Parenting While Black: Titus Kaphar’s Starkly Powerful Works

A painter’s new show ventures away from the past, toward contemporary traumas in Black lives.
Source: The New York Times

Titus Kaphar’s paintings have always been blunt in confronting both the paucity of Black figures in traditional Western art and the tragic inequities of Black life in the United States. Mr. Kaphar accomplishes this by being a skilled realist painter adept at violating his medium in startling ways to make his points, whether by tearing or cutting his canvases, or covering parts of his images with tar or whitewash. His paintings are conceptual objects freighted with historical or present-day references that require little explanation. They verge on didactic except for the visual richness and emotional directness with which they examine their entwined subjects. With his show of 11 new paintings, Mr. Kaphar becomes the latest successful Black artist to have been taken up by a blue-chip gallery — Gagosian — acting on instincts at once admirable and calculating. And like other artists in similar situations — Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley and Theaster Gates — Mr. Kaphar has made a determined effort to give back. In 2018, he founded, with the entrepreneur Jason Price and the sculptor Jonathan Brand, a New-Haven nonprofit incubator called NXTHVN to train emerging artists and curators of color. Mr. Kaphar’s aesthetic efforts walk along an unusually fine line between art and activism. Among his best-known works (not in this show) is “Behind the Myth of Benevolence" (2014), in which a careful, flipped replica of Gilbert’s Stuart’s portrait of Thomas Jefferson has been partly removed from its stretcher and hangs to one side, like a drawn–back curtain. Behind this, solidly attached to the stretcher, is a second canvas and another layer of the great man’s personal history: an intimate portrayal of a beautiful young Black woman. Her image refers to Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman of mixed race who belonged to Jefferson, and whose six children were in all likelihood fathered by him.

Judge Says No to Putting Fortnite Back on Apple's App Store

The ruling means that Epic Games' massively popular title will remain off iOS devices while Epic's suit against Apple moves to trial.
Source: Wired

TAs reported by our friends at Ars Technica, a federal judge has denied a request from Epic Games that would’ve ordered Apple to allow Fortnite to return to the iOS App Store while the two companies await the outcome of their lawsuit. It’s the latest in a large legal battle between the two companies hinged on Epic’s Direct Payments in-app purchase system for the game, and it essentially means that Epic will not be able to offer Fortnite on any of Apple’s platforms for the time being. In her ruling, Judge Yvonne Gonzales Rogers said that any damages incurred by Epic during this time period are its own fault, because "this predicament is of its own making." The ruling, however, does allow products related to the Unreal Engine to stay on the App Store, as Gonzales argues that removing them would do significant damage to the health of the development ecosystem and marketplace on the iOS platform. The conflict between Apple and Epic began when Epic unveiled its direct payment option in the iOS version of Fortnite, a move in violation of the App Store's standards for vendors. When Apple removed the game because of the violation, Epic sued, arguing that Apple's control of the iOS market was “unreasonable and unlawful.” The case ongoing, and Rogers said in her ruling that it was too early to pass any significant judgment on Epic's arguments regarding possible antitrust violations. In an apparent response to the ruling, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney tweeted out sad lyrics from the Eagles song "Hotel California." The move, pulled straight out of a teenager's instant-messaging playbook, proves, once and for all, that video games are not for adults.

‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Tries a Risky Play: Betting Chess Can Be Good TV

The new Netflix series, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, puts a self-destructive female player at the center of a male-dominated sport. But how to glean high drama from all that staring?
Source: The New York Times

Garry Kasparov, one of history’s greatest chess players, doesn’t think much of most onscreen chess scenes. “You can see that chess is being used unprofessionally,” Kasparov said, speaking on a fuzzy telephone line from Croatia. “Very often, the positions are not making much sense.” Chess, a sport in which two people, usually men, sit opposite each other and barely speak or move, sometimes for hours, seems an unlikely screen star. But chess has fascinated film since the silent era, infiltrating thrillers, romances, comedies, biofilms, documentaries, classy literary adaptations and cartoons. Few other pastimes have inspired both Ingmar Bergman (“The Seventh Seal”) and Pixar (“Geri’s Game”). On television, chess has guest-starred on “Columbo,” “Star Trek,” even “Friends.” Which makes “The Queen’s Gambit,” a seven-episode limited series that premieres on Netflix Oct. 23, both familiar and unusual. A glamorous and wrenching view of chess, set in the 1950s and ’60s, it centers on the fictional character Beth Harmon (first Isla Johnston, then Anya Taylor-Joy), a child prodigy who discovers the game in a Kentucky orphanage. Despite punishing addictions to alcohol and tranquilizers, Beth, clad in Gabriele Binder’s elegant period costumes, plays and trains obsessively, rising through the rankings until she faces the world’s best. Which makes her something like the thinking woman’s Rocky. With its troubled protagonists and climactic matches, “The Queen’s Gambit” resembles other chess dramas. Its focus on a woman has precedent, chiefly Mira Nair’s “Queen of Katwe,” which Kasparov recommends. But when it comes to chess positions — the particular arrangement of pieces on the board — no other work rivals this one in terms of both number and painstaking accuracy.