/day). The visit record in France is held by the Shchukin collection at the Louis Vuitton Foundation, which attracted 1.2 million visitors.
The Delacroix exhibition will be on show at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art from September. More information available (in French) via FranceInfo.
Eugène Delacroix, La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830
