Art F City

The NFT Explain Me with Marina Galperina and Amy Whitaker

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 19:53:48 +0000

Beeple (b. 1981), EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, 2021. Non-fungible token (jpg). 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (319,168,313 bytes). Minted on 16 February 2021. Starting Bid: $100. Hammer price: 6.6 million. Offered as a single lot sale concurrently with First Open. Online, 25 February to 11 March

On this episode of Explain Me we do a deep dive on Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs, pronounced Nifty, but also N-F-T. Joined by guests Marina Galperina, features editor of Gizmodo, and former curator and writer on digital art, and Amy Whitaker, author and assistant professor of visual arts administration, hosts William Powhida and Paddy Johnson navigate the headlines generating news around this new digital currency, the basic definitions, and the potential and dangers it poses to artists.

Timestamped resources

6' 21'' Explain Me's episode Related Utopias: Bitcoin and the Artworld with Kevin McCoy.
7' NFT definitions and the blockchain
13 Do artists need to care?
21' The Guardian features Marina Galperina's Vine Show.26' Beeple Mania and aesthetics discussion - Liberal Jon McNaughton or early digital art maximalism in the style of Cliff Evans and Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung?
40' NFT platforms and markets. Massimo Franceschet and Sparrow Read's The Inconvenient Truth About Secondary Markets, Part II 43' Legacy Russell tweets about the toxic white male culture dominating NFT conversation. Follows up with a shout out to QTPOCIA+ and female-identified people engaging NFTs.
44' Who is the face of NFTs? Kenny Schachter. His NFT article on Artnet.
47' Kenny Schachter's "Scam Likely" on Nifty Gateway.51' Alternatives - Casey Reese's Artist-to-artist exchange with Bitmark.com, Feral File. Goes live March 19.
Also relevant: Reese's Medium article, Collecting Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
57' - NFT and blockchain carbon footprint1 hour 10' Reasons for optimism1 hour 16' Art pricing and Greg Allen's Facsimile Objects
1 hour 22' Amy Whitaker discusses valuation and commensuration sociological studies

Read and Watch

Amy Whitaker, A New Way To Pay Artists, TEDXfoggybottom
Amy Whitaker and Roman Kraussl, Fractional Equity, Blockchain, and the Future of Creative Work, Management Science, July 2020
Amy Whitaker, Art and Blockchain: A Primer, History, and Taxonomy of Blockchain Use Cases in the Arts, Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts. Summer 2019
Amy Whitaker, Hannah Grannemann, Artists’ Royalties and Performers’ Equity: A Ground-Up Approach to Social Impact Investment in Creative Fields, CMSE Vol 3, no 2, pg 33-51.
Memo Atkin, The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #Cryptoart, Dec 14 2020
Rea McNamara, How Crypto Art Might Offer Artists Increased Autonomy, March 2, 2021

Goodbye 2020, Goodbye R.M. Vaughan

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 18:31:13 +0000

Documentation of R.M. Vaughan’s “Super-Diviner” (2014) at Videofag, Toronto

Some experiences I wish I could recall with clarity vanish almost as soon as they occur. Artist and writer RM Vaughan's "Super-Diviner" (2014) performance marks one such instance: an unusually perceptive tarot reading I still regret not committing to memory. Held at the now defunct Toronto artspace Videofag, visitors were instructed to enter the storefront alone, take three cards from a pile of assorted divinatory decks, and silently slide them under the screen for a blind reading. After he was done, we were asked to rate the accuracy of what we were told. Vaughan couldn't see who I was or what I looked like, but still made profound observations. I gave him a perfect score.

Explain me With Art Critic Ben Davis: The Year That Wasn't, Part Two

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 16:47:47 +0000

In this episode of Explain Me, we continue our conversation with Artnet's National Critic Ben Davis as we take stock of 2020.

In this episode:

We discuss the biases of algorithm sorting
Ben Davis coins the term cultural inflation, a term that refers to franchise media properties.
We examine the relevance of ART CLUB 2000 the recent subject of Ben Davis' review, Why the New ART CLUB2000 Retrospective Offers Lessons for Today’s Artists That Transcend Pure ’90s Nostalgia
We name check Davis' The State of Culture, Part One.

Explain Me With Art Critic Ben Davis: The Year That Wasn't, Part One

Mon, 14 Dec 2020 16:00:34 +0000

In this episode of Explain Me, we take stock of the year in art with Artnet's National Critic Ben Davis.

What happened in the art world in 2020? We ask this knowing that we obviously have not seen a lot of art or attended anything remotely like a normal opening. But, a lot happened this year, even if we experienced it all at a distance.

Explain Me with Andy Adams of FlakPhoto: From Idyllic Photos to The Surveillance State

Mon, 02 Nov 2020 19:32:12 +0000

Image by Andy Adams. via: FlakPhoto instagram.

In this episode of Explain Me we talk to Andy Adams (@FlakPhoto on instagram) a culture producer, and long time digital director. Andy is the founder of FlakPhoto Projects, an international community of photographers that operates in a parallel path to the one Powhida and Johnson come from—the New York based studio and museum world. Andy, William, and Paddy began working online around the same time—2003-2005, so we start our conversation there. We track through the exuberance and possibility we saw online in the early aughts, the economic collapse of the late aughts, and fraught political environment we’re now navigating. Subjects include: The signature FlakPhoto style, the ethics of documentary photography, and the the postponed Guston show at the Tate.

Zombie Figuration Isn't a Thing: A Critical Autopsy with Antwaun Sargent

Tue, 04 Aug 2020 00:31:28 +0000

Jordan Casteel, "Within Reach", New Museum installation view, 2020. Photo: Dario Lasagni

In this episode of Explain Me, critic and curator Antwaun Sargent joins us to discuss the effects of the pandemic and Alex Greenberger’s Zombie Figuration, a confusing essay that appeared earlier this month in ARTnews. In the first half hour we discuss the disparate effects of the pandemic and general politics. Then we move on to art, zombies, race, and why art has limits. Listen on Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts.

Institutional failure, Trump's Agenda, and Meme-Driven Conservative Movements: A Talk with Nayland Blake

Mon, 29 Jun 2020 13:44:10 +0000

Boogaloo Boys show off posters supporting Trump at a demonstration

Artist Nayland Blake joins the podcast to discuss the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer, mass protests, and the resurgence of COVID as the backdrop for public art and how museums are addressing diversity. Spearheaded in large part by Blake, we discuss all of these issues through the lens of what people need and how art makers, art workers and arts institutions answer that need.

Revolution for the Family: Heather Bhandari and Nikki Columbus on Pandemic Parenting, Art, and Activism

Tue, 19 May 2020 15:35:43 +0000

The Abrons Art Center has paid all their staff and performers during the shutdown.

This week on Explain Me, co-hosts William Powhida and Paddy Johnson talk to arts organizers and activists Heather Bhandari and Nikki Columbus about the challenges for mothers during the pandemic, and the challenges for arts workers seeking to make changes to a system that no longer works for them.

From L.A. With Love: Thoughts on Online Viewing Rooms, Museum Layoffs, and More with Carolina Miranda and Michael Shaw

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 15:55:00 +0000

Steve Locke, Student 338, 2016, Hydrocal, galvanized steel nails, procion dye, shellac
approximately 12x4.5x5.5", $4,000. Link to item.

This week on Explain Me, William Powhida and Paddy Johnson speak with artist Michael Shaw and L.A. staff writer Carolina Miranda how quarantining is affecting artists, galleries and journalists on the West Coast. Shaw talks about the prospect of losing his studio of nine years, The L.A. Tenants Union and landlords who are neither friendly nor flexible. Miranda speaks about cuts at the L.A. Times and the surrounding museums, as well as her latest story on how corona is impacting commercial galleries.

Explain Me with Jonathan Schwartz of Atelier4 and Magda Sawon of Postmasters

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 17:26:56 +0000

Serkan Özkaya's Proletarier Aller Länder (Workers of the World) 1999, Image via Postmaster's Gallery.

In this episode of Explain Me, hosts Paddy Johnson and William Powhida talk to Magda Sawon of Postmasters Gallery in New York, and Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO and founder of Atelier4, an arts logistics company based out of New York. The discussion includes stories and conversations you won’t find anywhere else.

Explain Me: We're Baaaaaack!

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 14:59:56 +0000

Spring Break. Image: Paddy Johnson

Welcome back to Explain Me! In an effort to produce content a little more regularly we’re trying something new: no editing. This means a little more baseless speculation, and off the cuff commentary, in return for actual podcasts! Yes!

In this episode we discuss news, art, and trends seen at The Armory, Spring Break and The Independent. Highlights include:

Explain Me: Standing in Quicksand

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 15:42:22 +0000

We cover a lot of ground in this episode of Explain Me. That ground looks something like this:

The Velvet Buzzsaw is a bad movie.
Mary Boone is still awaiting sentencing for falsifying tax documents—a whistleblower could get as much as $300,000 in reward for the tip.
Dawn Clements is remembered at Pierogi.
Dana Schutz's first show since the controversy over her painting of Emmitt Till at the Whitney Biennial.
Chelsea is more woke.
W.A.G.E. is asking artists to withhold their art from the Whitney Biennial until the museum adequately address the issue of their board chair selling tear gas used on children at the border.
Amazon is reaching out to artists in attempts to buy their support. Listeners who want to organize against this kind of practice should attend the next Artist Studio Affordability Project meeting. Contact the organization for details.

Museum Board Members Fail Moral Challenges, Museum Exhibitions Exceed Expectations

Tue, 04 Dec 2018 15:58:04 +0000

Jack Whitten, Black Monolith II (For Ralph Ellison), 1994

Donna DeSalvo assembles some of Andy Warhol’s greatest work for his retrospective at the Whitney Museum, while revelations that Whitney Vice Chair Warren B. Kanders owns a company that sells tear gas used at the border shake museum staff. Soul of a Nation at the Brooklyn Museum looks at the history of political activism, while Jack Waters offers a mix of bag of awe inspiring abject art paired with groan inspiring sculptures and paintings. Jack Whitten at the Metropolitan Museum dazzles, Art and Conspiracy flops, and Amazon is going to drive Queens residents out of their homes. Podcast and relevant links below.

Art F City Launches PARADE, A New Programming Arm Focused on Creating Civically Engaged Art

Thu, 04 Oct 2018 10:25:27 +0000

JOIN THE PARADE MAILING LIST

October 4 2018 – Art F City is pleased to announce the launch of their new programming arm, PARADE, which supports and commissions civically engaged public art in Western Queens and beyond. Founded with a mission of fostering dialogue and connection through art, PARADE is co-directed by Paddy Johnson, writer, organizer and Art F City founder, and Nancy Kleaver, a nonprofit management arts education consultant, and community advocate.

Live From Forward Union: Four Women Who Are Using Art to Change the World

Sat, 29 Sep 2018 16:15:25 +0000

Live from the Forward Union Fair!

It’s been a rough news week. Between Thursday’s testimonies of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Brett Kavanaugh before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Kavanaugh’s near appointment to the Supreme Court Friday, many of us are exhausted. We would like a win for women.

Sometimes the quickest way to achieve that is to do it yourself. As such, this episode of Explain Me celebrates women who have made waves in the world of art and activism, through a series of interviews with four major figures—Mia Pearlman (Make NY True Blue), Jenny Dubnau (ASAP), Nancy Kleaver (PARADE), and Mira Schor (Selected writing).

Explain Me: What it Really Means to be A Mid-Career Artist: A Talk with LoVID's Tali Hinkis

Tue, 21 Aug 2018 14:43:44 +0000

LoVID’s Tali Hinkis joins us in the studio to discuss the challenges of being a mid-career artist outside of New York. In this episode we discuss how to navigate it all from engaging a general audience to getting grants and networking. A refreshingly frank talk about what mid-career actually looks like for artists and what it takes to get there.

We're So Not Getting the Security Deposit Back: DC Edition

Sun, 05 Aug 2018 09:48:43 +0000

Last October, we published the first edition of our zine series, We’re So Not Getting the Security Deposit Back: A Guide to Defunct Artist Spaces in partnership with Beltway Public Works in DC. Today, we’re making it freely available to all in the form of a PDF. (If you want the physical version please contact AFC directly paddy@artfcity.com)

The zine charts the history of artist run spaces in DC from the 1970’s through to the present, from garage galleries to traditional white wall cubes. It even documents the ring of sweat left in a tiny gallery after they hosted a packed Bad Brains show. It’s a thorough accounting of the artist run movement in DC and worth downloading for that alone.

The Affect of Animated GIFs (Tom Moody, Petra Cortright, Lorna Mills)

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 20:47:13 +0000

Tom Moody, Optidisc, 2005

Previously published at artandeducation.net (2009)

Since the early 1990s, artists have chosen the internet as a medium, an environment and a forum. While some internet artists also maintain a gallery practice, the conditions and conventions that inform meaning in online art remain in many ways distinct from those of the off-line artworld. Internet art — inherently ephemeral and infinitely reproducible — eludes commodification and largely operates independently of the art market.1 In the online environment where acts of creative self-expression are the norm, the boundaries between artists and not-artists that confer status and hierarchy in the gallery and museum system are largely immaterial. Even among niche groups of online practitioners who self-identify as artists, the culture of internet art regards the agency of the viewer on a par with that of the artist. In most cases, viewers are also producers. Many online artists, such as myself, operate through the medium of the blog format, which allows for a hybrid practice blending art production with art criticism, cross-promotion and dialogue.

Explain Me: The Case for Taxing The Hell Out of Peter Brant

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 20:37:15 +0000

In this episode of Explain Me William Powhida and Paddy Johnson discuss the horrific business practices of Peter Brant and Interview Magazine, a fundraising campaign at University of North Carolina so misguided that firing is in order, and the latest headscratching Creative Time project. To help us discuss all of this, and how the new tax code will affect artists accountant and painter Hannah Cole joins us.

Explain Me, Part II: Doug Aitken's New Era, Worst Show of 2018

Thu, 07 Jun 2018 17:22:38 +0000

Philippe Vergne and Doug Aitken at Aitken's show New Era

In Part II of Explain Me, William Powhida and I discuss the difference between relational aesthetics and social practice, the whims of the auction market and the perilous affect it can have on artist careers, and Doug Aitken’s train wreck of a show at 303 Gallery along with a handful of truly remarkable shows. Those shows listed below. Listen to Part I here.

Explain Me: Bags of Cash Help New Galleries

Wed, 06 Jun 2018 14:31:46 +0000

Murakami at Gagosian Frieze NY

In this episode William Powhida and I discuss how the Frieze Art Fair’s failing air conditioning units won’t help global warming, sales strategies for emerging artists, and galleries that have come and gone. Look to Part II where we discuss the difference between social practice and relational aesthetics and discuss the Doug Aitken show at 303.

Explain Me: Related Utopias—Bitcoin Economies and the Art World

Tue, 01 May 2018 17:49:39 +0000

This week on Explain Me, William Powhida and Paddy Johnson talk with artist Kevin McCoy about Blockchain, Bitcoin and the Monegraph. This episode is your ultimate bitcoin/blockchain/monegraph explainer.

LINKS

Monegraph

Seven on Seven, 2014

Public Key/Private Key

READING LIST

China, Crypto-Currency, and the World Order Tribute and Tribulations - http://wdwreview.org/desks/china-crypto-currency-and-the-world-order/ Digital Denominations - http://wdwreview.org/desks/china-crypto-currency-and-the-world-order-part-2/ Clone Wars - http://wdwreview.org/desks/china-crypto-currency-and-the-world-order-part-3/

A modern classic

Hito Steyerl - If you don’t have bread, eat Art!

http://www.e-flux.com/journal/76/69732/if-you-don-t-have-bread-eat-art-contemporary-art-and-derivative-fascisms/

Does Digital Culture Want to be Free?

How blockchains are transforming the economy of cultural goods

http://www.academia.edu/33838249/Does_digital_culture_want_to_be_free_How_blockchains_are_transforming_the_economy_of_cultural_goods

Show sponsor:

Explain Me: The New Museum Triennial—Two Critics Perform Their Own Acts of Sabotage

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 08:00:11 +0000

Wong Ping, Wong Ping's Fables 1, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong

In this episode of Explain Me, Paddy Johnson and William Powhida discuss the New Museum Triennial Songs for Sabotage. Both Johnson and Powhida agree this show has more of its fair share of bad art but only Powhida sees this as a dealbreaker. Debate ensues. The ad in which Pepsi and model Kendall Jenner create world peace gets a mention.

Explain Me: The Spring Break Art Show Part One and Two With Pictures!

Sat, 17 Mar 2018 12:59:04 +0000

Bobby Anspach's "Bobby's World". Image: Art F City

Last week William Powhida and I spent an enormous amount of time at the Spring Break Art Show. We had so much to say about the show we produced two podcasts and discussed many booths at length. In the first podcast, we give the lay of the land in art fair world (we discuss the character of other fairs, and SPRING/BREAK), identify themes, and get the bad art out of the way. We also collect a few pitches from those in booths, so those who couldn’t attend the fair could get a sense of what it was like. In the second podcast we go deep on a few booths and try to give a more thorough analysis of what we saw.

Hans Ulrich Obrist Interested in Time, Hans Ulrich Obrist

Fri, 16 Mar 2018 16:48:30 +0000

Hans Ulrich Obrist delivering his keynote at The Armory Show

The line for last week’s keynote lecture at the Armory Show was as long as the speaker’s resume; slated to talk was Hans Ulrich Obrist, artistic director of the Serpentine Gallery and arguably the most famous curator in the world. But since Obrist is a fixture at large art fairs, the huge turnout was a surprise. Having watched a few of his interviews online, I worried that the talk would be a pretentious ramble. My fears weren’t entirely unfounded, though no one could accuse Obrist of lacking enthusiasm as he spent well over an hour discussing notions of time, the archive, unrealized projects, and the Serpentine’s recent shows. Central to all of this was his belief in the freedom to experiment.

Carol Cole: Cast a Clear Light at The Weatherspoon

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 18:37:54 +0000

Carol Cole, "The Dissection of ANI", from the series "ANI (Anti-Nothingness Image)", 1993. Clay, embroidery thread, linen, silk, and satin; 10 5/8 x 13 x 4 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Exciting news: I’ve co-curated an exhibition of Carol Cole’s work and collection at the Weatherspoon with Emily Stamey! This exhibition is long overdue, so I’m proud to have had a part in making it happen. Carol Cole: Cast a Clear Light opens March 3rd and will run through June 17th. If you have a chance to see it, make it happen. You won’t be disappointed.

Explain Me: The Stink of Met Admission Hikes Endures

Wed, 21 Feb 2018 14:26:11 +0000

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Back in January, William Powhida and I recorded an episode of Explain Me on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new admission policy. Earlier that month, the museum known for housing some of the world’s greatest treasures announced its admission price would no longer remain “pay-as-you-wish”. As of March 1st, their suggested admission, $25 will become mandatory for anyone living outside of New York State. Children under 12 get in for free.

How The New Tax Bill Affects Freelancers

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 15:24:42 +0000

It’s 2018, and you are likely starting to think about your taxes. You may also be wondering what’s in the newly passed tax legislation (officially the “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” or TCJA) and how it’s going to affect you. Here is some help, specifically targeted for freelancers and creative economy workers.

To be clear, the 2017 taxes you file in the next few months will be based on the rules you already know. In other words, the old tax laws apply to the 2017 taxes you will file this year. The TCJA applies to 2018 and beyond, so this is for your planning for the coming year.

Explain Me: What Curators Really Think—A Cringe Worthy Report

Fri, 29 Dec 2017 17:02:56 +0000

Installation view, Maryam Hoseini, Of Strangers and Parrots, Rachel Uffner Gallery

On this episode of Explain Me we discuss a disastrous curator conference at SVA titled “Curatorial Activism and the Politics of Shock”, the Miami art fairs, and three shows— “Talon Rouge: Six Mexican Artists Revisit José Juan Tablada and His New York Circle” at PROXYCO, “Johnny Abrahams: Threnody” at The Hole and “Molly Zuckerman-Hartung: Learning Artist” and “Maryam Hoseini Of Strangers and Parrots” at Rachel Uffner.

From Donald Trump's Lips to Future Clown's Hips: Time to Resign!

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 15:11:25 +0000

It’s a miserable day in American history. Republicans have passed a bill that will give corporations and wealthy millionaires massive tax cuts while reducing the services for virtually everyone else. They’ve included enrichment provisions that will benefit the president and senators who have been on the fence, and by lying to the American people. Previously, we’ve had presidents who wouldn’t condone, let alone encourage such actions. But this year, we have Donald Trump in office, a pathological liar, narcissist and mentally unstable dotard intent on leading us off a cliff. Naturally, he’s happy to sign a bill that benefits only him and his rich colleagues.

Irena Jurek Interviews Billy Grant: One-Time Pyromaniac, Now Artist with a Drill

Wed, 20 Dec 2017 14:24:43 +0000

Installation view

Billy Grant’s art practice is expansive. He works in virtually every medium from painting, drawing and collage to sculpture, video, and performance. He collaborates constantly—his best known collaborative effort with the Virginia based art collective Dearraindrop which ran from 2001 to 2009. (Grant was one of three members of the group that included his sister Laura Grant and their friend Joe Grillo, and had originally been part of the collective Paperrad, in Boston.) In short, he is a force.

Call for Submissions: We're So Not Getting Our Security Deposit Back, Baltimore Edition

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 14:42:17 +0000

Michael Dotson, Curves, Installation view, NUDASHANK

Attention Baltimore artists and organizers! Art F City is compiling our second city-specific zine archiving defunct artist spaces. For our first edition, we focused on Washington DC, and for our second we’ll be focusing on Baltimore. That means if you’ve run an art space in the Baltimore area that is no longer in operation, we want to hear from you. We want your story and your space in our zine. So fill out our survey, put together some pictures (300 dpi is best if you have it) and send it to submissions@artfcity.com by January 15th. The full call below.

Gentrification, Income Inequality and Donald Trump Baby Turds

Fri, 24 Nov 2017 19:24:09 +0000

The Museum of Human Achievement's Trump Babies. Image via: Leslie Moody Castr

In this episode of Explain Me William Powhida and Paddy Johnson talk about the 450 million dollar Leonardo Da Vinci of disputed authenticity and the Boyle Heights activists who follow artist Laura Owen’s from L.A. to New York to protest her non-profit 365 Mission while she visited The Whitney. Activists believe the presence of her gallery will lead to displacement. Additionally, we discuss the exhibitions listed below.

The AFC Paddle8 Auction Launches!

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 11:07:11 +0000

William Powhida

Charity auctions are a great way to acquire art while supporting the arts organizations you love. So, if you’ve listened to our new podcast, “Explain Me” hosted by yours truly (Paddy Johnson) and artist William Powhida, or would like to see “We’re So Not Getting the Security Deposit Back: A Guide to Defunct Artist Spaces” come to your town, consider bidding in our paddle8 auction. William Powhida has donated a letterpress print (shown above) that will directly benefit the production of our podcast, Richard Kern has offered a butt, Zoe Crosher’s photograph from her Manifest Destiny Billboard Project is damn near canonical (and missing a bid), and there are plenty of other artists to chose from. The auction ends November 14th at 5 pm, so get your bids in now!

Explain Me with Kenny Schachter: How Trumpian is the Art World?

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 16:32:52 +0000

This week on Explain Me, William Powhida and I talk to Kenny Schachter about the art world and it’s problem with truth. In addition to a bunch of talk about the upper tier—Schachter’s speciality—we grill him on the troubles of the middle tier, which he mostly describes as cyclical and thus not as bad as they seem. Tune in for the back and forth on this—we disagreed. We also discuss the market for Yayoi Kusama, Joe Bradley, Israel Lund, and a slew of unnamed middle tier artists trying to make a go of it in an unfriendly market environment.

Opera Virtuoso Hasn't Yet Recovered from Schroom Trip

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 14:38:20 +0000

The only thing online opera star (and AFC benefit host) Joseph Keckler needs to complete his persona is a massive following of rabid internet followers he can manipulate for his own evil ends. Today, he came one step closer to achieving AFC's goal for the performer by releasing a sequel to "Shroom Aria" called "Strangers from the Internet". In it, he regals his earlier reckless behavior on schrooms, where he invited online strangers into his home but no one came. Several years later, still reeling from the trip, he imagines a scenario in which these same strangers try to break into his house.

Keckler casts himself as an out-of-touch lord living in an opulent Victorian mansion who refuses to accept the presence of the rabble—youtube commenters, twitter trolls, etc—to his own great peril. Eventually, reality breaks down the doors. Performer Sheila Plummer (who bears a striking resemblance to Louise Fletcher), and a rag tag group of internet misfits find their way into the mansion and threaten attack.

I'll let the video fill in the rest of the details, but you get the picture. It's funny and not altogether unrelated to our current political climate. A one to one relationship isn't meant to be read, but it's hard not to see parallels between Keckler's story and America's billionaires, who disconnected from civil life are now under siege online. Keckler has his finger on the pulse.

Proving Craigslist is not yet dead, the performer managed to find and hire actual strangers from the internet through the free listing service and other online platforms. Each recorded their separate parts alone—the music was composed by Keckler and arranged by Patrick Grant—and were then assembled by producer Isaac Levine. Other actors and singers were cast from the students and faculty at The University of Michigan. Keckler’s new video precedes the release of his of his new essay collection Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World. It’s published by Turtle Point Press and comes out November 20, 2017.

The New "Explain Me"s: Monsters and Monstahs in the House

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 14:53:57 +0000

Omer Fast installation at James Cohan Gallery

The new Explain Me podcasts have dropped! This week William Powhida and I did more than we anticipated, so there are two podcasts. The first is a discussion with L.A.Times Staff Writer Carolina A. Miranda (also known as @cmonstah on Twitter) about what David Geffen’s $150 million donation to The Los Angeles County Museum of Art means to the institution. We get into the politics of architecture and discuss speculation over where Geffen’s own collection will land. Later we discuss the recent anti-gentrification protests in Boyle Heights, and how their take-no-prisoners approach has forced one gallery, PSSST to close. Long story short, when it comes to the LA art scene, Miranda is pretty much the most informed human being on the planet. So, we had her on the show. Listen to the podcast below, on Stitcher, and on iTunes.

A Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Spaces (DC Edition) Launches This Thursday!

Wed, 04 Oct 2017 08:30:14 +0000

Thursday, October 5th 6-8 PM Washington Project for the Arts 2124 8th St NW

Which 30-year-old DC art space got its start by petitioning Mayor Walter Washington to take over a room filled with broken parking meters

Which nonprofit gallery dedicated to women in the arts opened its doors in a former doctor’s office located inside a leaky English basement apartment?

To find out, join us for the release of We Are SO Not Getting the Security Deposit Back; a Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Space s (DC Edition). This zine is is the first of a series conceived by the NYC-based art blog Art F City, and co-published by the DC-based artist initiative Beltway Public Works with curator Blair Murphy. It documents spaces from the 1970s to the near present, and includes long-running entities like Market 5 Gallery and the Washington Women’s Art Center, and short-term projects such as FLEX, which ran for two days in an unrented ground-floor retail space. Publishing these stories makes visible the role of artist-run spaces in the cultural fabric of the city. As Paddy Johnson writes, projects like these, “made with love and tears” are “the ones least likely to be archived — and most precious to us.”

Introducing "Explain Me", a Podcast with Paddy Johnson and William Powhida

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:27:53 +0000

Good evening! Hello! I started a podcast with artist William Powhida! You read that right. This right here is the inaugural episode of “Explain Me”, an art podcast that talks about the latest art news and exhibitions through the lens of politics, money and the moral of responsibility of artists. To do this, we bring together the point of view of an artist and a critic, a perspective you won’t get anywhere else.

Catbox Contemporary: It Looks Different in Person

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 09:30:56 +0000

Irena Jurek, "Dirty Little Secret", installation view

The idea for Catbox Contemporary had been percolating for years. Founder and artist Philip Hinge hatched the idea of starting a miniature gallery just after he finished grad school at VCU in 2014. The plan was to launch exhibitions inside one of two kitty apartments in his cat tree. But it wasn’t until January 2017 that he opened the gallery in his Ridgewood apartment.

The Backyard Biennial: A Biennial Run on Zero Dollars

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 17:19:52 +0000

With the news that Documenta14 director Adam Szymczyk has led the massive 50-million dollar budget quinquennial into more than 8 million dollars of debt, it may be heartening to hear that there are other similarly named events that have managed to stay well under budget. Take The Backyard Biennial, which launches tonight (amongst the chaos that is Bushwick Open Studios) and runs through next weekend. According to Patrice Helmar, the organizer of the event, and proprietor of the backyard venue in Ridgewood Queens, the entire show was put on with a budget of zero dollars. The biennial includes the work of over 60 artists and takes place in queens.

Limited Posting Resumes Next Week

Fri, 15 Sep 2017 15:52:21 +0000

It's 85 degrees out right now, but we might as well admit it's not summer any more. All of which is to say, it's time to get back to work. As such, we'll be resuming limited posting next week. By that I mean you can expect the blog to be updated about once a week with reviews and opinion posts by yours truly, along with any announcements of events we're launching. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, I'm continuing to work on a few projects we'll be announcing soon. I can't wait for that!

So keep your eyes peeled, and in the interim enjoy the limited posting. I promise to deliver only the best of what I’ve become known for: articles that are full of unfettered opinion, and copyediting errors—typically published at least a day later than I’d hoped.

Posting Notice: The Long Days of Summer

Tue, 01 Aug 2017 18:20:00 +0000

We’re taking a short break for the month of August so we can plan for the new season. We’ve got a lot up our sleeves and we can’t wait to tell you about it. Look for us in September for some big announcements. See you then!

GIF of the Day: TAN MOM!

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:22:40 +0000

Watching the heinous dumpster fire that is the American news these days, sometimes it’s nice to reminisce about a more innocently crispy orange-faced villain from the news cycle’s simpler times. Remember Patricia Krentil, a.k.a Tan Mom? Her fifteen minutes of fame may have been shorter than her toddler’s sessions in the tanning bed, but boy did she leave behind a legacy.

For starters, her attempt to cling to fame with this insanely ill-conceived music video:

L.A. Art Diary: The Final Entry

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 21:06:54 +0000

Doug Crocco

This is my last entry from L.A. I’ll explain why later, but basically I realized it was not the city for me, despite the past month+ of adventures I’ve had: Week One, Week Two: Part One, Week Two: Part Two, Week Three, Week Four.

Monday 7/17

#spiritual #technology #LA

Monday Links: Donald Trump is a Terrible Artist

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 11:12:58 +0000

Donald Trump, who has the drawing ability of a seven year old, produced a drawing of the New York City Skyline that sold for close to $30,000. It was originally made for a charity event in 2005. The drawing is without a doubt the worst presidential drawing we’ve ever seen, and possibly the worst drawing by an adult. And that’s an evaluation that comes completely independent of his incompetence as a president. The line drawing doesn’t reach the edges of the page, doesn’t indicate that Trump has any awareness of what Manhattan even looks like, and includes two swooshy lines at the bottom that maybe indicate water or are perhaps just needless flourishes. It appears Trump signed the piece in gold marker and of course the only recognizable building on the skyline is Trump Tower. [artnet News]

Rhizome is offering 4-6 “microgrants” for web-based artworks, ranging from $500-$1,500. Applications are due August 14th. [Rhizome]

Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield Massachusetts has come up with a reinvention plan that includes raising 60 million dollars to help it refocus its mission to include science and history as well as art. The details of this plan, however, are making The American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors—of which it is a member— very uncomfortable.The Berkshire wants to deaccession works to fund this new mission. This breaks with the association's code of ethics, which dictates that Museums not deaccession works unless the funds are used for acquisition and direct care of the collection. Seems unlikely the museum will be able to remain a member of the association if it continues along this path. [NPR]

Non-art neon is making a big comeback in New York, from signs to restaurant interiors. [Eater]

Brace yourselves, New York, Miley Cyrus wants to return to the Big Apple to have another art exhibition. [Just Jared]

Why are auction prices so high for Mark Grotjahn works? An abstract painting by the 49 year old fetched $16.9 million at Christie’s and his primary market works can sell for $20 million. In a profile in the NYT, it’s revealed that Grotjahn has a rare amount of control over his career, working in with multiple galleries in multiple cities, often bypassing dealers completely, and having the final say over who his works sell to. This power shows up in the piece, as pretty much every quote comes off as an entry in a competition to offer the most ass-kissy complement to the artist. Notably Grotjahn didn’t respond to requests for comment. We weren’t asked, but we’re a bit confused about how even the best business management could push the value of these patterned paintings up so high. It’s not that they’re bad—but only a few feel truly distinctive. [The New York Times]

Danielle Directo-Meston considers the gentrification issue in her family’s house hunt. Not a lot of new information here, but it has plenty of Los Angeles-specific details and conversations about strategies for preventing displacement. Possible suggested legislation includes a ban on house flipping within a year and another that incentivizes owners to live in their properties for ten years. [Curbed]

Into the Unknown is a science fiction show at the Barbican Centre in London that should get the sci-fi nerd in us pretty excited. There are 800 works, going all the way back to the 19th century, and Hyperallergic has a review and photos to show off the exhibition. The review, though, doesn’t seem very excited about any of it. It’s a flat description, that complains that Octavia Butler and other African American artists didn’t get their due, but it’s still a significant show regardless because who else is doing this? I say, give us a few more photos and let us decide. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Alaska Bear Cam!

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 17:52:36 +0000

Let’s not sugarcoat this week—the news has been terrible from start to finish, even though the Democrats have had some victories. So let’s take a break and spend some time with the beloved bear cam before Trump’s pick to head the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, pulls the plug on this too.

Friday Links: Everyone Has Money Problems

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 11:57:34 +0000

Probably the most salacious news broke late yesterday and has nothing to do with art. Trump's new Director of Communications, Anthony Scaramucci, called up the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, talked about killing leakers, firing his entire department to get the leakers, and described Steve Bannon, the White House's Chief Strategist, as a cock sucker. The New Yorker reached out to Bannon for comment but received none. [The New Yorker]
Healthcare lives to see another day thanks to three Republicans who voted no and 49 Democrats, making the vote 51-49. The Republican representatives are: Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Thank you. Again, nothing to do with art, except for how thousands of artists depend on it.
Oof. Over in Toronto, 401 Richmond Street, a long time location for artist-run centers, festivals, theatre companies, supportive arts institutions, artist studios, etc learned they'd be getting an enormous tax increase. The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC), which calculates commercial property taxes, decided that 401, which enjoys subsidized rent because they do not bring in a lot of money, should pay the same tax rate as everyone else on that block. Bad news for the art community. [Canadian Art]
Jerry Saltz gives MoMA's redesign a resigned thumbs up after getting a tour with the architect Liz Diller, a partner in Diller Scofido + Renfro. Diller talked about trying to solve problems of flow with Saltz, which he appreciated. Ultimately, he thinks Lowry is the problem, not the architects. [New York Magazine]
The Artist Pension Trust is having troubles. The business pools work by thousands of artists to provide them future financial security, and recently announced it would begin charging for storage. Many artists involved are not happy about this. [artnet News]
Governor Andrew Cuomo floats the idea of selling naming rights to subway stations as a way of earning additional cash. It doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me, though it may increase the disparity between "rich" stations and "poor" stations if they aren't smart about how they sell the product. [Curbed]
For those who missed Up Close: Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel at the WTC Oculus, I've got good news—Gothamist has great pics. [Gothamist]

GIF of the Day: Lorna Mills

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 18:51:27 +0000

Congratulations to Lorna Mills for having her gif featured on Wonkette and captioned appropriately, “Clusterfuckery. Heinous clusterfuckery most foul.” Hard to imagine a more fitting GIF for the political stories as of late, though I wish this one involved just a tad more ass fucking. Then it would be perfect.

Thursday Links: Let's Talk About Butter Sculptures

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 12:04:01 +0000

Photographer Paul Raftery has documented the bizarre architecture of Kazakhstan’s post-Soviet capital Astana. The city looks like a weird low budget sci-fi show’s CGI landscapes brought to life. [Dezeen]
BienalSur, a new biennial organized by the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero of Argentina, launches this Fall with 379 projects scattered across different continents. This biennial format is sort of uncharted waters—Buenos Aires is the hub, but the focus is on South America in general, and projects will take place as far away as Paris and Tokyo. [The Art Newspaper]
The American Alliance of Museums and the Association of Art Museum Directors have both come out against the Berkshire Museum’s plan to sell 40 artworks to line its endowment and renovate its building. “One of the most fundamental and longstanding principles of the museum field is that a collection is held in the public trust and must not be treated as a disposable financial asset.” [The New York Times]
Ralph Steadman and Ceri Levy got a profile of their collaborations over at VICE. They make cheesy activist drawings of endangered animals, which are relevant because Steadman used to collaborate with Hunter S. Thompson, a well-known journalist and founder of the Gonzo journalism movement. (Thompson’s significance is never explained.) Anyway the drawings look exactly as you’d imagine—contrived splatter, extreme poses, compositions that all sit in the middle of the page. They’re no Walton Ford, that’s for sure. But the author seems to believe that if Steadman played into artist stereotypes more, and was “weirder, hermetic, less astonishingly prolific, and more pretentiously grandiose”, he’d be recognized as one of the truly great artists of our time. Sure. [VICE]
Why is today such a slow art news day? (Yes, we saw the Dana Schutz controversy. Lay off her, already.) I literally just found myself reading this blurb about butter sculptures at the Ohio State Fair, fascinated: “The American Dairy Association Mideast says the sculpture unveiled Tuesday salutes chocolate milk as the official drink of the Ohio High School Athletic Association. It’s the first time the butter sculpture has included color. Cocoa was added for the bottle.” [Seattle Times]
Thank fucking God. The MTA board has pushed back against the authority’s ambitious new rescue plan that would include more fare hikes. The authority’s chief financial officer, Robert E. Foran, pushed for those hikes, but the board thinks the money needs to come from other sources. Andrew Cuomo, the state governor has promised half the funds for the rescue plan, but New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has resisted giving the authority the rest. The mayor needs to man up.
TRIXI studios has used new ARKit software to develop an augmented reality version of A-Ha’s “Take on Me” video. Is this the future of music videos? [The Verge]

NSFW GIF of the Day: Dick Riding a Bike

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 23:47:11 +0000

This is a GIF of a guy in a dick costume riding a bicycle. I’m not sure there’s much to say about this beyond the fact that the dick is pedalling with its scrotum. Cue the “Cremaster Cycle” jokes.

Highlights From The Marciano Collection

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 15:51:53 +0000

The Marciano Art Foundation has been the biggest pleasant surprise of 2017. As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, the new museum, funded by the GUESS Jeans fortune, delivers big-time with site-specific special projects from Jim Shaw and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch. Those installations are so enthusiasm-inspiring it’s almost easy to overlook the “quieter” collection itself, on display mainly in the third floor galleries.

That would be a mistake, because the collection—the bones of the Marciano Art Foundation—has been curated in such a satisfying , thoughtfully-paced manner that the viewing experience stays engaging throughout. That’s a rarity, unfortunately, in so many hangs of private collections, which tend not to have a specific focus beyond showing off their holdings. Here, though, there are narrative interests evident in the Marcianos’ collection, perhaps highlighted by the apocalyptic nature of the Jim Shaw show and the site-specific “behind-the-scenes” vibe of the Trecartin/Fitch collaboration—namely an interest in social tension or upheaval and works that reveal their process, respectively.

Andrew James Paterson on Publishing Decades of Wisdom and Criticism Today

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 13:11:57 +0000

Andrew James Paterson

Andrew James Paterson Collection/Correction Co-published by Kunstverein Toronto & Mousse Publishing

Every city should have an Andrew James Paterson. Pity we cannot clone him.

Since the late 70s, Toronto-based Paterson has produced a mountain’s worth of material in a mountain range long list of disciplines: from seminal New Wave music to Super 8 films, neo-noir novels to ground-breaking critical texts blending art writing and fiction (aka ficto-criticism), diaristic video pieces and digitally sourced art to performed lectures to concrete poems to performance poetry to theatre works. And that’s the short list.

Wednesday Links: Transphobia, The 00s, Chewbacca Mom Make Comebacks

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 11:45:05 +0000

Image of the day: France is burning. By Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The latest news from the surreal hellscape that is our nation’s government is that Trump is banning transgender people from the military. Doesn’t it seem like the right wing always comes up with a culture wars bone to pick when their political/economic agenda (Russia investigation, healthcare repeal, etc…) is under siege? At any rate, this is terrible, but if laughing is therapeutic for you, watch this Samantha Bee bit in which she provides commentary to rambling speeches made by potentially drunk Republican congressmen about trans people in the military. How is our country this insane? [Facebook]
Pussy Riot and Les Enfants Terribles are fundraising for “an immersive theater project” in which the audience would get to experience the Pussy Riot ordeal. That includes everything from their infamous performance in a Russian church to their crazy trial and time in a labor camp. Sounds fun? [Kickstarter]
Here’s a new, pretty comprehensive list of grants and loans for artists and entrepreneurs. Lots of funding sources on here we’ve never heard of. [Insight Personal Finance]
Remember “Chewbacca Mom”? The Texas woman who rose to brief, unlikely fame because she laughed so hard wearing a Chewbacca mask in a parking lot on Facebook Live? Writer Alyssa Bereznak does, as she’s been following Candace Payne via Google alerts for the past year. Here she has a timeline of the viral sensation’s rise and fall in public favor. It’s fascinating. The internet is a weird (and judgemental) place. [The Ringer]
Phew. After much outrage (including plenty of cute tributes from artists included in this link) Microsoft announced that MS Paint would NOT be disappearing, but will be available for download from their app store. [artnet News]
Rumors have been flying that beloved Baltimore dive bar The Club Charles will be closing, starting August 1st, indefinitely. Some say it will reopen following renovations, but there are few details here. The 66 year old institution is basically like the evening office of the city’s art/theater/literati scene. It’s John Waters’ favorite bar, among countless other filmmakers, musicians, artists, and drunks. I (Michael) will be devastated if this is a permanent closure. [City Paper]
The Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan 1994 Museum will partner with @popculturediedin2009—an archive dedicated to the drama of the aughts—to mine the decade’s pop-culture. I’m not sure what to think of this. On the one hand, these scandals may already be a source of nostalgia, and therefore hold some enjoyment. On the other, is it not too soon for this? I keep thinking there’s got to be a better use of intellectual engagement than this—particularly given our current political climate. [artnet News]
Karen Loew makes the case for the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, and looks at what other cities are doing to stop the spread of chain stores, closure of neighborhood retail, and “high rent blight” that’s been hitting Manhattan so hard. Basically, New York is way behind on protecting legacy businesses. This is something every gallerist or artist with a studio (or really, anyone who enjoys bodega food) should be getting behind. [City Lab]
Related: The Zapatista-inspired Eastside Café (which functions as an art/activism/community space in East Los Angeles) managed to stand its ground against gentrification and buy their building from the landlord when developers came knocking. Amazing. [Remezcla]
2070 photographs by Annie Leibovitz were purchased by a wealthy patron in 2012 and donated to The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. That was a boon for Leibovitz who was struggling financially at the time. The problem is, while the donor purchased the work for 4.75 million, it’s valued at 20 million and the Canadian government doesn’t want to sign off on the deduction. The panel tasked with approving the donation has accepted that only some of the photographs are art. Also, it seems the valuation of the portfolio is less than that of the individual works, thus creating the disparity of value. [The New York Times]
A score for Acquavella Gallery: Phillip de Montebello, former head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will join their staff as curator of special exhibitions. [The New York Times]
Applications close in four days for the free 360 Xochi Quetzal artist/writer residency on Lake Chapala, Mexico. This place looks beautiful. [360 Xochi Quetzal]

GIF of the Day: Creepiest Emoji

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 19:30:24 +0000

If you spend enough time looking for a “GIF of the Day” several days a week, you’re bound to stumble down some weird rabbit holes online. Trust me, I have seen many a GIF that cannot be unseen.

By comparison to so many GIF repositories out there, the originally-titled German GIF website “animated-animations.de” is fairly innocuous. It just kinda has a charming web2.0 vibe and lots of watermarked CGI images for free download.

Summer Camp: A Break For Taxes and Parental Sanity

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 14:20:31 +0000

I’m taking a brief summertime break from my AFC column in order to direct the summer programming at “camp mom.” I will be back in the new season with more tips and advice on taxes and personal finance for creative economy workers. In the meantime, in honor of all the AFC working artist parents out there, here’s a post on the tax credit that applies to summer camp.

Tuesday Links: Hélio Oiticica and Peter Schjeldahl Vie for Unpronounceable Name Supremacy

Tue, 25 Jul 2017 11:45:10 +0000

Following up on our Shark Week coverage, the Discovery Channel aired their “race” of 500 time Olympic Gold Medalist Michael Phelps swimming against a Great White Shark, and people are pissed. Obviously, they weren’t going to put Phelps in the water with a shark, but I at least thought there would be a shark. Nope. Basically, they had Phelps wear a fin to give the swimmer the same advantage the fish had, filmed him swimming alone, and then paired him with a computer animation. Lame. There were at least some good memes to come out of this whole thing though. Whomever the intern is that made this image—hire them. [The New York Times]
Hate read: a guide to New York City’s largest mega mansions. There are typically created by rich people buying two to three buildings, kicking everyone else out, and combining them into one home so oversized it’s hard to imagine most of the space being used. The list of owners living/creating mega mansions includes Michael Bloomberg, Madonna, Larry Gagosian, and Jeff Koons. [Curbed]
“I’m getting braver at saying the name of a sorely under-known Brazilian artist whose retrospective at the Whitney Museum, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium,” comes as an overdue revelation.” This is the first line of Peter Schjeldahl’s review in The New Yorker and we’re seeing grumblings on Twitter of how offensive this is. Get a grip. If you don’t know how to pronounce a name, or if it’s hard to pronounce properly for English people, it’s embarrassing. This is an admission that he’s working to learn, not that he’s revealing his implicit racism. If anyone has a right to poke fun at unpronounceable last names, it's a guy named Schjeldahl. [Twitter, The New Yorker]
Artist Sarah Craske found a 300 year old edition of Ovid’s “Metamorphosis” at a junk shop. She’s since cultured centuries’ worth of readers’ bacteria from over the centuries for an artwork. [The Guardian]
Why is Condo being described as an art fair alternative? The event is an gallery-share model where galleries share their space with foreign dealers for the length of a show. Is launching exhibitions now secondary to participating in art fairs? [artnet News]
It turns out Alice Cooper has had a Warhol “Electric Chair” painting rolled up in a tube in storage for decades. The rocker totally forgot he had it. [The Guardian]
Microsoft is killing off its 32 year program beloved of artists, MS Paint. Well, there goes that genre of art making. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: Super Micro Paint

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 17:37:15 +0000

Super Micro Paint is a web app that simulates doodling and animation from an alternate timeline in the 1990s. Basically, it’s a GIF maker that can make simple drawings resemble lego blocks, stained glass, LED lights, LCD lights and more. I spent two seconds on the machine and made, well, crap. (See above.) But I bet it’s possible to do better than a blogger pressed for time. In fact, I know it is—there are plenty of examples of good animated GIFs people bothered to make. A few below.

This Week's Must See Events: Yes, There Are Openings This Week!

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 17:05:36 +0000

Polly Shindler, Mantel, 2017, acrylic on canvas, 14 x 11 inches

We’re looking at another slow events week, which frankly is a needed change of pace from the insanity the art world puts us through nine months out of the year. I say this because “slow” means there are just enough awesome events for a person to actually see all of them. We’ve got Jaimie Warren’s opening at the Hole this Wednesday. If you’re not familiar with her work, think female George Kushar for the digital age. You don’t want to miss this. The Bronx AIM Biennial,opens this Thursday, and promises to bring together the most promising emerging talent in the city. (They usually disappoint, but we’re listing them regardless because HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL.) And last but not least there’s Polly Shindler “Retreat” at Ortega Y Gasset Projects, a show of quirky interior paintings we can’t wait to see in person. Hope to see you there!

Monday Links: Stranger Things Season 2 Trailer is Out!

Mon, 24 Jul 2017 11:22:11 +0000

Season 2 of Stranger Things starts in October and the trailer is out. Holy. Crap. I don’t know if my post-internet self is designed to wait this long for anything. Related: Strange Genitals.

Bubbles the chimpanzee, famous for having belonged to Michael Jackson and immortalized in a Jeff Koons sculpture, is now an artist in his own right. The 34 year old primate has taken up painting, and his pieces can fetch up to $1,500. [New York Post]

The stories the internet brought—The truck nut wars. For those who don’t know, Truck Nuts are the testicals truck drivers will hang from the hitch on their back bumpers. There is now a turf war between the two dudes who both claim to have invented the nutz. [VICE]

Here’s an opinion column advocating for painter Yulia Kuznetsova, a recent SAIC graduate trying to get a visa to remain in the United States after school. Kuznetsova is from Russia, which is bleak as fuck and a terrible place to be an artist, apparently, thanks to Putin’s draconian censorship laws. [Chicago Sun Times]

Following up on the Salvador Dali paternity dispute story that lead to his exhumation, the embalmer charged with the task reports that the dead artist’s mustache is still in tact. The results of the DNA test, which would prove once and for all whether the 61-year-old fortune teller, Maria Pilar Abel, is the lone daughter of Dali will take 1-2 months to come back. In the meantime, we’ll be waiting. [The Guardian]

More than 100 of Crocket Johnson’s mathematically based paintings made between 1965-1975, now online at The National Museum of American History. [American History]

Here’s the latest, most ridiculous skirmish from the culture wars: makeup artist Gypsy Freeman has lost her spot as the winner of an Instagram contest because reality television star Kat Von D found out she was a Trump supporter. Is that unfair to Freeman? Probably. But so is being deported/dying from climate disasters. It’s hard to feel that sorry for Freeman here, particularly given that this is a prize sponsored by an individual. Something tells me we’ll be dealing with bitterness like this for years to come. [New York Daily News]

GIF of the Day: Timo Kuilder

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 20:02:35 +0000

The GIFs of Timo Kuilder.

Friday Links: Three Links, Lots of Fucking with Numbers

Fri, 21 Jul 2017 11:09:10 +0000

City hall

A guide to New York's affordable housing units. Nice. But remember, landing one of these units is like winning the lottery. It's a fake program designed to make the city look like it's doing something about the rising costs associated with living in the city when in fact it is doing nothing. [Curbed]

Josh Baer questions the valuation of Artsy in his newsletter. An excerpt: "Artsy announced a new round of $50 million in funding - bringing investment to over $100 million - with a valuation that financial experts we talked to speculate may be as high as $2 billion. Artsy declined to answer our question about valuation but reported doubling revenue. They are staffed at 180 now. Since Sotheby’s is at a record stock price and still only a market cap of just under $3 billion - well you get our questions." This looks like the beginning of a much more interesting article than all the other fluff pieces this week. Most of what we learned from them was in the artsy press release. [Baer Faxt]

A good overview on the city's cultural plan by David Freedlander. The plan advocates for all the lefty stuff you'd think it would —"translations services for arts organizations, new funding to support cultural workers with disabilities, and a professional development program aiming to help people of color ascend the ranks of leadership at the city’s museums and art spaces." Also, it would "help arts organizations lower their carbon footprint and increase direct support to artists, particularly those working with and in historically disenfranchised communities."

Great, though the article lands on a rather ugly statement by Cultural Commissioner Tom Finkelpearl. “We believe there are cracks,” Finkelpearl said referring to the issue of gentrification. “And if enough people are talking about how the city is too expensive to be an artist in, then there will be a breaking point.”
“But it is not happening,” he added. “Artists are still moving here.”

GIF of the Day: Literally

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 22:15:22 +0000

Thursday has the absolute worst GIFs of any day of the week. (Obviously nothing can compete with Hump Day, but c’mon!) If I were Thor and this shitty day had been named after me, I would smite the whole damn internet with lightning.

Enjoy this pathetic Thursday GIF buffet:

L.A. Art Diary Week Four (Everyone Loves Eames, Erotic Art, and More)

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 21:12:42 +0000

Screenprint by Polkela, seen at Co-Lab Gallery.

In his fourth week in Los Angeles, Michael Anthony Farley discovers that there’s not enough to do on weekdays and way too much to do on weekends. Here’s how he spent the weekend. Everyone loves Ray and Charles Eames, and erotic art.

Catch up on Week One, Week Two (and Week Two, Part Two), and Week Three.

Friday 7/14

I am working from a Starbucks in a nondescript strip mall near a Gold Line station in Pasadena. I stand in line for my second coffee, and give my name to the barista, when the man behind me asks “Michael? Michael what?” I turn around and realize I’ve just run into an old buddy from art school in Baltimore who I haven’t seen since we graduated. We chat about how we both ended up in the same suburban California Starbucks, thousands of miles from our hometown.

He moved out here to work in visual effects on films. Now, he’s attending a graduate program at the Art Center College of Design a few blocks away, learning virtual reality skills for the coming boom in demand. He tells me that he, like all the contract artists who work on big blockbusters, is under constant surveillance by the studios to make sure footage doesn’t leak as it did in the X-Men Origins: Wolverine debacle. I immediately start mentally formulating the plot of a William Gibson-esque thriller.

Thursday Links: George Bush Painting Pop-Up, $50,000 Fellowships, and Keanu Reeves Art Press

Thu, 20 Jul 2017 11:24:57 +0000

Israeli student Rotem Bides has generated a major controversy after allegedly stealing items from the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial site in Poland for an artwork. The university has since cancelled the exhibition, and Bides may face prosecution from Poland as well as disciplinary action from the school. [The New York Times]
The Roddenberry Foundation is giving out 20 fellowships worth $50,000 each to activists fighting to make the world a little more like Star Trek. You can apply for projects related to civil rights, climate change and environmental justice, immigration and refugee rights, or LGBTQIA and women's rights. Hurry, applications close on July 25th! [The Roddenberry Fellowship]
Whoa. Keanu Reeves is partnering with artists to launch X Artists’ Books, a new publishing platform that will focus on "unconventional, interdisciplinary and collaborative" print projects. [Los Angeles Times]
The conservative Steamboat Conference is going to feature a one day pop-up exhibition of George W. Bush's paintings in Colorado. There's nothing particularly noteworthy about this beyond the fact that I never miss an opportunity to bring up GEORGE EFFING BUSH'S WEIRD PAINTINGS. [artnet News]
The final U.S. iteration of Now Be Here, the photography project that documents thousands of women in the arts at the same time, will take place at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. The project is a collaboration between the NMWA, LA-based artist Kim Schoenstadt, and D.C.-based artist Linn Meyers. Female-identifying artists, curators, and gallerists in the DC/Baltimore metropolitan region are invited to participate, and can register here. [Google Forms]
Police in Spain have recovered three out of five Francis Bacon paintings (valued at nearly $30 million) stolen in Madrid in 2015. They managed to track down the photographer who took photos of the stolen paintings when the images appeared on the market. The case is considered Spain's largest ever contemporary art heist. [BBC]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Momma Tried

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 17:33:48 +0000

I’ll admit that the actual GIF by Momma Tried is perfectly web safe. But it sets up documentation of a NSFW butt tattoo, that might just be the most beautiful inking I’ve ever seen. This image comes from their tumblr account, which doesn’t seem too active, but we’ll use this as an excuse to plug Momma Tried Magazine’s Instagram account, which takes glamor to a new unsettling level. In it, you’ll see a grocery store cake with eyelashes, a women wearing pearlescent teeth, and passed out dog in mardi gras garb. It’s really just about the best thing out there.

Wednesday Links: Damien Hirst Spot T-Shirts for Kids Discontinued

Wed, 19 Jul 2017 11:54:48 +0000

Okay, who is buying "I "spot" Damien Hirst" t-shirts for their kids and why???

This seems pretty big for creatives in Sacramento: $500,000 has been allocated to a pilot program that will fund art, tech and food projects with a public benefit. [The Sacramento Bee]

A kinda sorta rags to riches story about art dealer Peter Loughrey, who began his career as a stunt man living out of his van, got life-threatening cancer, and is now a rich art dealer. [CNBC]

Governor's Island will remain open for the fall for the first time ever. [Curbed]

Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation has awarded grants to $50,000 each to eight arts journalists. The prize totals $400,000. Winners are Phong Bui (publisher of the Brooklyn Rail); Charles Desmarais (art critic for the San Francisco Chronicle); Bob Keyes (features writer for the Portland Press Herald, Maine); Jason Farago (writer for the New York Times and the Guardian and founding editor of the magazine, Even); Jeff Huebner (contributor to the Chicago Reader); Carolina Miranda (culture writer for the Los Angeles Times); Christina Rees (editor-in-chief of Glasstire, Dallas); and Chris Vitiello (freelance writer and independent curator and organizer, Durham, North Carolina). Congrats - this prize is a huge deal in the media world, where writers are chronically underpaid. [Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Foundation]

Random thought: Do we really need op eds about Donald Trump's secret meeting with Vladimir Putin? There's zero new information to be gained from this and what is there to say about this past the obvious fact that this President is not operating in the best interests of the country.

Is art schwag in trouble? Damien Hirst's store Other Criteria has announced it will close and relaunch as a book store. (Good luck making money on that venture.) In addition to selling his limited edition prints, the store sold all manner of art on skateboards, plates, mugs, t-shirts and whatever else you could print on or mass produce. [Devonline]

GIF of the Day: Apple's New Emojis Are Ridiculous

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 18:32:51 +0000

Apple is always looking to diversify their emoji collections. In the past few updates, we’ve seen new pictograms specifying everything from lesbian moms to personalized skin tones for emoticons. They ditched the gun emoji. And most usefully, added a taco. But this latest update seems to be taking things in a slightly more absurd direction? We can now send each other djinns, elves, a T-Rex, zombies, and somebody doing yoga.

In "The Wig Museum," Jim Shaw Inaugurates An Institution For The End Of The World

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 17:01:52 +0000

LOS ANGELES- Someone once described L.A. to me as feeling “less like a city, and more like post-apocalyptic suburbia.” Given the doom-and-gloom tenor of national political and global crises, it’s no surprise that this place has become such a topic of fascination for the art world. Below its veneer of conspicuous consumption, it’s a city known for cults, secret societies, and a near-Biblical litany of pending natural and climate-change-related disasters. Los Angeles is where the American Dream was symbolically forged, and unravels splendidly. I can’t think of a better artist to inaugurate an institution here—one housed in a trippy, abandoned 1960s Masonic lodge, no less—than longtime Angeleno Jim Shaw.

Tuesday Links: Famous New Media Artist Jeremy Bailey Promises Personalized Exhibition in Your Web Ads

Tue, 18 Jul 2017 11:19:55 +0000

Baltimore Clayworks, a much-beloved ceramic studio and education nonprofit, is filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy after 37 years. Frustratingly, it seems like the board didn’t cooperate with the community in attempting to resolve their cash flow problems, and instead were relying on a real estate deal that fell through. [The Baltimore Sun]
Speaking of closures/real estate deals, The Hard Times continues to roll out the best headlines on the internet: “Record Store You Didn’t Shop at Becomes Condo You Can’t Afford”. [The Hard Times]
I guess this is what it looks like when a reporter who begins with no knowledge of the art world writes about the art world’s transition to online sales. That transition is tracked wholly through Artsy - when other companies are described they’re lumped into categories so broad they misdescribe them. Quotes sometimes come from sources who aren’t exactly authorities on the subjects they discuss. That’s just a result of not knowing much though. The story has an extra grating edge because it’s a tale of privilege (Carter Cleveland is the son of an art historian and financier) soliciting funding for a company that tailors to privilege (art collectors). AND the company’s entire spiel-using the site is so easy it’s “almost pedestrian”—contains a whiff of class appropriation. That said, the article does contain some useful tidbits — the company now reports $20 million a month in facilitated sales (whatever that means). Glad it’s doing well. [The Verge]
The list of amenities at this artist residency is pretty funny. Highlights include “List of extreme activities all around the country” and “Bulgarian phone number – SIM card”. Sign us up! [Art Connect
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house famously straddles a waterfall. Unfortunately, the rapids were a little too rough recently and caused exterior damage, including to the Jacques Lipchitz sculpture “Mother and Child,” which Wright himself selected for the site in 1941. [Architectural Digest]
The NYT has an adorable blurb about the unlikely friendship between Jamie Wyeth, Andy Warhol, and Archie Warhol, the painter’s dachshund. [The New York Times]
Here’s a slideshow of Columbia University’s new Lenfest Center for the Arts, designed by Renzo Piano. It’s an “eh” building. Functional, but I believe Paddy once accurately described the exterior as looking “like a pharmaceutical company’s corporate campus”. [Dezeen]
Politicians about to re-enter an election campaign need to stop getting on the train anytime a problem is announced and start solving the problems. Bill de Blasio doesn’t need to ride the 7 train to see a Mets game, he needs to fix it. [Curbed]
Speaking of Curbed, we’ve noticed Famous New Media artist Jeremy Bailey has taken out an ad that appeared on the site for his “The You Museum”. The project “curates personalized exhibitions that are delivered to you via banners on the websites you visit most.” We want this. [The You Museum]
Brooklynites rejoice: Deborah Kass’ “OY/YO” sculpture is back! It’s been moved to the Williamsburg waterfront. [untapped cities]

GIF of the Day: Game of Thrones Hairstyle Foreshadowing?

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 18:54:34 +0000

I’ll try to write this up with the least amount of spoilers possible.

The internet is abuzz with speculation that a detail caught by some eagle-eyed Game of Thrones viewers might allude to a dark plot twist in the future. Of course, fans backed up their theories in GIF form [h/t Buzzfeed]. And knowing GOT’s obsessive production values and attention to detail, it’s hard to not think of something as simple as a hairstyle holding some kind of significant meaning.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Virtual Reality Exhibitions and Cyberdefense Workshops

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 18:51:35 +0000

The tight stuff and the right stuff at tonight's special event with @babycastles --@di_mo_da @micahnotfound @moisesnotfound @akaprash @princessgollum and many more superstars 7-10pm Only @vrworldnyc #virtuallyexcited #actuallyexcited

Monday Links: Cindy Cheng Wins Sondheim Prize, "Art Barbie" Fails to Win Art Battle L.A.

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 11:19:14 +0000

Frida Davidsson, winner of Art Battle Los Angeles. Image via @fridadavidssonart Instagram,

There's now a booming outlet for fanfic, including stories "portraying a near future where the Trump administration has criminalized selfies, radicalizing Kim Kardashian as a freedom fighter for women’s rights." The Toronto startup Wattpad has moved the online subculture closer to the mainstream publishing world, and former AFC editor Rea McNamara has written a fascinating profile on the subculture and its transition. [NOW]
Designer Raul Lopez has deconstructed the uniforms of corporate America into genderless cubist forms and they're amazing. [Vogue]
The Broad's upcoming exhibition Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors is expected to be a huge blockbuster when it opens on October 21. The museum announced yesterday that they'll be pre-selling all 50,000 tickets for the show online on September 1st at noon. I'd be worried about servers crashing from that volume of traffic. [Los Angeles Times]
In other L.A. news, Art Battle just took place in the Arts District and it sounds like it was terrible. It's a live painting competition, which involved lots of paintings of pop culture things, dollar signs, hearts, and someone named "Art Barbie". [artnet News]
Wow. Add this to the bucket list: the late French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle left behind a 14 acre sculpture park in Tuscany inspired by Gaudi's Park Güell. Her "Tarot Garden" is populated by giant goddess figures and a feminist takes on the tarot deck. This looks really cool. [Artsy]
Hong Kong high school students just set a world record for a display of 1,214 3D-printed sculptures of buildings from the city's skyline. It kinda looks like a Won Ju Lim installation! (The 3D printing marathon was organized to celebrate the anniversary of Hong Kong's return to mainland Chinese rule... which has been a less than great thing so far for the city's pro-democracy activists, but that's another story). [South China Morning Post]
Congrats to Cindy Cheng, winner of the 2017 Sondheim Prize of $25,000. (As a curator, I've worked with Cheng before and can vouch that she totally deserves it!) Here, Angela N. Carroll, Bret McCabe, and Cara Ober discuss all the finalists. [BmoreArt]

GIF of the Day: Meet Arató András, Star of Many Memes

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 18:43:04 +0000

The Independent recently published a profile of Arató András, the enthusiastic Hungarian stock photo model who became the star of countless seizure-inducing memes. Apparently he became a model on a fluke, after posting a vacation selfie that attracted the attention of some stock photo photographers. The rest, as they say, is history.

Surprising, And Some Unsurprising, Findings About Where NYC's Artists Live

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 17:36:16 +0000

As of 2015, there were 56,268 artists living in New York City. That number is a record all-time high, despite our collective nostalgia for the “good old days” of pre-Giuliani bohemia. That’s actually a whopping 17.4% increase since 2000. These statistics, among plenty of fascinating others, can be found in a report released by Center for an Urban Future report released yesterday.

The most interesting part of the study breaks down exactly where those artists live across the five boroughs. For all the talk of Brooklyn’s booming art scene, no outerborough rivals Manhattan’s dominance as far as artist saturation goes. That’s not to say many areas of Manhattan aren’t hemorrhaging artists as rents rise astronomically. The densely-populated area comprising the Financial District, Greenwich Village, and TriBeCa lost nearly a quarter of its artist population—now down to a “mere” 3,989 creative souls. There are even less artists left in the famously artsy Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen zone, which lost nearly a third of its art population. And despite the much-discussed migration of galleries from Chelsea to the Lower East Side/Chinatown, those downtown neighborhoods collectively lost 17% of their artist residents. For anyone not living under a rock, the increasing unaffordability of those neighborhoods isn’t exactly shocking. But the other side of gentrification is where artists are moving in Manhattan—chiefly, North to Inwood, Washington Heights, and Harlem.

Friday Links: Dietary Restrictions of Warhol Thieves Remain a Mystery

Fri, 14 Jul 2017 11:47:39 +0000

Sir Carter and Rumi 1 month today. 🙏🏽❤️👨🏽👩🏽👧🏽👶🏾👶🏾

A post shared by Beyoncé (@beyonce) on Jul 13, 2017 at 10:10pm PDT

GIF of the Day: DNA is the New Blockchain

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 19:24:24 +0000

DNA is the hereditary material in humans and is also it turns out a great medium for archiving data and, um, making animated GIFs. The goal of scientists isn’t to make a bunch of short looped movies, though, but to one day use DNA as a biological recorder that will keep track of cells and changes in the environment. It just happens that the GIFs are a great way to demonstrate the idea.

L.A. Art Diary: Week Three

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 19:14:18 +0000

The Mackey Apartments

Michael Anthony Farley has been keeping a diary of his Los Angeles adventures. Catch up with entries one, two, and three.

Thursday 7/6

I meet my friend, actor/director/writer Liz Eldridge, at a bar in Downtown, where she and a group of friends are inaugurating their new band Red Reign. It’s a cover band dedicated to the repertoire of British psychedelic rockers King Crimson, circa 1974. They warn the audience, “Some of these songs are really, really long. If you need to leave, feel free!” They weren’t lying, but I stick it out. My weekend is off to a good, weird, and somewhat early start.

Friday 7/7

Nicola and I arrive at The Mackey Apartments, a gorgeous 1939 structure from influential Austrian architect Rudolph M. Schindler. The MAK Center for Art and Architecture has converted the building into an artist residency, and I’m immediately envious of everyone who gets to live here. The loft-like apartments are hyper-designed and minimal, but thoughtfully liveable.

Thursday Links: Goddess Statue Needs Head, Art Dealer Gone Wild

Thu, 13 Jul 2017 11:31:56 +0000

A sign that really rich people are getting richer: the public spaces in their new condos are decorated with art by the latest up and comers. These are the kind of stories that make me want to poke my eyes out. (Who cares if rich people buy things and why do they always have to buy the same things?) [Artsy]
A round-up of the nation’s “best” glamping opportunities. I had no idea Glamping was so expensive. Keep in mind you’re basically sleeping in a tent but one that rents for as much as $1500 a night. In New York, that price comes with an increased chance of getting lyme disease. [Curbed]
The Tate Modern has put together a show of black American art made in 70’s, 80’s and 90’s and it’s now making waves. [Reuters]
Something about this Joel Mesler confessions column reminds me of The Awl’s “The 40-Year Old Reversion” a story about privileged Park Slope mothers who do drugs, drink too much and cheat on their husbands. Mesler is looking back at a life riddled with anxiety, compulsive spending and regular blackout drunk binges, but then, as now, he does so through the lens of an upper middle classer. His problems are and were real, but are also clearly cushioned by cash, and it’s hard not to begrudge that. (It’s worth noting that the Reversion story is infinitely better, because it attempts to get beyond the experience of one person.) [ARTnews]
Amazon has filed a patent for underwater storage and fulfillment facilities. I’m a little skeptical that this plan is anything more than a PR stunt. They claim the facilities would help counteract “inefficient use of space”, because, um, what? It seems like management of an underwater space involves far more logistics in terms of getting stuff in and out of the depot. We’d like a Jeremy Bailey response to this please. [Dezeen]
Google’s doodle today honors Eiko Ishioka, on what would’ve been her birthday. The late Japanese visual artist has won a Grammy and an Oscar in her career as an art director and costume designer. [Al Jazeera]
Las Vegas is still waiting for its much-delayed art museum. In the meantime, galleries have taken to staging large-scale exhibitions as pop-ups in warehouse spaces. Now, the team behind the city’s forthcoming Art Museum at Symphony Park are trying to make some permanent gallery spaces out of old warehouses. [Las Vegas Weekly].
As galleries continue to drop like flies in New York and London, gallerists are looking to alternate models. Some are doing nomadic programming in other galleries and splitting costs/proceeds, some are doing pop-ups, online businesses, house shows, and even using a boat as an exhibition space. [The Art Newspaper]
Someone beheaded a statue of the Hawaiian sea goddess on the grounds of the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo. The sculpture by Fred Soriano is valued at $15,000 and the artist says it can be restored if the head is recovered from the thieves. [Ledger Enquirer]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Beard Boobs Shouldn't Exist

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 17:53:19 +0000

Okay, I don’t know whose face this is, but I wish it hadn’t been grafted onto this woman’s boobs. Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

Wednesday Links: Social Climbers and Liars Can Suck It

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 12:00:16 +0000

Thomas Campbell, having been forced out of his position of Director due to budget woes and inappropriate romantic relationships, tells the Art Newspaper he left because he'd done everything right and there was nothing left to do. Sure buddy. [The Art Newspaper]

Some art doesn't stand the test of time. A good example: Aire D’attente an artistic revitalization of an abandoned lot that grew flax, barley, and hemp. Police destroyed it after erroneously concluding it was a pot farm. [Hyperallergic]

Iowa City has a new 175 foot mural featuring fruits and vegetables. [Press Citizen]

Oooh, a Kusama infinity room of pumpkins! The Dallas Museum of Art has acquired it. [Dallas News]

Seattle's Mount Analogue is hosting an inflatable art show. [Seattle Weekly]

Are you fucking kidding me? There's an invite-only app that allows some New Yorkers to change the spire colors of skyscrapers. There's also now a black market for the app where invites sell for $100 each. This is so dumb. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Killer Angel 123

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 17:50:40 +0000

This GIF comes from Tumblr user Killer Angel 123. It feels like a fitting postcard from the internet if you’re feeling summertime blues. Isn’t #FOMO resentment slowly killing us all? I blame the advent of the Instagram “story” feature.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: A Hot (In A Good Way) New Fair

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 17:35:31 +0000

Rachel Stern. who will be presenting work at Crushed: The Brooklyn Dirty Book Fair.

While the big galleries are still at the beach, the city’s museums and artist-run initiatives continue to keep us on our toes. Case and point: the Whitney’s opening the first US retrospective of Brazilian art/activism pioneer Hélio Oiticica on Friday. Speaking of art/activism, there are plenty of opportunities to get engaged this week, including talks at SVA on Wednesday and SOHO20 gallery on Sunday. The weekend’s real highlight, though, is Crushed, the inaugural Brooklyn Dirty Book Fair. Organized by former AFC teammate Matthew Leifheit, we’re expecting that to be great. Artist-made porn? Weird performances involving cake? A pop-up exhibition of vintage queer zines? Check, check, and check! We’ll see you there!

Tuesday Links: African Filmmaker Assaulted, Chelsea Manning DNA Portraits, and Homeless GPS Tracking

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 11:28:58 +0000

Paul Fusco, from Robert Kennedy Funeral Train, USA (1968) © Paul Fusco/Magnum Photos. Courtesy International Center of Photography

Paul Fusco's photograph of mourners watching Robert F. Kennedy's funeral train, now on view in Magnum Manifesto at the International Center of Photography, is Christian Viveros-Fauné's must-see pick in New York right now. [Art Agency, Partners]
The NYT profiles Carter Burden Gallery, which only shows artists who are at least sixty years old. [The New York Times]
Brad Troemel is calling out Russian designer Vika Gazinskaya on social media. Her Spring 2018 collection, shown recently at Paris Fashion Week, appears to blatantly plagiarize his paintings. Gazinskaya has since admitted that Troemel inspired her work, but had not credited the references because she didn't know his name. [ARTnews]
Heather Dewey-Hagborg upcoming show at Fridman Gallery sounds really creepy. The artist worked with Chelsea Manning while the latter was imprisoned. Photographs of Manning were prohibited, so to construct a "portrait", Dewey-Hagborg extrapolated possible faces from a DNA sample. These are the results of that process. [U.S. News]
Whoa. South African artist Zanele Muholi filmed her Airbnb host throwing her friend, filmmaker Sibahle Nkumbi, down the stairs of an apartment building in Amsterdam. Nkumbi ended up in the hospital. The man is being charged with attempted manslaughter.[artnet News]
Cringe-inducing relational aesthetics idea of the century: Kristian von Hornsleth has attached GPS tracking units to homeless people in London, who can then be "bought" as "human Tamagotchi" and tracked by collectors for £25,000. Why are people so awful? [The Sun]
Xenia Rubinos' "Mexican Chef" is the danceable social justice jam of the Summer. [YouTube]

GIF of the Day: Adam Pizurny + GIF Apps!

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 18:11:41 +0000

Not sure how I missed this, but the New York Times ran a story in June listing all the ways you can insert GIFs into your conversations faster. These include keyboard apps with GIF short cuts like Google’s Gboard, and PopKey, plus the GIPHY website. Somehow this article ran without any image at all, though. We’re here to fix that with our own choice of GIFs. If the Times can’t pick a GIF, we’ll pick one for them! Thanks to Adam Pizurny, the artist behind this GIF (and previously featured here.) Woo hoo!

Why Mid-Tier Galleries Leave New York

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 13:40:32 +0000

Monya Rowe in St. Augustine Florida

As an artist who moved out of New York City, I’m not alone in finding new energy, inspiration and freedom. My move was from Brooklyn to Asheville, North Carolina. But when I noticed multiple long-established New York galleries also making such moves, it surprised me. Don’t galleries have to stay close to collectors?

According to four dealers I spoke to who had moved out of the city, the cost of operating a gallery in New York City was a major factor for everyone, though lifestyle was also a factor. Says Monya Rowe, of Monya Rowe Gallery “Sadly, NYC is killing itself with all the rent hikes.” Rowe ran a gallery in Williamsburg, Chelsea and the Lower East Side for 12 years before she relocated to St. Augustine Florida in 2015.

Monday Links: Text SF MoMA to Receive Images You Don't Want

Mon, 10 Jul 2017 10:48:42 +0000

This is what the SF MoMA robot thinks clouds look like. The photograph is by Paul Strand

The Art Southampton and Art Hampton fairs won’t be running this summer. Don’t worry though, in their place...other fairs will run. Good grief - can’t art fairs ever take a vacation? In good news, Bill Powers is organizing a fair called “Upstairs” which will be held in a barn in Amagansett. That’s definitely an upgrade on the standard fair experience the other Hampton fairs offered. [artnet News]

Arthur Jafa, an artist represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, created the video for the title track on JAY Z’s new album 4:44. [ARTnews]

Betty Parsons was a great, well known dealer but also an under recognized artist. John Yau reviews her show at Alexander Gray Associates and raves about it. [Hyperallergic]

New York is exploring a type of zoning called “managed retreat” in flood prone parts of Staten Island. These neighborhoods were gravely damaged during Sandy and now the government wants to keep some of those areas empty for safety purposes - hence the experimentation with managed retreat. [Curbed]

Here’s a breath of fresh air - art runs led by Marnie Kunz that aren’t being contextualized as some sort of relational aesthetics bullshit. (Yes, these projects exist and they are across-the-board dumb.) [Runner’s World]

Museums will do anything to demonstrate engagement in their collection. To wit, SF MoMA has a next text message program where you text them “Send me ___” (you fill in the blank) and they send you back a picture from their collection that reflects that. Their robot could use some help. I asked for fluffy clouds and I got a message back telling me they didn’t have any images like that. Then I asked for a picture of “clouds” and got a picture of an oil refinery. Text 572-51 for pictures you didn’t ask for. [Lifehacker]

Brooklyn Artist Works Primarily With Steamed Milk. [Hard Times]

GIF of the Day: What Is Love?

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 17:08:20 +0000

This GIF combines two of my alltime favorite things from 1993—Star Trek: The Next Generation and Haddaway’s club banger “What is Love”—by superimposing Riker, Picard, and Data onto the Night at the Roxbury guys. Amazing.

L.A. Art Diary: Week Two, Part Two

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 17:04:50 +0000

A Parker Ito transfer painting in the office of Chateau Shatto, One of my favorite images I've seen of L.A.

Michael Anthony Farley (lifelong non-driver) is in Los Angeles, checking out the art scene and learning to love the city. Read parts one and two of his L.A. diary.

Saturday 7/1

"At this stage" Installation view.

I am hungover and terrified that I agreed to go to yoga.

Friday Links: Apply For $589/Month Housing in Williamsburg

Fri, 07 Jul 2017 11:36:26 +0000

People finding “Accidental Wes Anderson” locations is the best new internet trend. [My Modern Met]
Housing lotteries open this week for two new affordable housing buildings in Williamsburg, where rents start at $589/month. Definitely worth the long-shot of applying. Worth noting the affordable units in the Bronx start at $880. [Curbed]
Basically every British cultural institution (and plenty of mainland European ones) have signed a letter urging the UK government to not fuck them over in Brexit plans. [Dezeen]
The VGA, or Video Game Art Gallery, will be Chicago’s first art space dedicated to video game based artists’ projects. [DNAinfo]
The Green family (of Hobby Lobby wealth and infamy) has been ordered to pay $3 million in fines for smuggling artifacts from the Middle East to their businesses. This might cast a shadow over their forthcoming (and already dubious) Museum of the Bible in Washington, DC. [The Washington Post]. ←--- assholes
Aman Mojadidi’s ‘Once Upon a Place’, in which obsolete phone booths have been installed in Times Square with the stories of immigrants, was conceived of before the Trump regime. Now, it’s taken on new relevance, obviously. [ARTnews]
The “Is it art?” cliche just never runs out of steam. A Wired article explores a terrible art project that involves sticking some pictures into executable code and seeing what it does to the faces. Apparently said code is AI but how it works is never explained. The work looks like a souped up version of Datamoshing, which the new media community long ago discarded as too limited in its formula to ever produce good art. [Wired]
I dunno how to feel about Mia Fineman’s Talking Pictures: Camera Phone Conversations Between Artists. It’s a good idea for a show, and we know that mostly because other artists have been doing it. [The New York Times]
Cherokee writer America Meredith weighs in on the surreal case of Jimmie Durham’s fake Native ancestry. It’s an interesting, nuanced read. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Happy Birthday Frida Kahlo, José María Velasco Gómez, and Juan O'Gorman

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 18:24:56 +0000

This is crazy, but three of Mexico’s most celebrated painters—Juan O’Gorman, Frida Kahlo, and José María Velasco Gómez—all share July 6th as their birthday. Another fun fact/GIF gleaned from Museo Nacional de Arte INBA’s Facebook page.

L.A. Art Diary: Week Two, Part One

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 18:17:01 +0000

Michael Anthony Farley (lifelong non-driver) is in Los Angeles, checking out the art scene and learning to love the city. His first week of adventures can be found here.

Wednesday 6/28

I tag along to an art advisory meeting at the vegan restaurant Cafe Gratitude, which serves up “mindfulness” along with quinoa bowls. Cafe Gratitude is one of the few places in L.A. that I know of, thanks to VICE’s hilarious (and hyperbolic) listicle “Reasons Why Los Angeles Is the Worst Place Ever”. Cafe Gratitude is just as ridiculous as had been promised (think menu items with names like “I am vibrant” and “I am grounded”, but the food is undeniably amazing. In the midst of our conversation about the difference between art advisory and art appraisal services, the waitress returns and completely straight-faced says “Oh, by the way, our question of the day is ‘what inspires you?’ Just something to think about…”

Thursday Links: The Holodeck Has Arrived

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 10:45:31 +0000

Whoa. Artist Joanie Lemercier has developed a projection mapping technique that allows for true 3-D video to be projected into space, far better than existing hologram technology. [Facebook]
As the G20 Conference approaches 1000 art zombies took over the city of Hamburg Germany to protest political apathy. Apparently they eventually broke out of their clay, shedding their zombie personas and political malaise. I (Paddy) appreciate the message but geez this is dumb. Is it too much to ask for a bit more creativity when coming up with these performances? [artnet News]
China’s internet freedoms crackdown gets worse. Now it’s illegal to depict homosexuality, drug use, or prostitution online. [Artforum]
Hobby Lobby, the right-wing craft supply chain, has been ordered to return thousands of looted artifacts to the Middle East. The evangelical Christian owners had been using the corporation to smuggle antiquities into the United States. [The New York Times]
The Calder show gets a good review from Andrea Scott who seems especially appreciative of the show’s curation. Art handlers have been hired to “activate” the mobile sculptures three times a day but thanks to some careful selections the exhibition isn’t a circus. [The New Yorker]
62 new units of affordable housing in the Bronx are being offered up in the housing lottery. The application deadline is September 1. Those units range in pricing from $884 per month to $1740. [Curbed]
Maybe there’s no other city in the world where an art gallery based out of a car makes as much sense as in Los Angeles. That space, Gallery 1993, is one of many inhabiting unconventional spots across LA—from trucks to elevators. [The Guardian]
The Hepworth Wakefield art gallery in West Yorkshire, UK has been named the 2017 Art Fund museum of the year. I (Michael) have never even heard of this museum! We’ve apparently gotta check it out. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: Bees and Bombs

Thu, 06 Jul 2017 00:21:53 +0000

GIF of the Hump Day comes back next week—it takes quite a while to find those GIFs and we’re back logged with other work. In the meantime, Bees and Bombs gets a feature this week with a GIF that has been circulating in our feed lately. This is a somewhat uncharacteristically slow moving opti-GIF, which we like because it’s a bit more soothing than your average psychedelic GIF trope. Enjoy!

Wednesday Links: Bad Politician Land Art, Cyborg Choreography Trending

Wed, 05 Jul 2017 11:55:53 +0000

Haha. A sand sculpture of Chris Christie’s infamous beach outing appeared at the Jersey Shore yesterday. [NBC4 Washington]
In other “portraits of awful leaders turned land art” news, artist Dario Gambarin has plowed a massive portrait of Vladimir Putin into a wheat field ahead of the G20 Summit. It's creepy. [WSLS]
The new Botín arts center is a rarity in Spain—an institution built with private wealth rather than public funds. Some are hoping the project, bankrolled by the family behind Santander bank, can weather economic ups and downs better than museums that must answer to politics. [The New York Times]
Immigration lawyers are concerned that artists’ visas are being denied under Trump’s calls for increased border secrecy. [WBUR]
Oh no! Platform Gallery is closing! [Facebook]
An actually worthwhile listicle: “11 Young Art Dealers Who Are Revitalizing Their Art Scenes”. Congrats to our buddies at Springsteen! [artnet News]
Alvin Tran’s project at the Inside Out Museum in Beijing sounds good. It features choreography about self-aware robots inspired by Westworld. [Blouin Artinfo]

GIF of The Day: AMERICA!

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 18:58:23 +0000

Hey! It’s America’s birthday! That means we’ll probably have to hold her hair when she inevitably drinks too much and tell her that she’s not too old yet, but gently remind her that she really should start growing up and getting her shit together. It also means we won’t be posting tomorrow. See you on the other side!

This Week's Must-See Art Events: How's About Some Hot Stuff Baby This Evening?

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 18:51:05 +0000

Happy Fourth of July!

Everyone probably has cookout plans, but we’ve scoured around to find some nice indoor activities for the days you’ll be spending sunburnt after the holiday (and even an excuse tonight to be hungover on your day off). It may seem like there’s slim-art-pickings in the dog days of Summer, but you’ll be pleasantly surprised how much is still going on at smaller spaces.

Monday Links: Is Jimmie Durham Rachel Dolezal-ing The Art World?

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 13:22:45 +0000

Edward Williams has been collecting racist memorabilia and art for years. Now, that collection lives at Theaster Gates' Stony Island Art Bank in Chicago. [Chicago Tribune]
David Gray has been using Melbourne's anti-terrorism bollards as art spaces, installing mini-works and shows on the obtrusive concrete blocks around the city. [BuzzFeed]
Is Jimmie Durham "The Art World's Rachel Dolezal"? Them's fighting words, but it appears Durham has been lying about being Cherokee for years, and built a career out of Native American imagery. [artnet News]
The real estate industry is attempting to rebrand South Harlem as "SoHa". Cringe-worthy. Now, politicians are trying to legislate against the nickname. It's awful, but this doesn't really seem like an issue for congressmen and senators to be dealing with. [Curbed]
A United Nations initiative has been using the video game Minecraft to teach urban planning and architecture to women in slums. So cool. [Dezeen]
Saint Petersburg's new-ish Street Art Museum has to do a delicate dance with censorship and politics in Russia. [New Republic]

GIF of the Day: Monument to Fidget Spinners

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 17:46:30 +0000

Can we memorialize a thing we don’t fully understand? What the hell is the point of these and why are they suddenly everywhere?

Let us hope we can someday (sooner rather than later) memorialize this fad because it is dead.

Make Plans For Common Field Convening Los Angeles

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 16:17:08 +0000

Common Field, the national visual arts organizing network, is planning another convening for November 2nd - 5th in Los Angeles. I attended their convening in Miami last year, and it was one of the best-spent weekends of my life.

Common Field brings together artists and activists working across a variety of disciplines—you might join a discussion about the challenges of artist-run galleries or curating for the public in a time of accelerated capitalism. Last year we talked about everything from the importance of criticism to the different struggles faced by arts organizations in rural areas or gentrifying cities. Nearly every panel discussion, breakout group, or workshop felt like an eye-opener.

Friday Links: The Art World isn't Changing

Fri, 30 Jun 2017 12:01:09 +0000

Tomorrow is Canada's 150th anniversary. July 4th's coming up too, but we're a little less excited about celebrating that this year given the healthcare debacle and this muslim ban bullshit.
Curator salaries are increasing according to a new survey conducted by the Association of Art Museum Directors. So too are the salaries of COOs. [artnet News]
Acute Art has enlisted a bunch of A list artists to try out their new VR headset. Apparently it's not very realistic, but the article still ran with a title suggesting the software could change the art world. Given that we're looking at a bunch of stars promoting a product sounds like the art world is just the same. [Jstore]
Amtrak is making repairs which means Penn Station is going to be more of a world of hell than it already is. Hard to believe that station could be any worse than it already is. This explainer post is useful but also filled with some amazing pictures. [Curbed]
OMG this Times video on the Carsten Höller show at Gagosian is HILARIOUS. It talks about how playful the art is, but it's narration is slow and plotting and comes across as the most pretentious thing you've ever heard—all while watching kids run through his sculptures. [The New York Times]
Jerry Saltz reviews "Wrong Side of History" at Bullet Space, a group show addressing Trump's America. The show gets a good review, but it and its essays are mainly used as vehicle to take a jab at the art world's predictability. "I love the art world; great art is getting made and shown. Art will live, as always. But we all have to admit that the art world isn’t the definition of radical right now." [Vulture]

GIF of the Day: Visa Dance

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 18:18:59 +0000

Today’s the day that Trump’s insane visa ban went into effect. Welcome to dystopia.

Illustrator Michael Hogue created this GIF for a story in The Dallas Morning News about how other Trump immigration policies will affect the high-tech workforce and teachers here on H-1B visas. That issue is a little more nuanced, but basically the message the Trump administration is sending to the global community is a big ol’ fuck-off.

Thanks to Fanbase, Netflix Is Bringing Sense8 Back!

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 17:46:21 +0000

Death doesn't let you say goodbye. 2 hour finale episode in the works. Tell your cluster.

Thursday Links: Basically a Renaissance Painting

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 11:15:02 +0000

Basically a renaissance painting pic.twitter.com/ROGHicoZp9
— Simon Lewis (@sv_lewis) June 27, 2017

Kavi Gupta Gallery’s facebook reviews have suddenly been filled up with trolling comments from Trump supporters. It’s a response to gallery artist Scott Reeder’s public sculpture in Chicago which spells out the words “Real Fake” in fake gold. Good to see these Trump supporters use their time so productively. [Facebook via: @PDRVelez]

Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg has produced 3-D-printed portraits based on the DNA Chelsea Manning sent the artist while in prison for releasing classified material to Wikileaks. The show will feature 30 portraits of Manning during her gender transition and is credited to both Dewey-Hagborg and Manning. [ARTnews]

This looks so cool—for a special vinyl 7” release to benefit Planned Parenthood, Merge Records and its flagship band Superchunk, asked their favorite contemporary artists including Joyce Pensato, Brian Calvin, and Amy Sillman to create unique works of art the size of a 7” record sleeve. Now they are being auctioned off on Paddle8—at low, low prices. Worth noting that Merge is a huge supporter of the arts. Also, as per the paddle8 copy, “Along with the original art, auction winners receive an exclusive pink swirl vinyl edition of the record. All net proceeds will be donated to Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.” Get yourself some art! [paddle8]

Sparked by Uber CEO and raging misogynist Travis Kalanick’s resignation, Joanne Wilson talks about her venture investments to women-led initiatives and how she believes women are breaking through the caustic tech and vc culture. Don’t tell Marissa Mayer. [Gotham Gal]

Hyperallergic publishes their strangest comic yet. This one predicts the style of artist you are based on your snack preferences. If you like ice cream, for example, you’re an Abstract Expressionist. If you like twizzlers you’re a landscape painter. What? [Hyperallergic]

The rent stabilization freeze is no longer. Renters will see a hike of up to 2%. [Curbed]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The Accidental Dick Pic That Swallows a Man Whole

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 23:59:02 +0000

What started out as an innocent search for drawn nipples ended up in a world of Hentai images that would disturb even the likes of Robert Mapplethorpe and Hans Bellmer. Of course, that’s what we all say when we “accidentally” end up with fucked up porn on our computers. Our intention is never to find a dick swallowing a man whole. Happy Hump Day!

L.A. Art Diary: Week One

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 19:09:32 +0000

Brian Lotti, "The Great Outdoors". Collection of Nicola Knight.

Wednesday 6/21

I am on a plane, wondering how it is possible that I have never been to Los Angeles before. I’m trying to synthesize all the conflicting reports I have received over the years about what to expect. Looking out the window, it strikes me that the only truth is that L.A. is unknowably vast.

The sprawl is a morphology utterly unlike the East Coast megalopolis—with its familiar semilinear logic of defined centers and hub-and-spoke suburbs. L.A. instead resembles an endless circuit board poured into the topography. The way the components relate to one another is a mystery—an endless grid of houses, oil derricks, highrises, strip malls, office parks, improbably massive warehouses, and meandering freeways repeating without any discernable pattern or hierarchy. Somewhere in the anonymous mix I know there are countless galleries, studios, and private collections. L.A. feels like a treasure hunt. I have never driven a car in my life. I’m intimidated.

Updated: Demanding Progressive Politics from Progressive Politicians

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 15:14:18 +0000

New York is a famously blue state for politics that often seem conservative. Currently we have eight members of the Independent Democratic Conference holding the party’s agenda hostage in Albany because they think it’s too liberal. This includes single-payer health care, expanding abortion rights, and adopting public campaign financing. So, while I’d like to see more leftist policies take hold on both the city and state level, I have some concerns about the politicians that are supposedly leading that charge.

Wednesday Links: No More Electric Objects

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 11:26:24 +0000

Jake Levine announced today that Electric Objects, the digital art display company, would no longer be making their hardware. GIPHY has acquired their app, which means anyone who purchased a display unit can still use it. (The displays don't work without the app.) Art Club is suspending their commissions program. [Electric Objects]

George Lucas's 1.5 billion dollar ~~vanity project~~ museum was unanimously approved by the Los Angeles City Council in a meeting on Tuesday morning. It's supposed to tackle larger issues—narrative art and storytelling—but of course the first show slated is a bunch of sketches and props from Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I guess there's no getting rid of this thing. [artnet News]

Speaking of planned ~~vanity projects~~ museums, François Pinault, the head of the luxury conglomerate Kering and a well-known collector, plans to turn the Bourse, Paris's historic stock exchange, into a modern art museum. I suppose I shouldn't poo-poo a gift to Paris, but you know this thing is just going to be filled with the same blue chip art we always see. It's rich people dick swinging. [W Magazine]

The Art Gallery of Ontario gets four new assistant curators. I guess they'll need them if they want to compete with MoCA—assuming that project ever gets off the ground. [ARTnews]

NoooOOOOOooooo! McMansion Hell has gone off line after its creator Kate Wagner, received a cease-and-desist letter from online real estate database Zillow. From the sounds of her lawyer Daniel Nazer she will be disputing the claim. [Hyperallergic]

Bearcam is live folks. But where are the bears? I've tuned in three times and seen none fishing. Sad [Explore.org]

Lots going on in the Osprey nest, though! [Explore.org]

GIF of the Day: The Royal Ascot JPEG Rules Supreme

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 18:48:40 +0000

The New York Times has a truly delightful slideshow of weird hats seen at the Royal Ascot last week. I want to wear a giant flower on top of my head too. I set about to finding hat GIFs from the Royal Ascot and Derby Day but have found a corner of the internet that has not yet been overrun by GIFs. We’re going to have to do something about this. The preliminary research below.

An Interview with Brian Belott: Frustrating Expectations

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 13:58:06 +0000

Brian Belott at Gavin Brown

Brian Belott admits that he’s “anything but subtle.” The artist has carved out a reputation for creating exuberant over the top spectacles wherever he goes. Known for his wildly uninhibited paintings that vibrate with movement and motion, Belott also courts chance and accident in his hilarious, absurdist performances.

Belott’s latest project at Gavin Brown’s Harlem outpost expands on his 2015 show at 247365, (discussed with AFC’s Paddy Johnson here)— and is a multi-faceted homage to Rhoda Kellogg, a little known children’s art pioneer. Her obsessive studies innovated child psychology and contributed to the formation of the Montessori method of teaching that places its emphasis on teaching children based on their own individual interests and skills. By collecting over a million examples of children’s art over the course of her lifetime, Kellogg discovered that universal patterns and developmental stages emerge in all children’s art from around the world.

Tuesday Links: Draw Sean Spicer Like One of Your French Girls

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 11:33:31 +0000

In Los Angeles, the battle between Chicano anti-gentrification activists and gallerists in Boyle Heights continues to escalate. Maybe they should just team up to fight for something like New York’s proposed Small Business Jobs Survival Act together? [NPR]
CNN hires veteran sketch artist William J. Hennessy Jr. to record press briefings now that cameras are no longer allowed. They should hire Molly Crabapple to do some work for them too. [artnet News]
Talking Pictures opens today at the Met. For the exhibition, curators asked six pairs of artists to communicate with one another by sending photos from their smartphones back and forth. The show comprises records of that exchange in various formats. It seems kinda silly. [The Verge]
Sarah Douglas at ARTnews offers a recent history of gallery closings. The list does a good job at providing an overview of what’s happening in the industry and refutes the gallerist argument that these closures simply reflect the fact that there are too many galleries in operation. It’s not like these were bad galleries that didn’t make it because they were bad at the game, somehow. These were great galleries and businesses, often in operation for more than a decade, that should have been able to make it work. The business for lower tier galleries may not be sustainable. [ARTnews]
A lot of Alexander Calder’s sculptures and mobiles are meant to move, so they need to handled to make that happen. As such, The Whitney has hired “activators” for its new Calder show and the Times has a new feature showing them in motion. SO. COOL. [The New York Times]
Curbed provides an exhaustive account of just why Penn Station sucks so much and why this is going to be the “Summer of Hell” for commuters passing through. [Curbed]
Tarot card reader Maria Pilar Abel Martínez claims Salvador Dalí is her father and has taken the estate to court to prove it. No big deal except the court, siding with Martinez, ordered Dali’s dead body exhumed so a paternity test could be administered. If she is proven to be the heiress she would be entitled to a portion of the estate. The estate is expected to appeal. [Hyperallergic]
Rea McManara wrote about Alison S. M. Kobayashi’s detective work and performance when it debuted in Toronto last year. Now, it’s all the rage in New York. In fact, from the recordings she based her work on, the only brother still alive, Larry Newburge, gets choked-up when discussing it with the Times. It sounds like a great, great piece. [The New York Times]
Magazzino, or “warehouse” in Italian, has joined the ranks of museums in the Hudson River Valley. It’s the brainchild of collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, and will showcase works from their collection of Arte Povera works from postwar Italy. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: PEEKASSO's Trump

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 18:14:53 +0000

Another day, another reason to realize we literally have the worst fucking leader of any country in the developed world.

Thank you, PEEKASSO, for capturing the horror of the situation. (We’ve mentioned before that we love PEEKASSO’s irreverent approach to GIF-making.)

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Condo (the Good Kind) Invades New York

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 17:53:11 +0000

This week starts off and ends a little slowly, but Wednesday to Friday ought to be pretty great. Spend your hump-day checking out openings at Marianne Boesky Gallery and David Lewis, where a group show and a solo show by painter Megan Marrin, respectively, look to have a much-needed sense of humor. Thursday night Condo New York kicks-off, in which 16 local galleries have surrendered their spaces temporarily to galleries from London, Mexico City, Shanghai, LA, and beyond. The preview receptions for the multiple shows are (thankfully) on both Thursday and Friday nights, so you won’t have to go crazy trying to rush back and forth between Chelsea and the Lower East Side.

Displaced in Denver: A Discussion With the Artists Kicked-Out of Rhinoceropolis and Glob

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 15:27:21 +0000

This is the first discussion in our new series Tales From The Artist-Run, which will focus on stories from the art world’s DIY fringe. As artist-run spaces must contend with a shifting political and economic climate, we’re curious to see how they adapt to (and influence) the new world around them.

Warren Bedell (L) and John Golter (center) performing in Rhinoceropolis as Spellcaster's Rock 'n' Roll Time Travel Committee in 2009. (All photos by Tom Murphy).

On December 8th of last year a dozen artists in Denver were forced from their homes unexpectedly. The warehouse building at 3551-3553 Brighton Boulevard had for over a decade illegally housed artists and musicians in two roughly 2,000-square-foot units that doubled as venues at the epicenter of Denver’s DIY scene: Rhinoceropolis and Glob. Just days before, 36 people had been killed by a fire at Ghost Ship, a warehouse live/work venue in Oakland, California. That tragedy has since inspired a series of raids on artist-run spaces nationwide—often leading to displacements.

Monday Links: George W. Bush Doesn't Need to be in the Next Whitney Biennial

Mon, 26 Jun 2017 11:49:30 +0000

"We did a test with stuntmen and it was so fake. I spoke to a director who told me that I'd never be able to replicate an assault with a stuntman—and I'd never want to. There's the argument: "How is it real violence if it's not a real person?" It's real violence because I was applying real physical violence to the figure, despite it being made up of animated components. I wasn't really interested in VR, but I was interested in taking a medium with a basis in interactivity and reducing its interactivity. I was interested in the mundane violence we see and the difference between seeing an ISIS video and watching a Quentin Tarantino film."—artist Jordan Wolfson on "Real Violence," his #VR artwork depicting an assault shown in the recent #WhitneyBiennial. Wolfson joined @rhizomedotorg curator Aria Dean (@lol_prosciutto) in conversation tonight as part of First Look, a digital art commissioning and exhibition program.

GIF of the Day: Andres Manniste

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 17:10:46 +0000

"Human Development" (2016)

All of these GIFs are thumbnail images from the website of net artist Andres Manniste. Each offers a glimpse of a full-page experience, which often include multimedia and interactive components. They’re cute little standalone GIFs, but I definitely recommend browsing his site and getting lost in the scrolling web environments. Manniste’s work frequently updates art historical takes on the “sublime”—from the Renaissance obsession with anatomy to Impressionism and the hunt for something divine in the everyday. This time, with MIDI files and rollovers.

In "Mind-Controlled Sperm: Woman of STEAM Grabs Back" Ani Liu Flips the Script

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 16:18:32 +0000

Sperm, like some migratory birds, navigate using electromagnetic fields, apparently.

This isn’t the most shocking revelation from Ani Liu’s “Mind-Controlled Sperm: Woman of STEAM Grabs Back”, but it’s the scientific basis for the artwork. Liu, an artist and research assistant with MIT’s Media Lab, has figured out how to manipulate these electromagnetic fields and “trick” the sperm into swimming in choreography dictated by a woman’s thoughts. The project grew out of frustration with the political discourse, in which patriarchal ideologies often dictate the discussion over women’s bodies—particularly reproductive rights.

Friday Links: Inside the Pigment War

Fri, 23 Jun 2017 11:38:15 +0000

Stuart Semple's Black 2.0 pigment accomplishes some of the optical trickery of Vantablack.

Everything you've ever wanted to know (or not) about the beef between British artists Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple over Kapoor's exclusive rights to Vantablack. The story basically ends with Semple making his own ultra-black pigment that's available for everyone and far more affordable. [Wired]
The Tate Britain has placed work from Khadija Saye on view in their memorial gallery. Saye died in the Grenfell Tower fire last week. [BuzzFeed]
Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery is expanding, following last year's huge donation of $42.5 million from billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach. The plan, from OMA's Shohei Shigematsu, will allow the museum to display more of its collection while maintaining the Olmstead parkland in which it sits. They'll accomplish this by expanding underground and burying the existing parking lot. [WIVB 4]
As skyrocketing rents make expansion in major art capitals impossible, many mid-tier galleries are opening locations in smaller cities or vacation towns. Or giving up permanent brick-and-mortar locations altogether and just doing pop-ups and art fairs. [Financial Times]
Head to the Oculus at the World Trade Center sometime in the next month. Up Close: Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel features nearly-life-sized reproductions of the famous frescoes in great detail. [artnet News]
Stop plucking now: the Dallas Museum of Art is hoping to set a world record for most Frida Kahlo impersonators gathered in the same place. The event will take place on July 6th, what would have been the artist's 110th birthday. [Star Telegram]
Some of the brains behind the Highline have created a website, Highline Network, to share ideas with other similar park projects. A lot of the impetus actually seems to be a cautionary tale—most don't want to replicate the out-of-control gentrification that accompanied the park's arrival. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Assholes

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 18:37:00 +0000

Apparently this gif is the result of an Alexander Wang event in which free clothes were given out. It’s posted here, because this vaguely resembles how I’ll feel if we survive this healthcare business. The senate Republicans have produced a bill in a secret that looks pretty much like it did in the house, giving tax breaks to the wealthy and taking away health benefits from millions. Always working on behalf of Americans huh? What assholes.

Thursday Links: Good Bad Signs

Thu, 22 Jun 2017 11:31:19 +0000

A new bill would offer loan forgiveness to museum workers and humanities professors for up to $10,000. I see no chance of this ever passing. [artnet News]
Sotheby’s netted a total of $161.3 million at its Impressionist and modern evening sale in London, exceeding its low estimate of $141.2 million. ARTnews's Nate Freeman describes the sell-through rate of 74 percent as middling. The good news is this sale number jumped up by 24 percent from their sale last year. It seems like a bidding war over a Kandinsky helped the sale quite a bit. [ARTnews]
The 12th-century Grand Al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq was destroyed the Battle of Mosul. Iraqi and US officials blame ISIS, ISIS blames the US. [Hyperallergic]
The senate has finally released its new version of the healthcare bill, which they drafted in secret. It looks much the same as the house's version. What assholes. [The New York Times]
@goodbaddrawings gets a profile on Curbed. The twitter account charts all the crazy signs in the city. [Curbed]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: NSFW Female Gaze at the Museum of Sex

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 18:43:08 +0000

In honor of the exhibition NSFW Female Gaze co-curated by Creator’s and The Museum of Sex, we’re highlighting the GIFs of Tschabalala Self. Self’s practice centers on the black female experience and this image, drawn from My Black Ass comes from a series of GIFs depicting women twerking.

The exhibition itself showcases more 20 emerging female artists making art work about you know what. We approve.

Fourth International Awards for Art Criticism Announces Call for Submissions

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 13:47:24 +0000

Art critics don’t have it easy. They work for little pay and often get a lot of flack for issuing their opinions. But disinterested feedback is essential to the health of the industry, so it’s good to see that there are organizations working to help nurture the field with a little cash. To wit, The International Awards for Art Criticism has announced their fourth edition of their annual awards. Three prizes will be awarded—first will receive 10,000 euro for an essay in English or Chinese, and second, their and forth will receive 3,500 euro. The first prize winner will also receive a short paid visit to Shanghai.

Wednesday Links: Museum Staff Resign En Masse, Right-Wing Street Artist Trolls LA

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 11:19:40 +0000

More twists in the case of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist: Arthur Brand, an art advisor who works to recover lost artwork, claims that the paintings may be in the hands of former IRA members. This really is turning out to be a better drama than The Crying Game. [Daily Mail]
Kenny Schachter reports on Art Basel. These are great for an insidery look at the fairs. Still, I find them hard to get through. They’re as gossipy as a juicy Linda Yablonsky column, but often assume you know or care more than a reader does. I’m also not sure I care whether Schachter managed to secure a commission for a sale, what fairs he normally goes to and which ones he skips and who’s in a bad mood because they had to stay at the Radisson. I once stayed in a mobile home parked outside a prison and managed get through the Basel fair without complaining or a shower. [artnet News]
Wow. Nearly half the staff at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art have resigned. They alleged an abusive working environment with long hours and little pay. The museum remains open, despite the HR losses. [The New York Times]
The entirety of the United Kingdom’s public sculptures will be made available online by 2020. That’s 170,000 sculptures! [The Art Newspaper]
Following a $60 million renovation, Mass MoCA is now the largest contemporary art museum in the United States. Here’s a peek at what they’re doing with the space. It’s mostly really, really monumental artworks from A-listers. [Wired]
A timeline of the MTA’s complete meltdown in 2017 annotated with passenger tweets and instagrams. There are some nice moments here, though. I especially liked graduate student who missed his graduation ceremony due to extensive delays and the New Yorkers who threw him a mock ceremony while they waited for the train to proceed. It included an exchange of cell phones as a standin for the diploma and a cell phone picture of the student having graduated. [Curbed]
Meanwhile, Governor Andrew Cuomo who controls the subways is pretending he doesn’t. I was going to say that even the famously conservative daily, The New York Post is having none of this, but I forgot Cuomo is a democrat. The MTA board meeting starts at 10 am today and is being live streamed. Watch it if you dare (expect a lot of really boring speeches). [Gothamist]
The country is blighted by massive dead shopping malls, and more are emptying out every year. LA Times asked readers to weigh in on what to do with them. One suggestion was affordable live/work space for artists. That’s such a cool idea. [Los Angeles Times]
Anish Kapoor’s latest installation, “Destierro”, at Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires is intended to speak to the refugee crisis and the idea of borders. I’m not sold on how clear that concept translates—it’s a room full of brightly colored earth and a blue bulldozer. [Dezeen]
Allison Meier reports on the Library of Congress’s exhibition “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration”. It includes an extensive online component which can be seen here. [Hyperallergic]
“Republicans are the new punk,” says Sabo, a right-wing street artist who has been trolling LA with posters of Trump, among other gimmicks. Unsurprisingly, he seems like a tool. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: LOVID

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 21:19:59 +0000

Back in 2016 Transfer Gallery hosted “Nargifsus” an exhibition organized by artist Carla Gannis and Berlin-based curator Tina Sauerländer exploring the selfie GIF. We covered the show at that time, but we’re revisiting it today because artist LOVID never got the attention they deserved. And this GIF where eyeballs move like flies descending on cyclops deserves the spotlight. Why? Because it’s creepy but also does a good job of visually describing the job of the artist: seeing and making.

Envoy Enterprises Closes

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 14:25:56 +0000

Jimi Dams of envoy enterprises has announced the gallery will close its space August 4th after twelve years of operation. The reasons are the same as pretty much any emerging and middle market closure. In the parting words of Dams, “It’s no fun.”

On its own that rationale sounds a bit privileged. It’s not a basic human right to enjoy your job. But the reality for most small businesses owners is that there has to be some enjoyment to the work or there’s no point in doing it. There are easier ways to make money (and usually more of it).

Tuesday Links: How Art Lead to Pasteurization

Tue, 20 Jun 2017 11:45:35 +0000

Ouch. Jeff Koons has reduced his studio staff by half. The gazing ball paintings aren't doing very well. (Surprise, surprise. They're terrible.) [artnet News]

Wow. Ben Davis really doesn't like documenta 14. He calls it "deliberately irredeemable". A fun read. [artnet News]

Ew. A noose has been found hanging from a lamppost outside the National Gallery of Art. [Hyperallergic]

How art lead to pasteurization. [The New York Times]

Activist group Care2 is calling on Bill de Blasio to make some of the rainbow colored sidewalks honoring the LGBTQ community permanent. That would be so cool! [Curbed]

I bet Londoners can't wait for it to rain now. Burkinabe architect Diébédo Francis Kéré has unveiled this year's Serpentine Pavilion, an blue structure with a latticed canopy that will turn into a waterfall when it rains. It was sunny the day it was unveiled. [Dezeen]

“This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” John F. Kennedy once said, referring to the arts. The Kennedy Center will open its expansion in 2018. A great little profile on Kennedy's relationship to the arts. [The Washington Post]

GIF of the Day: Jumping Kids

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 17:19:30 +0000

This is the kind of half-assed straight from clipart GIF that harkens back to the days of Web 2.0. It’s adorable on so many levels. Enjoy.

A Museum Chain is Local, and Also a Hotel

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 15:35:45 +0000

21c Museum Hotel, Nashville

I spent seven hours inside the Nashville, Tennessee airport last week before they announced my flight had been cancelled. I was in town to see the latest 21c Hotel and Museum, but assumed I would only be staying there one night. At 11 pm, I returned to the hotel for a second evening in the hopes of getting a wistful 5 hours of sleep before returning to the airport the next morning. It wasn’t the best day.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Melting Ice Caps and Harlem Drag Queens

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 14:35:49 +0000

At first glance, this is another slow week in the city’s lazy art world summer. On closer inspection there’s plenty of good stuff to see, from a mysterious Ugo Rondinone tribute to the legendary John Giorno at Red Bull Arts (and over a dozen other locations) and The Painting Center’s juried survey of artists responding to Trump. Spend all weekend in Marcus Garvey Park, nexus of the Harlem Arts Festival, where everything from panel discussions to drag queens will give art weirdos an excuse to catch some sunlight and fresh air.

Monday Links: Trying to Sell Art? Look to Tallahassee

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 10:44:30 +0000

Khadija Saye

Here’s a fascinating peak at the world of art storage—where the vast majority of artworks bought and sold today will end up, sitting unappreciated but appreciating value. [The Art Newspaper]
Useful: 5 NYC tenant laws your landlord doesn’t want you to know. These include a provision in the loft law that enabled artist Margaret Maugenest to live rent-free until her landlord brought her apartment up to code. [Curbed]
Zaha Hadid Design has unveiled a high-end coffee table inspired by Princess Leia’s hair buns in Star Wars: A New Hope. We live in weird times. [Dezeen]
Well this is surprising. Tallahassee is the per-capita “art buyer capital” of the United States, according to a report from Artfinder. This is attributed mainly to online art purchases. [Tallahassee Democrat]
A rare Tomi Ungerer drawing of Günter Grass was apparently pilfered from The Paris Review’s offices during a highbrow party. [Page Six]
The Rocky statue has returned to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. [abc 13]
Heartbreaking: artist Khadija Saye was among those who died in last week’s highrise fire in London. Saye’s work is on view in the Diaspora Platform at the Venice Biennale, and she had been meeting with gallerists to set up exhibitions shortly before her death. [The Guardian]
Were Andrew Wyeth’s portraits of black subjects exploitative? Art historian Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw argues yes in a catalog essay for The Brandywine River Museum of Art’s Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect. [The New York Times]
Aaron Orbey muses on just why The Babadook (an indie horror flick) has suddenly become a queer meme icon. I’m still not sure I get it. [The New Yorker]

GIF of the Day: The GIF is Dead, Long Live the GIF

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 17:26:13 +0000

Back in August of 2016 Popular Mechanics published a History of the GIF type article, “The GIF is Dead. Long Live the GIF”. We’re just finding it now, and like any good GIF connoisseur we’re linking to it here. Looks like GIPHY gets tons of attention in this article, though it does offer a fairly exhaustive look at the GIF’s history as well.

Thursday Links: Basquiat Rules Basel, documenta 14 Fails Artists?

Thu, 15 Jun 2017 09:34:22 +0000

Basquiat’s Baby Boom (1982). © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, ADAGP, Paris and ARS, New York.

Well, the blue chip market seems to be doing just fine, if sales at this year's Art Basel VIP opening were any indication. [Financial Times]
....and apparently lots of art from the 1980s has now entered the blue chip club. Basel is chock full of 80s nostalgia with high price tags. [artnet News]
Industry researchers predict that the United States will need to add 4.6 million new apartments by 2030 to keep pace with demand. So far, most cities have failed to add enough new units of housing, and what gets built is usually just for the luxury market, leading to the affordability crisis nationwide. [Curbed]
Alexander Forbes argues that documenta 14 curators have failed the artists involved. This is mostly due to the near total absence of wall text, including artists' names. It seems like the organizers overlooked a lot of details here. [Artsy]
A new art fair, Upstairs Art Fair, is coming to the Hamptons this July. Why the hell are they doing this? Multiple fairs have cancelled their Hamptons iterations recently because they tend to be the lower-profile events as the calendar is too damn full of art fairs. Dealers and collectors alike are stretched too thin. [ARTnews]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Have a Jiggly Flag Day!

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 17:05:03 +0000

It’s flag day. It’s hump day. Obviously the only appropriate inappropriate GIF to mark this occasion is one depicting cartoon boobs jiggling in an American Flag bikini.

Marilyn Minter's "RESIST" Flag Hoisted Over the Bowery Today

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 16:29:48 +0000

Image Courtesy of Creative Time

Today is Flag Day, and Creative Time is celebrating with the launch of artist-designed flags. Pledges of Allegiance is a new commissioning series that invites sixteen artists to design flags to fly atop Creative Time’s headquarters at Bowery and 4th street.

They’ve kicked the project off today with Marilyn Minter’s “RESIST FLAG”. It is pretty awesome, and certainly sets the tone for what’s likely to be a very politically-loaded series. Every month, the flags will be swapped out for another artist’s, and given the line-up we can expect plenty of work with similar sentiments. Many of the participating artists have been outspoken critics of the Trump regime (perhaps none more eloquently than Yoko Ono) so this act of reclaiming public space should be a small catharsis for many of us.

Wednesday Links: Tonya Harding Still Muse for Artists

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 11:25:39 +0000

Animal rights activists in Athens smashed windows and threw paint on the studio of Aboubakar Fofana, whose Documenta 14 piece comprises 54 sheep dyed different shades of indigo. The dye is apparently nontoxic, so I’m not sure what the problem here is. If I were a sheep, I’d be happier being a piece of living artwork rather than mutton. [The Art Newspaper]
So, this is a job that exists: “Art curator for a cannabis company”. Meet Burgandy Viscosi, who picks the artwork for different strains of pot for a Washington marijuana company. [Leafly]
Daniel H. Weiss will take the helm at the Met as its president and chief executive. He takes over for Thomas P. Campbell, who was forced out of the position of chief executive and director due to the financial mismanagement and conflict of interest scandals that plagued his leadership. Weiss, will help find a director, as, unlike Campbell, he will not be overseeing both the artistic and financial direction of the museum. Much a do has been made about this, but the idea that any person can effectively fill both positions is misguided at best imo. This is a step in the right direction. [The New York Times]
Not to do with art, but the Gwyneth Paltrow Goop summit sure seems to reveal that line of product as being a total and utter sham (if the jade eggs you’re supposed to insert in your vagina weren’t enough evidence on their own.) Lectures included a talk on “integrative photosynthesis,” “spiritual Wi-Fi,” “laterality to the body,” “neuro-vegetative signs” and “the ontological experience called your life.”, a panel discussion about gut in which panelists claimed that that kale, superfood of the millennium, can be extremely dangerous; that taking one Advil or Aleve “is like swallowing a hand grenade” and that cancer does not exist among wild animals. It seems ever talk was punctuated with opportunities for guests to go buy vastly overpriced Goop products at the IRL store set up for the summit. [The New York Post]
From documentaries and musical theater to art collections, Tonya Harding has become an unlikely muse for the arts in the decades following her 1994 violent feud with fellow figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Erik Piepenburg considers why. [The New York Times]
The Riga Biennial (how many biennials does the world need?) is hiring a Curator of Public Programmes for their 2018 edition. Applications are due on the 24th. [e-flux]
There are $89 million worth of Basquiats on view at this year’s Art Basel. artnet News has a roundup of the works. It kinda seems like only two of these are really good? [artnet News]
We’ve never heard of UNDO Project Space in Chelsea, but John Ortved is RAVING about Alison S.M. Kobayashi’s Say Something Bunny, a performance based on an amateur audio recording made over 60 years ago that’s part detective story, part monologue, part tragicomedy. That’s not too dissimilar to our own Rea McNamara, who last year lauded the performance. [Vogue]
Adam Rogers’ tempered criticism of Norman Foster’s new Apple campus in Cupertino is a good read. Basically, it’s a building out of 1950s corporate suburban sprawl that reinforces some of the Bay Area’s biggest problems. [Wired]

GIF of the Day: Toyota Li + Time Frame!

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 17:46:25 +0000

GIPHY's "Time Frame" an exhibition of GIFs plus a week of public programming presented by RHIZOME now includes details on the programming—and most notably, the panel discussion about GIFs! "The State of the GIF", which will take place Saturday at Gallery 151 will attempt to "explore the past, present and future of the GIF". This is the kind of open ended discussion that normally frightens us, but since the conversation will be moderated by Rhizome Executive Director Zachary Kaplan, I suspect it will be a directed and smart talk. Kaplan has a history of launching smart and engaging lectures. The panel isn't too bad either! It includes Marisa Olson (artist/curator), Faith Holland (artist), and Molly Soda (artist and nude panda!). Check it out.

Above GIF: Toyota Li, Time Frame artist.

Business and Personal Accounts: Keep 'em Separated

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 11:56:42 +0000

There are a million meaningful reasons to operate an arts business, from creating revelatory art experiences for the public, to a commitment to a tradition, to the love of making hand-crafted objects. But at the end of the day, if it is a business (and not, say, a non-profit), a major purpose is to make money to pay for the expenses of living. And if the purpose of the businesses’ earnings is to pay for our personal expenses, why then is it so important to keep the business financial transactions separate from our personal ones?

Tuesday Links: Art Basel Unlimited Photos Disappoint

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 11:27:54 +0000

Philanthropist and art collector Agnes Gund sold Roy Lichtenstein's 1962 work Masterpiece for 162 million to billionaire hedge fund manager and art collector Steve Cohen back in January for a reason. She's funding a new project supports criminal justice reform and seeks to reduce mass incarceration in the United States. 100 million will go directly to artists who work with the incarcerated. In 2013, artist Laurie Jo Reynolds helped close Illinois's Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison through art. We're now seeing just how much impact that work has had. [The New York Times]

Thanks to criticism from Eric Trump and Fox News art looses again. Delta Airlines and Bank of America pulled promised funding from their support of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar because the Trump-like potentate is stabbed to death. [Vulture]

So apparently avocado art is a thing now? [Time]

A round up of highlights from Basel Unlimited. I dunno - the art doesn't look so impressive this year. [artnet News]

Andrew Russeth is at Art Basel too and has his own Unlimited round up. As per usual, he has the strongest eye. [ARTnews]

New York's 10 worst landlords targeted by housing advocates. [Curbed]

An aside - anyone else notice it's become impossible to navigate all the sponsored content on Curbed? [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Shameless Dishonesty Breeds Hypocrisy

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 18:35:46 +0000

These are the same people who complain about the ubiquity of fake news from main stream media.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Artists Take Over Your Landline

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 17:01:01 +0000

Every summer there’s a gallery that finds an occasion to launch a cat show, and this season is no different. Start the week off at Con Artist Collective, which will host a show demonstrating artists love for kitties. Consider that show a warm up for what’s to come. Thursday in Gowanus, we’ll see what happens when artists are given access to a treasure trove discarded electronics. We can’t wait. On Friday, head out to this week’s latest artist zine festival and wrap the week up Sunday with the 25 anniversary of Queens Pride at the Queens Museum. It’s a one day pop-up exhibition looking at the history of the event and bound to be both informative and joyful.

Monday Links: Failed Banks and More at the Museum of Capitalism

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 11:46:24 +0000

Superflex, Bankrupt Banks (2012).

Art duo FICTILIS has opened the Museum of Capitalism in a former industrial space in Oakland. The museum contains works from artists, theorists, and economists that try to imagine the legacy of capitalism from the perspective of its end. Interesting stuff. [artnet News]
Hurricane season is upon us. This news report might be of interest to anyone else who has wondered how the bayfront Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) is designed to hold up in a hurricane. The Herzog & de Meuron designed structure is built from a totally luxurious palette of materials, sits just next to the water, and has huge windows facing the bay. Supposedly everything about the building is super storm-proof. The confidence with which this is repeatedly expressed feels a lot like famous last words. [CBS Miami]
Apartment seeking? Here's a map and guide to all the affordable housing lotteries one can enter in New York City right now. [Curbed]
Karen Green, Columbia University's first-ever curator for comics. is now the subject of a comic book herself. The biography comes from Nick Sousanis, the guy who submitted his dissertation in comics form while a doctoral candidate in 2015. [boingboing]
Every 10 years, the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Skulptur Projekte Münster, and Art Basel align to create one jam-packed art summer for Europe. This year the brave writers at ARTnews are trying to do it all, as a contemporary version of "The Grand Tour". [ARTnews]
Fisun Güner considers the way artists' dark personal lives affect the way their work is contextualized or received (the protests that accompany Carl Andre's exhibitions, for example, because he's accused of murdering his wife Ana Mendieta). There are some good lesser-known stories in here, such as Kenneth Halliwell's murder of his gay lover, playwright Joe Orton, and how that story is framed at Tate Britain’s show Queer British Art. [BBC]
Delta Airlines has pulled its sponsorship of New York's Public Theater popular Shakespeare in the Park program because a production of Julius Caesar has a scene that alludes to the assassination of Donald Trump (yes, really). This was a nontroversy until Fox News (of course) criticized the production, which subsequently got the president's attention and inspired more anti-art funding tweets. Ugh. [Inc.]

Documenta 14: Learning From Athens, Learning From Crisis

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 22:52:01 +0000

Marta Minujín and Pierre Bal-Blanc, “The Parthenon of Books,” 2016 - ongoing. Photo by Anastasia Tuazon.

You don’t need to go to Kassel, Germany to know that the world seems on shaky ground. But this year’s documenta exhibition, “Learning From Athens,” nails home that idea, nonetheless. That’s quite intentional, given that documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyk, along with a team of more than a dozen curators, chose to stake out a markedly “political” point of view. Though the word “political” can refer to pretty much anything or nothing when it comes to curation, Szymczyk and team have carved out a specific focus: the local is the global. And right now, documenta envisions that the world is in need of being rebuilt entirely—from the ground up.

GIF of the Day: Stay Cool

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 19:16:12 +0000

As we head into the weekend know this: Anything cold won’t stay that way for long. We’re headed for a head wave. So make sure you have lots of ice. You’re going to need it.

An Interview with Aleks Slota: Language is a Shell Game

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 12:45:50 +0000

Years ago, if you read Derrida, Lacan and their fellow travelers and then came to the conclusion that language is inherently unreliable, you were considered at best pretentious and at worst mentally ill. Here, for instance, is Lacan on one of the various, maddeningly indirect ways in which words acquire meaning, or a lack thereof: “… insofar as it forms part of language, the signifier is a sign which refers to another sign, which is as such structured to signify the absence of another sign …”. Um, yeah, exactly. Language is a shell game.

Friday Links: Major Shows Get Major Reviews

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 11:38:46 +0000

Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the Met, is interviewed by Charlie Rose on his major retrospective of the work of photographer Irving Penn. [Charlie Rose]

David Simon, of The Wire, notes that Trump never bothers to find out what Comey knows. He only asks that he stop the investigation. Simon says the guilty never remember to ask questions because they already know the answers. [@aodespair]

Why isn't Christian Viveros-Faune writing full time at The Times or elsewhere? Is there anyone who can writes prose as well as he does? The latest example of that is his glowing review of the Robert Rauschenberg show at MoMA. He describes the artist as "the twentieth century’s art-gospel-spreading, medium-challenging, style-switching creative Johnny Appleseed." [The Village Voice]

George Condo has been inspired by the Michael Flynn controversy and is making paintings about it. [artnet News]

Here's a piece about how collector's taste change over time. (Collector's are shying away from former art market darlings like Basquiat.) [The New York Times]

Speaking of the New York Times, what, no art reviews today?

I didn't think anyone would be able to write an entire feature on Geoffrey Farmer's installation in the Canadian Pavilion—there's just not that much to say about a dismantled pavilion, but Craig Burnett proved me wrong. Here's 2000 words on the subject. [ArtReview]

GIF of the Day: Every Queer's Reaction to the Sense8 Cancellation

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 19:29:01 +0000

It’s so rare that a piece of pop culture feels as critically relevant and absorbing as the Netflix original Sense8. Fans worldwide are pretty devastated by Netflix’s decision to cancel the queer sci-fi epic. Hopefully execs at the streaming giant will see the error of their ways. Until then, the wigs are coming off.

Thursday Links: All Eyes on Comey

Thu, 08 Jun 2017 10:58:08 +0000

A post shared by Sharon Needles (@sharonneedlespgh) on Jun 6, 2017 at 9:57am PDT

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Creepy Cosplay

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 21:53:25 +0000

Not Safe For Work cosplay GIFs tend to pretty tame by NSFW standards. My google searches have brought back lots of cleavage but very little x-rated. This GIF isn’t particularly racy but it gets mention for the creepy Bill Clinton like figure hanging out behind the window grate. Ew.

2017-2018 Recipients of Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Announced

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 11:31:00 +0000

The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program has announced their 2017-2018 artists and we couldn’t be more thrilled. The seventeen selected applicants (out of over 1,300) include several names we’ve mentioned on the blog, along with frequent AFC collaborator Jaimie Warren. We’re excited they’ll be AFC’s neighbors at 20 Jay Street in DUMBO.

Since 1991, the program has provided select artists a full year of rent-free studio space in the neighborhood, and organizes an annual open studio event for the public each spring. It’s a hugely formative and important experience—just having a space to work without the stress of paying for it is transformational. Alumni of the program include successful artists such as Eve Sussman, Lorraine O’Grady, and Sarah Oppenheimer.

Wednesday Links: The Best Wonder Woman Review Ever

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 11:07:33 +0000

The BEST review of Wonder Woman out there. "Somebody said they gave it a 9 out of 10. How? When she was a 12 the whole movie!" And "I LIKE being a man, I like doing things men do, but I can't even lie to you, for like 89% of the movie, I wanted to be Wonder Woman!" Thank you Josh Pray. [YouTube]

Retreading the steps of Occupy Museums, artist Andrea Fraser will track down the political donations of major museum trustees. (In some cases retreading is fine—given that Occupy is a collective Fraser has connected to, this is one of them.) The artist will publish the results in a book that will resemble a phone book. [The Art Newspaper]

Another new fair. This one is in San Juan Puerto Rico. It's described as scrappy, but Gavin Brown Enterprises and Canal 47 participated. [Artsy]

Michael Moi, a former Dale Chihuly employee, is suing the artist for 21 million, claiming that he helped make valuable works without payment or credit. The suit itself seems crazy, but then there's also weird details that make the whole thing lurid—like how Moi and Chihuly would drink heavily together while Chihuly entertained multiple girlfriends. [Hyperallergic]

A round up of merch available at Documenta. [artnet News]

This is cool: Game maker Pedro Medeiros has been posting an animated GIF each week to his Patreon feed that shows followers how to make pixel art—think drawings ruins or animating fire. [Lifehacker]

One time Armory Show Director Katelijne De Backer will take over Helen Toomer's role as the Director of the Pulse Art Fair. Toomer is stepping down to start an artist residency program. Good luck to everyone. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Dogs in Hats

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 17:17:07 +0000

This is how you eat a dessert!

The Venice Biennale Pavilions: Caged Dogs, Fallen Logs, and the Problem of Time

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 16:52:29 +0000

A view of the Giardini. Photo: Marsha Owett

Pretty much any traveler will end up thinking about time in Venice given the age of the city, but the Biennale amplifies this tendency. Even in thinly attended years, visitors to the Venice Biennale preview quickly get used to standing in long cues to see popular pavilions. As far as VIP events go, the pavilion previews aren’t the least bit exclusive, so wait times come with the territory. As a result art is often considered by whether or not it’s worth the time you budget.

Tuesday Links: Best Places to Cry in Public

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 11:22:49 +0000

Very useful: a map of all the best places to cry in public around the city. [Curbed]
Israel's oldest art school, the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, is moving into a new SANAA-designed campus in Jerusalem. [The Jerusalem Post]
A Takashi Murakami show opens today at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art. Takashi Murakami: The Octopus Eats Its Own Leg is a retrospective that spans five decades of the artist's career, but based on nearly all of the promotion and media attention, you would think the focus of this show is Murakami's collaborations with Kanye West. Seriously, the way people talk about this makes it seem like Murakami was some obscure unknown that West "discovered" and brought to the masses, rather than an art star he hitched his brand wagon to. Ugh. [Chicago Tribune]
Strange New York story of the day: Laura Murray, a struggling SVA grad who was surviving by drawing portraits of tourists, was mugged in 2012 and drew a sketch of her attacker. The cops caught him based on her drawing, and now she's pursuing a career as a courtroom artist. [New York Post]
Here's a comic about the most annoying child of hippies coming to an art opening in San Francisco. [The Bold Italic]
China Guardian is opening a combination art museum/auction house in Beijing. So much for pretending museums and the market weren't too close for comfort! The building, designed by Büro Ole Scheeren also contains a hotel. [Dezeen]
From Banksy's ill-conceived print giveaway to Jeremy Deller's wheatpastes, British artists are responding in all sorts of ways to the upcoming election. Basically, everyone in the art world is hoping to oust Theresa May. Poor Grayson Perry had planned a solo show opening at the Serpentine Gallery on the 8th. Now that's election day, and his show about post-Brexit identity and division has taken on an added gravity. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: What Long Island City Will Look Like in 6 Years, from Zum-3d

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 17:19:00 +0000

I stumbled across this GIF today while looking for a Queens-centric image for our weekly events listings post, because the borough has out-paced all others for top-notch art offerings this week. Now it seems Queens might be out-pacing much of the metro region in the construction boom. This GIF is from architectural visualization team Zum-3d, and was commissioned by Rockrose Development to show what Long Island City will look like once all of the planned construction wraps up in the not-so-distant future. Basically, the neighborhood will have a skyline to rival most mid-sized cities.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Queens Reigns Supreme

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 17:01:33 +0000

A decade ago, if you said that Manhattanites would be regularly heading to Queens for their culture fix it’s unlikely most people would’ve believed you outside of Long Island City. But now the borough is increasingly our go-to destination for art events. From Marni Kotak’s artist talk at Microscope Gallery tonight (just on the Brooklyn side of the Ridgewood border) to the surrealist pop-up “DEBTBANK” at the Queens Museum on Sunday, everyone should be spending most of the week East of the East River.

Angela Bulloch at Esther Schipper: When Three Sculptures Feel Like a Ballet

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 13:29:02 +0000

Angela Bulloch, Heavy Metal Body

Angela Bulloch Heavy Metal Body Esther Schipper, Berlin Until June 17, 2017

The following might sound like a backhanded compliment, but stick with me. Angela Bulloch’s gorgeous new sculptures, on view at Esther Schipper, are happily in sync with what we traditionally think of as summer fare: big, colorful, distracting and kid-friendly. All that’s missing is the popcorn.

Monday Links: Punk Rock—Queers Steal Roger Bernat Stone from Documenta 14

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 10:50:00 +0000

The Athens activist group Lgbtqi+ Refugees in Greece has stolen a Roger Bernat sculpture that was destined for a performance in Kassel as part of Documenta 14. They accuse the German arts festival of exploiting the refugee crisis on somewhat shaky grounds that I have a hard time following. Mostly, it seems like a publicity stunt. To that end, good job! It’s the most glamorous art heist photo we’ve seen in awhile. [Hyperallergic]
Another art fair has left the Hamptons. Art Southhampton has cancelled its 2017 edition, following Art Hamptons’ February announcement that their fair was suspended. The organizers (who also own Art Miami) cite market conditions and pressure to focus on other art fairs. Good. The world does not need multiple art fairs every month. [The New York Times]
Evidence to support that opinion would include cringe-inducing headlines such as this: “Puerto Rico’s New MECA Art Fair Opens in a Debt-Ridden Island Paradise”. [ARTnews]
The Johannesburg Art Gallery, one of Africa’s premier art institutions, is facing a crisis. The local government has finally earmarked funds to repair the historic structure (suffering from leaks due to someone literally stealing part of the roof and general lack of maintenance) but it sounds like the Gallery has larger problems. What’s the identity or audience of a colonial-era institution in a context of white flight and an increasingly migrant-based population? [Seattle Times]
Ian Schrager (of Studio 54 and design-minded hotel fame) thinks One World Trade Center is “a missed opportunity”. With the politics involved, it’s hard to imagine how any truly inspired architecture could’ve happened at the site. Luckily for him, his own view of the tower has been blocked by a much better skyscraper from Herzog & de Meuron. [Dezeen]
Residents of Trump Palace, an Upper East Side condo building, are starting a petition to rename the building. Basically, no one wants to buy their units and they’re depreciating in value due to associations with the president. Residents of several other Trump-branded properties have already gotten his name scrubbed. [Curbed]
This interview with Markus Lüpertz is a good read. The painter talks about Germany’s postwar art scene, his colorful personal life, and the role of an artist in society. His perspective about the politics of artmaking is interesting, even if we don’t 100% agree. Lüpertz argues that artists have no political or social responsibilities, and that good art makes the world an inherently more peaceful and compassionate place. [artnet News]
Can we stop putting Kathy Griffin and Bill Maher in the same category of comedian jokes gone wrong. Maher told a racist joke and was rightly criticized for it. Griffin posed for a photo and was harassed online relentlessly by the right wing media (and some from the left.) [Hollywood Reporter]
Here’s a juicy local news bit. Mark Lyons, a parking director in Sarasota, may have steered a $100,000 public art commission to his son-in-law, artist Mark Krucke. Now the city is considering cancelling the public art program in general to avoid a lawsuit. According to the news report, the Public Art Committee had no knowledge of Krucke’s relationship to the parking director and awarded the project to the artist on its merits. However, when the committee became deadlocked over a decision between two candidates, Lyons told the committee that the proposal of Krucke’s competitor was too logistically challenging without revealing his relationship to Krucke. He thus tipped the jury. [Herald Tribune]
The Bronx is getting more affordable housing. Sav Enterprises filed plans to construct a 15 story building with 319 units of affordable housing at 1932 Bryant Avenue in West Farms. This prime real estate is just across from the Cross Bronx Expressway. [The Real Deal]
I think everyone might need to see Wonder Woman. It’s supposed to be good, and given the amount of art inspired by the character, certainly relevant to the art world. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Maarten Brinkerink

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 16:41:30 +0000

Back in 2015 GIF IT Up held a contest that invited people to use openly licensed and public domain material from the DPLA, DigitalNZ, Trove and Europeana to make animated GIFs. As with any public call, the results were mixed but this one by Maarten Brinkerink from Rotterdam stood out to us, namely because it didn’t make any sense. What was this man doing with a telephone, Google, and a Vermeer?

An Interview With Painter Alicia Gibson

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 13:00:31 +0000

Installation view

Alicia Gibson’s paintings are messy in the best sense of the word. Aesthetically, their sloppy paint, muddy colors and worked over surfaces look as if Gibson deposited all her thoughts on a given subject one canvas. Emotionally, they pack the same unvarnished punch. Her paintings overflow with acerbic humor, saccharine sweetness, and an aggressive punk rock ethos that’s impossible to forget.

Now, as the inaugural show at Real Estate Gallery, a new gallery in Greenpoint, started by Lisa Cooley, Jeremy Willis, and Kenan Gunduz, this work is on view.

The Personal Finance Attitude Adjustment

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 12:19:24 +0000

In my last post, I outlined the basics of a personal finance plan. That article is the “what to do” where I answer questions about insurance, debt management, savings and investments. If you haven’t read it I suggest spending a bit of time with the post because it provides the foundation for getting your proverbial ducks in a row. This week, I’d like to get into the “how to do it” part. This part is about the mindset to get yourself on track. There are a lot of general principles for good financial health but what I outline below are the most time-tested. Since what I’m talking about this week is more about attitude, this is the part where you make adjustments and decide for yourself what works best for you.

Friday Links: We Need More Seasons of Sense8 To Survive the Trump Years

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 11:00:03 +0000

I (Michael) don’t think I have ever been as emotionally invested in a piece of pop culture in my adult life as I have been watching the Netflix original Sense8. The show, from the Wachowskis, felt like the first site-specific artwork for the era of streaming—like watching eight addicting films from different genres at the same time in different tabs. It’s pretty heartbreaking that Netflix has inexplicably cancelled the show after two very well received seasons. In a real-world sociopolitical context increasingly defined by nationalism and bitter identity politics, a narrative that is essentially an epic morality play about global empathy—and individuals skill sharing to face repression in their respective societies—felt urgent beyond binge-worthiness.
Cara Ober stops by Glasstress, where international art stars collaborate with Venetian glassmakers. (Think Paul McCarthy glass buttplugs and an Ai Weiwei figure giving the middle finger). [BmoreArt]
Central St Martins grad student Camila Gonzalez Corea has been transforming images of topless women into emoji collages to protest Instagram’s censorship of female nipples. According to Instagram, it’s fine to show nipples if they belong to men. The Nipple Act bypasses this problem by replacing pixels with icons. [Metro]
68 Mayors are resisting Trump’s withdraw from the Paris climate accord and have pledged to uphold the agreements. New York is among them, and lit landmarks in green lights to show support for the international initiative. Michael Bloomberg, New York’s former mayor is co-ordinating the effort, and is negotiating with the United Nations to have its submission accepted alongside contributions to the deal by other nations. Bloomberg Philanthropies is offering to donate 14 million to help fund the deal’s budget. [Curbed]
Construction has started on “Ruby City”, a glittery red art museum David Adjaye has designed for the Linda Pace Foundation in San Antonio. For a building that is literally covered in glitter and painted bright red, it’s oddly understated. [Dezeen]
Another Renzo Piano museum that resembles a pharmaceutical giant’s depot has opened, this time in Harlem. Columbia University’s Wallach Art Gallery, nestled inside Piano’s Lenfest Center for the Arts, launches their inaugural show, “Uptown”, which is a triennial that includes well known artists such as Sanford Biggers, Nari Ward and Julie Mehretu along with emerging talent like John Pinderhughes and Alicia Grullón. Critic Jason Farago says it’s a pretty good show, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot to say about it. The most interest nugget in the review isn’t about the art but the fact that the Gallery partnered with other local museums to produce the show—a peace offering of sorts due to the gentrifying forces the University’s expansion brings. [The New York Times]
Sarah Cascone interviews Emma Sulkowicz about her strange S&M performance “The Ship Is Sinking” at the Whitney. Inspired by politics, Bertolt Brecht, beauty pageants, and figureheads on shipwrecks (among other references) it basically comprised a man dressed as “Mr Whitney” tying her to a piece of wood and torturing her. I have read the interview and I’m still not sure I (Michael) “get it”. [artnet News]
Ai Weiwei is posing as Alan Kurdi, the drowned Syrian refugee toddler, for a second time. Because it wasn’t a bad enough idea the first time around. In this picture he’s lying face down on his porcelain sunflower seeds—apparently it is a response to Donald Trump’s visit to the Israel Museum last week. The museum covered some of his works when the president visited—which it is now claiming it did because they were not fully installed. Whatever the case, can Ai Weiwei just let this toddler rest in peace already? [The Art Newspaper]
Here’s an interview with DoLab, the lighting team/curators who do the visuals for festivals such as Coachella. Their work sounds like a logistics minefield. [Variety]
“My Neighbor Totoro” will get its own theme park in Japan come 2020. [The Creator’s Project]

GIF of the Day: Time_Frame

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 18:23:21 +0000

Faith Holland

In honor of the GIF’s 30th anniversary, GIPHY is launching a physical show featuring the work of 30 GIF artists called Time_Frame. 151 artworks and installations from well-known artists such as Lorna Mills, Faith Holland, Carla Gannis, Jelly Gummies, and Robert Beatty will be on view at Wallplay Gallery June 15–22.

As far as exhibitions go, a week is a pretty short time frame. But it looks like there will be as more panel panels, presentations, screenings, artist performances, and workshops during that time than you can shake a stick at, so that’s a positive. We have some concerns about the theme, though, as there’s barely one to speak of. The exhibition text promises to “showcase artists working in and pushing the boundaries of digital art”—so basically it’s a group of artists whose work the curators like.

Tyler Shields is A Terrible Artist. Kathy Griffin is Just His Accomplice.

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 14:24:01 +0000

The Tyler Shields photo that started it all.

Is a picture worth ten million words? That’s the question we’re faced with when considering the out-of-proportion reaction to a recent photo of Kathy Griffin holding the decapitated head of President Donald Trump. Enough commentary has poured across social, mainstream, and fringe media to fill a small library. But conspicuously absent from the discussion has been mention of Tyler Shields, the photographer who should be at the center of the authorship conversation, not the comedienne. For example, The New York Times published two reports on the subject, neither mentioning Shields by name, and one omitting any reference to a collaborator whatsoever. Would the discussion be different if the image were considered as an artist’s work rather than a celebrity publicity stunt?

Thursday Links: AI Color Names Include "Bank Butt" and "Clardic Fug"

Thu, 01 Jun 2017 10:43:25 +0000

MoMA’s latest expansion, set to wrap-up in 2019, will add galleries, more public space, and extend what’s arguably the museum’s sole architectural icon—the Bauhaus staircase. Coinciding with this renovation, MoMA is aiming to diversify its collection and programming. [The New York Times]

Janelle Shane tasked an AI neural network to name colors based on data sets from paint companies. The results are hilarious. The AI’s first attempt included colors such as “clardic fug”, “sink”, “caring tan” (actually a grayish periwinkle), and “bank butt”. Round two was an improvement, with gems such as “gallerine white”, “luck in the spice”, and “shy bather”. Artificial intelligence is so much more entertaining than the movies predicted. [Curbed]

NFSW GIF of the Hump Day: Rafia Santana

Wed, 31 May 2017 17:16:23 +0000

In honor of tomorrow’s discussion on animated GIFs by Museum of Moving Image commissioned artists, Lorna Mills, Rafia Santana and Matt DiVito, we’re showcasing Rafia Santana’s NSFW dick GIF.

As has been mentioned previously on AFC, Santana is one of the rare digital artists exploring the vernacular of race, advertising and pop culture. Her style is direct and to the point—an approach we appreciate—an approach augmented by the occasional description of the work and its motivations. In the case of our Wednesday, NSFW GIF of the Hump Day, Santana’s summation is pretty much perfect.

A New Memorial Day Tradition: Burn a Confederate Flag With Artist John Sims

Wed, 31 May 2017 11:33:57 +0000

John Sims’ “Burn and Bury:Detroit 2017”, photo by Taku Nishimae

DETROIT—Of all the bitter divisions in 2017 America, it’s hard to believe one of the hottest flashpoints has been a 156 year old failed rebellion. Yet in recent weeks violent clashes have broken out over Confederate symbols across the South. Activists celebrating the long-overdue removal of Confederate monuments in cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans have been met with Right-Wing counter protesters, some carrying automatic weapons. When I raised this concern to artist John Sims ahead of his Confederate-flag-burning performance on Memorial Day, he didn’t seem too worried: “This is Detroit.”

Wednesday Links: Gallows Sculpture Deemed too Offensive, Slated for Demo

Wed, 31 May 2017 10:51:07 +0000

Sam Durant’s “Scaffold” is being disassembled by the Walker Art Center because it offends people. Image credit: ANTHONY SOUFFLE

Are these the world’s best outdoor sculpture parks? I have a hard time lumping the Brooklyn Bridge Park in this list. [CNN]
The Walker Art Center is dismantling a sculpture by Sam Durant after protests. “Scaffold” is a composite of seven different gallows used in executions in the United States between 1859 and 2006 (this article doesn’t make that fact particularly clear) and is intended to spark discussion about the history of capital punishment in this country. Activists from the Dakota community called for its destruction because one of the reference gallows Durant based the piece on was used to execute 38 Dakota Indians in 1862 and say the artwork trivializes genocide. I’m not entirely clear on why this is “trivializing”. If the sculpture was supposed to provoke discussion about the history of executions in America, it seems to be effective. Can we stop knee-jerk calling for the censorship of any artwork we might find any moral grounds to oppose? Otherwise we’re going to be left with nothing in museums/public spaces other than Jeff Koons balloon dogs. [Star Tribune]
The “Fearless Girl”/”Charging Bull” drama never ends. Alex Gardega has added “Pissing Pug” to the menagerie, urinating on the girl’s leg to demonstrate that adding another component to an existing sculpture distorts to original’s meaning. We get it. Let’s move on. [New York Post]
Speaking of dumb ideas, Comedian Kathy Griffin is in hot water because she posed for a video holding Donald Trump’s decapitated head. What passes for conversation in the media really needs to change.
Anne Imhof, whose much lauded four hour long opera “Faust” on view at The Venice Biennale's German Pavillion is still be discussed, tells a crowd at the Serpentine Gallery that her influences include Michelangelo and Jean-Michel Basquiat. I would have guessed Adidas. (Though in fairness, she does say the health-goth cast plays themselves.) [ARTnews]
We’ve all had some pretty weird homework in art school, but this might take the cake.Katie Martin-Meurer, a University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee art professor, challenged her students to make biodegradable insect motels. The idea is they’ll end up in parks, decomposing, rather than filling a dumpster with foamcore like most student projects. [NPR]
Google Street View is adding a host of new features to its museum interior tours. Soon you’ll be able to read wall text, zoom into high-res images, and more. How long until there’s a selfie-taking function? [Time]
Audible has created a 5 million dollar fund for playwrights. This seems like a very good thing. [The New York Times]
Uh oh, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento has a failing humidity control system that’s threatening the preservation of numerous objects on view. If the museum and contractors who installed the system can’t get a replacement up and running to specifications, the Crocker could lose accreditation to host certain exhibitions. Tuesday night, city officials approved a plan to fix the system, so hopefully all will be resolved. [CBS Sacramento]

GIF of the Day: Swear Trek

Tue, 30 May 2017 22:02:37 +0000

This pretty much sums up the Internet right now. Via Swear Trek.

This Week's Must See Events: Elevator GIFs and Dystopias

Tue, 30 May 2017 15:48:53 +0000

We’re looking at a pretty light week for events coming out of Memorial Day weekend. The good news here is that while there maybe fewer openings and talks to attend there’s no shortage of quality. Start your week today by visiting the SVA Computer Art thesis show and leave time on Wednesday for a performance by M6 of Meredeth Monk compositions. Thursday we’ll be heading out to the Museum of Moving Image to check out their new GIF commissions and panel discussion and Friday we’re heading to 470 Vanderbilt for an all woman art show. Saturday Cary Hulbert will take a stab at predicting the future at Ortega y Gasset Projects and Sunday we’ve got a day of music by John Zorn at the Jewish Museum.

Tuesday Links: Disney Art, Barbie Art Still Terrible Yet Still Trending

Tue, 30 May 2017 11:09:41 +0000

A detail from Jeff Gillette’s oil painting “Bandra Brown,” 2017. (Deborah Vankin / Los Angeles Times)

I (Michael) interviewed Raúl de Nieves ahead of his upcoming talk at the Baltimore School for the Arts as part of the Contemporary’s CoHosts series tonight (free tickets still available). We talked about process, growing up Catholic, and the sculpture he spent seven years making. [City Paper]
Anyone attempting to open a white box space in a drafty loft, take note: your perfect paint is here. Spanish paint manufacturer Graphenstone has created an eco-friendly paint by mixing lime with the synthetic “miracle substance” graphene. The result is an ultra-thin, durable lime wash which actually thermally insulates whatever walls you paint. So cool. [Dezeen]
Nate Silver writes a short novel on the likelihood that President Trump will be impeached and removed from office early. The upshot—not super likely. “The easiest-to-imagine scenario for Trump being removed is if Republicans get clobbered in the midterms after two years of trying to defend Trump, the Republican agenda is in shambles, Democrats begin impeachment proceedings in early 2019, and just enough Republicans decide that Pence (or some fresh face with no ties to the Trump White House) gives them a better shot to avoid total annihilation in 2020.” [FiveThirtyEight]
Jeff Gillette’s latest project at Gregorio Escalante Gallery in Los Angeles sounds terrible. The artist has painted Disney imagery around slums in India. He then documented his “interventions” and transformed them into 3-D photorealistic paintings. When can we stop using Disney as a cliché shorthand for all that is wrong with escapist capitalism? And haven’t we decided by now that ruin porn is problematic and exploitative? Viewers are also invited to trample on drawings on the floor that Gillette’s high school students created. Mixed in with the students’ work are some Gillette originals. You can buy pieces from this grab-bag of floor “trash art” for $5, a commentary on the art market because his paintings of slums cost a buttload of money. Get it? [Los Angeles Times]
Speaking of awful clichés, last week I noted that no one should bother making Barbie art. But lo and behold, one of the Kylie Jenner just dropped $20,000 on some Barbie prints from artist and model Beau Dunn for her Barbie-themed bedroom. [Inquisitr]
Peter Blum Gallery is moving back to Soho after being forced out of its uptown location on 57th street. (The gallery was located in Soho back in the early aughts.) [ARTnews]
Developers are moving forward with plans to rezone the former Pfizer site in Williamsburg. The latest plans from The Rabsky Group propose over 1,100 apartments in eight clunky new buildings. The number of affordable units in the proposal has dropped, and it doesn’t look like they’re opting to preserve any of the old industrial buildings. The plans are hideous. The rezoning is still in the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) stage, and now is the time for neighbors to get involved. Here’s one suggestion: push for a compromise that preserves the industrial buildings for arts/light manufacturing use and allows the developers to build smaller-footprint towers at a higher FAR in exchange for more affordable units? [Curbed]
I’m not sure how I feel about political figures being turned into action figures—I missed the days where politics was considered a boring field for nerdy policy wonks—but that’s where we’re at. Artist Mike Leavitt has created an Elizabeth Warren action figure you can support via Kickstarter in June. [lizwarrenactionfigure.com]

GIF of the Day: Trump Meets His Handshake Match

Thu, 25 May 2017 17:29:19 +0000

Donald Trump has a notoriously weird handshake that only Justin Trudeau has been able to successfully beat. Until today, that is.

Newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron countered Trump’s death-grip in a minor arm-wrestling match that was described by IRL witness Phillip Rucker of The Washington Post:

"They shook hands for an extended period of time. Each president gripped the other's hand with considerable intensity, their knuckles turning white and their jaws clenching and faces tightening."

It's noticeable that Trump just seems to want his hand back, which is exactly how anyone who's ever had their hand (or pussy) grabbed by the president must feel. Thank you Emmanuel Macron, for winning this second important victory—the other of course being his defeat of psycho Marine Le Pen, lest France found itself with a Trump of its own.

I’m wondering if there’s an asshole-countering handshake the French learn in handsome politician school? Notably, the only other world leader to best the tiny hand vice has been of French Canadian descent…

This Saturday in Bushwick: Art For Under $100

Thu, 25 May 2017 16:25:26 +0000

This Saturday, a group of artists is throwing a pop-up studio sale at 56 Bogart Street in Bushwick. All of the work will be priced for under $100, making this a rare opportunity to snatch some affordable pieces from emerging artists.

Dubbed Beg The Raven, the event will feature artist books, photography, paintings, sculpture and works on paper from Alessandro Keegan, Bob Szantyr, Elisa Soliven, Jaqueline Cedar, Jennifer Sullivan, JJ Manford, Jon Lutz, Elizabeth Insogna, Max Razdow, and Vanessa Albury.

Trump Family's Bizarre Goth Visit to Vatican Sparks Meme Wave

Thu, 25 May 2017 13:51:03 +0000

Dress for the job you want. #widow pic.twitter.com/4dC1Q7GAJy
— carla ciccone (@cciccone) May 24, 2017

Donald, Melania, and Ivanka Trump paid an extremely awkward visit to the Pope this week, and the only ones who seemed to enjoy themselves were everyone on the internet. This is the latest in a string of GIF-able, meme-able moments from a Mediterranean-spanning trip plagued by bad optics.

Of particular note were the bizarre goth ensembles donned by Ivana and Melania, adding to the somber vibe. Apparently it’s some Catholic custom (that seems out of the Dark Ages) for women to cover up when meeting the Pope. The Trump ladies took this as an opportunity to dress like Lydia Deetz from Beetlejuice. We wish we had these outfits for our Goth Opera party!

Thursday Links: Good Month for Bros; All-Male Group Show, Sports-Themed Gallery Open

Thu, 25 May 2017 10:57:28 +0000

Joey Falsetta’s photo of Amanda Lepore (L) and Platon’s photo of a Philip Treacy headdress for Alexander McQueen (R) are two of the works on display at Modern Love Club’s “Men I Love and Other Things I Think About.”

One of the most unconventional art spaces in the East Village, Modern Love Club, has opened an all-male group show. The “gallery” is actually a matchmaking service’s storefront. Amy Van Doran, the matchmaker/gallerist has thus far been running the space as an exclusively female-artist-focused exhibition space. Now she’s tapped curator Gabrielle Sirkin for the tongue-in-cheek-titled show Men I Love and Other Things I Think About. None of the art seems to have anything in common beyond the fact that the makers have penises, but hey, that's just the inverse of how all-women shows are curated most of the time. Beyond that, a lot of the work looks pretty good, if not overhung in the cramped space. It’s up through July 14th. [Cool Hunting]
Artist Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff is opening a new gallery in Chicago, All Star Press, that will feature exclusively art about sports. Is there even enough sports-themed art in the world to keep a gallery roster full? [dna info]
The Srihatta-Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park will be Bangladesh’s first major contemporary art museum, with 5,000 sf of galleries, 10,000 sf of residency space for artists, and acres of landscaped gardens. It’s the brainchild of collectors Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, who have previously organized biennials and other events to draw attention to the impoverished country’s art scene. [Smithsonian]
A megaproject at 80 Flatbush will include much-needed studio space for artists in Downtown Brooklyn. Alloy Development is partnering with BRIC to renovate the building at 505 State Street into free studio space for artists in BRIC’s residency program—doubling the organization’s capacity. This is one of several good decisions Alloy has made in the 80 Flatbush project. It’s an all-too-rare case of a developer starting a project by speaking to neighbors first to see what an area needs. Here, that means preserving the existing historic buildings on the site as cultural space and building vertically to create space for new schools, neighborhood retail, and nearly 900 mixed-income apartments in addition to a profit-generating office tower. More developers should approach projects this way—if you get your neighbors on board with planning from the beginning, it’s easier to fudge zoning and avoid endless lawsuits. [Curbed]
In other development news, the ridiculous-hipster-amenity-laden luxury rental tower Urby (the new Jersey City skyscraper that looks like stacked boxes… it’s kinda cool) will be launching an artist in residence program with Mana Contemporary. Will resident artists have access to the DIY apothecary classes, saltwater pool, and morning meditation deck? One can only hope. [Dezeen]
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have failed to disclose their multi-million-dollar art collection in financial papers related to their roles in the Trump administration. The couple is claiming the collection is just for “decoration” and not an investment. That’s certainly a murky distinction—one the Trump clan seems to blur with cosmetic procedures as well. [artnet News]
Yay! Artists Space will be reopening in a new location in TriBeCa sometime in 2018. The nonprofit left their longtime home on Greene Street because the owner wanted to create a penthouse. Here, though, they’ll be leasing 8,000 sf spread over two floors from art lovers—their new landlords are Gerry and Martin Weinstein. Martin Weinstein is the cofounder of Art in General. [ARTnews]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Rodell Warner's Photobooth

Wed, 24 May 2017 21:54:40 +0000

From 2009-2011, artist Rodell Warner set up a private photobooth at Trinidad and Tobago’s Erotic Art Week where visitors could take anonymous (or not) selfies in GIF form. The results are basically what one would expect, with some creative standouts.

I like that you can basically give people any type of camera (webcam, cameraphone, Polaroid) and n00dz will inevitably happen.

Christening a Film Festival's New Old Home With John Waters

Wed, 24 May 2017 21:25:40 +0000

I’m looking up at Divine’s face, projected to nearly the size of a house, cackling maniacally as she hurls a dead fish at a sauntering catsuit-clad Edith Massey. I’ve watched this scene more times than I can count, but for the first time in my life, hundreds of other people are laughing along too. That’s part of the magic of cinema as a collective experience—if John Waters is “The Pope of Trash”, his sermon of degeneracy deserves its own basilica.

Wednesday Links: Starchitect Corpse Turned Diamond, Melania Trump Turned Goth

Wed, 24 May 2017 10:54:51 +0000

“It’s curious that the intellectual and artistic community transforms its aesthetic unease or personal disgust into a longing for a type of patriarchal and pre-modern moral authority,” Cuauhtémoc Medina, chief curator of Mexico City’s MUAC, speaking about the controversy surrounding Jill Magid’s exhibition at that institution. (But really, such an apt observation on any art world scandal). Magid has turned the cremated ashes of legendary architect Luis Barragán into a diamond. This diamond is being offered to art historian Federica Zanco in the form of an engagement ring as a bartering chip (Zanco owns Barragán’s professional archives in her private collection in Switzerland, denying access to other scholars. According to rumor, the archives were gifted to her as an engagement gift decades ago). Magid’s intent is to liberate the archives to the trust of an institution for public access, but many see the project as disrespectful, tacky, sacrilegious, or even an act of cultural imperialism. The problem I identify here is the choice of an engagement ring. It contextualizes Barragán’s physical remains—in addition to his archive—in a form to suit Federica Zanco, adding insult to injury. [The New Yorker]
New York’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Art has opened with a four-person show that accidentally features all women artists. Dana Awartani, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Nasreen Mohamedi and Zarina Hashmi all deal in geometric abstraction and obsessively-controlled craftsmanship. It sounds like a surprisingly tame show given contemporary identity politics. [Hyperallergic]
This glass-and-concrete artists’ retreat upstate looks like pastoral utopia. Whoever the mystery artist is (a photographer who apparently is quite successful) should invite us up for a weekend! [Dezeen]
Wow. 103-year-old Margaret Ricciardi has been taking art classes every semester at CUNY’s College of Staten Island since becoming widowed in 1983. She still stands while oil painting. Now, she’s receiving an honorary Doctorate from the school. Not a bad way to spend one’s retirement! [New York Daily News]
Wassan Al-Khudhairi is taking over the controversy-plagued position of chief curator at St. Louis’s CAM from Jeffrey Uslip. She certainly has her work cut out for her. I can’t think of another institution as hated by its host city. Thankfully, Al-Khudhairi’s internationally-nomadic lifestyle seems to have given her plenty of experience listening and adapting to new communities. And maybe some global perspective can move the museum beyond its local tensions. [Riverfront Times]
Melania Trump and Ivanka Trump accompanied the president to meet the Pope. Their outfits were INSANE. Totally snatching these looks for our next goth ball. [People]
Speaking of the batshit crazy first family, Trump once again wants to eliminate funding for the NEA. We have some other suggestions for budget trimming. [artnet News]
Baltimore artist-run spaces take note: if you’re a nonprofit or other tax-exempt organization, the state is handing out some healthy-sized grants this year, and the Bromo folks will help you with your application. [Bromo Arts and Entertainment]
“A serious dreamer, he welcomes without begging analysis, and takes analysts, even critics, seriously. The evidence of his generosity is that he doesn’t give his own interpretations. There are so many artists who think they can do my job. I let them. I like writing about art that leaves space.”—Sarah Nicole Prickett on the strange joys of watching David Lynch’s weird-AF-reboot of Twin Peaks as an art critic. [Artforum]

GIF of the Day: Matthew DiVito (Fire Walk with Me)

Tue, 23 May 2017 17:45:42 +0000

In honor of the return of Twin Peaks we bring you this animated GIF courtesy of Matthew Divito.

Prospect.4 Artists Announced

Tue, 23 May 2017 13:50:58 +0000

Dawit Petros, Act of Recovery (Part I), Nouakchott, Mauritania from The Stranger’s Notebook, 2016. Archival color pigment print 20 x 26 inches Image courtesy the artist and Tiwani Contemporary, London.

Prospect, the New Orleans biennial conceived and founded by curator Dan Cameron, now transformed into a triennial has announced its artist list for Prospect.4 2017. The list, put together by Artistic Director Trevor Schoonmaker, (of the Nasher Museum in Durham North Carolina), includes 73 artists from North America, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia and the European powers that colonized New Orleans, and will address themes of identity, displacement and cultural hybridity. It will be called “The Lotus In Spite of the Swamp.”

Tuesday Links: Dome Over Manhattan

Tue, 23 May 2017 12:02:49 +0000

Buckminster Fuller – Dome Over Manhattan (1961)

Auctionata is finally kicking the bucket. [Press Release via artnet News]

Just what this city needs—a new survey show of contemporary art. Because the Whitney Biennale, the New Museum Triennial and the endless art fair season isn't already enough. This one will be launched by the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York and will be a Triennial focusing on uptown artists. The Wallach Art Gallery is pretty small—I can't imagine this will be a very comprehensive show. [ARTnews]

Facebook's rules on sex and nudity have been leaked to the Guardian. They are more liberal than we would have guessed. [Hyperallergic]

How the Nazis made art Fascist. Benjamin Martin's new book The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture gets a glowing review. [New Republic]

Ooooh, here's a Kickstarter project we can get behind. The Queens Museum is looking to raise $35,000 to create architectural models of unrealized, fantastical projects for their show "Never Built New York". The perks seem pretty fun. At the low end, a $75 pledge lets you lease one of the never-built projects. At the high end, for $5000 you get a dinner with starchitect Daniel Libeskind. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Happy Monday

Mon, 22 May 2017 19:53:22 +0000

The world needs a quantum physicist to explain how Mondays work. Time moves slower. The body feels somehow less rested than it does after a full week of work. Three cups of coffee can’t accomplish what one does any other day of the week. I don’t know what this grumpy thing is, but it’s definitely the Monday mascot.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Djinns Against Digital Colonialism, John Waters Action Figures, and "Werifesteria"

Mon, 22 May 2017 19:27:10 +0000

Tyson Tabbert’s “Female Trouble” action figures will be on view at La MaMa Galleria.

This week you’re in for a weird ride. From Aaron Pexa’s installation inspired by faeries from Welsh mythology (opening Wednesday at UrbanGlass) to a show of fake John Waters memorabilia Thursday night at La MaMa, there’s a lot of idiosyncratic happenings to partake in. Add to that itinerary a Friday night group show of emotion-altering colors (like the opposite of a mood ring!) at Small Editions and Eva Papamargariti’s speculative mutant frogs at TRANSFER on Saturday.

Monday Links: Ai Weiwei's Latest Project Disappoints, Saudi Contemporary Art Impresses the Trumps

Mon, 22 May 2017 11:35:03 +0000

Trump likes an Abdullah Al-Othman photograph of a former Islamic shelter for widows and divorced women wrapped in tin foil (all housing should be gilded?). This is one of the precious few details from Trump’s tour of the Saudi contemporary art scene, one of the lesser discussed sideshows from the circus that is his middle east visit. [The Art Newspaper]
An AFC alumn bring us a surprisingly fascinating read: Whatever happened to the Gilded Age art stars? They made fortunes during the first art market boom over a century ago, but were largely forgotten in the art history canon, having been overshadowed by their broke-ass impressionist contemporaries. [artnet News]
Following last week’s deadly crash in Times Square—in which Richard Rojas seemingly deliberately ran over dozens of pedestrians—and numerous similar ISIS attacks, Alissa Walker wonders why the city doesn’t just fully close Times Square to cars. It turns out that would be great, but difficult with the existing traffic patterns in Midtown. Suggestions include a Barcelona-style “superblock” configuration or London-style congestion pricing. I say just ban the damned things from Manhattan entirely. [Curbed]
Bjork has launched a virtual reality art exhibition at The Magic Box at The Reef in Los Angeles. She describes the various VR experiences as another way to “reach intimacy” with her listeners. [Variety]
This is really cool. The Chattahoochee Valley Art Association converted a small town Georgia jail into an art museum in the 1970s. It’s still in operation (as a museum, not jail) today. [Ledger-Enquirer]
I wish so much of Ai Wei Wei’s art wasn’t straight up terrible. 175 lego portraits of activists and free speech advocates sounds very contrived. It will launch at the Hirshhorn in June—I’m not excited about this. [The New York Times]
Turmoil at the Brooklyn Rail. Late last week the publication announced that its board of directors, “day-to-day senior staff and six additional full- and part-time staff members” would part ways. Now, Phong Bui, the publication’s publisher is saying that he has replaced the board and enlarged his staff. Really? That’s a lot of change in a week. [artnet News]
Renzo Piano (architect of The Whitney’s new digs) designs the best exhibition spaces. Here he’s hidden a gallery in the landscape of a French vineyard. Perhaps a less obtrusive exterior than many of his other projects? [Dezeen]
According to this report, there’s plenty to see in Washington Galleries this month. Arte Povera, minimalism, representation and lots of artist names we haven’t heard before. It might be time to make a trip. [The Washington Post]
Liz Hirsch looks at seemingly unrelated art world stories—from the unexpected closure of Andrea Rosen to the digitization of museum collections and the formation of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League—and makes the compelling argument that Trump’s presidency and the increasing concentration of capital and power are changing the game. Even as geopolitics become more nationalistic, culture is globalizing and institutions and artists will find new networks to distribute ideas and information. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: Paul Chan

Fri, 19 May 2017 17:01:48 +0000

burningkindlepointone.gif (2011)

There’s a dark humor to Paul Chan’s work that seems appropriate to today’s socio-political climate. That’s not surprising, considering his 2011 interview with Rhizome touches on our last conservative government’s disastrous invasion of Iraq as an impetus for art making. “weatherman.gif”, for example was created in 2004, shortly after the war began. It feel especially relevant now—especially considering the East Coast’s crazy temperature swings today and apocalyptic climate outlook.

Three Shows: Beki Basch, Hein Koh, and "Photo Flesh"

Fri, 19 May 2017 16:37:47 +0000

Installation View: Beki Basch’s “Vision Quest Lundi: Flush / Flood” at Current Gallery. The next week is a good time to do some art-seeing on the westside of downtown Baltimore. Michael Jones McKean’s commission from The Contemporary has transformed an old department store into a dystopian museum and it’s teriffying and great. You can check it out by appointment until May 31st, when it will be deinstalled. Luckily some of the city’s strongest artist-run spaces are within a few blocks of the show and also tend to accommodate by-appointment viewings as well. I checked out three openings last weekend: Beki Basch’s trippy Vision Quest Lundi: Flush / Flood at Current Gallery, Hein Koh’s technicolor wonderland Joy & Pain at Platform, and the group show Photo Flesh at Terrault Contemporary featuring three international genre-bending photographers from the Birmingham School of Art.

Michael Jones McKean Makes Museums Existentially Terrifying

Fri, 19 May 2017 09:30:23 +0000

All photos by Nick Davis, c/o The Contemporary.

Michael Jones McKean: The Ground The Hutzler Brothers Palace Building 200 North Howard Street, Baltimore, MD Presented by The Contemporary Gallery hours: February 18 - May 19th (today!) 10 AM - 4 PM Also on view during Black Ladies Brunch Collective Book Launch Saturday, May 20th and by appointment until May 31st.

Of all the strange art I’ve seen in my life, Michael Jones McKean’s brilliant installation The Ground is the only exhibition that’s given me an honest-to-god nightmare.

Friday Links: On Chelsea Manning's First Portrait As A Free Woman

Fri, 19 May 2017 09:10:19 +0000

Okay, so here I am everyone!! =Phttps://t.co/NuyZlcWfd9 #HelloWorld pic.twitter.com/gKsMFTYukO
— Chelsea Manning (@xychelsea) May 18, 2017

Samantha Allen considers the first image of a free Chelsea Manning, and how the prison where she was kept policed her gender expression. [The Daily Beast]
Both Adam Szymczyk, curator of the upcoming documenta 14, and Christine Macel, curator of this year's cheeseball Venice Biennale, included their lovers in their respective shows. Scandal or common practice? [artnet News]
There are few topics more depressing than the death of a whale. Yet that's the topic of Lukas Hofmann's show Enzyme, which opens tonight at Paris’ Galerie Frangulyan. If you're in town, go cry, I guess. [AQNB]
Chiba-based businessman Yusaku Maezawa just dropped a record-breaking $110.5 million on a 1982 Basquiat painting at Sotheby's. It's the most ever paid at an auction for work by an American artist. The good news in this story? It's going to live at the art museum in the buyer's hometown. [ARTnews]
Valse Kunst Museum in Vledder, The Netherlands is a museum dedicated to forgeries. The museum was started by jilted Dutch collectors, who of course made lemons out of lemonade, and now houses plenty of convincing knockoffs of masterpieces. This is awesome. [The Boston Globe]
83-year-old activist and artist Raphael Montañez Ortiz will receive a medal for his contributions to Chicano culture at a ceremony in UCLA. Ortiz is known for "destructivist" art, in which he literally destroys household items as sculpture. I'm kinda hoping he chops the medal in half with an axe on stage as soon as he gets it! [UCLA Newsroom]
Here's a very useful guide to applying to New York's Affordable Housing Lottery. Though with odds like these, you might as well apply for the actual lottery and just become a millionaire like anyone paying current market-rate rents in Manhattan. [Curbed]
Cara Ober is basically the only writer I know who seems to have actually enjoyed Venice this year. Apparently the secret is pregaming with a spritz! Note to self... [BmoreArt]
Andrew Berman Architects have added a beautiful extension to the The New York Public Library's Stapleton branch. My first thought: I could read here all day. My second thought: the acoustics of all these hard surfaces combined with the volume of Staten Island conversations will probably make this reading room unusable to all but the deaf. [Dezeen]
Mass MoCA's gigantic $65m expansion enables the museum to house long-term, large scale installations. The first batch includes a 15-year commission from Jenny Holzer, a 25-year James Turrell show, a 15-year Laurie Anderson radio station, and a 15-year exhibition of a massive Louise Bourgeois sculpture, among others. For a destination museum, this seems like a smart move. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: Bacon is Inspiring!

Thu, 18 May 2017 21:56:02 +0000

Every once and a while I like to check in on the cinemagraph scene and see what’s cooking. The short answer is bacon. Other than that, it seems not a hell of a lot has changed in the scene. I found the bacon GIF in a listicle of “28 inspiring cinemagraphs”. I love that bacon counts as inspiring!

Mostly, what counts as inspiring in this list are images that show the effects of wind (usually on hair but also on flames and swing sets.) Bacon was a great exception. Another exception: this dude below clicking his mouse. Concentration is inspiring. Don’t ever forget it.

A Personal Finance Cheat Sheet for the Overwhelmed

Thu, 18 May 2017 13:05:11 +0000

Money is the most powerful metaphor we have. For many people it represents their self-worth, their standing, their power and their security. In many ways artists are a little different—we have a life where we choose to value different things than the rest of society - freedom, both artistic and from societal norms, as well as intellectual independence. Our very existence can be seen as a challenge to capitalism. It’s why some people feel threatened by us—our choice to place a high value on things other than money might call into question their own choices and values.

Thursday Links: Fascist Prime Minister and Famed Doodler Gets Art World Pass

Thu, 18 May 2017 11:30:06 +0000

Edi Rama

Today, May 18th, is apparently International Museum Day, organized by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) and Art Museum Day, organized by the Association of Art Museum Directors. I (Michael) had never heard of either of these designations until this year. Museums worldwide will be offering free or reduced admission, and here in the USA, many are using the day as a rallying cry to save museum and arts funding from the conservatives. [Hyperallergic]

Olly Gibbs has been using Face App to make artworks in the Rijksmuseum smile. These are cute. And much less creepy than seeing your friends as old people on Instagram, the app’s usual function. [The Poke]

Christina Ruiz seems to agree with Paddy’s takedown of the Venice Biennale. The review is packed with hilarious snippets like this:

“A video documents the US choreographer Anna Halprin’s ‘Planetary Dance’, a gathering of middle-class white people on a hilltop in Marin County, California, where they chant, run around in circles and express their horror for all war and violence. Halprin staged this performance in 1981 to “reclaim” Mount Tamalpais from the clutches of a serial killer who was targeting female hikers in the area. People were “gripped by terror” the video informs us. But then Halprin staged her Planetary Dance and the killer was caught! Amazing. It may be fun, even life-changing, to take part in a Planetary Dance. I don’t know because I’ve never done it. What I do know is that it is neither fun nor life-changing to sit through a video of one.”
[The Art Newspaper]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Janet Napolitano Nude-Hoarding Conspiracy Theory

Wed, 17 May 2017 17:23:49 +0000

Of all the NSFW GIFs of the Hump Day that I’ve found, this probably has the weirdest origin. And that’s really saying something.

It’s an illustration from the right-wing blog The Last Crusade, in which an alarm has been sounded that former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano was behind a scheme to roll-out nude-grabbing full-body scanners at airport TSA checkpoints along with the complicit Obama administration back in 2010. According to the bloggers, Muslims specifically wouldn’t be subjected to the technology—which in theory could be used to harvest n00dz of the nubile daughters of good Christian airline passengers, via the hands and USB drives of salacious TSA employees.

The Venice Biennale: An Orphanage for the Terminally Out-of-Touch

Wed, 17 May 2017 14:55:27 +0000

David Medalla, "A Stitch In Time", 1968. All photos: Marsha Owett

It was close to midnight when my phone started lighting up last week. James Comey, the head of the FBI, was fired and the freak out was almost immediate. I felt lucky to be in Italy. A buffer from US news was necessary to maintain any kind of focus on the Venice Biennale, not to mention one’s sanity. And yet, even from this distance, the turmoil back home certainly drove home one point: Art isn’t going to save democracy. Art has no impact on Donald Trump’s actions, the FBI, or any of the Republicans in the senate and congress. People can call their representatives. Art cannot.

Wednesday Links: More Appropriation Accusations for Damien Hirst, a Circus Art School for Portland

Wed, 17 May 2017 10:40:12 +0000

Left: a photo Jason deCaires Taylor took of Damien Hirst’s “Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable” and posted to Instagram. Right: Jason deCaires Taylor’s own work.

Here’s the latest bizarre beef over Damien Hirst’s Treasures From the Wreck of The Unbelievable: sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor is upset that Hirst’s work here looks a little like his schtick. Taylor, who is showing in the Biennial's Granada pavilion, has been putting sculptures underwater for around a decade (the same amount of time Hirst started planning this show). Hirst, for his part, had been experimenting with similar processes in the 1990s, which makes Jason deCaires Taylor’s implication that Hirst plagiarised him and statement that he is “considering my options and discussing it with my legal team” even more ridiculous. There are 7 billion people on a planet with a surface that’s 75% covered with oceans. The fact that two of us had the idea to put some shit in them and leave it there isn’t surprising. [artnet News]
Here’s a very cool map: all the best mosaics in New York subway stations. [Curbed]
America’s first accredited degree program in “circus arts” is building a tent-shaped campus. The Circus Conservatory will be opening in Portland, Maine. I literally had to reread this sentence multiple times to accept that it wasn’t Portland, Oregon. [Dezeen]
The ReThink NYC plan imagines a transit system in which commuter trains can run from New Jersey, through Manhattan, and into Queens and the Bronx. They claim this, in addition to extending several subway and PATH lines to meet the new hub stations, would free up track space and avoid congestion at Penn Station. It’s always been baffling that NYC doesn’t have a connected regional commuter rail system that doubles as high-frequency rapid transit in the core, like Paris’ RER or Madrid’s Cercanias. [NJ.com]
Speaking of transit, the MTA has admitted New York City's subways are falling apart and has released a six point plan to address the matter. The big thing is that they are planning to expedite their capital plan to purchase hundreds of new trains. Cuomo cut 65 million in funding to the MTA this year even though the train system is in dire need of repair. [Gothamist]
The Cincinnati Art Museum has received a nearly $12 million gift to establish the Alice Bimel Endowment for Asian Art (the largest in the museum’s history). In addition to the cash, Carl and Alice Bimel donated over $14 million in art objects. [ARTFIXdaily]
Sotheby's Impressionist Modern sale had an Egon Schiele painting estimated to sell at between 30-40 million withdrawn at the last moment last night. Reports are that the sale was a bit of bore with its star lot lost. [ARTnews]
Josh Baer speculates that the cover lot (Schiele) was withdrawn because they did not anticipate a winning bidder. Ouch. [Baer Faxt]
The movie Baby Driver is inspiring so much fan art, that Kaitlyn Tiffany has written about it. The movie is about a getaway card driver who wants out of a life of crime, but his bosses won't let him. The art looks as unoriginal as the movie does, though, which is a disappointment. [The Verge]
25 million images of art from 14 art institutions world wide are about to be digitized and put online. The partnership aims to make available 7 million images by 2020. [artnet News]
Artist Matthew Ritchie is selling his 4 million dollar loft in TriBeCa. He needs more space to work. [Curbed]
Frighteningly, a new poll finds that the majority of New Yorkers support Governor Andrew Cuomo running for president. [Politico (paywall)]

GIF of the Day: Robert Ek

Tue, 16 May 2017 18:15:22 +0000

Were it not for just how strange and wonderful this GIF of human sushi is, I would say it’s nearly impossible to pick just one GIF from Robert Ek’s work. All of his work is bizarre and carefully rendered—check out the subtle differences in texture between the rice, mask, “tuna”, and seaweed. The figure’s fidgety hands are the thing that really sell this as one of the best-crafted GIFs I’ve seen in a long time.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Bollywood Musicals, Music for Dogs, Zines at the Pool

Tue, 16 May 2017 15:21:53 +0000

This might feel like a slow week, but you'll need to plan wisely. This weekend is packed with big events that span all day or more.

Friday, celebrate NYCxDesign (and Tom Dixon’s first New York showroom) with Dezeen at a block party in SoHo. Then rush to Williamsburg for the opening night of the Brooklyn Art Book Fair. They have programming scheduled all day Saturday too. But you’ll probably want to spend Saturday visiting all the idiosyncratic locales Lenka Clayton and Jon Rubin’s …Circle Through New York intersects. Alternately, head to the other side of the city for open studios in Sunset Park, which run until 6 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.

Tuesday Links: Racist Art Out, Vomit Art In

Tue, 16 May 2017 11:38:31 +0000

Twin Peaks Metrocards are available at select subway stations. Someone please nab me a Laura Palmer! [Curbed]
Georges Berges argues that galleries are being forced to adapt to the "experience economy" as the act of purchasing becomes less about a simple exchange of goods and more about activities. This is a trend Whitney Kimball identified way back in 2015, and that I recently praised Shin Gallery for embracing. I'm not sure this is about gallerists adapting to the market's demands (I don't think "relational aesthetics" or sleepovers or cookouts or whatever art spaces are doing is what sells art objects to collectors) but maybe just about justifying (and enjoying) a brick-and-mortar location in today's climate? [Observer]
21c, the art museum/hotel chain that operates on an alternative model to funding institutions in conservative states, is facing backlash at its Louisville location over a piece involving a racist postcard from the Civil War that an artist had recontextualized (apparently not very successfully) as a statement about confronting the past. After a boycott and threats of violence, 21c removed the piece. [WHAS11]
Teenage artist Sam Egli threw up on a canvas for his submission "Last Night's Supper" to a religious-themed group show at New Zealand's Jetcharm Gallery. It's actually a pretty nice piece. [Stuff]
Denver-based nomadic gallery Black Cube has brought a "Colorado pavilion" to Venice as a satellite show, challenging the nationalist model of the Biennale. With text based neons from Joel Swanson and shiny gold sculptures from Laura Shill, it might sound like a fair booth on paper, but the work is gorgeous. Even Paddy (who was unphased by most of the Biennale) loved it. [artnet News]

Highlights, and a Sad Observation, From MICA's Commencement Exhibition

Mon, 15 May 2017 15:56:27 +0000

Ceramics by Keli Beth Smith.

As a rule, we don’t generally discuss student work on the blog. There are plenty of reasons for this, but for me, one is simple: I am forever grateful no one from the art press ever saw the terrible work I was struggling through in art school.

Yet nearly every Spring, I am impressed by commencement exhibitions—how is it possible that so many college seniors have their shit together more than so many grown-ass artists? Thesis shows at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), my old alma mater, tend to be particularly polished and worthwhile.

Monday Links: Don't Blame Roberta Smith for Donald Trump

Mon, 15 May 2017 11:16:16 +0000

Jeff Koons’ sculpture “Play-Doh 1994-2014” has paved the way for Donald Trump, according to Alex Melamid. Is it because there’s a melty orange blob in the center and a weird yellow thing hanging off the top?

GIF of the Day: Happy Mother's Day!

Fri, 12 May 2017 22:01:22 +0000

Happy Mother’s Day!

I can’t imagine how much work it is to be a mom, but I do often consider this: for every obnoxious, need, or downright terrible person in the world, there’s a mother who had to put up with them. That’s some serious strength!

GIF by Libby VanderPloeg

We Went to the LES: Solo Shows of Chris Burden and Patricia Treib

Fri, 12 May 2017 17:51:50 +0000

Chris Burden, “Tower of London Bridge,” 2003 at Shin Gallery.

Michael: In the belly of the beast that was Frieze Week, I met up with Patricia Margarita Hernandez, Gallery Director/Assistant Curator of P! to check out some openings in the gallery’s neighborhood. We ended up at two solo shows: Chris Burden at Shin Gallery and Patricia Treib at Bureau.

I liked both of them a lot more than she did. Below, we talk nerdy masculinity, whether abstract paintings have content beyond “decor”, weird curating, and bad lighting.

Friday Links: Ballroom Inspired By Derelict Detroit Buildings Coming to Brooklyn

Fri, 12 May 2017 10:59:22 +0000

LOL. Someone at Vanity Fair, intending to reach John Waters via his mailing address at Atomic Books, addressed an envelope to “Jhon Walters; Antomic Books”. [Facebook]
The last few building booms have contributed some pretty heinous new additions to New York's cityscape, but this might just be the worse. I'm not sure we can even call this ill-proportioned stack of claustrophobia-inducing hotel rooms clad in signifiers of "Brooklyn-ness" (Brick! Street Art!) and mismatched decor trends architecture. This is straight-up an attraction out of a theme park, which I suppose makes sense considering it's called "The Williamsburg Hotel". The most cringe-inducing detail? A grand ballroom designed to "reflect the derelict buildings of Detroit". [Dezeen]
This is awesome. Baltimore nonprofit art space/residency Creative Alliance is throwing a giant dance party tomorrow in support the city’s status as a “sanctuary city”. Bailar Sin Miedo will feature Mexican food vendors, bachata lessons, and live music. [Creative Alliance]
The Hard Times has now fully replaced The Onion as my newsfeed’s satirical headline supplier of choice: “Moving to Brooklyn Gave Me the Confidence Needed to Finally Start Wearing This Hat”. [The Hard Times]
A giant Jeff Koons inflatable sculpture of a ballerina is coming soon to Rockefeller Center. [artnet News]
Here's a sneak peak at the new Marciano Museum opening in LA later this month. The inaugural exhibition is inspired by Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library." From the few images here, though, it doesn't really seem like the Marciano Collection is particularly good? [Los Angeles Times]
Rioters in Portland smashed the windows of Michael Parsons Gallery, which unbeknownst to them, ironically, was showing paintings of last year's riots by Alex Lilly. Is this a Portlandia sketch for the Trump era? [Oregon Live]

GIF of the Day: Sasha Katz

Thu, 11 May 2017 19:40:49 +0000

Whitney Kimball once remarked rather astutely that “plants are no longer a trend; they are a medium”.

It’s certainly the most beneficial zeitgeist we’ve observed in a while—the indoor air quality at art fairs has never been better! These GIFs from Sasha Katz don’t serve that utility, but might point to another environmental concern. There’s just so much damned e-waste everywhere! For all the greenwashing of Apple’s brand-spanking-NuvaRing campus (surrounded by parking in the midst of suburban sprawl), they sure seem to like designing consumer products with toxic components that outlast their usable lives by several millennia.

The Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva: The Pavilions, Part One

Thu, 11 May 2017 19:01:06 +0000

A view of the Giardini. All photos by Marsha Owett.

Today we spent the majority of our time looking at the Pavilions and we’ll be spending much of tomorrow similarly. Overall, there seem to be fewer people visiting the pavilions and Biennale this year—as evidenced by shortened bathroom cues and the ability to get a cup of coffee in less than hour. It’s hard, though, to discern the reasons for this. It’s not like anyone knows in advance what the shows (or weather) will be like. Still, I wondered if the poor quality of this year’s biennale might have depressed some enough that they took the day off. And perhaps the Americans here are too worried about the President’s recent firing of FBI Chief James Comey to focus on art? I know it’s an issue for me as well as many others I’ve seen over the last two days.

Be AFC's Neighbor: Apply For Two Trees' Cultural Space Subsidy Program

Thu, 11 May 2017 16:22:20 +0000

Install shot of “Strange Genitals” featuring (L-R) Ga Hee Park, Carol Cole, June Culp, Jared Buckheister, Saul Chernick, and Phaan Howng

We’re lucky participants in Two Trees’ Cultural Space Subsidy Program. The initiative rents space to artists and organizations at a mere $12/sq foot. It’s a price point virtually unheard of in ever-more-expensive areas such as DUMBO.

The program has successfully kept dozens of artists in the neighborhood, providing fantastic studio space as well as a home base for nonprofits such as AFC—we’ve been able to use our loft office at 20 Jay Street for programming such as workshops, talks, and a staging area for exhibitions. The sense of community fostered by having other artists in the building has its own rewards. Paddy frequently pops down to the New York Studio Residency Program for studio visits, and we even collaborated with the NYSRP and hung our exhibition Strange Genitals in their gallery space. Sometimes it’s just oddly comforting to walk down the hall of an office building and catch a whiff of oil paint.

Thursday Links: Venetian Headlines Vie For Absurd Surpremacy

Thu, 11 May 2017 10:37:17 +0000

New World Design, Flying Pigs on Parade: a Chicago River Folly (2016). Courtesy New World Design.

Yes! Former Washington Post art critic Jessica Dawson is bringing dOGUMENTA to Manhattan this August. The art show is curated with dogs as the intended audience and will be installed outside, hung at doggie-level, and mindful of the limited color spectrum visible to canine eyes. [W]
Chicago architect Jeffrey Roberts of New World Design is planning a Pink Floyd-inspired Trump protest installation and has the band’s blessing. If all permits and fundraising go ahead as planned, it will comprise a series of gold pig balloons anchored to barges in the Chicago River, obstructing Trump’s giant gold name on his tower there. [artnet News]
Looks like the Trump administration has one more post to fill. The White House curator, William Allman, is retiring after 40 years at the residence. [The Art Newspaper]
Banksy’s large Brexit-themed mural in the UK has already been tagged. This story is only of interest because it’s brought the following two sentences to a newspaper: “But thugs armed with spray paint have written the words ‘THE CLASH’ - complete with an anarchist 'circle A' symbol on top of it. Whether this is in reference to the punk band whose second album opens with the song ‘Safe European Home’ is unclear.” [EXPRESS]
“Behold the Health Goth Choir That Rules the Art World” is basically the best headline we’ve seen out of Venice this year (or ever). Coincidentally, health goth is Paddy Johnson’s favorite goth subculture! [Observer]
Oh, nope this headline might be better: “Courtney Love Is Here in Venice to Defend Damien Hirst”. [ARTnews]
Looks like Courtney will have her work cut out for her: Damien Hirst is being accused of the deadly sin cultural appropriation! Hirst’s epic "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable” features dozens of faux-antiquities from a fictional ancient collector’s shipwreck. Among them, knockoff Ife-era sculptures inspired by artifacts from Nigeria are supposedly problematic. Hirst’s exhibition fully credits the sources of his work, so I don’t see what the problem here is. It seems like an example of outrage-bootstrapping to get attention on the part of the “offended”. [CNN]
Blake Gopnik on the importance of preserving brutalist architecture. [artnet News]

The Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva: Images from the Giardini

Thu, 11 May 2017 07:01:59 +0000

Sebastian Diaz Morales, “Suspension”, 2014. All photos by Marsha Owett.

What’s the best way to understand art? One tactic is to see a lot of it. Another is to spend time with artists. And yet another is to curate an entire show around the idea that artist practices are God’s gift to the world and include as many studios, meditations on studios, and virtual studio renderings as humanly possible. Guess which approach Biennale curator Christine Macel takes in the Giardini section. A look at the show below. Arsenale pics here.

GIF of the Day: How to Get to MUAC

Wed, 10 May 2017 20:30:41 +0000

I have remarked before that Mexican art museums post a ton of weird GIFs to their social media accounts all the time.

This post, though, is pretty helpful. It’s a step-by-step guide to reaching the fabulous Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) via public transit. The museum is located in the Centro Cultural Universitario in the heart of the sprawling Ciudad Universitaria, a modernist campus set in acres of ecological preserves and sculpture gardens. It’s one of my personal favorite museums in the world, located in one of the best examples of modernist university design and land art (check out the Espacio Escultorico) but damn is it hard to navigate!

The Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva: Images from the Arsenale

Wed, 10 May 2017 19:40:50 +0000

Irina Korina, “Good Intentions”, 2017. All images by Marsha Owett

We’ve spent the better part of a day looking at the Venice Biennale’s exhibition, “Viva Arte Viva”. Curated by Christine Macel and described as a Biennale designed “with artists, by artists and for artists”, the show amounts to a love letter addressed to artists. Studios have been transported, materials worshipped, and methodologies examined. Weaving as a metaphor for making, togetherness, and life, is completely and utterly ubiquitous. The sincerity of it all can be a bit much. But more on that later. A look at the Arsenale section of the show below.

Brace Yourselves: Saatchi Art Is Bringing The Other Art Fair To Brooklyn

Wed, 10 May 2017 16:49:48 +0000

Can New York handle any more art fairs? No sooner had we finished discussing the scheduling conflicts and competition between various fairs and weeks than we hear yet another one is descending upon the city.

Saatchi Art is launching a Brooklyn edition of The Other Art Fair, the online gallery’s multi-national event that launched in London in 2011. TOAF will take over Greenpoint’s Brooklyn Expo Center from June 1st through 4th. It’s not quite the standard art fair model, however.

Wednesday Links: The Fifth Element Turns 20, Still Queer?

Wed, 10 May 2017 11:21:08 +0000

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (or a windowless detention cell somewhere) you’re aware that Donald Trump has dismissed FBI director James Comey, who has been investigating the president’s ties to Russia. Basically everyone is freaking out, because this is dictatorship 101.
David Wallace reviews the Jewish Museum’s The Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, which appropriately seems to meander like the writers’ texts. [The New Yorker]
The first trailer is out for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. Will this be good? Terrible? One immediate thought: movies need to stop putting those CGI “hologram” billboards in the background of every scene (it distracted from otherwise really lovely art direction in Ghost in the Shell). The original Blade Runner looked so great and so real because it was all show with practical special effects. Countless imitators have failed to make a believable future city in the decades since. [YouTube]
Speaking of Sci-Fi masterpieces, it’s crazy to believe Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element is now 20 years old. Ben Child looks back at the film’s depictions of gender and sexuality and tries to decided if they were regressive (straight white male protagonist surrounded by hyper-feminized service industry workers) or visionary (Ruby Rhod, female Jesus, etc.) As a weird queer kid, Ruby Rhod was basically my hero! [The Guardian]
Anish Kapoor dominates the discussion on Dezeen this week. Commenters are debating whether Kapoor’s calls for artists and designers to oppose Trump are hypocritical, given the apparent lack of political messaging in the artist’s own work. Opinion also remains divided over his vortex “Descension” that was recently unveiled in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Wasn’t the water in that thing supposed to be black? [Dezeen]
Hernan Bas discusses Florida Living (his new show at Savannah College of Art and Design), growing up in Miami, his part-time move to Detroit, and more. Bas seems like a funny guy who resists cliches about the artist narrative. [The Miami New Times]
This looks kind of cool. A new miniature of Manhattan, called Gulliver’s Gate, is now permanently installed in Times Square. It’s crazy intricately detailed (though geographically innacurate). [Curbed]
Sotheby's CEO Tad Smith thinks the art market is no longer cyclical, but structurally poised for growth. That’s because the richest people keep getting ever richer, meaning they will forever shell out more and more cash for artworks. While there’s some truth to that (obviously) we’ve seen enough boom-and-bust to know the market isn’t that simple. [CNBC]

GIF of the Day: Melati Suryodarmo

Tue, 09 May 2017 19:31:11 +0000

Documentation of artist Melati Suryodarmo dancing on butter at Lilith Performance Studio has taken on a life of its own. YouTuber Nathan Hatton set the piece to Adele’s “Someone Like You” and it’s been viewed almost as many times as the original. On Tumblr, GIFs from the video have become synonymous with #fail.

But really, this performance is a triumph. The original piece, set to drumming, is impossible to look away from. It’s wholly compelling and suspenseful while obviously maintaining a sense of humor. It’s time people knew the true origin of “butter dance” and Suryodarmo’s brilliance.

No, The Pineapple Prank Meme Isn't Proof "Modern Art" Is A Sham

Tue, 09 May 2017 18:59:47 +0000

Lloyd Jack

The mainstream internet’s latest “har har art people are whacky” meme is a pineapple in a vitrine. This is not a Damien Hirst nor Yoko Ono. The fruit was left as a prank by gallery visitors at Robert Gordon University’s Pester & Rossi: INFINITY INTENSIF exhibition on an empty plinth, and somehow ended up enshrined under a glass case during a reshuffle of the show.

GIF of the Day: Sahlooter

Mon, 08 May 2017 18:01:51 +0000

This GIF from Giphy auteur Sahlooter kinda creeps me out. It feels squishy like internal organs or hot dogs, but looks like a mother holding a baby.

Are we all just flesh tubes of meat? Basically.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Reading is Fundamental

Mon, 08 May 2017 17:54:43 +0000

Start your week off with a dose of Civil Rights history Monday at IFC, where fierce pussy is screening The Black Power Mixtape and Wednesday at ICP, where Hettie Jones will be talking about what Making America Great really looks like. Thursday, we’re looking forward to two book launches. Andrea McGinty will be releasing her Ah Yes Bad Things at Printed Matter and Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art is throwing a party to celebrate the catalog for their current exhibition Queer Threads. Friday night there are mysterious but promising exhibitions opening all over Brooklyn. Then it’s DUMBO open studios all weekend. End the week with a day trip to New Haven (seriously, it’s a painless train ride) where Bortolami’s ARTIST/CITY program has paired Tom Burr with a Marcel Breuer masterpiece that now finds itself surrounded by an IKEA parking lot.

Monday Links: Fat Cats, Shams, and Progressives

Mon, 08 May 2017 11:21:01 +0000

Image Via Newlin Tillotson's twitter.

Opera singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky retired from his singing career in 2015 when he learned he would need to be treated for a brain tumor. He made a surprise return to the Met Opera's gala concert last night, though, which is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Met’s home at Lincoln Center. What a performance. [The New York Times]
Looks like one recommendation of New York's cultural plan is a major redistribution of funds, so that the smaller organizations focused on diversity get more money and the giant institutions receive less. This is a good start. [The New York Times]
artnet News's new columnist, Tim Schneider, discusses my report on new commission agreements between artists and gallerists in the emerging field. He takes issue of Muriel Guepin's model of taking all the profit at an art fair until her costs are covered. I agree that this model isn't one that should be emulated, but a 60/40 split at an art fair only doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. Fairs are really expensive, and at the lower end of the market, its really difficult for galleries to recoup their costs. Perhaps the art fairs are the real fat cats here? [artnet News]
This picture of Martha Stewart giving Donald Trump the bird at Frieze is hilarious. She's standing between Andres Serrano photographs we deemed terrible of Trump and Snoop Dog. [e-online]
The University of Montana School of Art is offering a fully online Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art. I suspect studio art only means graphic design, but still—is there any way this isn't a total sham? [kpax]
John Waters will show "weirdly Baltimore-based" art at The Venice Biennale this year. (More sign art.) The show opens Wednesday and we'll be there. [The Baltimore Sun]
Christine Macel, the chief curator at of the Pompidou Center in Paris and this year's Venice Biennale will be focusing on art by artists and for artists, not politics. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Nina Bo'nina Brown's Single Tear

Fri, 05 May 2017 18:49:42 +0000

As a blog that features a lot of GIFs, it goes without saying that we appreciate RuPaul’s Drag Race, arguably the most GIF-able thing on television (basically, contouring reduces human flesh to 250 colors or less, expressions are over-sized, the editing packs in tons of drama to every 30 seconds, and dithering just makes queens’ makeup blends look even more flawless).

Has there ever been a more made-for-GIF moment than Nina Bo’nina Brown’s sad single makeup tear slowly rolling down her face on Season 9, Episode 5? It’s literally the first thing I thought when watching it for the first time. Second thought: someone should design black eyedrops so everyone can do this without first adding a quarter inch of eyeliner.

We Went to Frieze, Part Two: Pussy Hat Show Flops, Anti-War Hard On Holds Up

Fri, 05 May 2017 17:57:50 +0000

Frieze entrance

Yesterday we discussed the overall look and feel of Frieze and concluded that this iteration of the fair is far superior to previous years. Lots of lively inventive work and short on the kind of soulless work in a frame that can make these events so tedious. Today we take a deep dive into a lot of the art we saw. Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.

Who's Wearing the Pants at Frieze Week?

Fri, 05 May 2017 16:26:01 +0000

Amanda Ross-Ho, “Untitled Vestments (Have Not) 2016. At Mitchell-Innes & Nash

What do giant pants have to do with Frieze, NADA and the changing art fair landscape? In which Michael Anthony Farley and Paddy Johnson nerd out and discuss the fairs.

Michael: Yesterday, I remarked that Frieze surprisingly felt a bit like NADA back when NADA was still fun. Almost immediately after I said this to Paddy, we rounded a corner and found these giant pants from NADA darling Amanda Ross-Ho. Beyond being evidence to that opinion, they’re perfectly tailored (no pun intended) to an art fair context—great big grown-up business pants with the pockets turned out as if to say “I’m broke.” I feel like a like a lot of mid-tier galleries can relate about now. They should’ve been ubiquitous not-quite-navy dark cobalt like the contemporary gallerist uniform, rather than black.

Friday Links: Photoshopper Digitally Photobombs Kylie Jenner's Instagram to Hilarious Ends

Fri, 05 May 2017 10:42:18 +0000

Me n Kendall got roped into an Elmo themed runway show but at least we got to choose our own hairstyles LOL! Kendall went with "Beyoncé Lemonade" and I went with "The Coolio" ALSO snapped a quick pic of Kendall but she wouldn't let me post it (I'm def gunna post it)!!! #StayTuned #ElmoFashion #justBeatAngryBirds

We Went to Frieze, Part One: Seagull Poop, People Poop, and Demon Poop

Thu, 04 May 2017 22:28:08 +0000

The Frieze entrance. Photo: Paddy Johnson

Every year Frieze installs a massive tent on Randall’s Island and lures jetsetters from across the globe to its contemporary art fair. This year, the fair expanded its usual roster of contemporary art galleries to include a few secondary market stalwarts as well. Newcomers to the fair included Bernard Jacobson Gallery, Castelli Gallery, and Axel Vervoordt and Eykyn Maclean.

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Virtual Reality Sex

Wed, 03 May 2017 18:40:24 +0000

Thank God for anime.

Basically so much of it has been made and diligently translated to GIF form that you can find hyper-specific animations of pretty much any term, like “virtual reality humping while laying in a lap with nipples jiggling” or “man’s face melts off schoolgirl crush” or “tentacle ______”.

Keep it weird, otakus.

Highlights From Brown Paper: a Zine Fest For Artists of Color

Wed, 03 May 2017 18:29:28 +0000

I’m not sure why, but there’s a totally unfounded stereotype that zine nerd culture is “a white people thing”. Thankfully, that misconception has been corrected. Baltimore now has Kahlon, an event series/curatorial platform that prioritizes correcting the real and/or perceived diversity problems across DIY scenes.

Last weekend, Kahlon (Abdu Ali, Bomin Jeon, and Markele Cullins) partnered with Brooklyn’s 3 Dot Zine to bring an edition of the Brown Paper Zine Fair to Baltimore. Spread across three galleries of the Eubie Blake Cultural Center, the fair feels a bit like a smaller, more manageable version of Baltimore’s somewhat-overwhelming Publications and Multiples Fair. One big distinction: Brown Paper is focused on zinesters, small publishers, and printmakers of color.

New Strategies Emerge and Diverge For Surviving Art Fair Costs

Wed, 03 May 2017 17:00:28 +0000

Image via: Spring Break

Art fairs aren’t cheap. Participating galleries take on additional real estate costs, not to mention shipping and staffing expenses. These costs add up. As a result, some dealers in the emerging market are starting to renegotiate the common 50/50 commission split between artists and galleries.

While changing expectations is rarely easy, the dealers we spoke with largely viewed these renegotiations as a necessity. “At the lower end of these things (i.e. not Boesky et al) I think this makes a lot of sense as the cost of these fairs is so astronomical it becomes impossible to recoup them—and if the artist’s works are not 200K there is really no way,” said Allegra LaViola of the Lower East Side gallery Sargent’s Daughter’s. The gallery has not participated in any fairs, but LaViola attends many and has participated in fairs under the name of her previous gallery, Allegra LaViola Gallery.

Wednesday Links: Guy Who Came To Met Gala Naked In Box Wins Red Carpet

Wed, 03 May 2017 10:38:22 +0000

Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich has been arrested following his unsanctioned Met Gala performance (cue the fashion police jokes). The Russian artist was dropped off by accomplices naked and sealed in a plexiglass box on the red carpet. In his defense, the look was much more fitting of this year's "avant-garde" dress code than whatever the hell it was any of the Kardashian-Jenner brood squeezed into. [The Art Newspaper]
Long Island City's long-awaited new waterfront library, designed by starchitect Steven Holl, is being delayed yet again. This time, a custom glass shipment has been delayed by a strike in Spain. [Curbed]
Many millennials might vaguely remember the ridiculous children's film Blank Check that always seemed to be on TV for much of the 1990s. It turns out that the movie is really, really fucked up when you watch it from an adult's perspective. Though, honestly, I remember having suspension of disbelief issues with it as a child. [Observer]
Toronto's Visions Gallery has cancelled a show of (pretty bad) paintings by Amanda PL after the artist was accused of "cultural genocide". PL's work is influenced by Norval Morrisseau's 1960s paintings, which incorporated motifs from his Indigenous Canadian roots. When the gallerists found out PL was White, they axed the show and issued a public apology. I'm not sure I have an opinion about this beyond the point that the paintings are bad no matter who painted them. [Heat Street]
Apparently one of the booths at RuPaul's Drag Con (which wrapped up over the weekend) was a Divine "mini museum". Thankfully social media has documented this cultural event thoroughly for posterity. [Facebook]
Anyone planning an Escape From New York during Frieze Week: I highly recommend the Maryland Film Festival, which opens today. This year should be especially exciting. The organization has bought and renovated a historic theater in Baltimore where there will be year-round programming. It looks great. [BmoreArt]
Revisiting Jean Paul Gaultier's 1000+ costumes for The Fifth Element: twenty years later, they're still amazing and futuristic. [DAZED]
And some say the Grinch's heart grew three sizes as big that day: Florida Republicans have decided not to slash state funding for Miami's famed New World School of the Arts. [Miami Herald]

GIF of the Day: Alfredo Salazar Caro

Tue, 02 May 2017 22:36:50 +0000

The online exhibition Mermaids and Unicorns deals with the concept of impermanence, virtual presence, and the metaphor of vanitas. Today, we highlight the work of Alfredo Salazar Caro, whose GIF “Scan of Diego Rivera’s Tomb surrounded by Death Rite stones being summoned through a Sri Yantra for healing and balance of male and female spirits” rhetorically asks if altars can be digitized. The answer, of course, is in the making—it most certainly can.

The Estate Tax: An Economic Justice No-Brainer

Tue, 02 May 2017 13:32:54 +0000

Economic inequality is one of our biggest problems as a society, and it’s ruining our health. But it’s hard to write headlines about something that gets incrementally worse every day, instead of making a dramatic, newsworthy entrance. Bernie Sander’s campaign struck a chord by focusing on income inequality, and Trump garnered popularity by addressing workers on the losing end of the economy (though, I would argue, not with actual solutions).

Tuesday Links: Enter the Met Gala Time Vortex

Tue, 02 May 2017 11:35:50 +0000

The Met Gala

The NEA lives to see another day. In fact, it actually got a funding increase through Trump's administration. [artnet News]
The Met gala pictures are out. Watch out. It's a time suck. [CNN]
PS1 founder Alanna Heiss and New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni talk. [ARTnews]
B&H workers are on strike. The electronics company is being accused of union busting, following the announcement that it would be consolidating warehouses in New Jersey and eliminating those in NYC. [Hyperallergic]
Michael Kimmelman discusses Penn Station and Governor Andrew Cuomo's plan to update it, which he compares to slapping "a two-car garage onto a dilapidated split-level and declare the property good as new." He also compares Cuomo to Republican Governor Chris Christie. Uh oh. [The New York Times]
Ivanka Trump gets profiled in the Times and comes out smelling pretty okay. Her book, though, "Women Who Work", gets a thorough trashing. According to Jennifer Senior, it is written entirely from a point of privilege and is witlessly derivative. Those are the biggest issues identified by Senior, but from the reporting, I'd think the complete lack of interest in others might be larger. In the few quotes provided, I actually found it offensive. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Theo Jansen's Strandbeest

Mon, 01 May 2017 19:44:46 +0000

This is Theo Jansen’s “Strandbeest”, a walking house/crab contraption that looks like it was designed for the context of scaring-the-shit out of people on acid at Burning Man.

I don’t know how this thing works, but if you’re lucky enough to be in Mexico City on May 13th, you can catch the opening of Jansen’s Asombrosas Criaturas at Laboratorio Arte Alameda .

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Skip Most Fairs, See The Real Hennessy Youngman

Mon, 01 May 2017 19:33:11 +0000

Jayson Musson

Plan comfortable shoes for the week: it’s another inundation of art fairs and satellite events.

Thankfully, Frieze and SPRING/BREAK’s new Brooklyn offshoot are the only big fairs we’re recommending by now, so fair fatigue shouldn’t be too much of a problem. But of course, the city is packed with art star openings, book launches, and more brunches than you can shake a croissant at. We’ve done you the favor of skimming only the best of the best events this week though, to save you from too much overload.

Monday Links: All Eyes on The Met

Mon, 01 May 2017 11:00:56 +0000

Here’s a list of Hasan Minhaj’s best jokes from what sounds like the most awkward White House Correspondents’ Dinner in the history of the tradition. Knowing that basically no one from the press-hating Trump administration (including the President) even showed up, I totally would’ve been too preoccupied listening for an incoming drone strike to enjoy the comedy. [Washington Post]
Vito Acconci died of a stroke at the age of 77. The conceptual artist turned architect was best known in the art world for his performance “Seedbed” 1972 in which he camped out under a ramp in the gallery and masturbated to fantasies about viewers he voiced through a microphone. [The New York Times]
The Met Gala takes place tonight. This is a chance to look at rich people in fancy dresses. This year, guests are being encouraged to think “avant-garde” in response to the exhibition Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between. [The New York Times]
For those curious about the exhibition, Vogue got a walk-through with Chief Curator Andrew Bolton and it sounds like this is truly going to be one of the Met’s weirdest undertakings. The show spans decades of Kawakubo’s work, but it is not a retrospective and doesn’t feature her best-known work. Instead, it’s a highly-focused look at womenswear that’s organized into dichotomous categories like “Clothes / Not Clothes” or “Model/Multiple”. There is no other wall text, per the designer’s wishes. [Vogue]
Thaddaeus Ropac has opened his fourth gallery. This one’s in a converted London mansion and it’s huge. There are numerous exhibition spaces spread out over 16,000 square feet and five floors. That’s basically the amount of space some museums have. How can the market support that much art from one dealer? [Forbes]
Gentrification is basically turning all of once-cool Manhattan neighborhoods into Jersey strip malls. The Lower East Side is getting a Target and Trader Joe’s in the same building. This feels like the end of an era. [Curbed]
artnet News’ weekly “Best and Worst of the Art World” round-up is really good this week. The Smithsonian has an exhibition called Before Internet Cats and horrendously underpaid Tate employees were asked to donate to outgoing director Nicholas Serota’s going-away gift: a boat. People are pissed. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Nymphomaniac on the Hogwarts Express

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 16:00:44 +0000

The infamous train cruising scene from Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 remains one of my all-time favorite hard-to-watch sequences in film. I’m not sure who made this GIF mashing it up with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but it’s a masterpiece of discomfort. Enjoy.

The Last Day of Disco; DUOX4Odell’s: You’ll Know If You Belong

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 13:48:18 +0000

“DUOX4Odell’s: You’ll Know If You Belong” installation view. All images courtesy Wickerham & Lomax

Wickerham & Lomax: DUOX4Odell’s: You’ll Know if You Belong The Former Everyman Theater 1723 N. Charles St, Baltimore MD March 31 - April 28 Closing reception 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Presented by Light City and the Station North Arts & Entertainment District

I have a soft spot for any exhibition that’s promoted with coasters left in gay dive bars.

Friday Links: Public Art too Scary for Children? Frieze Going Populist?

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 10:48:48 +0000

Thomas Houseago

More developments in the saga of the beleaguered Bell Foundry art space in Baltimore. The city shuttered the live/work building last year, evicting residents with no warning, citing safety issues. Now the property is on the market as a knock-down development site for $1 million. Yesterday someone tagged “$HAME 100” on the side of the building, which is already covered in bank-sponsored street art. The article implies that the Baltimore Rock Opera Society (the sole remaining tenants) are somehow responsible for cleaning it up. Isn’t that their slumlord’s job? The Facebook comments on this one are entertaining/infuriating, as to be expected. [City Paper]
The Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg have broken ground on an expansion project (doesn’t that sentence about Virginia sound like something a Brooklyn poet would write about gentrification?). The expansion, designed by Samuel Anderson Architects, will increase exhibition space by 22%. I think it kinda looks like a McMansion. [ARTFIXdaily]
The NYT profiles American Medium, discussing the niche skill of translating digital works to the white cube, the gallery’s origins, and their move to Chelsea. [The New York Times]
Google is launching a virtual reality “art gallery” where Tilt Brush makers can share their works with one another. Importantly, you won’t need a VR headset to see the 3D objects. This could spark a lot of interest in the technology. [Business Insider]
Boy this is appalling: The city run initiative, “Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program”, leaves 38 percent of all affordable housing unoccupied due to mismanagement. [Curbed]
Is Frieze going to be a more “populist” fair this year, as this article suggests? Absolutely not. But gallerists are responding to the political crisis with some borderline-gimmicky nods to protest. Cheim & Read, for example, is doing an all-pink booth as a tribute to the sea of “pussy hats” from the Women’s March. And P.P.O.W. gallery will show an Anton van Dalen pidgeon coop that looks like a car burnt in a riot. [Bloomberg]
Advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather has created a font in memory of LGBTQ artist/activist Gilbert Baker, who designed the rainbow flag in 1978. They’ve launched the website Type With Pride, where the font can be downloaded in the hopes it is used in marches and protests. It’s a really pretty font, but I don’t see this being super legible from a distance at a rally. [Dezeen]
A vaguely skeletal public sculpture by Thomas Houseago is scaring some Chicagoans. It mainly seems people think it will spook the children or ruin family photos. We’re all for more scary public art. [ABC 7]

GIF of the Day: Robot Knife Game

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 18:20:58 +0000

I always hate those ubiquitous scenes in movies where people play this game (and after watching The Night Of, will anybody ever play again?). So it’s surprising that I love this GIF. Perhaps that’s a quality of the medium—no matter how many times the set number of frames loops, that guy is not going to lose a finger.

But would anyone trust a robot to do this? After all, Bishop’s not-quite-precision at this parlor trick is what outed him as an android in Aliens.

See This Tonight: John Belknap's Bathroom Interiors

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 16:26:47 +0000

John Belknap: Bathroom Interiors Special Special 44 East 1st Street New York, NY Opens Thursday, April 27th, 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. Event Page

We’re happy to announce that AFC’s awesome intern John Belknap has a month-long solo show that opens tonight at Special Special. Even if John weren’t part of the AFC fam, we’d recommend his work. Special Special is gallery/retail space inspired by museum stores that produces functional editions with artists. For this project, John is considering the most intimate of spaces: the bathroom.

Thursday Links: Handmaids on the Highline

Thu, 27 Apr 2017 09:59:19 +0000

The Handmaid's Train

A post shared by Michael Martin (@martinized) on Apr 26, 2017 at 3:09pm PDT

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Faith Holland

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 19:32:41 +0000

Most dicks just drip cum. Thanks to Faith Holland's inclusion in Mermaids and Unicorns, though, we now have a slightly broader vision for the organ. It can blow bubbles too. The new online show explores the imagined, fear of impermanence, death and ultimately life—a perfect match for the dick bubble blower.

It’s worth noting that most of the other works in the show are work safe. Peruse at your leisure.

Three Shows: Olafur Eliasson, Alice Neel and Romare Bearden

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 19:11:26 +0000

Olafur Eliasson

OLAFUR ELIASSON AT TANYA BONAKDAR Closed April 22nd

Too late to see it now, but viewing Olafur Eliasson’s show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is like walking into a selfie chamber for tourists. This is particularly true for the room in which turning on a blue light under a yellow florescent transforms all the dots on a wall from grey to a veritable rainbow of colors. When I visited, the exhibition was packed with Asian tourists, all armed with cell phones.

Wednesday Links: NFL Builds a Fake Museum

Wed, 26 Apr 2017 11:31:48 +0000

We haven’t read much about the Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale, but based on this review it looks like it’s going to be good and deeply disturbing. [Entertainment Weekly]

Apparently the NFL has built a fake Philadelphia Museum of Art in front of the real Philadelphia Museum of Art for a televised event. [NBC Philadelphia]

This is terrible news. Trump’s Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, wants to review every national monument designation made since 1996. This could lead to millions of acres of federally-protected land being opened to resource extraction or development. [Washington Post]

The Marciano brothers (of GUESS Jeans fame and fortune) are now serious collectors. They’ve bought an old Masonic Temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and are in the midst of converting it to a contemporary art museum, which should open next month. The space sounds insane, with leftovers from odd rituals and massive rooms. [Los Angeles Magazine]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is talking with the City of New York about charging mandatory admission prices for out-of-towners, rather than voluntary. [The New York Times]

Frances Stark is organizing an opera that cast children between the age of 10-19 in the orchestra. Why is this significant? The suggestion of this piece seems to be that it’s because she’s so involved with it, that she barely had time to make room for the Whitney Biennial. You’d think a better hook could be found. [The Guardian]

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is none too happy that Instagram has been censoring photos of their Imogen Cunningham exhibition. Apparently Cunningham’s abstracted nudes are just too sexy for the social media site’s community standards? [artnet News]

What could France’s election mean for the art world? Surprisingly both Macron and Le Pen have vowed to make the cultural sector a priority, though of course Macron’s policies would include European exchange programs for arts professionals and Le Pen’s proposals include stopping the sale of heritage sites to foreigners. [The Arts Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: 100 Days In

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 19:05:10 +0000

100 days in with President Trump and this armadillo pretty much sums up where I’m at.

Tuesday Links: A Camping Trip with John Waters

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:43:47 +0000

Beyza Çoruhlu, on view at Istanbul’s Mamut 5 survey show.

South Dakota, one of the nation’s reddest states, receives the fifth-highest amount of NEA funding per capita. Michael Cooper tours the state, and looks at where that money is going. [The New York Times]
Are Turkish artists moving away from politically-charged subject matter? It seems so. As the right-wing government clamps down on freedoms, artists are retreating to labor intensive studio practices, if the works selected for the sprawling survey Mamut 5 are any indication. [The Art Newspaper]
Filipino art collector and developer Robbie Antonio is launching a line of prefabricated museums (seriously) that aspiring governments, nonprofits, or collectors can buy for less than $1 million. What’s up with all the masonry walls here? [artnet News]
An interview with artist Christopher Kline, on why he’s using musical theater to tell the story of his small New York hometown at the Tate Liverpool. [Art in Liverpool]
OMG. John Waters is leading a camp for grown ups in Connecticut this Summer. I want to go! [ARTnews]
This is such a good idea. To combat the affordable housing crisis, there’s a London scheme to produce and sell totally no-frills, “unfinished” homes for a fraction of the cost. Considering how frequently people want to replace tacky cabinets or laminate flooring anyway, I for one would actually prefer to live in one of these. [The Guardian]
Headline of the day: “Stick-Wielding Woman On The Loose Near Asian Art Museum”. Watch out, San Francisco! [SFist]

GIF of the Day: Sheep Headbutt

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 18:07:57 +0000

The suspense! The cuteness! This GIF has it all.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Teach-ins, Yoni Eggs, Cemetery Secrets, and More

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 17:55:36 +0000

Martha Wilson

It’s a bit of a slow week for the art world, but that’s just fine by us. There are a handful of events we’re really looking forward to this week and those will be much better enjoyed without the stress of darting around to a dozen other openings. Those include Martha Wilson’s Activist History Teach-In at The 8th Floor on Wednesday night, Alex Ebstein’s solo show at Victori + Mo Friday night, and Sophie Calle at Green-Wood Cemetery on Saturday. Calle will be taking visitor’s confessions and entombing them. Never turn down an opportunity to check out Green-Wood, and certainly never an opportunity for consequence-free secret-telling.

GIF of the Day: Infinity Cat

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 17:28:34 +0000

I could watch this for hours. It reminds me of one of those perpetual-motion desk ornaments (such as the clanging silver balls, pecking birds, etc…) people seemed to have on their desks a lot in 80s workplace movies or 90s guidance counselor offices. Someone needs to invent an IRL version of this cat contraption.

Pulp Friction: Deborah Castillo on Her Politically-Charged Fotonovelas

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 14:12:07 +0000

Deborah Castillo wears a lot of hats as an artist. And wigs. Originally from Venezuela, Castillo often blurs the lines between performance, video, photography, publications and even jewelry making. What binds these endeavors together is a sharp, critical wit (usually trained on political institutions) and flair for the dramatic. That might manifest as necklaces in the shape of misogynist slurs in Spanish or over-the-top fictional narratives involving art world kidnappings and embezzlement.

Friday Links: Terrible Hippo in Tutu Sparks No Public Art Controversy

Fri, 21 Apr 2017 11:18:19 +0000

Artist Hannah Rothstein imagines a bleak future for America’s National Parks in a series of WPA style posters. Set in 2050, these parks will all be ravaged by the effects of climate change. This, of course, assumes they make it that long. We can imagine a future in which the public donates its parks to the Trump family. Their forests will be clear cut for golf courses, luxury hotels and handbag shops. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Freddie Smithson

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 17:28:22 +0000

I looked at this GIF from Freddie Smithson today while hungry, and now have visions of a rapture in which we are taken by the carb gods to a better planet.

Slideshow: AFC's Goth Benefit, Part 1

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 16:50:54 +0000

Unless you’ve been un-living under a tombstone, you know Art F City’s Goth Benefit took over the dungeon of Collapsable Hole Tuesday night. It’s an evening few of us will forget. Just in case we do, however, photographer Liz Ligon was there to document it thoroughly. From Hot Topic merch raffles to the goth opera stylings of Joseph Keckler, it was wild night. See for yourself below.

Slideshow: AFC's Goth Benefit, Part 2

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 16:48:37 +0000

Thursday Links: Get Your £1,705 IKEA Shopping Bag by Balenciaga

Thu, 20 Apr 2017 10:24:15 +0000

Balenciaga has released a "knockoff" of those blue IKEA shopping bags... which costs £1,705. The peculiar logic of late capitalism keeps the LOLs coming. [Dezeen]
Peter Garritano photographs New Yorkers he meets through Craigslist's "Strictly Platonic" friend-seeking section. These are surprisingly less sad than one would expect. But some of the ads are really, really strange. And borderline not platonic at all. [The New Yorker]
The DOT is seeking proposals for a new public artwork/design object for the Canal Street Triangle for a project called "Gateways to Chinatown". The selected proposal will receive a $900,000 budget. [Curbed]
Happy 4/20. Why is today Marijuana Appreciation Day? Like most stoner stories, it's murky and complicated. [WJLA]
Hmmm. Alex Jones now considers himself a "performance artist" (in defense of the craziest of his rants, while in court during a nasty divorce). I've long suspected this of Ann Coulter, but always suspected Jones was just legitimately out of his mind. [The Huffington Post]
Here's news that should make most city dwellers laugh: residents of a luxury highrise in London are suing the Tate Modern because visitors to the museum's outdoor spaces have views into the floor-to-ceiling glass apartments. Apparently the condo owners didn't understand the whole "glass houses" adage? Following this logic, does the museum have the right to sue the apartment owners for their views? [artnet News]
Wow, I had no idea Charlie's Angels star Farrah Fawcett was an artist! Hopefully the exhibition Mentoring a Muse: Charles Umlauf & Farrah Fawcett at Austin's Umlauf Sculpture Garden & Museum can disabuse us all of that oversight. [ARTnews]

Set up For Your Best Year Ever: A Tax Day How-To

Tue, 18 Apr 2017 16:11:52 +0000

Here we are at Tax Day. Your taxes are filed. (They aren’t? Here’s an IRS extension form - postmark it today. You’ll need one for your state, too.)

Last year you vowed to get your stuff in order. Then suddenly the tax deadline was upon you, and you scrambled through the process, and weren’t as careful as you intended to be. You suspected you should have been paying estimated quarterly taxes all year, but didn’t, and now your tax bill is surprisingly high.

GIF of the Day: Getting Ready for Tomorrow Night

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 20:04:04 +0000

How excited are we for our Goth Benefit tomorrow night? So excited I’ve been practicing black lipstick application all day (pro tip: put down smudgeproof liquid eyeliner as lipliner first, then blend inward with your lipstick or pencil and top it with a gloss).

Remember, get your tickets in advance!

This Week's Must-See Art Events: The AFC Goth Benefit and More

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 16:50:41 +0000

Joseph Keckler, shot by Jaimie Warren

The time has finally come. Our Goth Benefit is here. We’ll be converting Collapsable Hole into a goth wonderland, complete with drag performers, surprise guests, and options such as handcuffs for couples. (We’re also having a goth couple outfit contest, so plan accordingly). If last year’s benefit was any indication, this is basically going to be the party of the year.

Wednesday, nurse your hangover with a likely-nipple-tastic Betty Tompkins solo show at Marlborough Contemporary. Other highlights this week include Siebren Versteeg’s digital paintings at bitforms on Thursday, the annual Seven on Seven conference at the New Museum on Saturday, and Sunday’s open studios at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Monday Links: Apocalyptic Dinner Parties, Legal Battles Over Sculptures

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 10:47:57 +0000

Adrián Villar Rojas, "The Theater of Disappearance"

Adrián Villar Rojas’ The Theater of Disappearance, installed on the roof of the Met through the summer, looks so cool. The artist used the museum’s advanced imaging technology to scan and collage overlooked works from the musuem’s collection. That includes everything from medieval tombs to plaster casts of Renaissance sculptures and banquet tables. These new hybrid sculptures are rendered in black-and-white and feel like a strange end-of-the-world party. I can’t wait to see this IRL. [artnet News]
Gallerists have been returning, or refusing to display, the work of South African artist Zwelethu Mthethwa following his conviction in the murder of sexworker Nokuphila Kumalo. [IOL]
Designer Antonino Cardillo added an extension to a Roman art gallery inspired by the opening scene of Wagner's Das Rheingold opera. Which means, apparently, that every surface has been painted The-Exorcist-pea-soup-vomit-green. I am having a hard time imagining how artwork is going to live in this space. [Dezeen]
Arturo Di Modica, the sculptor behind Wall Street’s famous “Charging Bull” sculpture is suing to get “Fearless Girl” removed from in front of his piece, claiming it violates his rights as an artist by changing his work’s meaning. Jeff John Roberts points out why this case isn’t likely to go very far. [Fortune]
Somewhat related: sculptor Steve Tobin is suing nearby Trinity Church for removing his site-specific sculpture from its courtyard. Tobin created the sculpture in the place of a sycamore tree killed by falling debris on 9/11. Now, the church has put it out to pasture—literally, at a retreat center in Connecticut. [The New York Times]
Allie Wist, an associate art director at Saveur magazine, has a new photo series and recipe project about the dinner menus of the future. Lots of saltwater seafood, thanks to sea level rise, and not a lot of climate-sensitive crops (like chocolate). This is depressing. [NPR]
Christchurch is still recovering from the devastating earthquake that struck New Zealand in 2011. The Christchurch Art Gallery, which was closed for five years after damage, still hasn’t recouped its pre-quake visitor numbers. And now the museum faces higher insurance costs that make blockbuster shows impossible. [The Press]

Support AFC and Bid on Works by Katherine Bradford, Ross Bleckner and more!

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 13:00:51 +0000

Let the bidding begin! The Art F City 12th anniversary paddle8 auction is live, which means you’ve got exactly two weeks to secure that work you love. Our auction closes April 28th, so be sure to watch it carefully!

Not to toot our own horns, but here at Art F City, we take great pride in our auctions. We work hard to secure fantastic works of art by some of contemporary art’s best artists. And this year’s auction may be our finest yet. We have donated works by Edgar Arceneaux, Trudy Benson, Ross Bleckner (selected by Joshua Abelow), Katherine Bradford, Erik Den Brejeen, Jessica Dickinson, David Humphrey, Emily Noelle Lambert, Sara Greenberger Rafferty, Michael Scoggins, and Mark Tribe. Each and every work is outstanding.

Video of the Day: Cyprien Gaillard

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 20:00:11 +0000

I remember watching this video by Cyprien Gaillard at the New Museum’s first Triennial Younger Than Jesus and being a little ashamed of myself thinking the violence looked so natural and beautiful. Part of that feeling comes from the soundtrack by Koudlam, which seems almost forceful in its movement and rhythm.

The scene above documents a battle between members of two gangs of an underground fight club in St. Petersburg, which by today’s standards seems almost quaint. I googled “death gif” today after I read that the US is considering a pre-emptive strike against North Korea, and google dutifully brought back clips of people being murdered.

Thursday Links: Sleep With All of Earth's History

Thu, 13 Apr 2017 11:00:01 +0000

So, after reporting on art at the New York Times for 12 years, Randy Kennedy is moving to Hauser & Wirth as Director of Special Projects. A couple of WTFs here. First, this sucks, because it almost certainly means a reduction of arts coverage at the Times. Second, who is the head hunter for Hauser & Wirth because they seem to draw talent from really unexpected places? Paul Schimmel left his position as chief curator at MoCA to become a director (and then left). Noah Horowitz came from heading up the Armory to oversee their operations (and then left). And now Randy Kennedy has joined. ARTnews has a run down on which galleries have drawn from what talent pools. [ARTnews]
Speaking of ARTnews, they have the scoop on the press release of the month—Eataly has announced it will sponsor an air filtration system that will extend the life of Leonardo da Vinci’s 29-foot-by-15-foot fresco, "The Last Supper" by 500 years. It's currently rotting on a wall in a convent in Milan. [ARTnews]
Yay! The adult sleepovers at the Museum of Natural History are back. 350 bucks—and you have to sleep in your clothes—but still. You sleep with history. [artnet News]
Really? “Charging Bull” artist Arturo Di Modica, has threatened to sue if the “Fearless Girl” sculpture remains in place across from his sculpture on Wall Street. Is there nothing people won't fight about? [Curbed]
Interesting. More than 150 members of congress have signed a petition to increase funding to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), including 11 Republicans. Hyperallergic's Claire Voon writes that this signals growing bi-partisan support for the NEA. [Hyperallergic]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Dick Eye Makeup Tutorial

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 18:41:35 +0000

It seems like a lot of the gay internet consists of videos of dicks or makeup tutorials. So perhaps it makes unlikely sense that Instagram makeup artist Marion Moretti would synthesize her target demographic’s interests into one ridiculous concept.

Introducing dick eyes:

If someone wants to rock this to our Goth Benefit, we’ll figure out a prize for you.

Wednesday Links: AI Bob Ross, SNL Does Art Criticism

Wed, 12 Apr 2017 10:52:42 +0000

Will we ever get tired of how weird AI “deep dream” is? Alexander Reben has been feeding episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross into the neural net. Predictably, his hair gets even stranger. [IFL Science]
Art Cologne is in talks to absorb abc fair, launching Art Berlin in its place. How many art fairs can Germany possibly sustain? [The Art Newspaper]
More “Fearless Girl” controversy. Sculptor Arturo Di Modica, who created the original “Charging Bull” claims the promotional stunt distorts the intent of his work, and will be holding a press conference about it today. [The Washington Post]
Kate McKinnon as Cecilia Giménez, the abuelita who famously repainted “Ecce Homo” in Borja, is the best art critic SNL has ever had: “The first great question any sculptor must ask about the subject: what would he look like if he had a stroke? But he had the stroke while saying ‘cheeeeeese!’?” She’s talking, of course, about Emanuel Santos’s much-mocked bust of hunky soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo. This whole debacle reminds me of the I Love Lucy/Faces of Meth story from last year. Should we just give up on bronze busts of celebrities? Probably. [Mashable]
Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art will be free for teenagers starting this June. Unfortunately, admission is going up to $15 for adults. Youth is wasted on the young. [Chicago Tribune]
Jeffrey Deitch is heading back to LA, this time to open a gallery in Hollywood. [artnet News]
Ian Macfarlane has won Dezeen’s competition for a post-Brexit passport design. His proposal features the dark blue of old British passports in a gradient, erasing the familiar burgundy EU passport cover. I still can’t believe this is really happening. [Dezeen] There are too many highlights from the NYT Style Magazine profile of Sophie Calle… let’s just say the artist’s meet with the journalist begins(ish) by explaining that seemingly-fake-pregnant Calle is using the opportunity to enact giving birth to her dead cat. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Aja Untucked

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 18:36:59 +0000

RuPaul’s Drag Race never ceases to entertain. This season is a little weird, though, right? It seems like an awful lot of drama (even by both reality TV and drag standards) directed at seemingly inoffensive people. Case and point: last week’s episode of Untucked. Basically, Brooklyn’s own Aja was seriously resentful towards goofy California newcomer Valentina because the judges always seem to praise the doe-eyed West Coast ingénue and criticise the seemingly-no-eyed New Yorker.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Arctic Performances and Rooftop Sculptures

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 16:32:58 +0000

This is a bit of a slow week in New York’s art world. That’s a good thing, because everyone will need their energy for our goth party next week.

Nevertheless, we managed to track down at least one art outing per day that looks promising. Tuesday, Wong Kit Yi is closing her show of Arctic-specific performance documentation at P . Karaoke is rumored to be involved. Wednesday, Hercules Art Studio Program is opening a show about painting and the body that couldn’t feel more relevant to contemporary discourse. Thursday, we found a subversive performance night at Ridgewood’s The Woods, and Friday we’re looking forward to checking out Adrián Villar Rojas’s rooftop installation at the Met. This weekend MoMA opens the must-see Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction, and the Queens Museum will host a Sunday book launch of election-woe poetry.

Tuesday Links: No, This Museum Is Not On Fire

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 10:31:30 +0000

Daniel Knorr, Expiration Movement, (2017). Fridericianum Kassel. Photo © Bernd Borchardt, Courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan

“They go for the artists first. They go for the journalists, writers, painters, and photographers. That’s who you lock up if you don’t want people to know what’s happening. So that’s why I think if we don’t protect what they’re making now, it is a slippery slope, and we will lose by the time we need these images to go to the general public. No matter what these artists are working on now, whether or not it has an overt political sensibility, we need to protect them and their freedom.” Deana Haggag, the new president of United States Artists, on the arts in Trump’s America. [Vogue]
Dizzy is a new print-only art magazine that features everything from profiles of artists’ cats to an advice column by Princess Nokia. [ARTnews]
Man, The Hard Times (The Onion’s more punk cousin) has been killing it lately. This headline is everything: “Trump to Begin Series of Dumpster Fireside Chats”. [The Hard Times]
What is going on with LACMA’s expansion plans? When first announced, it seemed like architect Peter Zumthor was going to stitch together to museum’s existing campus with an elevated blob building that spanned busy Wilshire Ave and created connections above the various buildings. It turns out they want to demolish most of those buildings, which begs the question: why do you need a weird bridge building if the facilities it’s bridging are gone? The blob shape was explained as a reference to the La Brea tar pits, and the building was going to be clad in glossy black to match. But now they’ve ditched that idea, and even the interiors are supposed to be Real-Housewives-bathroom-beige. It seems like a lot of the conceptual justifications for this design just don’t make sense anymore, and this has been whittled into an odd-but-boring building. [Dezeen]
Daniel Knorr's piece for documenta 14 comprises a smoke machine installed in Kassel’s Fridericianum museum. It spews white smoke from the museum’s tower (a reference to the Pope dying/Vatican electoral process? Does the art world need a new Pope?) and this has caused alarm. City residents keep calling the fire department because it looks like the museum is on fire. The fire department has gotten tired of repeatedly checking on the installation to reassure everyone that it isn’t a fire, so now documenta will be providing a full-time smoke-watcher to reassure all involved that it’s just art and not a disaster. How did no one anticipate this being an issue in the planning process? [artnet News]
The Bell Foundry, an artist-run live-work-show space that was shuttered by the Baltimore Fire Department following the Ghost Ship fire, is for sale. The idiosyncratic building and adjacent lot are being marketed as a knock-down development site—suggesting that the owners have given up on trying to get the building up to code and, given its $1 million price tag, will likely never be art space again. This sucks, and also comes amidst a city-wide debate over the future of artist-run spaces. The mayor has pledged to help preserve and bring-up-to-code the city’s quasi-legal art spaces, but it remains to be seen how that’s going to work. [City Paper]

GIF of the Day: Guy Maddin

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 23:22:25 +0000

A GIF drawn from Guy Maddin’s “The Eye Like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity (Odilon Redon)”. For those who want to see the full Maddin movie, you can watch here.

Monday Links: Today is Leon the Replicant's Birthday, According to Blade Runner

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 10:36:47 +0000

Today—April 10, 2017—is Leon the replicant’s “incept date” from Blade Runner. Weird. [Gizmodo]
Indonesian artist Ardian Syaf is facing “disciplinary action” from Marvel after he inserted political/religious messages into a recent X-Men issue. The illustrator used references to the Quran and protests against a politician who has come under fire in Indonesia because he isn’t a Muslim. [Mashable]
“The dining room...is decorated in various shades of taupe, biscuit and fuck you.” This sets the scene (or what this reviewer calls “the scene of the crime”) for this devastating review of Le Cinq, a Michelin three-star restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel in Paris. This particular restaurant specializes in what it calls “spherifications”, one of which was described as “like eating a condom that’s been left lying about in a dusty greengrocer’.” The critic’s photographs at the end of the piece are really worth a look. Terrifying. [The Guardian]
This is a real bummer: Fashion icon, TV host and writer Glenn O’Brien has died. The ARTnews obituary does a great job of outlining who he was and his contributions. For those looking for a bit of extra fodder, O’Brien maintained an active Twitter account that showed off his trademark wit. It’s worth a look. [ARTnews]
Austrian artist Yadegar Asisi has opened a huge panoramic installation that recreates the Titanic shipwreck in an old gas storage tower. Titanic: The Promise of Modernity was created from hundreds of flashlight-illuminated photos from robotic submarines. It’s pretty cool. [Daily Mail]
Good news: New York state’s new budget prioritizes housing. [Curbed]
Art review doozy sentence of the day: “Proving that Richter is still the alpha male of conceptual, anti-ideological—and yes, perceptual—painting of the last half century, his works slide through the impermeable borders where abstraction and representation cancel each other out.” [ARTnews]
After the disastrous Pepsi Kendall Jenner ad, Ciara Lavelle argues corporations should stop using socially-conscious art as advertising. Case and point: Glad (makers of trash bags) have a ridiculous anti-hate advertising/art installation wall in Wynwood. [Miami New Times]

GIF of the Day: Disobedient Router

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 18:25:48 +0000

I stumbled across “Disobedient Router” on the Tumblr Pushpin Universe, and boy can I relate. Unstable wifi has to be the biggest pet peeve of my daily existence. I would hope that when my wifi router is being disobedient and not doing its job, it’s at least having this much fun.

Next 50 People to Buy an AFC Goth Benefit Ticket Get a Limited Edition T-Shirt!

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 17:04:13 +0000

When: April 18, 2017, 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM Where: Collapsable Hole, 55 Bethune Street, New York, NY Advanced Tickets:

Artist/Student/Musician—$75.
Individual—$150
Gothic coupling (the ultimate date night for those who come in costume):$250

Additional donation levels and perks available. Tickets at the door cost $100 for artists and $200 for individuals.

Good news readers! If you’re one of the next 50 people to buy a ticket to the Art F City Goth Benefit, you get a limited edition t-shirt out of the deal. This isn’t any ordinary t-shirt. We worked with designer Phillip Niemeyer to produce this design, which pairs the famous logo of the Bauhaus School of Design—later, appropriated and popularized by the goth band, Bauhaus, with the Art F City Goth Opera logo. Perfectly balanced, this design represents the brave spareness within the best Modernist work, with the courage imbued within goth culture and the art world at large. But act fast. There are only 50 t-shirts and they won’t be available for long.

The Shape of Indoor Space: An Interview with GIPHY Artist Peter Burr

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 12:37:58 +0000

Since visiting Peter Burr’s “Pattern Language” last September, flashes of imagery from his installation will occasionally come back to me. There’s a sticky quality to the work, so memories appear in the same way they might for a character in a sci-fi movie—suddenly and without warning.

Burr’s art conjures the future—projection screens picturing high density structures that resemble malls populated by people who move in slow motion; text by Porpentine that describes opinionless cultures; undulating black and white patterns designed to mesmerize the viewer. Unlike movies, though, which tend to center around heros and villains, there’s no morality attached to this environment. It’s not good, or bad. It just is.

California Dreaming: “Golden State” at Marianne Boesky Gallery

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 12:00:31 +0000

John Divola, Untitled (woman watering, striped top), 1971–73, Vintage gelatin silver print (Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery)

Golden State Marianne Boesky Gallery 507 West 24th Street New York, NY On view until April 27, 2017

Artists: John Divola, Buck Ellison, Christina Fernandez, Anthony Hernandez, Dorothea Lange, Catherine Opie, and Larry Sultan

Friday Links: Rosa Parks' Detroit Home Moved to Berlin for Art

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 10:49:49 +0000

Las Vegas is trying for a contemporary art museum… again. The city has had two art museums come-and-go in recent history. [Las Vegas Review Journal]
Choreographer Ann Carlson has found herself in the crosshairs of conservatives over her seemingly inoffensive project “Doggie Hamlet”. The piece involves dancers, sheep, and sheep herding dogs. It admittedly sounds extremely silly at first glance, and of course the Right Wing is pissed that some NEA funds went into its production (by way of New England Foundation for the Art’s National Dance Project). Dance critic Gia Kourlas weighs in on the debate. [The New York Times]
The Wildensteins, the eccentric and controversial family of art dealers, have sold their UES townhouse/former gallery for $79.5 million. That’s now the most expensive house ever sold in New York City, which makes sense, because you would have to be both disgustingly wealthy and totally insane to spend that kind of money. [Daily Mail]
Speaking of insane and wealthy: Damien Hirst’s Treasures From the Wreck of the Unbelievable has to be one of the oddest, most ambitious projects we’ve ever heard of. Hirst has spun the tale of a freed slave, who 2000 years ago became an art collector. His ship sinks, bringing all of his treasures with it. Hirst has spent somewhere around £50 million on the show—fabricating gold and bronze “antiquities”, dumping them in the Indian Ocean to patina, and hiring boatloads of divers to retrieve them for exhibition in Venice. [BBC]
Artica Svalbard, a residency program in the icy northernmost extremes of Norway, has announced its first batch of artists: Carlos Casas, Oddvar I. N. Daren, Lars Palgaard, and Mette Henriette. These lucky four will get to live out their Fortitude fantasies, hopefully avoiding polar bear attacks and vitamin D deficiency along the way. [ARTnews]
In yesterday’s links, I mentioned that London’s local governments have been scrambling to prevent a mass exodus of creatives from the increasingly unaffordable city. Here’s one of their initiatives. A House for Artists, designed by architects Apparata in conjunction with artist Grayson Perry, will provide affordable housing and studios above a community center in Barking Town Centre. Some of these interior renderings look unbelievably spacious for now-build affordable housing. [Dezeen]
Artist Ryan Mendoza and Rhea McCauley, the niece of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, have teamed up to move Parks’ house from Detroit to Berlin. Mendoza has restored the home and is showing it as a piece of public sculpture. For now, McCauley wants the house to stay in Europe until America “grows up”. [New York Post]

GIF of the Day: Women Happy in the Rain Photo Puzzle

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 18:15:30 +0000

I found this extremely cheesy (but weather-appropriate) GIF from a website that looks kinda like a stock-photo-style GIF depository. I’m not going to link to that website, because it immediately filled my computer with pop-up ads and crashed it. But it’s worth noting that it was titled “Women Happy in the Rain Photo Puzzle”, which raises a few questions: Where are the other “women”? What makes this a “photo puzzle”?

Jillian McDonald Ditches a Rib, Gains Goth Opera Ticket

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 18:08:34 +0000

Still from Jillian McDonald's "Hunger" video.

Last week, Paddy Johnson sent out an email promising free Goth Opera tickets to anyone with enough goth cred to have had a rib removed in the name of corsetry.

Much to our delight, artist Jillian McDonald took us up on the offer (she had a rib removed years ago). Thanks to this medical history, she’ll be at the party. Apart from McDonald’s rib-removal, her goth résumé includes plenty of spooky pop-horror-referencing video work and drawings like this one, below, which catalogues all the dead characters from Day of the Dead.

Thursday Links: Legal Troubles for Meme, Victory for 5Pointz Artists

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 13:58:35 +0000

In Russia, you can now face 15 days in prison for distributing memes of Vladimir Putin in drag. [CNN]
The original concept art for Ghost in the Shell is gorgeous. [Ash Thorp]
From initiatives to trade public service for housing and new live-work developments, London is desperately trying to stop its mass artist exodus. The pace of gentrification and rising rents is crazy there, and many of the city's artists are moving out. [Financial Times]
Eve L. Ewing's op-ed about authoritarianism and art. [The New York Times]
A judge has allowed 17 artists to sue the developer who demolished 5Pointz, claiming he violated the Visual Artists Rights Act by destroying their murals. [artnet News]
A news items that begins with "Olympia residents are asked to be on the lookout for a yellow unicorn that went missing..." should be more fun than this. Someone stole a public sculpture by Paul Kuniholm Pauper from a Washington park. [The Olympian]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Wong Park Yin

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:04:51 +0000

Hoo boy! Did we ever find a good NSFW GIF for readers today! The image below by Wong Park Yin pictures a lump rabbit with breasts for eyes and a tooth for a dick. We don’t know what this thing does to fuck, but the fact that it’s called “Naked Rabbit” gives us shivers. Is that all the creature does? Anyway, great inventive drawing. But also ick.

Wednesday Links: A Bad Month Ahead for Taurus

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 11:34:11 +0000

Image via: Gulliver's Gate

Come April 9th, the birthday of famous conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp, artnet is hoping Museums will let visitors in for free if they know the secret password, "R. Mutt". MoMA won't confirm if they are participating, so I guess there's a glimmer of hope. [artnet News]
Oooh, my favorite: Art world horoscopes! I think they hate Taurus's over at Hyperallergic, though, because we're always getting beaten down in our predictions. They're calling this an Ana Mendieta month! Guys, you know she ended up dead, right? Meanwhile Sagittarius is slated to have a retrospective because this is the month they realize all their long term projects. [Hyperallergic]
Artist Tony Conrad has a saying, “Life is too rich to finish everything.” That's a positive spin on all the things we can't get done. In this article by digital artist Cory Arcangel he discusses "Music and the Mind of the World", a project Tony started in the 1970's and continued for seven years, in which he recorded every encounter he had with a piano. When he was done, he had more than 200 hours of sound, which was impossible to publish. Well, thanks to digital technology, not any more. [ARTnews]
In just over a week, “S-Town” has attracted 1.8 million subscribers to its podcast feed. It's a blockbuster. If you haven't tuned in to this, make a point of doing so. It's an outlier in the genre of real crime because the writer, Brian Reed, isn't a documentarian - he's a storyteller. (It's produced by Serial and This American Life.) As such the narrative weaves back and forth in time, employs and exploits metaphor, and is propelled by the contradictions and complexities of its subjects, not just the stuff that happens to them. It's extraordinarily compelling, not to mention consuming. [The New York Times]
The Canal street building that once housed the famed art supply store, Pearl Paint will be converted into apartments. More condos for the hood? [Curbed]
A $40 million diorama called Gulliver's Gate, recreates some of the world's most-beloved places. It went on display yesterday and will be on view in Times Square. You have to buy tickets to see it. [Gothamist]

GIF of the Day: NEA, PBS, Planned Parenthood Budgets v.s. Aircraft Carrier

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 17:32:22 +0000

Thank you, Yahoo columnist Rick Newman, for coining the “Aircraft Carrier Index”. This compares which federal programs would have to be cut in order for Trump to build a single aircraft carrier—highlighting the absurdity of the Republican’s military-boosting, everything-else-slashing budget proposals. As you can see, gutting beloved institutions such as the NEA, PBS, or Planned Parenthood wouldn’t be enough to pay for even a tenth of an aircraft carrier.

Charitable Deductions for You, Me and Warren Buffet

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 13:48:36 +0000

Here’s a fact that may surprise you: lower income people give far more to charity than people in the upper income brackets. And yet the laws for charitable giving bend over backwards to accommodate high-income charitable givers, and often don’t allow low income people to get a deduction at all.

The reason is that only people who itemize their deductions get to claim charitable deductions, and lower income households usually don’t itemize. Here’s a quick primer:

Highlights From PMF VIII

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 13:22:03 +0000

BALTIMORE - The 8th Publications and Multiples Fair wrapped up Sunday at the Baltimore Design School, and as always, was awesome. The fair, organized by art collective Open Space, features DIY publishers, independent artists, and all manner of great weird stuff. Notably, it seemed this year had less “traditional” fares such as zines or screenprints and more odd small objects. With hundreds of surprisingly affordable vendors from across the nation, it’s always a serious challenge to not go on a mega-art-shopping spree.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Looming Disasters, Anxiety, Protest

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 11:01:04 +0000

We don’t live in happy times, and that’s starting to show. With the exception of Art404’s video game show opening Wednesday at the AC Institute and Todd Bienvenu’s likely-hilarious beach paintings opening at yours mine & ours, there’s not a lot of lighthearted fun in the art world this week. Hell, even Art404’s show features a virtual reality space where the viewer is suffocated by news.

The doom-and-gloom kicks off with Bortolami Gallery’s University of Disasters Tuesday night, though Equity Gallery is opening Not the End on Friday, another show about anxiety with a somewhat more optimistic name. Sunday, the Queens Museum will be opening Italian artist Marinella Senatore’s solo show, which deals with protest and social space. Obviously, we all have the dire political situation on our minds.

Tuesday Links: Dana Schutz Painting Removed, Brooklyn Gets an Art Fair, Melania Gets a Portrait

Tue, 04 Apr 2017 10:16:14 +0000

Those calling for the censorship of Dana Schutz’s “Open Casket” will be happy to know that the painting has been removed from view. They’ll likely be disappointed to know it’s for a logistical reason as boring as a water leak. The real story here seems to be that the museum’s brand-spanking-new downtown digs is taking on water. Cue the Titanic/iceberg jokes. [Hyperallergic]
Melania Trump’s official White House portrait is here, and it kinda looks like she’s an out-of-focus hologram. The internet is having lots of fun with this one. [New York Magazine]
A cast believed by some to be from a long-lost Degas mold will go on view in London. Meanwhile in Hong Kong, Sotheby’s just proved Basquiats are hot commodities no matter the continent. Expect to see more of his work heading to Asian private collections. [The Telegraph]
Artist and blogger Greg Allen has started a Kickstarter project, OurGuernica, After Our Picasso. The purpose of this initiative: raising funds to commission an anonymous Chinese artist to paint Angela Merkel giving Ivanka Trump side-eye (photo above) in the style of former-president-now-painter George W. Bush. That’s a lot of layers to unpack for what is essentially a meme. [Artspace]
This sounds like so much fun. The Museum of Sex has opened a fully-functional pop-up disco bar for their exhibition of Bill Bernstein’s New York nightlife photos. [The New York Times]
According to Mark Hudson, the Tate Britain’s Queer British Art 1861-1967 “begs the question of whether we're in for art that tells the story of homosexuality in Britain over the 150 years leading up to the legal landmark, or art by artists who just happen to be gay. Judging by the first room, devoted to the late 19th century Aesthetic Movement, the exhibition might have been better titled Screamingly Camp Art.” Sounds like a missed opportunity all-around. [The Telegraph]
Bad news (for those of us prone to soul-crushing fair fatigue): Brooklyn is getting a Frieze Week art fair. The good news: it will be an off-shoot of SPRING/BREAK, focused on large-scale public installations and environments. SPRING/BREAK is one of the only fairs we can can handle more of. [artnet News]
Snøhetta’s Lascaux IV Caves Museum in southern France is open and looks (as expected) like an anthropology museum from the future. Their treatment of the cave painting reproductions is a really interesting display strategy. For preservation reasons, you can’t visit the real thing, but the museum has managed hyper-accurate reproductions that never try to trick you into thinking they’re the originals. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Robot Crush

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 22:31:06 +0000

Here’s a robot on a train wearing a cable knit sweater. Is he interested in his companion to the right or just computing something?

Monday Links: Outgoing Met Director's "Inappropriate Relationship" With Staff Member Causes Museum Drama

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 10:22:54 +0000

The (obviously) strange story of how these terrifying wax Star Trek figures came to the collection of The Hollywood Science Fiction Museum. [The Fresno Bee]
A kinda-ugly Normal Rockwell painting has been reunited with a family after a theft 40 years ago. Sometimes the painting is known as "Boy Asleep with Hoe". LOL. [CNN]
Chairman Mao must be rolling in his grave. A Warhol portrait of the Communist dictator just sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong for $12.6 million. [Reuters]
Renzo Piano has completed new ceramic-covered galleries for the collection and exhibition programs of the Fundación Botín in Santander, Spain. The center has a lot in common with Piano’s new Whitney museum, but looks much more elegant. [Dezeen]
This is fascinating: a map of every borough’s oldest buildings and a little history blurb about each. Staten Island and Brooklyn have so many structures dating from the 1600s! [Curbed]
Paul Moorhouse, the curator of Howard Hodgkin: Absent Friends at London’s National Portrait Gallery, on the late artist’s work. A good, brief read. [Apollo]
Headline of the day: "City police save Light City art installation from a watery grave". [The Baltimore Sun]
Wow. The situation at the Met sounds like a mess. Thomas P. Campbell, the museum's outgoing director, apparently had an "inappropriate relationship" with a female staff member in the museum's digital department. And the board of directors seems to have very little control over the massive institution. We'll be watching this one closesly. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Cristiana Couceiro

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 20:43:52 +0000

This illustration by Cristiana Couceiro accompanied a 2015 article in the New York Times about how social media has made TV a more interactive experience. It’s worth a read, but I’m posting this GIF today because it relates to Emily Colucci’s review of Public Access/Open Networks, a show about how public channels can bypass institutional hierarchy. If this illustration points to that thesis it alludes to it only—the TV signal broken up and disbursed by many mostly indicates that we’re our own broadcasters. But of course, embedded within that reality is the belief that this offers us a chance to bypass and resist institutional structures. Does that actually happen, though? Eh, sometimes.

The Revolution Might Still Be Televised: “Public Access/Open Networks” At BRIC House

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 18:36:52 +0000

Nam June Paik, Good Morning Mr. Orwell (video still), 1984 (Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix and BRIC)

Public Access/Open Networks The Gallery at BRIC House 647 Fulton Street Brooklyn, NY On view until May 7, 2017

Artists: Alex Bag, Natalie Bookchin, Colab, Jaime Davidovich, E.S.P. TV, Ann Hirsch, Tom Kalin, Jayson Musson, Glenn O’Brien, Nam June Paik, Paper Tiger Television, Raindance, Doug Hall, Chip Lord, Pilot TV, Jody Procter, TVTV, Tony Ramos, Martha Rosler, Jon Rubin, and URe:AD Press | United Republic of the African Diaspora (Shani Peters and Sharita Towne)

Dancing in the Dark: The Art F City Goth Benefit

Fri, 31 Mar 2017 17:07:42 +0000

When: April 18, 2017, 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM Where: Collapsable Hole, 55 Bethune Street, New York, NY Advanced Tickets:

Artist/Student/Musician—$75.
Individual—$150
Gothic coupling (the ultimate date night for those who come in costume):$250
Artist group tickets: 4 for $200 or 10 for $350

Additional donation levels and perks available. Tickets at the door cost $100 for artists and $200 for individuals.

GIF of Day: G 1 FT 3 D

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 19:13:38 +0000

Behold, the eye.

Thursday Links: Some Dreams are Stupid

Thu, 30 Mar 2017 11:24:53 +0000

Joseph Keckler will be chatting with Lisa Levy between 2-3 pm on Radio Free Brooklyn about his work as an opera singer and the AFC Goth Opera benefit. Tune in. [Radio Free Brooklyn]
The Artist Studio Affordability Project has spent years promoting the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, and New York’s City Council still can’t manage to pass a bill that is unilaterally in the interest of New York City residents. Kirsten Theodos helpfully breaks down all the bullshit arguments against this bill, and explains why it should be passed. [The Villager]
The impossibility of managing entry into foreign countries aside, let’s see cities come up with zoning for Clouds Architecture Office latest proposal—a high rise suspended by an asteroid that circles the earth. Large drones could help people get in and out of the building, the firm says—or simply parachuting down. Um, sure. This is less a dream than it is a PR stunt, (which we have dutifully linked to). [Curbed]
Contemporary art is more popular than ever in US Museums. Now, more than 50 percent of temporary exhibitions launched showcase contemporary art. That’s a significant shift—20 years ago, Impressionist shows ruled the land. [The Art Newspaper]
An interview with Whitney Biennial curator Christopher Lew about the Dana Schutz controversy and the Biennial as a whole. [artnet News]
More on the debate over the Fearless Girl sculpture that is placed facing a bull in the financial district. Critics, including Hyperallergic’s Jillian Steinhauer, think the sculpture makes a disingenuous statement. "If you're talking about a financial company that has a history of fraud and screwing people over, a lot of those people are going to be women...If you think of feminism as a larger project of empowering women across all classes, not just women on Wall Street, it's kind of bullshit for them to be putting up this front of, ‘Oh, we love women. We want women leaders.’" I guess, but I’d say this is better than what the alternative this criticism would seem to suggest—a sculpture depicting the exploitation of women by financial companies. No one is going to rubber stamp that, so they might as well lead by example. [Campaign Live]
On Kawara’s One Million Years (Reading) will launch at the Venice Biennial this year. The piece involves a pair of people reading from a two-volume book by the late artist that lists, in chronological order, one million years into the future and one million years into the past. They need volunteers. [ARTnews]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Otto Splotch

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 21:11:18 +0000

I’ve always been a fan of Otto Splotch’s weird-as-hell punk illustrations. The blobby figures in his tableaus—who are usually engaged in some combination of sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, or crime—feature details from bad stick-n-poke tattoos to genital-like faces and face-like genitals.

Obviously, when I discovered that Otto Splotch makes GIFs (including this one of a strange shower orgy) there was no question that he would be our NSFW GIF of the Hump Day.

SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 3

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 20:46:30 +0000

The diversity and sheer volume of art on view in Mexico City at any given point in time never ceases to amaze me. This week, I had an uncommonly un-cerebral experience of conceptual art critic Robert C. Morgan’s retrospective at Proyectos Monclova. At the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, I went down the rabbit hole of curator Iñaki Herranz’s pleasantly chaotic survey of young Mexican artists, El placer de la incertidumbre, at Casa de Cultura San Rafael. And at Museo Experimental el Eco, got to check out Folke Köbberling & Arturo Hernández having a demolition derby in the name of international relations and clean air.

Wednesday Links: Too Privileged For Roommates

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 11:48:54 +0000

We need your thoughts: who owns the better gimp mask? @nashersculpture or @DallasMuseumArt ?https://t.co/s5qjeb32SE pic.twitter.com/2gQwyqx0Op
— Glasstire (@Glasstire) March 28, 2017

Not to ruin a funny tweet, but we will remind people that Nancy Grossman’s masks are not about S&M.
Not sure how I (Paddy) feel about this piece on class and privilege in the trans, queer, people of color community. Shak’ar Mujukian tells a story about living in a co-op mostly populated by TQPOC who were what I’d call conceptually poor—they live like paupers, but have grown up with a certain amount of privilege. In this case, the privilege was never discussed—to the point where it seemed like it might have been hidden. As an actual poor person, Mujukian found that offensive and something that fed into his insecurity or what he deems “internalized oppression”. Anyway, the upshot is that he felt alienated in a place that was supposedly built for people like him, and that’s why the wealthy privilege of being able to chose to live like a poor person is bad. [The Hyephen]
Trump’s former campaign manager Paul J. Manafort is involved in yet another scandal. Manafort, who used to be employed by a Russian oligarch “to nudge US news and politics in a pro-Putin direction”, may have been involved in a money laundering scheme involving New York real estate. Manafort would drop millions on properties (including one in Trump Tower) and then take out massive loans against the properties through the Federal Savings Bank, whose President Steve Calk was a Trump fundraiser and present economic advisor. [WNYC via Curbed]
Rupaul’s Drag Race is now on VH1, and the network is already stirring the pot. Many are outraged that Wendy Williams is scheduled to host a live pre-show, despite the fact that producers for her own show kicked drag queen Erickatoure out of the audience for wearing a dress instead of “dressing to impress” as a man. [Hey Qween]
Koenig and Clinton move from Chelsea to Bushwick. Why? Property tax in Chelsea is too high. [artnet News]
“Working from sternly jokeless material, Sanders and his crew save the wit for such formal flourishes. Roelfs’ production design, matching sprawling dystopian squalor to fluorescent, holographic flights of fancy, abounds in playful details within details; Kurt and Bart’s wardrobe of synthetic-chic kimonos and tectonic-plate bodysuits ensure not even a morgue body sheet goes without some subtle fabulousness.” The Variety review of the live-action Ghost in the Shell is so breathlessly glowing I (Michael) am nudging my skeptical optimism ever more to point of giddy excitement. [Variety]
Preview Michael Williams’ Artforum cover, featuring a “COEXIST” symbol obscured by moody purple haze on an upside-down portrait. It feels like one of the most subtle paintings of the current sociopolitical moment. [Facebook]
A mock trial at the Art Institute of Chicago tackled the issue of what the British should do with the Parthenon Marbles they stole/bought from Greece. This is the kind of debate we can get behind. Nobody is calling for the destruction of art works. [The Chicago Reader]
There are many icks and ews to this story, we’re finding it difficult to even link to it. A Swiss asshole drug addicted art dealer by the name of Bennet von Vertes murdered his best friend with a sculpture in a drug induced haze, believing him to be a green alien. He is also reportedly charged with rape, a case that will receive a separate trial. [artnet News]
Lynn Hershman Leeson’s life story is so interesting. Essentially, she’s been making 2017 work since the 1960s. So much of it has been in storage until recently. Now, at age 75, her explorations into digital identity and experiments with genre-blurring media are getting serious overdue attention. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: HappyToast

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 18:37:13 +0000

It won’t be too long before we’ll be able to cite a robust history on Piet Mondrian inspired GIFs. We’ve already posted about Chiara Passa‘s “Mondrian Happens,” a GIF that spells out its title. Now, we’re posting an image by a user who goes by the name HappyToast, who has animated this Mondrian painting into a game of Pong. This inspired more activity—after seeing the GIF designer Kristiana Hansen set out to design the game. The internet does not disappoint. Behold, 2 player MondriPong 1.2.

Climbing Generations Of Trauma And Muslim Heritage: Baseera Khan’s “iamuslima” at Participant Inc.

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 13:52:38 +0000

Baseera Khan, iamuslima, Nike ID Tag customized Nike Air Force One Mid-top shoes (Courtesy the artist)

Baseera Khan: iamuslima Participant Inc. 253 East Houston Street New York, NY On view until April 2, 2017

The personal is political is one of the longest enduring clichés in contemporary art. But, sometimes, an artist can dust off this tiresome trope to more effectively shed light on a critical issue with their own life and cultural heritage than with cold, hard facts.

Long Live Dusty Whistles’s New Flesh (with no apologies to David Cronenberg)

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 12:00:09 +0000

Dusty Whistles

It amazes me that we still talk about drag as if it is anything but performance art. Yes, there are degrees of drag, which makes it hard to pin down, to make institutional, and there are many, many styles: night club fancy drag, high end theatre grade drag, quick-draw men in dresses/women in suits “rough drag”, and the still alive tradition of “female/male impersonation”, to list only a few.

Tuesday Links: Patrick Stewart in Drag, Coco Fusco on the Whitney Drama, Canada's #Lacgate

Tue, 28 Mar 2017 11:24:15 +0000

AHHH! Patrick Stewart in drag looks so much like Kellyanne Conway it’s freaking me out. Please tell me there’s an SNL appearance planned. [22 Words]
I keep thinking we have to be done with the Dana Schutz Open Casket controversy and then something else comes out on the subject. Coco Fusco, hands down, pens the piece of authority on the subject. If you read anything today, make it this piece. [Hyperallergic]
Those interested in applying for a residency at New INC can attend an info session tomorrow and Tuesday April 18th at NEW INC. You’ll want to go tomorrow, because on April 18th, you’ll be at our Goth Opera benefit! [Facebook]
A performing arts center slated for development at Ground Zero could face a $100 million shortfall if federal officials retract the unspent funds the city received after Sept. 11. Basically, this nonsense is the result of government agencies fighting with each other. The Port Authority, which says it is owed $68 million by the Lower Manhattan Development Council (LMDC). The LMDC says it owes $45 million. Port Authority is refusing to hand over control for the site until they are paid. [Crains]
Related: one of many lawsuits by the City Club of New York may have finally succeeded in derailing the Thomas-Heatherwick-designed Pier 55. This is kind of a bummer. Of all the architect’s upcoming controversial projects, this one was by far the best and least offensive, especially in a part of the city that could use some non-High-Line green space. One of the arguments against the park was that it would obscure the natural beauty of the waterfront… Manhattan’s obviously man-made waterfront, where it would be straddling the ruins of two man-made piers. What a ridiculous group of crotchety fun-spoilers. [Dezeen]
One of the NEA’s most important functions is supplying insurance coverage to museum exhibitions. Without the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program, many cross-institutional exhibitions simply couldn’t happen. It’s saved museums an estimated $450 million but has only resulted in $4,700 in payouts from the federal government in the past 42 years. (For those curious, that’s less than one Melania Trump Hour, by our metrics). [Los Angeles Times]
Apply for the 2017 Summer studio residency at Ortega y Gasset Projects. [Ortega y Gasset Projects]
Cristo and Jeanne Claude aren’t the only ones who can bring fences into New York City for public art. Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei will build over 100 fences around the city for his installation project, “Good Fences Make Good Neighbors” this fall, thanks to a commission by the Public Art Fund. The work is inspired by the international migration crisis. [Gothamist]
The first trailer has arrived for Burden, the upcoming documentary about Chris Burden. [Artspace]
While the US has been plunged into a political drama out of a particularly boring episode of Game of Thrones, we have been neglecting Canadian political/news media scandals. Namely: #lacgate. Yesterday I clicked on the article “The Five Signs You’ve Written a Bad Column”, hoping for some journalism advice. Instead, I was introduced to the saga of columnist Leah McLaren, who wrote about her experience attempting to secretly breastfeed Conservative MP Michael Chong’s baby at a houseparty. This is so much weirder (probably) than whatever the fuck Devin Nunes was doing during his inexplicable missing time. [VICE]

GIF of the Day: Republicans Trying to Shoot Down Obamacare Like

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 18:20:48 +0000

Hey, even Sean Young had bad days filming the role that defined her career. (Actually, rumor has it, a lot of bad days.) So cheer up illogical healthcare haters! As for the rest of us who like going to the doctor: we dodged a bullet.

One thing to be kinda bummed about though: Sean Young won’t be returning as Rachel in the Blade Runner sequel this year. It’s too bad she won’t live… but then again, who does?

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Use Your Sick Days Wisely

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 18:10:10 +0000

Michael Williams' digital paintings open at Gladstone Thursday night.

There’s plenty of good stuff to do this week, starting with a Felix Gonzalez-Torres book launch reception at the Whitney Monday night. Carla Gannis has a book launch of her own Tuesday night at the Pratt library, including augmented-reality elements. The rest of the week is dominated by painting and digital art—exemplified by Michael William’s solo show of digitally-produced paintings at Gladstone and Jason Lahr’s digitally-informed paintings at the Painting Center, both of which open Thursday night. For digital purists, check out Low Res: Spatial Politics in the Cloud at NARS Foundation’s Sunset Park digs Friday night. For painting purists, catch Rebecca Leveille’s brushy portraits at Site:Brooklyn. Fans of both media will be relieved to note they’re but a few subway stops away. End the week with FIN’s ICE PIX album release party on Sunday in Bushwick, which features performances from rising stars such as FlucT and Raul de Nieves. Your Monday hangover will be so worth it.

Monday Links: Be This Dog's Neighbor

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 11:26:19 +0000

Gallerist Lydia Pettit with her dog Ruby. By J.M. Giordano for City Paper.

City Paper asked some of their writers and friends to pose for awkward portraits with their pets, by photographer J.M. Giordano. These are amazing. We would do this, but sadly no one at AFC has time for a puppy. [City Paper]
Baltimore: if you’re interested in responding to an RFP for vacant buildings along Howard Street in the Bromo arts district, there are open houses and assistance available to artists and organizations. This area is full of artist-owned buildings (including Platform Gallery, where you can hang out with Ruby and Lydia, the awesome dog and human pictured above). Let’s keep it that way! [Bromo Arts and Entertainment]
Do we give too much media attention to art vandals? That’s one of several motives Noah Charney hypothesizes in his fascinating look at why people attack artworks. So far we have no clue why a man slashed a Thomas Gainsborough painting at London’s National Gallery, but motives for past attacks have included religion (from Islamic fundamentalism to believing one is Jesus Christ reincarnated) and the desire for a media spotlight. [Salon]
Robert Walsh is convinced the Met has been displaying a knockoff French medieval sculpture the museum acquired in the 1930s. The piece in question is a head, purportedly from a doorway at Notre Dame, but arrived in New York via a dealer notorious for trafficking in fakes. [New York Post]
Whatever happened to Frida Kahlo’s “The Wounded Table”? The painting hasn’t been seen since an exhibition in Warsaw in 1955. Kahlo painted it during her brief divorce from Diego Rivera, after she found out he slept with her younger sister. When she exhibited it at Mexico City’s International Exhibition of Surrealism in 1940 she was concerned it wasn’t well-received. She ended up gifting it to a Russian ambassador six years later. Following the Warsaw show a decade later, the painting’s whereabouts remain a mystery. [The Daily Beast]
Not to do with art, but in news from our dystopic country, as reported in Canada, Daniel Dale finds that Trump voters in Ohio are not bothered by the president’s lies. On the subject of Trump’s claim that Obama illegally wiretapped him, James Cassidy, an out of work construction worker said that they were obviously lies, but he liked that. “He’s ruffling every feather in Washington that he can ruffle. These guys are scrambling. So: yeah! I like it. I think it’s a good thing. I want to see them jump around a little bit.” [The Toronto Star]
Brad Pitt has taken up sculpting to help him deal with his divorce woes. Word has it, he’s a quick learner. [Page Six]
We’re having a hard time identifying the point of this article about gallery closures in artnet News. As far as we can tell, it’s an attempt to connect the closure of two middle tier art galleries in London to Andrea Rosen’s closure earlier this month. But are the two comparable? Rosen ran an upper tier gallery with two outlets in Chelsea and described what mostly seemed like personal reasons for closing. The other closures have to do with the effect art fairs have had on brick and morter locations. Speaking of which, did anyone else notice Nicole Klagsbrun at NADA this year? She closed up shop in New York a couple years ago, penning a fire-y letter about throwing the towel in on this business, and is now operating as a private dealer out of Chelsea. [artnet News]
Hyun-Gi Kim has created a chair that moves fake blood around tubes, depending where you sit on it. This looks so gross. [Dezeen]
"Fearless Girl," a statue by Kristen Visbal that’s situated facing “Charging Bull” in the financial district will remain on view through February 18th, 2018. The new city permit extends the statue’s stay. The old permit was originally slated to expire April 2nd. The statue has been a lightening rod for critics, some of whom believe the piece represents a strong feminist statement, and others who believe it is a PR stunt rather than a “true” feminist statement. People will fight about anything. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Commercial Photography and Art History

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 22:40:19 +0000

Sometimes it seems like we’re just taking the same pose, over and over again. Other times, we’re remaking re-imagining poses entirely.

How Much is Culture Worth Compared to Melania Trump?

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 22:29:15 +0000

Two of the most hotly discussed Trump budget items include the defunding of the NEA and escalating security costs for the First Family. Comparisons have achieved something like meme status across our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and now there’s even a Snopes article debating the veracity of BOMB Magazine marketing director Ryan Chapman’s tweet that it would cost double the NEA budget to provide security for the First Lady.

Friday Links: Bloody Sanitary Pad on G-String Unwelcome at Art Basel Hong Kong

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 11:40:27 +0000

We can’t even keep up with all the Schutz controversy. A fake letter by Schutz saying piece should be taken down was circulated and then debunked. Now there are complaints that Hannah Black, the artist who wrote the letter demanding that the painting be removed and destroyed, isn’t black enough to have signed the protest letter, in which she removed the white signatures after critique, (thanks Facebook). Kara Walker, artist and a former professor of Schutz has weighed in on the controversy over Instagram and says the artwork should be seen. Howard Halle at Time Out shares that view.
This is cute. Gillian Anderson and the Tate Modern have donated a trip to the museum with the actress/activist as a prize in a charity raffle. This is literally my dream friend-crush play date. [Givergy]
Here’s one way to get a consolation prize from gentrification. When Paul Cocksedge was evicted from his long-time London studio to make way for a development, he excavated chunks of the concrete floor to make furniture. [Dezeen]
Artist Corrina Mehiel, 34, has been found murdered in her temporary apartment in Washington, DC. She was living in the capital to work with Mel Chin on his current exhibition at The Corcoran. [The Washington Post]
This is a must-have accessory for electronic music nerds. Avant garde musician Surachai is selling enamel pins with the electrical schematic symbol for “resistance” to raise money for the ACLU. [Bandcamp]
The crowdfunding campaign to build a public sculpture honoring David Bowie has come to an end, way short of its £1 million goal. Honestly, though, London might’ve just dodged a bullet: designs for this never looked good. [Pitchfork]
Here’s an interactive map of the New York City housing lotteries you can enter now for an affordable apartment. [Curbed]
Or if you’re tired of renting, be my (Michael’s) forever neighbor. The Bromo Arts District in Baltimore is offering artists/collectives assistance with applications in response to an RFP for dilapidated buildings. If you’ve ever dreamed of owning your own live/work space, gallery, etc… this is a great opportunity. Those applications are due April 10th. [Bromo Arts District]
Healthcare update: The bill failed to pass after the White House caved to the Freedom Caucus demands to that health care providers not need to support basic services like emergency room care, maternity care, and substance abuse, and “moderate’ GOPs peeled off. Now Trump is threatening the GOP that will be stuck with Obamacare (yay!) if they don’t pass the bill. But isn’t that obvious? [The New York Times]
Art Basel Hong Kong sounds like it was interesting: “Better than that was earlier in the afternoon when a man wearing a purple mask and a G-string attached to a bloodied sanitary pad was encircled by a human lasso of suited security guards and then strong-armed out the door. According to Art Basel’s official statement, the fair takes no responsibility." [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: Watching the Republicans Bicker About Healthcare Like:

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 18:22:00 +0000

All tea, all shade. We haven’t seen a party this indecisive since we started picking out outfits for our upcoming Goth Opera.

Finding Light (And An Ode To The Ass) In The 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 12:00:53 +0000

Meegan Barnes's Peek-a-boo Versace Booty at the 2017 Whitney Houston Biennial (photo by author)

The Whitney Houston Biennial: Greatest Love Of All Chashama 325 West Broadway New York, NY On view until March 29, 2017

Seven small spray bottles labeled “Trigger Spray” and a packet of tissues emblazoned with “Your Feelings Are Valid” sit on a pedestal in a back corner of the Whitney Houston Biennial at Chashama. In a silly sendup of trigger warnings and safe spaces, the corresponding label for the work by Elana Langer lists humor along with the other materials. As it turns out, this isn’t just an ingredient in Langer’s piece. Humor is key to many of the all-women group show’s inclusions, which felt like a breath of fresh air with the doom and gloom of both the Whitney Biennial and the daily outrage of the Trump administration.

Thursday Links: He Will Not Divide Us

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 11:30:58 +0000

The GOP house is set to vote on the new health insurance bill. Hardliners are pressing for the elimination federal requirements that health care companies provide basic benefits like maternity care, emergency services and wellness clinics. When I woke up this morning and read that I nearly cried. [The New York Times]
Tom Finkelpearl writes about the negative impact eliminating the NEA and the NEH would have on New York. [ARTnews]
More bad, related news for cities: Trump’s proposed budget is terrible for urban areas, particularly in the realm of transit. There goes any hope that the silver lining of a Trump presidency would be long-overdue infrastructure improvement (as was promised during the campaign). [The Transport Politic]
The controversy around Dana Schutz's “Open Casket” has been explosive. I responded yesterday, and Schutz given comments to a number of outlets. Artnet has a short interview with her worth a read. I particularly appreciate this sentiment, "I do think that it is better to try to engage something extremely uncomfortable, maybe impossible, and fail, than to not respond at all." [artnet News]
Tiger Strikes Asteroid has an open call for their Philadelphia location’s three-person show. Submissions are due May 1. [Tiger Strikes Asteroid]
Franklin Sirmans argues that NEA funding is about more than a little direct financial support from the government—when the infamously cash-strapped agency vets and funds a program, it signals a level of validity that encourages others to support it. [PAMM mailer]
As in anytime JJ Abrams decides to lend his vision to a cultural icon, we’re not sure how to feel about this one. He’s rebooting making a series about the life of RuPaul. Should we expect lots of CGI explosions and classic rock? Will RuPaul’s biting wit and word of wisdom be given the dumbing-down Star Trek’s dialogue received? [Rolling Stone]
Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö, and Luke Turner’s livestream “He Will Not Divide Us” has been moved...overseas. Pro-Trump trolls from 4chan have tracked the piece all over the US and violently forced its removal. Now it will be shown at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool. Let’s hope the Brits have more common sense about this. [The Verge]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Erik Seidenglanz & Partners + Play Play Play, Inc

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 22:42:21 +0000

What happens when you pair the graphic design of Erik Seidenglanz & Partners and the conceptual art of Play Play Play, INC? You get a lot of NSFW Gifs. The most recent images take American Apparel down to size — presumably a knock on their near porn-like advertisements. Not a bad idea, but given that the company has gone tits up several times now, I’m not sure they’ll be around much longer. I guess we can consider these GIFs a fond farewell.

On Dana Schutz's Open Casket: A Masterful Yet Imperfect Painting

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 16:12:56 +0000

Dana Schutz, Open Casket (2016). Oil on canvas. Collection of the artist; courtesy Petzel, New York.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, the blogz—if you can type on the platform and you’re in the art world, you’ve probably weighed in on the debate over Dana Schutz’s painting of Emmett Till. The painting is based on a photograph of African American Emmett Till, laid in a coffin. The 14 year old young man was brutally murdered in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, his face horrifically disfigured in process. Earlier this year, it came out that the accuser, Carolyn Bryant, had lied and made the story up.

Some Real Numbers for Artists on the ACA Repeal

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 11:51:41 +0000

GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz says that the American people may need to choose between a new iPhone or health care when trying to afford insurance under the new GOP bill that would replace Obamacare. Image via: istockphoto

When I went back to school for accounting, I never thought I’d get an education in healthcare. But the Affordable Care Act (ACA, aka Obamacare) forced tax preparers like me into learning about our healthcare system, because most of the credits and penalties are reconciled on the tax return. As an accountant for artists, I see the direct benefits of the ACA on my clients. I am required, per the ACA, to find out if my clients were covered by health insurance all year, and if not, I calculate the penalty for each month they weren’t. I record the premiums my clients pay, which can be a big deduction for a freelance arts worker. And I see the monthly subsidies that they get, because I reconcile them on the annual tax return (the “Premium Tax Credit”). I also calculate the 3.8% Net Investment Income Tax and the additional .9% Medicare tax for my very highest-income clients - these are the additional taxes on the top income earners that effectively pay for the subsidies provided by the ACA. This amount is only calculated on the very top dollars of their income and it hits a proportionately tiny slice of my clients.

GIF of the Day: Anthony Antonellis

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 18:45:34 +0000

Windows nostalgia hits a sweet spot for us as it’s one of 8 possible backgrounds to chose while reading this site. So, naturally, we’re drawn to this GIF by Anthony Antonellis, which appears to combine Windows iconography with stock powerpoint transitions. As it happens, the piece also neatly fits the definition of “defaults”, as per Guthrie Lonergan’s 2007 net art taxonomy of Hacking vs Defaults.

Announcing the Art F City Goth Opera with Joseph Keckler! A Benefit You'll Never Forget!

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:16:34 +0000

When: April 18, 2017, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM Where: Collapsable Hole, 55 Bethune Street, New York, NY Tickets: $75-$2000

We are a people in mourning. A dark shadow has been cast from Gotham’s blackest tower, stretching across the land. We lament at its doorstep.

We, the nation’s bloggers, journalists, artists, and critics were some of the first to cry. But our cries went unheeded. Now we must paint our lips in the darkest of hues and adorn our bodies with the garments of bereavement. It is time for our sadness to be made visible.

Tuesday Links: Artist Makes Salt Circle to Trap Self Driving Cars

Tue, 21 Mar 2017 12:10:02 +0000

Émilie Régnier photos of hairstyles from the Ivory Coast are amazing. [The Huffington Post]

Bronx Commons, an affordable housing complex coming to the Bronx along with a performance space, was supposed to include set-aside apartments for aging musicians being priced out of the borough. Now, the developers are being told that policy might violate fair housing laws. This is a bad precedent for affordable artist housing. [Curbed]

Artist James Bridle has designed a salt circle (like in witchcraft) to trap self-driving cars. This is so good. [The Creators Project]

White Mule Framing Inc. is auctioning off pretty much everything they own. This includes vouchers for future framing work. The business has decided to move out of Manhattan due to rising rents and is auctioning off their inventory to raise money for a down payment on a forever home. That’s a pretty smart move. [32 Auctions]

Looks like we’re going to have to check out Lynn Hershman Leeson’s work at Bridget Donahue. Photos from this show pique curiosity. [Contemporary Art Daily]

A.E. Benenson considers Sean Raspet's faux-food innovations as the conceptual grandchild of the Bauhaus’s optimism—a foil to a not-so-distant, cynical Silicon Valley dystopia. Paddy and I weren’t so happy with the non-food’s texture and chemical-y taste. We tried it at Frieze last year. To quote myself, the gel in a tube had “notes of past-due seafood kimchee with a squirt of toothpaste.” [Art in America]

Pace announces it will open a second gallery in Hong Kong during the Art Basel Hong Kong art fair. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Catalina Muñoz

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 19:18:37 +0000

"NEUROMARKETING"

Based on her tags on Tumblr, we’ll describe Argentine artist Catalina Muñoz as a “Cyberpunk Grrrl”. Her blog is full of great GIFs, including these strange tableaus of Barbie is burqas in various settings, from hot pink offices to doll houses. These are probably some of the strangest GIFs I’ve seen in a while, which is saying something.

“Cómo hacerse amigas/How to make friends” #1

This Week's Must-See Art Events: R&B Diva to Save Distant Brown Dwarf Star

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 17:53:23 +0000

Much like Paddy’s experience of the Whitney Biennial, New York’s art scene this week is dominated by the political with a healthy smattering of painterly painting, ubiquitous identity politics, and the unapologetically weird.

Highlights include a talk about “the intersectional self” at the 8th Floor featuring Genesis P-Orridge on Thursday, followed by a solo show from Dona Nelson at Thomas Erben Gallery. We’re looking forward to Ernesto Burgos’ work at Kate Werble Gallery (think ab-ex in 3D) on Friday night and some afro-futurist cyberpunk world-building by E. Jane at American Medium on Saturday. If you need a moment of zen before the work week starts, head to E.S.P. TV’s closing reception at Pioneer Works on Sunday—you can join them on a corporate retreat, complete with a self-help guru.

Monday Links: Anti-Trump Artist Threatened

Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:33:23 +0000

Thomas Gainsborough, “Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett,” aka “The Morning Walk.”

Marina Abramović, Laurie Anderson, Jasper Johns, and Cindy Sherman are among the artists who’ve signed a petition against the Trump administration’s proposed federal budget. Under Trump’s plan, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) would be totally defunded. [artnet News]
This is scary. Artist Karen Fiorito has received multiple death threats since creating an anti-Trump billboard. It was commissioned by Phoenix art gallery La Melgosa, and alludes to Nazism. [The Independent]
Also scary: German police now suspect a Belgian man killed Berlin-based artist Ewa Kowska in a sex game gone wrong. The artist’s body was found with multiple stab wounds, which the killer tried to cover up by setting fire to her apartment. [The Local]
Oh man, I have to see this. Apparently the finale of Tracey Ullman's Show features a wine-swigging “troubled artist” character inspired by Tracey Emin. [Mirror]
The Lower East Side’s 100 Gates Project, which pairs artists and small businesses for murals on bodega shutters, is heading to East Harlem and Staten Island. Will the Instagrammers seeking street art selfie backdrops follow? [Curbed]
For some reason, 63 year old Keith Gregory attacked a 1785 Thomas Gainsborough painting (above) with a sharp object in the National Gallery in London. [The New York Times]
Kerr Houston’s writing about Penelope Umbrico make me like Penelope Umbrico. [BmoreArt]

GIF of the Day: Kajetan Obarski

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 19:48:58 +0000

Art history is full of paintings depicting human misery and death. Kajetan Obarski, an untrained artist born in Poland and living in Amsterdam, takes this to an amusing new level with his use of the animated GIF. The message is often literally spelled out in his GIFs—“You’re All Going To Die”—which has us thinking he’s a bit like Banksy for GIFs. Some obviously work better than others. Check it out. (Hat tip: Carol Cole)

SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 2

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 14:23:46 +0000

Mural by Rurru Mipanochia at ArtSpace Mexico.

Last month, I checked out what was on view at some of Mexico City’s galleries during the art fairs. Over the past week, I stopped by a few more. Highlights include Rurru Mipanochia at ArtSpace Mexico (bastion of queer contemporary art), SANGREE at Yautepec, and Mauricio Limón at Galería Hilario Galguera a few blocks away. Today is the last day to see Mauricio Limón’s show, and I highly recommend it.

Cataloguing Immigration’s Impact At Yinka Shonibare MBE’s “Prejudice At Home: A Parlour, a Library and a Room” at James Cohan Gallery

Fri, 17 Mar 2017 12:00:49 +0000

Yinka Shonibare MBE, “The British Library” (2014), hardback books, Dutch wax printed cotton textile, gold foiled names, table with benches, four iPads, iPad stands, headphones, interactive application (Courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York; Photo: Phoebe D’Heurle)

Yinka Shonibare MBE: Prejudice At Home: A Parlour, a Library and a Room James Cohan Gallery 533 West 26th Street New York, NY On view until March 18, 2017

GIF of the Day: Laura Berger

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 17:31:25 +0000

I stumbled across Laura Berger’s adorable GIFs of nudes frolicking while looking for a NSFW GIF of the Hump Day (here at AFC, our browsers have very strange search histories). But these guys are totally SFW, as their minimalist anatomy leaves everything to the imagination. Maybe life’s just simpler when sex-less.

The Whitney Biennial: Visual Screen Burn Courtesy of America's Finest

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 14:49:33 +0000

Raul De Nieves, "beginning & the end neither & the otherwise betwixt & between the end is the beginning & the end", 2016

Out of the ten Whitney Biennials I’ve seen, this is the first one that could have used a vomit warning. But here we are, in Trump’s America, a future many of us never wanted to imagine, let alone live through. What is the purpose of art in this New America? This year’s Biennial bears no answers. Art doesn’t exist to defend its purpose and even if it did this exhibition was organized prior to the election. Nevertheless, it does bring then-simmering themes to a boil. So, while almost none of the work is Trump themed, as a whole the exhibition reads as a response to the challenges the country faces—increasing income inequality across the board, failing institutions, and the rise of hate-fueled violence. If art is a mirror, then this year’s Biennial should scare the shit out of you.

Thursday Links: Hitler's Painting in Museum "A Piece of S***"

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 09:30:07 +0000

A painting by Adolf Hitler. It’s “a piece of shit”.

Italian art critic Vittorio Sgarbi has curated an exhibition about art and madness at Museo Di Salo in Lombardy. The most high-profile inclusion in the show: a rarely-seen painting by Adolf Hitler that Sgarbi describes as "a piece of shit". [The Telegraph]
This is the best museum-related news we've heard in a long time. The Museum of the Dog is moving back to New York after relocating to St. Louis (really?) in 1987. Expect so much dog art. [NBC New York]
Yay! Trump's latest travel ban has been shot down by a federal judge, again. [The New York Times]
And the bad news: Trump's proposed budget is really bad for the arts, the EPA, and poor people. But great for the military industrial complex. Defense first, obviously, because once we're a toxic shithole of a country devoid of culture or social infrastructure everyone else will just be lining up to invade. [The Washington Post]
Ronald Hollar has been charged by Des Moines police after drunkenly crashing his car into one of that city's most beloved public artworks. [KCCI Des Moines]
Julian Opie and Lisson Gallery are prepping for Opie's first major show in China, at Shanghai's Fosun Foundation. Honestly, I had mostly forgotten about Opie. I wonder if that's because his work seems so dated as a result of how much it influenced turn-of-the-millennium graphic design. I can't look at one of his paintings without seeing a painfully hip early 00s Granta "best of" anthology cover. Maybe Chinese audiences won't be as jaded to his style? [Newsweek]
Versailles is changing its contemporary art program. After recent controversies surrounding their solo art-star exhibitions (Anish Kapoor, anyone?) the French landmark is shifting to a group show model. Whoever thought people would consider curating group shows as a lower-drama alternative? [artnet News]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Nude Yoga

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 23:37:52 +0000

This animated GIF of nude people spelling out the word “YOGA” in the woods brings such a smile to my face. I mean that not in the pervy sense, nor in the sense that it has helped me attain some spiritual serenity.

It’s just impossible to look at this and not smile. If you’re hankering for more pics of naked people doing yoga outside in some very funny positions, this is the site for you.

We Went to Gabriel Orozco's OXXO

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:28:04 +0000

Gabriel Orozco Kurimanzutto Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, Col. San Miguel Chapultepec 11850, México D.F. On view until March 16th

What’s on view: An exact replica of an OXXO (the ubiquitous Mexican 7-11 competitor) except without monetary exchange. Visitors are instructed to pick out three free objects, so long as they aren’t marked with the artist’s own sticker (because those products are artworks for collectors, despite being otherwise identical to the other goods in the store).

Wednesday Links: Hairy Coffee Cups, Blood Paintings, "Humiliating Wreck of a Movie"

Wed, 15 Mar 2017 11:47:03 +0000

Fire Island Artist Residency’s online editions store recently added a really good Catherine Opie reprint. [FIAR]

Krisztina Czika makes knockoff IKEA mugs using body hair removal wax and human hair. Based on the comments section of this article, they aren’t very popular. [Dezeen]
Entertainment Weekly has published the most scathing film review I have read: “In terms of content and meaningfulness, Terrence Malick’s Song to Song is the cinematic equivalent of a Trump press conference. Incoherent, disconnected, self-interrupting, obsessed with pointless minutiae and crammed full of odd, limp stabs at profundity from a closed-off man in his 70s who apparently has no ability to edit or accept constructive criticism. Malick, too, still inspires a passionate minority of hardcore devotees who will defend everything he does, no matter how inept or ludicrous, out of some bizarre sense of base loyalty towards the man who made Days of Heaven 39 years ago. Even for those groupies, this new humiliating wreck of a movie—the reclusive director’s worst ever—presents a test of will.” [Entertainment Weekly]

Danish police tracked down a collection of stolen paintings 16 years after their theft. But since the owner’s insurance company already paid for their value, they won’t be going home to the collector. [artnet News]

The Satanic Temple has launched its own art gallery in Salem, Massachusetts. Right now they’re showing Vincent Castiglia paintings made from human blood. I'm confused as to how these look so boring. [Observer]
Apply for the PhotoIreland Festival. This year, curators are looking for work that relates to a creepy old library. [PhotoIreland]

GIF of the Day: Henn Kim

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 23:41:27 +0000

Is this what the end of a snow day looks like?

Stella Forces Museum Closures, Delays Whitney Biennial Opening Gala

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 13:27:10 +0000

A winter wonderland in NYC today ❄️⛄️

A post shared by Paola Franqui (@monaris_) on Mar 14, 2017 at 7:56am PDT

Tuesday Links: New York Art Shops Continue to Close

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 10:24:51 +0000

The blizzard warning has been downgraded to 6-8 inches of snow in New York. Not that any New Yorker needs to read this, but stay off the streets. It’s terrible out there. [Gothamist]
Theaster Gates’s show, “The Minor Arts” opened at the National Museum of Art in Washington March 5th. Now, the Times has written up a profile on the artist. [The New York Times]
Art Dubai has a new director, Myrna Ayad. The fair’s only been around since 2007, but even in that short amount of time, programming can grow stale. This report shows a fresher face and the positive addition of curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath of ArtReoriented to the fair’s selection committee. [The Art Newspaper]
Galleries are being pushed out of West Chelsea due to rents and one developer thinks that sucks. Related will offer 15 new gallery spaces including ones in their Zaha Hadid-designed luxury condos. Paul Kasmin has already signed on. [Curbed]
Crap! A.I. Friedman, the 80 year old art supply store and frame shop is closing! Why are so many art supply stores closing? Aside from high rents, the issue seems to be Amazon resellers and Blick, an art supply store that now has seven stores in New York. Also, apparently students are spending less on materials like paint. Perhaps they are making more art on their computers? [The New York Post]
Photographs from IM Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. Amazing. [Dezeen]
And for those interested in the ballet, the American Ballet Theatre has enlisted artist Mark Ryden to create the set and costumes for their production of Richard Strauss’s surrealist ‘Whipped Cream.’ [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Snow Day: Snow Is Better with Animals

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 20:21:10 +0000

We’re just hours away from the epic snowstorm that will likely ruin your commute. Snow tends to be pretty inconvenient for adult humans. All other mammals, however, have a much better time during Winter. Those who aren’t hibernating seem downright ecstatic, likely because they know they will be immortalized in adorable GIFs for all of posterity.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Winter is Coming

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 18:52:54 +0000

The Whitney Biennial Installation view. Photo: Paddy Johnson

The week is of course dominated by two news items: The Whitney Biennial and The Wintery Downfall.

After the blizzard, Wednesday is a great opportunity to get yourself in the snowy mood, art-wise. Enjoy doses of culture from freezing, windswept regions, including Marsden Hartley’s Maine at The Met Breuer (if you’re missing the Whitney’s old digs) and Berlin-based Danish/Norwegian duo Elmgreen & Dragset in conversation with Dan Cameron at The Flag Art Foundation. Later, catch the Icelandic thriller Hevn at Scandinavia House’s New Nordic Cinema screening series.

Monday Links: If Trump Were a Woman

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 11:59:46 +0000

Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of political science, teamed up with Joe Salvatore, a theater professor who specializes in “ethnodrama” to examine gender bias in the 2016 election. For a piece of experimental theater, Her Opponent, they recast Hillary Clinton as a man and Donald Trump as a woman. It turns out audiences actually liked Trump as a brash woman and couldn’t stand a male version of Clinton, contrary to the expectations of the researchers. [New York Magazine]

This is so smart. Rather than demolish an aging midcentury modernist housing block on the outskirts of Amsterdam, NL Architects and XVW Architectuur came up with an award-winning proposal for the building. They restored the shell of the building and fixed circulation issues, and then sold individual apartments (which could be combined to make larger units) as affordable stripped-down shells that new owners could take on as DIY projects to renovate as starter homes based on their own liking and budget. This seems like a much more logical solution to the issue of aging affordable housing than the American approach—which was to implode hundreds of thousand of units of high rise housing and then hand the land over to developers. [Dezeen]

Elmgreen & Dragset caused a minor panic in Krefeld, Germany when their new exhibition suggested the town’s Mies van der Rohe Haus Lange had been sold to private owners. In reality, they’ve restaged the iconic villa as the home of a fictional family returning to Germany from the UK following Brexit. [artnet News]

This seems like a better business model than most young galleries have: L.A.’s ShowGrow is a combination marijuana dispensary and art gallery. [Los Angeles Times]

From a show about environmental damage at the Norton Museum of Art to a show about the US-Mexican border at L.A.’s Craft & Folk Art Museum, cultural institutions across the country are getting political this year. [The New York Times]

Turkish painter Zehra Doğan is being jailed over a painting. The painting is based off a photo of the town Nusaybin in ruins after a battle between Turkish security forces and Kurdish separatists. She’s being charged with producing terrorist propaganda. This is absurd. [Fair Press]

Thank you Jillian Steinhauer, for doing the one piece of reporting/criticism on the “Fearless Girl” Wall Street statue that is more than a Clickhole headline like “Wow!” or “Inspiring: Fake Girl in front of Fake Bull.” [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Inside Foxconn

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 23:56:19 +0000

Ever wonder what the assembly line of technology giant Foxconn looks like? Wonder no longer.

Reimagining Dance For The Disabled Body In “Our Configurations” At Gibney Dance

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 15:25:48 +0000

Alice Sheppard and Laurel Lawson of Kinetic Light in "Broken Intent" (Photo: Scott Shaw)

AXIS Dance Company, Marc Brew, Kinetic Light, and Marissa Perel: Our Configurations The Theater at Gibney Dance 280 Broadway New York, NY March 4, 2017

Two audience members lick the pant leg and cane of performer Marissa Perel. While this happens she recalls awkward and downright insulting moments related to her disability. In one particularly horrifying story she tells the audience about a subway rider who called her a “bitch” after she refused to answer why she had a cane.

Friday Links: How Much Are You Willing to Compromise?

Fri, 10 Mar 2017 12:29:03 +0000

Inside the Guggenheim. Image via: The New York Times

Arts organizations brace for the possible elimination of the NEA. [The New York Times]
Manhattan's cheapest rentals in priciest neighborhoods. We might as well just call this feature "How Much Are You Willing to Compromise? New York's Shittiest Soho Apartments." [Curbed]
The Guggenheim's permanent collection is on view in the rotunda—a rarity. Holland Cotter is happy. Looks like there's some great canonical modernist masterpieces on view. [The New York Times]
Since 2008 DOT Art has been diligently working to beautify tunnels, bridges and streets with art. Projects on average take between four and six months to implement, and are supported by $200,000 in annual funding through the city’s OneNYC plan. The article's mostly an overview on what they do, but it's worth noting that this is not a lot of money for what they do. They are looking for more permanent streams of funding, as they should be because a lot of money is going to dry up under Trump. [AM New York]
Speaking of politics, here's a terrifying tweet storm courtesy of David Frum, who appears to be the country's expert on envisioning the most horrifying and likely dystopic future under Trump. In this thread he predicts that the failure of health care might actually help Trump by discrediting Paul Ryan and the remains of the old plutocratic GOP. Trump could "then introduce a deficits-shmeficits tax cut, shrug off entitlements problem, focus on immigration & trade. Popular!" [@davidfrum]
Wow. Devon Van Houten Maldonado really doesn't like the Gabriel Orozco installation cum convenience store in Mexico City. "I wanted to be convinced of a deeper meaning hiding beneath the shallow analogy between art and disposable commodities, but I left sure that Orozco has given up making art for pretending to be a philistine." [Hyperallergic]
Oh God. St. Patrick's Day is a week away. Everybody hide. A map of places to avoid next Friday. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: I LOVE YOU CHEETOS

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 23:42:38 +0000

Theres a shitload of hot cheetos in the gallery room at school. Art school. pic.twitter.com/jlis77Nuh8
— G (@giancakes) March 7, 2017

Sparked by some photos of a “dangerously cheesy” installation by artist Jazmin Urrea, “Cheeto Art” is going viral today. I’ve never fully understood the draw of Cheetos, though I am not immune to its charms. It functions like a memento mori, only instead of alluding to death we are reminded that we could be eating Cheetos in bed instead of whatever we are doing right now.

Thursday Links: Trump Escort Service Trademarked, Gallery Gets Private Island

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 12:35:35 +0000

Jordan Kasey, “Poolside”

Jordan Kasey's show at Nicelle Beauchene gallery looks so, so good. [Hyperallergic]
IKEA will phase out metal fasteners and allen wrenches, instead shifting to snap-together wood joining. Reading the comments on this blog post about the new system, you would think art schools had just announced they would no longer teach figurative painting. Why are people upset about this? [Dezeen]
Police arrested Brandon Aebersold yesterday, who has been wanted since last week for his assault on a museum security guard. Aebersold told a guard at the Met that a painting was crooked. When the guard directed Aebersold a different department, he launched into a rage and smashed a bottle over his head. [DNA Info]
Applications for +Art's Engaging Artists Fellowship are due next month. [+Art]
Axel Vervoordt Gallery is getting its own island in Antwerp. The gallery's parent company is developing it into a "city within a city", complete with showrooms, housing, offices for their associated foundation, a grocery store, and even medical facilities. This is weird. [The Art Newspaper]
Trump is registering dozens of trademarks in China, which will theoretically grant him exclusive use of the Trump name in promoting "escort services," among other business ventures. [Reuters]
Stop by Pioneer Works, and you could appear in E.S.P. TV's "Work," a reality TV show the art collective is filming. [Forbes]
Transit planners are concerned that the MTA is unprepared for the impending L train shutdown. The MTA expects most would-be L train riders to switch to the G or JMZ (a problem in its own right) but a bus rapid transit alternative might be needed. The shutdown is expected to totally overwhelm bus lines, turning commutes into a nightmare. [Curbed]
Dana Goodyear looks back at the legacy of the late artist Jason Rhoades, whose practice seemed to foreshadow the contemporary American crisis. Rhoades sought to combine elements from the Middle East, Middle America, and Mexico into "clusterfuck" trash aesthetics. And the word "pussy" (and all its synonyms) frequently featured in his work. The irony of how prescient Rhoades interests seem: none of this work could ever be made by a white dude today without being crucified. [The New Yorker]

NSFW GIF of International Women's Day: FEMEN Strikes!

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 23:00:19 +0000

In honor of International Women’s Day, it only seems appropriate to give our Hump Day GIF spot to these assorted GIFs of FEMEN, the world’s most NSFW feminist group.

Considering how often their actions seem to take place in cold, windswept Eastern Europe, though, you’d think they’d have a signature strategy that wasn’t taking off tops. We salute you!

In Celebration of International Women's Day: A Series of Men's Tweets

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 19:01:03 +0000

Today is International Women’s Day and men all over the world are coming together to celebrate by whining over Twitter about the supposed lack of International Men’s Day. The holiday couldn’t have come soon enough, with white men reeling after Black History Month ended– they could no longer bemoan the question “When is White History Month?”

Not on Twitter? Don’t worry. I am your messenger. I scoured the underbelly of “Men’s Rights” twitter to find the best tweets by “activists” wailing about International Men’s Day and the “War on Bros."

The SEP IRA: A Lovesong

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 14:50:53 +0000

We freelancers pay a lot of tax. We don’t just pay an income tax rate of anywhere from 0 to 39% on our freelance income - we also pay a flat 15.3% self-employment tax, no matter what our income bracket. Without tax planning, this can be a huge bite.

As artists and cultural workers, our freelancer tax strategy is generally to reduce the amount of our taxable self-employment income as much as legally possible. Tax planning is hard, because it’s about saving small bits in many places. There are few silver bullets. But the closest thing there is to a silver bullet is tax-sheltered retirement savings. There are many tax shelters, with a range of limits, but the biggest contribution caps tend to be in retirement. Why? It takes a lot of money to retire, and if you don’t pay for yourself, and your children can’t, the government is going to have to. They put a big incentive there to sweeten the deal of saving for your retirement.

Wednesday Links: Are George W. Bush's Paintings Good Now?

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 12:45:51 +0000

George W. Bush, "Sgt Michael Joseph Leonard Politowicz"

Joshua David Stein grapples with the uncomfortable weirdness of George W. Bush’s painting career. Bush’s latest artistic endeavor, a monograph of portraits he’s painted of disabled veterans, is especially complicated: “Bush became a painter and his subjects were the very men torn to shreds, quite literally, by his own policy.” It feels so wrong to admit that at least the one image from the series is really compelling. [The Guardian]

Neighbors for More Neighbors, a project from artists Ryan Johnson and John Edwards, is part of the growing YIMBY movement. The crux of YIMBYism is that decades of NIMBY concerns over density and new development have made cities ridiculously expensive by restricting supply of real estate. The basic logic behind this argument is that downzoning or blocking building height increases drives up the cost of living—when neighbors oppose rezoning for taller buildings which usually include affordable housing, for example, all that gets built are less dense luxury condos for the few. Comparing the respective housing situations in booming cities such as Denver and San Francisco is a good case study in this theory. [Curbed]

We all knew the art market was top-heavy, but this is ridiculous. Andrew Fabricant, director of Richard Gray Gallery, claims that two Asian collectors are pretty much single-handedly propping up the auction market. [Observer]

Wow. Nate Freeman has written the definitive guide to Ivanka Trump’s art world involvements—from her supporters’ death threats against Halt Action Group artists to the Trump team’s numerous connections with Artsy. This is a good read. [ARTnews]

Speaking of (in)famous people’s offspring, this has to be the weirdest all-star, multigenerational collaboration by children of celebrities. Apparently Carrie Fisher and Sean Lennon wrote a song together, which Lennon recorded with Willow Smith as a tribute following the actress’s death. [E Online]

The Gardiner Museum in Toronto is hiring a chief curator. If you have eight years of curating experience working in the field of ceramics and a PHD, this could be a job for you. [Work in Culture]

Watching the Republicans try to come up with (and pass) an Affordable Care Act repeal-and-replace plan is like a room full of monkeys with typewriters, if the monkeys had just smashed the typewriters and then were frustratedly trying to jam all the pieces back together into something that resembled a typewriter. [The Washington Post]

Art world headline of the day: “Get Your Selfie Judged by Tracey Emin and Juergen Teller”. [artnet News]

Ronald Hollar drunk-drove his car into “Spectral Liberation”, a beloved piece of decades-old public art in Des Moines, Iowa. It’s estimated he caused nearly a quarter of $1 million in damage. [KCII]

Billionaire Dan Gilbert moved his company, Quicken Loans, to Detroit and commissioned a few public art projects to help “beautify” the city. What a hero. It seems the point of this article, if there is one at all, is to point out that Gilbert believes artists play a role in rejuvenating (read gentrifying) cities. None of Gilbert’s projects are even discussed though. We’re genuinely confused about why this article even exists. [Forbes]

Ooooh. Giovanni Garci-Fenech interviews Martin Herbert on his new book about artists who leave the art world. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Flamethrower Drones Clear Trash From Chinese Power Lines

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 19:59:17 +0000

Sometimes there’s a story so weird that it goes straight from local news to viral GIF sensation practically overnight. Such is the case of these guys—flame-throwing drones that a utility company in Xiangyang, China has started using to clean pesky trash off of power lines.

This raises so many questions, such as “Is this really the most efficient way to deal with trash?” or “Don’t power lines burn too?” to “Who the hell thought this program up and/or funded it?” Whatever the reasoning behind using cute/terrifying robots that look like they wandered off the set of a Hunger Games sequel, there’s no denying they’ve won over the hearts of the internet. If there’s ever an Olympics-style international Battle Bots, I feel like these would totally beat the USA’s most viral/dystopian robots—those sad Boston Dynamics creations that seem to have no purpose other than being kicked by mean MIT grads in animated GIFs.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Patriarchy-Smashing in Full Force

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 19:00:41 +0000

Pelenakeke Brown's eerie self-portraits open Wednesday night at ORA Gallery.

So far, 2017 might be one of the shittiest years in recent decades for the women of America, but New York’s art world is making sure this will be a Women’s History Month to remember. On Thursday, the New Museum is even hosting a talk on Feminist topics we haven’t even heard of: A.K. Burns will be leading a discussion on “Quantum Feminism”. That same night, Van DebEd is hosting Women’s History Month Invitational in Long Island City.

Tuesday Links: Alt-Right White Nationalists Play Art Historians

Tue, 07 Mar 2017 12:10:03 +0000

Ben Davis examines the art-historical references made by Identity Evropa (an Alt-Right group) in their Classical propaganda posters. 2017 is so weird. Also, can someone point out to the Right Wing that Europe has so much sculpture because the governments of antiquity commissioned it? If you wanna talk about the decline of Western Civilization, start by getting your own people to lay off the NEA. [artnet News]

The animatronics behind the live action Ghost in the Shell adaptation are crazy. It’s nice to see craft isn’t dead in the age of CGI filmmaking. [Tested]

The National Parks Service has released aerial inauguration photos in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, settling the absurd “alternative facts” issue. [USA Today]

The strange story of SoWeBo, the Baltimore artists enclave that actually bucked the trend and de-gentrified. [Splice Today]

Mari Katayama was born with a bone disorder that led to the amputation of her legs at the age of 9. Twenty years later, she’s found a fine art career that involves bedazzled prosthetics, soft sculpture, and surreal self-portraiture. [The Guardian]

Gowanus’s iconic “Bat Cave” (a former power station-turned-squat) is being renovated by a philanthropist into the “Powerhouse Workshop”. Designed by Herzog & de Meuron, the Powerhouse Workshop will be a fabrication center for artists. That sounds great, and is certainly something the city’s tiny-studio-bound artists need, but squats are cooler. [The New York Times]

Well, this should come as a shock to absolutely no one: Downtown Brooklyn has an oversupply of “market rate” (read: luxury) apartments and a dearth of affordable housing. Presently, hundreds of pricey apartments are sitting empty while tens of thousands of New Yorkers apply for scarce affordable units. What’s that saying about the logic of the free market correcting itself again? [Curbed]

The Dallas Observer has been doing some pretty thorough, exhaustive coverage of the John Wiley Price trial. If you haven’t been following the drama, though, it’s a bit difficult to get caught up. Price is a Dallas County Commissioner who is at the center of a complicated corruption investigation that involves bribery, tax evasion, and money laundering. Unsurprisingly, art is involved. Price is accused of using his African art collection to hide assets and evade taxes. His works were sold through Karen Manning’s Millennium 2000 gallery. If Manning’s recent, strange testimony is correct, she has to be one of the worst-paid gallerists in the history of the business (she claims she received a $45 commission per piece). Here’s a link to the Dallas Observer’s latest coverage if you want to stay in the loop. Or, you could hold out for a made-for-tv movie about this saga, which I’m hoping is an inevitability. [Dallas Observer]
The projection-augmented set for the play Ugly Lies the Bone, at London’s National Theater, is so smart. The play follows an injured American veteran as she readjusts to small-town Florida life with the help of virtual reality. The stage, designed by Es Devlin, is an inverted dome which feels claustrophobic when acting as the protagonist’s IRL backdrop, and an expansive surround screen when she’s experiencing simulations. [Dezeen]

Monday Links: In Rare Twist, Art Debate Ends Well

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 12:23:30 +0000

A love affair with the Art on Paper fair. [Observer]
The art market seems to be doing pretty well right now. Lots of collectors purchased art at the auctions and Katya Kazakina reports that while many collectors took their time and put art on hold, they did actually pull the trigger. [Bloomberg]
This pro-Trump media sphere appears to have not only successfully set the agenda for the conservative media sphere, but also strongly influenced the broader media agenda, in particular coverage of Hillary Clinton. [Columbia Journalism Review]
Claire Voon covered the "Show Mein" controversy that took place at SPRING/BREAK. A nice story here. Many found the "Show Mein" concept, which played off the idea of Chinese fast food insensitive because it feed into asian stereotypes. However, the show organizers, JONALDDUDD, were receptive to the feedback given to them in an open letter by collective AN/OTHER NY, and productive dialogue came out of the dispute. Good! [Hyperallergic]
There is an affordable housing boom in the Bronx according to the New York Times. [The New York Times]

Highlights From the Armory

Sat, 04 Mar 2017 16:14:33 +0000

The Armory Installation view, Yayoi Kusama

The Armory Show opened this week, creating a theme park for art collectors and lovers from across the globe. Over 200 galleries and site specific installations are on view at Pier 92 and 94 on the Hudson River. This year features a welcome overhaul of the fair’s floor plan, spearheaded by the new director, Benjamin Genocchio. The delineation of a “Modern” section, usually on view at Pier 92, has been phased out, relocating 17 dealers from the “Galleries” section and the “Focus” artists upstairs. In past iterations of the fair it seemed highlights were positioned in high traffic areas near the entrance and by the time the fair fatigue hit you found yourself stuck at a dead end inside labyrinth of the dullest booths. The new design features wider aisles and better traffic management, making for a vastly more pleasant experience. This year’s a hit folks—at least in terms of visitor experience.

GIF of the Day: Politics Still Terrifying

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 21:53:27 +0000

Also, this GIF of Sessions' face, turning to his lawyer, right after he lies to Congress about his communications with Russia is priceless pic.twitter.com/V34jNvBl6d
— igorvolsky (@igorvolsky) March 2, 2017

I haven’t heard much by way of politics this week, and the reasons for this are entirely field specific. It seems most of us in the art world are distracted by the five million fairs we have to attend. That’s a welcome relief from our decent in chaos, but the decent is still happening. Here’s a reminder of what’s happening elsewhere. Eye on Russia.

NADA Needs To Serve Its Exhibitors and Visitors Better

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 21:27:40 +0000

NADA, installation view. All photos by Marsha Owett unless otherwise noted.

Back in October NADA explained that in response to their members, they would move their fair dates from May, when they showed alongside the Frieze Art Fair, to March,when they would open alongside the Independent, The Armory and the ADAA. Their members felt that more collectors were in town during Armory Week. That may be right, but herein lies the problem of being beholden to a membership. They ask for dumb shit. Sure, more people are in town, but there’s five times as much competition from other fairs, making it difficult to attract quality exhibitors.

VOLTA: Skip The Booths, Head To "Your Body Is A Battleground"

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 15:18:35 +0000

Zachary Fabri, Aureola (Black Presidents), 2012 (photo by author)

VOLTA NY Pier 90 711 12th Avenue New York, NY On view until March 5, 2017

Ten years ago, it seemed most fairs were moving away from the anything-you-can-hang in a booth model to solo show booths. The pinnacle of that movement can be seen as VOLTA, which trumpeted a model in which all booths were solo shows.

Friday Links: REM's Michael Stipe Keeps Irony Alive From SPRING/BREAK

Fri, 03 Mar 2017 12:13:21 +0000

Michael Stipe instagrams his trip to SPRING/BREAK

Christian Viveros-Faune sees all kinds of political work at NADA this year. Just going to point out that it's possible to see a trend of virtually anything in a fair displaying thousands of works of art. My own observations of the fair did not lead me to the same conclusions. There was more political work than usual, but that's not saying much for a fair whose exhibitors rarely, if ever, showcase political art. [artnet News]
REM lead singer Michael Stipe visits Spring Break and poses in front of Guy Richards Smit's paintings. [Instagram]
I haven't been to the Art on Paper fair yet, but this Hyperallergic report on the massive hanging paper towers ensures I'll go. [Hyperallergic]]
Not sure how I feel about the firms who are courting the contract for the design of Donald Trump's wall between Mexico and the United States. “If it’s going to happen, we would like a piece of it,” says Jimmy Benavente, a project coordinator at Halbert. “We try not to bring our political beliefs into it.” In other words, money first, everyone else second. Luckily there are some humane design concepts that are cited in this piece, but it saddens me that there are people working on solving problems that never needed to exist. (Also, what are the chances the Trump administration is going to pick the humane design?) [Culture: High & Low]
Tattooing in art contexts seems to be on the rise (based on two examples I can think of but I'm certain there are others). I saw a booth at SATELLITE in Miami that included a tattoo artist offering tattoos and there was just a live tattoo session at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Not sure if there's anything to say about this, though, past observing that it's happening. [MLive]
A fantastic review critical of the 2nd Avenue Subway Line design. "This is not the subway as a work of art, but a subway saved from dullness by works of art." Critic Alexandra Lange does give a pass to those terribly cheesy Vic Munic murals picturing kids with balloons, though, but we'll forgive her this one transgression, since the larger criticism was art work placement—exhibition design crit makes an appearance! [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: El Greco VS Manet

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 18:17:44 +0000

Mexican art museums post a lot of weird GIFs on their social media accounts.

I’ve noticed this because I’ve purged my Facebook newsfeed (in an attempt to de-stress from American political bickering) of everything except Spanish-language art pages. I highly recommend this strategy, if for no reason other than the constant stream of GIFs.

This one, for example, is from the Facebook of Museo Nacional de Arte INBA. What is going on here? We see the famed painter Doménikos Theotokópoulos (better known as “El Greco”) as an old-timey baseball player with contemporary sneakers and dragonfly wings. He’s barging in on “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe” by Manet, and that painting’s famed nude seems bemusedly intrigued. He has three hands, presumably for his sword, baseball bat, and catcher’s mitt (just what position is he playing here?). I envy the art history students of the future who will get to study masterpieces like this.

We Went To SPRING/BREAK: Who Let the Dogs Out?

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 17:48:21 +0000

This cut-out from Allison Zuckerman gets a nod for many reasons, but primarily because everyone agrees it looks like AFC editor Michael Anthony Farley, AKA Ellen Degenerate.

What’s on View: Two floors crammed full of art shows assembled by 150 independent curators and responding to the theme of Black Mirror. Said theme, chosen by SPRING/BREAK organizers Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, is supposed to be a unifying force, and refers to tools used by old masters for landscape painting and portraiture. What we see, though, is a vast array of approaches ranging from formal painting to DIY barbershops. Some directly respond to theme, others have little to nothing to do with it. Mirrors are everywhere.

State Of The Union At SPRING/BREAK

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 13:00:57 +0000

Installation view of Valery Jung Estabrook's Hometown Hero (Chink) at SPRING/BREAK (Courtesy SPRING/BREAK Art Show)

SPRING/BREAK Art Show 4 Times Square New York, NY On view until March 6, 2017

With its emphasis on supporting artists and curators rather than commercial galleries, SPRING/BREAK Art Show is typically the highlight of the exhausting Armory week frenzy. While the verdict is still out on many of the other fairs, I can confidently report that this one does not disappoint.

Thursday Links: Apply Now for $519 Rent in the LES

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 12:37:27 +0000

Daniel Joseph Martinez on view at’s Armory Show booth.
Image: KATHERINE MCMAHON for ARTnews.

This is so cool. Adam Pendleton, Rashid Johnson, Ellen Gallagher and Julie Mehretu have pooled their money and purchased the birthplace of Nina Simone—a 660 square foot house in Tryon, N.C. Plans for the structure haven’t been fully formulated yet, but for now at least it’s going to be preserved. [The New York TImes]

A new building in the Lower East Side has entered the NYC affordable housing lottery, offering studio apartments from $519. Apply now. [Curbed]

The Orange County Museum of Art had plans to finance a new location in Costa Mesa through a real estate deal involving luxury condos on land it owns in pricey Newport Beach. Now it’s in a world of political drama. Southern California NIMBYs make the West Village look like a tabula rasa. [Los Angeles Times]

Here’s one museum personnel saga that’s more scandalous than the Met’s recent shakeup: Munich’s Haus der Kunst might’ve been infiltrated by Scientologists. Yep. There’s a full-on panic over a staff administrator who may have a secret agenda. In Germany, Scientology is considered a cult and they take its shadowy mechanizations very, very seriously. [Artnet News]

Well, Baltimore is getting a new piece of public art. The prone “Homeless Jesus” was just blessed with holy water one block from my (Michael’s) house. The irony of this is that the very Basilica where it was christened has a terrible track record of landgrabs and demolition of housing in its immediate vicinity. Jesus actually has a pretty big house, now with gardens and a parking garage where once stood apartment buildings. Lots of others in the neighborhood, not so much. [ABC 2 News]

In the same neighborhood, artists are fundraising to rehab a group of buildings for performance, studio, and affordable live/work space. The project is called Le Mondo, and is an ambitious example of artist-owned, artist-run real estate. This is a good project to support. [Crowdrise]

More good news for the markets of the insanely wealthy, Sotheby’s recorded the highest total for any London sale yesterday evening with a £195 million ($241 million) sale of 54 lots of Impressionist, Modern and Surrealist art. Their estimate was £150/180 million. [Baer Faxt]

Speaking of the uber wealthy Pace Gallery broke ground in Chelsea yesterday as they begin construction on their new 8 story, 75,000 square foot building at 540 West Twenty-fifth Street. For reference, that’s a little under half the size of the Whitney Museum’s building on Gansevoort, which is 220,000 square feet. Unlike the Whitney, though, which is a museum built to house and display treasures that belong to the public, Pace is building a sales showroom and offices for the rich. [Baer Faxt]

Yesterday we expressed disappointment in the lack of artwork addressing the Trump regime in the Armory Show’s curated section. But apparently plenty of gallerists didn’t shy away from bringing politically confrontational work. Good. This is a trend that was evident at Zona MACO last month, and hopefully one that gains momentum through the art fair circuit. [ARTnews]

Lorna Mills gives good interviews. On the subject of accreditation and GIFs she says, “I wonder if any artists working online think so much about ownership. They tend to think more about credit for the things they have done. Ownership also suggests some sort of control over the work, and we know that isn’t always possible online. Transfer Gallery published a GIF catalogue of my work recently and I think that serves as a more official form of accreditation.” More Lorna Mills please. [Hyperallergic]

Ann Pfoser Darby, member of Queens Community Board 4, allegedly said during a meeting about safety improvements to 111th street, “Once Trump removes all the illegals from Corona, there won’t be anybody to ride bike lanes.” People are calling for Darby’s removal from the board. I’d like to point out that if all the immigrants left Queens, there wouldn’t be anyone to use any infrastructure in the borough. [Streetsblog]

GIF of the Hump Day: Your Gender Neutral Bathroom Sign

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 22:41:25 +0000

Normally we reserve Wednesdays for our most outrageous x-rated GIFs of the Day. It’s art fair week, though, so you’re looking at enough porn already.

Instead, let’s take a minute to celebrate an appropriate fuck-you to all those assholes trying to legislate who gets to pee in what pot. Screw those guys.

SLIDESHOW: Mexico City Galleries, Part 1

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 21:42:00 +0000

Install view of "The Queen Falls" at Galería OMR with Ugo Rondinone paintings.

MEXICO CITY- The past month has been a crazy time for Mexico City’s art scene between art fairs, pop-ups, and countless openings/performances at museums and galleries. I’ll be posting updates of highlights—starting with group show The Queen Falls at Galería OMR, Rafael Uriegas: Cueva Semilla Sol & Keke Vilabelda: Overwrite at Galería Karen Huber, and a pop-up from digital art edition producers Janet40.

Letter From Juan Garcia Mosqueda—NYC Gallerist & Legal Resident—Denied Entry to US

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 15:02:17 +0000

Juan Garcia Mosqueda. Portrait by Lauren Coleman

Juan Garcia Mosqueda, Founder of Chelsea design gallery Chamber and curator, has been denied entry to the United States by border patrol agents. This, despite the fact that the Argentina-born Mosqueda has been a legal US resident for 10 years.

On February 24th, while returning from Buenos Aires, Mosqueda was detained for what he describes as a “36-hour nightmare” during which he was denied legal counsel, food, and privacy while using the bathroom. Fourteen hours later, he was forced to board a flight returning to Buenos Aires.

Wednesday Links: Facebook Deems Oil Painting of Sleeping Lesbians Too Sexy For Web

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 12:37:08 +0000

Charles Blackman, "Women Lovers."

More Facebook censorship news: Australian auction house Mossgreen wasn’t allowed to post an image of Charles Blackman's oil painting “Women Lovers”. Mossgreen executive Paul Summer says "It's like going back to the 1950s. It's ridiculous to censor this sort of thing." [BBC News]

Mexican-Canadian artist Miriam Aroeste is taking considerable flak thanks to her work at Vancouver’s Trump Tower. The developers commissioned 180 pieces from Aroeste before the Trump name became quite so politically loaded. But those developers aren’t actually the Trumps—the Canadian Holborn Group built the thing. They (rather stupidly, in hindsight) just licensed the Trump name. In a strange way, I guess the relationship Trump has had to most real estate for the past decade or so isn’t so different from those “street artists” who gets paid to make some luxury condos look like they’re “revolutionizing edgy urban living” or whatever. The difference is the Trump brand makes buyers look like a whole other brand of new money douchebag. [The Art Newspaper]

Related: the Trump administration has put out an RFP for "design and build of several prototype wall structures in the vicinity of the United States border with Mexico." I would imagine any architect who submits a non-ironic proposal will likely never find work in the culture field again. [Dezeen]

Thomas P. Campbell, head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has announced his resignation. Rumors are swirling that his departure wasn’t quite by choice—despite monumental success with exhibitions and visitors under Campbell, the Met has experienced problems with budget, layoffs, postponed capital projects, and of course that pesky new logo. [The Washington Post]

This is probably one of the cutest gentrification battles we’ve read about. A luxury apartment developer is suing a longtime neighborhood resident for feeding birds. Those birds poop all over the development’s balconies and rooftop amenities. Apparently the poop is scaring away potential tenants. Is this a good resistance strategy? Or at least a good subplot in a John Waters film? [The Baltimore Sun]

We (mostly) like the Second Avenue Subway’s public art. Alexandra Lange does too, but points out a problem with so much contemporary American architecture: the art feels a bit lost in spaces designed to be have as little identity as possible. [Curbed]

The Armory Show’s “Focus” section this year, What Is to Be Done? curated by Jarrett Gregory, frames sociopolitical issues through the lens of economics. That sounds a little dry, but the work here looks pretty good (and apparently smells terrible, in the case of Ibrahim Mahama’s dead fish blankets). Somehow, though, the topic of Trump is completely avoided. Gregory explains: “I’m sure people will do great things with that material, but this is more delicate, in terms of the approach, for the most part.” Eyeroll. Even in other commercial art fairs, gallerists have had the balls to show overtly political work that was often much more nuanced and original than this quote from Gregory: “I think that in the art world, we too often have a single perspective—the European white male, for example.” [ARTnews]

Ok, we have resisted the urge to comment on Doug Aitken’s Desert X installation because literally every other art and/or design blog has already told the world that it’s “unbelievable” or “breathtaking” or “mind-boggling” or “dangerous for birds” but this link has some actually useful information in case you want to decide for yourself. Here are directions to go see it in person (you need a car). [Time Out LA]

GIF of the Day: Garbage Cat Surprise

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 21:59:01 +0000

No matter how many times I watch this GIF, I always chuckle a little. Cats are kinda terrifying.

Massive Links: Mystery Art Fair Sentence

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 12:34:15 +0000

Alice Neel at David Zwirner

Does anyone understand what this means: "Art fairs do not struggle or close because of competition from other fairs; they close because of competition for their client galleries’ and visitors’ money and attention, such as rising rents or larger spaces, supporting museum exhibitions, publications, and so forth." So fairs close because the rent is too high and museum exhibitions and catalogues distract from their events? [The Art Newspaper]
A McDonald's in Italy may become a tourist attraction. During construction of a new McDonald's restaurant an ancient road was discovered—along with three skeletons. Rather than halting construction the restaurant sponsored a dig to reveal the road and even cast the skeletons in resin. According to the Times, though, the location is unlikely to become a huge tourist attraction due to its remoteness. [The New York Times]
Someone attempting to take a selfie in Yayoi Kusama's mirror infinity room stepped back a bit too far and fell over one of pumpkin sculptures. It broke. [Hyperallergic]
Is Sotheby's turning itself around? The company boasted a profit of 65.5 million in the fourth quarter, beating expectations. Still, there is a market downturn. Sales have slipped 27 percent compared to this time last year. [ARTnews]
Another Alice Neel show at David Zwirner—he launched one last year too. This one's getting some love from Christian Viveros-Faune. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Old Master Trump

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:26:25 +0000

This may be the most hilarious reference to old master paintings that we’ve ever seen in a GIF. Let’s unpack the narrative:

A time traveler by the name of Donald Trump has been sent back to the feudal system. Plucked out of the 21st century in his bathrobe and computer, he attempts to rule his kingdom by tweet.

Something is up.

His computer isn’t plugged into anything because electricity hasn’t been invented. The apple icon on the computer has been replaced with a painted image of an actual apple. There is no internet. Upon realizing this, Trump descends into a fit of rage, pounding his fists on the keyboard. The result is a string of nonsensical letters—the usual nonsense, only better because in this fiction, Trump has no audience.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Survive Art Fair Hell With Bushwick Punx and Georgia O’Keeffe

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 21:22:57 +0000

"Moll Madnoss" opens Friday night at Elijah Wheat Showroom. Why does a child's board game about navigating a mall sound like a perfect metaphor for Armory Week?

It is hell week for the art world. What used to be referred to as “Armory Week” is now a beast spanning more art fairs than anyone has time or energy for. Now that NADA has joined the fray, it’s likely going to be more stressful, but at least slightly less soul-crushing.

Monday Links: Neo-Nazis and Robot-Designed Architecture Sound Like the Plot of a Straight-to-VHS Sci-Fi Flick

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 11:54:50 +0000

La Pyramide (1973) in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, by human Rinaldo Olivieri (not an AI!). Photo by Iwan Baan.

New York's Center for Architecture has a show about postcolonial African modern architecture and it looks amazing. Apparently, somewhat paradoxically, African nations celebrated their independence from European colonial powers by commissioning avant garde works from European architects. These are so cool. [Dezeen]

A group of alleged neo-Nazis and a group protesting with the Industrial Workers of the World got into a physical confrontation inside the Minneapolis Institute of Arts this weekend. No art was damaged. [StarTribune]

“There have people using their own fecal matter in a harmful way in the bathrooms, in the showers, all over the bathroom," a RISD student discussing the poop swastika found on campus. I can’t tell if I’m more weirded out by the sudden rise of neo-Nazis or the sheer amount of poop-related news we’ve been reading lately. What the hell is wrong with people?? [New York Daily News]

How Jamillah James became the head curator of LA’s new-ish ICA. Spoiler: not via grad school. [Hyperallergic]

LD50, the London gallery which hosted a controversial show about the alt-right, may be closing. The gallery has since been targeted by intense protests. [The New York Times]

For the first time in Europe, Cindy Sherman’s recent self portraits as aging Hollywood starlets are on view all together. The show is at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, and this series looks so good. [artnet News]
“Watson,” IBM’s AI, has been tasked with learning to think like Antoni Gaudi. It’s been designing organic/modernist sculpture. Maybe one day, it will design buildings. [Forbes]

GIF of the Day: Best Bear Ever

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 19:50:16 +0000

This is a pretty cute gif, but honestly, my GIF efforts were thwarted today because I was not able to get this image of a bear hanging out on an old couple’s patio off the page it currently lives on. So, consider this a link and a couple bonus bear GIFs because bears are cute.

Museum Punk Show in Need of A Sound Guy

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 18:32:43 +0000

Gardar Eide Einarsson, "Always Carry A Bible / All Cops Are Bastards," 2007

Punk. Sus rastros en el arte contemporáneo Museo Universitario del Chopo Curated by David G. Torres Until March 26th, 2017

Featuring: Tere Recarens, Martin Arnold, Johan Grimonprez, Federico Solmi, Dan Graham, T.R Uthco, Ant Farm, María Pratts, Iztiar Okariz, Chiara Fumai, Raisa Maudit, Fabienne Audéoud, Eduardo Balanza, TRES, Raymond Pettibon, Die Tödliche Doris, Mabel Palacín, Christian Marclay, Guerrilla Girls, Brice Dellsperger, Jordi Colomer, Pepo Salazar, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Jota Izquierdo, Israel Martínez, Aida Ruilova, Antonio Ortega, Luis Felipe Ortega, Daniel Guzmán, Jimmie Durham, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, João Louro, Paul McCarthy, João Onofre, Santiago Sierra, Yoshua Okon, Miguel Calderón, Nan Goldin, Enrique Jezik, Guillermo Santamarina, VALIE EXPORT, Kendell Geers, Laureana Toledo, Sarah Minter, Semefo, DR. LAKRA, Gardar Eide Einarsson.

No Paintings for Old Men: I'm Done With Amy Feldman

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 15:27:47 +0000

Amy Feldman at Blain|Southern, Installation view

Amy Feldman Breath Myth 11 February — 8 April 2017 Blain|Southern, Berlin

I have to hand it to NYC-based painter Amy Feldman: not every artist can cause me to temporarily lose the will to carry on writing and the energy to carry on chronicling our bankrupt, post-meaning culture. What, I wondered as I walked around the palatial Blain/Southern Gallery, is the damned point anymore? Confronted on all sides by Feldman’s aggressively vacuous, massive canvasses, I can’t even argue conclusively that Feldman’s work is good or bad. It operates so outside of any qualitative value scale that I understand—as if attacking the very idea of value—that it defeats all rational readings of art or art making. All I can do is respond. And respond I must.

Friday Links: Texas Enema Performance Art Ends Up Messy

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 11:48:17 +0000

"My bartender was throwing up behind the bar… Plus, it was indecent exposure. They made performance art look bad.” - Mariana Lemesoff, owner of Houston venue Avant Garden on a performance by Sonic Rabbit Hole. Member Michael Clemmons is accused of butt-chugging a protein shake and then projectile shitting all over a fundraiser party for an artist with cancer. [The Huffington Post]

Programmer Christopher Hesse’s image translation software is amazing. Basically, you can draw a rudimentary building or shoe and an AI will render it semi-photo-realistically based on its knowledge of images from internet databases (think Google Deep Dream in reverse). But what the internet uses this incredible technology for is cats. Terrifying, terrifying drawings of monster cats. How long until someone makes the scary porn version of this? [The Next Web]

“Now more than ever, in my short lifetime at least, we need the ‘Scullys’ of the world to step up. Whether you’re squinting at a lab bench, or giving a voice to the oppressed in a courtroom, or chasing justice in three-inch heels, you are an integral part of the fight. You will not always win. But like Scully, I implore you to persist.” -Abby Norman on the importance of The X-Files, the show that inspired her (and countless other girls) to pursue science. [Paste]
Speaking of science, it’s close to 20 degrees above normal high temperatures today in New York and the surrounding area, a phenomenon scientists call Climate Change. They are worried that these changes will endanger all life on earth, but some people don’t believe the changes are real. One of these people has just been appointed head of the EPA.
The New York Times has announced it will embark on a massive brand campaign In an effort to educate the public on what journalists do, how facts are mined, and the importance of truth, narrative and responsible media in the age of Trump. This is important. Subscribe to the Times and support what they do. We’ve got independent media, and the the judicial system to blunt Trump right now and that’s it. If you want to make a difference, that’s where you spend your money. [The New York Times]
How Soleilmoon Recordings, a Northeast Portland indie record outlet, landed on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups. [Willamette Weekly]
Related: Depeche Mode wants everyone to know that Richard Spencer’s infatuation with them is most definitely a one-way street. [Gothamist]
New York could add thousands of relatively affordable basement apartments to the city’s existing single-family housing stock. The biggest obstacle that stands in a pilot program’s way: parking minimums. It’s beyond absurd that nearly every American city’s housing initiatives are thwarted by car-related zoning, as if owning a car were mandatory and regulating where people store their belongings were a government issue. [Curbed]
Well, that didn’t last for four years. Shia LaBeouf has terminated his streaming performance HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US, which had been moved to New Mexico, after gunshots were heard in the vicinity. [People]

GIF of the Day: Hussein Chalayan's Balkan Glitter Bomb Tops for Democracy

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 20:23:20 +0000

We snagged this GIF from Dezeen, because a standalone image it’s just so weird. A stoic woman in a bulky/futuristic outfit tears away packaging on her chest to unleash feathers and confetti. You’d think there’d be a really good story behind this one.

It turns out there are a lot of stories going on here, and I’m not sure any of them really make sense. The GIF is from Hussein Chalayan’s Autumn Winter 2017 show—a collection that’s somehow inspired by “universal personhood,” democracy, Greek folklore, and the “new, isolated individuals that the current world order is generating.”

You Want It Darker: Robyn O’Neil’s “The Good Herd” At Susan Inglett Gallery

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 13:00:00 +0000

Robyn O'Neil, Inflation Drill (after Guston), 2016, Graphite on paper (Courtesy the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery)

Robyn O’Neil: The Good Herd Susan Inglett Gallery 522 West 24th Street New York, NY On view until March 11, 2017

Is any art that depicts a vivid sense of doom and gloom immediately relevant in 2017? Yes, if Robyn O’Neil’s current solo exhibition The Good Herd is any indication.

Thursday Links: Protesters Demand Trump Advisor Resign from MoMA Board

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 11:59:30 +0000

Protesters, including Coco Fusco, at MoMA

Venice Biennale promo is like the Christmas season—every year it starts earlier. This year, in the lead up to the show, one video spotlight per participating artist will be released each day. That’s 120 days folks. [artnet News]

Protesters are demanding that MoMA drop board member Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, due to his ties to the Trump administration. Good. Make this guy’s life hell. MoMA has refused to make a statement. [Hyperallergic]

“One of the surprising things about these artists, which isn’t always apparent in the work, is how despondent, even dystopian, they are about the internet. They might fetishise PDFs and encourage open platforms and shared interfaces (Wikipedia as art), but when interviewed they describe the web as pernicious, and technology as the glossy face of human misery.” -Alice Sprawls on One & Other at The Zabludowicz Collection. [London Review of Books]

Choreographer David St-Pierre told audiences to expect a retelling of the Joan of Arc story. “Instead, the audience was treated to 95 minutes of screeching music, dogs barking and a climactic scene where a man gets his hand stuck in a vending machine.” Montreal’s Place des Arts is now allowing people to change their tickets to more conventional works. [BBC]

Ok, people say the art world does a lot of silly things, but non-art people do even dumber things for even stranger reasons. For example, people are fighting in New York subway stations over Metrocards with an ad for clothing brand Supreme on them. The Metrocard is only good for two swipes? Can someone explain to me why this isn’t just a shittier Metrocard? [The Hundreds]

MTA ridership has dropped for the first time since 2009. This may sound like a relief given all the over crowding and delays but it means less revenue for the MTA which is already looking down the barrel of 65 million budget cut thanks to governor Cuomo. I want that guy out as governor and the talk of him running for President to end. No good comes of anything Cuomo touches. [Curbed]

Can’t wait to see all the public art proposals for the highline. Here’s hoping they’re better than the Jeremy Deller lizard on a plinth they chose to release as exemplary. [The New York Times]

Desert X claims to be the Coachella of the art world. They know the Times refused to cover Coachella last year because it had become such a shit show, right? Anyway, the show responds to the desert and actually looks pretty good. Doug Aitken has made what he calls a human scale kaleidoscope and Claudia Comte basically made a building-sized Bridget Riley. Sign me up. [The Los Angeles Times]
João Doria, the new mayor of São Paulo, has launched a program to paint over the city’s famous street art with grey. This is a terrible idea. The program includes painting over even commissioned murals if they’ve been tagged. A judge is attempting to block the grey-washing with a rule that graffiti removers must consult the city’s historic preservation department. [The Guardian]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Ancient Erotic Japanese Print GIFs

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 23:11:35 +0000

For all the GIFs there are floating around the web, there are still times when I’m surprised not to see a surplus of GIFs around a particular subject. Take, for instance ancient erotic Japanese prints. You’d think the octopus below would already be animated, but no such luck. There are, of course, a few examples of Japanese prints that have been animated, but none we’ve found are porny. As such, we’ve collected a few images we think would benefit from animation. Anyone who wants to participate in this important project is welcome.

Why Refusing to Pay Federal Taxes Is an Ineffective Protest of Trump

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 17:37:23 +0000

Frustrated with President Donald Trump’s first four weeks in office? So far, he’s rolled out a sloppy and disgraceful travel ban on Muslims (notably omitting countries he has business ties to), and used taxpayer money to pay for his sons’ jaunts to other countries to promote Trump family businesses. His presidency has been rife with conflict of interest but he has not released his taxes, so there remain few ways to prove it.

An Interview with Painter Trudy Benson: Loving The Smell of Paint

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 17:07:44 +0000

Trudy Benson, installation view

Trudy Benson is a force to be reckoned with. Her painting upon painting upon painting leave artists and casual observers alike gazing in wonderment at the layers in her work. Her best abstractions demonstrate a masterful handling of patterning and color and seem to vibrate on the wall.

This week, I sat down with New York based painter, Trudy Benson on the occasion of her two concurrent solo shows at Ribordy Contemporary in Geneva and Galerie Bernard Ceysson in Paris, both opening at the end of March. We nerded out. We discussed the influence of experimental film on her newest body of work, as well as the evolution of her richly painted, lyrical oils.

Wednesday Links: Andrea Rosen to Close Gallery. Announcement Shakes Art World.

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 12:04:18 +0000

David Altmejd at Andrea Rosen Gallery

Andrea Rosen has announced she will close her gallery of 27 years. Art world shaken. More on this shortly. [Andrea Rosen]
Details for Geoffrey Farmer's installation at the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale have been released. He'll be drawing inspiration from a 1955 group of photographs showing a lumber truck that collided with a moving train. Can't say I'm excited yet, but whatever. I hope it's good because I'm Canadian and I cheer for Canadians. [ARTnews]
A full account of Andy Warhol's death. It seems his surgery wasn't so routine after all. "The surgeon found a gallbladder full of gangrene; the organ fell to pieces as he removed it." Wow. [The New York Times]
Good grief. PSSST, a non-profit gallery that opened last year in LA's Boyle Heights has been forced to close due to online and IRL trolling. According to this report, activists were concerned that the gallery was complicit in gentrification forces, and the gallery claimed it was aiming to help the very communities the activists were fighting for. [The Los Angeles Times]
Did you know that Housing Works was founded by members of ACT UP and actually builds affordable housing? I didn't. That history and more told here. [Curbed]
The New York Post is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for liberal smears. Their latest story tracks three animal deaths that have occurred while de Blasio was mayor and finds a disturbing trend. [The New York Post]

GIF of the Day: Ben McCarthy

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 19:22:38 +0000

You wouldn’t know it, but all the plants in the GIF above were made with an L-system, which was used by early computer graphics professionals to accurately model plants. And by early we mean, EARLY. L-systems, a type of formal grammar were developed in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist at the University of Utrecht.

Nothing about this eerie GIF by artist Ben McCarthy, though, looks particularly dated. The whole scene resembles a 3D rendered environment, so a viewer doesn’t even contemplate that the technology might be old. In fact, it’s the kind of picture you’d imagine a younger Vija Celmins making if she decided to venture outside the subject of water. Something basically still, but for a small movement, implied or real, that imparts a feeling of quiet dread to the whole picture.

Tuesday Links: Nothing for Artists to Do When it Comes to the End of the World

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 12:34:54 +0000

Emma Thompson in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America"

Last night, the New Yorker hosted a panel discussion moderated by editor-in-chief David Remnick and panelists playwright Tony Kushner, poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine and author Salman Rushdie. The subject was today's American politics and how artists respond. What a letdown. Salman Rushdie is still a misogynist (he blames Susan Sarandon for Bernie bros not giving his loss a rest). Tony Kushner oddly avoided the subject of race when Claudia Rankine brought it up, and Rankine was the only one willing to take potentially contentious positions. Even she didn't have much to say, though, perhaps because the entire panel was ill-conceived. Nobody thought their art would be influenced by politics—which was its subject. Rushdie pushed the cliched theory that art only gets good when times are tough. All in all a stinker, (but you can watch the video and decide for yourself). [Public Theatre]
Speaking of how the arts are influenced by politics, Matthew Rose discusses this very subject in his piece "Trump World—Signs of Protest". I'm quoted in Rose's piece more than once, but this sentiment closes out the piece. “Functioning democracies require the engagement and work of citizens,” says Paddy Johnson of Art F City. “It doesn’t require an excess of formalist abstract painting. I’m not interested in the work of right-leaning artists. We have Neo-Nazis shutting down anti-Trump statements at museums. This is not a curiosity. It is a battle and we need to be prepared for it because it’s not going to be pretty.” [Art Blog]
Need to escape Trump's world? Mark Farid is going to spend a month alone in a room wearing virtual reality headgear. The piece is basically a bunch of sane professionals expressing concern over the idea. Add me to this list. I've never been able to go more than 15 minutes wearing the goggles without getting nauseous and I'm told that's better than average. He's Farid going to do days of this? [VICE]
A Google doc listing all the galleries that show only white artists, those with no black artists, and those with only one non-white artist. [google docs]
A Golden Girls inspired cafe has opened up at 4394 Broadway in New York. Michael Anthony Farley says this is the only news that has made him excited to return to the United States—and since it's an all white show, I can't imagine it's going to land on President Donald Trump's hit list for any reason. [WQAD]

GIF of the Day: Dancing Eagles

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 21:06:04 +0000

I’m not sure where this GIF of buff eagles in speedos dancing came from, but I sure am glad it exists. Try as I might with reverse Google Image Search, I can’t seem to find this image’s source. It does seem to be pretty widely posted across the internet, though, and it’s easy to see why.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Happy Not-My-President's Day

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 18:42:29 +0000

Tony Schwensen's poem for "PUPPET PRESIDENT & POWER"

Kick the week off with the closing reception of an anti-Trump poetry show at EIDIA House, part of their "Plato's Cave" exhibition series. Tuesday, artist Hakan Topal and curator Joanna Lehan talk about representations of refugees at CUNY's Graduate Center, and Wednesday two artists plunge into the aesthetics of capitalism and consumption at respective openings downtown.

Things lighten up a bit starting Thursday. We’re looking forward to the NYC debut of North Carolina artist Carmen Neely at Jane Lombard Gallery and Monica Bonvicini’s oddly sexy work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. On Friday, AFC friend Saul Chernick is opening a collaborative show at NURTUREart in Bushwick, and Saturday Liinu Grönlund’s rat-centric video work goes live at Open Source Gallery. End the week with a timely show about barriers and portals from A.K. Burns at Callicoon Fine Arts.

Monday Links: Tiffany & Co., Museums, Shia LaBeouf Want You to Join the Resistance

Mon, 20 Feb 2017 09:53:14 +0000

Via Medium Quality Screen Captures. I would kill for some context on this one.

The Shia LaBeouf saga continues. After the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens kicked LaBeouf's anti-Trump installation "HEWILLNOTDIVIDE.US", the actor/artist relocated the piece to the El Rey Theater in Albuquerque New Mexico. It's already back up and running. [Independent Journal Review]
From rehangs at the Whitney and MoMA to The Brooklyn Museum's #J20 programming, Andrea K. Scott rounds-up how New York's museums are protesting the Trump administration. [The New Yorker]
Karen Pence wants to use her new position as "Second Lady" to raise awareness about the benefits of art therapy. One would imagine that after decades of marriage to Mike Pence, she must be a therapy connoisseur. [PBS]
Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer opposes Bill de Blasio's "mansion tax", which would add a 2.5% sales tax to homes over $2 million to fund much-needed affordable housing. That's because the vast majority of New York City's priciest property sales are in her borough, unsurprisingly. She claims this puts an unfair burden on Manhattanites. But aren't so many $2+ million sales investment properties for foreign buyers of pied-a-tierres for the globe-trotting ultra-rich? If anything, the tax might have the additional benefit of cooling the luxury market slightly, which would be a boon for most actual Manhattan residents. If you live in Manhattan, it might be worth giving her office a call. [Curbed]
Kota Ezawa has installed his illustration-like reproductions of missing paintings from the infamous Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist at the museum. These are surprisingly lovely. [artnet News]
Miami's once-scrappy Borscht Film Festival turns 10 this week, and is now a fully-grown-up institution... sort of. They're celebrating with all kinds of hijinks from a viking funeral to a jetski parade. This would be an excellent time to schedule a last-minute Miami trip. [The Miami Herald]
Bad And Nasty is planning a "Not My President's Day" of art and activism across the country. In Baltimore, for example, protest/activities/performances are planned across several blocks of the Station North Arts District. [Facebook]

GIF of the Day: Highlights from N I G H T D R I V E R

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 22:17:52 +0000

Last year, we would occasionally spend some of our Friday afternoons writing up unusual things we found in the ethers of social media under the tag The 150th Wing of the Internet. I thought of resurrecting that tradition today, when someone sent me a link to the Facebook page N I G H T D R I V E R ナイトコール, which posts lots of GIFs, illustrations, and photos of cars driving through cities at night. Some of them have a retro-futuristic cyberpunk vibe, or capture candid moments of traffic from cities around the world. It’s a notable example of hyper-specific Tumblr-style curating migrating to other social networks.

Doomed Capitalism And Psychedelic Escape In David Spriggs and Matthijs Munnik’s “Permutations of Light” at Pittsburgh’s Wood Street Galleries

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 13:00:22 +0000

David Spriggs, Gold, 2017, yellow acrylic paint on layered sheets of transparent film, triangular gold color structure, lighting units (Photo by David Spriggs; Courtesy the artist and Wood Street Galleries)

David Spriggs and Matthijs Munnik: Permutations of Light Wood Street Galleries 601 Wood Street Pittsburgh, PA On view until April 2, 2017

Friday Links: Down the Rabbit Hole of Alt-Right Meme Aesthetics

Fri, 17 Feb 2017 09:42:45 +0000

"Thus, we see the tragedy of the alt-right—it has no legible end; even when it tries to articulate a vision for the future, it relies on recycled 80s tropes and ultimately looks more or less like a barbaric version of status quo: corporate rule coupled with an alienated, atomized public." —M. Ambedkar on the above image. This report on the aesthetics of the Alt-Right is based on months of what must've likely been some seriously depressing research. It's a long read, but a good one. [Post Office Arts Journal]
Trump's bizarre, irrational press conference dominated the news cycle yesterday. Last night, Seth Meyers' take on the trainwreck is likely the best thing that's come of it. Please, Saturday Night Live, have Alec Baldwin square off against Leslie Jones as April Ryan. [YouTube]
Lisbon's new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) is a tile-covered bump designed by Amanda Levete on a riverside promenade. You can walk onto the roof, and it's crazy beautiful. [Dezeen]
Ben Grosser is a digital artist who designs plugins that change the way users interact with Facebook. Read this interview with him, because his work is much more interesting than I'm making it sound. [We Make Money Not Art]
Oliver Wainwright on the bevy of middling public art funded by private developers: "You know it when you see it. It’s the stuff that’s plonked on ring-road roundabouts and shopping centre forecourts, decorating the echoing courtyards of university campuses and the desolate plazas of luxury apartment schemes. It erupts in bold, brash, eye-catching forms, shrieking at full volume but rarely with anything to say." Wainwright then seems to suggest that community arts are the only viable public art endeavors. Good lord, I hope not. [The Guardian]
Wow. I haven't seen Harry Potter-spinoff Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, but apparently the vast majority of the movie was nausea-inducing CGI. Maybe that's why so many people described it as unwatchable? What is the logic of making a cheesy-looking CGI Woolworth Building in a CGI New York, when the Woolworth Building and NYC actually exist and are places where a movie could be filmed? [Gizmodo]
What is going on with Anselm Kiefer exhibit touring China? The artist has disavowed the show, saying it was planned without his consent or input. Esteemed curator Beate Reifenscheid claims the galleries which represent Kiefer are the ones with an objection—she claims they view the traveling museum show as a threat to their control over how Kiefer is perceived by the Asian art market. What a strange art beef. [artnet News]
Here's at least one reason Chelsea isn't a completely soulless place of misery: a golden retriever named after high heels likes giving hugs to humans while out for walks. Meet the rising social media star of the neighborhood, Louboutina. [AM New York]
An inspiring interview with Alison Gingeras, lead curator of Divided States of America at New York’s LGBT Center. [Paste]
Good and bad news on the housing crisis front: there's now slightly more affordable rental housing in the works at LES megaproject Essex Crossing. But the number of for-sale affordable units has been slashed due to the expiration of the 421-a tax program. Mostly though, doesn't this entire development seem like it's way less dense than it should be? While battles rage about infrastructure stresses and upzonings in the outer boroughs, why is a giant swath of vacant land in Manhattan, with great transit, getting what's essentially a suburban town center? [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: What a Dick

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 19:18:18 +0000

A GIF that needs no caption.

Thursday Links: FIN Secretly Films Music Video in The Met

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 09:40:21 +0000

FIN - Daughters from FIN on Vimeo.

Read how FIN (Rebecca Fin Simonetti), FlucT (Monica Mirabile & Sigrid Lauren), and Eartheater (Alexandra Drewchin) secretly filmed a singularly weird music video in The Met on phones. [DAZED]
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one: art workers are saddled with debt and are underpaid. This increasingly means only the adult children of parents with cash to spare for financial help can afford to work in the arts. [Artsy]
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College is protesting Trump's visa ban by removing or shrouding works in their collection either created or donated by immigrants. [The Art Newspaper]
Just how bad is New York's housing shortage? When Williamsburg's 325 Kent opened its lottery for affordable (under $1,000/month) units, 87,000 people applied for 104 apartments. [Curbed]
Related: cities from New York to New Orleans are scrambling to figure out affordable artist housing solutions, as gentrification threatens the cultural tourism industry. Good luck. [Huffington Post]
For now, the City of Edinburgh is leaving a mysterious sculpture (some have attributed it to Banksy) of a little girl reaching for a nautical mine in place. It appeared overnight in time for Valentine's Day in the city's Scott Monument. [BBC]
In other UK news, the South Downs Heritage Centre decided to remove a bunch of Victorian-era nude photographs from an art exhibit after a group of elderly visitors found them obscene. I literally LOLed reading this story. Depending on your coworkers, this link might be NSFW. [Daily Mail]
Uh, gross. There's an outbreak of a rare, deadly rat-borne disease in the Bronx. It's spread by contact with rat pee. If you live in the Bronx, don't touch rat pee. [The New York Times]
Following Paddle8's split from German startup Auctionata, the online auction house has been "gutted" of staff. Layoffs seem to have hit hard, and cofounder/former CEO Aditya Julka has departed. [ARTnews]
Oh dear god Bjarne Melgaard's fashion "purge" at Red Bull Studios (in which the artist invited the public to look his half-a-million-dollar wardrobe) looks insane and I wish I could've been there. [artnet News]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Mary Prats

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 18:56:09 +0000

Say hello to a gaping animated butt hole. That's right, it's hump day here at AFC, and we've got a butt to ponder. Enjoy. Animation by Mary Prats.

How to Navigate the CAA Conference

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 14:30:23 +0000

Starting today, the College Art Association (CAA) will host its annual four day conference. Draws of the conference include career development workshops and portfolio reviews, a book fair, and four days of panel discussions. Its biggest attraction, though, may simply be the networking opportunity. More art professors, artists and curators attend this conference than any other in the country.

Due to its size, the conference can be a bit unwieldy for the average journalist. As per usual, there are definitely some standout workshops and panels this year—grant writing for artists (a workshop that is sadly full), the panel on art criticism (naturally), and my own tour of Lower East Side galleries (Friday at noon)—but at CAA recommendations only get you so far. As such, pretty much every regular conference attendee offers the same panel picking advice: Artists tend to give the better talks. There’s no way to know how good most panels/lectures will be, so dip in and out of a lot until you find the good ones.

Remixing Intersectional Feminism At Pittsburgh’s Miller Gallery At Carnegie Mellon University

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 13:00:58 +0000

Skawennati, TimeTraveller™, 2008-2013, HD machinima video (Courtesy the artist and Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon)

HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING as Feminist Protest Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon 5000 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA On view until February 26, 2017

Even as feminism experiences a resurgence, there’s still a marked lack of representation of women of color and gender nonconforming individuals in both art and political activism. This disparity was recently debated on an international level with the criticism launched at the disproportionately white and cisgender Women’s March. A current show HACKING / MODDING / REMIXING As Feminist Protest at Pittsburgh’s Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon provides a direct rebuke of this continued inequality by emphasizing the power of intersectional feminism (feminism that embraces multiple, overlapping social identities beyond gender, including race, ethnicity, sexuality and class).

Wednesday Links: Last Day to Submit Proposals to AFC Commission Program Benefiting Artists Affected by Trump Policies

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 10:00:22 +0000

The art history behind Beyonce's pregnancy photos. [Hyperallergic]
The Davis Museum at Wellesley College in Massachusetts will remove works created by or given to the museum by immigrants between February 16th to the 21st. The timing seems appropriate—it precedes and overlaps with the congressional recess this month which runs from the 20th-24th. In another time, I might complain that making the art invisible might not be the best strategy, but today I don't care. Any and all protests against Trump are important. [ARTnews]
A reminder that today is the last day to submit applications to this round's run of commissions to artists who have been affected by Trump policies. [Art F City]
Paddle8 has laid off 25 people from their auction team. [artnet News]
87,000 people have applied for 104 affordable apartments in Williamsburg. [Curbed]
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged to create 100,000 “good paying” jobs over the next ten years on Monday. Yesterday during another press conference he revealed that the plans haven't been fleshed out yet, but were able to account for how 1500 would be created. Great guys. Only 98,500 to go. [Politico]

GIF of the Day: Resident Evil

Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:18:38 +0000

An eerily accurate depiction of Donald Trump.

Tuesday Links: It's Hard to Be King

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 12:32:12 +0000

Nicholas Monro’s "King Kong," part of 1972's "The City Sculpture Project" in the U.K.

Read the saga of Donald Trump and Jared Kushner's toxic real estate empires. The two own some of New York City's most polluted sites, and ironically enough, could stand to benefit from EPA programs. [Curbed NY]
Yep. It's dark days for print media. Cult horror magazine Fangoria will likely never see another issue, according to a former editor. [Bloody Disgusting]
NADA, MoMA, and Anish Kapoor take stands against Trump's travel ban, and France is building a wall of its own... around the Eiffel Tower? Highlight's from artnet's "The Best and Worst of the Art World This Week in One Minute". [artnet News]
College students stopped Jordan Russell Leishman from looting Boston's Galerie D'Orsay following the Patriots' Super Bowl win. The robbery was caught on tape, which is always fun to watch. [NBC Boston]
Why are public sculptures generally so unsuccessful? Maybe a short-lived British commissioning program from the 1970s holds some answers, namely: a public that doesn't give a shit. [The New York Review of Books]
Artists Space has hired Whitney Museum curator Jay Sanders as its new Executive Director. Sanders is coming on board at an interesting time—the nonprofit lost its longtime Manhattan home and is searching for a new space. [ARTnews]
I didn't watch the Grammys, but apparently plenty of musicians used the opportunity to speak out against Trump. This trend is actually making me care about awards shows. [Reuters]
There's a movement in India to stop the privatization of the Venkatappa Art Gallery. The best part of this story is that they're called "VAG Forum". [Deccan Herald]
And in politics, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn has resigned due to his connections with Russia. Leaked information to the Washington Post and the New York Times forced this resignation. Don't let anyone tell you news outlets like these aren't doing their jobs. They're saving the country.

GIF of the Day: R. Luke DuBois (Pop) Icon: Britney

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 21:24:57 +0000

This GIF is from R. Luke DuBois’ show at bitforms back in 2014. DuBois is interested in the shifting definition of “icon”, from its religious origins to our contemporary collective obsession with celebrity meltdowns.

Unlike Britney’s short-lived reality TV show, I can’t stop watching this GIF.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Spend Valentine's Day Grabbing Bjarne Melgaard's Sloppy Seconds

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 21:03:42 +0000

Bjarne Melgaard is going through a reinvention phase, which means he's giving away his entire $500K wardrobe for free on Valentine's Day at Red Bull Studios. Then he's launching his new project: a streetwear line with ~~an installation~~ a department store at the same spot Thursday night. Then two painters offer unique takes on domesticity through still lives—Sydney Licht at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts and Crys Yin at Amy Li Projects.

Friday night, things get weirder with a dystopian video game from Jeremy Couillard at yours mine & ours, artwork lost in translation at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and a late-night performance from Actually Huizenga and one-time-AFC-contributor SSION (video above). The weekend brings two more all-women shows conceived in response to Trump’s sexism: BODY/HEAD Saturday night at Be Fluent NYC and BEAT at On Stellar Rays Sunday afternoon. Lookin’ good, NYC.

.ART Domains Cost 757% More Than Other Comparable Domains

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 14:16:14 +0000

It’s been five days since e-flux sent out their mailers giving art professionals early access to purchase .ART domains, and the registration process has been a disaster from start to finish. Many users were not able to access the .art site, which is run by UK Creative Ideas Limited (UKCI). The website described an abundance of demand for the reason, and e-flux sent out an email earlier today apologizing for the technical issues. This should not have been a problem. e-flux has a mailing list of close to 100,000 readers—a fraction of the traffic needed to pull down most websites. What happened?

Monday Link: All The Single Ladies!

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 11:48:22 +0000

Rozalia Jovanovic has left artnet news due to a difference in vision with Jacob Pabst, the CEO of artnet. It's rumored Andrew Goldstein, former editor of artinfo and Artspace will take over. [BlouinArtInfo]
The Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow has released the artist names for its first triennial, slated to open March 10th. [ARTnews]
This David Hockney show at the Tate looks fantastic. A glowing review. [The Guardian]
This review of the Raymond Pettibon show at the New Museum is absolutely gushing. I worry I've spent too much time reading Pettibon's twitter feed to fully appreciate the show any more—he sends out a lot of strange tweets—but we'll see. Between this and the Holland Cotter review, it's hard to make an argument that the show can be skipped. [Hyperallergic]
Speed dating at el Segundo Museum of Art attracts tons of women...and no men. A report. [The Los Angeles Times]

Material Light on Substance, Heavy With Dick Pics

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 21:11:15 +0000

Jesse Harris at Toronto's Cooper Cole.

MEXICO CITY- Is a bigger fair necessarily a better fair?

Having doubled in floorspace since last year, Material Art Fair feels like a totally different beast. The fair has moved to two lower floors of Expo Reforma, with larger booths arranged around “courtyards” for conversation and concessions. There are plenty of new exhibitors, and much of the work looks far more market-friendly than the wares last year.

Friday Links: Neo-Nazis Shut Down Shia LaBeuof's Anti-Trump Art

Fri, 10 Feb 2017 12:19:15 +0000

Your dystopian nightmares just got worse. Here's a marketing ploy by Absolute that asks followers to name a cause they want to hear about at the Grammy's. Yes, that's right—corporate protest marketing is now a thing. [Medium Quality Screen Captures]
Kevin Buist writes about Artprize and its connection to DeVos. Artprize was founded by Rick DeVos, Betsy DeVos's son. Betsy is now the new secretary of education and she is an advocate of school voucher programs. Buist is not. But he does helpfully point out that she's not evil. He has also said that he feels he can work with her on the things they do agree on, and leave the other stuff aside. [Kevin Buist's Blog]
AFC Columnist Hannah Cole is offering courses to artists on how to do their taxes. $29 bucks! [Teachable]
Raymond Pettibon at the New Museum gets a good review. Holland Cotter likes the political bent of the work and coins the term "Language fallout". It's like nuclear fallout, but for words. [The New York Times]
Neo-Nazis effectively shuttered Shia LaBeuof's anti-Trump installation at the Museum of Moving Image. The Museum was forced to shut down Shia LaBeuof's cam due to public safety concerns. [Gothamist]
Snowstorm in New York = slideshows of snow in New York! [Gothamist]
ArtCondo gets a write up in Curbed for their venture into the Bronx. Exciting for artists who can afford the $175,000 to $700,000 price to get into this venture. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: No Stick, All Carrot

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 22:44:03 +0000

Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to today is having a crappy day. The weather in New York is terrible, the art world remains more stressful than it really should be, and the news is even worse worldwide. I found this GIF on Giphy, filed under #relax. Maybe we should all take a cue from this cozy rodent and curl up under a blanket with a healthy snack.

I bet this lil’ guy is binge-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation or something on Netflix. I have found my new spirit animal.

Slideshow: Zona MACO, The Art Fair Where Commerce and Politics Make Strange Bedfellows

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 12:27:41 +0000

A mystery artist has been leaving these silkscreened tortillas around the fair. I spotted this (appropriately) in Anonymous Gallery's booth. The gallerist loved it.

Last year, I remarked that Zona MACO excels at being an “average” art fair.

I stand by that opinion this year, with the clarification that it feels a bit like the average of many art fairs: a bit of NADA, a big dollop of Design Miami, a dose of Basel, and flavors of Frieze. That makes sense, as it’s by far Latin America’s largest and most important art fair—many of the curated identities of fairs in hyper-saturated US markets come from necessity of branding when there’s competition.

Thursday Links: Art Critic Jen Graves, a Pulitzer Prize Finalist Leaves The Stranger

Thu, 09 Feb 2017 12:03:20 +0000

Jen Graves looking at Maria Lassnig’s "You and Me", 2008, in Venice.

MCH Group, the company that owns Art Basel has acquired a 25.1 % stake in Art Düsseldorf. Marco Fazzone the managing director of design and regional art fairs at MCH is talking "synergies" with other regional fairs—whatever that means. It's not like buying a stake in the fair will suddenly change the landscape of the business. Synergy is the type of word pulled out when there's nothing to say. [The Art Newspaper]
Kelly Crow reports that the art market's slump got worse in 2016. Thankfully, we have President Donald Trump to turn all that around. [The Wall Street Journal]
Twitter shares tumble as growth slows to 1%. I love the medium, but if it goes tits up and Trump can't use it anymore, I'd gladly give it up. For the greater good, you know? [Bloomberg]
Opera Winfrey sold a Gustav Klimt from her collection for $150 million. She bought it for $87.9 million in 2006 at Christie’s in New York. [Bloomberg]
Is rent finally stabilizing in New York? According to Curbed, the median rent in Manhattan has been on decline for the last six months. Good. [Curbed]
Lots of snow in New York today. Here's how to get around. [Gothamist]
As a runner, I am genuinely fascinated by this dance that includes a dancer on a treadmill for the entire performance. 60 minutes of running is no big deal for any distance runner, but 60 minutes at a tempo pace or more seems really intense. [Hyperallergic]
Jen Graves has resigned from her post as art critic at Seattle's The Stranger. She has no plans as of yet for what she will do next. “It’s important to note that there should be other options for those of us who do critical work, and instead there seems to be a real, somewhat unfounded misunderstanding and disregard for what we bring to a city,” Graves told ARTnews. [ARTnews]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Winged Women Wearing Bras are all the Rage

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 20:15:35 +0000

Every time I write the NSFW GIF of the Hump day I find myself asking the strangest questions. Is hypnobutting really a thing? Why so many unfriendly tentacles? You put that laser pointer where? This week I ask readers why women in wings have become the calling card for Victoria’s Secret and pretty much every halloween costume site catering to fetishes. Do we still find sacrilege sexy? What is it about birds that says “fuck me”? Do feathers no longer itch? I don’t have the answer to these questions, and I can’t even say was even looking for them before my NSFW GIF search brought back these results. And that’s just about all I have to say on the subject.

We Went to Mexico: General Idea at Museo Jumex Restored Our Faith in Art For Fuck's Sake

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 11:45:08 +0000

General Idea: Broken Time Museo Jumex Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 303, Colonia Granada, Ciudad de México, D.F.

What’s On View: A retrospective of the Canadian Collective, General Idea (comprised of artists AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal.) A collection of works spanning two floors of the museum arranged semi-chronologically from their 25-year-long career in a vast array of formats including installations, video art, painting, publications, and performance.

Wednesday Links: Get Your Rock Hard Abs at the Met

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 09:18:33 +0000

Museum Workout

Workout at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Monica Bill Barnes and Anna Bass of the Barnes Dance Company. This sounds so cool—and the video is a hoot— but I don't suppose the Met has change rooms and showers? Classes run through February 12th. [NPR]
An article that satisfies curiosity: what artists do as their side jobs. I wish they'd spoken to Lisa Schilling. She's a food stylist and the master of what's called a "cheese pull" in pizza commercials. [ARTnews]
Six artists living in the US who now face uncertain futures thanks to Trump's travel ban. [artnet News]
2016 shows an uptick in the violation of artist rights. [Hyperallergic]
Rainey Knudson and Christina Rees discuss their top five shows in Austin and Houston. [Glasstire]
An interview with Theaster Gates. Love this closer, "I think that the problem is that in the absence of a certain kind of black leadership, we fight each other instead of fighting the system. And I want to implicate myself in this: I cannot afford to just be an artist in this moment. I have to use my art and my brain to try to imagine solutions not only for the museum, but for the city — for black people. I can’t afford to lock myself in the studio." [Culture: High & Low]

GIF of the Day: Crying, Crying, Crying.

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 18:05:57 +0000

I suppose we should all just rejoice that this isn’t another GIF of Hitler tossing the world around because Donald Trump has threatened to invade a country? Instead, all we’ve got is tears because we’re losing our public schools thanks to Betsy DeVos’s successful nomination to Education Secretary. The majority of the American public opposed the nomination, but Republicans paint Vice President as a hero for casting the tie breaking vote that confirms her. Great job.

Tuesday Links: Good Art, Defined.

Tue, 07 Feb 2017 11:02:19 +0000

Sunnyside Yards

BALTIMORE! The Mayor's Safe Arts Space Taskforce is meeting tonight. It's so important that advocates for maintaining affordable live/work spaces come to these things. [The Mayor's Facebook]
Why were so many female artists written out of art history? It's an unfortunate fact of most museum collections, but the Guerrilla Girls are making a dent in the art-historical glass ceiling. [The Guardian]
Right, on! NADA is donating half of its ticket sales this year to the ACLU. Acronym orgs unite! [artnet News]
Katie Alice Greer, singer of the D.C. punk band Priests and a solo artist under her initials, K.A.G., talks about why all art is political. Lots of great comments in this interview, but this really stands out, "To me, successful art isn’t someone wagging their finger at you or spelling it out on a chalkboard. I mean, maybe it is, if it’s literature or the written word. Successful art you have to unpack, because it’s interrogating you or what your idea of reality is, or what the world means, or is very beautiful or very complicated, very ugly." [The Creative Independent]
The city wants to build housing over top of Sunnyside Yards, the massive train yard. This would represent a huge new neighborhood in Queens, but the feasibility study, which paints a rosy picture for this new development, doesn't include any mention of increased transit options or new hospitals. Also New York State governor Andrew Cuomo controls the MTA portion of the yard and the Feds (Trump) control the Amtrak portion. We may not see this plan come together for another a 100 years. [Crain's New York]
A brief (read, long and comprehensive) history of art collectives in New York City's Chinatown. [Hyperallergic]
The SPRING/BREAK art fair says good-bye to their old haunt at the post office, and will take over two floors of an office building in Times Square. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: Calexit

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 22:38:19 +0000

Pretty much since the majority of the people between our coast and theirs proved why this stupid country can’t have nice things in November, Californians have been talking about a “Calexit”. This is not likely to happen, but neither are any of the threats Trump has been making to California (a state which, by the way, accounts for a way bigger chunk of this country’s GDP and tax revenue than those imaginary, super-fun-sounding coal mine jobs people think they’re getting).

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Have Your Cake & Smash It Too

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 20:51:26 +0000

Video still from Jen Catron and Paul Outlaw's piece for the show "Cake Hole" at Mrs. We can't wait to see the context for this!

Welcome to the new normal. We at AFC have noticed a decline in artistic output from Brooklyn’s DIY scene as of late, while commercial galleries and institutions in Manhattan (and a few in Queens) have been gearing-up for battle mode with politically-charged programming. We’re hoping this is because everyone in Brooklyn is too busy thinking about resistance, and not because they’ve fled the country.

Rent Too Damn High? Deduct Your Home Studio.

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 13:58:50 +0000

One of the best tax breaks out there is the home office (or home studio) deduction. In tax terms, this essentially turns a portion of your nondeductible personal expenses (your home) into deductible business expenses (a workplace). A lot of people are confused about the rules, and some people are scared to take the deduction at all because they’ve heard that it can be a red flag to the IRS. As long as you are following the rules correctly, there is nothing wrong with taking the deduction. And it’s a big one! So here is some help.

Monday Links: Lady Gaga Shocks Gays With Least Controversial Halftime Show of All Time

Mon, 06 Feb 2017 11:00:38 +0000

Finally, a border wall proposal so relatively inexpensive and easy to assemble a Republican could do it. [Dezeen]
Related: the indie video game "Papers, Please" is seeing a surge of interest as of recent weeks, unsurprisingly. The 8-bit game lets users play as a border agent in a dystopian Eastern European nation, rejecting or accepting immigrants based on suspicions they might be a smuggler or terrorist. [Humble Store]
MoMA is protesting Trump's visa ban with a rehang of its permanent collection. They've interrupted the galleries' usual art-historical arc by replacing a room of Picasso and Matisse works with pieces by artists from countries on the ban list. These include mostly artists from Iran. [The New York Times]
Meanwhile in Mexico, Samah Abdulhamid, a Syrian refugee, was greeted at the airport by a crowd with signs welcoming her to the country, including "Aquí no hay muros" (Here there are no walls). She's the first female Syrian student to arrive via Proyecto Habesha, which is helping Syrians whose studies have been disrupted by the war attend universities in Mexico. It seems like a really great organization, especially if you're looking to donate to something making a concrete positive impact now. [Fusion]
I can't figure out why this Salvador Dalí painting is being described as one of the artist's "most controversial works", but it's going up for auction at Bonhams. It's an innocent-seeming portrait of his sister, painted as a gift shortly before the two had a falling-out. [Blouin Artinfo]
Ridiculous headline of the day: David Spade is suing Peter Beard, along with his wife and gallerist, over Beard's failure to authenticate a photograph Spade bought fifteen years ago. [artnet News]
Pretty much all of the gay world just lost whatever respect we had left for Lady Gaga after she somehow managed to perform the least controversial Super Bowl Halftime Show of all time. Seriously, what the fuck? These past few months she had been a such an outspoken Trump opponent and she blew the one opportunity to have "other America" watching? Someone must've had a gun to her stylist's head.
Trump is really bad at writing executive orders, but here's a meme generator that lets you do it for him! [Executive Order]
“The definition of ‘pretension’ is somebody who elevates something that is not worthy of any kind of elevation... Brad does that quite a bit, but nothing he makes is straight-up dumb.” -Paddy Johnson is quoted several times in Adrian Chen's profile of Brad Troemel, which has to be one of the most thorough biographies of a young artist I've read. [The New Yorker]

GIF of the Day: Pop Goes The World

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 20:51:05 +0000

We can thank L.A Times Culture Reporter Carolina Miranda for tweeting this Charlie Chaplin as Hitler GIF in which he kicks a balloon of the world. This summed up Wednesday’s news and pretty much every day that will come after it so long as Trump is president. And on that same subject, one day later she remarked, “At this point, any day that doesn’t end in nuclear annihilation is a gift.”

Time Traveling for Gingerbread Totems: An Interview with Theo Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 14:59:28 +0000

Theo Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer At the Hole. Installation view

Entering Theo Rosenblum and Chelsea Seltzer’s “Culture Shak” installation at The Hole, is like walking into a Post-human Natural History Museum arrangement of “2016.” The decadence, absurdity, and pleasures of our fragmented culture are put on display with a monumental gingerbread totem pole, a sexy penguin with a six-pack abs, and a touching sculpture of a volcanic ash encrusted skeleton.

Avoiding Contemporary Politics At A.I.R. Gallery’s “Sinister Feminism”

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 13:00:35 +0000

Installation view of Sinister Feminism at A.I.R. Gallery (Courtesy the artists and A.I.R. Gallery)

Sinister Feminism A.I.R. Gallery 155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY On view until February 5, 2017

One of the few positive side effects of Trump’s chaotic pussy-grabbing rise to power is the revitalization of feminism as an active political tool. Between the Women’s March and women-driven exhibitions like Nasty Women, women are now at the forefront of the resistance to Trump’s dangerous administration. The strength of this feminist revival explains why the failure of A.I.R. Gallery’s 12th biennial exhibition Sinister Feminism is such a disappointment.

Friday Links: Lets Stop Pretending to Be Shocked that People Take Selfies at Berlin's Holocaust Memorial

Fri, 03 Feb 2017 10:00:43 +0000

From Tindercaust

"What Eisenman did in the Memorial, for all its strange and eerie power, was shrug his shoulders about such dated subjects as 'meaning' and 'politics' and let people decide what it is for themselves." -Amy Frearson on Peter Eisenman's Holocaust memorial in hipster mecca Berlin. The sunken plaza is in the news again, as there's yet another website shaming visitors' selfies at the memorial, Yolocaust. When are artists going to realize this idea is more clichéd than the act of taking a selfie at the memorial? We have Grindr Remembers, we have the absurdly-similar Marc Adelman project “Stelen (Columns)”, and the straight people version, Tindercaust. This is a perfect example of post-internet culture's obsession with endless-cycle shaming over politics of representation. Pick your damn battles, people! If you want to make some connection between abhorrent human rights abuses and selfie vanity, how about tackling the smartphone industry (and by extension, consumers') slave labor issue? Oh, right... that's a contemporary problem which could actually be addressed to productive ends. But that would involve more work than screen-capturing, not to mention addressing the awkward hypocrisy of generation-thinkpiece's consumption habits. [Dezeen]
Today, Bandcamp is donating 100% of its shares from music downloads to the ACLU, in support of refugees and in protest of Trump's policies. What a great opportunity to support independent artists and a good cause! Some musicians, such as (amazing) punk band BIDET, have pledged to donate their shares as well. [Bandcamp]
Eike Schmidt, director of Florence's Uffizi Gallery, has vowed to show more female artists, and will make efforts to highlight the work of women in their collection. This stemmed from a conversation with the Guerrilla Girls. Hell yes! [artnet News]
Other good news: NYC is finally getting the ball rolling on Community Land Trusts. Basically, this is a model of semi-collective ownership that ensures neighborhoods control their housing stock and can keep it affordable in perpetuity. More of this, please! [Next City]
The Contemporary, a rad, non-collecting institution in Baltimore presently headed by AFC friend Deana Haggag, is seeking a new Executive Director (Deana's leaving to head US Artists... we're sad/happy for her). [The Contemporary]
Mutations is coming to the Highline, and the exhibition looks like it should be good. It will feature works by Jan Rafman, Radames Juni Figueroa, and many others. [ARTnews]
Why are some single-collector museums terrible and others successful? It seems striking a balance between the appearance of a "vanity project" and adaptable programming are vital. This is an article I wish so many rich people had read before assuming their personal tastes were a public good. [Observer]
Illustrator Maki Naro confirms what we've suspected: we are living in a 1990s cyberpunk dystopia. [The Nib]
"Art can become a strong ally of revolution only in so far as it remains faithful to itself. Poets, painters, sculptors and musicians will themselves find their own approach and methods, if the struggle for freedom of oppressed classes and peoples scatters the clouds of skepticism and of pessimism which cover the horizon of mankind.” -Leon Trotsky, 1938. Thank you, editors of Temporary Art Review, for republishing this on inauguration day. [Temporary Art Review]

GIF of the Day: Tiny Spinning Painter Sculpture

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 20:19:55 +0000

When I first saw this little spinning guy hard at work on a portrait, I thought he was a 3D rendering.

Nope.

It turns out there’s a company in Sevilla, Spain—Studio Impresionarte—that makes tiny 3D-printed, full-color sculptures of clients. These are a little uncanny-valley-creepy, but I kinda want one? The GIFs don’t really do justice to the weird factor of seeing people hold tiny replicas of themselves.

e-flux Offers Early .ART Domain Registration to Professionals

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 19:35:47 +0000

Just how important is it for art professionals have access to .ART domains? The conceptual artists behind the collective e-flux believe it’s essential and have thus spent six years working on the project and hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to secure management of the domain. Ultimately they lost the bid to UK Creative Ideas Limited (UKCI) in 2015, a set back that as of yesterday turned out to be only temporary. On Wednesday e-flux announced their collaboration with UKCI to offer early access to the .ART domain to those who are signed up to e-flux mailing list, starting February 8th and running through May 8th.

Thursday Links: Finding Lunch Might be Harder Than Usual Today

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 12:36:22 +0000

Well, that was quick. Seventeen gallery shutters its new space after only two months in New York. Rumor has it Canadian financial backer Pierre Trahan withdrew his support after a feud with London dealer and founder of Seventeen David Hoyland. [artnet News]
Hyperallergic's horoscopes are out. Better hope you're not a Taurus. "You’ve been getting sloppy lately, and if you make any mistakes in the current, hyper-competitive cycle, you will pay dearly." [Hyperallergic]
L.A. and New York–based artist Awol Erizku gets a nod in ARTnews, after having shot the photo Beyoncé used to announce her twins yesterday. (Also,Beyoncé is pregnant with twins.) [ARTnews]
Wow. Glafira Rosales, a little-known art dealer on Long Island that was behind $80 million in fraudulent sales and the demise of New York’s oldest gallery, Knoedler, avoids jail time. [The New York Times]
Today, Yemeni merchants across the five boroughs will close 1,000 grocery stores and bodegas between the hours of noon and 8 p.m. in protest of Donald Trump's Executive Order banning travelers from Muslim-majority countries. I love this city. [Curbed]

POLITICS

It’s all bad.

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Masturbation Selfie

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 20:29:15 +0000

In honor of "Ways of Something- Episode 3", I'd like to dedicate today's NSFW animated GIF to Ann Hirsch, who has the closing minute of "Ways". I may prefer the video clip, which gently moves in slow motion to conclude the piece, though the jerkiness of the GIF may better reflect the actual act. Whatever the case, readers now have the opportunity to view both and evaluate for themselves.

Justin Peck's "The Times Are Racing": Biting, But Not Too Hard

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 20:02:45 +0000

Tiler Peck, "The Times Are Racing", (World Premiere), Choreography by: Justin Peck, Music by: Dan Deacon, New York City Ballet, Credit Photo: Paul Kolnik

It’s hard to imagine a ballet with more buzz than “The Times Are Racing”. Currently playing at the New York City Ballet (on through February 4th), the piece is choreographed by 29 year old wonderkind Justin Peck. Peck has created over 25 works for the New York City Ballet and beyond and collaborated with artists such as Jules de Balincourt, Sterling Ruby and Shepard Fairey. Leading up to the premiere, he was the subject of three New York Times articles, and last April, the subject of a Vanity Fair article that ran with the headline, “Is Justin Peck Making Ballet Cool Again?” In short, he’s an art star.

What’s So Bad About An Echo Chamber? Jim Torok’s “The New Age of Uncertainty” At Pierogi

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 14:42:17 +0000

Jim Torok, “I Went to Midtown,” 2016, Acrylic on Canvas (Courtesy the artist and Pierogi, New York)

Jim Torok: The New Age Of Uncertainty Pierogi 155 Suffolk Street New York, NY On view until February 12, 2017

The term echo chamber has been thrown around since Trump’s election. When applied by conservatives, it’s used mostly as an attempt to dismiss the alleged close-minded perspective of “coastal elites,” a critique with few merits, even if sometimes true.

Wednesday Links: Time to Flee America, Live in Retro-Futuristic Tents on the Seine

Wed, 01 Feb 2017 10:00:15 +0000

It's the 40th anniversary of the glorious Centre Pompidou, and to celebrate the offices of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers have released a bevy of gorgeous archival images. One includes their riverside inflatable office, which looks like something out of A Clockwork Orange if it were a movie about a fun slumber party I would want to go to. [Dezeen]
Sean Spicer actually retweeted his own profile in The Onion, which labelled his job distributing "Robust and Clearly Articulated Misinformation". For once, Spicer and the rest of the world see eye-to-eye on reality.
Pussy Riot's Nadya Tolokonnikova will be speaking tonight at JHU. If you're in Baltimore, go see her. She's a gem we need now more than ever. [Johns Hopkins University]
Iranian collector Mohammed Afkhami has loaned an impressive slew of contemporary works from his country to Toronto's Aga Khan Museum for the exhibition “Rebel, Jester, Mystic, Poet: Contemporary Persians.” That's the kind of cultural exchange we sadly can't look forward to in the United States anymore. [artnet News]
Contemporary Art Review has put out a somewhat vague call for works from artists worldwide. [NOT RANDOM ART]
The Thompson Family Foundation has given a staggering $10 million to the Museum of the City of New York to keep the exhibit New York at its Core "open to the public from now until Trump starts a nuclear war." [Observer]
Anish Kapoor has joined the anti-Trump movement with a self-portrait: "I Like America and America Doesn't Like Me." It's a play on Joseph Beuys’ 1974 performance “I Like America and America Likes Me," which appropriately began at Kennedy Airport. [Blouin Artinfo]
Art blog Saint Lucy has launched an online bookstore. Looking forward to seeing this grow! [Saint Lucy]
Holy crap! The young handyman from cult classic Grey Gardens, Jerry Torre, is an all-grown up artist now. His work is on view at Geary Contemporary until February 3rd. [The Art Newspaper]
What would happen if Trump cut all federal funding for the arts? Realistically, it might not be too much of a dent in the big-city art world, where grants from private organizations and deep-pocketed institutions keep things afloat. Those who would suffer the most would be rural Americans (i.e. Trump voters), who rely largely on government arts funding for basic things like radio stations. I've heard what those people listen to on the radio. I say screw em like they would us over a Chris Ofili show. [The New York Times]
Why are the Republicans constantly going after the damn NEA? "Because art is one of the few things that has the power to liberate, to overthrow, to topple, to rebel, to express the forbidden, to cut the tyrants down to size? Perhaps it is a sort of secret language, only for the 'elite': But in this case, the elite are not the wealthy. These elite are those with open, rich and thoughtful minds." [Salon]
Activists are already calling for another general strike, this one on February 17th, the day before Presidents Day. Hell yeah! Let's make this a monthly thing. [Mic]

GIF of the Day: Thank You, Sally Yates

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 21:17:03 +0000

Today I wanted to find a GIF of Sally Yates, the Attorney General who lost her job standing up to Trump’s inhumane (and likely illegal) executive orders on immigration.

Unfortunately, there were no GIFs of Yates, so I made this one using Blingee—the only place to honor a truly patriotic gangsta who stands up to the man while the country’s going down in flames.

Art F City Announces New Commissions Program to Support Artists/Writers Affected by Trump Policies

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 16:54:43 +0000

GIF by Rebecca Mock

These are not good times. None of Donald Trump’s bat-shit crazy ideas should ever see the light of day, much less take the form of executive orders (EO). But here we are, 12 days into his presidency and the chaos is taking root. Trump’s EO on visa bans effects 7 countries, approximately 90,000 people directly and innumerable more indirectly. His tariff plan to pay for a needless wall between the US and Mexico will cost Americans billions. And it’s already costing Mexicans—the peso is at a record low due to increased worries of Trump-led trade war.

Tuesday Links: Run for Cover—The Shit is Hitting the Fan

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 11:25:22 +0000

David Harbour and the cast of Stranger Things are the latest creatives to use an awards show acceptance speech as a pulpit against Trump. But the spotlight here is undeniably on Winnona Ryder, who looks like she's a little confused and also holding in a massive cocaine-induced shit during the whole thing. [YouTube]
Does Jonathan Jones really think there's no future for figurative sculpture in the UK? Princes William and Harry are commissioning a memorial to their mother, Princess Diana, for Kensington Gardens, and Jones seems pretty adamant that it must be abstract. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any work produced to fit a popular genre runs the risk of looking dated and tacky. [The Guardian]
"There’s no one more optimistic than I am about the power and importance of art, even when it’s just for art’s sake. But every once in a while, especially when prodded by a show like Perpetual Revolution, I want to shout, 'F*** art, it’s time to do something!'" -Blake Gopnik on the ICP's latest politically-charged exhibition. [artnet News]
"I’m really glad that this piece is happening when it is, because art needs to be a voice... You can’t just be in opulent halls — most of the people who come here are very, very wealthy, and to have a time in our country where this is going down, you have to speak directly to them and be like, get f--king real.” Dan Deacon on "The Times Are Racing," the New York City Ballet production set to his album America. [W Magazine]
Juicy: the worst art heists of the past century. [The Daily Beast]
Heji Shin's solo show at Real Fine Arts looks amazing and so weird. [Contemporary Art Daily]
If you need a break from politics, watch this minute spot on people who were offered $30 to jump off a 10 meter tower into a pool. They had never done so before. It's so great. [The New York Times]

POLITICS

And in the chaos that is now our country, lets run down the latest list of shit that’s happened. We expect this to be out of date in a couple of hours.

GIF of the Day: Donald Trump's Soul

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 23:52:32 +0000

There are almost no bright spots (except those weird white under-eye circles) when it comes to Trump. But the fodder his bombastic style has provided to GIF and meme makers is one of them.

Seriously, how soulless does one have to be to ban refugees fleeing ISIS from entering the country? He’s gone from asshole to full-blown comic book villain. Oh yeah, and Trump just fired the US Attorney General for pointing out that the Muslim ban is totally fucking illegal. So I guess we now live in a full-blown fascist state.

ONLINE PREMIERE: "Ways of Something - Episode 3"

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 15:24:22 +0000

Participating Artists (minute by minute): 1. Carine Santi-Weil, 2. Nicolas Sassoon, 3. Tom Sherman, 4. Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, 5. Rafaela Kino, 6. Alex McLeod, 7. Kate Wilson and Lynne Slater, 8. Aleksandra Domanović, 9. Systaime, 10. Erik Zepka, 11. Adam Ferriss, 12. Rodell Warner and Arnaldo James, 13. Debora Delmar Corp, 14. Brenna Murphy, 15. Nick Briz, 16. Carlos Sáez, 17. Jenn E Norton, 18. Juliette Bonneviot, 19. Luis Nava, 20. Vince McKelvie, 21. Claudia Maté, 22. Evan Roth, 23. Shana Moulton, 24. Sabrina Ratté, 25. Jordan Tannahill, 26. Vasily Zaitsev feat. MON3Y.us, 27. Ann Hirsch

With John Berger’s death this month, the online premiere of Lorna Mills’ “Ways of Something, 3” feels particularly poignant. While Mills’s “Ways of Something” wasn’t conceived strictly as an update, as 117 person re-interpretation it effectively functions as such. To complete this piece, Mills invited over 100 artists to remake all four parts of Berger’s 1972 BBC series “Ways of Seeing”, minute by minute. Each artist was given 60 seconds of video—doled out on a first come first serve basis—with the sole condition that they would need to retain the text used in captioning. What they did to the captioning font, the visuals, the sound, was entirely up to them.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Constructing Paradise or the Devil Giving Birth to the Patriarchy?

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 12:36:25 +0000

Bea Fremderman

It’s a strange week in post-America, indeed, when the least dystopian art event involves Kim Kardashian ass-workout tapes.

That would be Cindy Hinant’s solo show at MuseumofAmericabooks Monday night. Tuesday, perpetual AFC fav Peter Burr is speaking at the New School, and never has the thought of retreating into one of his installations and imagining life in an underground city been so tempting. But if you’re an artist ready to join the resistance, head to ICP School on Wednesday for a discussion about the role of artists in activism during these dark days. Thursday, every opening feels timely, even Mary Beth Edelson’s 1970s feminist mythologies on view at David Lewis. Down the street, Bea Fremderman waxes apocalyptic at Shoot the Lobster, and the New School has an exhibition about the US/Mexican border that will probably break some hearts.

Monday Links: Trump's Latest Offenses Too Terrible To Fit In Witty Headline

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 10:00:56 +0000

Stealing this idea from the amazing Sarah Glidden: the ACLU is challenging DT's #muslimban. Donate $50 or more, email me the receipt and address at emilyflake AT mac DOT com and I will send you a drawing. Or a painting! Or a fucking Play Doh sculpture, let's just get this done. My heart is barfing in my chest right now.

GIF of the Day: Creepy Hot Trump

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 23:56:00 +0000

Someone on the Internet thought it would be a good idea to render the hottest version of Donald Trump. First of all, ew. Second of all, the attempt above just looks like creepy video game character from Grand Theft Auto IV. This creepiness gets the above GIF a mention here. Why? Because ultimately we approve of anything that shows Donald Trump as the inauthentic imposter of a president he really is.

What Should Anti-Trump Art Shows Achieve?: Petzel Gallery’s “We Need To Talk…”

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 13:25:36 +0000

We need to talk…, Installation view, Petzel, 2017 (Courtesy of the artists and Petzel, New York)

We Need To Talk… Petzel Gallery 456 West 18th Street New York, NY On view until February 11, 2017

Since Trump’s election, numerous exhibitions have attempted to address the seemingly endless horror of his presidency. But, how should we judge these shows’ efficacy? Is the quality of the included work enough or should viewers demand more practical political action? A visit to Petzel Gallery’s disappointing We Need To Talk… convinced me of the latter.

Friday Links: Deana Haggag for President of USA

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 09:16:09 +0000

Holy crap. This drag queen using fast food to contour is the best piece of video art I've seen in all of 2017. [Facebook]

Pretty much all of Baltimore is sad to see Deana Haggag step down as the director of The Contemporary, a once-struggling museum she rebooted into one of the most important institutions in the city. She'll be moving to Chicago for her new position as President/CEO of United States Artists, or as she noted, ironically, "President of USA". Deana is the best. Chicago is lucky to have her. [BmoreArt]

In other Baltimore news, Peter Eide's solo show at Rope wins an award for weirdest exhibition title of the week: "Sex with Dolphins in the Future". [Facebook]

The IKEA Foundation's flat-pack refugee shelters have won 2016 Beazley Design of the Year. Other category winners include a coffee cup for astronauts! What a strange world we inhabit, where there's a demand for both. [Dezeen]

"The satire skewers the idea that a multicultural citizenship or power structure could in any way mitigate the violence of capitalism." Manuel Arturo Abreu's essay on art collective Mongrel's "Heritage Gold" as a part of the online exhibition Net Art Anthology. [Rhizome]

So I've been going to school in Mexico City, and noticed Japanese students make up the largest percentage of my classmates. Apparently Japan and Mexico have a lot of cultural exchange programs and a fascination with each other's subcultures (for example, there are entire shopping centers here dedicated to Otaku culture and Japanese street fashion). Several Mexican friends have told me Japanese is easier to learn than English, and vice-versa. The most idiosyncratic thing by far about this lovefest has to be the phenomenon of Japanese "Cholos" (based on Mexican-American gang culture) which is explored in the new documentary Chicano. It's a small world after all. [DAZED]

Dear Republicans who think the NEA is useless, please consider this veteran's story about how government-funded music therapy "saved my life." [Arts.gov] (Listen to this story before the link goes dead...)

"The show’s best piece may be “Untitled (bricked chair with drain),” which features garden furniture covered and extended with small white bricks that conjure both patio and hospital. Overall, it calls to mind mangled limbs, a geriatric toilet and something used for torture or sex." -Roberta Smith on Ann Greene Kelly's solo show at Chapter NY. It sounds so good. [The New York Times]

More #TrumpArtworks memes. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Alternative Facts

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 23:30:59 +0000

By now we’re all familiar with Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer’s penchant for “Alternative Facts.” Countless comparisons have been made to Orwell’s 1984, and countless memes birthed. But this meme is my favorite, because it references John Carpenter’s campy sci-fi conspiracy masterpiece They Live instead!

So uh, Sean Spicer, care to comment on where all of our signatures on that NEA petition went? I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to go to school in Betsy DeVos’s America. Maybe then I’d be able to keep up with this alternative math the Trump team seems to be so enthusiastic about.

Shia LeBeouf Arrested, Art Teacher Suspended Over Separate Anti-Trump Video Art Incidents

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 22:34:03 +0000

Shia LeBeouf has been arrested at his anti-Trump installation at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. This stems from what is apparently a separate scuffle from the one we mentioned earlier today, as the other person has been described as a fellow anti-Trump protester. It's alleged that LeBeouf pulled on the man's scarf, scratching his face in the process.

In the other confrontation, the actor-cum-performance artist shouted down a white supremacist who had intended to hijack his “He Will Not Divide Us” livestream. The installation is set to stream for the duration of Trump’s (hopefully short-lived) presidency. In true dystopian fashion, the arrest was caught on camera. (Um, shout out to the girl who thought showing us the neat sharpie heart on her palm was more important than letting us watch the drama unfold in its entirety.)

Thursday Links: A Whitehouse.gov Petition to Save The NEA Is Ignoring Signatures

Thu, 26 Jan 2017 09:36:54 +0000

White supremacist yells into the camera and Shia LaBeouf shuts him down. This has been a very interesting live stream. #HeWillNotDivideUs pic.twitter.com/CqY9pLobWi
— #HeWillNotDivideUs (@HWNDUS) January 23, 2017

Here's a weird sentence I never thought I'd write: Shia LaBeouf screamed at a white supremacist until he fled from his livestreaming anti-Trump art project in Queens. [Alternet]
Christo is the latest artist to join the protest against Trump in a yuuuuuge way. The artist is cancelling his $50 million installation over the Arkansas River, claiming that he no longer wants to benefit the new "landlord." Meaning, the work would've been erected on federal lands, which are now controlled by the Trump administration. [The New York Times]
A group of art professionals in Geneva has launched Responsible Art Market Initiative, a guide for gallerists and dealers to avoid artwork becoming entangled in illicit schemes. Switzerland's massive tax-exempt freeport for artworks has caused recent scandals involving antiquity smuggling and money laundering. [Bloomberg]
More Facebook algorithm drama. Apparently some users never saw The Women's March in the "Trending Topics". This is supposedly because Facebook thought they wouldn't want to? CAN WE PLEASE STOP THINKING OF FACEBOOK AS A LEGITIMATE NEWS SOURCE? Christ, buy a fucking paper people. [NPR]
When artist Pat Lasch asked MoMA to loan a work of hers she believed was in their collection for a retrospective at another museum, she found out it had been thrown out. Apparently MoMA classified the work as a “decorative element” and discarded it after it had deteriorated in storage. [artnet News]
New Yorkers take note: Denver rental prices just dropped, do to the fact that the city added more housing units. We should all be protesting for more new housing, not less. [Curbed]
Hmmm. For some reason, a Whitehouse.gov petition to save the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities isn't collecting signatures. Some might chalk this up to a technical glitch. Others might label it "alternative counting". [The Independent via Hyperallergic]
Related: The UK-based Economist Intelligence Unit has downgraded the United States from a "Full Democracy" to a "Flawed Democracy." We're now on the same level as Ghana and Botswana on the Democracy Index. [New York Daily News]
Awesome! Rome's MAXXI has launched JACK Contemporary Arts TV. Goodbye Netflix binges, hello documentaries and video art binges. [JACK TV]
London dealer Simon Lee has opened a new gallery on the Upper East Side [ARTnews]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Butt-Neck Face-Chest Sumo Wrestler

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 21:39:03 +0000

We’re not sure what the context of this image is (Japanese talk show?) but it’s one of the few reasons I’m glad the internet exists today. No matter how bummed you are about the massive shit avalanche that is this week, this GIF is guaranteed to bring a smile to your face—er, torso?

All the Vermeers Now on Electric Objects

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 16:40:48 +0000

By now, many of us are familiar with Electric Objects (EO). The company produces electronic screens designed to display art. That art can come from the pictures you take on your phone, but it can also come from Art Club, a subscription based service that gives subscribers access to everything from classic works of art to new commissioned work made by contemporary artists.

According to EO, the goal of the product is to make art more accessible—an end they learned was desirable when their 2014 Kickstarter campaign raised close to $800,000 of their $25,000 goal. Just how accessible does this make art? There's no shortage of debate on that subject amongst our friends on Facebook, but in our books, Art Club made a big jump in that department today.

We Went to Protests: Scenes of Inauguration Resistance in Three Cities

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 11:15:17 +0000

WASHINGTON/Whitney Kimball

MEXICO CITY, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON—Over inauguration weekend, three members of the AFC fam found themselves in different cities, united by pissed-off-edness at Trump and the rise of the Right-wing. On inauguration day, Whitney Kimball navigated the surreal belly of the beast: Washington, DC. Meanwhile in Mexico, D.F. Michael Anthony Farley joined in a #J20 solidarity strike, protest, and march from the U.S. Embassy. The next day, Corinna Kirsch was among the hundreds of thousands participating in the New York City chapter of the Women’s March on Washington.

Wednesday Links: A Tsunami of Bad News from the White House

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 11:03:31 +0000

@ThePoke #TrumpArtworks 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' by #DamienHirst... says it all really! pic.twitter.com/ulksCJLgWM
— Neil Wright (@neilmwright) January 23, 2017

Those with an enthusiasm for art history, Twitter, and Photoshop will enjoy #TrumpArtworks. Some of these are pretty good. [Hyperallergic]
It's not often that dumb sculpture news starts trending on Facebook, but this week it has twice. Yesterday we noted that people really care about a bust of Winston Churchill in the White House. Today, everyone's talking about this creepy wax sculpture of Ryan Gosling. THIS LOOKS EXACTLY LIKE RYAN GOSLING. People who say otherwise are in denial. He also never really moves his face in movies, so it's especially life like. [MediaITE]
Japanese art collective Chim Pom have erected a tree house that peeks over the US/Mexico border in Tijuana, labelled "USA VISITORS CENTER". It's pretty cute. Let's hope that tree grows faster than Trump's stupid wall. [Los Angeles Times]
Yesterday, The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation paid homage to a group of local artists who, a century ago, proposed seceding and forming “The Free and Independent Republic of Washington Square”. Hell, today that doesn't sound like such a bad idea. [Curbed]
"For any artists questioning the purpose of their practice, the plethora and variety, the beauty and creativity, and skill and sophistication in communication presented here at this march is proof that what we do matters." -Cara Ober on the Women's March on Washington. Tons of great photos here. [BmoreArt]
Bearcam highlights are providing a much needed distraction from the ongoing tsunami of bad political news. [Explore.org]
Louise Blouin Media continues to bounce employee checks. [The New York Post]
Anyone else feeling depressed about what's going down at the White House? They've put up a page with false crime statistics, removed the climate change page on the website, lied about crowd size at the inauguration, placed a gag order on the EPA, are complaining about non-existent voter fraud (and are threatening nation wide voter ID programs), threatened to invade Iraq, threatened to leave NATO and the UN, given Isreal's 2500 new settler homes the green light,will lift the ban on black site prisons, reinstated abortion funding restrictions and that's only about half of it. [The Internet]

GIF of the Day: Overload

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:27:21 +0000

This GIF by German digital artist Valenberg is titled “Overload”. It pretty much sums up how most of humanity not living under a rock has been feeling lately. The news has been awful, and social media’s reactions have been worse. Do yourself a favor and get outside before the stress nosebleeds hit.

Tuesday Links: Biennale Puts Good Art on Doomed Island, Trump Puts Bad Art in Doomed Office

Tue, 24 Jan 2017 10:00:54 +0000

Biennale de La Biche exists on a tiny island which will be swallowed up by sea level rise, along with all of the artworks. This place looks so, so beautiful. [artnet News]
Thank you Obama! On his last day in office, Obama's U.S. Department of Transportation began an investigation into racist infrastructure spending practices by Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. This follows a suit filed by the NAACP, ACLU, and others alleging the Republican administration violated Title VI by cancelling the Baltimore Red Line. That critical subway-to-surface rail line would've served predominantly Black (and Leftist) neighborhoods that didn't vote for Hogan. He instead distributed those funds to highway expansion projects in the sparsely-populated Republican areas that voted for him. [The Baltimore Sun]
Can we talk about how terrifying/surreal it is that Republicans are pushing legislation to criminalize protests, and that Teen Vogue is now a more trusted policy news source than a substantial chunk of non-print media? [Teen Vogue]
Citizens of Trump's America and recipients of our 24/7 barrage of "alternative facts" and commentary, perhaps you have heard about the White House's bust of Churchill, and its various locations? Why the fuck this is a news story is beyond me, but apparently most of the news outlets covering this non-news item have gotten its provenance wrong. You see, there is not one hideous bust by the late English sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein, but two. Two ugly busts of Winston Churchill. One that was sent to be repaired, and one that was lent by the British embassy while said bust was being repaired. Apparently Obama put one on a table somewhere (scandalous!) and Trump put it in the Oval Office. Now, Trump wants both of these sculptures for some reason that is utterly unbeknownst to me, but of great importance to most American internet users, apparently. 9/11 even gets brought up in here. [The Washington Post]
The Saatchi Gallery's upcoming From Selfie to Self-Expression will be “the world’s first exhibition exploring the history of the selfie from the old masters to the present day." It's a show about selfies, at a gallery founded by an advertising magnate, sponsored by a cell phone company. If I took a selfie right now, you'd see the world's biggest eye-roll. [The Art Newspaper]
After more than 10 years in Gowanus, Brooklyn Art Space is shuttering. The silver lining (for you): they're having a huge sale of art supplies, studio furniture, books, and more! [Facebook]
The new home of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami—a splinter institution born from board members fleeing the troubled MOCA North Miami—should be open before ABMB. Expect one helluva party (or at least one helluva fight for tickets, drunks in heels crying outside a velvet rope, etc...) [Miami Herald]
OMA has completed a new headquarters for the Qatar Foundation in Doha. I'm a huge OMA fan, but can't shake the feeling that the architects were just building a film set out of the dystopian love story Code 46. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Scenes From The Global Women's March

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 22:25:19 +0000

Saturday’s Women’s March, not even counting the thousands of protests on inauguration day itself, was by many accounts the largest demonstration in the history of the United States. In the US alone, a conservative estimate puts the number of protesters around 3 million. Hell yeah! The largest marches were concentrated in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, but dozens of other cities around the country saw massive crowds. (Just look at Chicago, above.)

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Propaganda for the Digital Age

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 18:07:13 +0000

Today and tomorrow New Yorkers will be saddled by this terrible Northeaster storm, but that shouldn’t stop you from attending Hannah Cole’s talk on artist taxes today or Judith Bernstein’s talk and book launch dubbed dicks of death tomorrow. They’re too important to miss. By Wednesday art lovers will be able to head to the Lodge for an opening of John Wellington’s dystopian history paintings, and on Thursday to the New York City Ballet to see electronic artist Dan Deacon’s “America” set to ballet. We’re particularly looking forward to seeing the ballet given Deacon’s connection to the blog. He’s a Baltimore resident and a long time muse for the blog.

Monday Links: Pretty Much Every Person We Have Ever Heard Of Spent The Weekend Protesting

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 10:05:07 +0000

Just when you thought the Trump administration couldn't bring any more reality TV drama: Duff Goldman, of Food Network's Ace of Cakes fame, claims Trump's inauguration cake was a plagiarism of the cake he sculpted for President Obama in 2009. [Facebook]
Groups including Canadian, British, and French citizens were denied entry to the United States, fingerprinted, searched, and photographed by border agents after disclosing their intentions to attend the Women's March on Washington. GO FREEDOM! [The Independent]
Digital art by students in Shiraz, Iran. [D.A.H. Project]
Oh man, I wish I could've gone to Marilyn Minter and Madonna's talk at the Brooklyn Museum. The two discussed feminism, aging as a woman artist, and Trump, among other topics. [artnet News]
Graffiti writer KATSU has demonstrated his newest model tagging-drone with the phrase "SCUM TRUMP". The technology still seems pretty far-off from making things that look nice, but it could offer politically-minded street artists access to hard-to-reach places like billboards.
In other anti-Trump art news, Jaden Smith and Shia LaBeouf have installed a camera on the side of the Museum of the Moving Image to livestream participants repeating "He will not divide us" for the duration of Trump's presidency. [Billboard]
With the future of the NEA in doubt, the editors of ARTnews have compiled a list of key battles from the Culture Wars that gutted American art funding. Seriously, sometimes it is so embarrassing to have to explain to people from other countries why Americans can't have nice things. [ARTnews]
Hrag Vartanian has rounded-up some of his favorite signs from the weekend's protests. "BURNING LIMO 4 PREZ 2020" is by far the best one. [Hyperallergic]
BmoreArt also covered protest signs from the Women's March on Washington, so many good ones on their social media. [Instagram]
Many museums are collecting signs from the protest. This post doesn't indicate which museums are collecting signs in New York, though. Anyone know who's doing that? [The Cut]
Meanwhile in London, Sir Ian McKellen marched with a sign bearing the "Picard face-palm meme". He and Patrick Stewart have the world's cutest friendship. [Twitter]

GIF of the Day: ART STRIKE!

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:42:52 +0000

We’re sharing this GIF from our friends at Hyperallergic in solidarity with the #J20 Art Strike. Tomorrow, AFC will be going black—along with dozens of other cultural institutions and on-and-offline arts spaces—in protest of Donald Trump’s inauguration as President. Instead of our usual content, we’ll be live-streaming Rachel Mason’s performance “FutureClown”, in which she’ll perform Trump’s inaugural address as a dystopian clown. It’s fitting.

So before we go dark, catch-up on our #J20 related posts:

Art F City and NYSRP Present: Taxes for Artists with Accountant Hannah Cole

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 15:14:47 +0000

Taxes for Artists with Accountant Hannah Cole NYSRP Seminar Space 20 Jay St, Ste. M10 Brooklyn, NY Monday, January 23rd 7:00 p.m.-9:00 p.m.

Art F City and the New York Studio Residency Program (NYSRP) present Taxes for Artists, a talk by accountant and artist Hannah Cole. Cole is a tax expert who specializes in working with creative businesses and artists. A long-time working artist with a high-level exhibition history, Hannah has a unique vantage point for understanding the financial challenges of freelancers and small creative businesses. During this 90-minute workshop, she will discusses:

The Nitty Gritty: How To Prepare for Filing Your Taxes

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:46:10 +0000

Nobody likes filing taxes. But thinking ahead and getting your documents lined up reduce the stress of the process. Here are some key ways to prepare yourself for tax season, and get you ready to sit down to your own tax prep software or deliver an organized package to your tax preparer.

1. Download a 2016 tax year organizer. There are many available online. Mine is here. This will be your guide and checklist, and will help you see what you still need, and tell you when you’re done. Follow this guide. Every accountant has a horror story about someone who, in the attempt to save themselves time, doesn’t read the organizer carefully, and causes no less than six follow up phone calls to chase down the information. Believe me when I tell you that a busy accountant in the heat of tax season will charge you extra for that kind of hand-holding. If you want to save yourself time (and money) on the tax process, have these materials fully prepared before heading to your accountant.

We Went to Mexico: Barbara Kruger and Juan Pablo de la Vega Take the Subway

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 13:34:30 +0000

Barbara Kruger: Empatía

Bellas Artes Metro Station Angela Peralta, Colonia Centro, Ciudad de México, D.F.

What’s on View: Giant blocks of white, green, and red text, oriented in different directions. Each has a different question or declarative platitude such as “WHO SACRIFICES HONOR FOR MORE TIME?”, “WHO HAS THE LAST LAUGH?” or “ENOUGH SHOULD BE SUFFICIENT”. The vinyl signage is installed in a narrow transfer tunnel between two metro lines in a busy station below the national art museums.

Thursday Links: The Verdict of the People

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 10:22:02 +0000

Spencer Kornhaber on tomorrow's #J20 strike, Meryl Streep's Golden Globes speech, and the debate over culture's role in resisting Trump: "None of these rationales directly speaks to stopping the president-elect’s policies or removing him from office. They speak instead to an existential quandary triggered by the rise of someone who, to many in the art world, seems at odds with truth, free expression, and egalitarianism. An art strike, according to its supporters, is about reflection, recalibration, and ideological stress-testing in the name of more effectively wielding power in the years to come." [The Atlantic]
Common Field has started a running list of how member organizations are responding to the inauguration. Expect this to grow and grow. [Common Field]
Now that UNTITLED has launched a new San Francisco edition and a slew of new art spaces opened in town, it seems the Fog art fair/week has come into its own. Is the art world's calendar going to become even more crowded with yet another "obligatory" destination weekend? [San Francisco Chronicle]
Um, according to Vogue, art-teacher-chic "has left the hovel of the upstate art studio and emerged as the uniform of some of the chicest patrons in the city." [Vogue]
Today and tomorrow is your last chance to submit your best, worst/most embarrassing Trump-like tweet to the Filthy Dreams @realdonaldtrump writing competition. We'll be honest—we've been too shy to submit to this thus far — for both a fear of not being able to come up with some terrible enough, and a fear that we might succeed and have our name forever tied to something that terrible. We need to just get over this and submit. [Filthy Dreams]
If you haven't read this piece on the letters that are sent to President Barack Obama, definitely do it. It's a really sweat story and reveals the character of our President. [New York Times Magazine]
Christian Viveros-Faune takes a closer look at Donald Trump's chosen painting for his post-swearing in luncheon, "The Verdict of the People" by George Caleb Bingham. It's warts and all depiction of democracy in action—and of course is racist. [artnet News]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Blue Nude by Coke Wisdom O’Neal

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 23:29:29 +0000

Coke Wisdom O’Neal photographs naked people inside a plexiglass box. Yep, the portraits are as unsettling as they sound. These kinda make me think of human meat for sale, or a case Clarice Starling would have to crack before the models run out of oxygen.

I’m Afraid Of Americans: Farley Aguilar’s “Bad Color Book” At Lyles & King

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 13:00:45 +0000

Farley Aguilar, Boy School, 2016, Oil on linen (Courtesy the artist and Lyles & King, New York)

Farley Aguilar: Bad Color Book Lyles & King 106 Forsyth Street New York, NY On view until February 12, 2017

Sometimes it takes the right sociopolitical moment for an artist’s work to land its critique. That’s precisely what happened with Farley Aguilar’s paintings, currently on view in his solo show Bad Color Book at Lyles & King.

Wednesday Links: NYC's Most-Cocaine-Worthy Hotel Lobby Landmarked

Wed, 18 Jan 2017 09:17:02 +0000

The UN Plaza Hotel, Courtesy Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates

Artist Emily Spivack has opened a T-shirt store, which only sells plain white, medium t-shirts, in honor of President Obama. The piece is in reference to an inside joke POTUS once made about not wanting to make decisions, and is presented through the Honolulu Museum of Art. [Hyperallergic]
Applications are open for Terrault Contemporary's second annual juried exhibition. Terrault is one of our favorite artist-run spaces in Baltimore, and this year's jury comprises artists Stephanie Barber, Mina Cheon, and Amy Sherald. This should be good, apply! [Terrault Contemporary]
Applications are also open for a two-year fellowship at Washington, DC's Hamiltonian. This is one of the capital's best arts spaces, and the program is pretty tricked-out. It's open only to artists without gallery representation, and applications close Wednesday March 1st. [Hamiltonian Artists]
The National Parks Service is struggling to find space to accommodate the dozens of huge demonstrations that will accompany Trump's inauguration in Washington, DC. There are now an estimated 1 million people planning protests, scattered among all 50 states and 37 countries across every continent. Yes. We will be striking, and have a guide for protests and other events in some of the cities where we have the most readers. [USA Today]
Yay! The UN Plaza Hotel's retro-glam interiors are now a NYC Landmark. [Curbed]
86 artists were displaced from the massive Sample-Studios in Cork, Ireland last month to make way for a demolition/development project. They've documented it across social media. [YouTube]
Nancy Spector, the new chief curator of the Brooklyn Museum, shares her wisdom for balancing hectic nonprofit/online feminist/family life. My favorite gems: she writes best at 3:00 a.m. (samesies!) and sets aside one day a week to see art shows at other institutions. [The Cut]
There's some academic debate about the veracity of a maybe-Velázquez painting at Florida's Ringling Museum of Art. The painting is a portrait of Spain's King Philip IV, and new scans reveal that the author had repositioned the monarch's legs to make him look less portly, and added more fashionable garments on top of his armor. [The Art Newspaper]
Russian artist Pyotr Pavlensky, of nailing-his-balls-to-Red-Square-fame, is seeking political asylum in France. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Chelsea Manning's Sentence Commuted!!!

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 19:17:47 +0000

Holy crap! Finally some good news! President Obama, in his last days in office, has commuted the majority of the sentence of Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning. She will go free on May 17th, far sooner than her planned release date of 2045.

To celebrate, enjoy excerpts from Faith Holland’s “Chelsea Manning Fan Art” (2014). At least there’s one cyberpunk-as-fuck victory in our dystopian future.

The AFC Guide to Inauguration Resistance Actions

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 16:25:23 +0000

I think I have more Facebook invitations to different demonstrations in Washington D.C. and New York this Friday than I have friends. If you live within a hundred miles of either city, it’s likely you already have inauguration protest plans. For those of us not presently near the respective political and media capitals, it can feel like we’re left out of the party. But don’t fret: we’ve reached out to artists in seven cities where we have a large number of readers—Baltimore, the Bay Area, Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, and Philadelphia—and got the scoop on where you can go while joining us in the #J20 art strike. It’s incredibly inspiring to see hundreds of thousands of RSVPs across the country and beyond. And after the demonstrations, we’ve found some fun nighttime activities to raise funds and solidarity for the long fight ahead.

Tuesday Links: Star Trek: Voyager is 22, Red Hook Artists' Home a "Bargain", Zaha Hadid Was Super Rich

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 10:01:44 +0000

OMG! Star Trek: Voyager premiered 22 years ago, as of yesterday. I feel old. [Facebook]

Shepard Fairey, Jessica Sabogal and Ernesto Yerena have created a series of protest posters that are free to download in anticipation of the #J20 strike and demonstrations. Unfortunately, there are new (draconian) restrictions on bringing signs into certain parts of the capital on inauguration day. To get around this, they're raising funds to take out full-page ads in Washington newspapers and to distribute hard copies in the District. So far they've raised over $1 million. [Kickstarter]

Apparently the late, great Zaha Hadid left behind a £70.8 million fortune. Unfortunately, übercapitalist dickhead Patrik Schumacher is the executor to her will (a decision I doubt she would stand behind given his recent inflammatory comments about affordable housing). The other check-writers include her niece Rana Hadid, artist Brian Clarke, and former Serpentine Gallery chairman Peter Palumbo. The have 150 years to figure out how that money gets dispersed, via the Zaha Hadid Foundation. I hope those three vote to dole it out for innovative affordable housing. [Dezeen]

As opposed to participating in the #J20 strike, many museums are offering free admission on inauguration day, with programming such as a marathon reading of Langston Hughes’s 1935 poem “Let America Be America Again” at the Brooklyn Museum. The National Museum of Women in the Arts is closing on Friday, though, but will reopen for the Women's March on Washington the next day, offering a "nasty women" tour of its galleries. Diversity of tactics is good for resistance. Disappointingly, the Guggenheim and MoMA, among others, have offered asinine, relatively apolitical statements about their decisions to remain open. [ARTnews]

London's gallery-sharing event Condo 2017 sounds so smart and so successful. This is the kind of cooperation that will keep brick-and-mortar arts spaces alive. [artnet News]

Are memes the key to making the art world less elitist? Probably not, but Katie Fustich thinks they might be. How is Jaimie Warren not mentioned in this article? [Salon]

Wow. The Asheville Art Museum is beginning an $18 million, 18-month demolition/reconstruction project that will see the facade of its historic home seemingly half-swallowed/penetrated by a transparent glass box. It's hard to tell from the renderings if this can be pulled-off effectively. [abc 13 WLOS]

Two Brooklyn artists are selling their historic 11 bedroom, 5,000 square-foot-home (with wraparound deck and killer waterfront views) for the relatively low price of $1.25M. Here's the catch: it's an old ferry with an insane history. 11 very smart artists should form a coop and buy this immediately. It's one way to survive gentrification and/or sea level rise in Red Hook. [Curbed]

Potsdam, just outside Berlin, is getting a private museum from billionaire Hasso Plattner. The star attraction at the new Museum Barberini is will be Edvard Munch’s "Girls on the Bridge," which recently sold for $54.5m at Sotheby's. It's believed Plattner was the buyer. If you're a Munch fan, you can see it starting January 23rd. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: Present Mood

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 21:06:58 +0000

Yep, the whole world is going to shit this week.

This exploding head is from David Cronenberg’s sci-fi horror classic Scanners, but really isn’t Cronenberg’s Videodrome, about a reality TV program that causes real-life horror a more appropriate film for the week?

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Anxiety on High

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 15:07:00 +0000

Let’s face it—the bulk of this week’s chatter in the art world isn’t going to be about Donald Trump’s Inauguration, but Marilyn Minter and Madonna’s talk Thursday evening at the Brooklyn Museum lamenting it. And that’s as it should be. Resistance to this new presidency is essential.

Friday, we’ll be participating in the #J20 Art Strike, so no content on our website will be available but for a livestream of Rachel Mason lip synching the inauguration as FutureClown. Those seeking to participate in the art protests can head to the Whitney where Occupy Museums will be hosting a “Speak Out”.

Pussy Grabs Back For Planned Parenthood In “Nasty Women” At Knockdown Center

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 13:00:19 +0000

Installation view of Nasty Women at the Knockdown Center (photo by author)

Nasty Women The Knockdown Center 52-19 Flushing Avenue Maspeth, Queens On view until January 15, 2017

In the months since Donald Trump’s election, I’ve often wondered about the possibility of art to enact tangible change. Looking forward to four years of terrifying and potentially life-threatening rollbacks on progressive achievements, how can artists do more than just address these issues aesthetically?

Monday Links: MLK Day, Luxury Apocalypse Bunkers, Museum Loans to Inauguration, CalArts Walkout

Mon, 16 Jan 2017 09:27:50 +0000

LA-based artist Kadir Nelson on his Martin Luther King Jr. cover for The New Yorker: "What happened to his dream of racial and economic equality, and what is the impact of non-violent resistance over half a century later?"

Museums all over the country are celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. Day with special programming. The Studio Museum in Harlem will be open on a Monday (!) and free. [culture type]
Pianists rejoice (in a sort of hauntingly melancholic way?) French pop/classical musician Maxence Cyrin has released the sheet music to his beloved, spooky cover of "Where is My Mind". You too can now download it and regale your roommates/neighbors with bittersweet ennui. [Maxence Cyrin]
The world is going to shit, and the wealthy aren't taking any chances. Elites can now buy into a community of decommissioned military bunkers, far from rising seas and nuclear targets, that's been reconceived as a luxury apocalyptic enclave. Don't worry, it will be fully stocked with a spa, en-suite media rooms, and armed security. [Dezeen]
The list of the world's most expensive living female artists is here (yay feminism! shruggy-face to assigning "value" based on the market?) and it features the usual suspects: Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman, Jenny Saville, etc... But it's nice to see names such as Vija Celmins and Bridget Riley on the list, who have been in the game a long time and weathered many fickle cycles of taste. [artnet News]
Whoa. The Women's March On Washington organizers have released their platform, and it includes everything from living wages for sex workers to recognition of the burdens women of color bare in the care industry. This is awesome. [BUST]
If you've ever dreamed of art school at Harvard but aren't the heir to a hedge fund fortune or oil-rich emirate, here's your chance! (sort of). Harvard will be giving away free online photography classes this year. [Konbini]
Ugh. The St. Louis Art Museum is lending George Caleb Bingham’s "The Verdict of the People" (1854-55) for Trump's inauguration luncheon. People are upset, because, you know, that would imply that Trump's election was "The Verdict of the People" instead of an archaic and racist institution designed to give rural whites outsized representation in government. [The Daily Beast]
CalArts students have joined the #J20 Strike, and are planning a walk-out in solidarity. We will also be striking, and you should too. [Hyperallergic]
For those who can't afford a car or rising NYC rents, here's a list of walkable, transit-friendly suburbs within commuting distance of Manhattan. [Curbed]
Are civic megaprojects like the Second Avenue Subway and Hamburg's gorgeous new Elbphilharmonie a dying breed? Given cost over-runs and an increasingly fractured political sphere, it seems like these two accomplishments might be a last gasp of public sector city-building in much of the global north. [Community Architect]

GIF of the Day: Jim Golden's Relics of Technology

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 21:27:49 +0000

I came across this typewrite GIF below (h/t Museo del Chopo) and discovered it was part of a whole series celebrating obsolete technology (h/t designboom). These are pretty magical. Photographer Jim Golden documents everything from overhead projectors to floppy disks, each posed neatly against a neutral background and stop-motion animated. There’s something so reassuring about analog technology—it’s really nice to immediately understand the mechanics of how something works rather than just guessing digital projectors work with magic and cords that always seem to need adapters.

The Timelessness of Sex, Violence, and Portraiture: Otto Dix at MUNAL

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 21:09:15 +0000

"Lady Eleonore Frey II," 1963.

Otto Dix: Violencia y Pasión MUNAL Museo Nacional de Arte Calle Tacuba 8, Delegación Cuauhtémoc, Ciudad de México, D.F. On view until January 15th

MEXICO CITY-When an artist’s oeuvre zig-zags through five of Western civilization’s most turbulent decades, it’s a curatorial challenge to wrangle it into one solid exhibition. Otto Dix’s work in particular resists a straightforward relationship with the concept of a timeline. His experiences of violence in the first World War remained a fixed psychic scar throughout his career. While dramatic changes in political and economic circumstances influenced his practice, his subject matter and stylistic decisions would often operate in a strangely out-of-synch relationship with art history. Dix’s interests looped back upon themselves and leapfrogged forward—in the 1960s Dix was painting portraits that recalled German Expressionism and brushy abstractions decades earlier in the Weimar Republic.

Join the #J20 Art Strike on Inauguration Day!

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 16:18:30 +0000

Come inauguration day, many New York Galleries will be closed and art websites gone dark. It’s all part of the #J20 Art Strike, which has been debated over blogs and facebook for the last month and a half. The protest would be in solidarity with the J20 General Strike, which is intended to send an economic message to Donald Trump, a leader many feel will lead us into fascism. If no one works or buys anything on that day, the economy would quickly grind to a halt. An art world strike might also address concerns many have that the culture wars will be renewed again, and federal arts funding will disappear entirely. Critics of the strike worry we’ll be preaching to the converted, that the symbolism of closed doors to those who already feel excluded from institutions will not be effective, and that there won’t be enough participants for the action to be legible. There are also a myriad of arguments for the strike. Some believe that solidarity with other groups will create a sense of unity. Others see acts of silence being superbly effective protest actions. And others still think the visual statement of nation-wide shut down of institutions being an incredibly powerful statement. Of all these arguments, perhaps the only one that really matters is that we achieve more unity in our fight against a President Donald Trump. I hesitate to describe Trump as being good at anything, but he has at least been successful at dividing people and distracting them from his agenda to limit the freedoms of the press, personally profiteer from the office of the president, and institute policies that threaten to undo decades of environmental and human rights progress. We need everyone working to keep this country from falling into authoritarian rule. Past that, it’s clear that absence—or the fear of absence—actually works. In 2012, a co-ordinated set of protests based on concerns that S.O.P.A., a bill many feared would infringe on freedom of speech, stopped the bill in its tracks. That’s because thousands of websites, including Reddit, English Wikipedia, Tumblr, Twitter, Google, Mozilla, Wordpress (and AFC!) shut down their sites or participated by making the campaign more visible in some way. We can do that too. It is important to participate in this strike. It will bring like-minded concerned citizens together and will be felt across the country. Additionally, I don’t see the benefit in questioning the importance of anything that could strategically undermine Trump. So, to those critics who want fear absence won’t be enough, I hear you. But don’t let those reservations curb any effort you can offer, however small, to bring attention to the protest. We may not have your hands, but we still need your voice.

Friday Links: Richard Prince v.s. Ivanka Trump is the Beef We Wish We Didn't Care About

Fri, 13 Jan 2017 11:48:05 +0000

For his new show at Sean Kelly Gallery, Luis Casebere built scale models of Luis Barragán houses and photographed them, creating an optical illusion of the architect's idealized spaces. I want to live in one of these. [Dezeen]
Walead Beshty's FedEx Works are the stuff of art handlers' nightmares. [This is Colossal]
Anyone looking for a job in Kansas? The Wichita Art Museum is seeking a new curator. [The Wichita Eagle]
Baltimore's new Mayor Catherine Pugh has created a Safe Arts Space Task Force following the eviction of the DIY space The Bell Foundry and Ghost Ship fire in Oakland. We're happy to see names such as Lu Zhang, Dan Deacon, and Stewart Watson on task force, but this thing kinda seems like a mess in general. Tracey Knuckles, "a consultant on Bloomberg Associates’ Cultural Assets Management team" (what is that?!?) cited "successful" policies in New York and London that Baltimore can learn from to preserve affordable live/work housing... because if any two cities in the English-speaking world have been successful at preserving affordable artist live/work housing, it's those two? [City Paper]
Here's some uncharacteristically good news from the real estate sector: now is the time to negotiate with your Brooklyn or Manhattan landlord. Apparently the rental market is starting to correct, and is experiencing some "stess." [Curbed]
Hate read alert: Ivanka Trump may or may not own a Richard Prince artwork that appears to be a screenshot of her own Instagram account, and Richard Prince may-or-may-not have disavowed it (or it might be "fake" in the first place?). All of this potential drama is of course playing out on social media. [artnet News]
Here's a list of museums participating in next week's art strike on inauguration day. Prepare to be depressed. They're all staying open except for the ones that had planned to be closed for other reasons. [ARTnews]
The gallery strike participation list is a lot less depressing. [Hyperallergic]
Artist and Standing Rock resident Cannupa Hanska Luger talks to Carolina Miranda about the protests. "We’re not just in protest of a pipeline. What we are trying to do is maintain a cultural practice." [Culture: High & Low]
Looking for ways to get out of this political mess we're in? The kids have some ideas. Flippable gives people on their mailing list daily tasks in preparation for the upcoming fight for seats in 2018. [Flippable]

GIF of the Day: This Shower Glitters

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 20:11:37 +0000

We’re still on the presidential pee thing. The voracity of intelligence reports detailing Trump’s hiring of two prostitutes to pee on a bed the Obamas slept in while visiting Moscow remains unclear. In fact, there are some details that may never be verified. And yet, we do have this GIF providing anecdotal evidence that perhaps some naughty deed did occur. Exactly what is that yellow substance the woman above are dumping on Trump? We’re not sure, but our best guess is that they are giant buckets of pee from pregnancy tests. Enjoy.

Seriously, Fuck You, GOP

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 12:26:35 +0000

It’s been real hard to motivate to do anything this morning. Last night the Senate held a “votearama” – and eventually passed – the budget resolution that contains instructions to repeal the ACA or “Obamacare”. Democrats proposed amendments to preserve certain parts, like healthcare protections for veterans. Republicans voted against that. They voted against coverage for pre-existing conditions. Then they killed CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. They voted against federal aid to rural hospitals, against contraception coverage, against the rule that allows you to keep your kids on your insurance until their 26, and against protecting Medicare and Medicaid.

Thursday Links: A Pleasant Home in which to Cower

Thu, 12 Jan 2017 10:29:06 +0000

The life-changing magic of decluttering in a post-apocalyptic world. [The New Yorker]
Tinseltown gets the George Lucas Museum. [The Los Angeles Times]
Here's some good local news: Woodside's new assemblyman Brian Barnwell wants to change the formula for determining the New York's Area Median Income, or AMI, which is used to set the income requirements for affordable housing. Currently, AMI is calculated using the incomes of residents in the five boroughs but also Westchester, Putnam, and Rockland counties. Those counties skew the numbers upwards. [DNAInfo]
Other good news: The de Blasio administration is opening the door to community land trusts. This is essential to keeping the city affordable. [City Limits]
A database of women illustrators. [Women Who Draw]
Rumors are that Agnes Gund has sold Roy Lichtenstein’s “Masterpiece” from 1962 sold for $150 million. Josh Baer speculates that the sale is part of her lifetime strategy of philanthropy. He also thinks Steve Cohen may have purchased the piece. [The Baer Faxt]
American Museums are increasingly dependent upon the wealthy, a new study finds. No real surprises there. [Hyperallergic]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Dick GIFs!

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 19:27:57 +0000

It’s unclear who’s behind these dick animations, but whoever it is clearly has a Google strong hold on the search term “dick gif”. These images overrun the image results. The biggest question I have right now about the GIFs is why they were made. They seem almost too specific to be someone’s random dick gif project. Where these GIFs made for a company or project? If you have any intel on this, let us know in the comments.

Ni’Ja Whitson’s “A Meditation On Tongues” Conjures The Dead At Abrons

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 13:00:07 +0000

Ni'Ja Whitson and Kirsten Flores-Davis in "A Meditation on Tongues"

Ni’Ja Whitson: A Meditation On Tongues American Realness Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand St New York, NY January 7-9, 2017

Sitting in Ni’Ja Whitson’s A Meditation On Tongues Sunday night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching ghosts. Part of the American Realness festival, their moving performance (Note: Ni’Ja identifies as gender non-specific and prefers the pronouns “they/their”) reinterpreted Marlon Riggs’s seminal 1989 film Tongues Untied, which explored the fraught intersection of black and gay male identity during the critical years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

Wednesday Links: Politics All Day Long

Wed, 11 Jan 2017 09:15:28 +0000

Artwork by high school student David Pulphus

The J20 Art Strike is gathering steam. The New York Times has blurbed a tiny piece about strike, noting that thus far institutions have been "mulling over their moves", which is short hand for not participating. They've promised to keep their doors open. Meanwhile, the list has some big names, including Cindy Sherman, Richard Serra and Joan Jonas. More notably, Hyperallergic has commissioned a series of essays by artists on the subject. The first is by Coco Fusco. She describes the strike as a coming together. [Hyperallergic]
Brace yourselves collectors! Parisan art fairs have been forced to relocate in light of the Grand Palais closure. FIAC, Paris Photo, and the recently-renamed La Biennale Paris, formerly the Biennale des Antiquaires—will need to find a new home in 2021 and 2022 while the Grand Palais closes for renovations. [artnet News]
Governor Andrew Cuomo is promising to change the New York economy by creating a 750 mile running trail across the state. Um, okay. The trail is expected to be complete by 2020. [Curbed]
Watch President Obama's farewell speech in its entirety. [YouTube]
Pete Wells loves the Flora Bar at the Met Bauer. The price points for most dishes means we won't be dining there any time soon, which is too bad because his description of the food sounds good. One point of contention, though: having been to the restaurant myself, I can't say I miss the art on the walls. All the work hung in those areas had the feel of unloved work shoved in a basement. Even with the renovated bar space, I can't see that that would change. [The New York Times]
Politicians will even bicker over high school art. In this case, Republican Rep Doug Lamborn of Colorado took issue with a painting by David Pulphus, which depicted a pig in a police uniform aiming a gun at a protester, and removed it from a wall on capital hill. Rep. William Lacy Clay, D-Mo., rehung the painting on Tuesday. [The Washington Times]

GIF of the Day: Animation Factory

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 18:20:44 +0000

Anyone have any idea what this is? A wizard covering his eyes because a knight has fallen?

Mostly, I find the animated GIFs at Animation Factory pretty creepy. I’m not sure if this has to do with their small size, which in the age of massive column width websites and blogs, seems a bit bewildering, or if it’s because a picture of a blinking star actually is creepy. Either way, I couldn’t bring myself to pay the ridiculous membership fee that starts at $59.00 a year. For this reason, all of the GIFs I’m featuring here come complete with the animation factory watermark. I’m sure this won’t matter to the artists and curators who want to dig into the site.

Ligia Lewis at American Realness: Forceful Celebrations

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 17:06:06 +0000

It took me about 15 minutes to notice that the performers in Ligia Lewis’s “minor matter” were wearing black contacts that obscured the white of their eyes. That’s probably because for the duration of the piece, I was preoccupied by the worry that performers Jonathan Gonzalez, Ligia Lewis, and Hector Thami Manekehla might accidentally break a partner’s vertebrate. “minor matter” is approximately 65 minutes of these dancers slamming each other on the floor, climbing on top of one another and basically beating the shit out of each other. I loved it.

Tuesday Links: News for End Times

Tue, 10 Jan 2017 12:25:05 +0000

That bird in the background looks ominous.

Is it time to start worrying that Donald Trump will actually place an overall cap on deductions? The Art Newspaper has a piece on how this change could effect museum income. (Long story short it would be a catastrophe.) But this is one thing I'm not worried about. Donald Trump will want better ways of sheltering his money from the IRS than continually bankrupting himself. This is a very easy means to that end. [The Art Newspaper]
A bi-partisan group of women have decided it would be a great idea to have a women's history museum in the national mall in DC and are asking for Donald Trump's support. My first impulse was to wonder why anyone would want the support of a self professed pussy-grabber but than I remembered that America elected this man, so they now need his support to get this done. *Wipes tears.* [The New York Times]
Activist artist Dread Scott gets a profile. I expect we'll be hearing a lot from this artist over the next four years. [ARTnews]
Artists and activists look back on the three month long residency "Decolonize This Space" at Artist's Space. Artist Betty Yu talked about the need to be more creative with protests because people don't want to out to the same old ones. Is this really true? I don't think I've ever gone to a protest because I thought it was clever or was doing something different. I go because I want to express my support in the cause. [Hyperallergic]
ABC No Rio's total rebuild of their space has hit a snag. Higher than anticipated building costs. [Curbed]
The end times are near. A Williamsburg cafe is now selling $9 unicorn lattes. [Gothamist]

GIF of the Day: Snowy Owl

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 19:20:12 +0000

Sometimes machines make gorgeous art. Take, for example, this snowy owl which was captured by a traffic cam in Montreal. It’s beautiful.

Hat tip: Hrag Vartanian.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Rejoice! Our Times Are Intolerable and Nasty Women Are Front-and-Center

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 16:16:57 +0000

Jenny Holzer's eerily prescient works from the late 70s and early 80s open at Alden Projects on Friday.

New York’s week is characterized by two dominant themes: revisiting art history, and women owning “nastiness”. Monday, NYU’s Grey Art Gallery is launching Inventing Downtown, an ambitious look at how artist-run spaces informed the city’s radical aesthetics decades ago. Tuesday, Kate Hush illuminates archetypal feminine deception and betrayal at Cooler Gallery. She’ll be joined by legions of Nasty Women starting Thursday, when the Knockdown Center kicks-off a four-day fundraiser for Planned Parenthood featuring art, dance parties, and more. Alden Projects has a timely survey of Jenny Holzer’s early poster work that opens Friday, and White Columns is opening it’s 11th Annual, Looking Back. That’s but a sampling of the art history-mining going on this week. Stay nasty, New York, and remember that you always have been.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe Straddle NYC’s Past, Present and Future in ‘Paranoia Man In A Rat Fink Room’

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 13:00:36 +0000

"Paranoia Man in a Rat Fink Room" by Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe. Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture and the New York Comedy Festival, 2016. Photo by Brett Beyer.

Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe: Paranoia Man In A Rat Fink Room Storefront for Art and Architecture 97 Kenmare Street New York, NY On view until February 18, 2017

Monday Links: Mixed Martial Arts Are Not The Arts, According to Meryl Streep

Mon, 09 Jan 2017 09:21:06 +0000

send nudes descending a staircase
— Friedrice Nietzsche (@tinynietzsche) January 9, 2017

“Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners and if you kick us all out you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts… which are NOT the arts!” Meryl Streep, during her emotional Golden Globes acceptance speech about the importance of empathy, freedom of the press, and how horrible Donald Trump is. Scroll down to the bottom of the linked article for a video of the whole thing, it's worth it. Meryl Streep is a fucking treasure. [Rolling Stone]
Over the weekend, Michael Lutin released this month's horoscopes for the art world. These are really, really weird and oddly specific. Apparently this isn't going to be a good month for my career. [artnet News]
Hull, the UK City of Culture for 2017, has unveiled a massive wind turbine blade as a public sculpture by artist Nayan Kulkarni. I guess this is the kind of thing you have to experience in real life to have an opinion beyond "wow, that's big!" [Express]
Adam Langer argues that all the cited precedents for great art coming out of awful circumstances don't matter much if there's no funding for artists from Trump's NEA. Hear, hear! [Salon]
Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter has personally removed a painting he found offensive from the Capitol building. The artwork was created by a high school student from Missouri in response to the murder of Michael Brown at the hands of the Ferguson police. Apparently Congress is inspired to act when cops' feelings get hurt by teenagers, but not when cops kill black teenagers? [Teen Vogue]
From gentrification and preservation battles to starchitecture and new ferries, here's what to expect from New York's 2017. Mostly, this list is useful because it tips you off to which affordable housing lotteries you should be entering. [Curbed]
This story was published about 6 months ago, but it's been trending like crazy the past few days, likely due to this headline: "Hyerim Shin questions cuteness with dog-stretching device".[Dezeen]
Dallas, TX digital art trailblazers And/Or Gallery has uprooted to sunny(er?) California, following a seven year hiatus. [Dallas News]
The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Goethe-Institut have commissioned 12 artists to speculate on the future of Europe, 2,000 years from now. A lot of Brexit angst seems to be brewing. The exhibition opens next month, and looks to be an extremely strange, tech-heavy show. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: GIF Wrapping!

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 23:45:08 +0000

To Sune Martas. From Terrell Davis.

The holiday season may be over, but there’s always a healthy contingent of people who are still sending their gifts out through the month of January. Count us amongst that group. Last year around this time, Michael Anthony Farley took the opportunity to revisit GIF Wrapping, a project that invites digital artists to play secret santa with each other using GIFs. The project is “unboxed” Christmas even. Farley liked the project so much he requested it be taken up once more in 2016. netartnet.net, (Anthony Antonellis), and 85 other participating artists took him up on the request. What a boon! The website is a treasure trove of amazing Santa rifs, news themed sentiments, and abstractions using holiday color palettes. Merry Christmas to me!

Getting Organized: Financial Resolutions for Artists in 2017

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 14:24:28 +0000

As we enter a the new year, let’s take time to think about the priorities in our arts practices, and in our personal lives. You may roll your eyes at the idea of New Year’s resolutions, but there is evidence that writing down your goals actually helps you achieve them. So grab a pen, and let’s put some intention into 2017.

In my interview with artist Susan Crile about her eight year ordeal defending herself in US Tax Court, there was a lot of discussion about keeping records to prove the profit motive in one’s art practice. It brings up a good question for most of us: how are we doing on our own record keeping? If the IRS sent an audit letter tomorrow, would you feel good about the shape that your records are in? If the answer is not good, don’t panic. Here is a list of what you will need, and some thoughts on how to improve your record keeping going forward.

Friday Links: More Evidence We Live in a Dystopian Hellscape

Fri, 06 Jan 2017 12:28:59 +0000

Brandi Twilley, “Gold and Blonde,” 2011, Oil on canvas. Twilley is born in Oklahoma City, OK, lives and works in NYC. From the Nasty Women show.

Singer and artist David Byrne and technology investor Mala Gaonkar have launched Neurosociety at Pace Art + Technology gallery in Silicon Valley's Menlo Park. The show is described as an 60-minute immersive theater performance where visitors will be guided through a series of experiences created in collaboration with working neuroscience labs. Viewers are supposed to experience a "surprising aspect of yourself and how you relate to the world and to other people." Two things: 1. Investors are now artists? 2. This whole description sounds like a recipe for cheeseball art, but I guess we'll find out. [Eventbrite]
Roberta Smith must really love painter Elizabeth Murray—she describes a vitrine of 14 sketches at CANADA "exciting", a word I'd never think to apply to a vitrine. But you know what? I've never liked Murray's paintings, and the drawings, as Smith rightly points out, are a significant part of her practice. Smith calls for a museum to put on a show of these works. [The New York Times]
Roxanne Jackson's facebook call to female artists and curators to organize a NASTY WOMEN show in response to the November 9th election went viral and now she has approximately 1000 pieces. She and a team comprised of Jessamyn Fiore, Angel Bellaran, Barbara Smith, Haley Shaw, Young Sun Han, Clive Murphy, Carolina Wheat, Liz Nielsen, Stephanie Stockbridge, and Aimee Odum will launch the show Nasty Women Art Show at the Knockdown Center on January 12. The organizers are names we feature frequently here on the blog, so we expect the show will be expertly organized and hung. That being said, it's an open submission show, so don't expect to see the Chelsea standards here. There'll be a lot more paintings like the one you see above. [The Huffington Post]
Mayor Bill de Blasio is proposing a new 100 percent affordable housing building and library in Inwood that would have the city partner with the New York Public Library. An ill-conceived rezoning proposal that would allow developers to build a 17 story building that would include affordable housing units in another wise low-rise neighborhood was rejected by the city council last fall. [Curbed]
A futuristic looking BMW self-driving car is said to be able to receive deliveries from drones. This car looks like something from a sci-fi movie set. I don't trust that it can do anything. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: ohmannothingisfunny

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 19:13:05 +0000

The stop-motion claymation GIFs on the Tumblr ohmannothingisfunny are so charming it’s odd we don’t see more GIFs produced like this.

I like this one, because it certainly feels like the internet has been a self-destructive place as of late, where discourse tends to implode and suck one in.

Maybe we should all take a break for a while and remember to make stuff with our hands, even if that something is a GIF.

Applications Now Open for Open Space's 8th Publications & Multiples Fair

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 13:24:45 +0000

There are few art events that are as fun as Open Space’s Publications & Multiples Fair. The annual PMF brings screenprinters, DIY press, and artists working in a variety of 2D and 3D media to the Baltimore Design School for a weekend-long affair that feels more like your favorite neighbors’ garage sale than an art fair. Check out our highlight’s from last year.

Applications for PMF VIII are open now, and we highly encourage artists/collectives to apply. It’s a super affordable opportunity to network with other groups working in the field, and as a visitor, a great opportunity to pick up some accessibly-priced, high-quality work. In past years, I’ve snagged self-published comics, t-shirts, limited edition prints, and even ceramics. The most I’ve ever “splurged” was about $100—when I walked out with a new tote bag jam-packed with nearly a dozen goodies. That’s not to say artists can’t make a bit of coin here—booths are ultra-affordable, and there’s tons of foot traffic. Mostly though, it’s a great weekend for browsing and meeting people.

Cate Blanchett Is Possessed By 20th Century Artists In Julian Rosefeldt’s 'Manifesto'

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 13:18:44 +0000

Installation of Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto at Park Avenue Armory (Photo by James Ewing)

Julian Rosefeldt: Manifesto Park Avenue Armory 643 Park Avenue New York, NY On view until January 8, 2017

Manifestos don’t age well. This became clear as Cate Blanchett, playing twelve different characters, channeled some of the most notorious artist manifestos of the 20th century in Julian Rosefeldt’s Manifesto at the Park Avenue Armory.

Who is “Fuck Theory”? Find Out, Sundays This Month

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 12:11:14 +0000

We’re not exactly sure what to expect from Postmasters Gallery’s Lectures for the End of the World. The series features presentations from porn star/writer Stoya, artist/nightlife personality Juliana Huxtable, outspoken punk illustrator Molly Crabapple, and more. But none of these identity-centric artist/activist/writers will be speaking as themselves. They “will serve as live stand-ins” for “the pseudonymous philosopher FuckTheory.”

Who/what exactly is Fuck Theory? Fuck Theory is a Twitter account and Tumblr that complains about philosophers, with some anonymous personal kvetching thrown in for good measure. It’s hard to know how much of this is sincere and how much of it is ironic (is anyone really this mad about Henry David Thoreau?) and that’s an ambiguity that carries into the event’s press release. The general tone is something along the lines of THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE. STOP LISTENING TO PEOPLE WHO TELL YOU THE WORLD IS A TERRIBLE PLACE AND LISTEN TO THIS INSTEAD. This pseudo-contradictory signaling carries into the language itself:

Thursday Links: NYPD Gets Brooklyn Museum Mini-Retrospective, Louise Blouin Gets Layoffs

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 11:28:57 +0000

Huh. The NYPD gave mayor Bill de Blasio a presentation about the city’s dropping crime rates in the form of a photography exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Why? To celebrate the fact that crime rates have dropped more in Brooklyn than any other borough. [New York Daily News]

Dystopian product of the day: Fisher-Price exercise bike/iPad holder for obese toddlers. Was this actually inspired by that exercise bike/video game episode of Black Mirror? [Gizmodo]

Good news for curators and the despots who want to lend them artwork: President Obama has signed into law a bill protecting foreign-owned artworks from confiscation if they are in the United States for the purpose of an exhibition. The exception to this rule is Holocaust-looted pieces. This follows a years-long lending frieze between Russia and the United States over disputed Jewish texts seized in the Bolshevik Revolution. [Artforum]

Headline of the day: Man Warned Woman He’s An Asshole, So It’s Fine. Pretty much every woman has dated this man and regretted it. [Reductress]

Someone bought an apartment in Queens that came with a mosaic of early-aughts pop star Mandy Moore in the shower. [Curbed]

Google has added a virtual reality “Artist in Residency” program, which actually sounds like they’ve just hired/invited (Google won’t discuss compensation) a group of artists to advise on the development of their new Tilt Brush tool. [Mashable]

Louise Blouin Media appears to be in the midst of a major staff shakeup. They’ve dismissed Modern Painters editor-in-chief Scott Indrisek, among others, potentially over budget cuts. What kind of budget cuts? “The kind in which you terminate your editor-in-chief midway through the closing of your March/April issue,” Indrisek said in an email. [ARTnews]

Two juveniles were shot in Jacksonville Florida last Friday during an art walk. The victims are fine - they suffered non-life threatening injuries. There’s almost no information other than this. [First Coast News]

The most popular searches on artnet are pretty much entirely photographers known for nudes and street artists. [artnet News]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is promising a new terminal and transportation options for JFK. Ugh, stay away. It’s not that these airports don’t need work but that every time Cuomo gets involved the projects become cash giveaways to private partners and the construction is done in the most ass backwards way possible. Case and point: thanks to the renovation projects and ill-conceived interim traffic management at LaGuardia it often takes two hours just to leave the airport. [Gothamist]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Adam Pizurny (Hypno Butt 2.0?)

Thu, 05 Jan 2017 00:12:19 +0000

These GIFs by Prague-based artist Adam Pizurny wrap nudes in strobes of black-and-white stripes. If Madonna had released animated GIFs in her “Erotica” era, they might look something like these. But mostly they reming me of the mysterious Hypno Butt that captivated us all in 2015.

Remembering John Berger, The Old Master of Seeing

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 19:08:27 +0000

Vincent Van Gogh, Wheatfield with Crows

“The silence after a felled tree has fallen is like the silence immediately after a death,” wrote John Berger in his 1984 book And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. “The same sense of culmination.” Of course, today, two days after the great art critic’s death that’s not exactly what he got. So far, it’s been a cacophony of Twitter alerts, Facebook notifications and hastily written obituaries. In the world of social media, the same tree can fall continually for months even years. Like most celebrities largely out of public view, we can expect Berger’s death to be rediscovered several times over the coming decade—his death tweeted a new, a tree felled once more.

Wednesday Links: Sexy Neptune Censored, David Hammons Powerless, Shazaam Movie Mystery

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 11:48:32 +0000

Jean de Boulogne's Neptune is too sexy for Facebook, apparently

Why do thousands of us have memories of a nonexistent early 90s children movie Shazaam starring Sinbad as a genie? One theory is that we’re from an alternate dimension. This is so, so weird. [NewStatesman]

Adam Harvey, the artist behind anti-facial-recognition makeup technique “CV Dazzle” (which is so cool) has designed a textile print “HyperFace” that overwhelms algorithms with hundreds of false faces. [Mashable]

Are people finally tiring of social media wars? We’ve noticed a lot of people unplugging and/or stepping back from Facebook and Twitter citing self preservation (including our own Michael Anthony Farley). Now the articles are starting to come out. Frankly, this seems like a step in the right direction. [The Guardian]

Hyperallergic has released their annual Most Powerless list. It hurts a bit to see David Hammons, an artist who has made his reputation by resisting authority and wealth structures, on the list this year. It seems the staff felt that Hammons couldn’t out maneuver a news cycle that included his gallerist’s son as head of Trump’s treasury. [Hyperallergic]

A photo of a 1560s statue of Neptune by Jean de Boulogne has been censored by Facebook for being too sexy. [The Telegraph]

The long, dramatic story of how George Lucas has been trying to build a “lowbrow” museum of narrative art in three different cities. Mayors seem to want it, but no one else does. Lucas does not come out smelling like roses here, as he seems unwilling to compromise on much and emails reveal his team refusing to release even basic information (like what would be in the museum) to potential partners. [Bloomberg]

Picasso fans take note: Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía is celebrating the 80th anniversary of “Guernica” with a massive Picasso show from April to September. This will involve the loan of more than 150 works from collections across the globe. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: chavesfelipe

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 20:25:46 +0000

I recently stumbled across the Giphy account chavesfelipe, and boy, what a rabbit hole. His page is populated by bearish men, from burly gay hunks to celebrities such as (queer sex symbol?) Zach Galifianakis in a variety of #vaporwave environments. Often, they seem to be stuck in some sort of turn-of-the-millennium Microsoft dilema. There are close to 200 GIFs in there, so brace yourself for a wild ride.

This Weeks Must-See Art Events: The Art World Mobilizes for 2017

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 19:26:57 +0000

Farley Aguilar, "The Protest," oil on linen, 2015. Aguilar has a solo show opening Sunday night at Lyles & King.

For everyone who has complained that the art world is too apolitical in the past month or so, take note of how 2017 is kicking off. We have a week of feminist exhibitions, the start of a month-long project about Trump’s America Saturday at Petzel Gallery, and shows that tackle topics from water contamination to the holocaust and the attack on the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

On Power: A Teachable Moment for the New Year

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 14:26:19 +0000

Lordes, "Yellow Flicker Beat"

In the video for Lorde’s anthemic pop song “Yellow Flicker Beat”, the young singer approaches a room stuffed with posh looking, and mostly much older, well dressed people. Men in tuxes and women in evening gowns make small talk and sip drinks. Lorde strides through the room, full of swagger, and then suddenly she falls down, falls over an unseen ledge, into a dark pit. The party goers carry on, never noticing her presence or her tumbling absence.

Tuesday Links: Politics, Art Begin Year on Bad Terms

Tue, 03 Jan 2017 11:46:12 +0000

Diane Bronstein, "GRAB THIS!". Part of the NASTY WOMEN Exhibition at the Knockdown Center.

A statue of imprisoned Native American activist Leonard Peltier is being removed from American University’s campus following threats. According to the artist, who goes by the name Rigo 23, "What the director of the art center told me is the Fox News item unleashed the crazies, and the crazies are threatening the university." [WUSA 9]

John Berger, the famed scholar and author the book and BBC series Ways of Seeing is dead. Our obituary will go up later today but in the meantime Adrian Searle, who knew Berger personally, has you covered. [The Guardian]

The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum reflects on his time at Standing Rock, with an honest (and often funny) account of that “what should I be doing?” feeling so many people are going through. [Hyperallergic]

10 bucks for a 2017 calendar from our favorite designer, Phillip Niemeyer, at Northern Southern. Get one. [Northern Southern]

In politics, late last night, the GOP secretly voted to eviscerate the independent ethics committee established in 2008 after the party became mired in abuse and bribes. Even Fox News reported on this thoroughly and without their usual spin (though the news was deemed the second most important story of the evening next to the weather last night and is now below the fold).

A large text sculpture by Ahmet Güneştekin has been censored in Turkey after eliciting protests. The piece “Kostantiniyye” is just a series of block letters spelling out Istanbul’s former name, which the city was called from 1453 to 1930. Why people are so upset over this is a bit confusing to me. [artnet News]

Wow. According to the MTA, every underground subway station in New York City now has wifi. And AFC staffers can confirm that their routes now all include wifi. Finally some good news to kick of 2017. [Gothamist]

In protest of Trump, and in support of Planned Parenthood, female artists are throwing a NASTY WOMEN Exhibition in Queens. The show will feature affordable artwork, and all of the proceeds will go to benefit PP. The show runs from January 12 to 15 at The Knockdown Center. [The Creators Project]

2017 will see another huge private collection opening a museum in LA. The Marciano Art Foundation, funded by a fortune built on GUESS jeans, is renovating a former Masonic Temple into a shrine of contemporary art. Let the conspiracy theories begin. [Los Angeles Times]

Get your Jeff Koons balloon dog sweater. [Forever 21]

GIF of the Day: RuPaul's End of 2016 Message

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 22:02:10 +0000

Goodbye 2016 pic.twitter.com/EZzk8zdCXl

— RuPaul (@RuPaul) December 23, 2016

Yep.

The Best of Everything, 2016

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 21:00:30 +0000

Deborah Kass's OY/YO under the Brooklyn Bridge

We were pretty sure 2016 was a stinker until we sat down to reflect on all that was good. Going through the images on our phones and our archives, we learned there’s actually quite a bit to celebrate. So much so, in fact, it took us an entire week to assemble this post. That’s quite a bit of time, but it was worth every minute. Here’s to all the artists, curators and performers that made our days and lives better this year.

The 10 Weirdest AFC Stories of 2016

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 18:37:16 +0000

What a fucking year.

Equal parts surreal and horrifying, 2016 was basically an Hieronymus Bosch painting come to life. Given how apocalyptic and strange every headline from the mainstream news media has been this past year, it’s easy to overlook all the weird shit that went down in the art world.

But this year was chock-full of crazy art world stories, often that intersected with politics. (Remember a few weeks ago, when Madonna charged Art Basel visitors thousands of dollars to watch her grind on a chair while dressed as a clown, covering Britney Spears’ “Toxic” in front of a giant projection of Donald Trump?) It’s hard to even pick a “top 10”, but here’s our best effort to round-up the weirdest art stories we reported on in 2016:

Friday Links: Virtual Mourning, Wooden Spoon Tech Breakthrough, Stairs, Trump Rooster Scares China

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 12:35:56 +0000

Well this is weird and cute. Fans of the online multi-player role play game “Star Wars: the Old Republic” have been gathering on virtual Alderan to pay tribute to an avatar of Carrie Fischer’s Princess Leia. [CBR]

Polish aristocrat Adam Karol Czartoryski just sold his family’s art collection to the Polish government for €100 million. That might sound like a lot, but the collection spanned 86,000 objects, includes da Vinci's "Lady with an Ermine," Rembrandt's "Landscape with the Good Samaritan" and works by Renoir. The discounted sale was so undervalued the board of the family’s foundation resigned in protest. [The Telegraph]

Ever get the sense that you’re reading a listicle that should be a tad shorter than it actually is? Enter “10 Technologies That Are Defining Art Right Now”. (OooOooh!) a listicle that includes the obvious suspects—Oculus Rift, drones, and 3D technology—as well as a host of items that aren’t technologies at all. This includes “the wooden spoon” (cooking is a trend!), the kiln (so is ceramics!), and the ballpoint pen (drawing too!). Someone needs a tech writer. [artnet News]

And here’s one of the most specific (but oddly enthralling) year-end top 10 lists: “The Top 10 Staircases of 2016”. These are some pretty cool staircases. [Dezeen]

A report card for the MTA has been issued once more by Strap Hangers. The lines with the best grades were the 7, 1, and the L, and those with the worst were the 5 and the A. No surprises with the 5 and the A, but as someone who is regularly made late by rush hour traffic on the 7 line in the morning, I would suggest this report card indicates there is a lot of work to be done. And in fact, the bad news listed in the report supports this. Car breakdown increased and subway regularity decreased this year. [Strap Hangers]

The Gowanus Canal is a superfund site, but that’s not stopping some city council members from declaring that with a little rezoning the neighborhood could become New York’s Venice. People have lost their minds. [Curbed]

Researchers have “discovered” that auctions are designed push bidders emotional buttons, that time pressure makes bidders even more emotional, and that social pressure is key to securing higher bids. Who didn’t know this already? [New York Magazine]

An obscure painting from ukiyo-e master Hokusai turned up at auction in Denmark last month, where it was purchased by a Tokyo dealer. It’s an almost-unknown work with an interesting provenance and unusual characteristics for its era. [The Asahi Shimbun]

A Chinese shopping mall has erected a statue of Donald Trump as a rooster, because next lunar year is the Year of the Rooster. This thing is creepy and looks like a fried chicken company mascot. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Tormento de Cuauhtémoc

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:31:11 +0000

I’m in Mexico City, which has an overwhelming number of museums. I follow a bunch of them on social media and noticed that many institutions make animated GIFs out of works in their collection or exhibitions. This one, from Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes, is really creepy.

They’ve animated the David Alfaro Siqueiros mural “Tormento de Cuauhtémoc” in honor of what would’ve been the Mexican painter’s 120th birthday. The museum has an amazing collection of murals, many of which document the city’s turbulent past. This one memorializes the torture of Aztec ruler Cuauhtémoc by the Spanish conquistadors, who were trying to extract the secret locations of Tenochtitlan’s treasures. They were assholes. Maybe it’s a small consolation that Cuauhtémoc is now memorialized in so many ways: my closest metro station is named after him, he’s represented in murals, and now GIFs.

The Worst Shows of 2016: What's the MoMA Björkgate of the Year?

Fri, 30 Dec 2016 00:13:30 +0000

Exhibition view of GesammttkkunnsttMeshuggahhLaandtttt, Charlemagne Palestine, 2015. Photography Aad Hoogendoorn. Credit: WDW

It’s that time of the year, when arts publication editors sit down and compile best and worst lists. One would think, in such a soul-crushingly awful year, coming up with a “Worst Shows of 2016” list would be easy. But in 2016, most of the disappointing shows left me saying “meh” rather than with any memorable bad taste in my mouth. In short: 2016 seems to me to lack a polarizing failure of epic proportions, such as Björk’s infamous retrospective last year at MoMA.

Thursday Links: RIP Kenneth Snelson

Thu, 29 Dec 2016 13:34:09 +0000

Kenneth Snelson, "Easy Landing," 1977.

Oh no! Kenneth Snelson died today of prostate cancer at the age of 89. He was known for his science-influenced sculptures. On a personal note, his installation in front of the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore is one of my earliest memories of interacting with public art as a child. [The New York Times]

70 year old Yolanda Baker might be America’s last disco ball maker. This video of her making disco balls makes me so happy. [courier-journal]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The BPA

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 21:41:30 +0000

Welcome to the first NSFW GIF of the Hump Day that doesn’t totally frighten me. That’s because, in fact, this GIF is somewhat uncharacteristically for us, extremely work safe as it comes pre-censored. Released in 2008, and featuring singer David Byrne, the video Toe Jam featured a variety of nude cast members, each with their private parts blacked out. The blacked out privates made all kinds of fun patterns, and quickly became a viral sensation. As it happens, a few GIFs were drawn from the video as well. Our favorite, below.

Wednesday Links: Inside Pizzagate

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 12:28:21 +0000

John Waters favorite films of 2016. Looks like I have some work to do: I've seen none of them. [ArtForum]
Ben Davis's article on the lesson of Trump's election for art — the lesson being that our influence is limited as we pretty much uniformly rejected him and he still got elected—is worth a read if you haven't already. We linked to the article back when it first came out, but it's making the rounds again, so it's in our links again. [artnet News]
Hyperallergic's top 20 NYC shows is out. Good list. [Hyperallergic]
Those who want the real skinny on Pizzagate and don't mind having the bejesus scared out of them, should listen to this podcast. All the details are there. We've got some huge problems coming down the pipe. [Reply All, hat tip: Liv Moe]
Speaking of which, here's an interview with an artist who was targeted by pizzagaters. The interviewer and artist aren't quite as informed on the subject as I would like, but still, useful voices. Notably, the comment section on this article is closed. I can hear the trolls crying censorship already. [Hyperallergic]
A list of Artnews's most read articles of the year. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: RIP Carrie Fisher

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 18:33:39 +0000

The above GIF is drawn from what may be the most famous broken video clip in pop culture. It’s an image of Princess Leia, (played by Carrie Fisher), sending a distress message in the movie Star Wars. “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi. You are my only hope,” she says. The message repeats.

It’s probably not accurate to think of this broken clip as a proto-GIF—the earliest GIFs were much more simple, looping animations—but its appeal and long standing presence in the cultural consciousness exists for many of the same formal reasons GIFs are so popular today. The short hypnotic loop repeats at the exact moment of tension, keeping the viewer’s attention indefinitely.

Tuesday Links: Anish Kapoor Gives "Exclusive" Pigment the Finger

Tue, 27 Dec 2016 12:08:58 +0000

After Anish Kapoor secured the exclusive rights to light-absorbing pigment Vantablack, artist Stuart Semple created “The World’s Pinkest Pink,” which is available to everyone except Kapoor. Kapoor responded to this dig with the above Instagram photo, wherein his middle finger is dipped in Semple’s pigment. This seems like the kind of drama one wouldn’t expect Kapoor to have time for. [artnet News]

Beginning with David Bowie, J. Kelly Nestruck looks back at artists who died in 2016 and the ways in which they “performed” their deaths. [The Globe and Mail]

George Michael died this weekend. Here’s a look at why he mattered beyond the music. Think making gayness more interesting and less threatening, and erasing the barrier between who should and should not sing a soul song. [The New York Times]

Last week we previewed the new artworks in the Second Avenue Subway. It didn’t occur to me though, that Vik Muniz’s “Perfect Strangers” mosaic features what appears to be New York City’s first depiction of a gay couple in a permanent, non-political piece of public art. [AP]

Photographer Wing Shya’s aesthetic emerged about two decades ago, while working as an on-set photographer for filmmaker Wong Kar Wai during Hong Kong cinema’s golden age. Today, his gorgeous photos maintain a cinematic quality, even as the city’s culture and economy stagnate under mainland Chinese rule. [CNN]

Famed minimalist and art critic Donald Judd amassed a tomb of writing over his life, but never used a typewriter. This news comes in a profile by Randy Kennedy on a new collection of the artist’s writings and his children’s role in shepherding the project. [The New York Times]

Best new architecture in NYC. In a surprise to no one, Santiago Calatrava’s Oculus makes the list, but not without some heavy caveating. (Late opening, political tomfoolery, shopping mall effect, etc.) [Curbed]

The Denver Art Museum’s upcoming renovation proclaims to be fairly sensitive to the existing facilities. Nevertheless, there’s apparently some controversy over relocating Edgar Heap of Birds’ outdoor sculpture “Wheel”. This editorial doesn’t really explain what that controversy is, though. [Denver Post]

Great. The GOP is connecting Democratic senate candidates in New York to Mayor de Blasio and corruption wherever possible. And of course, it’s an easy attack to launch because the administration has been plagued by corruption. [Politico]

GIF of the Year: We Are All Ellen Ripley in 2016

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:39:12 +0000

Of all the “me at the beginning of 2016 v.s. me at the end of 2016” memes, this one nails it. I’m not sure who made it, but I feel this on a really deep level. I myself spent all of November 9th watching the Alien movies and crying with friends. (Aside: doesn’t Mike Pence remind you of the human/alien hybrid from Alien Resurrection that Ripley blows into the vacuum of space?)

Dynasty Handbag's Nightmare-ing of a White Christmas and It's the Holiday Song of 2016

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 20:21:18 +0000

For everyone who isn’t quite feeling the holiday spirit of December 2016 as a result of November 2016, this is the Christmas song for you!

Perpetual AFC favorite Dynasty Handbag performed this jingle at her recurring “Weirdo Night” at LA’s El Cid over the weekend, and it pretty much sums up how a big ol’ chunk of female, queer, brown, or just-not-fucking-batshit people feel following the rise of the “Alt-Right” and spike in hate crimes.

Alex Da Corte: "Ivanka Trump, please get my work off of your walls. I am embarrassed to be seen with you."

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 19:52:03 +0000

Artists are none too happy with collector/future First Daughter Ivanka Trump. As noted in Bloomberg recently, the socialite has an impressive collection of contemporary art, including works by John Baldessari, Dan Colen, Christopher Wool, and many others. But now that the Trump family’s abhorrent politics have been made glaringly clear, many dealers and artists are facing “seller’s remorse.”

“No one could have anticipated Trump’s policies and how horrible he’s turned out to be, and no one could have anticipated that his daughter and son-in-law would agree with him,” gallerist Brendan Dugan told Bloomberg. Dugan’s bookstore/gallery Karma has shown several of the works in Ivanka’s collection, a relationship he clearly seems to regret: “The real argument is that the art world is primarily a marketplace, and if you have money, people will sell you things. I think maybe this is a wake-up call.”

Friday Links: "Hotbeds of Liberal Radicalism and Degeneracy" The Right Wing Goes After Artist-Run Spaces

Fri, 23 Dec 2016 09:45:37 +0000

Crap. The Right Wing is now targeting semi legal artist-run spaces, punk houses, etc. According to 4chan threads, they plan on reporting code violations to shut down "hotbeds of liberal radicalism and degeneracy." We need to strategize about this one. [VICE]
Just when you thought Atlantic City couldn't possibly be any more depressing, a group of tourist industry types is pitching the idea of a Donald Trump museum. They think it could bring visitors to the town, which is presently (ironically enough) blighted by various failed Trump enterprises. [NJ.com]
Speaking of dystopia, the new Blade Runner movie looks like it might actually be good? That would certainly be a relief to die-hard fans of the 1982 original, including myself. [NME]
From a flag for first-time Olympic team "Refugee Nation" to illustrators coping with David Bowie's death, terrorist attacks, the election, and Brexit, Dezeen rounds-up the good design that came out of awful 2016. [Dezeen]
Hili Perlson's "Meet Kaari Upson, the Artist Whose Mom Loved Pepsi Too Much" is one of the strangest pieces of art writing I've read in a while. I think that's a good thing? Truth be told, I can't tell if Upson's solo show at Sprüth Magers (Berlin) is any good from reading this, but the review of a truly, singularly bizarre sounding exhibition definitely makes me want to go see it. [artnet News]
75 year old Chi-Tien Lui is the electronics repair shop owner who worked with Andy Warhol. Bruce Nauman, and most closely with Nam Jun Paik. Now, a new generation of art conservators is hoping to learn his magic touch, as cathode ray televisions and other obsolete technology show its age and need repairs. [The New York Times]
Wow. The past few years have been rough on NYC Galleries. Nate Freeman rounds up which ones bit the dust and which ones departed Chelsea in search of cheaper pastures. [ARTnews]
The totally bonkers story of how Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire basically ruined their then-friend Dale Wheatley's life in the 1990s. The emerging actors starred in Wheatley's black-and-white indie project Don's Plum and then regretted it, going to great lengths to bury the film. It all sounds very petty. [Vanity Fair]

GIF of the Day: Brandon Muir

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 18:56:02 +0000

Brandon Muir’s GIFs are a really satisfying blend of absurd and creepy. Whatever inscrutable things are going on here, I wanna watch but definitely not touch—just like a mini Cronenberg film. According to this interview, the above GIF “A Night’s Prayer,” was the first he ever created. I think it’s a masterpiece.

Preview the Second Avenue Subway's (Surprisingly Not Bad) Art

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 18:06:27 +0000

Detail from Vic Muniz, “Perfect Strangers,” photographed by George Etheredge for The New York Times.

Fingers-crossed, the first phase of the oft-delayed Second Avenue Subway is scheduled to finally open on New Years Day.

But maybe we can un-cross our fingers for at least one component of the problem-plagued project: the stations’ artworks look like they turned out much better than I expected. The MTA, Governor Cuomo, and publications such as The New York Times, have released a flurry of images of the installed works, and they’re a pleasant surprise. But admittedly, my expectations weren’t very high. I generally find most public art to be forgettable at best, and the initial renderings of the selected work elicited little more than a passing “meh” at the time, as well as some lingering questions.

Thursday Links: 2016 Continues to Elicit Skepticism, Cynicism, Bitterness

Thu, 22 Dec 2016 12:20:24 +0000

Michael Green, "r/Pizzagate I. An Evening W/ The Podestas."

“This is the first year that really felt like 1984... Information is vanishing. There is no resistance because nobody knows what is true or fake anymore.” Digital artist Michael Green has a new series of Maya 3D renderings based on #pizzagate, and wow. Creepy stuff that would be hilarious if the reality of just how crazy people are didn't lead to armed assaults on pizzerias. [The Creator's Project]
Is this good news? Bad news? Baltimore's new mayor Catherine Pugh has announced the creation of a "Safe Arts Space Task Force." I personally know many of the members of this task force, so I'm optimistic, but troubled by Pugh's remarks that safety is "non-negotiable." What does this mean for artist-run and/or artist-owned spaces that can't afford sprinkler systems or upgrades to operable windows on their own? Should we expect financial support from the city? Or even more scrutiny? This announcement comes on the wake of a national crisis, wherein artist-run spaces such as Denver's Rhinoceropolis and Baltimore's Bell Foundry have been shuttered by authorities following the deadly Ghost Ship fire in Oakland. [City Paper]
Meanwhile in the other Bay Area, nearly 10,000 people signed a petition urging the cities of San Francisco and Oakland to place a moratorium on evictions of artists. The petition asks the city to grant artists more time to bring their spaces up to date and to waive permit fees for safety upgrades such as sprinkler systems. This is a great idea. But it would be fantastic if cities actually used a fraction of their discretionary budgets to help artist-run spaces become safer. [KRON4]
'Tis the season for end-of-the-year "top 10" listicles... but WTF is up with The Hollywood Reporter's "The 9 Strangest 'Stranger Things' Things of 2016"? First of all, 9? Really? But mostly this is just the most junk-posting clickbait piece I've seen in a while. Note: not a recommended reading piece, just commentary on the state of media. [The Hollywood Reporter]
Speaking of the aforementioned genre of blog posts, Jonathan Jones has released his roundup of top exhibitions. They're mostly what you'd expect: Giorgione at the Royal Academy of London! Caravaggio at the National Gallery of London! Picasso at MoMA! [The Guardian]
Lots of problematic gender stereotypes in this article, but it also offers many valid points. The main argument is that ["typical"] women utilize cities differently than ["typical"] men do, and that designers need to consider this when planning for all inhabitants of an urban area. It's a little shocking that the author exclusively cites contemporary studies without acknowledging Jane Jacobs, whose experiences as a housewife and resultant proto-feminist writings revolutionized urban theory. Most of the points researchers "discovered" draw an obvious, long-overdue parallel to her observations from the 1960s. [Fast Company]
The top-nine most expensive cities for renters (NYC is second to just San Francisco in the ranking) are all in solidly blue states, with oddball Miami taking the #10 slot. But this study reveals there's plenty of affordable housing in swing states. Frustrated Brooklyn artists: take note. We'll thank you for moving to Toledo, Ohio (where 1 bedroom rents average $440) and voting 4 years from now. [Zumper]
Awww, yet another instance of a Right-wing attempt at art criticism! This piece of journalism about Ann Carlson's performance "Doggie Hamlet" contains nothing but out-of-context quotes from The New York Times and kvetching about how $30,000 of "their" tax dollars are going to support our wacky antics. Except, you know, red states are far more dependent on the tax income us lefty coastal folks generate than vice-versa. Wanna take away our arts funding? Fine. How about us kooky city folk stop subsidizing rural America's not-farming programs? [Tammy Bruce]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Laser Crotch

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 19:18:04 +0000

Remember Dazzler, the X-Men character who could turn disco music (and after a 1990s rebranding, techno) into laser beams? This acrobat is kinda like that, except instead of using glamour to fight crime, she uses some orifice to hold a laser pointer while doing splits in the air.

Girl Power Is Back: Top 10 Shows For Women In 2016

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 19:01:04 +0000

Thomas Tilly, Charlotte Moorman performs Aria 4 of Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique, Düsseldorf, West Germany, October 7, 1968, Courtesy AFORK (Archiv künstlerischer Fotografie der rheinischen Kunstszene), Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Despite the misogynistic horror of Donald Trump’s campaign and eventual election victory, 2016 was a great year for women in the art. There were compelling solo exhibitions by women artists in major institutions, a copious list of all-women group shows and dynamic revivals of unfairly overlooked female artists’ careers. It seems like 2016 marked the return of much-needed 1990’s-style “girl power.”

Wednesday Links: Trump Supporters Attack Queer Activists Outside Artists Space

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 11:35:27 +0000

Connor Hicks, Colin Ashley, Peter Soeller (photos by Patti Cruz, courtesy Peter Soeller via Hyperallergic)

A group of queer activists were assaulted by Trump supporters while leaving the Decolonize this Place closing at Artists Space over the weekend. One of the most troubling things about this story, which no one seems to be talking about, is that the attackers sound like off-duty police or military based on their description. [Hyperallergic]
The Denver Art Museum claims it will use a light hand during renovations of its iconic building. That's great news—the structure is the only North American work completed by architect Gio Ponti and it's a singularly weird masterpiece. [Dezeen]
In today's awful political climate, it's nice to hear about a (mostly) good guy. Senator Harry Reid and artist Michael Heizer have become allies in an effort to protect Nevada's environmental assets, including Heizer's massive earthwork "City," [Los Angeles Times]
Jerusalem's Bezalel Academy of Art is mired in controversy (with some opponents wanting the school shut down) after a student depicted prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a naked king with a noose around his tiny junk. [International Business Times]
Poissy, the Parisian suburb home to the iconic Villa Savoye, is getting a Le Corbusier museum. [artnet News]
Airline food that looks like a giant dick. [New York Post]
Someone is adding googly eyes to subway ads. Keep up the good work! [Twitter]

GIF of the Day: Zsa Zsa Gabor

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 23:21:40 +0000

With actress Zsa Zsa Gabor’s passing over the weekend at the age of 99, it seemed a good time to mine a few of the more notable GIFs out there. Boy, she was a looker. I just lost a half hour to Google searches on the starlet and personality because I like looking at pretty people.

Anyway, Rest in Peace Zsa Zsa.

This Week's Must-See Events: Relax and Go To A Party

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 17:35:09 +0000

Party or mob scene?

Let’s just concede that there’s no a hell of a lot going on this week. Arthaps, our go-to source for events has nothing listed for Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and we’re not listing anything either. That’s not because there aren’t events out there to attend, but because we don’t want to encourage any behavior that doesn’t involve actually relaxing for the holidays. With that in mind, we’ve listed a holiday party to attend tonight, a concert tomorrow and a group election therapy session Thursday. That last one probably constitutes work, but you might feel better for doing it, so it gets a pass. It also has the added benefit of giving us three events we can recommend.

The Pant Suits Come Off: Yesterday's Action at Madison Square

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 16:08:01 +0000

10 Women perform a version of Yoko Ono's "Cut Piece" in Madison Park. Organized by theater directors JoAnne Akalaitis and Ashley Tata. Image: Noah Fischer

It’s hard to imagine a day for worse news than yesterday. Andrey G. Karlov, a Russian ambassador to Turkey was shot dead while speaking at an art opening the Contemporary Arts Center in the Cankaya area of Ankara. In Berlin, an attack by terrorists killed nine after they plowed a truck into a Christmas market. And what many believed to be our last hope to save democracy, the electoral college, let America down: only two Trump electors defected in the electoral college, while four voted against Clinton. (Congress would have voted for Trump even if 37 voters defected, but the symbolism would have been significant.)

Do It Slow: A Conversation With Sara Reisman on ‘Enacting Stillness’

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 13:00:01 +0000

Bruce Nauman, Still from Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square (Square Dance), 1967-68 (Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York)

Enacting Stillness The 8th Floor 17 West 17th Street, 8th Floor New York, NY On view until January 13, 2017 Artists: John Ahearn, Rehan Ansari, Nicolás Dumit Estévez, Brendan Fernandes, Alicia Grullón, Yoko Inoue, Joan Jonas, Claudia Joskowicz, Kirsten Justesen, Kimsooja, Carlos Martiel, Bruce Nauman, Clifford Owens, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Emily Roysdon, and Roman Štětina

Tuesday Links: Cats Continue to Serve Public Good Online

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 10:20:42 +0000

Behind this kitten lurks something much more sinister.

A chrome extension that replaces pictures of Donald Trump with kittens. [Business Insider]
We've all seen this by now, but Russia's ambassador to Turkey was shot while giving remarks at Contemporary Arts Center in the Cankaya area of Ankar. [The New York Times]
Andrew Russeth's Top 10. My favorite list so far. Just the right mix of the expected and shit you didn't even know was shown. [ARTnews]
Jonathan Jones's Top 10. My least favorite list so far. It begins with Pablo Picasso and Hieronymus Bosch and ends with Douglas Gordon. Sure, sure on the old time-y stuff, but every contemporary art pick is tacky as hell. [The Guardian]
A look at the art on the 2nd Ave Subway line. Ugh. A tacky Vic Muniz picturing a girl and her runaway balloon. But there's a good Chuck Close, so maybe it evens out. [The New York Times]
38 more units for New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio's affordable housing project. [Politico]

GIF of the Day: I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 23:36:44 +0000

After today’s news I thought nothing would be more appropriate than some sort of horror GIF. That didn’t go well—I found most of them too scary to post. But I did find this board of wandering eyeballs, which seemed more appropriate than any chucky doll GIF I’d seen anyway. With so much bad news happening at once it’s hard to know what to pay attention to, let alone what to do to feel safe. I don’t know what to do to solve any of these problems, but I do know I’m not going Christmas shopping today.

Is Our Best Hope for the NEA Gone Now That Sylvester Stallone Says He Would Decline an Arts Role?

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 14:07:21 +0000

Artist Adrien Brody displays his work during the the kick off of Art New York and CONTEXT for 2016 New York Art Week at Pier 94 on May 3, 2016 in New York City. (Photo by Mireya Acierto/Getty Images)

Last Thursday rumors began to fly that professional actor Sylvester Stallone would be asked to head the National Endowment for the Arts. He has no experience in government, but in 2009 he made a splash at Art Basel Miami when his amateurish paintings were made available for sale. As of last night, he declined any position that might be offered at the NEA, saying he’d much rather play a role in helping military veterans “find gainful employment, suitable housing and financial assistance these heroes respectfully deserve.”

Monday Links: VR Augments Christmas Tree Experience

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 12:27:16 +0000

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.

Christian Viveros-Faune sees Donald Trump and resistance to what he represents in art in museums across the city. [Artnet news]
A letter from MTL + Decolonize This Space to the incoming director of Artist Space. They are concerned about what will happen under President Elect Donald Trump and that donors and money will rule. [Hyperallergic]
If you haven't read it yet, Randy Kennedy's profile on Marian Goodman is a must-read. [The New York Times]
After a decade of thumbing its nose at San Francisco’s zoning laws, the Academy of Art University has agreed to a $60 million settlement with the city. They intend on bringing the school’s many illegally converted buildings into compliance with local rules. Good. As it happens, the school, because it is an institution for higher education, does not have to pay tax on these properties, which is why people often see universities as agents of gentrification. [SF Gate]
On Saturday four activists were attacked by Trump supporters. Racism and homophobia seem to be part of the impetus. [Towel Road]
You can now take a virtual ride on the Rockefeller Center's Christmas tree thanks to a new virtual reality tour on a crane produced by USA Today. [Curbed]
Actress and personality Zsa Zsa Gabor has died at the age of 99. It sounds like her last years were no fun. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Vortex GIFs

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 20:00:42 +0000

Konczakowski

The Creator’s Project has assembled a collection of vortex GIFs that seem suitable for the weekend, so we’re reposting a few here. I’m particularly fond of the weirder ones—the watermelon vortex and the teeth, which aren’t even a vortex, but seem to be an increasingly used art trope (at least as recognized this week on AFC.).

Michael Shillingburg

Balazvarga

April Faison

Friday Links: Will Rocky Star Sylvester Stallone Head the NEA?

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 12:03:31 +0000

Sylvester Stallone in front of his art

Should the art world strike on inauguration day? Hrag Vartanian has posted a call and is asking others to participate. There's a long thread on Facebook of supporters and people who claim this action won't be visible enough. My own feeling: if this is the start of repeated action, it will be visible. It does lack the poetic symbolism, though, of a Day Without Art. [Hyperallergic]
Sylvester Stallone is being eyed to chair the NEA. He has zero experience in the field, so I'm sure that'll work out well. [Fox News]
The new facebook messenger camera comes with new art, 3D masks, and special effects. This is in response to the rise of use of stickers and emojis. [Forbes]
More than half of New Yorkers are rent burdened, says new study. No shit. [Curbed]
New York City officials are very worried that their budgets are about to be cut thanks to Trump. Trump loves NYC, but my guess is that the Republicans will do what they like here and we'll all suffer. [Politico]
Well, this has to be a bummer for Sargent's Daughters. They've lost artist Jordan Casteel to Casey Kaplan. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: Mert Keskin

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 21:16:27 +0000

Normally, teeth, eyeballs and McDonalds are visual cliches I’d rather not see in art. But I’ve been coming around on all these things lately and thus enjoying Mert Keskin’s collage of stuff I don’t like. I guess teeth and eyeball art are being reclaimed.

No Fear: Macon Reed at ICA Baltimore

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 15:54:25 +0000

Macon Reed: Who’s Afraid of Magic? Institute of Contemporary Art Baltimore at SpaceCamp 16 West North Ave, Baltimore, MD 21202 On view until December 18th

Macon Reed doesn’t do anything half-assed. We know this personally, because she offered to fly to Miami last year for 24 hours to help faux-finish the walls of our pop-up F.A.G. Bar, where AFC was exhibiting excerpts from her epic installation Eulogy For the Dyke Bar.

An Audit Nightmare Turned Artist Victory: An Interview With Susan Crile

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:48:42 +0000

Susan Crile in the studio

American businesses sometimes lose money. Those losses actually create a tax shelter for other income. While the tax code explicitly provides this incentive for businesses - to encourage investment for growth, and to allow for unpredictable events - losses that go on for too long tend to draw scrutiny from the IRS.

If your arts practice loses money for more than a couple years, they may question the legitimacy of the business - specifically, the profit motive. Typically, they reclassify such a business as a hobby, and disallow the artist from expensing deductions past the point of their income from the activity. That’s bad news for any artist, but it was a near nightmare scenario for artist Susan Crile.

Thursday Links: Respect Yourself, Don't Eat at Trump Grill

Thu, 15 Dec 2016 12:06:46 +0000

Wildenstein's palace.

The worst restaurant in America: Trump Grill. What a crushing review. Naturally, Donald Trump has already tweeted nasty things about the publisher. What a thin-skinned, small man. [Vanity Fair]
Christie MacLear will leave her position as CEO at the Rauschenberg Foundation for Sotheby's There she'll be expanding the advisory services within the auction house acting as its expert on artist estates and foundations. Really didn't see this coming. It's a big loss for the Foundation. [ARTnews]
Baltimore city has condemned the Bell Foundry, a place where people of marginalized identities could be live in a community and be cared for. [Hyperallergic]
And the award for fanciest Year In Art web feature goes to Artsy (and UBS). Aside from expensive design, though, there's precious little to say about it. It's a list of things events and artist responses. [Artsy]
Christie's board has appointed Guillaume Cerutti as Chief Executive Officer. [Baer Faxt]
While Guy Wildenstein, of what was once Pace Wildenstein (now Pace Gallery) is awaiting a verdict on tax fraud in France, he's offloading some absurdly expensive property. The going price is 39.8 million and it's 9,600 square feet. [Curbed]
It would be good if NYC officially addressed the homeless problem rather than temporarily housing the homeless in $200 a night hotel suites. [Gothamist]
Anti-Trump imagery by artists. [Hyperallergic]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Museum Butt

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 20:09:30 +0000

Someone thinks this butt GIF belongs in a museum, right between a larger-than-life “Mona Lisa” and “American Gothic.” We’re not sure which museum, though, as the “Mona Lisa” is in the Louvre and “American Gothic” is at the Art Institute of Chicago. No matter, if this exhibition ever went on tour it would undoubtedly be a NSFW blockbuster. Curators take note.

Based on the watermark (or wall text?) that someone might be named Mark Heffron. The best detail in this GIF is the janitor, taking a break from his duties to watch these hands spastically whack the butt. Is he a tiny sculpture of a janitor? Or are these reproductions and ass just really enormous? Like all the best exhibitions, this one raises more questions than it answers.

Rob Pruitt Measures Obama’s Legacy In Paintings At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 13:00:27 +0000

Installation view of Rob Pruitt's The Obama Paintings at Gavin Brown's Enterprise (Photo: Thomas Mueller; Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's Enterprise, New York/Rome)

Rob Pruitt: The Obama Paintings Gavin Brown’s Enterprise 291 Grand Street New York, NY On view until December 18, 2016

Wednesday Links: Friends, Enemies, Silence, Gold

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 11:52:40 +0000

The Condo art event is returning to London, in which galleries in the British capital each play host to a different international gallery. Two New York galleries are participating this year, but mostly I’m excited about this map—which looks like it's advertising a fantasy rave for libertarians thrown by M.I.A. [ArtReview]
As if any of us needed any more reasons to be upset about the current political climate, we found out yesterday that America’s sweetheart RuPaul is losing beauty sleep over the election of Donald Trump. “It feels like the death of America.” [Vulture]
Salvaged video art collective Everything is Terrible is transforming LA’s iam8bit Gallery into a VHS rental store… which only carries thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire. It opens in January. [Consequence of Sound]
Fred Lazarus, the former president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, discusses the need for cities such as Baltimore to cooperate with artist-run spaces to make them safer places, following the Ghost Ship fire in Oakland where at least one MICA alumn died. [The Baltimore Sun]
NY Times critic A.O. Scott isn’t a fan of Rogue One. It sounds like Star Wars might be getting a bit too formulaic. [The New York Times]
Net art maven Minh Nguyen on the role of social media and art in 2016: “as the year progressed... everyone went ‘You know what? Maybe the Internet is a horrible place that cements all of our biases.’ You know, fascists also make memes, the alt-right have aesthetic Tumblrs, and they’re way better and more effective at it than us… Nobody understood aesthetics better than the Nazis. You have to acknowledge that, or the optimism is really irresponsible.” She also discusses the commodification of identity politics and the legacy of Occupy. [Seattle Weekly]
Headline of the day: ‘FRIENDS AND ENEMIES’ GATHER AMID SILENCE AND GOLD FOR MARINA ABRAMOVIC’S 70TH BIRTHDAY. Sounds like the conceit of an electroclash song. [ARTnews]
Seriously, if New York can’t figure out how to fix its subway problems, it’s not going to remain much of a tourist destination. The MTA has announced that the 2,3 will no longer operate on weekends due to Sandy repairs. Repairs start this spring. [Curbed]
Alan Thicke has died. Those who grew up watching Growing Pains will find this a bit sad. Thicke played Jason Seaver, a father of three kids, in the sitcom. [LAist]
An American judge has thrown out Scott C. Mueller’s lawsuit against German gallery Michael Janssen and art advisor Marisa Newman. Mueller was suing both parties for damages related to his purchasing of Cady Noland’s “Log Cabin,” which the famously mercurial artist disavowed following unauthorized restoration work. [artnet News]
Tracey Emin has finally abandoned her controversial plan to demolish a historic East London building in order to construct a five-story live/work studio/mansion. Preservationists are breathing a collective sigh of relief. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: Jess Mac

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 23:11:06 +0000

Jess MacCormack (Jess Mac), has GIFs all over PaperMag right now. The company published a profile on the artist’s protest GIFs a few days ago—Mac is a bit skeptical of the good fortune Donald Trump claims he’ll bring to America. Count us in on that.

The profile showcases seven GIFs from the artist’s portfolio, ranging statements on immigration and identity politics to Obama’s tears. All them are worth a look, but given today’s news we’re featuring a different GIF—“everything will be ok” built from SOS signs. Ok is recessed a little, as if it could drop off at some any point. This seems about right to me, because though I’m pretty sure that everything won’t be okay, I know it will at least “be”. That’s not exactly solace, but it’s the truth. There’s so little of that going around these days, that I find the thought comforting.

Reminder to Art Folks: Healthcare Sign Up Deadline is This Thursday!

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 17:52:56 +0000

The best picture of doctors ever.

Just a heads up to all those artists, curators and art advisors who make a living off freelancing: the deadline to sign up for Obamacare is this Thursday. For many of us, the penalties cost far less the insurance, but let’s face it, the insurance is important. So, put a bit of time aside, and get this settled. You’ll feel better you did.

Tuesday Links: Imelda Marcos Collected More than Just Shoes, Chinese Artists Arrested

Tue, 13 Dec 2016 12:18:54 +0000

McDonald's daring homage to contemporary art. pic.twitter.com/wjNrAz9rI8
— Giovanni Tiso (@gtiso) December 11, 2016

The Philippines has spent three decades trying to track down the illegally-purchased art collection of late dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos and his wife Imelda. Now they're taking to the web, using the hashtag #ShowMeTheMonet. [The New York Times]
The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act of 2016 is designed to make it easier for rightful heirs to claim Nazi-looted artwork in the United States. [Smithsonian]
The New York Times has retired its weekly “Inside Art” column, to be replaced by a new series, “Show Us Your Wall,” which will profile different collectors in their homes. This is supposed to target a broad audience. The "Arts, Briefly" column will now run six days a week. [ARTnews]
Has anyone else seen Walter Robinson: A Retrospective at Jeffrey Deitch? David Ebony seems to like the show, claiming Robinson infused some heart into pop subject matter. The review makes me want to see the work for myself, which is always a good thing. [Art in America]
A group of artists in Chengdu, China have been arrested for a performance protesting out-of-control air pollution. Their criminal act? Walking around the city center en masse wearing filtration masks. [BBC News]
“Ghost Ship is our Fields Triangle factory fire.” Eva Wingren attributes the tragedy in Oakland to gentrification and housing injustice. She relates this to the recent eviction of the Bell Foundry artists in Baltimore, and a model of collective ownership that’s been a successful alternative. [Rooflines]

GIF of the Day: Anthropocene Man's Best Vladimir Putin GIFs

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 19:09:26 +0000

Did Russia’s borderline-sociopathic president Vladimir Putin order cyber attacks that influenced the terrible, terrible American election? Probably. (Remember that time the pro-Putin cyber troll army tried to frame a New York Times journalist as a Nazi for investigating their bizarre internet schemes?)

But one thing is for certain: the Tumblr Anthropocene Man has some killer Putin memes. We’re imagining this is pretty much what the Kremlin looks like right now, as they celebrate the complete meltdown of our republic:

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Nightmares Before Christmas

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 18:43:06 +0000

No, Bill Murray isn't dead. But Con Artist Collective will be honoring him this Wednesday as if he were.

This week there’s not a lot of art stuff happening beyond holiday parties and craft fairs. One could say NYC’s taken an unexpectedly Middle-American turn in that regard, were it not for how morbid so much of the week’s happenings are. Tuesday night, scholars Sam Tanenhaus and Richard Wolin perform a post-election autopsy on the American Republic and speculate about its afterlife (hint: It’s not looking good) at CUNY. For a slightly less depressing evening, head to Ubu Gallery where German artist Heide Hatry is opening a new series of drawings made with the ashes of human remains. If that’s not enough mortuary holiday cheer for you, Con Artist Collective is throwing a fake memorial art show for the comedian Bill Murray (one of the few national treasures that hasn’t died in 2016). Thursday night we’re looking forward to a subversive holiday group show at Kate Werble Gallery, and a six-hour night of discussions about Art After Trump at Housing Works.

Monday Links: Artist-Run Spaces Evicted Nationwide, #Pizzagate Trolls Become Art Critics

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 12:04:05 +0000

Paintings such as this one, by art therapy patient Ria Pratt, are now being used by fake news websites as "proof" of the #pizzagate conspiracy theory, which seems especially unethical.

The #pizzagate trolls are trying their tiny hands at art criticism. Here’s one of several fake news articles examining the murals inside Comet Ping Pong for some nefarious symbolism. We would like to point out that the real murals at Comet Ping Pong are by Arrington de Dionyso, and that most of the images used in this article are from the website of art therapist Kim Noble, and were produced by trauma victims. Also, LOL, this “article” is written by “Liberty Belle” ....ugh, the alt-right has the worst drag names. [Fury News]
Following the deadly fire at Oakland’s Ghost Ship, artist-run spaces nationwide are in crisis. We’ve been getting calls from friends in various cities who’ve had fire inspectors show up at warehouses and tell them they have 30 minutes to grab their stuff and get out. Let’s not let this be the end of an era for counterculture. Now, more than ever, these places are so necessary. [The New York Times]
Just prior to the eviction of Denver’s artist-run space Rhinoceropolis, musician and urban planner Michael Semen discusses how important DIY spaces are to cities and what local governments can do to protect them. [Westword]
Meanwhile in Baltimore, the city has condemned the artist-run space The Bell Foundry, citing safety concerns. Imagine if we lived in the kind of society that went around giving poor people sprinkler systems instead of eviction notices? [The Baltimore Sun]
A massive profile on Jerry Saltz by Kenny Schachter appears in British GQ this January and in Artnet news. There have been a lot of profiles on Saltz over the years, but this one manages to shed new light on the critic, exploring his early home life and then beginning to track his career closely from 2010 on, with his appearance as a judge on Work of Art and a burgeoning social media star. [Artnet news]
Is History Painting making a small, international comeback? K.P. Reji, Michael Armitage, and Daniel Boyd are “de-colonizing” the genre with dreamy, politically-charged illustration-like works. [Artspace]

Join us Sunday December 11 for Flux Factory's 10th Annual Art Auction

Sat, 10 Dec 2016 11:25:24 +0000

It’s Flux’s biggest production of the year, at which hundreds gather to celebrate our community and make it possible for Flux to produce yet another year of affordable space for our artists-in-residence, as well as commissioning new artworks for our free public exhibitions and educational events. Get your ticket now.

Sunday, December 11 2016 6pm Feminist Fete Hour (details below) 7pm-10pm General Admission CUNY Hunter MFA Gallery – 205 Hudson St. NYC, 2nd floor

GIF of the Day: Retreat into the Weekend

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 21:10:52 +0000

Well folks, this is the end of a big week. We’ve returned from Miami and are attempting to get back settled in. The weekend is much needed. See you Monday!

Pipilotti Rist at The New Museum: Feel-Good Feminism

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 20:59:15 +0000

Pipilotti Rist Pixel Forest. Image: New York Times

Feminism isn’t easy to pin down. It’s a social movement that shares a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve political, economic, and social rights for women. It’s famously defined by waves (first, second and third) that only a few of us can fully explain without referencing Wikipedia.

For me, feminism is characterized less by the social movement it describes, than by woman who chose for themselves what they like, what they want, and who they are. It’s simple, and that’s part of why I like it. It’s inclusive, and it can be fun, pleasurable and charming—all qualities of the most infectious and influential kinds of movements.

Do The Divisions Between Artist, Writer and Activist Matter Post-Election?

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 13:00:27 +0000

The lineup of What Now: The Artist-Writer As Activist-Critic with Jennifer Liese, Mariam Ghani, Pablo Helguera and Gregory Sholette (Courtesy e-flux)

What is an artist’s role in activism? A panel at e-flux on Tuesday night explored the question many in the arts community have been wondering since Trump’s election a month ago.

Friday Links: Positive Politics Emerge

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:22:45 +0000

A dropbox link to the writings of Agnes Martin. [Dropbox]
David Axelrod's interview with Senator Harry Reid is so good. The retiring senator tells the story of his career—a real American hero. Check out the interview with Presidential Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin too. So good. [The Axe Files]
Writer, art fair manager and former gallerist Edward Winkleman discusses the failure of the "Leo Castelli" gallery model in today's market. That model is that a gallery nurtures an under-known artist through their career and leads them to market success. Now, artists leave for greener pasturers once they become more established and galleries often cycle through younger artists due to the need to pay their bills. [Artspace]
Jerry Saltz Best of List for 2016 is mercifully shorter than the New York Times list. Gavin Brown makes the top ten list twice. Lucky him. [Vulture]
A mural by artists and students Santa Rosa Junior College has been painted over Donald Trump anti-immigration graffiti. This is a great example of the positive contribution art can make. [The Press Democrat]
A "Dear Ivanka" letter has been published in ArtForum, pleading the President-Elect's eldest daughter to try to talk some sense into her father. Guys, it's not going to work. She's brokering hotel deals with foreign diplomats on behalf of the Trump family, which means she's just as corrupt as he is—just perhaps not quite as insane. [ArtForum]
A change.org petition is demanding that Shopify stop hosting Brietbart News due to its racist messages. This is a petition that actually has a fighting chance of being won, so sign it if the message resonates with you. [Change.org]

GIF of the Day: Happy Birthday Nicki Minaj

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:02:24 +0000

Guess who’s birthday it is today? Nicki Minaj! I’m posting this GIF in honor of the big day with a note to readers to tune in to the blog tomorrow. We’ve been working on a couple reviews and features today that we think you’ll really like. I know I do.

Thursday Links: Art Handlers Wear Art Face

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 12:24:34 +0000

Several publications have written articles blaming a large cedar sculpture by Ursula von Rydingsvard for a series of illnesses suffered by agents working out of the Miami field office of the FBI. However, according to reporter Benjamin Sutton, there's no evidence suggesting that the sculpture is responsible for these health problems according to Federal Occupational Health and General Services Administration. [Hyperallergic]
Here come the Best of Lists. Roberta Smith and Holland Cotter are out with theirs and it is expansive. Nice to see that the Times critics like that much art. It's easy to become cynical in the field so it means a lot for two established critics to still support so much art. [The New York Times]
David Salle observes that over the last few decades a focus on theory and relational aesthetics has eroded the idea that art has an "aura". We then, he asks, do we have to replace it with? [ARTnews]
I gotta say, I love this art handlers calendar. It's all black and white photographs of art handlers posing with art face. [Etsy]
This story in Pitchfork about the Oakland warehouse fire is really touching—A bar tender donated his tips to those who lost housemates to help cover rent—but also gets at the struggles of musicians. Venues are vulnerable to displacement. “When you have these closures and this stagnation, people are forced into spaces that aren’t proper." Said Michael Buchanan, a local booker. "And when they lack healthy ways to express themselves, it can be destructive.” [Pitchfork]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Dick in the Park

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 20:32:07 +0000

Some of you may remember Alexandre Louvenaz from yesterday’s GIF of the Day. Her GIF pictured a man with a glowing sword and his barking dog and it was awesome! Now, normally, we feature a number of GIFs by one artist in a post, but because we didn’t want to blow our wade prior to today’s NSFW GIF, we left the above Louvenaz GIF in the reserves for today.

This Week's Must See Events: Crack Some Nuts

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 19:28:24 +0000

Brooklyn Ballet dancers Paunika Jones and Elisabet Rubio. Photo by Stephan Moskovic

This week starts off slow, presumably to give those of us who were at the Miami fairs a bit of time to recover. Today we’ve listed Ballet at the Brooklyn Museum and Faith Ringgold at MoMA and that’s it. Thursday, look out. Chelsea will be a zoo. We’ve listed Michelle Grabner, Xaviera Simmons, and Andrew Kuo as picks, but there’s plenty more to see. Friday head to Bushwick. Every gallery and their dog is hosting an opening, including Parlour and Interstate. We recommend picking up a few Christmas presents at some of these galleries. Emerging art is very affordable, and your parents will either love it or give it back to you. Either way, that’s a win-win scenario.

I Went To The Jewish Museum’s “Take Me (I’m Yours)” And All I Got Was This Stupid T-Shirt

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 13:00:26 +0000

Installation view of the Take Me (I'm Yours). September 16, 2016 – February 5, 2017. The Jewish Museum, NY (Photo by: David Heald; Courtesy The Jewish Museum)

Take Me (I’m Yours) The Jewish Museum 1109 5th Avenue New York, NY On view until February 5, 2017

Wednesday Links: Foot Traffic is Down at 57th Street Galleries

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 11:00:06 +0000

Outside the Trump Tower

Jerry Saltz discusses Andreas Gursky's "Amazon", a photograph taken inside an Amazon warehouse in Phoenix, as it pertains to the election. Saltz describes the photograph as depicting the "almost-unknowable patterns of contemporary mass consumption and the hyper-distribution of goods." Seems like this photograph really has scale going for it. It's 81.5 × 160.25 inches. [Vulture]
Retail sales on 57th and 5th street are way down thanks to the Trump Tower security for the president-elect's family—which is now advertising the security as a draw. That means galleries in that neighborhood such as Tibor de Nagy, Marian Goodman and Mary Boone are all being effected. Nobody is happy. [Artnet news]
Naeem Mohaiemen, in a piece illustrated with Hans Haacke's photos from Saadiyat Island, writes about the efforts of the Gulf Labor Coalition. From the text: "Defiance is welcomed when it is sanctioned and staged as art. Drill a crater in the floor, flood a gallery, embalm an animal, smash an object, stage a pitiful death—critics hail these gestures as having the power to “shape worlds.” But when artists sit down at a conference table with museum administrators and read from a list of demands for labor rights, this work—involving conversation, negotiation, research, protest—suddenly becomes illegible to the same museum. The artists whose projects were previously praised as stretching boundaries are now tagged as maverick spoilers." [The Walker Art Center]
Josh Baer says Brett Gorvy, the Chair of Contemporary and Post War art at Christie's will be leaving to join the gallery Dominique Levy. [Baer Faxt]
Does the Oakland Warehouse Fire "mean the end of these spaces in the Bay Area and with it the last vestige of any kind of affordable artists community?’” asks artist Aaron Muszalski. No real answer here, because once you make a warehouse space legal for residence the rents go up. [The New York Times]
The Art Newspaper's full coverage of the Art Basel Miami here. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: Alexandre Louvenaz

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 18:41:08 +0000

Back in January we posted Cucumber Cat GIF, which remains one of my favorite GIFs of all time. It’s a classic meme, in which a 3D rendered cat is comically frightened by a cucumber. It is hilarious.

Now, nearly a year later, Alexandre Louvenaz brings us more 3D animations! The one above, White Magic, features a dog barking at flames, and a guy with a glowing sword. Every time he unsheaths his sword, the dog goes quiet and a strobe light goes off. It’s the inverse of what you’d imagine—wouldn’t a magic sword make a dog nervous? But I guess this dog understands who’s boss. It’s the sword.

Turbulence.org Announces It Will No Longer Shutter. Moves to Canada.

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 18:13:15 +0000

A Turbulence.org commission.

Good news: Turbulence.org will stay online! Last March, the non-profit commissioning net art from the US and abroad announced it would shutter December 1st. Co-founder Helen Thorington cited the long standing issue amongst non-profits—program grants that don’t cover operational costs, and the increased costs associated with web hosting. Web hosting costs run at about $1000 per month. It was unclear whether they would be able to preserve the website.

The Miami Art Fairs: Final Thoughts and Reflections

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 15:27:05 +0000

Scope Art Fair

A few stray observations now that the fairs are over.

Dealers may not have been worried early on last week, but by Sunday it had become clear that many of those participating in the satellite fairs had not sold enough to cover their expenses. I spoke to dealers from UNTITLED., Pulse, Aqua and Satellite on Saturday and Sunday, many of whom suffered tremendously for the reduced foot traffic. Art Basel and NADA were slower, but seemed less affected than the smaller fairs.

Anecdotal evidence of slimmer crowds this year: little to no Uber surge rates; the ability to drive from South Beach to the mainland in less than an hour.

As I mentioned previously, the reasons for thinner attendance seem more likely to be Zika fears and art fair fatigue than election woes, since many art collectors are Trump supporters. Still, most parties I attended included a lot of grim predictions about the fate of our democracy. Not much dancing this year.

No post about Art Basel this time. Why? There's very little to say about the main fair. Crowds were thinner. The art is the same list of A-list artists we see every year. There were a few highlights, of course, which can be viewed on my flickr feed.

Context and Art Miami were oddly buzzy. The two fairs carry a lot of second-rate secondary market work, so it's not our bag, but according to at least one report confirming the hype, the fairs have been getting better. Not sure this explains the buzz. How much better can it get? It's still the same fair. But perhaps they are benefiting from being the only game in town on the mainland (save for Design Miami).

As per usual, we didn't cover the Scope Art Fair. They show too much bad art to make a review worth it. That stopped me from attending years ago, but AFC's Michael Anthony Farley was more brave. During his visit, I received the following texts:

This is like walking through a sitcom about an art fair.
There are rumors that Kevin Federline is going to come.

Tuesday Links: Synergy Handbags

Tue, 06 Dec 2016 11:57:52 +0000

Helen Marten has won the 2016 Turner Prize for her assemblage sculptures. This win seems to be attracting more criticism than normal. ARTnews editor Andrew Russeth took to twitter to say Anthea Hamilton was robbed. And on the conservative end of things, British MP Michael Rove complained that Marten's work did not live up to the prize's name. [Hyperallergic]
Oh man. Artsy landed an interview with Ivanka Trump (Update: The post is from three years ago.). Nominally, the point was to ask her about her art collection. (She likes Cy Twombly and Christopher Wool, and a bunch of young male artists too—Wade Guyton, Nate Lowman, Alex Israel, Dan Colen, Joe Bradley). The larger point of the interview seems to be brand schilling. She fluffs up the Artsy name, which she claims democratizes art thanks to the accessibility of masterpieces and then talks about her new lifestyle brand projects. "There is a lot of synergy between the Ivanka Trump brand and the Trump Organization and our goal is to continue to enhance that for the consumer." [Artsy]
Andrew Uroskie review of Chrissie Iles "Dreamlands" exhibition at the Whitney is a bit hard to follow, but there are some smart nuggets. For example, he sees the show as an attempt to test cinema’s transformation of modern perception and subjectivity and identifies three enduring themes: the dissolution of a sense of place, the changing character of documentation, and the transformation of the self through the creation of alternate phantasmatic realities. [4columns]
A fire in an Oakland warehouse killed at least 36 people, many of them artists. The artists were occupying the building illegally and there's been some speculation that the blast may have been started by an electrical fire. The residents had been priced out of the San Francisco Bay area. [The New York Times]
Listen to Hrag Vartanian's three part series on Standing Rock, where thousands of water protectors and their allies have congregated to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline. [Hyperallergic]
This is handy: A holiday tipping guide for your building staff. [Curbed]

Satellite Remains a Bright Star in Gloomy Art Week

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 19:08:06 +0000

New Orleans-based performer Dangerous Rose with a "Make America Great Again" sign.

Even when it’s sunny, it feels as if there’s a dark cloud over Miami Beach this year. I’m not sure if this is the result of the election, concerns over ever-increasing costs, or just general fatigue. But almost everywhere we’ve gone, people seem stressed or listless. There’s not a lot of programming at the big fairs anyone has been excited about.

Seeking Highlights at Pulse

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 17:20:49 +0000

At The Pulse entrance in Miami

What kind of dealer is the Pulse Art Fair trying to attract? It’s unclear, and that in combination with years of accepting whoever had the booth fee, has had an impact. Without a recognizable identity, the fair will continue to struggle to hold onto its stronger exhibitors and attract new ones.

That much is on view right now, as Pulse might be most notable for its regrettable art: greeting card-esque floral photographs, a cheeseball sculpture of motorcycles cuddling, and a red enamel figure sitting on top of shiny mountain of metal. Given this showing, it’s no surprise most dealers we spoke to seemed anxious. Even the spin seemed more transparent than usual “I think the fair’s even better than last year,” one dealer told me, but then failed to name a single booth I should visit.

NADA on Top

Sat, 03 Dec 2016 15:25:51 +0000

The Deauville

A cab driver told me there are fewer people in Miami beach this year due to Zika fears. An artist told me there were fewer artists in Miami due to Donald Trump’s election. Everyone tells me they have fair fatigue. But dealers, willing to refute any and all evidence to the contrary, say their fairs have been busy.

Whether or not anyone is suffering as a result, one thing is certain: attendance is way off from last year. There are fewer people in the streets and at the fairs across the board. Certainly this was the case at NADA yesterday, which was uncharacteristically quiet. Not that this seemed to bother the dealers. Most were relaxed and seemed content, having made their sales the day before. This stood in stark contrast to Pulse, where even the slightest expression of interest, inspired long sales pitches and desperate looks. I felt bad for them.

UNTITLED: Bright Lights, Dim Content

Wed, 30 Nov 2016 13:45:57 +0000

The entrance to UNTITLED.

Evidence that the election results have had any impact on the art fairs were scant at best yesterday. Artist Jason Lazarus told me he kept hearing that this was the year artists would skip, but as I walked around UNTITLED., I didn’t notice any fewer artists then usual. I witnessed plenty of sales, though, and the dealers mostly seemed pleased. Collectors are aware of their upcoming tax windfall.

The AFC Selected Miami Art Fair Guide

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 13:44:00 +0000

Most people we know are flying into Miami and staying for only a couple of days. In our opinion, this is the best way to see the fairs—quickly enough to minimize the pain. But those who stay for only two or three days won’t be able to see all the fairs, so the trip requires some advance research. Our guide will help with that. We’re not listing all the fairs—only the ones worth your time and money.

Your Miami Tax Guide: Yes, You Can Deduct That Piña Colada

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 12:45:57 +0000

After a few weeks diligently absorbing the dark, awful post-election news, I’m ready to turn my attention to fun, sun, and travel deductions for the Miami art fairs.

To review the basics, if you’re a professional artist with a profit motive, you’re reporting your income each year on a Schedule C (as part of your 1040 form), and the beauty in that is that it entitles you to list your income and your expenses. So as a self-employed person, you are paying taxes on the difference between those numbers (aka your “profit,” which is income - expenses), and not on the gross income you receive.

Tuesday Links: This is the Last of the Them for a While

Tue, 29 Nov 2016 12:27:21 +0000

We’re opening our show “Strange Genitals” at Satellite, so between that and covering the fairs we’ve got our hands full. This is the last of the links for the week.

The secret trash collection of a retired New York sanitation worker Nelson Molina is its own museum. I want to see this so badly. [Atlas Obscura]
I'm a little skeptical of the idea that Ivanka Trump is a voice of reason. Artists are protesting outside her house because she buys contemporary art and seems to be more rationale than her father. But she spent the week leading up to the holidays meeting with foreign leaders about Trump Hotels and has filed 25 new trademark registrations since the beginning of the year. (Meaning they've been making plans for their conflicts of interest to pay off.) She's just as corrupt as her father. [The New York Times]
I've been following Hrag Vartanian pretty closely on Facebook these days. He went to Standing Rock North Dakota over thanksgiving to report on the protests there and is promising a podcast this week. Standing Rock is an Indian reservation of the Sioux Tribe and the protests regard the Dakota Access Pipeline, which directly threatens the only water supply for the Standing Rock Reservation. [Facebook]
No Miami based artists were chosen for the Whitney Biennial. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Live From Miami

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 22:40:20 +0000

Greetings from Miami. We’ll be posting from this location for the rest of the week in order to give you the low down on the fairs. Some GIFs to help get us in the mood. All of these were found using the search term s “Miami” and “Vaporwave”, an electronic music subgenre that originated during the early 2010s. Enjoy!

Matthew Metzger's Sweet Peace

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 14:40:27 +0000

Matthew Metzger, Installation view. "The Shadow of the Mailer", left. "The Wedge", right.

The Shade of a Line October 29 - December 3, 2016 ARRATIA BEER, Berlin

We live in terrible times. I need not explain that assertion. And while I do not subscribe to the reading of art as always and/or necessarily “therapeutic”, it would be silly of me to not acknowledge that art can be therapeutic, even healing. To wit, Matthew Metzger’s exhibition The Shade of a Line is the Xanax in my tea.

Monday Links: Tangible Outcomes on Sparse Display

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 13:28:44 +0000

Xaviera Simmons, Landscape (2 Women), 2007.

Is it cheating our links to link to someone else's links? If so, today we cheat. Hrag Vartanian's weekend links have so much good stuff in them we're compelled to list the whole post here. From Amanda Palmer's refusal to stop talking about politics to Jen Graves' account of her discussion with Marina Abramovic every link felt relevant and important. That's fantastic because the political climate right now can make art feel unimportant—this is proof that art doesn't disappear in times like this. [Hyperallergic]
Madonna's gonna perform during Art Basel. [artnet News]
I wrote a tribute to Pauline Oliveros in this week's newsletter. She died last Friday at the age of 84. (Sign up for the AFC Newsletter here.) [AFC Weekly]
No disrespect to the various art editors putting together listicles about how to fix the art world, but there seems to be little purpose to these lists other than to generate traffic. I mean, is there any other tangible outcome from the list other than traffic? [ARTnews]
The Modern Art Podcast: Xaviera Simmons. [Manpodcast]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Terrible Sexy Thanksgiving

Thu, 24 Nov 2016 00:56:33 +0000

Although no one is likely at work today, some of these might be NSFFamily. These are the worst sexy Thanksgiving GIFs I could find. If you need to change the conversation subject at dinner, just pull any of the really homoerotic ones up on your phone and hold it up to silence your cousin’s pro-Trump rant.

With Art As My Witness: Carrie Mae Weems at Jack Shainman Gallery

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 14:19:58 +0000

Carrie Mae Weems, All the Boys (Profile 2), 2016, archival pigment print (©Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)

Carrie Mae Weems Jack Shainman Gallery 513 West 20th Street and 524 West 24th Street New York, NY On view until December 10, 2016

Wednesday Links: Watch this Dog Eat Goldfish

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 11:39:34 +0000

This slow-motion video of a pug eating a Goldfish cracker is the most captivating thing you can watch this morning. [Facebook]
Uh, architect Moon Hoon has completed one of the strangest/creepiest museums we’ve ever seen, located outside Seoul. The museum comprises a series of lumpy silver buildings for a collector of Pinocchio dolls and memorabilia. [Dezeen]
Congratulations to Piper Shepard, a MICA fibers professor who was just awarded a $50,000 United States Artists prize. The nomination was anonymous, and she still has no idea who entered her name. [The Baltimore Sun]
Artists respond to the stand-off in Standing Rock, where Native Americans are fighting to protect their lands from the horribly ill-conceived Dakota Access Pipeline. [Hyperallergic]
Capitalist irony: a recently discovered East German stained glass window completed in 1982 for the Stasi secret police will go on sale in Miami for upwards of $20 million. The piece is the work of Otfried Wilhelm, chief master of glass for public works in the German Democratic Republic. The motif features Lenin, doves, and a hammer and sickle. [The New York Times]
A Salem State University exhibition has been censored after students complained that it featured a digital painting of Klansmen by Garry Harley. [necn]
David Hockney has been tapped to design a new stained glass window for Westminster Abbey in honor of Queen Elizabeth II. [Blouin Artinfo]
Because none of us are tired of being lectured to or told what to do these past few weeks, read “28 Ways to Change the Art World”. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Randy Cano

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 18:34:08 +0000

I kinda hate that I can’t stop watching this somewhat-horrifying GIF. What makes this melting/deflating man particularly strange is the unlikely logic of his collapse—it appears as if he’s a membrane hanging upright by his nostrils and ear, two stationary anchors from which the rest of his skin sloughs off. The otherwise intense realism of his textured skin down to the stubble intensifies the creepy factor here.

Tuesday Links: Creepy Jeff Koons Sculpture Heads to Paris

Tue, 22 Nov 2016 12:26:45 +0000

Jeff Koons

Fascinating/sad: ten illustrators discuss their work for the election, produced when they assumed Hillary Clinton would win the presidency. There’s even a GIF in there. [GQ]
Jeff Koons is donating a giant public sculpture of a hand clutching tulips to the city of Paris, in memory of the victims of last year’s ISIS attacks. [The New York Times]
Looking for an actually lucrative use for your sculpture BFA? People are paying big money for ultra-realistic, ultra-creepy baby dolls. [Mashable]
Snøhetta’s plan for a pedestrianized Times Square is nearly complete. The plazas are expected to be mostly realized just in time for New Year's Eve, the ultimate test of crowd control (awful, awful crowd control). [Curbed]
Ever heard of the Rent Stabilization Association? Sounds like they’d support rent stabilization, but they’re really just a bunch of fat cat developers who want even more money. They’ve put out an anti-DeBlasio ad which casts a man with a thick New York accent pillorizing the major for collecting rent from tenants, but disallowing those with stabilized buildings to do the same. He even appointed committee members to the rent stabilization board. Good grief. These landlords need to suck it up. There’s hardly any affordable space left in New York. Give a tenant a chance. [YouTube]
Speaking of rent stabilized buildings, one loophole the Rent Stabilization Association failed to point out, is an MCI, which allows landlords to make building repairs and bill their tenants for it. Now there are all kinds of reports of landlords not making those repairs. [Village Voice]
Just in time for ABMB, the ICA Miami is finally slated to move into its new home by Aranguren & Gallegos Arquitectos. This is great news, because the provisional space they’ve been using (an office building owned by a museum supporter) kinda sucks as a context for art-viewing. But this new building is surprisingly underwhelming as a work of architecture. Maybe it’s subversive, on some level, to be the least-flashy new building in the Design District, overshadowed by starchitect-designed purse stores. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Bill Domonkos

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 18:14:02 +0000

Bill Domonkos has an entire Tumblr full of somewhat creepy black-and-white GIFs. These remind me of early surrealist experiments in film and animation. Mostly, the top GIF sums up the experience of running for the train in the morning when you feel totally dead.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Give Thanks for Kate Bush

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 17:03:35 +0000

It’s a slow week, but one with just enough good events to keep any Thanksgiving-related food coma at bay. Monday night, we’ve got two book release events with talks and more! Fragments of Metropolis – Rhein & Ruhr launches with a panel discussion at NYU’s Deutsches Haus and Douglas Crimp: Before Pictures is kicking-off at The Kitchen. Tuesday, rising video art star Sondra Perry speaks at SVA and bitforms gallery returns to its roots for a homecoming party. Wednesday, MoMA opens a Josef Albers exhibit that shows the color guru’s dark(room) side.

Carolee Schneemann’s Body Is A Battlefield At PPOW Gallery and Galerie Lelong

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 12:00:41 +0000

Carolee Schneemann, Fresh Blood, 1983/2004, c-print (© Carolee Schneemann; Courtesy PPOW Gallery; Photo: James Brown)

Carolee Schneemann: Further Evidence–Exhibit A PPOW Gallery 535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor New York, NY

Carolee Schneemann: Further Evidence–Exhibit B Galerie Lelong 528 West 26th Street New York, NY Both shows on view until December 3, 2016

Monday Links: Trans Visibility, Market Disconnect, Skyscraper Glare, and Dystopian Book Covers

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 11:53:35 +0000

Daniel Brown's new cover art for William Gibson's "Sprawl Trilogy"

Yesterday was the 18th annual Trans Day of Remembrance. Today, Sabine Heinlein considers the state of trans artists working now—namely, there’s unprecedented acceptance and demand for trans visibility in the arts, even as American politics swing radically to the Right. [The Guardian]
Long, weird read: Kenny Schachter on the surreal state of Manhattan’s art market, where dealers/collectors’ inscrutable dances and financial mechanisms are set against a backdrop of political uncertainty and constant protests in the street. [artnet News]
Erick Antonio Benitez: Esta Tierra es Tu Tierra just closed at Current Gallery in Baltimore. It was a really great show about the Mexico/US border. If I had seen it before the closing reception, I totally would’ve reviewed it. Thankfully, BmoreArt beat us to it. [BmoreArt]
New editions of William Gibson’s most iconic literary works will feature cover art by British digital artist Daniel Brown. Brown used fractal mathematics to abstract architectural photography into an Escher-esque dystopia. I’m not sure I like these. The material’s very dear to my heart, but the execution just feels underwhelming. [Dezeen]
Extrapolating from the popular phrase “arts ecosystem,” Taryn Wiens argues that we should care more about protecting the art world’s “biodiversity.” Namely, there isn’t an existent art space that functions quite like Seattle’s recently-defunct, one-room residency/gallery Suyama, and that makes its closure an important loss. [Temporary Arts Review]
The strange, strange story of how a pension-fund-backed luxury condominium tower’s glare upon an art museum led the city of Dallas to the brink of bankruptcy. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Wire Frame PC

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 19:14:15 +0000

There’s something a little humorous about a 3D architectural rendering of a PC computer. It’s not going to require a team of builders to install this thing. Still, the computer does have an institutional quality to it, so the treatment makes sense. Also, it just looks good, aesthetically.

As a side note, I found this via Tom Moody’s blog, who posted the image with a hat tip to superamiga. I did a reverse image search for the GIF and google brought up no results. Seeing as how I actually found the image online, this begs the question: When did google start sucking so much? Are they like everything else now, where you have to pay to be seen at all?

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE at AICAD: Art Should be Done From Your Death Bed Looking Back

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 17:35:44 +0000

“Creation is divine work,” proclaimed Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE this past Wednesday. God’s first acts were to create the world, and Genesis, an adopted name gestures to this history. H/er words served to introduce a lecture prepared for the seminar class at AICAD and represented the event programming for AFC’s curated exhibition “Strange Genitals”. The talk was something of a divine experience.

By way of background, the point of the exhibition and auxiliary programming was less about showcasing a bunch of weird dicks and vag’s than it was offering the broadest possible look at gender—and by extension art. BREYER P-ORRIDGE, who identifies as pandrogynous, a separate entity made through the union of two bodies, is a perfect fit in this regard. (S/he and h/er now deceased wife, Lady Jaye have had extensive surgery to look like one another and create a separate entity that is both of them.) Moreover, BREYER P-ORRIDGE has made h/er entire life a work of art, thus offering up the most expansive definition of art we’ve seen. “As far as we’re concerned” s/he said of art, “it’s a spiritual path.”

Reading Félix González-Torres in Times of Fascism

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:45:11 +0000

Félix González-Torres, ‘Untitled (Perfect Lovers)’ 1991.

Over the past week, several texts from previous rounds of the Culture Wars have been replaying in my head. Mostly, they’ve been screamed—I can’t stop listening to Riot Grrrl. I highly recommend it.

But a quieter voice has been steadily bubbling up, that of queer Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres. His nuanced, thoughtful observations on sociopolitical conflict, the Right Wing agenda, and the Left’s dysfunctions are so singularly true and poignant that it’s physically painful to know he’s no longer with us. (Indeed, next time someone says “well, we survived the Reagan years!” I’m tempted to remind them of the hundreds of thousands of voices absent from the political discourse due to that administration’s failure to address the AIDS epidemic.)

Working Through Post-Election Grief with This Riot Grrrl Playlist

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:26:26 +0000

For many of us feminists, the election of Donald Trump might just be the single worst event we’ve collectively experienced. This statement needs no litany of examples to back it up.

Of course, many people—myself included—have been glued to social media, religiously reading political commentary, the news, and critical theory to help process how royally fucked the world is. But honestly, the only thing that I have found to be remotely comforting is feminist punk.

Friday Links: The $1 Billion Week in Art

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:21:21 +0000

The Whitney Biennial list is out. Lots of new artist names for this one and lots of political work. Looking forward to it. [The New York Times]
Artist Caroline Woolard's How the Art World Can Change for the Better During the Trump Years, includes a list of concrete ways to combat economic inequality. I dunno about some of the suggestions on this list. Holding a seminar for white liberals to bemoan their guilt over their privilege sounds like not the best use of time. Paying artists, interns and staff well is essential—but to do this we also have to figure out ways to make non-profits and for-profit businesses in the arts more sustainable. [Hyperallergic]
ARTnews has released a mammoth feature in which it asks artists, curators and dealers how to "fix" the art world. The contributions of W.A.G.E. and Martha Wilson in particular seem useful. [ARTnews]
Sotheby's Contemporary Art Auction sale last night brought in $276.6 million, a total that exceeded its low estimate of $209 million. This sounds pretty good, and the press has been covering the results that way, but collector Alain Servais expressed reservations over twitter. Many of the major works came with irrevocable guarantees, meaning a third party pledged a bid prior to the auction to win the picture if other competition didn’t materialize. [Blouin ArtINFO]
And this week was a 1 billion week in art sales. [Bloomberg]

GIF of the Day: Patrick Lichty

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 23:05:40 +0000

Back in March Transfer held a group screening for NarGIFsus, a show curated by Carla Gannis that invited more than 60 artists to present selfie-self portraits. We need a bit of levity, so we’re highlighting the work of one artist in that show—Patrick Lichty. For this project Lichty made a self portrait of his digital self. The figure is his Second Life avatar, Man Michinaga, surrounded by cats, Confused Travolta (his totem at the time), on a background of flying saucer invasions. When he sent us the animated GIF he offered the following explanation. “I live in Dubai, so my life IS science fiction.”

Alex Da Corte Takes On The Founding Fathers In 'A Man Full Of Trouble'

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 14:44:51 +0000

Installation view of Alex Da Corte's 'A Man Full Of Trouble' at Maccarone (Courtesy of the artist and Maccarone, NY/LA)

Alex Da Corte: A Man Full Of Trouble Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street New York, NY On view until December 17, 2016

Now that the country has elected a threatening Wizard of Oz figure for president, any art that takes aim at the myth of American exceptionalism feels pretty relevant. The democratic dream created in 1787 looks a lot like a nightmare in 2016. And with the news of White House staff and potential Cabinet appointments reading like a list of supervillains, it’s refreshing when art can articulate a pointed skepticism of America’s promise.

Thursday Links: Welcome to the Kakistocracy

Thu, 17 Nov 2016 11:38:59 +0000

T. Rutt, “Flag desecration artwork” (2016)

Apparently there’s a Greek word to describe our current state of affairs: kakistocracy. "n. 1829, ’government by the worst element of a society,’ coined on analogy of its opposite, aristocracy, from Greek kakistos ‘worst,’ superlative of kakos ‘bad’ (which perhaps is related to the general IE word for ‘defecate’;" [Dictionary.com]
Max Robinson’s review of Arrival pretty much sums up everything I was thinking when I (Michael) saw the film Tuesday night. Except I was also thinking “This is The Notebook meets Contact.” [City Paper]
Looters have been pillaging Italy’s earthquake damaged towns for artwork. This is so sad. [The Daily Beast]
Miami’s Red Dot Art Fair won’t be showing art collective T.Rutt’s “T.RUMP” bus, a repurposed Trump campaign bus that has been used for anti-Trump protest art during the election. Eric Smith, president and CEO of Redwood Media Group, which owns Red Dot, has decided to revoke T.Rutt’s space in light of the election results and potentially inflammatory nature of their work. To which we say, fuck you. Also, has anyone ever cared about Red Dot? (We stopped reviewing the fair in 2008 because they made the art viewing experience so depressing it wasn’t worth it.) We’re pleased to say Satellite, where we’ll be exhibiting, offered T.Rutt a booth, but didn’t have a place to park the bus. [Hyperallergic]
Finally some good news for the gays: Kensington Palace is opening an exhibition about the wardrobe of Princess Diana. [artnet News]
Rob Pruitt had been planning an exhibition at Gavin Brown Enterprises of his celebrity look-a-like paintings. Now, he’s made an eleventh-hour decision to show a selection of his portraits of Obama instead, citing the election as impetus. [ARTnews]
Lincoln Center has named Debora L. Spar its new president. Spar replaces Jed Bernstein who was forced to leave after failing to disclose an affair with a woman he’d promoted. Spar will be the first woman to lead the center, which is the nation’s largest performing arts non profit. [The New York Times]
Finding substantive auction coverage isn’t easy. With the exception of ARTnews, I haven’t read a single report that’s noted that Gerhardt Richter’s Düsenjet, Phillip’s top selling lot in yesterday’s contemporary evening sale, was guaranteed. These reports shouldn’t just offer up a bunch of numbers but account for the conditions informing the sales. [ARTnews]
Inside the most terrifying place in the world: the factory in Japan that churns out rubber Donald Trump masks. Apparently they’re having trouble keeping up with demand. This video is so creepy. [The Guardian]
Temporary Art Review is releasing a special anthology binder, To Make Public, sampling five years of critical, artist-centric writing. [Temporary Art Review]

NSFW GIF of the Hump-Day: See Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Speak at Strange Genitals TONIGHT at 6

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 18:01:47 +0000

Shockingly, the below GIFs are the only vaguely NSFW GIFs from the groundbreaking oeuvre of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge that I could find. S/he will be speaking tonight as part of F.A.G.’s Strange Genitals exhibition, at the AICAD Seminar Gallery in 20 Jay Street (suite M10).

Genesis was the founder of the innovative music/performance art group Psychic TV

I can’t overstate how much we recommend this artist talk. There are few people with as unique a perspective on gender, sex, politics, music, and art out there. So hurry to DUMBO! Of course, it’s free!

Wednesday Links: Sean Hannity Gifts Trump Painting of White Man Being Forgotten By Obama

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 12:34:44 +0000

Sean Hannity just bought Donald Trump a painting by Right-wing-kitsch producer Jon McNaughton, painter of gems such as a tableau depicting Jesus delivering the constitution to the Founding Fathers and “One Nation Under Socialism,” in which Obama burns said Jesus-given constitution. The one Hannity purchased for Trump shows all the white presidents looking disappointed at Obama, because Obama is ignoring a dejected-looking white guy sitting on a bench. According to McNaughton’s Twitter, this is destined as a housewarming gift for the White House. [Wonkette]
Has a French family had a notebook full of Van Gogh sketches in their oblivious ownership for generations? Scholars are divided on the authenticity of one such claim. [The Telegraph]
The Memphis School is making an art world comeback, in the market and in exhibitions. [artnet News]
The Upper West Side’s Trump Place development will be getting a new name, after tenants petitioned that they were embarrassed to live in buildings once owned by the president elect. [Curbed]
Architect Max von Werz has renovated a 1960s concrete building into a new home for Mexico City’s OMR gallery. It’s so nice, if you’re a fan of brutalism. [Dezeen]
David Newbury a technologist speaking at the Museum Computer Network conference had this to say about art. “Art is nothing important. Where it’s important is where it connects people to people and people to events and people to things. It’s a social network of objects.” Beautiful. [Hyperallergic]
The Michelin Star winners are out. I’m (Paddy) always surprised St. Anslem isn’t on their list. [Gothamist]
Ohad Meromi’s hot pink sculpture "The Sunbather" has been installed in Queens, and some neighbors aren’t too thrilled about it. I (Michael) kinda like it. Nobody ever unanimously agrees on public art. Let’s stop pretending that every person has to personally engage with every artwork in the public sphere. [QNS]
Wow, this Apartment Therapy guide to hanging art is truly terrible. Their formula is likely to confuse everyone who hasn’t hung art before and will likely have dwellers end up with a lot of crooked art on the wall. Don’t use this guide. [Apartment Therapy]
Christie’s Contemporary Sale Auction results are $277 million with 89% of lots sold. That sale total is down from last year, which totalled $331.8 million but with 80% of the lots sold. Josh Baer, asks in his newsletter, “We wonder which had a greater effect from sales a year ago - the post election climate or the fact Loic Gouzer has been missing in action at Christie’s with his knee injury??” [The Baer Faxt]
An early self portrait by Frida Kahlo was gifted to one of her studio assistants shortly after the artist’s death. It’s remained in a private home and relatively obscure for 60 years. Now it’s heading to auction. [Huffington Post]

GIF of the Day: 100 GIFs by Marco Rosella

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 19:56:13 +0000

Thanks to last week's internet flea market "Internet Yami-ichi", we were introduced to Marco Rosella's GIFs. I paid just $1 for a USB drive in the shape of key that held 100 of Rosella's GIFs. The project gets a nod for packaging, but to be honest the result is a bit disappointing. The animation categories map back to his projects, so the GIFs are little more than promotion. I guess some props should be given to the artist for that, though. It worked.

The Heart of New York Lives on a Sticky

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 19:31:29 +0000

Matthew Chavez

I don’t believe it’s necessary to see all art in person. As the existence of Contemporary Art Daily demonstrates good documentation can go pretty far and for some exhibitions understanding the concept is more than enough.

There is a danger in living by that assumption, though, in that it’s easy to miss shows that need to be seen in person. That almost happened to me this week, when I stumbled upon Matthew Chavez’s “Subway Therapy” after coming home from dinner. I’d already read about his piece, which invites riders to express their feelings in whatever way they might need. The project began in June, but after the election, Chavez brought pens and sticky notes to the subway, and riders came by the thousands to express their feelings. Now, a subway wall on 14th between fifth and sixth is coated with people’s thoughts.

How Donald Trump's Tax Plan Will Effect Arts Workers: There's Bad Stuff Coming

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 15:37:46 +0000

It’s been a terrible week. Tuesday’s election of Donald Trump has already damaged the emotional wellbeing of our country and its citizens. He will do much worse in the long term.

Most immediately, many of us are feeling wrecked. I include myself in that group. I had envisioned taking my daughters to the inauguration of the first woman President, and assured them that a bully and an abuser would not be chosen by the American people. Not only will we not see the inauguration of the first woman President, but a bully and an abuser has been chosen by the American people. This is not the history I’d hoped my children would live through.

Tuesday Links: Enough with Hans Ulrich Obrist's Face Already

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 12:20:30 +0000

Salvador Dali's "Paysage avec Femme" (detail), 1934 Sotheby's Impressionist and Modernist sale

I (Michael) took a lot of flak for my criticism of Light City, a “light art” festival that the Baltimore Office of Promotion and the Arts sunk millions of dollars into. Now, apparently, even the people who started Light City are unhappy about it. [City Paper]
A holographic Virgin Mary that visitors can “destroy” by artist Timo Toots is causing a problem for an Estonian museum. Man, I love how weird headlines have been now that the culture wars have moved into our “awful future” era. [The Art Newspaper]
Even the promise to work with President-elect Donald Trump is sparking outrage. The American Institute of Architects sent out one such note to its members, causing a backlash from many of its 89,000 members. Good. [Hyperallergic]
Has the art world had enough of curators? Not sure, but I’ve (Paddy) definitely had enough of Hans Ulrich Obrist being the face of all curators. Replacements for the term include “organized by” and “exhibition maker”. [artnet News]
Dealer turned art fair manager Edward Winkleman is using his facebook feed and blog to begin a new series called “History Repeating”. Like the rest of us, he’s terrified by what electing Trump will mean for the country and is pointing out similarities in history where dictators did terrible things. If you’re thinking of Hitler and Nazi Germany, you’re on the right track. [Edward Winkleman]
And here’s a post from a conservatively leaning website, contemplating the moral implications for Republicans who must chose whether they will serve under Trump. To sum up the message: “Don’t do it. Save yourselves.” Great. [Just Security]
Deborah Kass's Trump on the cover of New York Magazine. [ARTnews]
Sotheby's Impressionist Modernist sale totaled $157.7 million with 81% of lots sold. Josh Baer says there is a supply problem in the art world that's slowing sales. [The Baer Faxt]

GIF of the Day: John Waters' Female Trouble

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 23:51:33 +0000

A GIF posted without commentary. Do with this what you will.

This Week's Must See Art Events: What the World Needs Now is Genesis Breyer P-Orridge

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 21:34:10 +0000

Probably the most inspiring night of my life was Genesis Breyer P-Orridge’s artist talk at MICA a few years ago. I’m likely paraphrasing here, but there was anecdote along the lines of “If you told me when we were pissing in a bottle as performance art in the Sixties that we’d end up saving dolphins in the Eighties, we wouldn’t have believed it. But now, in retrospect, we see that they’re all parts of the same process.” The message I took away from this: art is important. Working out our frustrations and tears and hopes now might lead to tangible victories in the future—even if they might be considered small in the grand scheme of things.

Monday Links: Florida Man's Erotic Art Heist and Cyborg Custody Battles

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 11:52:01 +0000

Some of the recovered stolen artwork, described by the local news as "too graphic to show on TV."

Headline of the day: “Bizarre erotic art heist unravels.” Unfortunately the story’s not quite as juicy as the title suggests. It’s the standard Florida Man helps mistress steal millions of dollars worth of nudes from her sugar daddy’s island mansion. [KOB 4]
The BALTIC Centre of Contemporary Art is inaugurating a new biennial Artists’ Award, the first of its kind to be awarded to artists by artists. Monica Bonvicini, Mike Nelson, Pedro Cabrita Reis, and Lorna Simpson will each be handing out £30,000 to their selected artists, which includes an honorarium and mostly comprises a budget to produce new work while in residency at BALTIC. [artnet News]
Probably the strangest GoFundMe we’ve ever seen: a dad trying to raise legal fees for a custody battle after his ex-wife deemed him unfit to parent because he’s a cyborg. Yes. Meet “Cyborg Dad”. [GoFundMe]
Starting tonight, Rafael Viñoly’s 432 Park Avenue skyscraper will be illuminated with architectural lighting. So, if you’re looking for the supermoon, you might end up noticing the new skyline instead. [Curbed]
Benjamin Sutton reviews the Phillip Guston show at Hauser & Wirth, which looks at his drawings from 1971-1975. Lot’s of Nixon in those drawings, which these days feels very relevant. [Hyperallergic]
Good news for developers. New York governor Andrew Cuomo has plans to renew the affordable housing program known as 421-a, which expired in January, this time with even more generous terms for those who offer subsidized units. With this new deal, developers get 100 percent tax rebate for 35 years. Not sure I understand why the city needs developers to get richer in order to take care of the poor. [The New York Times]
What will a Trump presidency mean for cities? Short answer: no one really knows. Some are cautiously optimistic about the president elect’s infrastructure “promises” but we’re pretty unconvinced. Brace yourselves for a shitty, shitty ride. [City Lab]

Video of the Week: Yoko Ono's Response to Donald Trump

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 18:19:09 +0000

We feel you, Yoko, we feel you.

Replace this Very-Awkward Thanksgiving with Thank Immigrants Day

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 16:25:36 +0000

This Thanksgiving is going to suck for a lot of people.

Most city dwellers really can’t stomach the prospect of having to sit with one crazy racist uncle who’s going to be gloating about Trump’s win. Some people come from entirely-Republican families, and for them I’m truly sorry. The fact that Thanksgiving is essentially a celebration of colonialism and genocide is the gravy on top of it all.

Art Is The New Black: An Interview With Tatiana von Fürstenberg On “On The Inside”

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:48:40 +0000

Installation view of On The Inside including "Portrait" by Armando M. (Photo by Christopher Watkins)

On The Inside Abrons Arts Center 466 Grand Street New York, NY On view until December 18, 2016

After Donald Trump’s election, private prison stocks soared. While this small but ominous tidbit might be overshadowed by the glut of other horrifying news pouring in since Tuesday, it makes On The Inside, a group show of incarcerated LGBTQ artists at Abrons Arts Center, that much more crucial.

Mark Leckey Made Me Hardcore at MoMA PS1

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 15:11:09 +0000

Mark Leckey, UniAddDumThs (Animal), 2013-2016 (photo by author)

Mark Leckey: Containers and their Drivers MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Avenue Queens, NY On view until March 5, 2017

It’s hard not to see any art through the lens of politics this week. Trump’s unexpected victory leaves little space for anything else–nearly any experience has a surreal quality to it.

Friday Links: RIP Leonard Cohen, America

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 12:35:12 +0000

The Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen has died at the age of 82. Let’s pay our respects to the man by listening to “There Is a War”. It seems appropriate right now. [YouTube]
A topical discussion between journalist Christopher Borrelli and Coya Paz, Director of Free Street Theater in Chicago, “If art can't fix problems, what good is it?” Art is still important. Keep making it and we’ll keep paying attention. [Chicago Tribune]
Roberta Smith affectionately calls Marilyn Minter “A ‘Nasty Woman’ of Contemporary Art” in a great review of her exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. [The New York Times]
A rogue artist therapist set up shop in the 14th Street subway tunnel between Sixth and Seventh Avenues this Wednesday and asked people to share their thoughts on the election via sticky note. About 1500 people participated and those notes were stuck to the subway wall. [Gothamist]
Lise Ragbir, director of the Warfield Center Gallery at the University of Texas at Austin, writes about the importance of exhibition space devoted to art and stories about struggle. Concerning The Smithsonian’s new National Museum of African American History and Culture, “true, there is something disconcerting about housing a Michael Jackson costume and 10 shards of stained glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in the same space.” [TIME]
A new Tumblr, “why we’re afraid”, tracks the surge of hate crimes that have escalated since Trump was elected. I (Michael) personally know two people who have been attacked by Trump supporters in the past 24 hours. This is terrifying. [why we’re afraid]
Critics are complaining that the lede in this auction report describes a shockingly insulated and privileged group. “There were no signs of a post-Brexit or Donald Trump election victory backlash in the art market tonight as, fairly predictably, every lot found a buyer in the first of Sotheby’s three-part, two-day sale of the David Bowie collection.” I’m going to save my outrage for other matters. [artnet News]
Steve Jansen theorizes that arts and culture flourish when a Republican is in the oval office, because artists and musicians are inspired by hardship and a rebellious spirit. It’s a compelling argument. But, like, not if we’re all dead. [Houston Press]

We're Still Here

Fri, 11 Nov 2016 12:27:36 +0000

Dear readers,

This week’s posts have not been easy to assemble. There’s not a shred of post-election news that’s good. It’s all terrible, horrifying and deeply frightening. After a small meeting about how to respond, Michael and I decided that while there is no normal right now, perhaps the best thing we can do for ourselves is carry on. And thus, we have links. And we will have reviews. And we have each other.

GIF of the Day: Let's Cut Off America's Flaccid Orange Dick

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 18:29:34 +0000

There are a lot of reasons we love Phaan Howng, one of the artists in our F.A.G. exhibition Strange Genitals. For starters, she made a giant neon dick covered in vagina-like orifices full of tiny penis teeth. She also strapped it to the hood of her car and drove it Brooklyn from her studio in Baltimore, along with the work of two other artists, when we had a logistical problem due to a family emergency. Phaan is a trooper.

Fear and Loathing in Trump’s America

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 16:10:51 +0000

Photo of the author on Election Night, by Chrissy Abbott for City Paper.

I’ve been drinking pretty much non-stop from around 7 p.m. on election night to about 12 hours ago. That’s when the realization sunk in that the world hasn’t ended—yet—and I had to work today, sober.

I guess cultural commentators are supposed to provide some sort of eloquent, thoughtful observations in times like these. But there’s just not a lot I can muster beyond repeatedly screaming “FUUUUUUCK!”

Thursday Links: The Staten Island Climate Refugee Wall

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 12:05:32 +0000

Trestle Gallery and Brooklyn Art Space are offering grants for artists to relocate to their new studio spaces on 3rd Ave. If you move in December, you could get 1-2 months free rent. [Facebook]
Here’s a map that shows which NYC neighborhoods voted for Donald Trump and which ones voted for Hillary Clinton. In a fitting bit of poetic justice, the Trump supporting neighborhoods are mostly in areas highly vulnerable to sea level rise. When they become climate refugees, we could build a wall, if we’re feeling vindictive. [Curbed]
Photos from Architecture of Color: The Legacy of Luis Barragán, on view at Timothy Taylor 16 x 34. This looks like a really understated show that’s light on the standard architectural documentation/models but captures the Barragán spirit. [ARTnews]
Bayeté Ross Smith invited artists, critics, and other to a multi-venue discussion about gun violence. At one event at a firing range, attendees were given guns to shoot paper images of themselves. This is Brian Boucher’s account, which sounds pretty creepy. [artnet News]
The Daily Mail’s morning-after cover features two train wrecks—the largest of which being the election results, as commemorated by an image from legendary punk artist Gee Vaucher. [NME]
Massive tax cuts for the rich are good for the art market, according to Amy Cappellazzo, co-head of the Fine Arts Department at Sotheby’s and Benjamin Genocchio, the director of the Armory Show. Both made clear that they would have preferred a Trump loss, but they apply a very narrow lens to the presidency. A tax windfall for the rich—which is what they discussed— may benefit the art market, but the tradewars Trump promises will not. Anyone who thinks this is good news is either misguided, uninformed or stands to gain financially through the presidency. [ARTnews]
How the art world is grappling with new media. A bunch of experts weigh in on why it hasn’t been more fully embraced by the art world. [The Art Newspaper]
As many of our readers probably saw over Facebook, last night Trump protests took over the streets of Manhattan. On my own feed, I’ve seen some commentary wondering what the use of the protest is because there’s no stopping Donald Trump from becoming the next president. As one Facebook friend very wisely pointed out, there’s some catharsis to be had simply by getting together with a group and yelling about it. [Gothamist]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: What the Hell is This?

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 19:20:03 +0000

In the aftermath of a Donald Trump election, you wouldn’t think finding a NSFW animated GIF would be that hard. Surely there are millions of people worried the country is fucked. And yet, my google searches for the like mostly led to boilerplate porn fucking—fine if you’re looking to get off, but not exactly what we’re going for here. I’m not sure the GIF below fits the bill either, but it’s a hell of a lot closer. Exactly what is going with faces of these women? I have no idea—I’m not sure it’s even that women friendly—but my own confusion earns it a mention here. Make of this GIF what you will.

The Tears That Donald Trump Brought

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 16:31:19 +0000

When I did sleep last night, I dreamed I was stuck in a small hovel trying to hide from an evil demon. I told my friend there was a demon outside, but he let him in anyway and then left me to defend myself. Somehow, I knew I’d be doing it for a long time—this wasn’t the first time I had the nightmare.

The symbolism in my dreams—when it exists at all—has never been anything but obvious. I woke up to the light of my phone. It was 3 am, but there was so much activity in response to the election, that the battery was drained and the screen was on. Donald Trump’s win of the election was already taking a toll. No one I knew slept for more than three hours.

Wednesday Links: Cue the Art World Election Reactions

Wed, 09 Nov 2016 11:55:47 +0000

At Berg'n in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Image via: Ben Jay / Gothamist

The Trump nightmare is here. Hrag Vartanian has already weighed in. He says we'll have to regroup as an art community. [Hyperallergic]
A morning list of art world reactions to the election on social media. [ARTnews]
More reactions to the election news—this one is artist focused. [The Art Newspaper]
Art critic Blake Gopnik discusses Bruce Conner's nuclear test film, Crossroads, at the Whitney. Naturally he ties it into the election. [artnet News]
Photos and a report from Times Square last night. "I don't let the media dictate anything in my life," said 32-year-old Trump supporter Tonye-D’mitrias Vickers. That sentiment may explain why getting only one endorsement from a major newspaper didn't kill Trump's chances. [Gothamist]

GIF of the Day: Calm Your Mind

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 19:55:13 +0000

We’re all a bit nervous about the election tonight, so here are a few breathing exercises to calm your nerves.

Also, though, a pantsuit is important.

Virginia Heffernan Thinks The Internet Is Art

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 12:58:30 +0000

Promo image for Virginia Heffernan's lecture at SVA last Tuesday (image visa sva.edu)

Virginia Heffernan joined the Internet in 1979 at 9. Growing up near Dartmouth, the cultural critic learned the computer language BASIC from the college’s president John Kemeny with a group of her classmates. I learned this random factoid about Heffernan’s online life at her lecture last Tuesday night at School of Visual Art’s Design Research, Writing and Criticism Department, where she discussed her new book Magic and Loss: The Internet As Art.

Tuesday Links: This Is the Last Day of the Election from Hell

Tue, 08 Nov 2016 12:19:17 +0000

It sucks to work in admissions at this art school in Taiyuan, China. Here are photos of the school’s application process—which involves walking around a hangar-sized building full of 15,000 virtually identical paintings to be graded. [Daily Mail]
“Trump has built his name on his special combination of blandness and opulence, with complete blindness toward anything that makes architecture with a capital A.” Architect and critic Doug Stalker throws some serious shade at “Trumpitecture” in this op-ed. [Dezeen]
Stephen Hibberts bought a trampled, falling-apart painting at a French market for about $450. Now, he suspects it might be a Raphael. [National Post]
Photographer and writer Chris Arnade put 100,000 miles on his car and talked to voters in low income neighborhoods and photographed them. Yesterday he tweeted some of their stories. [@chris_arnade]
Author and Modern Art Notes podcast host Tyler Green is posting art by American women all day on twitter in support of Hillary Clinton. [@tylergreendc]
Anti-Donald Trump quarters are popping up around the country. That’s the whole story. [Hyperallergic]
Los Angeles is launching a new billboard design from Tom Wiscombe Architecture that aims to combine advertising, sculptural public space, and digital artworks. It’s weird and seems like something that should be in a fountain in a Las Vegas porte-cochère. [The Guardian]
The 24th annual Canstruction NY exhibition and competition has produced some crazy sculptures made out of canned food. NYC’s pizza rat has been immortalized, as has the Guggenheim Museum of Art. [Curbed]
I (Michael) will never forgive myself for missing Tom Sachs’ Space Program: Mars at the Armory in 2012. But maybe this installation from National Geographic is a decent knock-off? Nat Geo had a faux-Mars-mission pop up in Trafalgar Square to promote their new documentary series about the red planet. [Irish Examiner]

GIF of the Day: Election Mode on High

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 18:51:01 +0000

I called my mother Saturday morning and it was as if she was running the above script through her mind. She’s Canadian, but told me she was in a horrible mood because the United States might elect a fascist. Fair enough.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but that’s because pretty much every one I know is doing something to help get voters out for Hillary Clinton. Let’s win this thing. Let’s win the presidency. Let’s win the senate. And then let’s appoint some Supreme Court nominees.

This Weeks Must-See Events: Election 2016 Edition

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 16:27:41 +0000

Ed Ruscha, Untitled, 1985, oil on canvas, 59 1/4 × 145 1/2 inches (150.5 × 369.6 cm) © Ed Ruscha

Expect the next three days to be filled with election news. Events are largely election related, and thus I will be wearing pant suits the whole god damned time. (Go Hillary!) Once that’s passed, there’s a whack of openings in Chelsea Thursday—Andreas Gursky, Paul McCarthy, etc—a must-see ceramics inspired show at Present Company in Bushwick Friday, and Smack Mellon’s 20th Anniversary exhibition Saturday. In short, nothing, not even an election, disrupts the art world.

Monday Links: The Art World Responds to Election Day

Mon, 07 Nov 2016 12:08:32 +0000

All the major auction houses have moved their impressionist and modern sales three weeks into November to avoid overlapping with the US election. Dan Durray reports that "Stephen Suttmeier, a technical research analyst at BofA Merrill Lynch Global Research, has concluded that since 1928, the S&P 500 index has dropped 2.8% on average during election years without an incumbent president seeking re-election." [The Art Newspaper]
Looks like Electric Objects has some competition. Introducing Meural, a display for digital art in which a simple hand gesture can change the image on view. Meural can be oriented in portrait or landscape—Electric Objects requires a hack to orient images in landscape view—but the frames themselves are a bit tacky, as is their library. They've got some work to do. [CNET]
"How ballots get designed is really a combination of local election officials and what their printers can do, if it's a print-based ballot, and what the computers can do, if it's an electronic voting system." says Dana Chisnell co-director of the Center for Civic Design, a nonprofit aimed at developing best practices for election materials. Good lord. [NPR]
Weird. This is what a more accurate world map looks like. [Spoon & Tamago]
Sotheby’s CEO Tad Smith announced this morning that the auction house will post a net loss of $54.5 million for the third quarter. Only 7 percent of Sotheby's sales take place in the third quarter, so they normally take a loss at this time, but the numbers still suck. The decline works out to be roughly 8 percent. [ARTnews]
Ben Davis offers up a comprehensive listicle of art that "mattered" during the 2016 election cycle. If it hit a headline, it's in this list. [artnet News]
Developers really don't care for the affordable housing plan as it is and activists don't think affordable housing is gonna do much of anything. The latest: Fortis Property Group will not seek permission to rezone the site of Long Island College Hospital in Cobble Hill, thus enabling it to build market-rate condos without any price-controlled housing for lower-income residents. [Politico]

GIF of the Day: UNSATISFIED

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 17:22:47 +0000

France’s Parallel Studio created this GIF sequence of minor tragedies, “UNSATISFIED.” It’s hypnotically depressing, but also amazing for its length! I can’t think of another GIF that loops this long.

Wikileaks: Marina Abramović Invited Clinton Campaign Chair to Satanic Menstrual Blood & Sperm Fest?

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 15:07:21 +0000

Halloween may be over, but this shit-show of an electoral haunted-hay-ride just got a little spookier.

Wikileaks has released an email purportedly hacked from Clinton campaign chair John Podesta’s inbox from none other than performance art star Marina Abramović. The email had been forwarded from his brother, lobbyist Tony Podesta last June, inviting John to join him at a “Spirit Cooking” party hosted by Abramović in New York, at the artist’s request.

Friday Links: Anxiety on High

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 11:18:16 +0000

Japanese artist Yukio Takano

As a non-profit AFC isn't supposed to have an official opinion on election politics. But it's four days before the election and for the benefit of the public good, I feel comfortable imploring people not to elect Donald Trump. He brags about sexually assaulting women. He wants to build a wall between the US and Mexico. He seeks to hamper the freedom of the press. He shows no respect for democratic process in the US. His ignorance will start trade wars, destroy the economy and possibly entangle us in nuclear war. I'd like to survive the next four years—don't vote for this guy. And by the way, that Hillary Clinton email scandal is bullshit. [Vox]
Speaking of terrible people, here's a piece on Israel’s Miri Regev who in January 2015 defunded Haifa’s Al-Midan Theater, a liberal drama troupe, for staging a play she judged was secretly “trying to undermine the state.” She then created a “a loyalty in culture bill,” which is currently stuck in the Israeli Knesset. That bill needs to die. [artnet News]
I <3 Nayland Blake. [Hyperallergic]
"The New Imageries of GIF Culture" is a conference that will launch November 24-25 at Università di Bologna. We're said we'll miss it, but excited about the reading list they've assembled. (full disclosure: I'm in it.) [Viral Art]
The Tribeca art scene just got a whole lot bit bigger. Bortalami will move to Walker Street. [ARTnews]
Some mushroom lights. [Colossal]
Take a look at the new NYC subway map. [Curbed]

With A Little Help From My Friends: Ellen Cantor’s ‘Pinochet Porn’ At MoMA

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 12:00:07 +0000

Ellen Cantor. Pinochet Porn. 2008–16. Super 8mm film transferred to video (black and white and color, sound), 123 min (Courtesy the estate of Ellen Cantor)

It’s quite a surprise that a film titled Pinochet Porn depicts a tender portrait of friendship. Granted, Ellen Cantor’s final film buries that theme under a shocking mélange of spank-heavy sex scenes, depressed clowns, descriptions of rape and torture over vintage Pepsi ads and disturbing archival footage of the Pinochet dictatorship, Hitler and September 11th. But looking beyond its violent and erotic imagery, the film is a celebration of a close-knit avant-garde community.

Thursday Links: Image of Angelina Jolie Bleeding Will be Offered at Art Basel

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 11:11:45 +0000

Looks like the New York is poised to ram through the streetcar line that nobody needs but the development company Two Trees. The line serves all of their major development projects, and was a conceived of by a non-profit they founded to conduct studies the city could use to bolster their case for it. It's supposed to be appealing because it will cost a fraction of the amount it would cost to build a subway—they estimate 2.5 billion—but the city plans to pay for it by increasing property tax. So gentrification is baked into this shitty, shitty project. [The New York Times]
A six million dollar lawsuit against David Zwirner and his gallery will go forward. Italian art dealer Fabrizio Moretti claims that Zwirner violated New York’s Arts and Cultural Affairs Law, when they allegedly changed the dimensions of a $2m Jeff Koons Gazing Ball sculpture after the dealer purchased a version in 2013. They also changed the way it editioned the works. The judges ruling does not look good for Zwirner. [The Art Newspaper]
Martha Rosler discusses the social pressures of being nice in the art world's workplace. The new 24 hour a day work week demands it. All her points are valid, but there's no mention of the flip side—the Facebook threads of artists on politics where your friends stop talking to you like they even like you, the endless trolling, and general combativeness that seems to be given for anyone who choses to use social media. [e-flux]
Who wants a portrait of Angelina Jolie, bleeding. It'll be available at Art Miami this December. [artnet News]
Subway delays were up 21 percent in August as compared to last year. No shit. Apparently the number one reason for this is overcrowding and the only fix—a modernized signal system—is super costly and an incredibly long range project. Great. [Curbed]
A fascinating read. Here's Marnie Weber on monsters. [Culture: High & Low]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Jonathan Monaghan's Strange Genitals

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 20:26:14 +0000

We’re pretty pumped to open the latest F.A.G. project, Strange Genitals tomorrow night at AICAD. The exhibition, as its title suggests, is a collection of weird organs invented, depicted, or otherwise enhanced by artists. Although the show features a lot of fleshy skin tones, it was actually inspired by something totally inorganic: these futuristic fuckmachine tower GIFs from Jonathan Monaghan.

Jonathan sent us this series last year, when we were looking for architectural/landscape inspired work for our exhibition Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place. We ended up showing another series of his, but knew this one needed to be seen. Thus, Strange Genitals was born—squeezed into the world from a baroque steampunk orifice being penetrated by a futuristic robot phallus.

Halloween at "The Wolfpack" Apartment

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 20:25:14 +0000

Until this Halloween, I was only tangentially aware of the Angulo family. I had seen a trailer for the documentary “The Wolfpack,” in which filmmaker Crystal Moselle follows the six brothers around as they explore New York City after a childhood confined almost entirely indoors by their domineering religious father. I still haven’t seen the film, but it’s received near-universal critical acclaim. The brothers now have something of a following as “outsider” artists for the labor-intensive projects they pursued to pass the time when sequestered.

Wednesday Links: the Astor Place Cube Returns, the Albright Knox Get $100 Million, Tumblr Witches Divided

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 11:29:46 +0000

The latest artwork to be launched into space are two manga murals on a Japanese rocket from cartoonist Chuya Koyama. The idea is to get kids excited about “the wonders of the universe.” [phys.org]
Due to Chinese cities’ slash-and-burn style gentrification, in which whole neighborhoods might be demolished for a development, artists are flocking to the nondescript Beijing suburb Yanjiao. Are dystopian-looking cheap condo towers the new warehouses? [The New York Times]
Tony Rosenthal’s “Alamo”, better known as the Astor Place cube, is finally back! New Yorkers are thrilled, and Nicole Puglise cites the city’s enthusiasm as evidence that public art is important. [The Guardian]
Crain’s asked a dozen of NYC’s top architecture firms for ideas to help the city absorb so much new growth. Most of them are pretty good—especially the outer borough transit ideas. Others not so much—is a hotel at the Javits Center really a priority? And can we please make preserving manufacturing/workspaces a part of the discussion rather than always viewing industrial land as “underutilized”? [Crain’s]
Canadian artist Jeremy Shaw has won the prestigious Sobey Prize. Who is he and what does he make? From the report, “Working in a variety of media, Shaw explores altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience by creating a post-documentary space in which contrasting ideals and belief systems are put into crisis.” I (Paddy) haven’t even seen the work, but this garbled and pretentious statement makes me want to hate it. [artnet News]
Uruguayan gallerist Diana Saravia was summoned to a police station after displaying a painting by Julio de Sosa that depicted former president José “Pepe” Mujica and his wife, senator Lucía Topolansky, as nude Adam & Eve. The police also confiscated the painting. She’s justifiably upset. What gives Uruguay? [Artforum]
Well, this is depressing. Here’s what $1,400 a month rent will get you in NYC right now. [Curbed]
This Julia Halperin story on how the Albright Knox raised $100 million in three months is just nuts. Last April Janne Sirén, the director of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, got an email billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach pledging an insane amount of money towards their $80 million capital campaign. Gundlach, who had never donated to the institution gave $42.5m and the museum’s trustees pledged $21.3m this summer. Halperin says the rate of giving works out to over 1 million a day. Sirén had met Gundlach only once the year before, had not been in touch since, but did remember to send his mother flowers on Mother’s Day. Executive Directors, take note. [The Art Newspaper]
We couldn’t be more thrilled for the art collective Current Space, who just bought their building (and one next to it!) from the city of Baltimore for $1. They’re the best, and now they finally have a permanent home! Read about that process in this interview with the collective’s Co-Director Michael Benevento. [Bmore Art]
Headline of the week: “Boneghazi: How a Grave-Robbing Controversy Tore an Online Witch Community Apart.” The piece is a mind-blowing look at the identity politics of Tumblr culture. [Broadly.]

The Hustle: Tax Shelters for the Working Artist

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 14:39:47 +0000

Editor’s note: The Hustle is a new bimonthly column in which artist and Enrolled Agent Hannah Cole discusses taxes and finance management for artists. She is the founder of Sunlight Tax. In this week’s column Cole examines tax shelters such as Flexible Spending Accounts and Healthcare Savings Accounts.

What is a tax shelter?

The term “tax shelter” may conjure offshore accounts and shell companies, but in fact it is just a way of reducing your taxable income. Abusive tax shelters are illegal, but there are many legal ones that are actually set up by the US government to encourage Americans to set aside money for important things, like health care, child care, college, and retirement. I want to discuss a subset of these tax shelters, the Flexible Spending Accounts (FSAs) and the Healthcare Savings Accounts (HSAs) which came up in my previous piece on artist taxes. These accounts allow you to set aside up to a certain dollar amount tax-free to pay for qualified expenses. What you set aside gets subtracted from your taxable income, reducing your overall tax liability. Many of these programs have open enrollment periods in November, so just in time, here is a primer on this group of tax shelters for the working artist.

Tuesday Links: Is Ai Weiwei a Dick?

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 11:31:55 +0000

19 years after legislation passed to establish Greece’s first contemporary art museum, it’s finally opening. Greece’s art scene sounds like a mess, but people are hopeful the new EMST can change that. [Al Jazeera]
There’s a one-legged Statue of Liberty with a crazy life story in Japan. Manaka Murakami, a student at Tokyo University for the Arts, is planning her thesis exhibition on the theme of the devastating 2011 earthquake. She tracked down the replica Statue of Liberty in a coastal town, which lost its leg in the tsunami, but was otherwise unscathed, and it’s going to be incorporated into her show. [The Asahi Shimbun]
Images from New York’s Halloween parade. Covering political themes this year we see a bad hombre, a brexit, some NRA zombies (a personal favorite), and a basket of deplorables. Other costumes include boobs, a naked guy, a plug, a broken computer, plenty of injured people and 2015. [Gothamist]
New York University’s 23 story sports center has got the green light. This is a lot of floors for ellipticals, so we hope they include a several story mountain in there or something. The building is of relevance to art folk, because it will also apparently house a performing arts center. The building will be divided into two towers. The project is expected to be completed in 2021. [Curbed]
Long, but interesting read: Jacoba Urist examines the changing role of college museums in the academic and art worlds. Universities are spending big bucks on exhibitions, starchitecture, and collections. Some are starting to rival their non-academic peers. [The Atlantic]
The Shanghai art collective Chi She has a new home in the West Bund Arts District. The building, designed by Archi-Union, was essentially “printed” by bricklaying robots and looks kinda like a pixelated buffering video of a warehouse. [Dezeen]
This report of a conversation between Ai Weiwei and Tania Bruguera does not cast a positive light on Ai. Bruguera asks him a question about the ethical implications of restaging a well-known photograph of a Syrian father holding his dead toddler and Ai responds by accusing her of not being a full political artist, just a “Cuban” political artist. [ARTnews]
How a Yoko Ono joke from The Simpsons ended up becoming an actual sculpture in her show at The Reykjavik Art Museum. [i-D]

GIF of the Day: Celebrating Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Light

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 16:42:39 +0000

Over the weekend GIFs made in honor of the five-day Hindu festival Diwali started to appear on our facebook feeds. The celebration of lights, which began yesterday and closes this Thursday may be the perfect inspiration for animated GIF makers. A reverse image search brought back hundreds of similar images, many of which feature patterns that move like fluid slow motion shots of water or traffic. The result is mesmerizing.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: F.A.G.'s Strange Genitals & More

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 15:21:57 +0000

Tokyo artist Megumi Igarashi (aka Rokudenashiko) ended up in court after digital scans of her own vagina were deemed obscene. She's one of many artists included in AFC's exhibition Strange Genitals, which opens during DUMBO's First Thursday Gallery Walk.

If ever there was a week for art nerds, this is it. It begins Tuesday with a screening of artist made music-videos Otion Front Studio and a show of meticulously assembled abstract paper works by Jessica Dickinson and Alison Knowles at James Fuentes. Paper nerds and music nerds unite. By Friday, gallery goers will be heading to Transfer Gallery to witness a room full of projectors showcasing a playlist of works by a dozen or more new media artists. New Media nerds rejoice.

In between all this nerdery, there are also quite a few exhibitions promising a good time, not the least of which being our very own Strange Genitals, which opens this Thursday at AICAD. Following this, is the always provocative Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum come Friday and Jennifer Catron and Paul Outlaw’s performance looking at how the relationship between gravity and politics leads to the break-down of thought. Catron and Outlaw promise an “assembly of libations” after their performance, so don’t make any plans for Sunday

Monday Links: The Socialist Internet, Zika Scares, Curators are In

Mon, 31 Oct 2016 11:17:29 +0000

“Utopia” is the theme of this year’s London Design Biennale, and people are looking to “the global south” for inspiration. In the Chilean booth, for example, there’s the Star-Trek-like control room from a 1970s attempt to build a nation-wide proto-internet for then-socialist Chile. It looks even cooler than it sounds. Too bad the CIA overthrew their government and the project never came to fruition. [Dezeen]
Here’s the surprisingly-entertaining backstory of a once-controversial public sculpture in the Capital’s Judiciary Square. If you’ve ever wondered why there’s a golden statue of a naked woman with a deer amidst the District’s stern-looking monuments, here’s why. [The Washington Post]
Walking around Savannah College of Art & Design, one would never guess the college was only established in 1978. That’s because Paula Wallace, who founded the institution, had the foresight to buy up a bunch of Savannah’s then-dilapidated historic buildings to create a campus. [Curbed]
Here’s one “charity” Donald Trump has actually given money to: the National Museum of Catholic Art and History… even though he’s not Catholic, and according to this post, the “museum” might be a scam run by the mob? What? [Wonkette]
For the Wes Anderson fans in the audience, there’s a new show of Wes Anderson inspired art at Spoke Art. Most of it looks terrible. [Geek]
So tempted to make a trip to Pittsburgh for the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hélio Oiticica retrospective. It sounds awesome. [Vogue]
Remember how the subject of how curators had become the art world’s new power brokers dominated all art conversation five years ago. Well now that ArtReview has named curator Hans Ulrich Obrist the art world’s most “powerful person” the Times seems to have caught on. In 2012, ArtReview named curator Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev the most powerful, but I guess she didn’t count because Obrist? Anyway, it’s 2016, curators are hot, and the Times is ON IT. [The New York Times]
Ok, this headline/subheadline is pretty outrageous-sounding: “Amid Zika Scare, Art World Insiders Fear Discrimination While Planning for Miami Fairs: Welcome to the new reality for the art world's most seductive fair.” But there’s a very real fear that pregnant art world workers might face employment problems this year. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Dance with Death

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 19:59:16 +0000

There may be no single image more iconic than the skull. It’s used in science labs, jewelry, stickers, emoji, art, poison warning labels, metal band t-shirts—even tequila bottles. For this reason, I typically don’t want to see it in art. It’s often difficult to use well because the image is so ubiquitous.

The skeleton, and by extension, the dancing skeleton, has a lot more potential. Or at least that’s what I’ve found in my hunt for halloween party inspired animated GIFs. A few choice findings below.

Struggling ‘To Organize Delirium’ at the Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hélio Oiticica Retrospective

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 16:49:18 +0000

Installation view, “Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium” at Carnegie Museum of Art (Photo: Bryan Conley)

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium Carnegie Museum of Art 4400 Forbes Avenue Pittsburgh, PA On view until January 2, 2017

Geometric abstractions, makeshift shacks and a copious amount of sand transforms Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art into a hippie playground for Hélio Oiticica’s retrospective To Organize Delirium (which comes to the Whitney next year). The exhibition presents a chronological look at the Brazilian artist’s short but feverishly prolific career. (He died suddenly in 1980 at 43-years old). In one gallery, a cluster of orange boards hangs from the ceiling while a cage of live parrots sits in a corner. Colorful macramé hammocks and projected images of Jimi Hendrix covered in cocaine fills another room. And the Museum’s grand Hall of Sculpture looks like a tent city on a beach.

Friday Links: Double Standards on Display

Fri, 28 Oct 2016 11:58:34 +0000

A look at sculpture at the EXPO Chicago Fair. A lot of it looks like it came direct from a tomb. [Bad at Sports]
Roberta Smith reviews the Pipilotti Rist show at the New Museum. She describes Rist as a "true natural" in the medium of video. [New Museum]
The mayor of London is promising to provide artists with affordable studios. I'd call this a victory, but doesn't this just set up a caste system of privilege? [Hyperallergic]
Why does everything developer Two Trees manage end up looking like a soulless downtown revitalization project? Here's a look at the new Sugar Domino Factory for start ups, complete with a skate park. [Curbed]
Can artist Ragnar Kjartansson's star get any higher? He's making waves in DC at the Hirshhorn Museum for Woman in E, in which a woman wearing a gold dress strums an E minor chord for two and a half hours. [NPR]
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ at the Queens Museum gets some attention from Andrea K. Scott. The review begins with a discussion of Ukeles manifesto "maintenance art", in which she points out that "repetition and systems were considered rigorous in the context of the avant-garde, but dismissed as drudgery when it came to maintenance workers or housewives". (See Ragnar Kjartansson for example one). We learn that the manifesto frames the work in the show, though I'm a little unclear as to what Scott thinks of the show as a whole. She seems broadly positive. [The New Yorker]

NSFW GIF of the Day: Jessica Wilson's Jiggle

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 18:43:34 +0000

Every Wednesday we post the NSFW GIF of the Hump Day. Yesterday, I failed to do that, so today I hit you with a NSFW jiggle butt by Jessica Wilson. This GIF gets better the longer you look at it. You realize that the skin is really just an empty plastic wrap for a body that's no longer there. The image would be gross if it weren't so sanitized. This is the cleanest butt and the cleanest body digital rendering can produce.

Artist Challenges Facebook With Promises of Cock Spam

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 15:28:15 +0000

An uncensored image from Sean Capone's Facebook feed.

Is the US presidential election putting many of its citizens on edge? The daily headlines are terrible, each bringing a new revelation more shocking than the next. The stakes could not be more dire and conversation more urgent.

In reaction to these times, though, perhaps many us of block friends dissenting friends on Facebook or silence comments we don’t want to hear. Under these conditions, Facebook can seem a bit more like a police state. Prolific artist, Facebook user (and now blogger) Sean Capone speculated that this was indeed the case in an email this morning informing AFC that he’d been banned from Facebook for three days. The offending update? A picture he’d posted from a Larry Clark show at Luhring Augustine back in 2014.

Be Somebody With A Body: Curator Jessica Beck on “Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body”

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 12:00:14 +0000

Edward Wallowitch, Andy Warhol with Face in Hands, 1957–58, The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, Contribution The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. (© Estate of Edward Wallowitch. All rights reserved)

Andy Warhol: My Perfect Body Andy Warhol Museum 117 Sandusky Street Pittsburgh, PA On view until January 22, 2017

The Hellion is a Lonely Hunter (with apologies to Carson McCullers)

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 11:00:23 +0000

Joshua Abarbanel, Golem (maquette), 2013, Holz, Metall, Keramik. Image courtesy of the artist

Golem Jewish Museum Berlin September 23, 2016 to January 29, 2017

BERLIN — After wandering through “Golem”, the Jewish Museum Berlin’s occasionally insightful but too often flat meditation on the fabled creature of medieval European-Jewish folklore, I was left with a curiously empty feeling. Hardly what one expects from an exhibition depicting a monster of such long-standing and resonant legend; a homunculus whose story has influenced all things horrific from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein to Disney/Marvel’s evil robot Ultron to those adorably gangly “grey aliens”.

Thursday Links: Art Chicken News Has Legs

Thu, 27 Oct 2016 10:59:30 +0000

More art chicken news. Belgian artist Koen Vanmechelen is taking his Cosmopolitan Chicken Project to Detroit. Vanmechelen has spent the last 20 years breeding chickens with other chickens to create a super breed. Now that he's in Detroit, which is plagued by poverty, he's breeding his 20th-generation cosmopolitan chicken with an industrial hen so it can produce eggs at Avenue Urban Farm. [The New York Times]
Museum of Modern Art announced yesterday that designer Shigetaka Kurita’s original 176 emojis will be added to its collection. [Hyperallergic]
An interview with David Kordansky of David Kordansky Gallery. TL;DR version: Loves his job. Conceptual art was a hangover. Collectors are less willing to take risks. L.A. is special, though, because the people are more open. [artnet News]
Josh Baer sure thinks highly of the TEFAF fair. From his latest newsletter, "How about the ambience of TEFAF at the Park Avenue Armory - if the ADAA doesnt step up their game this winter before TEFAF’s cont/modern fair in the spring they may look a bit silly?" [Baer Faxt]
In honor of Halloween Michael Jackson in a dance rehearsal for Thriller is making the rounds on Facebook and YouTube. [YouTube]
James Franco has endorsed Hillary Clinton. Taylor Swift's endorsement, however, remains illusive. [LAist]

GIF of the Day: Yoshi Sodeoka

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 18:45:59 +0000

Continuing on our theme of GIFs the New York Times has commission, here we take a look at Yoshi Sodeoka’s illustration of the brain and visualized data. The GIF illustrates a piece titled “Do You Believe In God or is That a Software Glitch?” The article cites a an paper written for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which discovered a glitch in MRI data that can cause false positives. The glitch can suggest brain activity where there is none and does so up to 70 percent of the time. Eek.

Art F City's Strange Genitals Opens Next Thursday at AICAD Seminar Gallery

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 12:52:39 +0000

LOCATION: AICAD Seminar Gallery, 20 Jay Street, suite M10, Brooklyn NY

SHOW DATES: November 4 - November 19. Open: Thursday, Friday, Saturday 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM

OPENING RECEPTION: Thursday November 3rd, 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM

ARTIST TALK: Wednesday, November 16th. Genesis P-Orridge, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM.

CURATED BY: Art F City’s Paddy Johnson and Michael Anthony Farley

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS: Jared Buckhiester, Saul Chernick, Sejong Cho, Theresa Chromati, Carol Cole, June Culp, Phaan Howng, Megumi Igarashi, Jonathan Monaghan, Cupid Ojala, Ga Hee Park, Sophia Park, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Jessica Stoller, Jessica Wilson

Wednesday Links: In Search of Some Jack-O'-Lantern Rehab

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 10:59:17 +0000

Art jack-o-lanterns. Oof. These things are terrible. [The Seattle Times]
A post on the unsung artist behind the popular tarot card, Pamela Colman Smith. [Hyperallergic]
Based on the five takeaways from the Marina Abramovic biography artnet has produced, there may not be much reason to pick up the book. It looks like a snore fest. That said, we do appreciate that she correctly identified all three "Marinas": “There is the warrior one. The spiritual one. And there is the bullshit one.” [artnet News]
Hell's Kitchen is getting 98 affordable housing units. [Curbed]
A statue of a naked Hillary Clinton jumping on emails appeared yesterday in Union Square. It was installed last week at the Bowling Green subway, but was removed by the police. [Gothamist]
Another old master painting turns out to be a fake. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Scott Gelber

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 19:30:15 +0000

Thanks to artist Scott Gelber we’ve got this GIF to show off at the end of the day. I wasn’t able to locate the original article this ran with on the New York Times (Update: A reader sent in the source article), but in my searches I did come to realize that Gelber makes a lot of GIFs for the Times. So, when we think of the Times aesthetic, we should also look to Gelber. Another image below, which illustrates the article Hearing Is Believing.

Tuesday Links: Taco Bell on the Horizon

Tue, 25 Oct 2016 11:14:22 +0000

ArtReview's Power 100 list is out and we've barely heard a word about it since its release October 20th. Is this evidence that we're over lists? The issue used to create a lot more buzz. This year there are 12 new entries and only one eyebrow raising entry—Katie Hollander and Nato Thompson of Creative Time. We're of course super excited to see their new projects, but Hollander and Thompson are new in their roles of Executive Director and Artist Director, respectively. Both have been at Creative Time for a while now, but I'd like to give them at least another year before proclaiming their chops proven. [ArtReview]
Headline of the day: Art Dealers Move Out of the Gallery and into a Taco Bell. It's also a great story. Stefania Bortolami of Bortolami Gallery, growing tired of the commercial art fair circuit, decided to take a new approach—"yearlong, not primarily commercial, experimental projects in cities that are museum- and culture-rich but are not considered art hubs.” That resulted in Eric Wesley installing his “burrito paintings” in an abandoned Spanish Colonial-style Taco Bell in Cahokia, Ill. [The New York Times]
And the Kerry James Marshall reviews are coming out: Christian Viveros-Faune is first out of the gate, and loves it. [Artnet news]
Construction spending on buildings is slated to hit an all time high in New York, at 43.1 billion. This is a result of private development companies building residential housing. But just because there is a lot of spending on apartment buildings doesn't mean there are more apartments. In fact, the number of built units is down this year due to an increased focus on luxury apartments. [Curbed]
A report on the panel discussion "Decolonize This Space" at Artists Space, which focused on the gentrification of Chinatown in New York and beyond. Seems like the big victory for this event was the turn out, which garnered more than 200 attendees. The big question of the night was whether artists and gallerists can help stem gentrification, and from the report, it seems everyone agreed that the answer was "yes". Pressure city council. Don't displace long term residents. Represent asian artists. Some of these prescriptions sound a little facile, but hey, it's a start. [Hyperallergic]
Portraits of stray dogs just before they are euthanized. [Four & Sons]
VICE Media is moving to DUMBO—55 Washington. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: "Culture" GIFs

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 19:47:42 +0000

GIPHY has released a new culture channel celebrating culture, identity, and diversity. So far, that means sorting for stereotype. For example, “body positivity” seems to be defined by proud overweight women and LGBQ, is a lot partying GIFs. Nothing wrong with either, but for a channel that claims to be about diversity, it would be good if we saw a little more of that.

This Week's Must See Events: A Week of Historicization

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 16:26:13 +0000

Brace yourself: Pretty much every museum in the city has a major show launching, from The Met’s Kerry James Marshall show, to the Whitney’s Immersive Cinema survey, to the Rhizome and New Museum’s Net Art Anthology launch. We’re excited about EVERY. SINGLE. SHOW. Why? Because they are all historical shows in some way, attempting to chart a history of important art works and movements. This is important work.

Monday Links: Where Have All the Titian Paintings Gone?

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 11:10:43 +0000

A "subjective, non-comprehensive list of colleagues who have changed the shape of the American art world". No individual or group of individuals can "change the shape" of the art world. This is a list of people who have received a lot of press this year, either for spending a lot of money or for having a social agenda. [artnet News]
Charles Jones, master vegetable photographer. [Hyperallergic]
James Franco made a video for Sotheby's in which he pours goo over the heads of models. The project was inspired by the Renaissance Italian ceramics that comprise Glazed: The Legacy of The Della Robbia and is on view to the public in New York City through November 18. [The Creator's Project]
Kellie Jones, a curator and recent recipient of the MacArthur Genius Grant offers some words of wisdom about the art world. Amongst other things she says even though you can experience shows digitally, it's important to see them IRL. [New York Magazine]
Oh, boo hoo. Here's a litany of complaints about how contemporary art wants to express who we are at the expense of beauty. Let's just dub this post "where have all the Titian paintings gone?". [The Wall Street Journal]

GIF of the Day: Treasures From the National Archives

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 18:49:23 +0000

The National Archives and Records Administration holds all kinds of documents pertinent to the nation, from the parchment the Declaration of Independence was written on to this newly release treasure trove of animated GIFs drawing from newsreels and other sources. A lot of them are weirder than you'd expect. I assembled some of those here, but you can view the archive in its entirety on GIPHY.

Bathing In The Purple Rain At Sam McKinniss’ “Egyptian Violet”

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 12:00:08 +0000

Detail of Sam McKinniss' Sandy, 2016, oil, acrylic and aqua leaf on canvas (Courtesy the artist and team (gallery, inc))

Sam McKinniss: Egyptian Violet team (gallery, inc.) 83 Grand Street New York, NY On view until November 12, 2016

Some exhibitions raise more questions than they answer. Take Sam McKinniss’ current show Egyptian Violet at team (gallery, inc.), which presents a sense of unease and potential for violence in his fan boy paintings of celebrities and movie characters. The subject matter is thoughtfully curated and carefully painted and yet, it is still difficult to pin down McKinniss’ exact critique. Is it a general representation of our anxiety-ridden era in 2016? A statement, à la A.L. Steiner’s 30 Days of Mo:)rning, about how everything is going wrong at once? A critique of the vacuity of pop culture? A death obsession? Or is there no real social critique at all? I left the show with no clear answer.

Friday Links: Is Martin Creed's Public Sculpture an Ad for His Music?

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 11:24:16 +0000

Understanding is a rotating neon sculpture on the Brooklyn Bridge Park waterfront, which reads “Understanding” in red. It’s nice enough, but relies on the viewer for any interpretation. For a better understanding of “Understanding” here’s the Creed’s music video. Critic Terence Trouillot rightly complained at this week’s Review Panel that the video, which promotes Creeds new album, made the public sculpture seem like an ad. [Purple.FR]

NSFW abstraction! [Gitlab]

GIF of the Day: Carl Burton

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 19:02:39 +0000

Artist, animator and designer Carl Burton has created a game called ISLANDS set to drop this fall. Exactly what it is no one can say—a source of frustration a few youtube commenters—but it seems the Greenlight community has given it the go ahead for development. Meanwhile, we’ve got the GIFs. Happy GIF of the Day!

Julie Mehretu at Marian Goodman Gallery: Can Social Abstraction Succeed?

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 18:59:04 +0000

Julie Mehretu, Installation view, 2016 Marian Goodman

How valuable are first impressions? In art, this seems to be a perennially important question. A work should, aesthetically, stand on its own. Except, of course, when it doesn’t matter because the concept determines the formal choices. Or when aesthetics kinda sorta matter but so does the context.

It’s this latter murky territory where we’ve been seeing a lot of artistic activity. From Gerhard Richter’s holocaust paintings (the Birkenau series) to activist Theaster Gates’s fire hoses and floor board sculptures, artists pairing abstraction with politics and world events now dot the gallery circuit. The going name for it, “Social Abstraction” (coined by Mark Bradford), describes a politically conscious subset of artists who use art as a vehicle to express their investment in varying concerns.

Greetings from Little Haiti: The Common Field Convening Starts Tonight

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 14:50:10 +0000

If you're not in Miami, check out this Livestream of the events or stay tuned for my updates all weekend.

I’m in Miami for the Common Field Convening, where I’ll be both speaking on a panel and posting updates to the blog all weekend long. When I tell people this, the first question I get is almost always “What is Common Field?”

And part of why I love Common Field is the sense that the organization is still trying to figure that out—as a nimble, collectively-generated entity. Basically, it’s a network of non-commercial art spaces, nonprofits, publications, organizers, and other groups/individuals who strive to support artists and the communities they work in. Tellingly, when I first met Common Field’s co-director Courtney Fink at The Contemporary’s Artist Retreat outside of Baltimore, she introduced the organization by asking our group what local arts organizers need, rather than telling us what Common Field could do for us.

Thursday Links: Storm Systems of Art and Politics

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 10:57:46 +0000

From James Bridle's "Cloud Index" website.

Surprise, surprise. Ryder Ripps, the artist known for his Donald Trump-like vacuous chest thumping and misogynistic paintings was interviewed last night as a Donald Trump supporter. His biggest concern? The wall between Mexico and the US. “I just hope they build it high enough,” he said. “Because people climb walls.” The artist then updated his Facebook to brag about duping a reporter into believing he was a Trump supporter when he actually supports Bernie Sanders. [The Guardian]

Dezeen is a blog we enjoy for many reasons, including their weekly round up of notoriously snarky reader comments. This one might just take the cake. Responding to a reverse-vaulted pizzeria interior, reader TFO remarked "I feel violated. Cis male architecture sitting on my face." Architecture criticism is starting to look a lot like art criticism. [Dezeen]

Thinking of funding your brilliant project through Kickstarter? Maybe reconsider… factories in China are ripping off design ideas from the internet before they even hit their own production start. [Quartz]

So, that naked statue of Donald Trump mostly elicited plenty of laughs (and one high-profile theft) but when a similar sculpture of nude Hillary Clinton was erected in Downtown Manhattan this week it caused a minor violent street brawl. A National Museum of the American Indian employee (identified only as “Nancy”) toppled the sculpture by Anthony Scioli (maybe?) and enacted a pretty comical tug-of-war with the artist that ended with Nancy sitting on top of it. Of all the borderline hilarious/cringe-worthy confrontations this trainwreck of an election has stoked, this art fight is probably the most of both. [New York Daily News]

Bethany "Sick Din" Dinsick is seeking music videos from artists for a screening at Bushwick’s Otion Front Studios on November 1st. Email her submissions at bdinsick@gmail.com. [Facebook]

Can anyone else figure out James Bridle’s “Cloud Index”? The artwork/website maps cloud patterns to potential outcomes of the Brexit vote, and talks about cloud seeding as a form of propaganda, as well as cloud computing. It’s a really pretty website, but what exactly is the relationship between the clouds and the vote? It brings Spurious Correlations to mind. [Serpentine Gallery]

Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde’s smog-eating mini-tower has come to Beijing. In tests in Rotterdam, it sucked about 60% of pollutants from a small area, which were then made into jewelry. In far more polluted Beijing, however, data on its effectiveness won’t be made public. [Forbes] According to Chinese press, the tower (which is installed in the capital’s 798 arts district) hasn’t really impressed locals. [ECNS]

Carolina Miranda reports on why memes have greater currency this election than artwork. [Culture: High & Low]

Amid investigations of corruption and money laundering, the US Justice Department has seized some pretty valuable paintings from Jho Low, an aide to the Malaysian Prime Minister. Now art dealer David Nahmad, of Monaco, is claiming a Monet in the collection actually belongs to him. Although he attempted to sell the painting to Low, and received a $2 million wire transfer, he reports that the deal fell through. This story ought to get juicier as it develops. [International Business Times]

Turns out there’s lots of poisonous heavy metals in paint. Not exactly a surprise, and the writer doesn’t seem to understand that while cobalt blue is more expensive and toxic than its cheaper cousin french ultramarine blue, there are actual differences in the color. It’s useful, though, because it does offer examples of colors made with heavy metals and their knockoffs. [The Observer]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The Girls Next Door

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 19:19:15 +0000

There’s only one NSFW GIF in this trilogy of Girls Next Door GIFs, though it’s not for lack of images. Despite the plethora of shots of Kendra Wilkinson’s boobs, we thought the GIF below communicated more about her. Admittedly fewer exist for Holly Madison and Bridget Marquardt—but we managed to find a nymph surprise and a blingee. Good on us.

No Links: On The Donald Trump of Art World Social Media

Wed, 19 Oct 2016 12:31:27 +0000

Image via Jerry Saltz's instagram.

Artists Leah Dixon and Lauren Christiansen are taking issue with Jerry Saltz’s Instagram feed because they think he’s too interested in vaginas. They’ve titled their social media post, “The Donald Trump of Art World Social Media” and have dedicated themselves to ranting about Saltz’s obsessions. “It only takes thirty seconds on Saltz’s instagram to see how destructive and trivial his interests are.” they write. “How he is using his power to openly fetishize female bodies, in lieu of actually presenting valid cultural critique. Honestly, one out of every three of his posts is a vagina.”

GIF of the Day: Unicorn Shocker

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 17:37:20 +0000

This is a shocked unicorn super imposed over a hypnotic spiral background. That is all.

What Makes An Artist Special? Nothing, According to the IRS

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 15:02:22 +0000

Being poor for art has a shelf life. It’s important to be brave enough to sacrifice potential revenue and follow your dreams, but to make a career in the arts happen, eventually a sustainable income and lifestyle has to be secured. Part of getting there, is knowing how to handle your taxes. Learning the ins and outs of this part of your practice will help you get through the tough times and the boom times.

Tuesday Links: Climate Change Spurs City Into Action—New Flood Map to Save Us All

Tue, 18 Oct 2016 11:28:04 +0000

Works from Alexandra Rubinstein‘s ongoing series ‘Thirsty’ in her studio at 540 President Street. Image by Benjamin Sutton at Hyperallergic

Oooooh. A photo essay from Gowanus Open Studios with huge browser sized images. I <3 this so much. [Hyperallergic]
It does not take long for forgeries to emerge once an artist has died. Leon Golub died in 2004 and already there are fakes surfacing. The news: Andrew J. Hall, an aggressive Wall Street trader, purchased 24 Leon Golub’s from a 68 year old art history professor and her 34 year old son, all of which have turned out to be forgeries. Hall paid only $676,250 for the works, which probably should have been a clue that something wasn’t right. [The New York Times]
We’re normally not fans of wow-y landscape photo memes, but we’re not immune to it either. These photographs by Tommy Clarke that resemble abstract expressionist works are surprisingly moving. Clarke takes the shots from a helicopter and has focused on Utah’s salt ponds. [Time]
A mostly useless list of places to stay in during Art Basel Miami due to their price. A link for our wealthy readers. [artnet News]
Public Advocate Letitia James has released her 100 worst landlords in NYC list. Rent from them at your own risk. [Advocate NYC]
New York City could be underwater in less than 100 years and the city’s doing everything it can to prepare. They’ve revised NYC’s flood maps! They’re planning to build a multi-billion dollar streetcar line along the waterfront. [Curbed] Ancient Roman and Greek tombs in Libya are being looted by ISIS and sold to Italian mobsters in exchange for weapons. Eventually this work makes its way into museums, foundations, etc. [The Daily Beast]

GIF of the Day: GIF of the Decade

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 18:21:26 +0000

We say “GIF of the Day,” but today it should be “GIF of a Generation,” because it is an index of everything popular in recent internet culture, while managing to maintain a pretty balanced classical composition. I stumbled across this GIF, by Isabel Laauer, on GIPHY. There, it’s tagged as #seapunk (the spinning dolphin!), #art (the ubiquitous rotating chunk of severed CGI anatomy!), and #normcore (the nondescript, GAP-esque outfit?). For good measure, the background is a gradient of the controversial “culturally sublimated” #vaporwave colors of the year and there’s a palm tree (forever vying with ficus lyrata to be the dominant CGI plant of contemporary art).

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Future Bodies are Everywhere and Scary

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 15:59:43 +0000

Chris Jones, "OF VANISHED ALPHABETS," 2016. Book and magazine images, board, polymer varnish 76 x 21 x 21 inches

There’s plenty of heady discourse this week—future bodies, hypothetical architectures, theories of curation and criticism—and of course plenty of election-related hand-wringing.

Kick it off Monday night at Jersey City’s Word Bookstore, where the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research is inaugurating a lecture series about cyborgs. Or head to Manhattan’s Red Bull Studios for an event celebrating Grand Arts, the Kansas City project space that launched dozens of conceptual art projects and, now, a catalogue. Tuesday night, Paddy Johnson joins other art critics to talk shop at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Dweck Cultural Center, and Tyler Coburn talks genetic engineering and body mods as the future of humanity at e-flux. If you’re looking for something more hands-on (or a chance to move your feet), there’s a survey of handmade prints at Site:Brooklyn and an epic-looking disco fundraiser for El Museo del Bario Wednesday night. Thursday, White Box is opening a jam-packed group show (with some impressive names!) all about political angst. Friday we’ve got a talk from Maura Riley at Stony Brook Manhattan and Underdonk opening a class-conscious solo show by Patrice Renee Washington.

Monday Links: Pepe Plans Social Media Comeback

Mon, 17 Oct 2016 10:45:20 +0000

More “Pepe” news: the Anti-Defamation League has reached out to artist Matt Furie in an attempt to reform the cartoon frog’s image to be less racist. Does anyone else feel like the whole supposed Pepe scandal is the media/ADL/internet hardcore trolling everyone? [The New York Times]

Kader Attia is opening ”La Colonie,” a vaguely-defined art space near Gare du Nord in Paris. It’s not clear what exactly will happen in the new three story exhibition and event space, but knowing Attia’s work ethic, it will likely have programming that’s smart and politically-informed. [The Art Newspaper]

I can’t watch documentation of this Sachiko Kodama installation and understand that what I’m watching is not CGI. Kodama magnetizes NASA’s ferrofluid rocket fuel, resulting in something akin to trippy visuals from some EDM subculture. [Atlas Obscura]

With online platforms eroding lower-end sales, and mega galleries dominating the high-end market, middle tier galleries are dropping like flies in New York and California. And more and more gallerists are having to work “for” their artists less and focus on the secondary market, Christian Viveros-Fauné explains: “the against-all-economic-odds gallery once begun with boundless ambition and maxed out credit cards is no more. Here’s the same idea put differently: the era of undercapitalized, illiquid, labor-of-love galleries that rely mostly or exclusively on the primary market for sales is over.” [artnet News]

Is new development driving up New York’s property values? Quite the opposite, it seems. Thanks to restrictive zoning in most of the city, new developments are bigger and more expensive where they can be—present zoning rules that favor lower densities make it impossible for most of the boroughs to create enough new housing units to absorb demand. [Curbed]

Dogs like leaf blowers. [YouTube]

Matthew Naimi built a house out of garbage and then blew it up, alarming his neighbors and bringing out the fire department. The project, described as a “Rube Goldberg chain-reaction contraption”, was designed to illustrate the connectivity of societal issues. [The Detroit News]

A Saudi artist, currently working on her P.H.D. in Australia, was told by her native government that she needed to live with a male guardian in order to pursue her studies. She’s since created the #IAmMyOwnGuardian hashtag under the social media nom de plum Ms. Saffaa in protest. [PBS]

Lite Brite Studios in Gowanus makes neon signs for businesses and artists. We want the field trip this reporter got! [Gothamist]

GIF of the Day: Hillary Says GIF with a "Hard G"

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 22:35:52 +0000

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton says that that recent sexual abuse allegations lodged against her opponent, Donald Trump, may you want to “unplug the Internet or look at Cat GIFs. It turns out, we’ve seen a few cat GIFs in our day. Here are a few of our favorites.

Worst Case Scenario: A.L. Steiner’s Apocalyptic “30 Days of Mo:)rning”

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 12:00:52 +0000

A.L. Steiner, 30 Days Of Mo:)rning, 2016, color pigment prints and photocopies (photo by author)

A.L. Steiner: 30 Days of Mo:)rning Koenig & Clinton 459 West 19th Street New York, NY On view until October 29, 2016

What a difference two weeks make. I was ready to write-off A.L. Steiner’s current exhibition 30 Days of Mo:)rning at Koenig & Clinton as an overly ambitious mess after my initial visit. But on second viewing, the show, which Steiner adds to daily, presents an effective elegy to our seemingly doomed contemporary society.

Friday Links: Someone Stole this "Transformers" Sculpture in Queens

Fri, 14 Oct 2016 11:24:37 +0000

Someone stole the above “Transformers” sculpture from Long Island City artist Annalisa Iadicicco. Come on guys, she made it with children! [QNS]

Recently discovered cave etchings in Spain might date back 14,500 years and have been described as "the most spectacular and impressive" on the Iberian peninsula. [BBC]

Holland Cotter joins the chorus of (mostly) praise for Pedro Reyes’ “Doomocracy”. [The New York Times]

From an auction immediately following the artist’s death, to a price “correction” in the 1990s, and ending up for sale again today—here’s what David Bowie’s prized Basquiat painting tells us about the way the art market works. [artnet News]

“If you can’t get walk-in traffic, why be in Chelsea?” -Mike Weiss on the closure of his eponymous gallery. Apparently having your gallery in a 24/7 luxury condo construction zone has become too much to deal with. Wow, how many Chelsea galleries have closed this year? [ARTnews]

150 affordable housing units are available from $833 to $1,082 in what’s temporarily Downtown Brooklyn’s tallest tower. Applications close December 15th. [Curbed]

Simon Fujiwara’s latest video installation at the Photographer’s Gallery in London sounds bizarre. He’s created a sort of video portrait of Joanne Salley, the British art teacher who was forced to resign after students discovered a thumb drive containing her topless selfies. The video shows an idealized/banal version of her life. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: The Joinery

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 18:17:08 +0000

This has to be the nerdiest GIF we’ve posted in a good while. The above animation illustrates how a timber joint fits together. These Tetris-like forms lend themselves to GIF making—so much so that a Japanese artist so obsessed with the technique set up a Twitter account called The Joinery dedicated to the like. (hat tip: Dezeen)

You can visit the Twitter account to see all the animations, but to geek out for a moment myself—Twitter is not the ideal medium for this file format. The platform requires a user to press “play” on the GIFs, which is antithetical to its original purpose. What’s more, because Twitter has figured out that GIFs are popular, it’s nearly impossible to remove the files to share them elsewhere. I hate to keep beating the democracy drum, but the whole reason GIFs became popular in the first place was their quick loading times, and ease of sharability. Twitter removes both these qualities.

Twyla Launches The Most Offensive Art Ad on the Internet

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 14:02:39 +0000

The new art editions company Twyla is certainly making a splash. Last week they announced they raised 19 million in venture capital funds while boasting such innovations as being able to search by color, size and theme. This week, they’ve embarked on an ad campaign so offensive, it’s been papering my feminist Facebook forums. Behold the ad above, which encourages collectors to “get some” while picturing a young woman taking off her shirt. A caption overlaid reads, “Recently Single? Buy Art”.

Thursday Links: New Use for Ground Up Mummies—Paint Pigment

Thu, 13 Oct 2016 10:50:58 +0000

Martin Drölling, “L’intérieur d’une cuisine” (1815), believed to have been painted with Mummy Brown (via the Louvre)

Painting/art history nerds will like this one. It’s a round-up of pigments from yesteryear that we no longer use. The weirdest one is undoubtedly “Mummy Brown,” which, as it’s name suggests, is made out of ground-up mummies. Gross? [Hyperallergic]
Jean-Michel Basquiat fans rejoice. A new, never before exhibited drawing will be on view at Brooklyn’s Bishop Gallery during Art Basel Miami. The gallery is part of the satellite fair X Contemporary. Not to sound too dismissive, but the drawing doesn't look remarkably different or better than anything else he's done. [ARTnews]
Bob Dylan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Nice to see musicians getting their due. [The New York Times]
Here's a page that allows a user to distort an image by shrinking or enlarging it. Sometimes new images appear, but generally, I don't get this "pixel art". How is this any different than using the distort tool in Photoshop? [Essenmitsosse]
The Artists and Writer's Cookbook is out. Recipes from James Franco (pb and jelly), April Gornik (salad), and Swoon (ratatouille). Those recipes are all pretty traditional compared to Marina Abramovic, though, who submits a breast milk and sperm recipe that is to be eaten on top of a volcano. That's one place I'm not going to travel for dinner or art. [Artnet news]
And in the news world of "no shit", Brooklyn and Queens have never been this expensive. [Curbed]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Tentacle Porn—Definitely Not Ass Friendly

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 20:48:58 +0000

I love my job, but there are occasional downsides. Trolls. Moronic debates. Exposure to images I wish I had never seen. This latter issue is most pressing each Wednesday when we do NSFW GIF of the Hump Day. I’ve now seen women peeing on octopuses, male republicans getting fucked in bathrooms, and a whole lot of tentacles doing nasty things. I would like to forget all of this (and will ensure you don’t have to by linking to none of it).

Stripping Down Self-Exposure With Karen Finley And Narcissister In “Baring It”

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 12:00:50 +0000

Narcissister speaks in "Baring It: Self-Exposure In Feminist Performance" at NYU's Performance Studies (photo via Performance Studies @ NYU)

What is it like for a woman artist to self-expose? A roundtable at New York University’s Performance Studies Department last week gave some insider insight into the bravery and vulnerability that explicit feminist performance art requires.

Wednesday Links: Laying Low, Getting Away, and Moving Out

Wed, 12 Oct 2016 11:03:07 +0000

James Mellick, Wounded Warrior Dogs. Image via: MLive.com

Ooooh. Production drawings from the 1960's T.V. series, "Batman". [Batgirl Bat-trap]
Don't buy your art off e-bay. The company reportedly made 1.4 billion in the in the UK, but paid just 1 million in taxes. (hat tip: Paul B. Davis) [The Guardian]
James Mellick and Stacey Kirby win ArtPrize's top honors this year. Mellick produced a series of wooden dog sculptures with prosthetics and Kirby a series of performances set within site-specific installations that examine government processes [artnet News]
More on Chinatown's gentrification—this time with some good news. A small 20-unit apartment building in Chinatown will receive $2.2 million towards not only preserving its affordability but making it more sustainable. [Curbed]
Why You Shouldn't Live in New York. A new 20x200 print by William Powhida. My favorite line item: Graffiti tours. [20x200]
Speaking of getting away: here are the best places to escape the art world (in L.A.) [Artillery]
File under fodder: according to Time, Ronald McDonald is lying low until the crown craze is over. Is this a bullshit story dreamed up by McDonalds? That mascot's been laying low for the last 15 years. I thought the company had moved on to new touchstones—like Dash Snow. [Time]

GIF of the Day: Tell Your Friends & Family You're Gay with Doritos

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 18:45:57 +0000

Today is “National Coming Out Day” and I was really hoping to find a good GIF of someone jumping out of a cake in drag to surprise their shocked parents with the big announcement or something. But instead I found these GIFs, a marketing stunt from Doritos to promote new gay Doritos. Why are there gay Doritos?

"To expand on what the brand positioning 'For the bold' means and tell the world, 'There’s nothing bolder than being yourself,' Doritos decided to 'come out' in support of those who haven’t yet..."

Cue the Lady Gaga!

I probably can’t think of anything more literally and figuratively nausea-inducing than a corporation “celebrating” marginalized sexual identities with a cool-ranch-flavored “food” product dyed in an array of artificial colors that are probably illegal in more civilized nations.

How to Keep AFC in Your Newsfeed

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 18:02:49 +0000

When AFC launched in 2005, the internet was a totally different beast. Blogs were the little guy, out to upset the corporate media and democratize web content. And we succeeded! But fast-forward to 2016, and “user generated content” is what’s doled out to us by Facebook’s algorithms.

As Facebook continually tweaks its content-prioritization metrics, you’ve probably noticed less and less posts from small publishers like us. Instead, you’re likely to see trending stories about the Kardashians, paid content, and family members fighting about the election. Or worse, baby photos.

Tuesday Links: Brutalist Homes & Gardens, Women Artists Photoshoot Comes to Brooklyn

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 11:05:54 +0000

Anton Rodriguez

Barbican resident and photographer Anton Rodriguez has launched an ambitious project to document every one of his 2,000 neighbors’ apartments in the famed brutalist landmark. Mostly, this makes me want to move there. [The Guardian]

Lawyer Pierce O’Donnell is suing his business associate, art adviser and New Age spiritualist Maitreya Kadre, because they bought a painting together that may or may not be a Jackson Pollock. Apparently she keeps the painting locked up in a storage facility, and has been stymieing attempts to authenticate it. What? [Los Angeles Times]

Jeffrey Uslip has unexpectedly resigned as curator at CAM St. Louis. His departure comes on the heels of a racially-charged debate over a Kelley Walker exhibition that many found insensitive in the context of a city with so much recent race-based unrest. [artnet News]

Were the early 90’s an exemplary period of shoestring-budget, groundbreaking curation? Molly Gottschalk argues that the cash-strapped art world of 2016 could learn from the past, as young gallerists weathered the bursting 1980s bubble with innovating programs not reliant on speculation. Of course, rents in art capitals were a fraction of what they are today. How much freedom do non-blue-chip galleries really have when one month of commercial rent in contemporary London or New York is equivalent to what they might’ve made in a year in 1991? [Artsy]

The Queens Museum’s new exhibition Chance Ecologies features artists considering the patches of “wilderness” that have reclaimed vacant lots around the borough’s booming waterfront. [Curbed]

“As a serious music journalist I am proud to note that my article about Insane Clown Posse for Baltimore City Paper made it to Faygoluvers.net and now a bunch of Juggalos are trying to prove how not-sexist they are by calling me a bitch” -Lexie Mountain, on the backlash her hilarious, insightful account of a night deep inside “The Dark Carnival.” [City Paper]

If you’re bummed you missed the group photo of hundreds of women artists at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel in Los Angeles, have no fear. On Sunday, October 23rd, Kim Schoenstadt and assistant curator Carmen Hermo will be restaging an East Coast version of the photoshoot at The Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux-Arts Court. [The Art Newspaper]

The Times’ Style Magazine briefly profiles Paula Cooper, who’s apparently quite the real estate trend-setter, among other accolades. [The New York Times Style Magazine]

GIF of the Day: Michael Steele on Last Night's Debate

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:40:26 +0000

I’m not a huge fan of Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee and Lieutenant Governor in one of the worst gubernatorial administrations Maryland has ever suffered through (think “highways to nowhere” built through nature preserves and you get the idea).

But man, can this guy tweet a GIF. Here’s his reaction last night to the current state of his political party:

GOP at this moment. #debate pic.twitter.com/nD0gc29sWj
— Michael Steele (@MichaelSteele) October 10, 2016

To which all of us still waiting for transit funding in Baltimore would like to reply:

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Manicures for the Post-Apocalypse

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 17:06:55 +0000

Sam McKinniss's seductive solo show "Egyptian Violet" opens Thursday night at Team Gallery.

Behold: a perfect week for the fun-but-a-little-nerdy art lover.

Finally, a week in New York City where there’s at least one totally worthwhile, low-key art event every night without too many #FOMO -inducing major scheduling conflicts. We’ve picked out the best of the best, including such different activities as a pop-up opening party at Babycastles with a Kawaii nail art bar on Monday night and an artist talk from painter Keltie Ferris at the New York Studio School on Tuesday.

Monday Links: Don't We All Want a Dyke for President?

Mon, 10 Oct 2016 11:12:22 +0000

Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem “I Want a Dyke for President” is justifiably having a moment. The piece has been blown up and installed underneath the Standard Hotel, and has recently gone viral as a video featuring Mykki Blanco reciting the poem. Basically, we have the two most unpopular major-party candidates ever, and “I Want a Dyke for President” sums up so many frustrations. [The Creators Project]

After jilted Marina Abramović collaborator Ulay was awarded a quarter million Euros a few weeks ago in the largest conceptual art lawsuit ever, Noah Charney tries to figure out just how much Abramović made and how. Unfortunately, he never really gets to the bottom of which works sold for how much and to who, but it’s a decent intro to the commodification of performance art. [Salon]

Creative Time director Nato Thompson describes Doomocracy as “less like hanging art in a museum and more like ‘putting on an opera at the Met.’” The Pedro Reyes installation spans multiple rooms of a derelict warehouse, and tackles issues from school shootings to climate change in the style of a haunted house. We can’t wait to see it. [artnet News]

Speaking of giant creepy abandoned buildings, this VICE documentary about Ohio’s sprawling “Ghost Malls” is amazing. Journalist Rick McCrank interviews photographers and ameature filmmakers who explore abandoned malls, and you come to realize how absurd and tragic the typology of the shopping center is—it’s the closest thing many suburbanites have to public/civic space, but since it’s privatized, its fate is tied to the whims of the market. [VICE]

Reflecting on Thomas Heatherwick’s $150 million “Vessel” slated for Hudson Yards, Aaron Betsky muses that spectacle-driven installation art has supplanted grandiose architecture as site of collective experience. I’m not entirely sold on that argument—the truth within that statement might have more to do with economics. It seems that the private sector is increasingly more likely to fund expensive art than the public sector is to fund expensive architecture. Most civic buildings are now designed by budget and zoning, but plenty of contemporary high-end private property still has a sense of whimsy (I’m thinking of Herzog & de Meuron’s cathedral-like Miami Beach parking garage). And many museums strive for both. [Dezeen]

Rob Goyanes is the best. Here’s his take on accelerationism, late capitalism, and environmental disaster as they manifest (/in) Miami. [Temporary Art Review]

An interview with East New Yorker Patrick Eug‎éne, who uses abstract expressionist painting to discuss gentrification. [PBS]

This is such a good idea. In many gentrifying cities, there’s paradoxically a surplus of school buildings due to closures or replacements. St. Louis is considering turning a former school into workforce housing for teachers. [Education Dive]

GIF of the Day: Jeremy Olson

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 22:03:05 +0000

Jeremy Olson’s black and white GIFs are not inviting. They take viewers through a fictional subterranean labyrinth, and are part of a kickstarter project in which the artist hopes to raise enough funds to produce his 3D artist’s book called GROTTO. It’s worth backing.

The book has been three years in the making. Olson spent that time carefully constructing dioramas and small sculptures in his Ridgewood studio and documenting them. Each has been photographed with the intent of producing 3D images that can be viewed with red/cyan glasses. (It comes with two pairs of 3D glasses. )

Unexpected Election Revelation: Joy Can Be Found in a Brooklyn Call Bank

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 19:28:37 +0000

Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1954-55

Art and the presidential race don’t often collide. Every once and a while we can report on an artist who’s rendered Trump with a small dick, or more recently, the bizarre Twinks4Trump art show. But mostly, the election replaces the art news on our feeds, rather than intermingles with it.

This past Wednesday I experienced a rare intersection of art and electoral politics in the most unlikely of places—Hillary Clinton’s campaign office. I was there with seven other artists, galleriests and curators to work the phone banks. That night we spoke to dozens of people, all of whom were casting absentee votes. For many of us, myself included, it was our first time doing any campaigning at all.

Covering The Waterfront: The Dumbo Gallery Round-Up Part 2

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 16:41:53 +0000

Ieva Epnere, Sea of Living Memories, (video still), 2016. (Courtesy the artist and kim? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Latvia)

Following the first part of my DUMBO gallery round-up, I concluded my waterfront adventure by visiting A.I.R. Gallery and Art In General. More on my trip below:

Yvette Drury Dubinsky: On The Move, Nancy Morrow & Erin Wiersma: With/drawn and Yun Shin: Filtering

Yvette Drury Dubinsky, CominggoingEurope, 2016, 28-inch diameter, Cyanotype, monotype and collage on handmade watercolor and Japanese paper (Courtesy the artist and A.I.R. Gallery)

A.I.R. Gallery 155 Plymouth Street Brooklyn, NY On view until October 9, 2016

The Art F City Fall Fundraiser: Because Mexico Won't Pay

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 12:15:37 +0000

William Powhida, “The Names of Drumpf”, 2016, digital archival print, (size tbd)

This year, Donald Trump drew attention to the so-called charitable activities of his foundation, by using the funds to purchase two portraits of himself. When we investigated this story, we discovered something equally odd. Donald Trump has given only $30,000 to his own foundation over the course of the last ten years—less to his foundation than it costs to run Art F City’s own non-profit program for a single year. So we propose a wager: If our readers can raise more than $30,000, the minimum amount we need to support our operations for the year, we will reward our first 100 supporters with the limited edition print, “The names of Drumpf” by famed artist and satirist William Powhida.

Friday Links: Self-Mummification is a Thing

Fri, 07 Oct 2016 11:16:55 +0000

Betty Yu from the Chinatown Art Brigade writes about displacement in Chinatown. [Hyperallergic]
Speaking of gentrification issues, this Phineas Harper column for Deezen is so insightful. "Gentrification in the case of Williamsburg was in direct opposition to the interests of the businesses based there. It replaced economically and socially productive workplaces with unproductive capital stores. Even by the metrics of conventional capitalist wisdom, it was a strategic blunder damaging the real economy of Brooklyn." [Deezen]
Jeremy Bailey and Rafaël Rozendaal discuss podcasts. [Good Point]
"To be honest, I wonder what a lot of people see in abstract painting. I love it, the idea of it and the experience of it, because it’s been in my life for decades. But what if you don’t have that information?" Now, that's how you write a lede. Holland Cotter on Agnes Martin at The Guggenheim. He LOVES it. [The New York Times]
Ew. There's a term called "The Brexit Discount", which is being applied to purchases made in London England during Frieze and the auctions now that the pound is depressed. Nice to see a vote driven by xenophobia is helping out collectors. [The New York Times]
There is now a filter to turn your cell phone videos into paintings. [Engadget]
Apparently self-mummification is a thing. [Atlas Obscura]

GIF of the Day: Cute Baby Surprise

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 18:11:36 +0000

We’re not sure where this GIF originated, but I’m hoping it’s an X-Files-esque FBI document and this is Julian Assange’s much-hyped “October Surprise” is.

Covering The Waterfront: The DUMBO Gallery Round-Up Part 1

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 16:15:48 +0000

Installation view of Ghost of a Dream's When the Smoke Clears: The Fair Housing Project at Smack Mellon (Photo by Etienne Frossaard; Courtesy the artists and Smack Mellon)

Can art thrive in the land of startups and $10 coffee? Neither is known to be particularly art friendly, so the question seemed relevant as I headed over to DUMBO. Dotting the neighborhood are several non-profits (and a few for-profit spaces), many of which are beneficiaries of the space subsidy program run by Two Trees, the largest (and arguably only) arts-friendly developer in the city. The program offers these spaces rents at reduced retail prices. (Disclaimer: Art F City is a space subsidy program participant.) This fall, the proliferation of non-profits in the neighborhood hosts more than its share of politically oriented shows. Following my last gallery round-up in the West Village, I decided to cruise the Brooklyn waterfront on a Saturday afternoon to see what these non-profits to offer for their fall shows. And I was not disappointed. Here’s what I found:

Thursday Links: Twinks4Trump is Just as Creepy and Bizarre as it Sounds

Thu, 06 Oct 2016 10:59:10 +0000

Lucian Wintrich, from the series "Twinks4Trump."

Uh, Williamsburg gallery Boiler | Pierogi almost ended up hosting #DaddyWillSaveUs, a “Twinks4Trump” art show featuring homoerotic photos of young men in “Make America Great Again” hats by Lucian Wintrich. The exhibition also somehow includes a veritable “who’s who” of assholes from gay white supremacist Milo Yiannopoulos to predatory capitalist Martin Shkreli. What do those two have to do with art? The whole thing is confusing and sounds unreal, which is why the Boiler | Pierogi people agreed to do it in the first place—they assumed it had to be a parody. [artnet News]

Twyla, a little-known website that produces limited edition prints has raised 19 million in VC funding. What is it about this website that has investors believing it’s worth this much money? They have curators! Their site allows search by theme, color, and size! The work comes with a custom frame! OoooOOOOooooh! This smacks of Color, the app that did nothing, but whose founders somehow raised 41 million in VC money. The company failed. [VentureBeat]

Soldiers in Ukraine located 24 stolen Dutch paintings, but refused to turn them over because the finders fee was not large enough. Eventually, five of these paintings made their way to the Ukraine government, which has returned them to their home in the Westfries Museum, located in the Dutch maritime town of Hoorn. [CNN]

A collection of tweets in which Donald Trump berates architecture critics who have been critical of his buildings. [Curbed]

Art in Odd Places returns today, this year focusing on race and taking place on the entirety of 14th Street. The outdoor art show is free and features pieces such as a dress from Dominique Paul that changes colors based on context. As she walks from one end of the street to another, the electronics in the dress react to the block’s median income. Art in Odd Places wraps up Sunday. [The Art Newspaper]

Bryan Zanisnik’s multiple busts of Christopher Walken at Socrates Sculpture Park have been understandably popular. [Lonely Planet]

The estate of the infamous junky, and art world royalty artist Dash Snow has sued McDonalds for their unauthorized use of one of his graffiti tags in their new graffiti-themed restaurants. The suit says that the use could not be more antithetical to Snow’s anti-capitalist beliefs. To which we say, sure, but this stuff lives on the sides of buildings and is thus made freely available to the people. If McDonald’s wants to use the tag in their locations, they should be free to do so. Besides, there is an argument to be made that showcasing the work of a known artist and drug addict is perhaps a bit subversive. (It’s probably worth noting that we don’t buy this particular argument.) [Hyperallergic]

Related: in this video, London street artist Strik prepares for a mural (which is nothing to write home about) by walking around Shoreditch and talking to residents about the wave of hypergentrification crashing through the neighborhood. [The Guardian]

Who can afford to be a starving artist? Unsurprisingly, research points to a class divide, where children from middle-class and affluent families are more likely to pursue an art career, likely because they’re less concerned about the economic risks. [Createquity]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Nadine Faraj

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 19:30:48 +0000

Nadine Faraj’s blobby, wet watercolor style is unsurprisingly great at capturing how blobby and weird and fluid-filled the human body is. She came to our attention this week because she has a show opening tomorrow night at Anna Zorina Gallery. Naked Revolt is a celebration of the international phenomenon of topless feminist protesters. Hell yeah!

But it’s pretty surprising how well these watercolors translate to GIF form. Watching this flesh jiggle and change skin color is a bit like an especially arty twerk-centric music video from that early aughts trend of songs in which people rapped about all the different ethnicities of boys and/or girls they liked (does anyone else remember that being a thing?).

Top Trends at Frieze London, According to Instagram

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 17:47:42 +0000

Pink is the new black #frieze2016 #pink #artfair #art #london

Wednesday Links: "Mapplethorped" is Now a Verb, and Female Jesus is Back

Wed, 05 Oct 2016 11:24:47 +0000

Edwina Sandys, "Christa," photo by Hiroko Masuike, The New York Times.

Applications for the Knight Cities Challenge open next week. If you have a project to make your block, neighborhood, or city a better place, apply for some serious Knight Foundation funding. [Knight Cities]

“I have no beef with hip painting, but that kind of art does not need my help. I would rather champion art and artists whose voices are less mainstream and obvious. The best art represents belief systems; humanist values that people have been addressing and debating for centuries.” In an artnet profile, Cristin Tierney discusses her transition from art advisor to gallerist, weathering ups and downs of the market, art fairs, and more. She relies less on retail sales—her brick-and-mortar space in Chelsea might show unsalable installations or video—and more on expert knowledge of the secondary market and relationships with collectors. [artnet News]

This video from Nowness documents the final house architect Luis Barragán came out of retirement to design. The Mexico City residence has been faithfully maintained and loved by the owners since the 1970s. It’s so, so beautiful. [Curbed]

In other “house envy” news, Dr. Jean-Laurent Casanova commissioned a rooftop garden in Chelsea inspired by the French Alps. [New York Magazine]

AFC’s friend and occasional contributor Molly (Rhinestones) Ryan is taking artist Lucia Del Sanchez to task on social media, alleging artist Harrison Curley's queer imagery was “Mapplethroped” out of a show at Chinatown Soup on account of his work being “too shocking.” [Facebook] UPDATE: A reader has informed us that Del Sanchez was not the curator of the exhibition, and that the exhibition in question was organized by Emily Sussman. If anyone wants to explain this confusing conflict, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Total Proof: The Gala Committee, 1995-1997 is on view at Red Bull Studios through November. The exhibition comprises the subversive artwork that made its way onto the set of campy 1990s television show Melrose Place. This looks so, so good. [The Daily Beast]

In 1984, Edwina Sandys displayed “Crista” in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The sculpture depicts Jesus as a topless woman being crucified. In the 1980s, this led to a maelstrom of hate mail and complaints, so when she was forced to remove the piece, she strapped it to the roof of a red sports car and drove off. Now, she’s been invited to display “Christa” again, and it’s likely not going to be nearly as controversial. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Andrej Ujhazy

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 18:54:02 +0000

Today’s GIF by Andrej Ujhazy comes courtesy of dump.fm and Tom Moody’s blog. On his blog, Moody writes that he liked the suggestion of “a battlefield via the insertion of ambiguous “tracer fire.” This could also be strange electrical fields in a parallel Earth scenario.”

Oddly enough, when I saw this, my first thought was that it was a piano in a dessert wind storm. I rather liked the reference to destroyed pianos—something of a trope in the fine art world—but one that more than gives back in this case. This is the rare GIF that actually suggests sound, (as opposed to being manually paired with it.) And that suggestion works whatever you think the object is, be it a piano, a truck, or unidentified remnants on a battlefield.

Can I Get a Tax Deduction For the Artwork I Donated? Short Answer, No

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 14:58:28 +0000

Image via: c-monstah

Here’s the scenario: Your friend at Charity X wants you to donate one of your paintings to their upcoming fundraising auction. You’re on the fence, but she mentions the tax deduction, and so you agree. After your painting sells at the event, you get a letter from Charity X, intended for your tax records, stating the price your piece sold for.

This scenario is misleading to the artist. The charity is implying that you can take a tax deduction that you are not actually entitled to.

Tuesday Links: We Have Reached the Point Where Actual Scandals are No Longer Scandals

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 11:32:35 +0000

First order of business: Hyperallergic redesigned and it looks SO GOOD. The images are huge. The design is simple. It’s easy to read. With this new website, Hyperallergic is clearly the best looking art website out there. (AFC still has them beat, though, in the wallpaper category.) [Hyperallergic]
Good lord, this animated GIF show “Looped Dreams” curated by Rhizome and GIPHY sounds terrible, as reported by Wired. The idea, here, was to show GIFs and their physical counterparts. But Wired reporter Liz Stinson says the physical work all looks better than the GIFs. [Wired]
Kohl’s has donated over 1.5 million to the Milwaukee Art Museum. This was reported by, get this, Fox News. [Fox News]
David Byrne and his collaborator Mala Gaonker have put together a show called “Neurosociety” at Pace Gallery. I don’t get it. Apparently it puts neuroscience to work by testing “our ability to predict elections by judging the competence of faces” and revealing “how our sense of an object’s size depends on our sense of our own size.” Does anyone else understand this? [The New York Times]
Museums are organizing shows for private collectors. It’s amazing how quickly things change. Remember when the New Museum launched “Skin Fruit”, an exhibition showcase Dakis Joannou’s collection and the outrage that followed? It’s hard to imagine that kind of hoo-haw over a show like that now and it’s only six years later. [The Art Newspaper]
A summary of the New York City Hearing on keeping the city affordable to small business. I was there for part of it, and it seemed like there was zero consensus on what do about the problem. Thank-you city council members. Patricia Dorfman, from the Sunnyside Chamber of Commerce has money quote. "It feels as though a great tsunami is coming towards us: big real estate dominating the city. You're talking about life rafts and water wings when a tsunami is coming." [Gothamist] Try throwing some paper planes across the world on your mobile phone. [paperplanes.world]

GIF of the Day: HBO's "Westworld" Explained in GIFs

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 18:37:21 +0000

Everyone’s talking about HBO’s new cyberpunk western Westworld, which debuted last night. But what is it about, you might ask? It’s the age-old story of people building robots to have sex with and then (probably) getting killed by said sex robots.

I’m not sure why this is such a trope of literature/popular imagination, but I bet even the ancient Greeks had a myth about Hephaestus trying to bang his creation Talos, only to end in tragedy. Pretty much as soon as humanity realized we could make androids, someone’s wanted to fuck them. Even though we all know robot-human relations are doomed to end in cyborgs killing us all.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: An Overdue Eclipse of Male Artists

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 17:00:48 +0000

Robin Kang: Skywoman's Secret Circuit opens Friday at OUTLET

While the Guerrilla Girls are in London chastising Europe’s man-centric art world, we’re happy to report an all-too-rare week in New York that’s dominated by awesome female artists. Tuesday night Esther Ruiz is unveiling an installation at BAM, and the much-missed queer space Spectrum gets resurrected as The Dreamhouse in Ridgewood, with performances from Juliana Huxtable and more. Thursday night at Anna Zorina Gallery, Nadine Faraj’s solo show celebrates going topless as an act of political defiance, and Friday Robin Kang’s weavings at OUTLET demonstrate that textiles are still relevant to tech.

Monday Links: Giant Video Hitler, Clown Art, Denver Airport Conspiracies, and Syria's Westeros Tourism

Mon, 03 Oct 2016 11:04:52 +0000

Brian Belott.

As part of the “Berlin Leuchtet” light art festival, the collective RE:SORB decided to project a giant talking Hitler face, Blade-Runner-geisha-billboard style, onto the side of a building. Apparently people were so freaked out a man actually called the police. [RT]

And in other “insane dictators/questionable A.V. decisions” news, the Assad regime is trying to lure tourists to Aleppo with video ads featuring the Game of Thrones theme song. You would think the Syrian government would want to distance itself from references to a drawn-out, convoluted civil war with a byzantine cast of characters no one can follow featuring Medieval-style religious cults, beheadings, and rape. I’m not sure how many tourists this tactic is going to lure. Maybe Gary Johnson? [CNN]

“I believe that our world is very open to clowns: Koons is a clown. Kelley’s a clown. Duchamp is a clown. Joe Bradley is a clown.” Brian Belott on absurdism. The artist has lit his hair on fire for YouTube and glued rocks to a calculator. There’s also an anecdote in here that explains why perishable paintings are a kinda terrible idea. [ARTnews]

The huge Denver International Airport is pretty weird, in part because it’s full of creepy public art about the apocalypse and mosaics of genetically modified STD viruses. This has lead to plenty of conspiracy theories involving underground bunkers, the New World Order, and aliens. Rather than attempt PR damage control, Heather Kaufman, the airport’s director of Arts & Public Events, is embracing the airport's bizarre reputation and hosting a series of screenings, exhibitions, and other events inspired by DIA conspiracy theories. This is the coolest public art story ever. [Westword]

A British reality tv show might have just uncovered a forgotten Raphael. [artnet News]

Matt Furie, the guy who first created “Pepe the Frog,” discusses the character’s origins and how it feels to have your artwork become “the new swastika.” Man, the internet is terrible. [The Creators Project]

Galeria Millan’s new annex in São Paulo is so cool. The gallery’s facade comprises just sliding doors, so the white-box exhibition spaces open to the street and a small courtyard. [Dezeen]

Isaac Kaplan looks at actions before-and-after earthquakes in Haiti, Italy, and beyond in regards to preserving cultural heritage such as art and architecture. [Artsy]

GIF of the Day: The Rare Panda Hanky-Panky

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 18:23:22 +0000

Female pandas are almost never in the mood for sex, reports the New York Times. It happens only once a year, for 24 hours. In fact, they have sex so little, that when it is time to do the deed they often don’t know what to do. Crazy. The problem is so dire that scientists have taken to showing pandas mating videos. Panda porn?

Given our long standing interest in pandas, it’s no surprise that the GIF accompanying this story would make our GIF of the Day. We’ll note, however, that the pixels obscuring all the action are doing those pandas no good. How are they ever going to learn if we insist on protecting their innocence!

Being Dieter Meier

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 12:39:57 +0000

Installation view

Dieter Meier Possible Beings 1973-2016 Galerie Judin, Berlin Until October 29, 2016

What becomes a near-legend best? A fresh new mantle of re-invention. Plus a few bitter truths held up to the baldest light.

Dieter Meier, best known outside of Europe as one half of the influential electro-pop band Yello, works in photography, video, and performance. His latest exhibition echoes a project he first began way back in 1973. In his youth, Meirer decided that he wanted to be other people. He created a set of new identities, named each and wrote back-stories for them, and then crafted photographic self-portraits of the various iterations. Some were writers, some were filmmakers, some physicists and some acrobats. So far, so Suzy Lake, Cindy Sherman, General Idea, Gilbert & George, Bruce Nauman, Rebecca Belmore, etc., etc., etc.

GIF of the Day: Make America Great Again

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 18:04:50 +0000

John Karel’s Tumblr is an addictive rabbit hole of skeletons, houseplants, and aliens living through the trials of crappy late capitalism. They deal with declined credit cards, mountains of e-waste, grocery stores full of high-fructose corn syrup, and more.

But Karel’s above GIF, of a skeleton wearing a “Make America Great Again” hat while attempting to walk down an “up” escalator, is probably the best use of GIF as political cartoon I’ve seen in a while. And as social media users in this election year, I think we can all relate to this impulse:

From Botswana with Love*: The Gaze in Meleko Mokgosi's Marxist Oil Paintings

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 17:22:00 +0000

"Comrades," 2015 three panels: oil on canvas. All images by the author unless otherwise noted.

Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition: Lerato Jack Shainman Gallery 513 W. 20th Street & Meleko Mokgosi: Democratic Intuition: Comrades II Jack Shainman Gallery 524 W. 24th Street Both on View until October 22nd, 2016

Can a painter ever really capture the essence of a place, while considering the canvas a stage unto itself? I wonder this, among other things, when I stand in front of Meleko Mokgosi’s massive works. They’re part collaged index of postcolonial concerns, day-to-day southern African life, images-within-images, disjointed architectures, globally hybridized art history lessons, and domestic mise-en-scène. They feel politically urgent, but move slowly, happy to meander across the border into the realm of magical realism.

Mokgosi’s sprawling, ongoing body of work Democratic Intuition includes two new chapters, presently installed at both of Jack Shainman’s Chelsea locations. On 20th Street Lerato, which almost-but-not-quite translates to “love*” in the artist’s native Setswana, art-historicizes contemporary life in postcolonial southern Africa with somewhat esoteric references and allegories. Meanwhile on 24th Street, Comrades II frames the ongoing process of African liberation from a Marxist perspective, using enormous oil paintings of school photos and text bleached directly into raw canvas, among other imagery.

I Want To Believe At Paulina Peavy’s “The Artist Behind The Mask”

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 12:00:45 +0000

Paulina Peavy, Untitled, n.d., Mixed media (Courtesy Andrew Edlin Gallery)

Paulina Peavy: The Artist Behind The Mask Andrew Edlin Gallery 212 Bowery, New York, NY On view until October 30, 2016

It’s not everyday you get to see collaborations between UFOs and artists in a Lower East Side gallery setting. But, Paulina Peavy’s The Artist Behind The Mask at Andrew Edlin Gallery is exactly that.

Thursday Links: New York Gets Star Trek Art, Iggy Pop Nudes, and Ersatz Pumpkin Spice

Thu, 29 Sep 2016 11:20:36 +0000

Hyunju Kim "NUBIGi, 000, 095" made from sewing-machine thread.

The Paley Center for Media is hosting an exhibition of all Star-Trek-themed art from 50 artists to celebrate the show’s 50th anniversary. It looks like most of it is the kitsch you would expect, but I would totally own this thread portrait of Spock. [Space.com]

In other news surrounding futuristic interplanetary relations, here’s a breakdown of just how Elon Musk plans to transport colonists to Mars. [Space.com]

Remember when we wrote about Medium Quality Screen Captures? The Facebook group is now a print publication and its first issue is out. For $8 you can own a black-and-white zine on the crowd-sourced topic of “Romance.” [Medium Quality]

Curbed has a new map of starchitect-designed buildings coming to New York, from museums and libraries to residential high rises—and actually, more than one residential high rise that includes a museum and/or library. [Curbed]

Uh-oh. You know that pumpkin latte, pumpkin pie and pumpkin spice you’ve been consuming? It’s not pumpkin. It’s squash. This story seems on a par to learning that Hello Kitty isn’t a cat. [Food & Wine]

Here are the long-awaited results of Iggy Pop’s nude modelling session at the Brooklyn Museum. Maybe it’s the staff he’s holding, but some of these drawings kinda look like Lord of the Rings fan art. [Dazed]

Printed Web Founder Paul Soulellis talks with internationally acclaimed GIF artist Lorna Mills. I love this interview, mostly because Mills is so fucking smart. When asked about the relationship of her work to cinema, Mills replies, “I am looking for something else. In the past I've described this something else as the particular and peculiar expanding to universals that, at an alarming rate, contract right back to the particular and peculiar—basically, constant oscillation punctuated by the odd abrupt rhythm.” It’s the most precise description of her GIFs I can imagine. [Rhizome]

Artist Malcolm Peacock’s latest piece involves a tour of a park that was once a segregation-era pool. Today the site is marked by a somewhat-forgotten memorial from MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Joyce J. Scott. Peacock’s work will touch on death, race, and more. We don’t know exactly what to expect, but many have speculated it will be a book. It’s not a book. [City Paper]

The Sacramento Jeff Koons debate rages on over Facebook. Tim Foster, a local writer and musician, notes that all those complaining about the philanthropic money that went to purchasing a public art work by Jeff Koons should have been spent on local artists, don’t have a history of supporting the arts themselves. Two years ago, The Crest, a 25 year old theatre known for supporting the arts, was pushed out of their home due to a landlord who hoped to make more money off the real estate. There wasn’t half the outcry. [Facebook]

Saddam Hussein’s former Basra palace has been reborn as an antiquities museum. I guess that’s one not-terrible outcome of the invasion. [artnet News]

A map charting the locations of the best Frank Lloyd Wright buildings in the US. [Curbed]

David Shrigley’s new bronze sculpture “Really Good” in Trafalgar Square lives up to its name (it’s a giant thumb’s up, appropriate among bombastic monuments). Here’s an interview with the artist about the art/design/illustration divide, the Brexit, and more. [Dezeen]

Anish Kapoor claims the repeated vandalism of his vaginal sculpture at Versailles was an “inside job.” What does that even mean? [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: Render Fruit

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 21:16:06 +0000

"Gone"

I stumbled upon this above GIF by Clara Luzian today after reading Irena Jurek’s excellent interview with Eric Mistretta, all about existential angst and waiting rooms, among other topics.

I ended up poking around Luzian’s Tumblr, Render Fruit, which is full of kinda-creepy, often funny, #vaporwave -esque animations about surreal modern dilemas. I love the idea that our digital files are a burden, as suggested in “Sisyphus” and the dismembered “live long and prosper” hand in “Broken Apart (but) Gently Responding.” These are but a few of the dozens of GIFs with “GIF of the Day” potential on Render Fruit. Enjoy.

An Interview with Eric Mistretta: When to Panic

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 13:26:33 +0000

Eric Mistretta, installation view at Anna Kustera

Visiting Eric Mistretta’s current show, “Bad Doctor,” at Anna Kustera (on through October 2nd), feels a lot like walking into the mind of a mad pop culture meta-physician. He’s turned the gallery into a glowing ultramarine chamber complete with glowing violet crystals and a pentagram painted on the floor. At first glance, the show looks like it’s a celebration of New Age beliefs and all the accouterments that go along with the lifestyle.

Wednesday Links: Legions of Frog Profile Pics, Explained

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 11:14:30 +0000

Image via the ArtPrize Facebook page. Artist unknown.

The Anti-Defamation League has listed the meme Pepe the Frog as a hate symbol. I guess that explains why so many Donald Trump supporters on Twitter use Pepe's image as their profile pic. [The New York Times]
Plans have been unveiled for the new Penn Station within the old Farley Post Office. The new design from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is obviously better than the claustrophobic conditions under Madison Square Garden, but mostly this design is pretty bland. It just feels like a glass mall or airport anywhere. Yawn. [Curbed]
An article that connects culture wars of 1990s to the rise of gentrification. [The Los Angeles Times]
Related: It’s almost impossible to get a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. If you’re an artist who is being approached on Facebook by a stranger claiming to be an NEA employee trying to give you money, it is obviously a scam. Yes, this is apparently a real problem. [artnet News]
Ella Coon visits Jessica Stockholder’s The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room at Mitchell-Innes & Nash. The center of the exhibit is a platform that both references a table and provides a vantage point to look down on the rest of the art, “This bird’s-eye view, however, holds more symbolic clout than this description suggests. And, viewed against the dish of jettisoned shells, which now looks more like the remnants of a seagulls’ bacchanal, it begs the question of what it really means for humans to make and consume anything.” [ARTnews]
Bad at Sports talks with performance artist Sam Hertz. The sound of the actual interview could use some help—lots of philosophical discussion about perception and the nature of knowledge here. “How do you know the snow is white?” Little too much navel gazing here, but still - a reasonable listen for the studio. [Bad at Sports]
One of the few remaining public housing structures left in Chicago after the Hope VI program gutted the city’s affordable housing stock will become a museum. The National Public Housing Museum (NPHM) will open in time for the 2018 Architecture Biennial. [The Architect’s Newspaper]
Voting doesn’t always produce informed consensus. Take the US Presidential race as one example. Take ArtPrize, a 19 day art orgy in Grand Rapids Michigan, in which the public votes for their favorite work of art, as another. We’ve seen plenty of questionable finalists and winners. An article detailing highlights, lowlights and everything in between. Looks like Kiki Smith is a participant this year! [Detroit Free Press]
"Breaking News: Cassils", at Tufts University in Boston gets a review. In one video now on view, a black and white montage of volunteers at SF Pride pop balloons through the gesture of hugging. It sounds like gunshots and is a memorial to the people who were murdered at The Pulse Nightclub in Orlando Florida. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Loop Dream Reservations

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 20:36:45 +0000

Image: Nicolas Sassoon. This is not an exhibition image.

I have some serious concerns about recommending the newly announced group show “Loop Dreams”. The IRL animated GIF exhibition will be presented by GIPHY, a corporation that poses as a GIF search engine, but is really just a community standards filter for Facebook. Nothing can be posted to GIPHY that violates these standards, so we’ll be looking at a show that contains zero nudity or violence. You can definitely forget about the tentacle porn GIFs.

Deadline Reminder: Submit to We Are SO Not Getting the Security Deposit Back; a Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Spaces

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 20:20:02 +0000

The Lounge Underground Artists' Collective in its heyday in Brooklyn pre-gentrification. The space is now the Franklin Guesthouse luxury hotel.

Reminder: the deadline for submissions to We Are SO Not Getting the Security Deposit Back; a Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Spaces is this Saturday, October 1st. So send the completed questionnaire at the bottom of the page, along with any photos of your space you’d like to see reproduced in glorious zine format to submissions@artfcity.com

Tuesday Links: Hillary Clinton is a Person Too

Tue, 27 Sep 2016 11:31:29 +0000

Jonathan Horowitz, “Hillary Clinton is a Person Too” (2008)

Jonathan Horowitz’s creepy sculpture “Hillary Clinton is a Person Too” has been added to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit exhibition Art as Social Force Exhibition: It’s Your Party, Cry If You Want To. That is probably the best name for a show about politics in 2016. [ARTnews]

Outraged activists are calling for the removal of works by Kelley Walker from the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. Walker (who is White) uses appropriated imagery in his work, including magazine covers featuring Black women and historical photos of Civil Rights era protests. This has offended a number of people, including museum staff, who view the work as insensitive. In response, the museum has walled-off the pieces in question and added trigger warnings. People still want the works removed. Didn’t we all decide in the early 90s that museums should be spared from censorship? Even if the images in question might be offensive to some viewers (viewers who decide to read the trigger warning and walk around the wall anyway) censoring artwork is probably one of the least fruitful outcomes of a controversy. [St. Louis Post Dispatch, Artforum, Hyperallergic]

And in Moscow, activist group “Officers of Russia” succeeded in getting Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography shut down in hopes of censoring Jock Sturges, who they accuse of being a child pornographer. His exhibition, Absence of Shame, documents families living in nudist colonies. The Officers of Russia succeeded in shuttering the gallery by dousing the photographs in urine, a tactic that thusfar hasn’t been employed in St. Louis. [artnet News]

Have no fear, the (beloved?) statue of Lenin that had been watching over the East Village from a Houston Street rooftop until recently will be back. Lenin is moving a few blocks away to the roof of 178 Norfolk Street, another building owned by Michael Rosen. [Curbed]

Uh oh. A real estate industry publication has declared the Bronx is the new Bushwick. According to the article, rents are rising and artists are moving in (I’d like to point out that the causality of these two phenomena isn’t as clear-cut as it seems) and the Bronx Museum of Arts is broadening its profile. None of the above is without controversy. The Museum has recently been focusing on expensive-to-produce blockbuster shows to elevate its profile, which sounds like a strategy that’s working—attendance is way up, and the institution is able to offer artist-centric services such as studio space for local artists. Realistically though, doesn’t it seem like far more people are leaving Brooklyn and heading to LA or small towns upstate than the Bronx? [Crain’s]

Speaking of real estate, the Observer is up in arms about the fact that Jimmy Van Bramer won’t support a 100 percent affordable housing building in Sunny Side. They chastise him for being a hypocrite, but don’t bother to explain his position. (They just call it lame.) If they had, they’d know that the residents of Sunny Side are against the building because it’s a pilot program to redevelop the entire stripe from light manufacturing to residential. A lot of jobs are on the line here, which the Observer would care about if they were anything more than a propaganda arm for REBNY. [The Observer]

Sacramento, California finally has its new $8 million Jeff Koons sculpture… and it’s actually pretty decent. This local news station, however, seems determined to drum up some sort of scandal surrounding the unveiling, perhaps to rival the heated debates surrounding its commissioning? No such luck. They ended up with controversies such as… a “live painter” tweeted something totally unrelated at the same time? Jeff Koons is from New York? It’s a pretty funny example of fishing for a story. I do like the suggestion at the end, that the city should flip the piece for a profit. How’s the secondary auction market for public art looking these days? [CBS Local Sacramento]

GIF of the Day: Oblivion

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 20:03:39 +0000

As we anxiously await tonight’s presidential debates, we’ve been looking for ways to calm our nerves. Heroin? Drink? The best work week safe solution we’ve been able to come up with is to simply hypnotize ourselves. I’m not sure it’s working. I can only see impending doom in some of these GIFs.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Immortalizing Bushwick

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 19:57:07 +0000

Join Bushwig queens Horrorchata and Merrie Cherry for brunch post open studios!

What a week ahead of us. It begins Monday with the first presidential debate, so naturally, we’ve got a conversation with artist and political hound Martha Rosler on Tuesday. Ostensibly, the conversation will cover Rosler’s career, but knowing her, a good portion will be dedicated to discussing the current political climate.

Monday Links: Calgary Didn't Like It, Shouldn't Have Put a Ring on It

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 11:19:35 +0000

Inges Idee, "Travelling Light"

Residents of Calgary really hate “Travelling Light,” a public sculpture by art collective Inges Idee. It’s actually pretty confusing as to why anyone is vehemently offended by the piece—which simply comprises a street light atop a giant wheel—but apparently people think it’s a waste of taxpayer money in “economically distressed” times. [Calgary Herald]

Swansea Museum in Wales believed they had an 18th century copy of a Flemish master sitting in their storage room. Then historian Bendor Grosvenor “discovered” the piece and authenticated it as an original Jacob Jordaens, valued at almost $4 million. The painting is now going on display, which begs the question, is it solely the authorship of an artwork that makes it worthy of exhibition? What was wrong with the painting before it had a name attached? [artnet News]

NASA hasn’t had an artist in residence since Laurie Anderson’s position was terminated by Congress in the Culture Wars more than a decade ago. But now, the agency is using private grants to work with artists, including Justin Guariglia, who is photographing our disappearing ice sheets from NASA flights. [The New York Times]

David Hockney and Martin Gayford discuss their favorite art historical works. These guys really love a good painting. [The Guardian]

Unfortunately (but unsurprisingly) it looks like the Second Avenue Subway’s opening date might get pushed back yet again. [Curbed]

The Turner Prize has opened to the public. Look forward to lots of sensationalized “BUT IS IT ART?” headlines from the British tabloids in the coming days. [BBC News]

GIF of the Day: Geriko

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 19:59:42 +0000

The above GIF comes from a music video by Hélène Jeudy & Antoine Caëcke of Geriko. The animation, which was produced for the song “Anvil” by Lorn, depicts a futuristic megacity with an overpopulation problem. Watch the full video, below, to find out the society’s unique way of dealing with that issue.

The animation style is just gorgeous, with a crisp European-feeling take on Anime’s cyberpunk-influenced imagery. I wish we had known about Geriko when planning Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place!

Hot as Hell: Peter Burr's Subterranean Utopias

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 15:08:00 +0000

From the Peter Burr exhibition Pattern Language

It’s hard work to build a world. I went to visit Peter Burr in advance of his upcoming exhibition at 3-Legged Dog Art & Technology Center this Sunday to find out just how hard. It’s hot as hell inside the center. At the time of my visit, it resembled a dark dungeon spot lit with computer screens used by Burr and programmer Mark Fingerhut. It takes me less than five minutes to drink the water I was offered.

Beyond Chelsea And The Lower East Side: The West Village Gallery Round-Up Part 2

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 12:00:25 +0000

Detail of Dale Jackson's Untitled, ink on posterboard work at White Columns (Courtesy the artist and White Columns)

Continuing my exploration of the West Village galleries’ September shows, I ventured above Houston Street to Maccarone and White Columns:

Coming To Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women

Installation view of Carolee Schneemann and Marilyn Minter at Coming To Power: 25 Years of Sexually X-Plicit Art By Women at Maccarone, 2016 (Courtesy of Maccarone)

Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street and 98 Morton Street New York, NY On view until October 16

Friday Links: The Ubiquity of Art Market Bullshit Is On Full Display

Fri, 23 Sep 2016 11:27:17 +0000

Installation view of work by Ryan Gander at Lisson Gallery, 2016. Photo by Jack Hems, courtesy of Lisson Gallery.

The MacArthur Genius Grants were announced yesterday. Baltimore artist Joyce Scott was the big win in the art world for her “repositioning of beadwork into a potent platform for commentary on social and political injustices”. [MacArthur Foundation]

Marion Maneker explains how the gallery strategy of only selling to museums to thwart flipping actually increases the desirability to flip. Basically, it increases the value of said work in the hands of private collections. What he doesn’t mention is that the strategy—named by Victoria Miro Gallery—only works when galleries have the luxury of only selling to museums. How often is that? [Art Market Monitor]

Here’s what it’s like to live in New York’s first “micro housing” experiment, touted as the future of housing in the city. Basically, it’s like a futuristic hotel. [Curbed]

Remember those naked Donald Trump statues INDECLINE installed in various cities? Apparently someone was such a fan they made off with the Miami edition. Police are pursuing a lead in the theft. [The Washington Post]

“An increasing number of galleries have become disaffected with concentrated commercialism, or have been priced out, or simply want a change and are seeking new territory.” Oh, for God’s sake. Galleries that sell multimillion dollar art works aren’t disaffected by commercialism. They’ve been priced out by condos. The crux of this story is that Elizabeth Dee has moved to Harlem, and so have other galleries, so there’s a new gallery district in the making. Dee has the good fortune to be interviewed about how her gallery and artists fit into this shift. [The New York Times]

Chong Weng Ho on the ever-continuing, always dumb debate about whether or not painting is still relevant: “...here’s the thing — outside the white cube, nobody cares if painting is dead. Because people like painting.” Apparently this has been an especially heated conversation in Australia as of late. [Crikey]

Ryan Gander’s show at Lisson Gallery sounds really fun. The artist has amassed a collection of knick-knacks and detritus (cans of rice pudding, luxury dildos) and arranged them on a conveyor belt. Each one has a personal anecdote, but the narrative connections aren’t always evident to the viewer. Giant robot eyes oversee the whole thing. [Artsy]

GIF of the Day: The GIF Connoisseur

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 17:23:09 +0000

We like to think of ourselves as the ultimate GIF connoisseurs, but we have nothing on this dapper-suited gentleman. He’s been superimposed into hundreds of GIFs over the years, thanks to this Tumblr.

He is totally the digital art version of those people who always insist on standing directly in front of a painting at MoMA, lost in a contemplative state that prevents anyone else from seeing the work.

Beyond Chelsea And The Lower East Side: The West Village Gallery Round-Up Part 1

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 12:00:39 +0000

Installation View, Vadis Turner, Bells and Burn Piles, Geary Contemporary, 2016 (Courtesy the artist and Geary Contemporary)

Is the West Village still worth visiting for art? I asked myself this question the other day, after realizing that there’s been something of an art world exodus from the neighborhood in the past couple years. Most recently and notably, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise left their West Village space for two galleries in the Lower East Side and Harlem in the summer of 2015. But this shift out of the area began even earlier. Harris Lieberman Gallery closed in 2013, Sperone Westwater moved to the Bowery in 2010 and numerous lesser-known galleries either left or closed in between. Just trying to find a current list of West Village galleries is a study in dead links and farewell letters.

Thursday Links: Marina Abramović Owes Ulay €250,000

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 10:51:26 +0000

Sun Mu, "Jesus of Chosun," oil on canvas, 2009

North Korean defector Sun Mu has been stirring up controversy with his parody Socialist Realism paintings. Apparently some South Korean audiences don't see the irony in his work... which is hard to believe. [The Guardian]
Famously a fan of midcentury modernism, the musician Moby really hates this hotel room designed by the late Zaha Hadid. [Dezeen]
Ulay sued his ex Marina Abramović for royalties over their collaborations, and has been awarded €250,000 by a Dutch court. Cue Simpsons-style "HA HA." [artnet News]
There's a huge resurgence of interest in 20th century art dealers who defined movements' aesthetics. Is this because we're nostalgic for charisma in the age of global mega galleries and a sometimes faceless business? There are books, exhibitions, and more in the pipeline celebrating legendary gallerists Virginia Dwan, Richard Bellamy, Leo Castelli, and others. [ARTnews]
Former students of NYU's defunct Tisch Asia art school in Singapore are suing the university, alleging a sub-par education and lack of networking opportunities that left graduates saddled with debt. [New York Daily News]
The listicle "10 Things You May Not Know about Tracey Emin" isn't all that revelatory, with a few exceptions. Kate Moss once bought one of Emin's works and it ended up in a London dumpster, found by a lucky passerby. Also, she has a twin and "very bad herpes." [Sleek]
Here at AFC we're equally baffled and delighted by the current obsession/trend of houseplants everywhere, particularly in the art world. Kate Losse theorizes our society's sudden, collective love of all things potted might be rooted in environmental anxieties and the popularity of plant-centric midcentury modernism. [Curbed]
I love how VICE can cover anything from a protest camp in the Amazon to a heroin den in the Midwest and make it seem like the coolest place to be. Mostly for that reason, here's their coverage of PS1's NY Art Book Fair. [VICE]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Miley Cyrus

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 18:20:00 +0000

For the occasion of the NSFW GIF of the Hump Day I decided to look up Miley Cyrus. Why? Because we haven’t heard much about her in a while, I was sure there’d be NSFW performance art GIFs of her around the web, and a friend once told me that her performances were some of the best art he’d ever seen. Naturally, I found a million pictures of her topless, wearing a giant dildo and a blue wig with a unicorn horn. She’s our spirit animal. Sadly, there aren’t as many GIFs as we’d like of Miley wearing this particular costume —we’ve had to settle on a GIF of her riding a giant inflatable dick. But there are plenty of pictures. So, today I post GIFs and jpegs. The scandal never ends around here.

From Nipple Fountains to Holographic Keith Haring: Governor's Island is Weird

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 15:01:28 +0000

Julia Sinelnikova, "Saṃjñā ⌘," at the Holocenter. Image courtesy of the artist.

For better or for worse, the spirit of the 9th annual Governor’s Island Art Fair could most accurately be described as “quirky.” There’s plenty of inscrutable colorful blobs, a seemingly hands-off curatorial approach, and at least one artist statement written in the font Papyrus.

Wednesday Links: Low-Brow Gallery for Lower East Side, Jared Leto to Play Warhol

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 11:16:29 +0000

“It is an artwork or building (Paul Goldberger has pointed out that neither term is exactly apt) as pure spectacle, pure participatory carnival, but a carnival that seems mostly to involve walking up and down stairs…” Andrew Russeth on Thomas Heatherwick’s $150 million Hudson Yards “Vessel”. He is not a fan. [ARTnews]

Dutch researchers claim Immanuel Kant’s theories about art have a neurological basis—subjects’ brains react more emotionally when they’re told something is “real life” vs “art.” [Observer]

Ahead of the upcoming Sotheby’s estate auction, David Bowie’s art collection is being exhibited in L.A. and it looks amazing. [L.A. Weekly]

Archaeologists uncovered a 1934 time capsule in Poland. It’s from a Hitler Youth camp and likely really, really creepy. [TIME]

On November 29th, MoMA is screening Pedro Almodovar’s latest, unreleased film Julieta. Then, throughout December, the museum is screening the entirety of his filmography. This is awesome. [Remezcla]

“When I came and saw the new production floors, I had the impression that I am in a museum of modern art, I think the contents corresponds to that appearance.” -Vladimir Putin visiting a Kalashnikov weapons factory. [Newsweek]

Jared Leto is going to play Andy Warhol in an upcoming biopic. [artnet News]

Lower East Side landlord SMA equities is “donating” the storefront at 104 Delancey Street as exhibition space for “low brow artists” until a permanent tenant can be found. What the hell is “low brow” exhibition space? It looks like there’s going to be street art involved. [Bowery Boogie]

The Norwegian government is moving to scrap plans for a memorial to victims of the 2011 terrorist attacks. Locals really don’t like Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s design or want the tourists they fear it will bring. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Harambe v.s. Capcom

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 18:57:02 +0000

I’m a little confused by the bizarro troll-internet’s obsession with Harambe the gorilla. Are people endlessly fixated on ironic grief over Harambe’s death to distract from the crushing reality of human suffering we’re too cowardly/emotionally exhausted to look in the eye?

That’s likely the case, and nothing calluses our pesky empathy like mocking those who care about something more than we do. Potentially to that end, someone made a game that allows the user to play as Harambe to fight classic Capcom video game characters .

This Week's Must See Events: Ride the Macabre Wave

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 15:41:29 +0000

Last month, Corinna Kirsch pointed out to us that NYC's art scene is getting pretty goth this fall. A quick glance at the exhibition thumbnails below reveals this spooky prophecy was dead-accurate: graveyards, skulls, and darkness predominate.

Tuesday night, recount the psychedelic adventures of Bruce Conner at MoMA. Wednesday, the domestic gets the spotlight with projects from Chloë Bass and Oksana Todorova at CUNY and A+E Studios, respectively. Expect plenty of creep-out factor from the latter’s biomorphic, toxic household items. Thursday, Julie Mehretu’s occult-influenced new body of work takes her practice in a darker direction, and Irene Lusztig lectures about conjuring empathy from (probably) eerie archival material.

Tuesday Links: Lenin Toppled, Potentially by Market's Unseen Hand

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 11:06:55 +0000

Josh Roth is the art lawyer tasked with assembling United Talent Agency’s art team, essentially responsible for the Hollywood agency’s controversial move into representing visual artists. There’s a lot of concern that UTA is going to disrupt traditional artist/gallery/audience relationships and reward entertainment-style spectacle. After reading this interview with him, the whole endeavor seems to make a bit more sense. Maybe this isn’t the L.A. art apocalypse it’s been made out to be? [VICE]

Well, everyone should’ve seen this coming: secondary market prices for “emerging” artists such as Hugh Scott-Douglas and Lucien Smith are way below the prices they commanded in 2014. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Those prices were over-inflated by speculators just buying to flip, and the correction keeps the primary market in check. Will this encourage young artists and gallerists to stop churning out endless quantities of soulless crapstraction? [Bloomberg]

Andrew Sullivan’s long-form reflection on his (very common) addiction to a constant data stream of social media as a professional blogger is a good read and very relatable… until about ⅘ of the way through, when it’s suggested that yoga, Burning Man, and organized religion are productive alternatives to wean us off Facebook. The first 10 minutes of this essay had me convinced that living real life should be enough. [New York Magazine]

This is a great idea. Berlin has trained refugees displaced by ISIS and the associated civil wars as museum guides to give other refugees tours in Arabic. [The Art Newspaper]

Headline of the week: A Sex Toy Lawsuit Highlights Privacy Concerns Around “Smart” Dildos. The lawsuit centers around “We-Vibe” a dildo that can be controlled via smartphone, and collects data like intensity settings, frequency and date of us. Personally, I’m (Paddy) far less concerned about the privacy issues than I am baffled by the need for such a “smart” product to exist in the first place. To use a dildo you have to hold it in your hand...just like a phone. Isn’t this just complicating the whole procedure? [Motherboard]

We’ve been fascinated by the story of Rebecca Moss, the artist-in-residence aboard a cargo vessel owned by Hanjin Shipping Company. After the Korean company declared bankruptcy, no port would allow the ship to dock out of fear the parent company wouldn’t be able to pay fees. She’s been stranded at sea by this bizarre situation until September 17th, when the ship was allowed to dock in Tokyo, where she’s now catching up with art world folks. [artnet News]

That giant statue of Lenin atop the East Village apartment building Red Square has been removed. This comes amid rumors that the complex has been sold to developer Dermot Company. Sad. There’s gotta be some joke in here about capitalism winning over the East or something. [Curbed]

Kansas Gallery is closing after five years. The gallery was located across the street from Postmasters on Franklin Street in Tribeca. They showed a lot of great young talent and will be missed. [AFC Inbox]

In other “Kansas” news, Wichita-based artist Curt Clonts wrote a short opinion piece condemning trendy art as social-media-focused or else overtly political “crap”. What’s remarkable about this is the backlash/conversation it started—after igniting heated debate locally online, the Wichita art space Harvester Arts is hosting a public forum to discuss the piece. I can’t tell if living somewhere where one short piece of art criticism ranting could become such a hotly contested issue would be inspiring or crazily suffocating. Either way, it’s good to see people care. [The Wichita Eagle]

Oh man. Greg Allen reports that we missed the Rob Pruitt birthday panda balloon market on ebay back in June. Doh! [Greg.org]

GIF of the Day: Marco Bruzzone

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 17:45:09 +0000

Marco Bruzzone, Study for Noodle-Doodle, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Behold, the abstract pasta noodle inspired by Marcel Duchamp and recreated by artist Marco Bruzzone for an exhibition at Pollock Gallery in Dallas. The Built-In Kitchen of M. Duchamp is environment in which people can reenact Marcel Duchamp’s supposedly typical meal after he moved to New York: a simple plate of pasta with butter and cheese. Gallery goers are encouraged to throw their noodles at the wall to test firmness but also, to ultimately create a work of pasta art. Get your noodle on people.

Monday Links: I Never Want to Hear the Words Kanye and Art Used Together Again.

Mon, 19 Sep 2016 11:08:28 +0000

Is there a more self-obsessed and conceited rapper than Kanye West? He's joined Instagram and calls it "his art". It's bad enough that West joining Instagram is deemed news, but to discuss this as art—as if there's some higher import to joining a social network—is just lunacy. [Dazed]

I'm probably looking forward to the Kerry James Marshall retrospective more than any other show this fall. Randy Kennedy's profile of the artist begins with Marshall showing him a bin of bobble head dolls, which he uses to work from because he says they're very accurate and live models are a pain. Artistic ingenuity makes me happy. Marshall's paintings build "a sturdy bridge for figurative painting from the 15th century to ours" writes Kennedy. [The New York Times]

Performance Research is seeking contributions that address maternal aesthetics, ethics, politics, labour and care, as well as questions of inter/trans/subjectivity. Deadline is today. [Performance Research]

T.O.P, a member of the K-Pop group Big Bang will curate a Sotheby's Charity auction to support, The Asian Cultural Council, a nonprofit foundation engaged in fostering economically struggling young art talent in Asia. We learn about the charity six paragraphs into the news story. [Korea Herald]

Artist Michael Mandiberg will open a show on the eighth anniversary of Lehman Brother's collapse. He's laser cutting the logos of failed banks onto discarded books about finance. [The New Yorker]

William Louis-Dreyfus, the French-born billionaire collector and philanthropist has died at the age of 86. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: My LaCroix

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 17:50:38 +0000

A genius by the name of Nelson Cash has gifted the world MyLaCroix.com, a webpage that enable users to design their own cans of sparkling flavored water with custom text and colorways.

We’re huge fans of various brands of sparkling water at AFC… I think it was actually the first topic of conversation when Paddy and I met during a studio visit years ago. What would Art F City flavored LaCroix taste like? I think it would be grapefruit with just a hint of cacao butter… like that faint whiff of earthy smell you get from oil paintings sometimes.

Molly Crabapple Hands Over The Paintbrush To Her Muses At Postmasters Gallery

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 12:00:16 +0000

Molly Crabapple, detail of Kim Boekbinder, 2016, mixed media, collage and acrylic on canvas (courtesy the artist and Postmasters Gallery)

Molly Crabapple: Annotated Muses Postmasters Gallery 54 Franklin Street, New York, NY On view until October 15, 2016

The relationship between an artist and their muse is one of the most romanticized clichés about art making. Just think of the movie Titanic in which the protagonist, a penniless artist named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) draws the wealthy first class passenger Rose (Kate Winslet). If you look beyond the tale of class mobility, the artist/muse relationship is one big power trip. And it is the (male) artist who has control.

Friday Links: You Can Really Poop in Maurizio Cattelan's Gold Toilet

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 11:37:35 +0000

Maurizio Cattelan has come out of retirement with a new piece at the Guggenheim. “America” is a fully-functional 18-karat gold toilet, installed in a restroom about two-thirds of the way up the museum’s spiral atrium. [The New Yorker]

Jay Z narrates an op-ed on the War on Drugs, which is illustrated by Molly Crabapple. [The New York Times]

Glad someone finally wrote this essay: What Canadians Understand About Ketchup Chips that American’s don’t. Oddly enough the theory proposed has little to do with Canadians. It’s that Americans fear the ketchup-chip combination. Get over it people. Ketchup chips are good! [The A.V. Club]

Daniel Arsham’s first New York solo show, Circa 2345, is now on view at Galerie Perrotin. From this profile piece, we learn that the artist is color blind and is just now working with color thanks to special contact lenses. Wild. [artnet News]

The National Museum of African American History and Culture opens September 26th and the Times has a gorgeous feature on it. Lots of moving images, huge image spreads, oh yeah, and some text too. Each section is divided by gallery and tracks a path through the museum. [The New York Times]

The Senate is working on a new bill to extend the statute of limitations on claims of Nazi-looted art. [CBS News]

The public forum on gentrification in Queens AFC’s Paddy Johnson is moderating is picking up steam. DNAinfo has published a story on the forum. Let’s make sure Queens doesn’t become the next gentrification battleground. [DNAinfo]

The New York Art Book Fair at PS1 sounds really good and really weird—you can buy editions of everything from Cory Arcangel sandals to wrapped up papers from the NY Family Court’s trash. [ARTnews]

Japanese designer Nendo has installed 50 uncomfortable-looking chairs in Chelsea’s Friedman Benda gallery. The chairs are inspired by illustrations from manga, and accompanied by floor-to-ceiling video projections. [Dezeen]

Yesterday’s Twitter conversation between Carolina Miranda and Jorg Colberg was so funny that I keep remembering it and breaking into laughter. The two discuss their breakfast in the rare language of artspeak for #askacuratorday. Some highlights: @jmcolberg Breakfast is indeed a cyclical concept, a performative gesture that regenerates with the start of each day. @cmonstah It's not for nothing that in certain circles, you're referred to as the On Kawara of eggs and toast! @jmcolberg A compliment for sure, though no evidence remains of my performance except its memory. I am the Tino Seghal of huevos fritos. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Dog Disaster

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 18:44:57 +0000

Anyone who has ever had a dog has imagined this scenario. Now, you get to see it.

Thursday Links: Artist Breeds Killer Chicken, George W. Bush Still Painting

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 11:23:27 +0000

I'll be on Radio Free Brooklyn talking to Dr. Lisa today between 2-3. Phone in and talk to us! (718) 928-9732 [Radio Free Brooklyn]

George W. Bush is releasing a book of his paintings February 28, 2017. He's only a marginally better painter than he was president, which is to say he's terrible. Don't buy the book. [Time]

Koen Vanmechelen has been breeding chickens for the last 20 years as part of an art piece called "Cosmopolitan Chicken Project". In order to illustrate metaphorical ideas about diversity and multiculturalism, he created a super breed of chicken by using a diverse breeding pool. This chicken is healthier, lives longer, and adapts more easily to change. And it's art, which means these chickens are available to collectors for purchase. [Smithsonian]

"Contemporary art at its worst is rarely so naive as contemporary architecture at its best," begins a review of the Venice Biennale by Ian Volner. He claims this is because architects sometimes confuse design with power and that architecture is politics—a misunderstanding he sees as afflicting the Biennale. [ArtForum]

Vessel (a temporary name) by British designer Thomas Heatherwick is a 100 million public art work that will adorn the Hudson Yards. The design has been unveiled and it looks like giant glassware. [Gothamist]

Artist Jon Rafman is keeping a dream journal and illustrating those dreams with low resolution animations. [Facebook]

We Went to Bushwig 2016, Tits Out

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 10:00:20 +0000

Kandy Muse and Mo Mo Shade

Bushwig 2016: Five years ago this scrappy drag/performance art festival opened out of its namesake neighborhood’s Secret Project Robot as an alternative queer festival for everything a little too weird for mainstream drag culture. Now Bushwig’s founders Horrorchata and Babes Trust have moved the event on up to The Knockdown Center in Queens. The festival is able to accommodate more performers, thousands of audience members, vendors, and much-needed air conditioning. This spanned two days, hundreds of drag performers (Full disclosure: including Michael, as Ellen Degenerate), and non-stop “techno brunch” on the patio. It was a lot to take in.

Thursday Links: Climb Hudson Yards' New Public Art to Appease the Overlords

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 09:30:18 +0000

This staircase is Hudson Yard's obligatory "Public Art Feature." Or a hive for giant robot bees? Whatever.

Cubans are distributing hard drives stacked with everything from an off-line Craigslist substitute to episodes of Game of Thrones and porn to get around the island's media isolation and communications woes. [The New Tropic]
A new study confirms that Berlin has defied expectations and continues to remain attractive to artists. Compared to other global cities, it's still cheaper than most of Europe while still providing great social services. Its economic health, however, is about on par with the developing world according to some questionable metrics. Uh, can New York shed a few Fortune 500 companies in exchange for cheaper rent? [artnet News]
The LinkNYC kiosks will no longer be providing free internet service, because apparently New Yorkers can't stop watching porn on them. The Giuliani-era culture wars have entered the 21st century, and the pervs have lost another battle. [New York Daily News]
Jonathan Jones weighs in on the Alec Baldwin v.s. Mary Boone debacle with an opinion predicated on the argument that all artworks by the same artist are both objectively and subjectively equal. What? How are you an art critic? [The Guardian]
That weird, dystopian Hudson Yards megaproject is getting a fittingly weird, vaguely dystopian piece of very-expensive public art. Thomas Heatherwick has designed a giant hive-like tower of staircases to nowhere that looks like it will be extremely popular for suicides when the property bubble bursts again. Or as a filming location for young adult sci-fi adaptations in which teenagers have to fight to the death to topple tyranny or something. [Dezeen]
MoMA is making thousands of photographs from its archive of exhibition images public. Be still our curatorial-nerd hearts! [The New York Times]
London is proposing to target specific neighborhoods for preservation and expansion of artist studios, housing, and creative industry jobs. Although the city has remained a center of art and design, there's considerable fear that rampant gentrification will drive out young talent and cripple the creative sector. The plan sounds vague, but well-intentioned, especially the part about funds to help artists buy property. [City Lab]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The Neverending Butt Walk

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 19:20:39 +0000

Every NSFW GIF search I do begins with this one question: can I top hypno butt?

The answer, frustratingly, is almost always no, but this one sure comes close. Does anyone else think this GIF look like a Julian Opie video? Because it sure looks like one to me - albeit a bit more accomplished.

I realize that the GIF above features a woman wearing underwear, thereby making it mostly safe for work. I’ve posting a pair of anime bare butts below to fix that problem.

The Topless Cellist Finally Gets Her Due At The Grey Art Gallery

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 12:00:14 +0000

Hartmut Beifuss, Charlotte Moorman performing Nam June Paik’s TV Bed, Bochum Art Week, Bochum, West Germany, 1973, Digital print, Peter Wenzel Collection. © Hartmut Beifuss (all images courtesy the Grey Art Gallery)

A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde 1960s-1980s Grey Art Gallery 100 Washington Square East, New York, NY On view until December 10, 2016

Wednesday Links: Lionel Shriver in Defense of Cultural Appropriation

Wed, 14 Sep 2016 11:12:08 +0000

A must-read: the full text of Lionel Shriver's talk about identity politics that ignited a firestorm of controversy at the Brisbane Writers Festival. It's worth reading in its entirety, because the most cringe-worthy "can she say that?" moments are offset by smart observations on the nature of "identity", empathy, outrage culture, and how we challenge ourselves as artists. [The Guardian]
Finally, some good news from the MTA: bar cars are coming back to the Metro North New Haven Line. This might make life a little more more bearable for all the art world people who commute back-and-forth to/from Yale. [WTNH]

GIF of the Day: Umbilical Cord Phone Charger

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:31:18 +0000

Because umbilical cords aren’t just art: they charge phones too.

This Week's Must See Art Events: Cuban Death Metal Sci-Fi, Art Book Fairs, and More

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 19:27:33 +0000

One of the great things about the art world is its permeability with other fields. Except that can seriously compound one’s #FOMO when one’s art calendar gets squeezed by spillover from Fashion Week in Manhattan, three publication fairs across the East River, political organizing, and art-film screenings. Phew.

Wednesday, catch some more conventional art openings uptown and in Chelsea with solo projects from Henry Hudson and Oscar Murillo, respectively. (Actually, Murillo’s vaguely haunted-house sounding installation promises to be anything but conventional). Thursday, check out Jessica Stockholder’s latest work at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, gender-bending in the Garment District, and black-metal-meets-science-fiction-literature from Cuban artist Yoss (how’s that for interdisciplinary?)

Tuesday Links: Umbilical Cord Art is a Thing

Tue, 13 Sep 2016 10:50:06 +0000

"Umbilical cord art" is now a trend, according to Buzzfeed.

Strangest headline of the day: “Why I Won’t Judge Women For Making Umbilical Cord Art”. [Refinery29]

Berlin’s legendary nightclub Berghain has been deemed a “high art” institution by German courts. This entitles the club to pay a lower tax rate than an “entertainment” business. ARTnews defends this “art v.s. entertainment” decision by pointing out that Art21 host Claire Danes is a fan of Berghain. But seriously, cities should be doing more to help keep their nightlife afloat. [ARTnews]

Alec Baldwin has escalated his dispute with Mary Boone and is now suing the gallery over a Ross Bleckner painting. Baldwin had approached Boone in the hopes of acquiring Bleckner’s 1996 work “Sea and Mirror.” Instead of tracking that down, Boone just sold Baldwin another, identical version of the painting, also by Bleckner. [artnet News]

Tommy Hilfiger is throwing a fashion-show-cum-carnival on a pier. This is just one of the “unconventional” venues for NYFW shows this year, ranging from public spaces to Department of Sanitation salt storage sheds (yes, really). [Curbed]

Melania Trump used $20,000 of the Donald J. Trump Foundation’s funds to buy a six-foot-tall portrait of the Donald by “speed painter” Michael Israel. To be fair, this was at an auction benefitting a charity for children. But The Washington Post reports that it’s one of many shady dealings at the Foundation. [Hyperallergic]

The Finnish government has refused state funding for the €130 million Guggenheim Helsinki. Several of the politicians who opposed the new museum outpost argued that they would support a privately-funded Guggenheim, but that the Finnish government’s share of construction costs would not be an appropriate use of state funds. [Dezeen]

10 songs that help Pitchfork staffers get shit done. This is the epitome of a music nerd/writer listening list—mostly instrumental and heavy on drone. Pretty much the opposite of anything we’d use to motivate, expect perhaps Daft Punk’s Alive and Rhythm & Sound’s The Versions. [Pitchfork]

Democratic New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo shies away from criticizing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump by name. [Politico]

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro contrived to convert the grounds of an elite golf course into a series of national art schools, housed in creative architecture designed around economic restrictions such as an embargo on imported US steel. Unfortunately, the campus became abandoned and neglected. Today, it’s one of many culturally significant sites in the country that face preservation challenges from the coming tourism boom. It would be so great to see this complex restored and put to use as an art school. Knowing the impact tourism has had on other islands in the Caribbean, though, it wouldn’t be too surprising to see the site ironically returned to use as a golf course, unfortunately. [The Art Newspaper]

Chinese social media users are bashing painter Guo Jia, accusing her of destroying historic frescos she had been tasked with restoring. We can’t find any before-or-after images of her work, but is this the Chinese equivalent of Spain’s “Beast Jesus” in-the-making? [China Daily]

High Anxiety and Escapism at Rashid Johnson’s “Fly Away”

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 12:00:21 +0000

Installation view of Rashid Johnson's "Antoine's Organ" from Fly Away at Hauser & Wirth (Photo: Martin Parsekain; Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth)

Rashid Johnson: Fly Away Hauser & Wirth 511 West 18th Street, New York, NY On view until October 22, 2016

Monday Links: Oh Yeah!

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 10:56:56 +0000

What we're listening to: Yello's, "Oh Yeah". Yello musician Dieter Meier has a show up in Berlin right now, and we're excited. [Galerie Judin]
An increasing number of museum workers are heading to jobs at auction houses. The pay is significantly better, reports Julia Halperin. [The Art Newspaper]
New York City's Department of Cultural Affairs and the Rockefeller Foundation are investing 1 million in a paid internship program with the hopes of increasing diversity. It's a good idea, but if something isn't done about displacement of lower income families due to rent increases and gentrification, they might as well be pouring that money down the drain. [artnet News]
Jerry Saltz rightly lauds the New Museum's "The Keeper" exhibition, a show he describes as a "museum full of museums, possible encyclopedias, indexes of other orders, and miniature models of pain." [Vulture]
Liberal Arts degrees pay off later in life. [The Wall Street Journal]
100 roll down security gates in the Lower East Side have been decorated by artist L'Amour Supreme. Round up of highlights here. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Hacking the Dancing Baby with stAllio!

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 17:13:33 +0000

There’s probably no GIF more famous than the Character Studio sample animation “Dancing Baby"—arguably the young internet’s first meme, and certainly the only one to be immortalized with its own episode of Ally McBeal.

What better file to use for experiments in GIF deconstruction and glitching? Benjamin Berg (AKA stAllio!) has been using the stock animation as a demonstration for how files can be corrupted. Some of the results are pretty abstract. The dancing baby is just 20 years old, and already starting to wrinkle and crack!

We Went to Aneta Grzeszykowska: NO/BODY

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 14:08:53 +0000

Aneta Grzeszykowska: NO/BODY

September 7 – October 16, 2016 | 11R | 195 Chrystie Street, NY NY 10002 September 7 – October 16, 2016 | Lyles & King | 106 Forsyth Street, NY NY 10002

Installation shot from 11R. Aneta Grzeszykowska, "Skin Head #1," recycled leather, 2016; "Selfie #15," and "Selfie #10," both pigment ink on cotton, 2015.

What’s on view: A solo show spanning two galleries. In 11R: several photographs of female body parts carefully sculpted from pig skin: a mask being painted with needles in its cheek, a hand missing fingers, a breast. Two black leather masks, one with cat ears. Three films in a darkened room featuring naked choreographed performers.

Friday Links: Brooklyn Museum, Vanessa Beecroft Unsurprisingly Court Respective Controversies

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 10:48:26 +0000

The Brooklyn Museum has named David Berliner president and chief operating officer. Given the museum’s PR problem with accusations of being pro-developer (and by extension, pro-gentrification) this is an odd choice. Berliner served previously as the chief operating officer of Forest City Ratner Companies, the developers who controversially created Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park using eminent domain to displace residents. [ARTnews]

Wow. Kanye West and Vanessa Beecroft can’t seem to stop doing controversial/dumb things. For their latest collaboration, they left models (“multi-racial women only”) standing for hours in the blistering sun on Roosevelt Island for so long that several women fainted and audience members (not production crew) felt so bad that they brought them bottles of water. Why? According to Beecroft, “The long wait before, I believe it was planned because wanted the audience to get into this state of having to observe and having to stay.” [artnet News]

As New York rents skyrocket, in conjunction with higher labor and food costs, the city is hemorrhaging restaurants. Chefs are instead heading to midwestern cities to open places that can afford a “neighborhood” feel or culinary risk-taking. Meanwhile, landlords are ending up with vacant retail space or some combination of banks and Duane Reade locations. [Food Republic]

This post’s title-"Time to Let People Decide if 9/11 Sculpture is Art or Exploitation"-is pure click bait but the post isn’t. Reading through the article we watch the writer cite her own past criticisms of Eric Fischl’s sculpture back in 2002, Eric Fischl's response years later and her reassessment of her position now. It's rare to see that kind of bravery in writers. [The New York Post]

In other WTC news, a design has at last been chosen for the complex’s performing arts center. The winning proposal comes from Brooklyn-based firm REX, headed by former OMA architect Joshua Prince-Ramus (who spearheaded the famed Seattle Central Library alongside Rem Koolhaas). It’s a translucent marble box that slightly recalls OMA’s Casa da Musica, or perhaps I.M. Pei’s East Gallery. Those buildings are successful because they feel sturdy, timeless, and permanent yet lightweight and welcoming (as opposed to the 1 World Trade Center tower) and the performing arts center looks to hit those same notes. [Curbed]

It only took three weeks for New York Mayor Bill de Blasio and City Councilman Jimmy Van Bremer to sit down for the meeting de Blasio promised in their latest skirmish over affordable housing, but it happened. Van Bremer has not backed down on his position that the so-called affordable housing at Phipps House slated for Queens is not a good idea. Now, a coalition of nearly a dozen community and arts organizations (Art F City included) will hold a summit on Sunday, Sept. 18, to discuss the Phipps Houses plan, the overdevelopment of western Queens and the SBJSA. [Times Ledger]

Not so sure about the photos on this site, but what the hell: YaPhoto is a new photography platform that’s launched in Cameroon with the mission of promoting an emerging community of Cameroonian photographers. [YaPhoto]

Art Basel has announced Buenos Aires as its first partner in the vaguely-defined Art Basel Cities Initiative. This is intended to “develop a program of cultural events designed to celebrate the city’s vibrant arts scene and raise its profile in the international art world as part of its economic development.” [Miami Herald]

We’ve never heard Joan Semmel’s theory that feminism comes into fashion when the market is down, because women’s art is less expensive. We’re not sure how this theory follows the rules of supply and demand. Art market experts, is this true? Anyway, an interview with painter and feminist Joan Semmel. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Stumblers by Erdal Inci

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 16:55:04 +0000

Erdal Inci edits multiple snapshots into crazily choreographed GIFs. We like this one, “Stumblers” because it’s exactly what Chelsea is about to look like in an hour. Seriously, based on the number of huge openings tonight, it’s going to be a shitshow. No complaints though; after having to search far-and-wide for decent art all Summer, a little stampede isn’t so much of a challenge for us culture-starved art fans.

Back To Nature In Loren Nosan’s “The World Was Good Once”

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 12:00:22 +0000

Peering inside Loren Nosan's The World Was Good Once (Photo by Holden Brown; Courtesy Loren Nosan)

It’s not everyday that you have to sign a waiver before entering an art installation. However, that’s exactly how my trip to Loren Nosan’s The World Was Good Once began.

Turning off a main road, straight into a grassy field outside Wassaic, it became obvious why the waiver and my emergency contact information were necessary. Nosan’s installation is located in a looming, desolate and derelict barn that looks like it went through hell–or at least, a meth lab explosion. Before allowing viewers to look around the show, Nosan pointed out unsound areas of the barn’s floor, which were scattered with holes where the building’s property manager had previously fallen through. Yikes…

Thursday Links: Better Curation Through IKEA, Artist Stranded at Sea

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 11:27:48 +0000

What does Google’s decision to make its photo-editing software free have to do with Susan Sontag? Quite a bit, apparently. Om Malik muses on the ubiquity of digital images and their new home on “The Cloud” and social media as opposed to fussy “objects” of consideration and control. The piece is from a few months ago, but it’s a good read and has resurfaced on Facebook/Twitter. [The New Yorker]

Hype over LA’s booming art scene may be outpacing actual support for the arts. Some Los Angeles-based collectors, gallerists, and consultants worry that speculation about the city’s newfound place as an art capital might be its undoing—an influx of pricey galleries, rising rents, and a focus on salability over connoisseurship seem to be growing faster than the city’s relatively small collector base. But the artists seem happier than in New York, and maybe that’s more important? [ART news]

Rebecca Moss signed up for an artist-in-residence program on a cargo ship owned by a shipping line that’s now $900 million in debt and barred from docking at most ports. They’re pretty much stranded in international waters until an East Asian port will accept their cargo and allow them to restock food and water. Late capitalism is so weird! [Hyperallergic]

Ecosia is a search engine that uses its ad revenue for reforestation projects. I switched my default search engine a few days ago and it’s pretty much exactly like Google, but apparently I’ve already done enough browsing to plant 8 trees. I’m equally impressed and disturbed by that. Regardless, I recommend it! [Ecosia]

“Maybe it is a silly example, but when you go to Ikea, when you walk through the trajectory, there is always something that is pulling you to go to the next step. But in exhibitions there is often no visual clarity, so you go around, and maybe there is something here and here, but the pieces don’t gel.” -Till Fellrath, one half of curatorial duo Art Reoriented, on accessibility and his practice with collaborator Sam Bardaouil. [The New York Times]

The 9/11 Museum is opening its first art exhibition to mark the 15th anniversary of the attacks. [USA Today]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Vagina Flowers!

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 19:23:10 +0000

Guess what I found googling vagina flower GIF? You guessed it. Some truly amazing flowers.

A Melancholic Stroll through the Sony Photography Awards

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 12:57:52 +0000

Kevin Frayer, Winner, Professional, Environment, 2016 for the series "Eagle Hunters of Western China"

Sony World Photography Awards 2016 Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin Until September 25

BERLIN - Only a terribly mean person could find fault with the traveling edition of the annual Sony Photography Awards. As both a showcase of a specific kind of photographic venture (more on that in a moment) and, likely more to the point, a brand-enhancing exercise in “excellence” promotion, the exhibition does exactly what it promises and is devised to do.

Wednesday Links: Is This Parrot's Painting Art?

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 10:52:15 +0000

Sally Mann will launch a show at Gagosian on September 22nd that addresses the subject of Cy Twombly, her good friend and neighbor, who died recently. Her son's recent death is said to have influenced the show as well. [The New York Times]
Oh, great. Another "Is it art?" feature. This one's about whether paintings made by animals in a zoo are art. To determine the answer, the author proposes two definitions of art and sees how they match up to paintings and process. [The Washington Post]
A map of Detroit's public art essentials. [Curbed]
This seems like good news: As part of a broader push to help the growing number of workers relying on the “gig economy,” the New York City Council will consider legislation giving all Uber and taxi drivers access to “portable” benefits like health care coverage, disability insurance and life insurance. [Politico]
Burning Man has become popular amongst Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires. Now there are luxurious camps which use hired staff like cooks, builders and security. Class tensions have erupted with many Burners saying this is a betrayal of radical self-reliance. Art people have steadily maintained little interest in the event. [The Telegraph]
Expected but still terrible news: Many artists, newspaper cartoonists and cultural figures have been detained after the attempted military coup against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. [The Art Newspaper]

GIF of the Day: Water Orb Thing

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 19:02:04 +0000

I just spent about 20 minutes transfixed by this hand tenderly holding this ball of translucent stuff and dipping it in water. I don’t know why this is simultaneously a really seductive substance that I want to touch and also something that makes me uncomfortable… like a jellyfish that could be hiding in every bathtub.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Painted Rooms, Painted Faces, Digital Everything

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 18:36:39 +0000

Well, we hope the art world had a good summer vacation because school is officially back in session. There are so many good shows opening on Thursday night in Chelsea we just couldn’t list them all—Matthew Barney at Gladstone, Rashid Johnson at Hauser & Wirth and Lynda Benglis at Cheim & Read, to name a few.

We’ve focused on the absolute can’t-miss openings and those that might get overlooked below. From Wednesday night’s opening exhibition on the work and collaborative legacy of early digital/conceptual artist Alison Knowles at The Graduate Center to Thursday night’s absolute must-see double exhibition of Meleko Mokgosi at both of Jack Shainman’s Chelsea locations there’s plenty to see and do.

Taking A Curatorial Gamble At The Mattress Factory’s “Factory Installed”

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 13:08:43 +0000

Detail from Kevin Clancy's installation IRIS_SIRI at the Mattress Factory's Factory Installed (all photos by author for Art F City)

Factory Installed Mattress Factory 1414 Monterey Street, Pittsburgh, PA Open until February 12, 2017 Artists: David Bowen, Kevin Clancy, Wendy Judge and Lauren Kalman

Tuesday Links: Karl Lagerfeld's $3,323 Colored Pencils

Tue, 06 Sep 2016 10:47:02 +0000

The KARLBOX from Faber-Castell.

The New York Times profiles Participant Inc founder Lia Gangitano. Why can’t everyone in the art world be this cool? [The New York Times]

Want to spend over $3,000 on drawing supplies? Try the KARLBOX. It’s a collaboration between Karl Lagerfeld and Faber-Castell and it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds. [CNN]

Laurie Simmons made a film called My Art, which seems vaguely-autobiographical and really, really bad. [The Hollywood Reporter]

A Menashe Kadishman sculpture in suburban Tel Aviv, Birth, has become a bizarre site of pilgrimage for Orthodox women who sit on it and pray for fertility. They claim the artwork has mystical powers, which is probably one of the most unique public receptions to a piece of contemporary sculpture. [artnet News]

According to the rumor mill, the new iPhone won’t have a headphone jack but it will be waterproof. Are that many people dropping their phones in the toilet? [The New York Times]

A battery operated sculpture featured in a Kanye West video that features 12 naked pop stars and political figures in bed together including Taylor Swift and Donald Trump does not cost 4 million dollars. The sculpture, currently on view at Blum & Poe in Culver City, was early reported by the Times to be for sale, but now the gallery press representative claims the piece is not for sale. Unless, of course, the right buyer comes along. We’re just going to go ahead and speculate that West, a self-described genius, is waffling on the sales strategy and price. [The Los Angeles Times]

For those who thought that the Gawker suit was a one off case: Roger Ailes is hinting at a suit against New York Magazine for their feature on him and the long history of sexual harassment allegations that have followed his career. He’s retained Charles J. Harder for the case, the lawyer funded by Peter Thiel for the Hogan Gawker case. [Politico]

Because of heightened security surrounding the US Open tennis championships, the neighboring Queens Museum has decided to close until 9/11. This sucks. [ARTnews]

Iceland is home to lots of utopian-looking modernist churches. Combined with the stark landscape, these would be great locations for a sci-fi movie. [Dezeen]

Developers Henderson Land are building a 24-story building in Hong Kong with the goal of leasing to high-end gallerists looking for quality exhibition space. Hong Kong has a notorious property shortage, particularly spaces suitable for art galleries. The new building has high ceilings and a crane for moving artwork, and tenants such as David Zwirner and Pace have already signed on. [Financial Times]

GIF of the Day: Dan Deacon

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 16:54:37 +0000

Over here at AFC we’re big fans of Baltimore based electronic musician Dan Deacon. His music has an infectious quality to it that makes just about all of us want to dance. We’re also fans of this GIF, in which the center of the fan Deacon holds up for his audience mirrors the center of the light shining down upon him. It’s probably an accidental synchronistic visual, but one that makes the whole scene appear as though powered by these two reflecting sources of light and wind. We wish we were there.

Looking Forward to Next Week's DiMoDA 2.0 Launch

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 16:46:22 +0000

I can probably count on one hand the number of times an exhibition has made me completely reconsider how a viewer relates to an artwork, and how an artist might expand the limits of a given medium. The works of Meleko Mokgosi and Jessica Stockholder, for example, have little to with each other except that they have caught me off-guard for their respective abilities to stretch the predictable, tired-old field of painting into new immersive possibilities.

Friday Links: New York Central Art Supply Closes Today

Fri, 02 Sep 2016 10:30:08 +0000

Generally, cats are assholes. Apparently this is because they’re usually bored. Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley want cat owners to make their pets work for their food—they suggest “food puzzles” where the cat has to solve a problem to access a snack. I feel like this is going to lead to plenty of YouTube videos that are more entertaining for humans than cats. [Gizmodo]

After 111 years of operation in the East Village, New York Central Art Supply Inc. is closing today. The store supplied Andy Warhol, Basquiat, and even De Kooning’s Hamptons studio on the weekends. If you have the time today, swing by and say goodbye/pick up some discounted paint. [The Wall Street Journal]

Nathan Lyons, influential photographer, curator, and critic, has died at the age 86. Lyons’ contributions to the field were enormously important for cementing photography’s place in the annals of contemporary art. [The New York Times]

As Rhizome turns 20, ART news looks at the organization’s history (“it’s older than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in internet years”.) From humble email list in Berlin to major cultural archive, Rhizome has done a lot. This is a long read, but a good one. [ART news]

After Ai Weiwei was excluded from the Yinchuan Biennale for “political reasons”, Anish Kapoor is now threatening to withdraw in protest. [artnet News]

The New York Times has ceased publishing local arts sections for the city’s suburbs. There will no longer be, for example, Connecticut or Westchester arts coverage for the Connecticut or Westchester editions of the paper, respectively. People are pissed. [artnet News]

MAC Cosmetics and Star Trek have teamed up for an unlikely cross-promotional marketing thing that has resulted in these YouTube makeup tutorials. They’re not particularly useful—s model does makeup “inspired” by a character and ends up looking insane every time—but they’re impossible to look away from. [YouTube]

GIF of the Day: Scott Gelber

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 18:16:33 +0000

Scott Gelber’s GIFs have graced the pages of AFC, but there’s now on The New York Times as well. The GIF accompanies a piece on The Upshot, which tells us how little we know about dental hygiene. It turns out, virtually nothing—even the benefits of flossing were up for reevaluation.

Gelber’s GIF doesn’t signify that exactly, but it does make all those teeth models you see in dental offices seem way more creepy than already do. Even so-called healthy teeth suggest death and decay when removed from the face they came from.

Finding John Riegert at Pittsburgh’s SPACE

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 12:00:06 +0000

Installation view of 'John Riegert' at SPACE (all images by author for Art F City)

John Riegert SPACE 812 Liberty Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA On view until September 4, 2016

PITTSBURGH–Who is John Riegert? And why are there 243 portraits of him in a current exhibition at SPACE, one of Pittsburgh’s main downtown galleries?

Thursday Links: Mexican Tolerance Museum's Trump Invitations

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 11:06:44 +0000

Ahead of Donald Trump’s visit to Mexico, the Museo Memoria y Tolerancia in Mexico City (which has a program of artworks and exhibitions about war, genocide, racism, etc…) has been posting messages to him on their social media accounts. My favorite: “FOR YOU IT’S FREE.” [Instagram]

The Italian government, which likes to think of itself as a preservation expert, really didn’t want Venice to go on UNESCO’s list of endangered sites. But Venice is pretty endangered, largely from an out-of-control tourism industry. [The Art Newspaper]

Ramin Shokrizade used the economic model of a multiplayer online game to figure out what’s wrong with our IRL economy, years before the recession hit. Basically, property taxes should be higher to keep speculation in check. In the game, factories sat idle because players bought them up with the idea that they would be worth more “money” as the game progressed. In the real world, speculators snatch up real estate and land bank it as well—most of the “abandoned” buildings you see in East Coast cities are actually owned by investors who don’t put them to use because they’re waiting for a higher return on their investment. Taxing the hell out of vacant real estate would incentivize them to put all that inventory back on the market and force a housing/commercial real estate price correction. [Gamasutra]

The First International Contemporary Art Biennial of South America is seeking proposals from artists through September [BIENALSUR]

Is a museum show really the best and most logical capstone for an art award? Amber Eve Anderson makes a convincing argument that it’s not, based on the Baker Artist Awards exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. I agree with her—after seeing the show I thought “this is it?” All but one of the artists would have been better served with programming such as film screenings or performances. [Bmore Art]

In other Baltimore museum news, The Walters is presenting the tour “Drinking Our Way Through History” with local beers and a focus on art-historical imbibing. This looks like fun. [Facebook]

United Talent Agency is opening an art space in LA’s Boyle Heights. But the agency, which represents celebrity artists, claims it won’t function like a typical gallery. Instead, they’ll partner with out-of-town galleries who want to expand their collector base to Los Angeles and use the space for their artists to “experiment”. [The New York Times]

Huh. Dublin painter Kevin Sharkey has been homeless, arrested for destroying artwork, and collected by celebrities including Courtney Love. Now he’s running for president of Ireland. Somebody give this guy an HBO biopic. [artnet News]

Good Lord. Brooklyn Museum Chief Curator Nancy Spector gets up at 3 AM to write, because that’s the time she can find the quiet and solitude she needs to do it. That is drive. An interview with her at New York Magazine—she is intense. [New York Magazine]

The L Train’s planned disruption in services are more than three years away, and companies are scrambling now to profit off it. Uber has proposed a temporary deregulation of their services that would allow commuters to use a car pool app. We’re not sure how to feel about this. It may well be useful during that time, but it also will compete with the city’s own bus services, which as seen in other cities, has the effect lof eroding those services and creating class systems. Once we have this app will we be able to get rid of it? [Politico]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: The Best NSFW GIFs from DIS/dump

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 18:22:29 +0000

Back in 2010, before they were curating controversial international biennials, DIS collaborated with the image-sharing website dump.fm to produce DIS/dump. The project represented a crowd-sourced, user-generated “lookbook” of absurdist “New Style Options in Real Time.”

Their curated documentation of the project is fantastic, and much of the content points to the fact that “fashion” is essentially just censorship of nudity.

Submissions for GRIN's 2017 Spring/Summer Exhibitions Close Tomorrow

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 14:43:50 +0000

Installation shots of the AFC-curated exhibition "Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place" at GRIN.

Providence, RI gallery GRIN is accepting proposals from curators and artists for group or solo exhibitions for their 2017 Spring/Summer season. But the deadline is tomorrow! If you’ve had a pretty solid idea for a show simmering on the back burner, now’s the time to get your act together. The gallery’s submission guidelines are available here.

Wednesday Links: Burger King to Honor Political Dissident With Performance Art Burgers

Wed, 31 Aug 2016 11:13:01 +0000

Petr Pavlensky nailed his scrotum to the Red Square in protest of Putin. Now there's going to be a Burger King meal about it.

Weirdest art news we’ve read in awhile: fast food giant Burger King is making a series of burgers inspired by Russian performance artist Petr Pavlensky for its Saint Petersburg location. Pavlensky is famous for nailing his balls to Moscow’s Red Square, setting fire to a government office building, and sewing his mouth shut to protest the arrest of Pussy Riot. He’s not exactly the type of political figure usually associated with international corporate junk food. [BBC News]

“Of the 40 galleries and nonprofits that took part in the first edition of the NADA fair, only 13 remain in business—Derek Eller Gallery, Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, James Fuentes, Galerie Zink, Inman Gallery, Moniquemeloche, Momenta Art, Taro Nasu Gallery, Participant Inc, Peres Projects, Kavi Gupta, Hiromi Yoshii, and ZieherSmith.” ARTnews tracks down what became of the first class of NADA, and the results are depressing. [ARTnews]

The news above makes us ask: what is the average lifespan of a gallery? Does it map to what gallerist and art fair founder Edward Winkleman once described as the average length of time an emerging artist’s work remains profitable for a gallery—seven years?

In other NADA news, the fair’s Miami Beach iteration is moving back to the Deauville this year. Thank God. Fontainebleau sucked the life out of NADA. [ARTnews]

Star Trek Beyond’s weird/desperate cross-promotion with Rihanna was pretty terrible. But for the film’s Chinese release, they replaced her with pop star Zhang Jie and an even more terrible track. His song sounds a bit like it was written by an algorithm in 15 minutes, which at least makes it a little more interesting that the U.S. brand of schlock. [Fansided]

People in one South Carolina apartment complex have convinced the local police that clowns are in the woods offering money to children and flashing laser pointers. The Atlantic seems to be the only publication wondering if some kids just made this bizarre story up. [The Atlantic]

Lisa Crossman discusses the state and importance of art criticism in Boston. It sounds like institutions get most of the mainstream press coverage, and the criticism that emerges from those institutions tends to focus on its own bubble. It’s a great read about the need for criticism in general. [Big Red & Shiny]

Starchitect Renzo Piano will lead the cleanup effort in Italy after their major earthquake. Amongst other buildings Piano designed the new Whitney building in New York’s meatpacking district. [The Guardian]

Can cities be too tall? According to most Londoners they answer is yes. Residents associate tall buildings with rich people and are increasingly voicing their opinion that cities should not be so dense. The anti-density movement is heating up. [Curbed]

An interview with artist, activist and Arts Advocacy Project Program Associate Joy Garnett from the Arts Advocacy Project at the National Coalition Against Censorship. She discusses Artist Rights, a new online resource that informs artists on their rights and what is and isn’t protected under the first amendment. [Creative Capital]

GIF of the Day: Mrzyk & Moriceau's Subways

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 17:58:18 +0000

This GIF [h/t Dezeen] comes from animators Mrzyk & Moriceau’s music video “Subways” for the band The Avalanches. The psychedelic video is a bit like an urban version of Yellow Submarine, and took just over a month to make. Dezeen describes the above as a “cast of surreal commuters.” That’s probably because Dezeen is based in London and not New York, where trains get stranded on the bridge because of incidents like women pretending to be deranged homeless people throwing crickets on riders and pissing themselves to raise awareness of …something?

Why I Didn't Come to Your Opening

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 15:48:22 +0000

I’m sorry I didn’t come to your opening. And I’m sorry I probably won’t make it to all of your future ones either.

Like many people lucky enough to work in the arts, I should probably just have some variation of these phrases saved as drafts in my phone, email, and Facebook messenger. Apologies and explanations have become somewhat of a Monday morning ritual.

That’s because, for reasons I don’t understand, the vast majority of art openings happen on three nights of the week between the hours of 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. or 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. It is impossible to be in two galleries at the same time, yet an artist-run space in Bushwick with otherwise inconsistent hours will open a show the same Thursday night as 20+ gallerists in Chelsea, 40 minutes away.

Tuesday Links: Teapot Not Enough Dick-Coverage for Australian Painting

Tue, 30 Aug 2016 11:00:49 +0000

Headline of the day: “Bob Ross Was a Tyrant and Hated His Perm, Says Former Manager.” [artnet News]

Police were called to an art gallery in a small town in Australia over a complaint of a nude self-portrait by painter Dennis McIntyre. But you can’t even see his junk in the painting! It’s covered by a teapot. It’s not clear who exactly was so offended by this portrait that they actually called the police. According to gallery volunteer Beryl Ramsay, a group of elderly women recently visited the gallery and were far from offended: “Their only complaint was that they couldn't lift the teapot to see what was behind it.” [The Border Mail]

Here’s an interview with Rossy de Palma, a.k.a. “Dama Picasso” about her decades of collaborations with Pedro Almodovar and how much fun being an artist was during La Movida Madrileña of the 1980s. [Dazed]

The Shchukin collection—which makes up the bulk of the Hermitage’s early modernist masterworks—is leaving Russia for the first time in a century for a loan to the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. There’s a nice irony to this—Shchukin collected mostly Parisian artists during his lifetime and he fled to the French capital during the Russian revolution in which the state seized his art collection. [Bloomberg]

Lisa Cooley talks to ARTnews about closing her gallery. Cooley cites art fair exhaustion as an issue, as well the rise of social media. Seeing and sharing so many images desensitizes people and erodes community and relationship building. That becomes a huge problem when rent rates demand that prices double or triple every year. “The scale is the problem—whether that is scale of information you have to process, or competing with the larger galleries. You can’t scale relationships.” The business model for smaller galleries isn’t working. Hopefully Cooley will get her artists paid. [ARTnews]

As much as people like to hate on Santiago Calatrava, the World Trade Center redevelopment’s numerous cost-overruns, delays, and design failures—and malls—there’s no denying that the Transportation Hub oculus looks beautiful. [Dezeen]

Electric Objects is looking for a Curator-in-Chief. This is a pretty exciting job. It means overseeing the editorial and curatorial direction of the company, setting the direction for their commissions program, and hiring and building a capable team of writers and curators to do the job. [Electric Objects]

Jerry Saltz got himself into some hot water by posting a doctored image of a female tennis player without underwear. The image is now removed (and we won’t post it because the image is offensive), but there are plenty of women still fuming about this over Facebook. [Facebook]

The Studio Museum has installed four public artworks across Harlem parks from Rudy Shepherd, Kori Newkirk, Simone Leigh, and Kevin Beasley. [The Wall Street Journal]
A British community garden features a shed modeled on the cockpit of the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Unfortunately, someone broke into the farm and vandalized it. The Stonebridge City Farm plans on fixing it. [BBC News]

GIF of the Day: RIP Gene Wilder

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 18:34:28 +0000

Gene Wilder passed away yesterday at the age of 83. But, apart from his decades-long career in film, he’ll live on for digital perpetuity in countless memes and GIFs.

What made Wilder such a popular figure in internet culture? Likely his unparalleled delivery of physical comedy and ability to communicate such a full range of emotions with as little as a slight cocking of the eye. He’s become the surrogate face of many an internet user—his expressions giving wordless voice to disbelief, bemusement, or panic beyond the descriptive powers of language.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Art from Pelham Bay to Fort Jay

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 18:13:07 +0000

Zak Krevitt's photos of the puppy play fetish community open Thursday night at Ray Gallery in Brooklyn.

Okay, now that we’re on the brink of September, New York is coming back to life. And what a life it is—from anarchist spots in Bushwick to mansions in the Bronx, holograms on Governors Island to museums is Astoria—we’ve dug deep to find you the best, weirdest, and most under-represented stuff to do this week across the city.

Monday Links: New Trend Piece Discovers 30 Year Old Art Trend

Mon, 29 Aug 2016 11:02:45 +0000

Lisa Cooley Gallery, one of the most influential scene-makers of the Lower East Side, is closing its brick-and-mortar location on Norfolk Street. Cooley declined to comment on why the gallery closed, but in her email announcing the gallery’s closure she wrote, “Although this chapter is ending, another one is right around the corner—more sustainable, more rewarding, and more interesting. In my mind, this change will continue and extend the direction of the recent gallery program. Stay tuned. I hope to show that growth can be about ideas, not just about scale, and I look forward to seeing everyone in person soon. Lastly, consider taking a break from art and donating to one of these organizations:Food Bank of New York, Planned Parenthood, Children’s Defense Fund”. She sounds disillusioned, as anyone working in this field should be. [ARTnews]

Vogue has identified the hot new trend in the art world: small-scale, intimate paintings supplanting large-scale installations. Except, A: installation art is just as popular as ever, B: all of the work they highlight is of a vein people have been mining since the 80s, and C: none of it is particularly “small.” Essentially, this is just a list of painters in their 20s and 30s who are cool. [Vogue]

Is this the last we’ll hear about the insane lawsuit against Peter Doig? Three legal experts weigh in on the outcome and its place in the history of authentication law. Surprisingly not as dry of a read as one would guess. [artnet News]

Jayne Merkel and Julia Wertz document and mourn some of the innumerable small—and vital—businesses shuttering across New York City as rents rise. Doesn’t it feel like huge swaths of Manhattan are turning into a suburban mall? Even the East Village is getting a Target. [The New York Times]

But the East Village is also getting a shelter for LGBTQ homeless youth, named after Golden Girl Bea Arthur. Arthur donated $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center, and supported it several times before passing away in 2009. [Refinery29]

Theo Ponchaveli has painted a mural of Lee Harvey Oswald on the side of a barbershop in Oswald’s former Dallas neighborhood, now an arts district. Some neighbors are predictably unhappy about the associating the assassin with the area. [Dallas News]

More than 750 women artists gathered in Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s courtyard this Sunday to mark the closing of their exhibition “Evolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016”. Here’s a video from the gathering. [The Los Angeles Times]

Watch the destruction of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius in this 8 minute 3D animation. [Open Culture]

Art F City Seeks Fall Interns

Sat, 27 Aug 2016 07:57:14 +0000

Are you a master’s student in arts administration overwhelmed by your desire to make offices run smoothly? Perhaps you’re a communications major with a burning desire to tweet and make updates to facebook. Either way, have we got a job for you!

Art Fag City is seeking administrative interns.

Ideal editorial candidates have a strong interest in visual art and digital media, are proficient in basic HTML, and possess excellent writing and editing skills. Applicants should also be extremely organized, self-motivated, and detail-oriented. Familiarity with AFC’s content is absolutely essential.

GIF of the Day: Eltons Kūns

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 23:46:01 +0000

Eltons Kūns, Inddustry, 2014

We’ve looked at a lot of 3D rendered GIFs over the last year, but relatively few that use those techniques to reproduce variations on canonical art works. As you can see here, Eltons Kūns draws inspiration from Donald Judd.

Apply for the First Antarctic (Yes, Really) Biennale

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 16:19:31 +0000

The craze of exotic international art fairs and biennales has reached peak saturation: there’s now an international biennale in Antarctica. Yes, Antarctica, population: 0.

But that’s not stopping a group of cultural organizers, artists, and utopian thinkers from setting sail for Antarctica with the goal of an anti-nationalist biennale of art, design, and interdisciplinary cooperation.

The organizers are seeking proposals for all types of artworks (including video and performance) to be installed on land, ice, water, or aboard the biennale’s vessel. Selected artists will also represent the Antarctic Pavillion at the Venice Biennale. Mostly, it’s a chance to check out the icy nether regions of the planet while they still exist.

Friday Links: Embarrassed Dancer Literally Tries to "Break the Internet"

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 10:55:41 +0000

#trimp #dinild #dinildtrimp #trump #donaldtrump #trump2016 #presidenttrump #viscousfluid #wetsuckingnoise #bloatedskinmonster #dumpsterfire #toiletfire

GIF of the Day: Rupaul's Drag Race All-Stars Starts in Less than One Hour

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 19:08:31 +0000

Is everyone else this overjoyed that Rupaul’s Drag Race (arguably the best thing to ever happen to reality television) is airing a second All Stars season, starting tonight?

As the show has brought drag to primetime televison, it somehow doesn’t feel quite as transgressive anymore. That certainly doesn’t mean it can’t be surprisingly smart and undeniably entertaining. And the first All-Stars season was especially good because of on queen: Tammie Brown.

Bye-Bye Bb: An Interview with Allie Linn & Colin Alexander

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 18:23:37 +0000

Dina Kelberman, "Roll/Roll" installed at Bb. Kelberman's solo exhibition "No No No No No" felt like a fitting finale for the space—this piece, projected on a bare mattress, spoke to both "packing up" and a sense of provisional use of interiors, the gallery's forte.

For the past two years, we’ve been big fans of the little artist-run space Bb, which has brought smart site-specific projects to both its odd storefront in Baltimore’s Westside and booths at art fairs. When Colin Alexander and Allie Linn, Bb’s founders, announced that the space was closing, everyone seemed to be scratching their heads. Why would a popular art space close, one year after receiving a grant and so much attention? Colin’s answer, it turns out, is pretty straightforward: “Allie and I are temporarily moving to focus on our studio practices for a while. The end of lease on the gallery space and our house happened to coincide, so it seemed like a good opportunity to archive the project and let it exist as a two year project.” The pair also assured us that they’ll likely be back to Baltimore to pursue other curatorial projects, and that their brick-and-mortar space is going to live on under a new name and management. I spoke to Allie and Colin about the challenges and triumphs of their two-year endeavor:

Thursday Links: MICA to Replace Historic Buildings With Condo-Lookalike

Thu, 25 Aug 2016 10:56:25 +0000

MICA is demolishing the 1914 buildings that house the school's Printmaking department and replacing them with this ugly, out-of-scale thing from GWWO Architects. It's not surprising they opted to render it at night.

Mikolai Napieralski—a former employee of the Qatari National Museum—provides a surreal behind-the-scenes account of the tiny nation’s rise and fall in the art world. Qatar’s former Emir and his daughter Sheikha Mayassa went on an ambitious spending spree to bring Western art professionals, museum outposts, and crazily expensive exhibitions to Doha. All of this was made possible by oil wealth and underpaid foreign labor. Now, that money is gone, and there’s a new Emir on the throne. [Quartz]

With the re-opening of SFMOMA, now the country’s largest modern and contemporary art museum, and a small but loyal collector base, is San Francisco poised to be a major art capital? The article briefly touches on one obstacle: international blue chip galleries are opening branches, but the city is just too expensive for artists and artist-run spaces. [W Magazine]

Ew. You can now buy Truman Capote’s ashes at auction. [artnet News]

Painter Timothy Desmond is suing the state of California over its ban of selling or displaying images of the Confederate flag. His paintings of Civil War battles have been rejected from the Fresno State Fair because they feature the flag. Okay, that law is kinda ridiculous… but so is this painting. [The Art Newspaper]

Italy’s horrible earthquake has destroyed countless historic sites, artworks, and ancient buildings. This is pretty much almost too depressing to read. [The Guardian]

Artist and Bad at Sports contributor Amanda Browder has been wrapping old buildings in Buffalo with fabric as part of a public art initiative led by The Albright Knox. The piece is called “Spectral Locus” and is intended to create a sense of connection amongst viewers. [WGRZ]

Times Square Arts has unveiled a new installation from German artist and architect J. Mayer H that pays homage to the hyper-gentrified zone’s sexier pre-Giuliani era. Titled "XXX Times Square With Love,” the piece comprises a series of recliners in the shape of Xs, which is a fitting commentary on the area’s transformation from porno mecca to sunbathing tourist trap. [Curbed]

MICA is demolishing its printmaking department, housed in a series of buildings from 1914 in a historic district, and replacing it with a product design center that looks like bland, cheap condos. What the fuck? What will this mean for the alley behind the Mount Royal Tavern? [Baltimore Fishbowl]

This interview between multispecies ethnographer Eben Kriksey and artist Katherine Behar is nuts. They discuss Behar’s show, which includes a performance by two Roombas, and the questions look like this: The Roomba really isn’t a species as such. A Roomba can’t fuck another Roomba and make baby Roombas. In that way a plant is different from a Roomba? [Bad at Sports]

The Tate Modern is hiring assistant curators, at about half of the average London salary. The positions pay less than the museum’s cafe pays chefs. [Hyperallergic]

The impending shutdown of the L train, the oncoming development of the Cornell Tech Campus on Roosevelt Island, and the proposed Midtown East rezoning set to affect Manhattan stations along the 7 line is leading some to speculate that property further into Queens will increase in value. [Commercial Observer]

Speaking of Queens, the feud between Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bremar and Mayor Bill de Blasio continues. Five days after de Blasio told reporters he was going to reach out to Van Bremar and give him a stern talking to about affordable housing, he still hasn’t done reached out. Van Bremar is pissed. And rightly so. The councilman has has said will not approve a building of affordable housing units until the developer gets its act together and makes the repairs on the building it runs across the street. He has also said that these units are not actually affordable. Finally, a councilman willing to say what everyone knows—the affordable housing plan is media plan, not an actual plan. [Politico]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Lauren Gregory

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 18:14:04 +0000

Lauren Gregory photographs her improvisational finger paintings every few strokes. In an interview with The Creators Project, Gregory described her time working with collective Aboveground Animation as an eye-opener:

"Being surrounded by other animators like Casey and Jacolby Satterwhite who have such strong voices was inspiring. Those guys aren't afraid to be irreverant or let their sense of humor shine through. Some artists are funny people in private, but when it comes to their work, they get really serious and strip it of any personality. I think I used to do that before, and Aboveground Animation made me remember that my personality is an asset, not something to polish or hide in my paintings."

Fortunately for us, that translates to GIFs such as "Dickmatized," which is a really lovely painting of a dick swinging around. Seriously, this is so great:

All The Instagrams I Should've Taken at Fields Fest

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 17:13:42 +0000

THE WHIRLPOOL #fieldsfest

A video posted by lydia pettit (@lydiapettit) on Aug 21, 2016 at 10:50pm PDT

Wednesday Links: I Always Feel Like Somebody's Watching Me

Wed, 24 Aug 2016 11:05:12 +0000

Mysteriously legible graffiti appeared on an abandoned hospital facing a luxury condo tower in Miami Beach yesterday:”YOUR MILLION DOLLAR HOUSES WILL SOON BE UNDERWATER.” Is this in reference to sea level rise or the city’s notorious problems with mortgages? [The Miami Herald]

We at AFC recently joked that we should start a new category for news stories: “Living in Dystopia.” Well, today we have one that’s so dystopian and paranoia-inducing it’s practically a public mental health threat. Persistent Surveillance Systems is a private company that has secretly been flying aerial cameras over the city of Baltimore to document everyone’s movements and selling their data to the police. It’s like “real-time Google Earth.” How dystopian is this? So dystopian that the first sentence of this factual news article is virtually identical to the first sentence of seminal dystopian novel Neuromancer. Really. [Bloomberg]

In lighter news, Dominic Wilcox has opened the world’s first art exhibition for dogs. The London gallery has paintings in dogs’ color spectrum, hung at their eye-level and interactive installations. [Bored Panda]

Noah Charney is concerned about “art in the age of digital reproduction,” chiefly, that 3D-scanned and printed forgeries are reducing our appreciation of original works, or even hand-made copies. [Smithsonian]

Peter Doig’s bizarre legal troubles seem to have been resolved. The artist was being sued by a former Canadian corrections officer who claimed to own a painting Doig painted as an incarcerated teenager. This, despite the fact that Doig was never in the prison where the plaintiff worked. The whole case is just so weird. [Yahoo]

The Economist asks “Is Hacktivism Art?” We answer: sometimes? It’s one of those things like farming, where someone can use it as an artistic medium but the vast majority are just doing it because they need to eat. And then for every good piece of activist/hacktivist/farmer art there are 10 just horribly ill-conceived copycats. [The Economist]

Oh what a tangled web. Yesterday we linked to a report of a court ruling against restitution in the case of Nazi-looted paintings at The Norton Simon Museum. Today we learn that the person trying to reclaim the art is the daughter of a Nazi. [Culture: High & Low]

Queens City Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer is killing it! He’s taken Mayor de Blasio on over his support of an out of scale development in Inwood which would include affordable housing units, but push more residents out of the neighborhood. And now he is blocking a new building development in Sunnyside that promises 100 percent “affordable housing”, but has numerous issues that have kept residents from supporting the development. This includes being out of scale for the neighborhood, being developed by a developer with other projects across the street known for their mismanagement, and not actually being affordable. [NY1]

We can’t even believe this headline is real: “Mouthwatering Qing Dynasty Sculpture of Braised Pork Belly Leaves Asia for First Time”. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Japanese LOLympics

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 19:26:48 +0000

Confession: I just realized about an hour ago that the Olympics had ended. I typically don’t get too excited about the games except when there’s interesting architecture involved or really, really gay ceremonies like that time the Spice Girls performed with the Pet Shop Boys and George Michael after people danced to Kate Bush. (Did I dream that? Whoa, that actually happened.)

Somehow all of the news surrounding this Olympics failed to excite me—from the much-discussed suckiness of the Olympic Village and environmental concerns to the predatory-journalistic abuses of dating apps and the surprisingly-uninteresting illicit activities of dudes in gas station bathrooms—everything was just depressing. All of the voracious media commentary and gossip surrounding the games pointed to failures of humanity rather than the achievements or campy pomp I get joy out of observing. Everything was mean, or sexist, or racist, or recursive criticism of the above.

One Day Into the World Without Gawker

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 19:21:23 +0000

The Montauk Monster

For those of us who started and maintained blogs in the mid aughts, yesterday’s closure of Gawker wasn’t easy to watch. A year ago, I published a list of art blogs and magazines with Corinna Kirsch, full of headings modified with words like “active,” “not-active,” “defunct,” and “deleted.” It was already the end of an era then. Now, with the demise of the largest and arguably the most pioneering of blogs, I find myself wondering who amongst us will be left standing.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Long Island Eclipses Manhattan

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 15:29:01 +0000

"Strict Governing Hands," choreographed by Monica Mirabile, 2014. Image from Superchief Gallery. Mirabile is one half of FLUCT, the performance duo closing out the BOFFO Fire Island festival on Sunday.

For years, people who make proclamations about “something being the new something” have said “Brooklyn is the new Manhattan.” Apparently that means it’s now also totally boring in August? New York’s two most over-exposed boroughs are having a slow week, with just a smattering of art events (but we are thrilled Vector Gallery is making a triumphant return to Manhattan Thursday night.) Brooklyn has a Wednesday night performance at The Park Church Co-op and a screening of the 1977 feminist classic Riddles of the Sphinx to look forward to Thursday, but really it’s the rest of Long Island that sees the most action.

Tuesday Links: Make Your Own Boobs, Say Goodbye to Gawker, Think About "Post-Internet"

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 11:08:05 +0000

Homemade BoobsHomemade Boobies
Posted by Beki Files on Friday, August 19, 2016

We can't stop watching the above video of someone explaining how to make fake boobs.
Barry Schwabsky considers post-internet art (somewhat erroneously) as a “micro-trend” that won’t go away, and traces its influence, as well as the elusive notions of sincerity and reality, through last year’s New Museum Triennial, the related DIS-helmed Berlin Biennial, and Thomas Struth’s latest exhibition. It’s a really beautiful, thought-provoking piece of criticism that adds a lot of nuance to a discussion that’s thus far been characterized by so much internet-style hyperbole and value judgements. [The Nation]
Lovefone has been retrofitting historically-landmarked but functionally obsolete public telephone booths in London as cell phone repair stations. So smart. [Dezeen]
The PATH train’s Downtown-Midtown tubes are closed for repairs. The Port Authority is dealing with this issue with a shuttle bus… despite the fact that there are faster, more frequent MTA subway lines literally running directly underneath the busses. It’s a laughably inefficient and redundant use of taxpayer funds, one indicative of the lack of regional cooperation between transit agencies. [The Transport Politic]
Gawker’s last day of publication was yesterday. Lots of thoughts from its writers on its shuttering. Nick Denton, co-founder and publisher of Gawker, writes his final thoughts. It’s a sad but poignant burial. [Gawker]
Alex Balk, a former Gawker editor, describes the blog as, “stupid, loud, bullying and ill-informed, and most days it was the only honest thing you could read.” [The Awl]
“Gawker always said it was in the business of telling true stories”, writes Tom Scocca, in a devastating account of Gawker’s demise. “Here is one last true story: You live in a country where a billionaire can put a publication out of business. A billionaire can pick off an individual writer and leave that person penniless and without legal protection.” [Gawker]
Gawker had no editorial direction, but a sensibility. Gawker was barely recognizable year to year. Gawker has history of publishing sex tapes—according to former editor Jessica Cohen’s account, Peter Thiel has made Fred Durst seem like a real pussycat. [Gawker]
MoMA PS1’s Forty casts yet another nostalgic glance (following the institution’s Greater New York) toward the city’s grittier, more glamorous heyday of “alternative spaces”. Alanna Heiss (who founded PS1 back in the day) returns as curator, presenting a redux of many of the works featured in the space’s seminal 1970s exhibition Rooms. Ben Davis argues that these artists seem to have been selected based on how famous they’ve become in the intervening years, and that the work has lost its teeth as its context changed from post-industrial to polished. We haven’t seen the show yet, but it sounds annoying. [artnet News]
Raphael Olivier’s photos of vintage Soviet architecture in Pyongyang look like a weird, low-budget sci-fi movie. [Curbed]
This has to be the wildest “Beer With a Painter” in the history of Hyperallergic: that time Enrique Chagoya received death threats from the Tea Party, Christian fundamentalists destroyed his work with a crowbar, and a pastor invited him to paint Jesus for a church. [Hyperallergic]
Wow. A California court has ruled against restitution in the case of Nazi-looted paintings at The Norton Simon Museum. [Deutsche Welle]
Hrag Vartanian asks historian Karen Wilken what the legacy of Abstract Expresionism is in the Hyperallergic podcast focusing on the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Denver Art Museum. “The idea that art is profoundly about self expression.” she replies. “Art is not about depicting or reporting what everyone can see. It is revealing something that is unseen and that is something that’s pretty fundamental. People don’t even talk about that anymore.” [Hyperallergic]

Post-Pickle Surprise: Tracing the Influence of Tom Rubnitz at Anthology Film Archives

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 11:48:11 +0000

Screen shot from Seth Bogart's 'Eating Makeup' video (screen shot by author)

Even if you don’t know the name of the director or the glitter-covered club kid stars, you’re probably familiar with Tom Rubnitz’s viral video “Pickle Surprise.” With over two million views and counting, the Internet granted the East Village filmmaker a prolonged afterlife. (He died in 1992 due to complications from AIDS.) After inadvertently connecting with a new generation of YouTube viewers, what is the legacy of Rubnitz’s fast-paced, TV-drenched brand of cinematic camp on today’s filmmakers and artists?

Monday Links: Jesus Christ, Virtual-Reality Star

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 09:17:03 +0000

The Dean's very own menthols were nabbed from his desk. Now being passed around. (Nobody is smoking inside) pic.twitter.com/UW8maSWF78

— Eden Faithfull (@EdenFaithfull) August 22, 2016

Art students occupy an administration building at the University of Sydney to protest proposed cuts to the Sydney College of Arts. Essentially, these cuts would shut down the university's art department and require all remaining students to attend the University of New South Wales. That's not fair, to say the least. [Junket]
Here comes the latest destination art event: the Antarctic Biennale. Apply today for a spot on the research ship. [Antarctic Biennale h/t e-flux]
In Southampton, a stolen zebra sculpture was found, dumped in a river. This was the second zebra sculpture to be stolen from the city this year. Stop targeting zebras! [BBC]
Beyond the paywall, a report on why the SFMoMA deal with the Fisher Collection isn't all it's cracked up to be. From the author, Charles Desmaris: "This stipulation has major implications. It means that something like 60 percent of SFMOMA’s indoor galleries (not counting free-admission areas that serve as combination lobby and exhibition spaces) must always adhere — or, at least, respond — to a narrative of art history constructed by just two astute but obdurately private collectors. Granted, curators will be able to address some of the collection’s most significant absences (the Fishers tended toward big art by men of European, particularly German, heritage ). But for the next 100 years, their job will be limited in those galleries to a kind of scholarly embroidery, filling in around the edges of a predetermined scenario with works by other artists, such as women, artists of color or California artists." [San Francisco Chronicle]
Feminism! Brooklyn! A year of feminist art exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum! Affiliated events begin this October with Beverly Buchanan, Ruins and Rituals. [Broadway World]
Somewhere, someone in a marketing department thinks that everything will be better if you put some virtual reality on it—even a movie about Jesus. That's Jesus VR – The Story of Christ. [Screen Daily]
The Internet exploded this weekend after Frank Ocean dropped a new album online.
Artists Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman founded the first-ever artist-run super PAC, Four Freedoms. [Four Freedoms]
"Is the Dallas Fire Marshal Trying to Kill the Local Art Scene?" [Glasstire]
Once upon a time, Frieze was only a magazine. Then they added on an art fair. Now they've added on a school of sorts: this fall, Frieze Academy offers one-day courses in topics like "An Introduction to Managing Artist Estates" and "How to Write an Exhibition Review." [Frieze]
Downtown Brooklyn is slowly, but surely on its way to having a one-acre park, to be named Willoughby Square. [New York YIMBY]
We haven't heard about any nutty activities from actor-and-sometimes-performance-artist Shia LaBeouf in awhile. I guess he was busy being an actor because there's a trailer for his new movie American Honey, a schlocky teenage romance in which LaBeouf wears dreadlocks. [HUH.]

GIF of the Day: Faith Holland's "Chelsea Manning Fan Art"

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 17:51:45 +0000

If only I were in New Orleans right now. If so, I would be petting an alligator (because you can do that there), walking along the edge of the world (because you can do that there, too), and visiting 2 Freaky 2 Friday at Pelican Bomb Gallery X (which you still have time to do because the exhibition runs through September 18). The mostly femme and femme-identifying artists in the exhibition all explore images of celebrity in a sometimes critical, sometimes celebratory way that fits in so well with the AFC brand. A note on the exhibition from curator (and friend of AFC) Amanda Brinkman:

AFC's Fall Forecast: Goth Art Everywhere

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 17:43:18 +0000

Winter is coming. As the nights grow longer, shadows seem to creep into the city’s innumerable white boxes.

Our prediction for what the Fall/Winter 2016 look will be in New York: goth as fuck.

Artists, galleries, and institutions across the city seem to be embracing the macabre, gloomy, and achromatic in the months leading up to Halloween (by far, the art world’s most important holiday). We’re looking forward to aesthetic darkness, existential angst, and an embrace of the occult. Is this otherworldly tragic election season to blame for our state of mourning? We’re not sure, but let’s hope some fall weather shows up in time for us to break out our all-black wardrobes.

Friday Links: Goodbye, Gawker

Fri, 19 Aug 2016 11:04:48 +0000

Eyebeam announces the five recipients of its 2016–2017 artist research residency. Those lucky, talented artists are...Morehshin Allahyari, Nora N. Khan, Mimi Onuoha, Macon Reed, and Karolina Sobecka. Residencies start in October. [Eyebeam]
Ask the Internet, and the winner of the “worst opening credit sequence on Netflix” goes to Orange Is the New Black. More than being annoyed by the jumpy Regina Spektor, writer Christine Elliot argues that the images of incarcerated women belong to a long line of “repressive portrait photography.” Recommended. [Dilettante Army]
On the thriving sales market for exhibition catalogs. [Los Angeles Times]
Trivia: What did Hitler describe as the “most beautiful village in the world”? Why, the 1935 Olympic Village outside Berlin. The site, the first permanent Olympic village, now serves as a museum, but local authorities plan to build 1,000 apartments there. Berlin currently faces a housing shortage, making housing issues a priority for civic officials. [Deutsche Welle]
Gawker, you will be missed. We will miss you so much. [Gawker]
The Ukranian ministry of culture is calling for an international boycott of Russian museums and other institutions that have taken art from Crimea. [The Art Newspaper]
Greenpoint is losing local icon Palace Cafe. After 83 years of hospitality, the family that owns the neighborhood dive bar has announced that it’s closing. No word on the reason why yet. [Gothamist]
As if any of us needed further proof of the decline of Western Civilization, we can now watch the Kardashians argue over a coffee table book about "Le Courvoisier, which is an architect. It's so weird and boring, but I'm obsessed…it has words, big words." Very tempted to find a tasteful building designed for easy access to its flat roof so I can throw myself off of it. [Dezeen]
Art dealer Fabrizio Moretti (not to be confused with Fabrizio Moretti, drummer for the Strokes), is suing David Zwirner over an editioned Jeff Koons sculpture that he claims is not number two of three, but rather numbered three in a seemingly endless edition. Yawn. Can’t rich people find something juicier to fight over? When I saw the headline I was totally hoping an art handler broke off Jeff’s dick in a “Made in Heaven” statue or something. Can you even imagine being the Manhattan judge who has to deal with shit like this all day? [artnet News]
Lisa Kuivinen, a 20-year-old School of the Art Institute of Chicago student, was killed when a truck crossed into a bike lane and collided with her. This is really tragic, and based on the photo provided, indicative of everyone’s biggest complaint about most American bike lanes: they’re painted between parked cars and the lanes for vehicle traffic. For the love of god, transportation planners, please just put the parking between a curb-adjacent bike lane and the street. We’re all so tired of people dying from bad design. [The Chicago Tribune]
Cara Ober also recalls her time at the amazing artist retreat organized by the Contemporary. We all miss the goats! [BmoreArt]
Mayor Bill de Blasio makes a convincing argument as to why City Council member Ydanis Rodriguez should’ve supported rezoning a parcel in Inwood district. Basically, the plan offered developers the option to build taller buildings if they include affordable housing. Now, Inwood is just getting stumpy luxury condos with no affordable housing. It seems like another case of knee-jerk NIMBYism getting in the way of productive compromise. [Observer]

GIF of the Day: Eltons Kūns

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 18:33:36 +0000

Step inside Eltons Kūns’ manipulations of the dreaded white cube. Given Corinna Kirsch’s problems with seating in exhibition spaces, the above GIF might be nightmare-inducing for some AFC staff. And as far as the art world’s myriad Donald Judd puns/tributes go, this one’s pretty fun:

Check out more of Elton Kūns’ industrial design and architecture influenced work here.

Pink and Naked as a Pig, Donald Trump (Sculpture) Delights and Terrifies New Yorkers

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 14:15:46 +0000

So this happened today. Image courtesy of Indecline.

Thursday morning, the Internet began flooding with reports of a UFO sighting in Union Square. Onlookers gawked at this UFO (unidentified fat object), with its furious brow, bulbous translucent flesh, and teeny-tiny weenie. They took plenty of pictures and shared them online because, why, the sculpture looked a lot like a naked Donald Trump. Because that’s what the UFO sculpture depicts: a naked Donald Trump.

Black Is and Black Ain’t in Pace Gallery’s “Blackness in Abstraction”

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 11:00:00 +0000

Wangechi Mutu's "Throw" at Blackness in Abstraction (all photos by author for Art F City)

Blackness in Abstraction Pace Gallery 510 West 25th Street, New York, NY On view through August 19, 2016

Artists: Terry Adkins, Jonathas de Andrade, Rasheed Araeen, Kevin Beasley, Sergio de Camargo, Kōji Enokura, Ellen Gallagher, Robert Irwin, Sui Jianguo, Rashid Johnson, Sol LeWitt, Glenn Ligon, Laura Lima, Turiya Magadlela, Steve McQueen, Ulrike Müller, Oscar Murillo, Wangechi Mutu, Louise Nevelson, Lorraine O’Grady, Adam Pendleton, Pope.L, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Fred Sandback, Jack Tworkov, Carrie Mae Weems, Jack Whitten, and Fred Wilson

Thursday Links: Sick Pyongyang Trip, Brah!

Thu, 18 Aug 2016 10:40:05 +0000

Lucia Moholy, wife of László Moholy-Nagy, is pretty much the unsung hero of the Bauhaus. While her husband taught at the school, she took gorgeous documentary photographs of everything from architecture to student-designed teacups. These negatives were left behind when she was forced to flee the Nazis, and Walter Gropius ended up using them to promote the school’s design philosophy while the campus remained occupied, first by the Nazis and then behind the Iron Curtain. She was often not credited. [99% Invisible]

Why is unnaturally (and obnoxiously) cheery travel vlogger Louis Cole now making bizarre North Korean propaganda? This batch of extremely weird vlogs look like what a British person would make if a North Korean agent forced them at gunpoint to do “hip” things...based on a North Korean perspective of what’s cool in the West, based on smuggled DVDs of South Korean media. Sick beats, bro! Skateboarding! Water parks! Dreadlocks! Human rights abuses?! [Vanity Fair]

Gary Nader and Jorge Perez are currently feuding over who gets to build a museum in Miami or who’s dick is bigger or something. [artnet News]

Curator, critic, and online-project organizer Carla Acevedo-Yates join the Broad Art Museum in Michigan as an assistant curator.

$9 and this Dan Graham cassette could be yours! [Primary Information]

There’s more single people than ever before, and now social scientists are trying to figure out how to start studying this previously neglected category of people. [The Science of Us]

Q: Why are academics such bad writers? A: Part I and Part II.

Here’s the first aerial photo of Manhattan, taken from a hot air balloon in 1906. Now that we’re so accustomed to ubiquitous crystal-clear satellite imagery it’s hard to imagine just how crazy this must’ve been just 110 years ago. [Curbed]

We’re looking forward to Chrissie Iles’s Dreamlands exhibition, a survey of immersive moving image works over the last century, opening at the Whitney this fall. In an interview with Sloan Science and Film, she gives a preview of the exhibition, and discusses the relationships between art made in Weimar-era Germany and today. Hint: it has something to do with cyborgs. [e-flux Conversations]

Photo filters have gone passé, it seems, now that augmented reality are taking over apps. Still, here comes Prism, an app that lets you apply so-called art filters like “Impression” or “Urban” to your phone pics; the app has the Mercury News speculating that “fine art may be the next career killed by the internet.” We doubt the latter on so many levels. [Mercury News]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Matthew Wrath

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 18:44:33 +0000

Different office standards abound. What's NSFW for some offices won't cause others to bat an eye. Today's GIF is a test: Is a butt enough for NSFW status? Judge for yourself with this tastefully pivoting nude, a snippet from Matthew Wrath's Computers Club landing page.

An Open Letter to MoMA PS1: So, About That Couch...

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 17:48:31 +0000

Dear MoMA PS1,

I am writing to you about a couch. In particular, the couch pictured above. You’ll find it midway through the MoMA PS1 exhibition VITO ACCONCI: WHERE WE ARE NOW (WHO ARE WE ANYWAY?), 1976.

Now, everyone at MoMA PS1 probably has more to think about than a couch, but this couch is very important. I used to think all you needed to screen video art was some comfy seating. That was, until I met your couch.

The Bronx’s "No Commission" Art Fair: Promising? Yes, but Not for Local Artists and Residents

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 12:53:09 +0000

Nina Chanel Abney, "Untruth," 2016. All photos by the author.

The story of art’s role in gentrifying urban neighborhoods is not new. But plant an art fair in the Bronx—one of the more recent instances of skyrocketing real-estate—and throw in the involvement of big-name sponsors and developers, and you have the makings of an event that won’t please everyone. That isn’t to say that locals were not involved with “No Commission NY: Art Performs,” a four-day art fair hosted at a former piano factory in the South Bronx; the art fair was aided by the vision of a culturally respected Bronx native, Swizz Beatz, a rapper, music producer, art collector, and recently appointed Chief Creative for Culture at Bacardi Limited.

Wednesday Links: No One Likes Your Blood Art or Thinks Soylent Is Cool Anymore

Wed, 17 Aug 2016 10:38:53 +0000

"My Little Edward Scissorhands" by Jvermillionaire

Robot taxis? Ford Motor Company announces plans to unveil a driverless vehicle for use in commercial ride-sharing by the year 2021. No plans yet as to whether the company plans to partner with Uber, Lyft, or any other commercial ride-sharing services yet. So what will happen when taxi drivers go the way of the dinosaur? Taxi drivers who fear losing their job to robot cars were not interviewed for this article. [Reuters]
Speaking of cold-blooded creatures: Aborigines “look like dinosaurs,” according to Marina Abramović. “They are really strange and different,” she wrote in her diaries in the 1970s, “and they should be treated as living treasures.” O_o [Hyperallergic]
And then, this morning comes the news that that line about dinosaurs will be removed from an upcoming publication of Marina Abramović’s memoirs. Delete doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. [The Guardian]
Art dorks rejoice because you can now hike up your pants and show off your love of Edouard Manet’s “Luncheon on the Grass” with a pair of socks. Also available: Mona Lisa, Nefertiti [Google Ghost Press]
CIA releases hundreds of declassified papers on UFOs. Also incredible: the CIA gives tips on how anyone can investigate flying saucers. [Open Culture]
Anthony Antonellis’s new series for Electric Objects speeds up the slow process of “wear and tear” on tech, by burning, breaking, and busting open iPhones, desktop monitors, and printer cartridges. [Electric Objects]
David Mermelstein argues that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's At Home With Monsters—a show that sprinkles the museum’s collection amongst that of horror director Guillermo del Toro—is kitsch masquerading as art. I haven’t seen the show, but I hate that stance, even though the show does sound kind of terrible. [The Wall Street Journal]
Clayton Chowaniec’s net game That Pokeyman Thing allows users to play as an old person struggling to understand what the hell Pokémon Go is. It’s hilarious, and weirdly fun. [Kill Screen]
Johnny Depp apparently made paintings with his own blood to get over a divorce. To demonstrate that this is gimmicky instead of shocking, Dan Duray outlines a short history of artists using blood as a medium, from the seminal to the schlocky. It’s a funny, quick read. (Yes, the Edward Scissorhands My Little Pony nods to Johnny Depp.) [The Guardian]
Feel the wrath of the surveillance society, where corporations know more about you than your boyfriend does, with this fake name generator. Sure! Sounds like fun. No it's not. It’s terrifying: it generates social security card numbers, passwords, usernames, addresses, and credit card numbers. [Fake Name Generator]
Johnny Cash’s Tennessee ranch, replete with general store and music venue has been reopened as the Storytellers Museum outside of Nashville. Only a 14-hour drive, for those of us in the northeast! [artnet News]
The federal agency of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is being lambasted for efforts to desegregate affordable housing. The HUD proposal would de-concentrate vouchers in low-income neighborhoods and encourage more Section 8 recipients to move to wealthier areas. The problem, according to NYC officials and advocates, is that there’s simply not enough vacant rental housing stock in the city’s wealthier neighborhoods. Maybe the sudden influx of federal subsidies for low-income renters could be used as an incentive to build more? [Curbed]
Move over Soylent, there’s a new performance-enhancing non-food in town. Nootropics, which have been popular for some time, are now making their way into a more public eye through the help of several startups selling pre-mixed “artisanal brain boosters.” [The Baffler]

GIF of the Day: Jake Rowland

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 18:49:22 +0000

Jake Rowland’s GIFs involve finding various ways to either kill happiness or send it off to the bright blue sky. I’m not sure I quite identify with the GIF above—it’s the day before I leave vacation—but let’s talk mid-season when we’re all too busy for words, and we’ve got several months of criticism under our belts. It’ll sure feel relevant then.

Dream Job Alert: Rhizome Curators

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 18:23:03 +0000

Come work for mastermind Michael Connor...dreamy.

Rhizome is hiring for two curatorial positions as the organization expands its programming. And here’s the good news for all you recent grads: one of them is an entry-level Assistant Curator position, where you’d be working with Artistic Director Michael Connor to “curate the re-performance and narration of” net art. The position, funded by a grant from the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Art Foundation, is only part-time, but does include benefits. And it’s likely one of the coolest entry-level jobs out there.

Tuesday Links: McMansions Aren't Architecture and Rooms Aren't Parks

Tue, 16 Aug 2016 10:25:11 +0000

Oh dear god yes. There’s a scathingly funny (because it’s true) Tumblr devoted to architectural criticism of McMansions. If you’ve ever been nauseated by a relative’s house in the suburbs and not-quite been able to put your finger on the reasons why, this blog outlines it all from mis-matched porticos to ill-proportioned secondary masses and garages that look like they’re eating a plantation. [McMansion Hell]

Alexandra Lange would like us to stop calling the “Lowline” a park. It’s really just an underground room with plants in it. But hey, in the event of nuclear fallout, it sure beats the Highline. [Curbed]

Just how racist, corrupt, and utterly ineffectual at investigating rapes is the Baltimore Police Department? Graphic designers Post Typography illustrate the findings of the Justice Department’s damning report. It’s especially infuriating when one takes into account that “public safety” is where so much of the city’s residents’ tax dollars are going. [Baltimore Brew]

Two men were killed and another wounded when a gunman opened fire following an argument at Prime Development, an art gallery in Oakland, California. [New York Daily News]

Art Basel surveyed participating gallerists about what other careers they would pursue if they weren't selling art. Most said none, but some would be curators, and one would be an astronaut. [Art Basel]

Miami’s Wynwood arts district is luring back visitors amidst its Zika outbreak by offering bug repellent, free parking, and drink specials during the Second Saturdays art walk. Can we please keep the half-price margaritas going after the virus has been eliminated? [Miami Herald]

And in other overrated-street-art-moneymaking-schemes news, drunks tried to steal a fake Banksy. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Curt Cloninger

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 17:46:33 +0000

GIFs have a legacy on the web that far exceeds the participation of most netizens. The file format was introduced by CompuServe in 1987—well before the first browser, Netscape Navigator, was introduced in 1994. Basically, they’ve been around forever.

For that reason, it’s exciting to see durational projects that have been employing the file format for almost as long. Curt Cloninger’s Playdamage, is an ongoing webpage project that was started in 2000, runs through today, and at the time of this writing includes 114 GIFs. Each GIF is assigned its own page, and a looping song to match. Essentially, it’s a play list that tracks evolving aesthetic and musical tastes over the course of 16 years.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: The Art World Never Shuts Down

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 17:13:11 +0000

We all talk about how the art world shuts down in August, but a brief look at Friday’s schedule shows how much of a fallacy that’s becoming. Bushwick is full of openings that night from Signal’s exhibition of artists to respond to stories penned by three writers to Hood Gallery’s two person show for Tim Long and Jack Shaefer looking at what they call “self-defense prosthetics (canes, slingshots etc.)

You Say You Want “A Static Revolution” At One Art Space

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 11:17:14 +0000

David Chalk, Untitled, digital print (image courtesy Everett Kane)

A Static Revolution One Art Space 23 Warren Street, New York, NY On view until August 15 Artists: David Chalk, Carla Gannis, Everett Kane, Peter Patchen, and Claudia Tait

Is digital art alone a complex and multifaceted enough curatorial theme for a group exhibition in 2016?

Monday Links: Learning to Love the Vulgar

Mon, 15 Aug 2016 10:28:31 +0000

Chris Mottalini tried out the new I-1 instant camera from Impossible Project and the MoMA design store.

"The vulgar is a version of the discerned, or scapegoat of good taste." Adam Phillips on the exhibition about vulgarity he is co-curating with his partner Judith Clark at the Barbican. [The New York Times]

Want to keep up with the L.A. arts and culture scene? Carolina Miranda has been covering the scene for several years now at the L.A. Times for her blog Culture: High & Low. Now, she’s also penning a weekly newsletter (sign up at the bottom) filled with links to L.A. Times arts coverage and beyond that’s worth signing up for. Prior to Culture: High & Low, Miranda maintained C-Monster, a blog that firmly established her as the original links master. [L.A. Times]

After 30 years, Tyree Guyton has decided to dismantle his famed “Heidelberg Project”, a massive public artwork. The found-object installation brings hundreds of thousands of visitors to East Detroit, so many people are concerned about its uncertain fate. [Detroit News]

The Impossible Project and MoMA Design Store have partnered to launch I-1, the first new instant camera to use Polaroid technology in decades. It’s controlled by a phone app and lends unprecedented control over instant film processes. Here, six photographers test it out in and around NYC. [Curbed]

This is great news! There’s an experiment to pedestrianize Downtown Manhattan. [Wired]

When public art is a trainwreck… literally. Roger Hiorns proposal for an installation at a British train station looks like a bunch of overturned train cars, and a lot of people are not happy about it. [Express and Star]

Alec Baldwin thought he was purchasing a painting by Ross Bleckner he’d long coveted. But, he was in fact, buying another one like it, but not the same. Mary Boone, Bleckner’s dealer, insists she told Baldwin he was purchasing a copy. Baldwin insists he was misled. Now there are lawyers involved and press coverage over the dispute. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Call for Submissions

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 19:38:43 +0000

Over here at AFC we can spend hours looking for GIFs worthy of showcase. Featured above is one such GIF by Hugo Moreno. We even included him in our show, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies. It’s a great job and we love doing it, but you know what would make it easier? Submissions. We love GIFs. We need GIFs. We want your GIFs. And we will even, from time to time exhibit them. So, it’s worth your while to send them our way. The submission process is easy: email them to paddy@artfcity.com or michael@artfcity.com. If we like what we see, you’ll hear from us.

I Wish it Was Last Weekend Again: The Contemporary's Grown-Up Art Camp

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 18:51:04 +0000

Group photo by Olivia Obineme, courtesy of The Contemporary.

BALTIMORE - Last week I had the pleasure of participating in The Contemporary’s first artist retreat. The first, I hope, of many. For four days, 50 artists from Baltimore joined dozens of “consultants” and “guests” that included national arts professionals and artists, representatives from nonprofit organizations, gallerists, curators, and critics at a Jewish retreat center with a farm in rural Maryland. The program included presentations from artists, numerous panels and workshops, and one-on-one meetings; all catered towards networking or “this weird vortex hellhole that is professional development for artists,” as director Deana Haggag described it. What follows is a diary assembled from the notes I ended up scribbling near-constantly.

Friday Links: Pro-Trump Lawn Art Burned in Staten Island, Interiors Gentrified by Apps Everywhere

Fri, 12 Aug 2016 10:21:26 +0000

Bushwig is leaving Bushwick. Don’t cry your eyeliner off yet though, the drag festival is moving just over the border to the Knockdown Center in Queens. Still, that’s a really long walk from the train in heels. [Bushwick Daily]

Such a great read. Kyle Chayka defines a new type of homogenous interior accessed and influenced by digital platforms such as FourSquare, Airbnb, and myriad co-working/co-living startups: AirSpace. In AirSpace, a coffee shop in Portland looks just like a coffee shop in Shanghai: edison bulbs and white-painted exposed brick. Apartments all have knockoff midcentury modern pieces and accent rugs, and shared office spaces have reclaimed wood and Eames chairs. [The Verge]

The art market is actually hoping some big collectors die before November auctions so some estates can hit the block. We live in some dark, weird times. [CNBC]

Architects agree that Brooklyn’s skyline is pretty boring, largely because it’s defined by nearly-identical residential towers and not a lot of variation in shape or height. The main WSJ article is hidden behind a paywall, but this gives you the gist of it. [Curbed]

For those who love concrete buildings. [Sebastian Weiss]

A Staten Island man erected a giant “T” sculpture for Trump in his front yard. Last weekend, someone burned it down. Insert obligatory South Park “It’s a burning ‘T’ for ‘Tolerance!’” joke here. [artnet News]

Apply for the Emerging Digital Artists award. The winner receives $5,000 and four runner ups receive $1000 each. AFC Alumn, Rea McNamara is one of the judges. Deadline September 15. [EDAA]

AFC’s own Whitney Kimball gets a shout-out for her piece How Do People Feel About the Gramsci Monument, One Year Later in Avi Alpert’s essay on the state of art criticism today. [Temporary Art Review]

GIF of the Day: Weather Update from Dina Kelberman

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 19:49:16 +0000

This GIF from Dina Kelberman, titled “Simpsons on Fire,” is really useful, because it shows you what the weather feels like today.

Climate change sucks.

See more of Dina’s GIF-appropriated cartoon Smoke & Fire at the New Museum/Rhizome’s First Look: New Art Online.

O / U at P! And Room East

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 12:00:32 +0000

Installation view of P!

Two galleries, P! and Room East—located about five blocks from each other, respectively in Chinatown and the Lower East Side—came together for a group show titled O / U. That’s shorthand for “over-under,” which may refer to the sports wager where you bet on the combined score in a game. The text for the exhibition suggests it may also refer to “a complicated sexual position, a type of double barrel shotgun,” or the formal qualities of overprinting or undercutting. Of course, overall, it suggests that the conceptual layering is heaavy, though the two galleries are spare and clean and contemporary looking.

Thursday Links: Fall/Winter Zika-Proof Fashions for Miami

Thu, 11 Aug 2016 10:31:13 +0000

With Miami’s big art season just months away, everyone’s a little (justifiably) concerned about the Zika outbreak in the Wynwood gentrification arts district. Thankfully, the organizers of the Borscht Film Festival have unveiled the above Zika-proof prototype suit. Look for this on red carpets across the 305. [Facebook]

The case of the guy who climbed Trump Tower yesterday using suction cups gets weirder. Apparently the internet thought the 19-year-old was Jared Padalecki, of Gilmore Girls fame. Huh. [Vanity Fair]

Trend alert: female millennial sculptors referencing the human body in gross plastic works. [artnet News]

Justin Davidson poses the question: “Can an architect design a kinder, gentler gentrification?” And despite what he paints as the best efforts of Rheingold Brewery designers ODA, it’s hard not to read this piece without screaming “NO!” [New York Magazine]

If I knew how to drive, I’d go on this epic roadtrip. Here’s a map of all the country’s biggest and best land art. Hint: it’s mostly in the middle of nowhere. [Curbed]

Aoife van Linden Tol is the first artist selected for the European Space Agency’s arts and science residency. Her medium: explosives. Everything about this appeals to my inner 11 year old. [The Creators Project]

Canadian model Gigi Gorgeous was detained at the Dubai airport and denied entry into the UAE on the grounds that she is transgender. Totally fucked, though all LGBTQ people should probably be boycotting the Emirates anyway. [TIME]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Rollin Leonard

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 18:30:18 +0000

I don't think we'll ever cease to be amazed by all the weird ways Rollin Leonard has digitized, manipulated, and reproduced representations of the flesh sacks we call human bodies. This GIF is kinda what sex would be like if humans were buffering video streams that reproduced by reverse mitosis. Some day, we may be.

Side-By-Side Lucy Statues Look Like Faces of Meth PSA

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 13:45:23 +0000

Lucille Ball statues by Carolyn Palmer (L) and Dave Poulin (R)

Remember that terrifying “I Love Lucy” sculpture upstate? Lucille Ball’s hometown of Celoron, N.Y. erected the statue by Dave Poulin in 2009, and pretty much everyone hated it. Even the sculptor told the Los Angeles Times “From the day of its installation, I have shared my disappointment in the final outcome and have always believed it to be by far my most unsettling sculpture.” Unsettling, perhaps, because it looks like Steve Buscemi as a meth-addled drag queen chugging a flask in the park:

Burning Down The House: An Interview With Brandi Twilley On “The Living Room”

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 12:00:25 +0000

Brandi Twilley, Fire and Fall Painting, 2016, oil on canvas (Courtesy the artist and Sargent's Daughters)

Brandi Twilley: The Living Room Sargent’s Daughters 179 East Broadway, New York, NY On view until August 26, 2016

How accurate are the precious memories of our childhood homes? And what happens when those memories are all that’s left after the home is irreversibly destroyed?

Wednesday Links: Do We Value Harambe or the Idea of Harambe?

Wed, 10 Aug 2016 10:21:42 +0000

The “Trolley Dilemma” is the internet’s most philosophical meme, of course able to update and mutate given a user/creator’s sensitivities. [New York Magazine]
Joseph DeLappe, Malath Abbas, Tom Demajo and Albert Elwin developed Killbox, a video game that allows players to assume the roles of drone pilot or villager. It’s pretty depressing. [AJ+]

The Walker Art Center is offering a two-year fellowship for curators focused on intermedia artworks and performance. [The Walker Art Center]

But here’s an even cooler opportunity: Lisa fucking Frank is hiring digital artists!!! Please, someone take this job and make AFC some psychedelic panda stationery for the office. [Facebook]

This is the last week for artist-run spaces and nonprofits to apply for the Satellite Art Fair in Miami Beach. We had a great time last year! This year, the format is a little different and booths are pricier, but it’s still the cheapest art fair in Miami and now has a super-central South Beach location. [Satellite]

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has a guide for advocates of architecture from our recent past—meaning modernism from civic buildings to googie diners. This is so important right now! [Saving Places]

Let’s all remember that time Clyfford Still sent Emily Genauer a pair of rubber underpants in the mail because she wrote a bad review of his work. They’re now in the Smithsonian. [Hyperallergic]

Jala Wahid’s collection of inspiring images about the body is one of my favorite short image essays I’ve seen in awhile. Ancient mythology, the Borg from Star Trek, Ripley destroying her clones in Alien Resurrection, and a photo of her parents in a refugee camp all totally make strange sense together through her associative logic. [Frieze]

Rebecca Power and Kim Upstill are throwing “dinner parties” with the beverage Soylent in an all-white room. First thoughts—I’m reminded of our own experience with the milky stuff in Sean Raspet’s installation at Frieze New York and the sterile future foods and presentation of Miriam Simun. This food piece, however, features vodka, so it builds on our zeitgeist of food anxieties and pushes it in a more fun direction. Into it. [Hoodline]

GIF of the Day: OTAKON!

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:37:30 +0000

Otakon, one of America’s biggest anime conventions, opens Thursday in Baltimore. I’m super excited, though not for the same reasons as most people. Confession: I fall asleep almost every time someone tries to get me to watch an anime. I don’t know if that’s because of the slow frame rate or bad dubbing or something related to convoluted storylines—I just don’t have the attention span. But I love a good costume party, and Otakon (“Otaku” is more-or-less Japanese for “nerd”) is all about weirdos from all over the world coming together to cosplay as their favorite characters and party with like-minded people. It’s a pretty magical sight, best summed up by this adorable GIF narrative I stumbled across:

Vanessa Beecroft Continues to Prove She Doesn't Deserve Comparison With Rachel Dolezal

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 20:32:25 +0000

Vanessa Beecroft, “VB66,” Mercato lttico, Napoli, 2010.

We were going to write a blog post titled “Vanessa Beecroft is the Rachel Dolezal of the Art World” and then realized what an unfair comparison that is. Beecroft’s appropriations of blackness are so, so much worse. This is not a post about stupid things someone has said once, twice, or in the case of Beecroft, many, many times. This is a post about how systemic racism cannot be wished away: “If I don’t call myself white, maybe I am not,” says Beecroft in “The Bodies Artist,” a profile published online today on the Cut (as well as this month’s issue of New York Magazine). Published two years to date on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s shooting death in Ferguson, there are many people who cannot find themselves in a place to change their race—or gender, or sexual preference. Beecroft can perform blackness, but that’s her privilege. Her totally, insanely un-self-aware privilege.

Tuesday Links: Temporary Tattoos and Fugly Fabrics

Tue, 09 Aug 2016 10:10:49 +0000

Artist Menja Stevenson wearing a dress to match the bus seats. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Mind blown: the Olympics used to have medals for the arts!?! They stopped doing this in 1948, but how cool is that? [The Huffington Post]
If you want to watch the Olympics in virtual reality, you can, if you care about sports, own a $99 Samsung Gear headset, and download an app. [USA Today]
This cat is having a no-good, existential crisis kind of day after ripping up a balloon. [Imgur]
In our email inboxes: a note from SFMOMA that you can now purchase museum tickets online through January 2017. Are the lines really so long that tickets must be sought out so far in advance? Or does this just mean that museums are going the way of airlines, letting you plan out your vacation far, far in advance? [SFMOMA]
The Jewish Museum launches its first Kickstarter campaign today. The museum has set a goal of $30,000 for their fall exhibition, Take Me (I’m Yours), which will let visitors bring home artist-produced takeaways, like temporary tattoos by Lawrence Weiner or air dispensers (not sure what that will look like) by Yoko Ono. 400,000 of these small editions will be made in total. [Kickstarter]
Despite market turbulence, Sotheby’s actually saw an increase in year-to-year profits. This is mostly due to cost-cutting within the auction house. Sotheby's CEO, Thomas Smith, identifies “a paradox” wherein there’s still demand from collectors for high-value works in a financially uncertain time, but that sellers are holding out and restricting sales volume because they believe this isn’t the best time to sell. Dear collectors, please consider putting more of that pent-up purchasing power into the primary market. [Business Insider]
Today marks the two-year anniversary of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and with it, the growth of #blacklivesmatter. [The Root]
This piece about why fabric on public transportation is so ugly is surprisingly a really interesting read. It even touches on the work of artist Menja Stevenson, who dressed herself to match different transit lines. [BBC]

GIF of the Day: I Hate You

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:39:51 +0000

Sometimes I think there’s an unexpected value in relating to pop culture on a wholly personal level. For example, there are pretty much just two things from the past 50 years of media that shaped my ethics and worldview: the anti-capitalist, but otherwise almost entirely separate, phenomena of Star Trek and punk.

The above GIF shows the brief few seconds when those worlds improbably collided in the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. The story was conceived of and directed by Leonard Nimoy (RIP) and involves the protagonists travelling back in time to then-present-day San Francisco to rescue whales, who had been hunted to extinction. In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Spock (played by Nimoy) gives a Vulcan nerve pinch to a punk who is loudly playing music from a boom box on the bus. It’s exactly the kind of camp 80s-era Star Trek pulled off so well.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Summer Campy

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:09:09 +0000

Has the art world been getting lonely in a slow summer defined by gallerists and museums phoning it in from the beach? That might explain why so many art people seem to be planning something fun and social this week, from a Monday night campy screening of a Paul Morrissey film starring Warhol Superstars to open studios across Brooklyn. Wednesday, both BRIC and American Medium are hosting events for artists to relax and mingle, and out by the Hamptons, the Parrish Art Museum is throwing a Grey Gardens costume contest on Thursday. If you can’t make that trek, pass the time in Yiyang Cao’s debut New York exhibition. Friday, head to Bushwick for a night of openings at Tiger Strikes Asteroid and Underonk, both of which promise to be pretty fun. Saturday night, catch up on the latest episodes of fake reality TV show “Sad Girls Club” (trailer above) at the Anthology Film Archives, which is pretty much a party in and of itself. Finally, Sunday marks the last chance to score a smiley face portrait from Nobutaka Aozaki in Corona, followed by more open studios, DJs, and more at Red Hook’s Pioneer Works.

Monday Links: Comic Book Movie Conspiracy Theorists Exist

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 10:39:44 +0000

Martin Creed at the Park Armory. Image: James Ewing

John Oliver talks about the fate of journalism. Depressing. [Last Week Tonight]
Looks like the Martin Creed show at the Park Armory is the one to see this summer. Andrew Russeth fauns over the retrospective, explaining that this is more than just his greatest hits. It tells a long story with well-known and more obscure works. The big thing, though, is that that the show leaves the Armory’s vast drill hall space empty but for projections on the wall. [ARTnews]
Kirk Johnson visits the Seattle Art Fair, which prominently featured science-inspired works to appeal to the city’s booming tech industry and more standard fair fare such as Helen Frankenthaler painting with a seven-digit price tag. The most interesting aspect sounds like Out of Sight, a satellite fair started by local spaces not represented under the big tent, but work there doesn’t get much coverage in the article. [The New York Times]
Spot upzoning is illegal in New York when it is not part of what the state describes as a “well considered well-considered and comprehensive plan calculated to serve the general welfare of the community.” But how often do these plans exist when zoning variances are granted? Inwood seems to be the latest case of the city disregarding this clause and neighborhood residents are upset. They say a proposal to build a 14 story condo in an area of six to seven story buildings does not make sense, and will only increase their rent. Unsurprisingly, no one cares about the “affordable” units that will be offered—they can’t afford them, and what are a few units in the scope of displacement of thousands when the rent rises? Strangely the developer goes unnamed in this article.[NY1]
New York is now the world’s most expensive city, surpassing London amid the financial turmoil wrought by the Brexit fiasco. [Curbed]
Online sales account for 3.6 percent of Sotheby’s auction total, which means they have a long, long way to go before they can say their online business accounts for any kind of meaningful revenue stream. [Art Market Monitor]
The new film Suicide Squad looks terrible, and is generally panned by critics. Here’s the strange story of how its fans (none of whom have actually seen it yet) started a petition to shut down review-aggregating site Rotten Tomatoes. Apparently some believe there’s a conspiracy wherein critics are being paid to suppress certain comic-book-inspired films… which makes no sense and ignores the fact that most of these movies are just awful. [The Washington Post]
This is such a good read. Grayson Perry visited the degree exhibitions at Chelsea College of Arts, and Gillian Wearing visited Goldsmiths. They reflect on their own time at art school and the work students are making now. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: Oliver Laric's Three D Scans

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 17:39:11 +0000

Ligier Richier, Le Transi de Rene de Chalon, 1545

A little something old, a little something new.

Multi-media artist Oliver Laric’s Three D Scans project is part conservation effort, part research for new work and part remix. Through the cooperation of 15 institutions around Europe, Laric has been scanning important sculptural work for the purposes of 3D printing. He’s uploaded the 3D information to a website along with GIFs of each sculpture and anyone who cares to use that info to print their own sculpture is welcome to.

A Brief History of Autechre's Album Covers

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 14:59:23 +0000

Oversteps vinyl edition (2010) by The Designers Republic

I’ve always hated minimalism. I don’t think that’s a blanket statement I’d make about any other artistic movement but I hate minimalism. From my perspective, it was audacious for like a year, and then it was decoration. This hatred even extends to minimalist design for the most part, though I can occasionally be persuaded to appreciate a nice, functional spice rack. But, I’ve always loved the tension between the experimental electronic music duo Autechre’s stark album packaging and dense, maximal music.

Friday Links: Creepy Dolls and Trolling Grandmas

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 10:20:54 +0000

This little girl used face swap with her doll. Nightmare fuel. [IMGUR]
The 90-year-old German woman who filled in the crossword puzzle Fluxus piece by Arthur Köpcke is now claiming (via her lawyer) copyright-protection for the “collaborative work” that she enhanced by completing. You really should read the full statement, this woman’s lawyer is hilarious. [Ars Technica]
Music producer Swizz Beatz is bringing his No Commission Art Fair to the Bronx. The fair provides free exhibition space and gives 100% of profits to the artist. The inaugural edition that was held in Miami featured 35 artists and sold over $1m in art. [artnet News]
Recently, President Obama became the first sitting president to publish an academic paper. Now, he’s published an article in Glamour about what feminism means to him. Will post-Presidency Obama become a blogger? We hope so. [Glamour]
Rhizome is looking to hire a software curator and an assistant curator of net art. If you’re the type of person who’s qualified for that, this is a rare opportunity. [Rhizome]
A very interesting piece about the culture and politics of the contemporary art scene in Brazil. It’s a thorough look at a place that’s going to be in the news a lot in the coming weeks. [Even Magazine]
This is some bullshit. The International Olympics Committee has expressly forbidden press from making animated GIFs. [The Verge]
Not one, but TWO art detective stories: The first is the story of how Arthur Brand tracked down lost masterpieces by Dali and Tamara de Lempicka. The second is a look at how researchers used a particle accelerator to identify a portrait beneath the surface of Degas’s “Portrait of a Woman.” [The Independent, The Guardian]
Speaking of art history researchers, a new documentary that goes behind the scenes with the people who study Bosch is opening today. It looks great. [YouTube]
Even though the museum is still facing millions of dollars in deficits and undergoing layoffs, the Met announced that its had record attendance this year. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Rick Silva's Corpse Flower

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 18:18:21 +0000

Last week, the world was obsessed with the New York Botanical Garden’s “Corpse Flower,” which bloomed briefly and rarely. It even had its own webcam. It unfurls for just a few days about every 10 years, mimicing a decomposing body’s temperature and stench in order to attract flies (and tourist, apparently). It’s Latin name is Amorphophallus titanum, giant misshapen phallus, which makes this plant even weirder and more disgusting.

Unfortunately, the warm, smelly phallus has now shriveled. But if you didn’t make it up to the Bronx to catch a whiff, you can enjoy this stench-free rendering from Rick Silva, which will bloom forever thanks to the looping magic of the GIF.

Thursday Links: Gun Violence Solutions?

Thu, 04 Aug 2016 10:36:24 +0000

After a year-long campaign by the activist group New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Apple has replaced its revolver emoji with a squirt gun. I guess that’s progress. [Hyperallergic]
Architects are also trying their hands at curbing gun violence. Spurred by terrorist attacks and mass shootings, a new interest in safety and making people feel safer has arisen in the architecture community. Phrases like “natural surveillance” are a little unnerving but the focus on making people feel less isolated seems like a step in the right direction. [Motherboard]
Antiques have declined in overall value by 45% since 2002 so antique fairs are jumping into the contemporary art market. [The Guardian]
That guy who made the art pricing app filled with stolen images and data says it will be coming back. His argument is that many of the images are user generated and that no one is calling for Instagram to be taken down. It’s true, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc are billion dollar businesses built on copyright violation. This guy’s still kind of a jackass though. [The Art Newspaper]
Looks like Moscow’s Garage museum is putting that VICE money to use. It will expand to a second location on New Holland Island in St. Petersburg. [ArtNews]
An inspired journalist from The Hollywood Reporter has answered the question of how tiny Donald Trump’s hands are. The exclusive information was obtained by walking down to Madame Tussaud’s and measuring Trump’s wax figure. So now, dear reader, you too can compare your hands to Donald Trump’s. They’re pretty tiny. For a 6’ 2”, 200 pound man, they’re very tiny. [The Hollywood Reporter]
Bill Viola is set to install a second video work at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The work, entitled "Mary," will be a companion piece to Viola’s Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) from 2014. [The Art Newspaper]
Jens Hoffman is leaving his position as deputy director at the Jewish Museum. He’ll still handle special exhibitions and will be working with other institutions. [ArtNews]
Photographer Jeff Wall is joining go-go-Gagosian after spending 25 years with Marian Goodman. [New York Times]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Shoot

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 18:40:42 +0000

Normally, NSFW GIF of the Hump Day is just meant to poke fun at some of the puritanical attitudes that surround art, sex and nudity. It is certainly weird that sex and nudity are more off-limits in American culture than violence. But NSFW can mean more than just jiggling boobs and raging boners.

While we wouldn’t necessarily say that Chris Burden’s “Shoot” (a performance in which he allowed someone to shoot him in the arm with a gun) is violent, your boss might think you’re watching some sort of fucked up snuff meets America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Pokémon Players Show Up at Museum Director's House, Crash into Her Car

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 16:02:16 +0000

Nearly every museum director seeks higher attendance and groups eager to stand in front of an artwork. Often, they turn to mobile apps to lure visitors. But they usually don’t want those crowds at their house. In the middle of the night.

AFC’s friend Deana Haggag, the Executive Director of The Contemporary, has made a career out of bringing art programming to unexpected places. From dystopian food trucks to vacant museums, Haggag and The Contemporary team have a curatorial knack for surprising the public with artwork in unusual contexts. But now, the public is unexpectedly showing up at her home, thanks to a mural and the strange logic of Pokémon GO.

Wednesday Links: Silicon Valley Jackass Edition

Wed, 03 Aug 2016 10:10:23 +0000

Magnus, the app Magnus Resch named after himself and described as “Shazam for Art”, has been pulled from the Apple Store after claims that it operates using data stolen from other art databases. I’m sick of hearing about art apps that are “the ____ for art,” but this story merits attention because Resch sent a photo of himself with a donkey to Hyperallergic with his press release. At least that’s one JPEG we can likely assume he didn’t swipe from Artsy’s servers. [Hyperallergic]
Professor Robert Ekelund has been studying what causes art museums to experience declines in visitors and revenue at a time when overall museum attendance is up. He finds that it comes down to three factors: audiences want more contemporary art, billionaires are buying up all of the contemporary art, and demographic/social shifts mean that more people are attending while museums are increasingly under pressure to provide free admission. [The Conversation]
Two recent studies have found that people of color “make up only 9% of museum boards and 16% of the administrators, curators, conservators and educators who make decisions about what is exhibited and preserved as culturally important.” After a review of more than a 1,000 cultural institutions, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs is dedicating $1m to diversity efforts including an increase in paid internships. [The Art Newspaper]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning pregnant women to stay away from Miami’s Wynwood Art District due to an outbreak of the Zika virus. Basel’s just four months away. [Jezebel]
Those afraid of Zika in South Florida will soon have more indoor room to see art, though. Miami Beach’s Bass Museum has added 50% more exhibition space without an addition. They accomplished this by reconfiguring interior spaces (remember that huge ramp? It’s gone) and enclosing the terraces, so no more great outdoor parties for Basel week. [artnet News]
Lisa Ruyter has begun the process of transitioning into a man. Ruyter started hormone therapy two weeks ago but he isn’t sure about future plans to undergo gender-reassignment surgery. [Page Six]
The Rio Olympics don’t seem to be going very well and now funding has been pulled for a series of public art projects that were planned to coincide with the games. Giancarlo Neri, an artist who was to be included in the project says that the cancellation has more to do with politics than budget concerns. He says that the upcoming impeachment trial of President Dilma Rousseff has caused many projects to be stalled or cancelled completely. [artnet News]
Yuri Pattison has transformed the Chisenhale Gallery in London into an eerie, abandoned co-working space for some hypothetical tech startup that may or may not have gone out of business. The installation sounds uncanny and brilliantly evocative considering how little intervention there seems to be beyond creating a simulacrum of an office. [The Guardian]

GIF of the Day: Instagram 95

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 18:03:57 +0000

Misha Petrick created this series of GIFs [h/t Designboom] to offer a glimpse of what Instagram.exe might look like as an application for Windows 95.

I for one would be thrilled if these filters existed, rather than the existent options of making your cell phone photos look like “Free People Catalog” or “Religious-Themed Sympathy Card”:

Faulty Cottages: the Curious Case of Mill Hill's Fired Community Artists

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 15:05:51 +0000

The proposed home of the Mill Hill Community Arts Center. Photo courtesy of Macon Arts Alliance, via The Knight Foundation.

The project sounds too good to be true: a half-vacant historic neighborhood brought back to life through community land trusts, permanently affordable housing stock, and arts integrated every step of the way. This is the vision for The Mill Hill Arts Village in Macon, Georgia, where the Knight Foundation, the county’s Urban Development Authority, the Macon Arts Alliance (MAA), and various community groups secured an NEA “Our Town” grant to restore historic homes for low-income people and provide cultural programming and green space.

Tuesday Links: Melrose Place as Context

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 10:32:13 +0000

The Hyde Collection has received a donation of cash and modern and contemporary artwork valued at $11 million. The huge windfall comes to the upstate museum from the architect Werner Feibes and his late partner James Schmitt, who together designer the studio of their friend Ellsworth Kelly [Times Union]

Wow. Here’s the insane story of how Mel Chin and his GALA Committee infiltrated the set of 90s television show Melrose Place with conceptual art. All of the work that appeared on (and sometimes became plot points for) the show will be on view this fall at Red Bull Studios in New York. [ARTnews]

Residents of a rent-stabilized SRO owned by Church of the Ascension are facing eviction following the sale of the building to developers. Remarkably, they’re finding the time to organize an effort to save the building’s interior Keith Haring mural in the midst of freaking out about their living situation. [Curbed]

A group of librarians based in Portland are matching readers with books based on their tattoos. [Katu2]

Here’s an interview with Beckii Cruel, a British girl who accidentally became a Japanese internet celebrity at the age of 14. [Dazed]

A Canadian perspective on the United States election, with just 100 days to go. Very amusing. [Maclean’s]

Yes! Jamillah James has been appointed as the ICA LA head curator! She’s so great. [Artforum]

As if anyone needed convincing, here’s a listicle of all the reasons Rockaway Beach is awesome for artists. [Artspace]

The ambitious installation/exhibition Oakland, I want you to know… at the Oakland Museum of California aims to document the city’s culture before it’s wiped out by tech industry gentrification, and hopefully inspire viewers to political action. [Huffington Post]

A report on The Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement gives all the background that led up to the event, plus a report on the conference itself. Notably, after all the fuss about the heavily protested Brooklyn Real Estate Summit back in November 2015, Pasternak nor any of her senior staff showed up for the conference. Why? [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Soliman Lopez

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 20:14:13 +0000

This GIF from Soliman Lopez is part of project investigating Joseph Kosuth’s 1965 piece “One and Three Chairs.” Kosuth represented the chair as a manufactured object, a photograph, and the printed dictionary definition of “chair”. The then-groundbreaking conceptual work is in MoMA’s permanent collection.

Soliman Lopez created the above GIF of the iconic chair for the larger piece “Making Disappear Joseph Kusuth’s Chair,” which concluded with the artist swallowing the micro SD card containing the rendering (also documented in GIF form, below) and signed statements from witnesses. That’s what I call commitment to 1960’s conceptualism—with a very contemporary, likely toxic, twist.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Augmented Reality, Black Lives Matter, Bromoeroticism, and More

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 14:50:38 +0000

Sean O'Connor's Greek-and-sportswear inspired paintings of bros will be on view at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art starting Friday.

It’s August. Very few people are having openings. Which is okay, because you can catch up on some other activities. Such as reading and sports! Head to Printed Matter’s pop-up on Tuesday, then head down to Basketball City for a friendly game with the folks from NADA. Wednesday, the Con Artist Collective is having a $99 art sale in the spirit of a Lower East Side Bodega. Thursday, the New Museum has all sorts of techy delights as they unveil New INC projects and Carter Burden Gallery is hosting a trifecta of medium-specific shows. End the night at the Brooklyn Museum, where Juliana Huxtable will be DJing from within a Tom Sachs installation (uh, hello all my favorite things!). Friday, identity politics gets graphic with Sean O’Connor’s wallpaper-like paintings of homoerotic sports stuff at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art and Carla Cubit’s Black Lives Matter posters at chashama.

Monday Links: This Video of Nico Covering David Bowie is the Best

Mon, 01 Aug 2016 10:29:37 +0000

Someone dug up footage of Warhol Superstar Nico covering Bowie’s “Heroes” with a disco beat in a small British bar in the early 1980s. She looks totally crazy and it’s one of the best performances I’ve ever seen in my life. [YouTube].

More counterculture nostalgia out of England: London’s Michael Hoppen Gallery has a show of vintage punk memorabilia and 1970s photographs of Vivienne Westwood, Siouxsie Sioux, Johnny Rotten, and more. It’s on view through August 26th, if you’re planning a trip to take advantage of the cheap pound! [Blouin Artinfo]

Alexandra Lange questions the veracity and relevance of the “50% of the world’s population live in cities” assumption. She makes some good points about the inaccuracy of the UN’s methodology and the need for more nuanced looks at local morphologies for designers and theorists. In the Bay Area, for example: “I can think of a dozen other reasons, right in their own backyard, why a Silicon Valley incubator should be interested in the future of housing, transportation, regional planning, and workplace design. Why, then, must they go global? The future of one kind of city, in which people live densely and work in sprawl, is being written on their doorstep, and yet, the use of the statistic implies that they want to change a larger, less knotty idea of the city.” But isn’t the whole fun and spirit of architecture, design, and planning a never-ending strive for the utopian? [Curbed]

The New York Post unearthed pictures from the mid 90’s, when Melania Trump (then Knauss) posed with another female model for a “lesbian-themed” photoshoot. True to the Post’s classy editorial style, this just reeks of slut-shaming and isn’t really journalism. Maybe all those out-of-work Gawker staff can send their resumés over to Rupert Murdoch. [The New York Post]

Related: Australian muralist Lushsux has had his Instagram account deleted after publishing photos of a mural he completed depicting Hillary Clinton in a sexy American Flag swimsuit. [9 News]

Update: Lushux responded to the censorship by covering Clinton in a Burqa. [ABC News]

This must’ve been a fun article to research… the history of drugs in art, from ancient times to Kenny Scharf’s installations for tripping and Damien Hirst’s medicine cabinets of psychopharmaceuticals. Even Marina Abramović has dabbled in mind-altering substances! But for the best example of drug-induced creativity, rewatch Nico’s “Heroes” rendition at the top of the page. [CNN]

Job alert: Italian art fair Artissima is seeking a new director. The fair takes place in Turin in November. [artnet News]

The AC Institute is holding an open call for a gun memorial design. Those interested should submit a mock up for a memorial design at the National Mall in Washington DC. The winning projects won’t be installed at the mall, but will be included in an online show and a publication. Deadline: December 2016. [AC Institute]

Creative Time has added seven new board members: artist/actor Waris Ahluwalia, artist Trevor Paglen, designer Ivana Berendika, collector Heather Farrer, curator Sofía Hernández, Clinton Foundation program vice president Maura Pally, and Andrei Tretyakov, a venture capitalist. [ARTnews]

GIF of the Day: That Friday Feeling

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 18:21:41 +0000

A little exhaustion, a little delirium, a little love.

From Andrew Benson’s “Everyday GIF’s."

NEW INC's "Public Beta" Showcase Is Incubating Something Weird

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 18:04:17 +0000

It’s been about 35 years since we were first promised a viable, commercial virtual reality headset. The time for that promise to be fulfilled seems to be upon us with major technology companies going all in on the research and infrastructure that will be necessary to make it happen both as a technology and a product.

NEW INC, the New Museum’s ambitious effort to fuse artist residencies, coworking spaces and business incubators into one singular program, has had two years to become a fully-formed innovation. It’s tough to say whether that’s happened yet, but the latest “Public Beta” (on through July 31st, part 2 will run from August 4-7th) is certainly different than any exhibition going right now and indicates that what’s to come could be a weird and original niche between several disciplinary worlds. Located next door to the New Museum on Bowery, NEW INC is a non-profit, affordable workspace that handles admissions through a selective application process. Its stated mission is to work with artists and creative people who fall somewhere in between the commercial and gallery worlds without really fitting into either. The showcase itself feels like something between a gallery exhibition and a trade show. To truly assess how NEW INC is doing you’d need to hear from specialists in business, networking, tech and art. Art is our forte, so we’ve highlighted some of the stronger projects that fall in our wheelhouse below.

HIV/AIDS Goes Art History In “Art AIDS America” At The Bronx Museum

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 12:01:42 +0000

Installation view of ACT UP NY/Gran Fury, Let the Record Show..., 1987/re-created 2015, mixed media installation (all photos by author for Art F City)

Art AIDS America Bronx Museum of the Arts 1040 Grand Concourse, Bronx, NY On view until September 25, 2016 What is lost when HIV/AIDS becomes art history? A lot, as it seems.

Friday Links: Billionaire Museums and Taco Bell Artists

Fri, 29 Jul 2016 10:00:39 +0000

Eric Wesley's converted Taco Bell gallery. Photo: Eric Wesley

J. Tomilson Hill is opening his own private museum in Chelsea on West 24th street. The Hill Art Foundation will be a two-story, 6,400-square-foot space that currently does not plan to charge admission. The collection is estimated to be worth $800 million and consists of stalwart contemporary artists like Christopher Wool and Richard Prince as well as Renaissance and Baroque bronzes. [New York Times]
Eric Wesley was looking for something in between New York and Los Angeles that would reinvigorate his art practice and allow him to use alternative space. What he found was an abandoned Taco Bell in Cahokia, Illinois. The renovated fast food joint operates as a gallery, installation and workspace.[Chicago Tribune]
Manhattan art consultant, Lacey Doyle, was arrested on Thursday. She is accused of using overseas bank accounts to hide millions of dollars she received from a family inheritance. Doyle is out on bail and faces up to six years in prison. [New York Daily News]
Stephen Hawking explains his belief that Brexit signals a need for society to change its relationship with money. He believes that we need to refocus on “cathedral projects,” meaning the type of initiatives that only serve the purpose of cultural good rather than short term profit. [The Guardian]
The original film from 1954 has long been understood to be an allegory for the birth of atomic weaponry and it looks like Godzilla is returning to its political roots. Kotaku’s man in Japan explains how the film is actually about the rise of right-wing militarization that is currently sweeping the country. Unfortunately, it seems, the film spends the bulk of its time with politicians arguing and doesn’t have enough giant lizard. [Kotaku]
The Detroit Institute of Arts is planning to better reflect the demographics of its home city by expanding its collection of African-American art. [Hyperallergic]
Following the release of a 2016 sales report that was relatively grim, three top executives have left Christie’s auction house. It’s unclear if the two events are related. [artnet News]
Leonardo da Vinci expert Mario Taddei explains why Dan Brown’s conspiracy theories about The Last Supper are probably bullshit and positions the painting as following proper traditions for the scene. Taddei says the most notable break from tradition is simply da Vinci’s choice to paint the apostles without a halo, indicating that they were just common men. [Smithsonian Magazine]
Found Art: Russian man crashes truck full of yellow paint and reconsiders his life. [YouTube]

GIF of the Day: Claudia Maté

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 19:28:48 +0000

These are but a small sampling of the many GIFs in Claudia Maté’s “gif ssense summer sale campaign,” The webpage is a grid of hilariously obnoxious advertisements that feature everything from exploding wildlife to a television being penetrated by a skeleton. Really, click on the link, because you really ought to immerse yourself in the 34th-street-like consumer dystopia of it all.

Thursday Links: Real Estate, Personnel, Collections Come and Go at Institutions

Thu, 28 Jul 2016 10:27:28 +0000

As art fairs become more and more ubiquitous across Asia, will they offer direct competition with traditional avenues for screening and selling films? Vivienne Chow sees gallery representation and sales through fairs as an attractive alternative for filmmakers who can make more money in the art world than the film festival circuit. [Variety]

How have I never heard of this? An entire medieval village in Provance was donated to SCAD in 2002, and now it’s a perfectly-preserved campus. So cool. [inhabitat]

Vienna’s Belvedere Museum will be seeking a new director next year. Agnes Husslein-Arco, who presently holds the position, will not have her contract renewed over misconduct. She has admitted to the board that she charged thousands of dollars in personal expenses to the museum and she has agreed to pay back approximately € 13,000. It’s pretty surprising they’re letting her finish out her tenure. [artnet News]

Of all the things that make Mr. Robot the best show on TV, its cinematography and locations are near the top of the list. Someone actually mapped out the show’s NYC filming locations, so if you’re a die-hard fan you can do a tour. [Curbed]

Fisk University has come under fire for attempting to sell its Alfred Stieglitz collection in opposition to the terms of donation. But the cash-strapped university also sold two rare Florine Stettheimer paintings under-the-radar. Now, the institution is coming under fire for pillaging its cultural assets to plug budget holes. [The New York Times]

Is there an emerging trend of British museums commissioning futuristic expansions in old-timey brick? The Victoria & Albert Museum’s east London outpost at Olympicopolis has been unveiled, and it’s a gravity-defying brick and glass stack. [The Art Newspaper]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Poképeen!

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 16:24:48 +0000

Okay, when we warn that this is a NSFW GIF of the Hump Day post, we mean it. There are tons of dicks after the jump.

That being said, this is one of the weirdest online subcultures we’ve stumbled across in a while, and for that we love it. People like using their smartphones for two things: sexting and playing Pokémon GO. Now, there’s a Tumblr that combines both: Poképeen! Basically, a community of Pokémon/dick pic enthusiasts attempt to catch the augmented reality critters on their dicks and send documentation to whatever sick genius runs the blog.

The AFC Summer Guide to Grants & Residencies You Should Apply For Now

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 14:05:10 +0000

Yes, it is Summer, and none of us feel like moving. Thankfully, the heatwave makes a great excuse to stay inside and catch up on applications to grants, residencies, and fellowships for individual artists, curators, and critics. I rounded up some of the most promising with upcoming deadlines—organized by due date to keep your procrastination in check.

If you know of any other summertime grants (and don’t mind sharing your secret with potential competition) let us know in the comments!

Stop Being Nice And Other Activist Strategies At The Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 12:00:41 +0000

The Movement To Protect The People's Alicia Boyd (standing) leads a small group discussion at the Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement (all images by author for Art F City)

Is gentrification inevitable? Or is that just a myth perpetrated by greedy real estate developers and politicians who seek to gain from residents’ fear and inaction? The answer is undoubtedly the latter if Sunday’s Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and Displacement is any indication.

Wednesday Links: Court Rules Orlan Owes Lady Gaga €20,000

Wed, 27 Jul 2016 10:40:07 +0000

Was Audrey Munson Picabia's muse "Udnie"? James Bone makes the case in his new book The Curse of Beauty. She was described as "America's first supermodel" and her likeness still adorns numerous Beaux-Arts buildings in New York City in sculptures. [The Art Newspaper]
In advance of the dreaded 2019-2020 L Train shutdown, StreetEasy compiled a list of neighborhoods for riders who are considering relocating. Apparently they have never heard of the JMZ? Heading to Harlem or Astoria seems a bit drastic compared to just moving a fraction of a mile south. On the up side, the 18 month transit shortage might lower property values, so this could work in the favor of people who want to live and work in some Brooklyn neighborhoods. [Curbed]
Jersey City has painted over a mural by Gary Wynans, which depicted a giant locally-themed Monopoly board. Wynans was approached by developers who asked to have their real estate projects included in the piece, and it drew ire from groups ranging from the police union to neighborhood activists. [NJ.com]
Temporary Art Review is looking at the artist-run scene in Fayetteville, Arkansas all month long. This includes projects such as a backyard art space and a university gallery run by students. The series totally makes me want to visit! [Temporary Art Review]
Washington-based artist Eames Armstrong interviewed Tom Boram about his visual art and interest in noise music. We checked out Boram's Star Trek-themed work when we went to Maryland Art Place. [BmoreArt]
Performance artist Orlan has been ordered to pay Lady Gaga €20,000 after losing a copyright lawsuit in French court. Orlan was suing the pop star for ripping off her imagery in the "Born This Way" music video. Uh, Orlan had a point! [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: François Beaurain's Monrovia Animated

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 17:14:03 +0000

Monrovia has had a rough time as the capital of Liberia. It's been rocked by two civil wars, an Ebola epidemic, and a slew of related economic problems... all of which have left behind modernist ruins from the city's more stable past. François Beaurain's "Monrovia Animated" series uses these decaying utopian structures as sets for some grand choreography that looks straight out of the golden era of decadent Hollywood musicals. I wouldn't expect any of these dancers to go diving in that pool for some synchronized swimming, though. This is definitely one instance of GIF art where the medium's lack of audio contributes to the uncanniness of the content—a silent musical number in an abandoned hotel.

The series was featured in the joint Guggenheim Bilbao and Vitra Design Museum exhibition Making Africa.

This Is the Last Week to See Philip Guston at Hauser & Wirth, if That's Your Thing

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 16:17:00 +0000

Hauser & Wirth Philip Guston: Painter, 1957 – 1967 511 West 18th Street New York, NY 20 June – 29 July

Philip Guston’s career was characterized by a few Madonna-like reinventions. I’m a fan of his later works, when he retreated upstate and made fun, painterly-figurative canvasses throughout the 1970s. These were mostly pink and playful, the “Confessions on a Dancefloor"of his oeuvre, to keep the Queen of Pop analogy going. Coincidentally, Hauser & Wirth is housed in a building that used to be a gay roller disco.

Tuesday Links: Let's All Stop Guilting Each Other About the Election

Tue, 26 Jul 2016 10:23:52 +0000

Okay, we’re not usually big on “street art” here at AFC, but this is great. Mathieu Tremblin has been painting over terrible tags around French cities and translating them to legible fonts. [design you trust]

Let’s all read this guide to how the electoral college works and spare ourselves any more Facebook/Twitter fights about how voting for a 3rd party candidate “is a vote for Trump”. The popular vote doesn’t matter (remember when most people voted for Gore but we ended up with Bush?). Statistically, most of us live in a solidly “blue” or “red” state and all of that state’s electoral votes are already going to Clinton or Trump, respectively. So stop trying to bully your friends into voting for anyone they don’t want to. But, seriously, if you live in Florida or Pennsylvania, vote very, very carefully. [How Stuff Works]

The Municipal Art Society of Baltimore is seeking proposals for a public artwork in a location that looks straight outta Hogwarts. There’s a $30,000 budget/stipend. Apply! [Baltimore Arts]

Whoa. India’s government is instituting a national “grading” system for artists and writers that groups them into the categories of “outstanding, promising, and waiting.” Is this to prioritize granting or something? As far as I can tell, it’s just to create a government-curated map of cultural assets. Or the plot of a really unsuccessful YA dystopian novel/film series aimed at the band kids. [Hindustan Times via Artforum]

Adam Andrzejewski is shocked and appalled that the VA spent $20 million on public art in the last ten years, all while providing notoriously crappy healthcare to veterans. I’d like to point out that the F-35 bomber program is $200 BILLION over budget. Pick your fucking battles dude. [Forbes]

A growing number of “YIMBYs” have become actively pro-development in cities as an attempt to combat escalating housing prices.They argue that the past several decades of activism has been aimed at stopping development and implementing ridiculous zoning regulations, which has created a huge lag between cities’ demand and supply for new housing. The problem is, we need even more new urban housing than the private sector is trying to build. But it’s a good idea, as long as it’s accompanied by housing/architectural preservation efforts. [Fast Company]

GIF of the Day: The Only Good Thing in Johnny Mnemonic

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 19:02:18 +0000

Johnny Mnemonic should have been good. A pre-Matrix Keanu starring in a cyberpunk thriller written by William Gibson had so much potential, but the whole thing just sucked. In the midst of the bad dialogue, terrible acting and nonsensical plot, the single saving grace was the virtual reality sequences by the German artist Brummbaer.

Brummbaer is a pretty fascinating guy who started out in the druggy-political scene of underground comics in the sixties and was an early publisher of R. Crumb. In the Eighties, he became a dedicated digital artist who pioneered the fractally-generated, magic-eye-ish art that we associate with the early internet.

This Week's Must See Events: Fear and Loathing in the Art World

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 18:55:30 +0000

Politics, politics, politics. Practically every event we have this week has some sort of political edge. From a video art retrospective dedicated to the political conventions of 1972 to Martha Wilson invading the persona of Trump, the campaign season is infiltrating the exhibition space.

Take a break from being yelled at on Facebook by someone you’ve only met once and hit the gallery. People will surely be more open to a dialogue when they can’t just click unfollow. Right? Right???

Monday Links: Tough Times for Tumblr

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 10:30:45 +0000

Tumblr artists take note. Verizon is set to buy Yahoo, Tumblr’s parent company, for the bargain basement price of $4 billion. Changes are expected and no service is safe, so make sure to back up any artwork. [The Verge]
Hans Ulrich-Obrist’s latest project has reportedly run into trouble. The Shanghai Project, a multi-disciplinary biennial that Obrist was organizing with Yongwoo Lee has been reimagined as a community-based event rather than art exhibition. Reports of scheduling, funding, staffing and bureaucratic difficulties have plagued the project for months. [The Art Newspaper]
The New Yorker takes a dive into the mysterious circumstances surrounding the archives of the conceptual architect Luis Barragán. Following his death in 1988, the archives were sold and have been held in a Swiss bunker ever since. [New Yorker]
The net artist Guthrie Lonergan has installed a new work on the Hammer Museum’s website and it has made visitors baffled, delighted and angry. The museum has put together some messages they’ve received over the last six weeks along with an interview with Guthrie about the work. [Hammer Museum]
Edward Snowden has collaborated with hardware hacker Andrew "Bunnie" Huang to design a cell-phone case for journalists and other people who may be tracked by malicious forces. It’s not the prettiest thing in the world but it’s far better than Snowden’s music video. [Fast Company]
Have to say that this James Turrell takeover of a memorial church in Berlin is great. It’s like the nightmare funeral scenes in Heathers made sublime. [The Creator’s Project]
U.S. Congressman John Lewis has won the prestigious Eisner award for the second volume of his graphic novel memoir, “March.” Done in collaboration with illustrator Nate Powell and co-writer Andrew Aydin, the series chronicles Lewis time in the American civil rights struggle.

Bushwick will be a major pain in the ass in a few years. MTA officials have voted to shut down the L train for 18 months straight. The scheduled maintenance won’t begin until 2019 but this can’t possibly be good for local businesses or galleries. [DNAinfo]
Alanna Heiss recently gave a shout out to Laurie Anderson’s criticism from the early 1970’s, so ArtNews decided to collect some capsule reviews that Anderson wrote for them. Capsule reviews are a tough format and Anderson mostly sticks to a style of quick impressionistic description that’s light on opinion. [ArtNews]

GIF of the Day: A Glitch at the Convention

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 21:25:56 +0000

This GIF pretty much sums up the Republican National Convention. It was quite a mess. Technical glitches plagued the video displays on Wednesday, resulting in some great visuals that were far more appealing than Ted Cruz face. Between this, Melania Trump’s plagiarized speech, white supremacist tweets being displayed, Cruz basically telling voters to not vote for Trump and a parade of D-List celebrities, it’s safe to say that things were chaotic. This may be our future.

The Spiritual Failure of Tony Oursler's "Imponderable"

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 14:20:27 +0000

Is there a secret, intertwined history that ties together mass media, spiritualist con artists, pulp fiction and the unreliability of the image? Tony Oursler’s “Imponderable” would like you to think so. The multimedia artist’s latest work (on at MoMA through January 8th, 2017) is a 90-minute immersive video experience that attempts to draw connections between all of those topics as well as his own familial autobiography and other threads that relate to his collection of spiritualist memorabilia. Unfortunately, when the work seems to come close to solidifying a thematic relationship between its various subjects, it tends to feel a bit like a magician who has all the elements for his act, but never manages to execute a successful trick.

Hoarding For History: “The Keeper” At The New Museum

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 12:00:04 +0000

Ydessa Hendeles, Partners (The Teddy Bear Project), 2002 (Photograph by Robert Keziere; Courtesy of the artist and the New Museum)

The Keeper New Museum 235 Bowery, New York, NY On view until September 25, 2016

I wonder what the crew of A&E’s guilty pleasure Hoarders would say about the New Museum’s recently opened exhibition The Keeper. With four floors of artists’ obsessions, the collecting impulse on view is more manic and compulsive than merely an academic archival interest. In fact, the exhibition looks a lot like the aftermath of a Hoarders Anonymous meeting.

Friday Links: Matthew Barney's Perineum and Alexander McQueen's Skin

Fri, 22 Jul 2016 10:34:05 +0000

Barbara Gladstone Gallery will recreate, "Blind Perineum," the performance that put Matthew Barney on the map 25 years ago. Gladstone has borrowed the original elements that were used in the performance in which Barney climbed around the gallery ceiling with ice screws and a harness. The anniversary show is scheduled for September 8th. [New York Times]
Robert Irwin is just finishing up a permanent installation at Donald Judd's Texas outpost Marfa. It will be the first new permanent work in 16 years. It's hard to tell from the photos what exactly this project is but it will be officially unveiled to the public on July 23rd. [The Art Newspaper]
The latest artist to jump into the Trump protest fray has built a wall around the Donald's star on the Hollywood walk of fame. I know that this election has been hard on everybody but try a little harder people. Most of the protest art has been pretty weak. [BBC]
Heads up video artists, Japan is making its final VCR this month. It might be a good time to pick one up for that retro project you wanted to do or to back up those old tapes for posterity. [Mental Floss]
The internet was freaking out, yesterday, over this sculpture of a human evolved to withstand a car crash. His name is Graham and he's pretty gross. [Jalopnik]
Kurt Cobain's daughter, Francis Bean, is selling her art online. All we can say is it's ... affordable. [depop]
A design student, in London, wants to make a bag out of Alexander McQueen's skin. The proposed project would involve using stem cells from the late designer's hair to manufacture new skin. The student, Tina Gorjanc, is actually trying to patent McQueen's genetic information and sees this as a larger piece of social commentary. [artnet News]
A number of big name artists will be taking over the prison that caged Oscar Wilde for an exhibition entitled "Inside." Participants include Ai Weiwei, Patti Smith, Marlene Dumas, Robert Gober, Nan Goldin, Steve McQueen, Jean-Michel Pancin, and Wolfgang Tillmans. [artnet News]
John Stewart gets behind Colbert's desk and lets it all out. [YouTube]

GIF of the Day: Rick Silva

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 19:58:40 +0000

The above image is the last animated GIF Rick Silva produced in his “En Plain Air” series, which ran from January 2012 through June 2013. For the series, Silva sketched out landscapes on site, on his laptop.

It was a great series full of mesmorizing GIFs. Now, Silva is building on that, with “The Silva Field Guide to Birds of a Parallel Future”, which is comprised of a number of 30 to 40 second videos complete with a digital sound track. I chose not to make GIFs from these videos, since that obviously isn’t how they are meant to be seen. But they are part of the Portland Biennale, which is open now through September 18th and is curated by Michelle Grabner. So, those who wish to see the work installed have an opportunity to see them presented in Portland. And for those of us who want to experience them from the comfort of our laptops, we’ve got that option too.

We Went to Artscape: Weird Futures on Saratoga Street

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 14:32:15 +0000

Tom Boram

Young Blood 2016

Maryland Art Place 218 West Saratoga Street Baltimore, MD

Artists (and MFA programs): Tom Boram (UMBC), Elena Debold (UMBC), Sarah Eargle (Towson), Taha Heydari (MICA), Kei Ito (MICA), Andrew Paul Keiper (MICA), Dane Winkler (UMCP), Jowita Wyszomirska (UMCP)

July 14 - August 20, 2016

What’s on view: A survey of paintings, sculpture, installation, and digital work from 2016 graduates from Maryland MFA programs.

Thursday Links: Another Unarmed Black Man Shot By Police

Thu, 21 Jul 2016 10:55:06 +0000

Florida police shoot unarmed therapist who was attempting to c...

Cell phone video of cops shooting yet another unarmed black man is making its way around. This time, police shot Charles Kinsey, a behavioral therapist trying to calm an autistic man, while he was laying on the ground with his hands up announcing that he didn’t have a weapon. When asked why they shot him, the officer replied “I don’t know.” And then handcuffed the bleeding victim. Can we please stop handing guns to the members of the population who exhibit the least capacity for critical thinking? This is the biggest WHAT. THE. FUCK. video of them all. Utterly inexcusable. [Facebook via Shaun King]

There’s an exhibition at American University of North Korean Socialist Realism. I really want to see this. [National Geographic]

Behold: the bizarre street carnival of protesters and supporters at Trump’s surreal RNC. Hillary Clinton as Cersei Lannister, a Sikh Captain America, Chewbacca detained at the border, and plenty of Trump “fan art”... the art of the RNC looks a lot like the world’s angriest ComicCon. [The Atlantic]

Related: a map of Donald Trump’s Manhattan real estate empire. [Curbed]

Even more on the growing feud between anti-gentrification activists and art spaces in LA’s Boyle Heights. It seems like some of these spaces have been in the neighborhood for decades, but real estate speculators didn’t start moving in until after the Gold Line light rail connected the neighborhood to downtown. The cause-and-effect here is specious at best. [artnet News]

Speaking of the never-ending dance between luxury development and galleries, Robin Scher traces the long history of art spaces founding, leaving, and returning to what’s now known as “Billionaire’s Row,” a.k.a. 57th street in Manhattan. It’s a pretty interesting read. [ARTnews]

The Durst Organization has commissioned Stephen Glassman to create a 32,000 pound steel sculpture inspired by the Hudson. The piece will adorn the main entrance of The Bjarke Ingels-designed tetrahedron, Via 57 West, and is supposed to look like the river. [Curbed]

Alan G Brake visits The Hills on Governors Island, a major landscape intervention/earthwork by the firm West 8. Brake argues that the new vantage point afforded by The Hills allows us to recenter our psychogeographical map of the city. From there, it’s easier to conceive of the metropolis as an archipelago, with views toward the island of Manhattan, Liberty Island, Staten Island, and the boroughs on Long Island. [Dezeen]

In a brief essay titled “The creepiest work of public art ever,” Howard Halle claims that Union Square’s 1999 “Metronome” from Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel “looks and functions like an asshole.” [Time Out New York]

In an all-too-common case, international retailer Zara has been ripping off designs from independent artist Tuesday Bassen for years. Apparently the fast-fashion chain can’t come up with its own shit as fast as sweatshops can churn it out. [Refinery29]

Paradise Interrupted: An Interview with Jennifer Wen Ma and Guillermo Acevedo

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 14:12:28 +0000

"Paradise Interrupted" installation opera, Scene IV. "Rebirth," image by Julia Lynn Photography

In the words of composer Huang Ruo, “The installation opera Paradise Interrupted integrates opera, theater, dance, music, poetry, made-up words, interactive multimedia, and cross-cultural operatic spirits, all into one entity.”

Sound ambitious? It is. This stunning opera combines more media than I’ve ever seen in one work of contemporary art, while gracefully navigating Chinese-English translation. For this reason, I wanted to talk with the artist mastermind, Jennifer Wen Ma, Director and Visual Designer of Paradise Interrupted, which kicked off Lincoln Center Festival. (Tickets sold out immediately, but the festival runs through July 31st with other amazing productions worth checking out).

Say Yes To Death With Rachel Stern At Black & White Gallery/Project Space

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 12:00:21 +0000

Rachel Stern, Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, 2016, Silver Gelatin (Courtesy Rachel Stern and Black & White Gallery/Project Space)

Rachel Stern: Yes, Death Black & White Gallery/Project Space 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY On view until July 31, 2016

Why does the division between life and death always seem narrower in the American South? Maybe it’s the prevalence of ghost stories or just the spooky imagery of Spanish moss hanging from a live oak tree.

Wednesday Links: Tiffany Trump's "Music" Discovered, Larry Gagosian Pays Taxes

Wed, 20 Jul 2016 10:28:07 +0000

Yet another art app no one asked for: Google Arts & Culture. It seems to do many of the same things as Artsy with an eye cast more toward art history. And users can visit architectural wonders using Google Cardboard. And of course, search for artwork by color. I’d try it myself, but my phone has limited space thanks to all the immovable, self-updating “bloatware” apps Google has already snuck on there. [The Next Web]

In other Google news, the tech giant asked artists Marina Esmeraldo and Mallory Heyer to make a mural using the dreaded Google Sheets app, seemingly to make accounting look cool? Congratulations Google, there’s now a wall in Brooklyn that looks like a Miami juice bar/Zumba studio, thanks to the fun magic of spreadsheets. [The Next Web]

Sales reports from the first half of the year are down for Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Both auction houses are seeing sales in the ultra high-end collapse, with Christie’s latest total down 37.5%. Contemporary art sales took a staggering 45% hit, totalling substantially less than a billion. The surprising news, according to Marion Maneker is that Europe nudged ahead of the US in terms of buyers. Also interesting: new buyers account for 25 percent of all sales at Christie’s. In any event, The Wall Street Journal is describing the report as bad news for the top end of the market and health in the middle market. Meanwhile the Art Market Monitor has used the statistic of new buyers to predict growth, and perhaps even a flashier market going forward. [The Art Market Monitor]

Queen is really pissed that the Republican National Convention used “We Are The Champions” on stage… especially after they already publically criticized Trump for using their music in his campaign. Though after Hillary’s AIDS comments earlier this year, it’s probably not a good idea for her to try to channel Freddie Mercury either. [CNN]

Here’s some music Trump can probably secure the rights to, but might not want to: his daughter Tiffany’s awful foray into auto-tuned trash pop. Listen now (if you dare) before the campaign gets this scrubbed from the internet. [Youtube h/t Mieke Gentis]

Erik Satie was really, really weird. But he might have invented performance art, and spent 8 days in jail for it. [Flypaper]

Concept art has been revealed for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel. Please, god, do not let them turn this into a CGI clusterfuck that looks like a video game. The original was so, so good precisely because of its practical special effect that still hold up compared to contemporary movies. [Shortlist]

Related: in this tribute to Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin, it’s revealed that they started making the latest of the terrible, terrible JJ Abrams reboots before having actually written a script. This film is directed by the same guy who brought us The Fast and the Furious…. A subtle joke from 30 Rock about a movie from that franchised being advertised as “Written by No One” now seems tragi-comically prescient. [Fox News]

An old Bronx courthouse has been scouted as the site for a new hip hop museum. [Curbed]

Larry Gagosian has finally agreed to pony-up $4.3 Million in unpaid sales taxes, including interest and penalties, after an investigation by the New York Attorney General. Given the scope of his art empire, it’s frankly surprising that number isn’t higher. [The Wall Street Journal]

GIF of the Day: Post-Artscape Astronaut Drink

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 20:16:10 +0000

We’re doing a lot of Baltimore coverage thanks to Artscape, the nation’s largest free public art festival. There will be more to come in the next week, because we saw a lot of art. But as one might have gleaned from some of our earliest Artscape coverage a few years ago, there’s just as much partying (if not more) as art involved with the festival. And if not “partying” per se, drinking.

We Went to Artscape: The Artist-Run Art Fair

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 19:15:21 +0000

Phoebe's booth featuring work by Sophie Friedman-Pappas, Cecilia Salama, and Madeline Seely.

Paddy: The Artist-Run Art Fair returned for its third year inside of an old parking garage as part of Baltimore’s annual Artscape festival. The festival itself began rather slowly Friday afternoon, as if the entire city was suffering from a giant case of heat stroke. I watched a guy sitting in an ice cream truck a block away from the fair tell one kid after another that no ice cream could be purchased because the machines were broken. In an adjacent parking lot to Artist Run, bands played continuously throughout the day. That meant that the noise inside the fair was insufferable. Eventually, I went outside to see the band, only to learn that they were playing to all of five hippies, only one of whom was high enough to enjoy the music.

Tuesday Links: Extremely Un-First-Family-Appropriate Behavior Abounds at RNC and Abroad

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 10:25:52 +0000

Ayanda Mabulu's extremely-NSFW painting of South African president Jacob Zuma... which we have censored with a Pokemon.

While giving her speech at the Republican National Convention last night, Melania Trump plagiarized an entire paragraph from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Democratic Convention speech. The campaign just straight up denies this happened. It’s insane. [CNN]

Resource for artists and professionals: Clarion List has links to things you need often like framers and things that are extremely specialised like art risk consultants. [Clarion List]

Parviz Tanavoli, the Iranian pop artist who was mysteriously detained earlier this month has had his passport returned to him and he is free to travel. He promptly left Tehran for Vancouver. [The Art Newspaper]

Wow, two days in a row we get something dumb from Jonathan Jones, what are the odds? Today, he enlightens everyone on the topic of “artwashing.” It’s a tough subject that Jones breaks down for you like this, “There is such a thing as civilisation – and it has a way of looking a bit like “gentrification.” Yes, low-income neighborhoods are uncivilized. This makes art look bad. [The Guardian]

The Prado’s Hieronymus Bosch exhibition marks one of the only times in the past five centuries that this many of the artist’s works are together in one place. Insane. [New York Post]

“When I see Ayanda Mabulu, I am going to wrap my fingers around his neck and throttle him.” -Edward Zuma, son of South African president Jacob Zuma on a painter who has criticised the administration. [News24]

17 buildings by Le Corbusier have been designated world heritage sites by UNESCO, including the the National Museum of Western Art, in Tokyo and the Unité d’habitation in Marseille. [Curbed]

Mladen Stilinović, the Croatian conceptual artist whose contributions to the tiny country’s contemporary art scene helped put it on the map, has passed away at 69. [artnet News]

The de Blasio administration has tapped Toronto’s Adam Giambrone as the new Brooklyn-Queens “Streetcar Czar”. Let’s hope Giambrone has learned what makes streetcars suck so much from Toronto’s example: trains don’t do well in mixed traffic. Seriously, every time a car double parks or hits a train the whole damn system gets held up. Why do people keep talking about streetcars like they’re the technology of the future? They made sense in the Victorian era when they didn’t have to share the road with someone’s Hummer. If this idea is going to be remotely usable in New York, they’re going to have to close the streets and give this baby signal prioritization. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: v1r0l0gy

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:15:49 +0000

Today we offer a GIF as a gateway drug. As a standalone piece, this is a solid little work of glitch art but the site it comes from is great. Domenico Dom Barra has been compiling malware glitches in a project titled v1r0l0gy and it’s just a very pretty collection of some standout examples of the form.

This Week's Must See Events: Benefits, Boom Boxes and Bears

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 19:02:23 +0000

It’s a light week for galleries that’s heavy on screenings. That’s just life in the middle of July. But fear not, these screenings are good. We’ve got some demented digital video art from Jacob Ciocci and a MoMA retrospective that promises to shed some light on modern New York. Two excellent online galleries have joined forces to go IRL and there’s a boom box party at the Brooklyn Museum.

Jeff Koons Lays Off Workers Amidst Reports of Unionization

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 13:19:50 +0000

According to sources speaking anonymously with Art F City, Jeff Koons’ mammoth studio operation in Chelsea has laid off 14 of its night crew workers who were attempting to unionize and one day crew member who was friendly with those night crew organizers.

Though details are scant, multiple anonymous sources say that the painters had begun the process of unionization over the past few months. Reportedly, communication was established with 829 United Scenic Artists to handle the formalities of the negotiation process.

Monday Links: Goodbye Alan Vega

Mon, 18 Jul 2016 10:09:15 +0000

Famed founder of Suicide and prolific poet Alan Vega has died at the age of 78. [The Quietus]
Following budget cuts and buyouts, the Met says it will begin layoffs in order to balance its budget. More than 50 people reportedly accepted the buyout offer and the Met says that layoffs will increase the total positions cut to more than 100. [New York Times]
Jonathan Jones takes a stand against all of those people who think that you can make great art by clicking a button in a photo filter app. We’re pretty sure that is practically no one, but glad he’s on the case. [The Guardian]
It turns out Damien Hirst’s work isn’t toxic after all. [The Art Newspaper]
The Contemporary Austin has established $100,000 art prize that will also include a solo show for the winner. [Artforum]
Is transrealism the first major literary movement of the 21st-century or just “Post-Internet” for books? You be the judge. [The Guardian]
The Keno Brothers, antique specialists famous for appearing on Antiques Roadshow are involved in a couple of bizarre lawsuits. Having worked at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s, one would assume the brothers would know how to handle themselves at an auction. But, on at least 3 occasions at two different auction houses, they say they didn’t realize they were bidding against each other and sending the respective item’s prices soaring. They’ve refused to pay and are being sued by different auction houses. [New York Times]
Photojournalists are packing bulletproof vests, gas masks and other war-zone type gear to get ready for the Republican National Convention. They aren’t the only ones who are worried, the head of Cleveland’s largest police union has asked for open carry laws to be suspended during the convention out of fear for officer’s lives. [Wired, CNN]
Speaking of the RNC, Jon Stewart will be rejoining Stephen Colbert as he broadcasts live from the convention this week. [CNN]
Yayoi Kusama is releasing an illustrated edition of Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Little Mermaid.” [Dazed]

GIF of the Day: Duck! Shoot! Gag!

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 18:07:22 +0000

Before the Zucker brothers descended into the schlock of Scary Movie sequels and one weird right-wing conservative comedy, they were masters of absurdist slapstick sight gags. Here we have a clip from the opening credits of their short-lived TV show “Police Squad!” with special guest star William Shatner. Shatner has always had a gift for going over-the-top. I don’t know if it’s that the public’s over this kind of humor or just no one is trying to do it anymore. I laughed.

Sugar Shock: An Interview With Jessica Stoller

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 12:00:55 +0000

Jessica Stoller, Untitled (slip), 2016, porcelain, glaze, china paint, lustre (Courtesy of the artist and P•P•O•W, New York)

Dainty and delicate, porcelain is not the typical medium for radical feminist art. However, Brooklyn-based artist Jessica Stoller’s porcelain sculptures seem closer to Karen Finley’s chocolate sauce-drenched performances than precious Royal Doulton figurines.

Friday Links: Creation and Gentrification

Fri, 15 Jul 2016 10:04:30 +0000

The Lowline, a controversial project that plans to create a bizarre underground park in the Lower East Side, has gained its first official approvals from City Hall. For its detractors, the park represents another step towards gentrification. For its supporters, the park is a way of opening up public space in a dense area of the city. For Alicia Glen, deputy mayor for housing and economic development, its “some crazy, smoking-dope stuff.” She likes it. [Curbed]
Activists in Boyle Heights, a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Los Angeles, want the art galleries to pack up and get out. The organizers view the gallery owners as pawns in “planners and politicians and developers” efforts to “art wash” gentrification. Some gallery owners are upset, while others are attempting to join in the dialogue. We’ll keep an eye on this story as it develops. [LA Weekly]
A 91-year-old woman was arrested at the Neues Museum Nürnberg on Thursday. Charges of vandalism were related to the fact that she “solved” a crossword puzzle that was part of a work by the Fluxus-artist Arthur Köpcke. Something tells us the Fluxus people would like this story. [artnet News]
The New Museum’s newest show, The Keeper, is an attempt to explore why we collect things. It’s packed, floor-to-ceiling with 4,000 objects from two dozen collections. It opens next Wednesday. The Times talks to the curators about this unusual show. [New York Times]
Check out the convoluted history of the McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ it” jingle. It’s fascinating that even people that worked on the campaign at a high-level don’t seem to know for sure who wrote it. [Pitchfork]
Hyperallergic breaks down some OKCupid data. Among the findings: liberal artists don’t think orgasms are the most important part of sex. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. [Hyperallergic]
We know surprisingly little about NYC’s rat population. For instance, it’s estimated that there are somewhere between two and 32 million rats in the city. We’re just not sure. Researchers have begun to chip and surveil them, hoping to get a better understanding of how they operate. The end goal is to find more effective methods of control. [Motherboard]

GIF of the Day: Clickhole

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 16:18:31 +0000

Clickhole, The Onion’s bitingly-accurate satire of internet culture, released the above video with the headline “We Don’t Know How To Make GIFs, So We Had This Guy Make A Surprised Face 200 Times In A Row” last year.

It’s been viewed at least 11,355 times.

We Went to Baltimore Part II: Platform, Springsteen, First Continent

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:13:08 +0000

Melissa Godoy Nieto, "Caballos, Cabellas."

Artscape, Baltimore’s annual, gigantic public art festival, and the Artist-Run Art Fair launch this week. Yesterday, we posted about a few local galleries ahead of time to scope out what’s on view across town from the main festivities. Today, we’re discussing exhibitions from Melissa Godoy Nieto and Lane Harlan at Platform, Colin Foster at Springsteen, and Michael Assiff at First Continent.

Melissa Godoy Nieto & Lane Harlan: Ut Pictura Poesis

Melissa Godoy Nieto, "Compuestos" at Platform Gallery.

Platform Gallery 116 W. Mulberry St. Baltimore, MD July 9 – 30, 2016

Dream Job Alert: Creative Time is Seeking a New Curator

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 13:03:58 +0000

Do you have at least 5 years of curatorial experience? Consider applying to Creative Time, the arts organization that’s funded public arts programs such as Duke Riley’s LED-lit pigeons over the East River (above) and Tom Sachs’ epic SPACE PROGRAM: Mars.

Creative Time has been bringing us high-quality, strange, and smart public arts programming since 1974, with an eye towards politically-charged works and projects that seem unlikely candidates for funding. So if you’re up for the task of writing so eloquently about an artwork that it can persuade someone to give you money for light-up pigeons, this is the job for you!

IMG MGMT: Freddie and St. Cosmas

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 11:30:03 +0000

These images are pulled from my personal database of thousands of saved jpgs, gifs and video clips from Internet memes, pop culture, and art history, collected over a ten-year period. At first, I mimicked them in self-portraits which I’d send to my friends as a joke, but lately, they’ve become the starting point for large scale collaborative photo recreations of scenes from art history, staged with students and communities in several cities (Raleigh, San Diego, Kansas City, New York). I scroll through the collection, mixing and matching for hours, gradually finding somewhat of a cohesive narrative that eventually forms the guts of the work. The following images inspired three of these projects. Each group is paired with music that can be heard by scrolling over the images.

Thursday Links: Someone Buy David Bowie's Stereo

Thu, 14 Jul 2016 10:13:18 +0000

David Bowie’s art and design collection is heading to Sotheby’s. This is the first time the legend’s collection has been made public, and it’s a treasure trove. Bowie collected mostly 20th century painters and designers, including Basquiat and Duchamp and a 60s stereo system from Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (above) that looks straight out of A Clockwork Orange. [BBC News]

Dennis Cooper’s blog, which he has kept since 2002 and is considered an important piece of experimental literature, has been deleted inexplicably. Google deleted both the author’s Blogger account and Gmail, erasing over a decade of work including an incomplete animated GIF novel. It’s terrifying that corporations now control the fate of so much cultural output and can erase it on a whim. [ARTnews]

“Rendering the Unthinkable: Artists Respond to 9/11” opens September 12th at The National September 11th Memorial Museum. The exhibition will be the museum’s first foray into curating art rather than historic artifacts. [The New York Times]

Ryan Mendoza purchased two more homes in Detroit for an artwork. This time, the facades are lit with LEDs in bullet-sized holes that spell out “CLINTON” and “TRUMP.” This sounds dumb. [Detroit Free Press]

The City of Miami is considering legislation that would make developers set aside a percentage of a building’s construction budget for on-site artwork or pay into a public art fund. The city of San Francisco attempted a similar program, but recent reports indicate this has just lead to a lot of artwork in building lobbies and relatively little cash in the public trust fund. When given an option, the private sector tends to put “public” art where it has the most benefit to themselves. A mandatory contribution to neighborhood public art funds is a far better idea. Besides, do we really want developers curating what our public art looks like any more than they already do? [Miami Herald]

Yale has asked the state attorney to drop charges against Corey Menafee, a dishwasher employed by the university until he was fired for shattering a historic stained glass window depicting slaves. [artnet News]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Acrobatic Blowjob

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 21:56:05 +0000

Wow! If oral sex was an olympic sport judged along the same parameters as ice dancing, this couple would win the gold.

Deadline For Applications To Be AFC's Neighbor Fast Approaching

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 16:38:03 +0000

AFC is a lucky participant in Two Trees’ Cultural Space Subsidy Program. That means we’re one of the arts organizations that benefits from more than 50,000 square feet of prime DUMBO real estate rented below market-rate to nonprofits, professional artists, and other groups who otherwise couldn’t afford the neighborhood.

We really love being between Downtown Brooklyn and the Lower East Side, and we’re probably some of the few people in the city who can say we’re lucky to have an awesome landlord. If you’re an artist or arts organization looking for a studio, office, or gallery and think you would qualify, we encourage you to apply for the program and be our new neighbors!

Not an Alternative: “FORTY” at MoMA PS1

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 12:00:18 +0000

Brian O'Doherty, ROPE DRAWING NO.19, REDUX, 1976/2016, rope, liquitex, nylon (all photos by author)

FORTY MoMA PS1 22-25 Jackson Ave, Long Island City, NY On view until August 28, 2016

Can alternative spaces and their anti-institutional goals ever be faithfully represented inside a museum? If MoMA PS1’s current exhibition FORTY is any indication, the answer is a definitive no.

Wednesday Links: All Aboard for Offshore Art?

Wed, 13 Jul 2016 10:44:49 +0000

Photo by Ian Dickson / Rex Features ( 750588ck )
X-Ray Spex - Poly Styrene

Gross. Developer JDS turned a former Gowanus art gallery into a sales office for luxury condos. And designer Anna Karlin has staged it with “sculptures” made from the building’s finishing materials. [Curbed]

Whoa. Someone dug up a 1979 episode of the BBC show Arena titled “Who is Poly Styrene?” It’s a really awkward 40 minute documentary about the female punk pioneer. [Dangerous Minds]

This skillfully written profile on Chuck Close questions whether Close has changed over the last couple of years. The author recounts interviews where he couldn’t keep track of his stories long enough to tell them, his latest work is garish and unskilled, last year, he was mistakenly diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Close has even had trouble painting—painter’s block. Set aside a bit of time and emotional energy to read this sad, end of life story. [New York Times Magazine]

A janitor at Art Southampton threw out a Will Kurtz sculpture (which comprised a trashcan full of trash-like art) and the internet cares because Brooke Shields curated the booth. [Observer]

Speaking of the Hamptons, The Parrish Art Museum MidSummer Party last weekend featured a “Radical Seafaring” group exhibition about art on the water. The curator, Andrea Grover, argues that “offshore art” is a movement to be considered alongside Land Art. Or maybe they just threw a beach party for people who live for nautical-themed everything? If the art world’s elites do go full-on #seapunk, I claim the drag names “Regatta Cotillion” and “Yacht-Club Abramović”. [ARTNews]

And in other beach town news, Raymond Roy of Yarmouth, MA has set off a free speech debate by making a sand art mermaid sculpture with breasts considered too big by many an upstanding Cape Cod citizen. [Death & Taxes]

I love that artnet News has filed their listicle naming collectors who own the largest sculptures under “Analysis”. It’s difficult getting through this piece—who cares who bought what—but the images are nice, so it’s worth it for that. [artnet News]

This potentially-problematic slideshow listicle comes with a multi-paragraph introduction/disclaimer aimed at defusing a semantics debate in the comments section: “Homoerotic Art by Straight Artists”. [The Advocate]

GIF of the Day: Not JIF of the Day

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 20:54:10 +0000

I don't know who this rhetorically-JIFted man is, but he makes one convincing argument about how to pronounce ".GIF".

We Went to Baltimore Part 1: Current & Open Space

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 20:47:14 +0000

Jon Duff, "Big Boss," mixed-media assemblage, 2016.

Artscape, Baltimore’s annual, gigantic public art festival, and the Artist-Run Art Fair launch this week. We visited a few local galleries ahead of time to scope out what’s on view across town from the main festivities. We saw too much art to fit into one post, but we’ll start off with solo projects from Jonathan Latiano, Jon Duff, and Jihyun Hong.

Tuesday Links: Fox News Not A Fan of Dread Scott's Flag at Jack Shainman

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 10:15:41 +0000

Jack Shainman has hung Dread Scott’s “A MAN WAS LYNCHED BY POLICE YESTERDAY” flag above the gallery, referencing the iconic Jim Crow era NAACP flag. Predictably, our colleagues over at Fox News find this controversial and insensitive following the mass shooting in Dallas in which five police officers were killed. Because in conservative logic, the deaths of five police officers somehow outweigh the roughly 100 unarmed black people killed annually by police? [Fox News]

Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance have presented the “Culture Forward” plan to retain and expand the neighborhood’s art scene in the face of large-scale developments. Most excitingly, they’re advocating that the city-owned properties at 31 Lafayette Avenue and 334 Furman Street be renovated into 30,000 square feet of artist studios and are offering affordable housing seminars for arts/culture workers. [Curbed]

Mark Hudson doesn’t seem to be a fan of the Liverpool Biennial. His chief complaint seems to be that the future of art looks a lot like the 1980s, but the whole curatorial concept of “episodes” sounds bizarre and hokey. Has anyone else seen the show? Sound off in the comments, please. We’re curious. [The Telegraph]

A French court has indicted dealer Olivier Thomas over charges he participated in the theft and sale of three Picasso paintings from the artist’s stepdaughter Catherine Hutin-Blay. The paintings were discovered at the home of Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev, who purchased them for €27 million from the Swiss businessman Yves Bouvier, who has been accused and fined for harboring the stolen paintings. Juicy. [artnet News]

And in a far more bizarre case of international art legal troubles: a Canadian corrections officer, Robert Fletcher, is suing Scottish artist Peter Doig for $5 million because he won’t admit to painting a landscape painting in Fletcher’s possession. According to Fletcher, Doig was arrested for LSD possession as a teenager in Canada in the 1970s and sold the painting (which could now be worth a hefty sum) to the corrections officer when on parole for $100. The plot thickens, as there’s also a now-deceased Canadian with a similar name whose circumstances also fit the narrative. [Daily Mail]

This is disgusting and also kind of cool: Central Saint Martins student Tina Gorjanc has filed a patent to clone human leather from Alexander McQueen’s DNA to produce a line of leather goods. I guess that human leather “Perfecto” jacket would be cyberpunk as fuck. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Gotta Catch 'em All

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:35:04 +0000

Pokemon Go has taken the world by storm over the last few days and it seems like a good moment to reflect on the simpler times. A time when smart phones weren’t ubiquitous, hope was on the horizon and one of the dumbest people in history was President of the United States. On December 18, 2008, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi became an international hero by throwing his shoes at the President during a press conference. If only those shoes had been Poké Balls. Seeing Dubya fight it out with a Squirtle in arena combat would almost make it all worth it.

This Week's Must See Events: All Goth Timelines Lead to Brunch

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 16:39:04 +0000

This is a great week for some of the more obscure haunts around the city. Not only are the DIY venues bringing some good programming but we have a lot of stuff to check out at museums that don’t get as much attention as the big guys.

We start the week off with a cyborg sex lecture, move into what will probably be an excellent drawing show of found speaker screens and finish out with a mobile sound installation and zine fest. Mark your calendars, this is a good one.

Monday Links: The British Are Coming

Mon, 11 Jul 2016 10:15:24 +0000

Sophie Michael, The Watershow Extravaganza, 2016 courtesy of Seventeen Gallery

London’s Seventeen Gallery will be opening a space on Bowery in what some are seeing as a migration inspired by the International Center of Photography opening near the New Museum. Seventeen has a pretty nice lineup of artists, including Paul B. Davis, Sophie Michael and Oliver Laric. [Bowery Boogie]
In what is probably not a coincidence, a self-portrait of Frida Kahlo standing on the border of the U.S. and Mexico will be coming to Philadelphia just 2 weeks before the presidential election. We’re guessing it will be viewed quite differently depending on which candidate is elected. [Art Newspaper]
LACMA is acquiring 39 major lithographs from the legendary L.A. print shop, Gemini. The acquisition includes works by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha and Frank Stella. [Los Angeles Times]
Douglas Gordon has completed a feature about the patriarch of experimental film, Jonas Mekas. It will premiere at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland. Not much is known about the piece but the festival’s director says that “Douglas Gordon offers us a truly sensorial experience, which challenges the concept of seeing, and links the idea of the present with that of memory.” Gordon’s previous feature work, “Zidane: A Self Portrait” was an extremely unique approach to portraiture and biography, so the idea of him taking on Mekas is pretty exciting. [Art News]
The photograph of a weeping officer that became one of the most iconic images from the Dallas police shooting last week was by an intern at the The Dallas Morning News. [Columbia Journalism Review]
This mirrored library in Yangzhou, China looks like some sort of unholy marriage between the Starship Enterprise and Hogwarts. [Curbed]
Speaking of the Starship Enterprise, the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum has opened an elaborate, interactive Star Trek exhibition. Yes, it’s basically a commercial for the new series that launches next year. But, it’s also a chance to find out what position you’d be given as a Starfleet cadet. [New York Times]
Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art has a new CEO. Terry Nicholson, the former director of arts and culture of the City of Toronto, will replace Chantal Pontbriand, who left after only eight months on the job. This appointment seems like a step in the right direction. Nicholson has worked with the institution before and has a long history of successfully pulling projects out of the fire. [The Toronto Star]
The Brooklyn Museum’s anti-gentrification forum was rescheduled this weekend due to an air-conditioning outage that forced the museum to close. It will now take place Sunday July 26th. In the meantime, Ben Davis gives some context to the event and offers a few highlights to look forward to. [artnet News]
Making the rounds: This Warhol style screen print of Donald Trump, with the words “Vote Hillary” inscribed below. The piece is by Deborah Kass. [Facebook]
From Hugo Ball to Kanye West, The Times’ staff takes a look at the history of Dada on its 100th anniversary. [New York Times]
The best thing on the Internet right now: bearcam! We spent most of the weekend watching bears patiently wait for salmon to fly into their mouths in katmai national park, alaska Alaska river. It’s early morning, and as I write this there is only one bear on the cam and a million salmon flying through the air. A good breakfast will be had. [Explore]

GIF of the Day: Sam Rolfes

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 22:09:32 +0000

Back in May It’s Nice That used a few GIFs to illustrate the game artist and sound producer Sam Rolfes created for Adult Swim. As far as I can tell, the general concept is this: a fucked up figure floats in space while squares are shot it at. You control the figure. Every time a shape hits the body, it makes a noise. You like it when shapes hit the body, because you can literally turn the game into a drum machine. It’s kinda fun, and of course, moving the figure around turns it into a dancer.

I Downloaded "Tinder for Art" and Haven't Found Love Yet

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 15:00:42 +0000

I decided to test drive the much-discussed art purchasing app Wydr today. It’s been described as “Tinder for art,” which is a little misleading. Basically, it’s more of a shopping app than a social networking platform. You can swipe right to favorite an artwork, or left to say “not my type.” If something catches your eye, you can tap on the work, see the artist’s name and purchase information, and add it to your shopping basket. For the past hour or so, I’ve been doing a lot of swiping left.

Five Challenges to Curating Your Own Online Exhibition

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 13:00:08 +0000

Daniel Temkin heads up the AFC workshop on building your own exhibition online.

With the ever rising cost of real estate, the traditional format of an exhibition in a gallery is giving way to the infinite possibilities of online shows. Two Saturdays ago, I gave a workshop for AFC's 21st Century Survival for Artist Series in which I discussed some of the challenges to curating in this medium. I've highlighted five below, but there's enough work to be done in the medium that I could write several posts on the subject and still not be done. Consider this a primer.

1. DEVELOP THE CONCEPT AND CONTENT

Many online shows build on media that is already tied to the Web, such as:

Interactive pieces and online storytelling
GIF-based shows, collecting these images native to online exchange. A Bill Miller’s GIF free for all speaks to the format’s democratic, ubiquituous nature, mirroring the chaos and idealism of the early Web. The online gallery ANI GIF had solo shows of gif works from 2011 to 2014 or so.
Shows that have the Web itself as its subject. The wonderful Not Found Exhibition (archived here) could only exist as an online show. My own exhibition, NetVVorth, had online content and exchange as its subject, asking digital artists to make counterfeit works.

Other media, such as photography, may be everywhere on the Web but for now is mostly confined to the “online portfolio” format, implying that the print is still considered the ideal experience of the work. This will likely change as photographs and still images appear in more online shows, such as My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days and the online component of The Real-Fake.

2. BUILD/FIND THE PLATFORM

Social media and art-sharing platforms like New Hive or Tumblr are an easy option. These are very configurable; Cloaque shows how un-Tumblry a Tumblr can be. Although there is worry that these platforms will disappear, in the short term it's far more likely for an online gallery to be taken down (the list of online galleries at netartnet.net includes many that are now gone: http://netartnet.net/directory/galleries).

If you do your own hosting, the options for design expand considerably. It’s good to start off deciding how noticeable / intrusive the design itself should be. A few options to consider:

Simple Design

One piece per screen: Bodyholes http://newscenario.net/bodyholes/
A drop down to load each work: http://www.mon3y.us/
A simple grid of works executed simply and cleanly (such as Jan Leegte’s homepage) http://www.leegte.org/

“Difficult” Design

Some work asks for design that is unusual or more challenging for the viewer; the Temporary Stedelijk features immersive works that retain that sense even contained in boxes. Here the changing menu helps focus us on a few works at a time, even with many pieces stuffed onto the same page.

No design

If you decide to go your own way, sometimes no design at all works best.

Skeumorphism

Beware not to artificially recreate limitations of meatspace exhibitions. Recreating a gallery in 3D inhibits access to the work (see: Exhibbit), as can sub-dividing shows into artificial "rooms" that are nonsensical on the Web. However, there are always exceptions if your show engages with the institution itself, like the fantastic DiMoDa project.

3. CURATE THE WORK

If you're asking artists to create work, be very clear about deadlines and expectations from the beginning:

A deadline for agreeing to be in the show
A deadline for when the work needs to be ready. Make this about a week before you actually need it. Someone will definitely send you work a week late.
Acceptable formats and max sizes for work. Remind in subsequent emails. Make sure this is in line with your hosting strategy.

Be aware of how much you're asking of people: if you're asking artists to make work they're unlikely to be able to use again, expect a good number of artists to flake out.

If possible, two months is a great amount of time for artists to get ready, especially if they will have to make new work for it. Any more and they'll forget; less and it's more likely to conflict with other commitments.

Send reminders / gentle nagging masked in excitement and encouragement. If you haven't heard back from some artists, send them an update with all the exciting artists who have agreed to be in the show.

4. GET THE WORD OUT

Mailing services like MailChimp are fine but many journalists and curators will never see the email; these will often be redirected into folders for mailing lists, if not discarded as spam. Much better to put something individual at the top of each email, with a friendly, short (one sentence or so) greeting to serve as a reminder of how they know you or highlighting what may interest them in the show.

5. DOCUMENT & ARCHIVE

Some shows (like the Wrong) end at a certain time and are taken offline with no archive. Others (like My Nights Are More Beautiful Than Your Days) are never taken offline, simply have the links pushed back from the front page of the gallery site after some time has passed. There are pieces which entirely blend documentation and the work itself. Inf3xxx10n was a "show" with an open password that anyone could submit to (or clear work from), existing now as screenshots and an archive of posts. If you’re hosting work that might sit on the artists’ servers (for larger works), link rot will set in, but this can be embraced as part of the flow of the Web.

A Door-Shattering Breakthrough At Denny Gallery’s Pop-Up “The City & The City”

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 12:00:11 +0000

Looking out of Denny Gallery's pop-up space on East Broadway post-door shattering (photo by author)

The City & The City Denny Gallery Pop-Up 150 East Broadway, New York, NY On view until August 19, 2016 Artists: Trudy Benson, John Dante Bianchi, Michael Flomen, Ghost of a Dream, Nicolas Grenier, Justine Hill, Erin O’Keefe, Caris Reid, Jordan Tate, Russell Tyler, and Amanda Valdez

The Great Firewall of GIFs: Miao Ying's Chinternet Plus

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 10:55:43 +0000

Screen recording of Miao Ying's Chinternetplus.com

We’ll probably never get sick of artwork about the weird state of the internet in China. China is home to nearly a quarter of the world’s internet users, more than the United States, India, and Japan combined. But widespread Internet access is a relatively recent development there, and the government keeps an iron grip on content. Censors have placed China’s more than half-a-billion netizens behind “The Great Firewall,” severely limiting access to the rest of the world’s web. The upside: this has lead to the development of unique online subcultures and codes to work around authorities. And a wave of young artists has drawn inspiration from this political situation and the creative subversions it has fostered. For example, Miao Ying’s GIFs of blocked websites superimposed over landscapes and Chinese net aesthetics draw attention to the government’s censoring of social media and common reference sites. (We included Miao Ying’s blocked websites in the AFC-curated exhibition Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place at Providence College.) And before she was an AFC contributor, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee collaborated on a pop-up cybercafe, FIREWALL, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. FIREWALL enabled users here to experience what the internet looks like from the perspective of an internet user in mainland China, where search terms such as “Tibet” and “Tiananmen Square” yield censored results. In a somewhat ironic twist, the act of displaying the internet as curated by the Chinese government drew ire from authorities.

Friday Links: A Mercifully Shorter Frieze

Fri, 08 Jul 2016 10:17:25 +0000

Hot times, summer in the city. Due to an air-conditioner outage and temperatures expected to be in the nineties, the Brooklyn Museum will be closed this weekend. [New York Times]
Eric Shiner, the director of the Warhol Museum, will be leaving to join Sotheby's. He has held the position since 2011 and will now be Senior Vice President of the new Division of Fine Art. [Artforum]
Frieze is getting shorter next year. Organizers say that the 2017 edition will only be four days rather than the usual five in order to reduce the burden on galleries. Ben Davis reports on the various factors going into the decision. [artnet News]
Jeffrey Deitch has officially announced his plans for reopening the 18 Wooster St. location that was previously home to Deitch Projects. The new/old space will kick off with a series of performances by Eddie Peake that will run September 8-10th and it will not be running on a standard gallery model of representing artists. Despite the very public and acrimonious conflicts that were part of his time as head of the LACMA, Deitch says, “I rented the Wooster Street gallery to the Swiss Institute for five years, and figured that would cover my journey to Los Angeles. I always intended to come back.” [The Art Newspaper]
In advance of its official 2020 opening date, The Main Museum of Los Angeles is offering public programming through “Beta Main”, a sort of preview of what to expect when the new institution opens in its official digs. [Los Angeles Times]
The Second Avenue Subway’s 86th Street station is going to feature huge mosaics by Chuck Close. This is good news if you’re a Chuck Close fan, I guess. [Curbed]
Fairphone—the Dutch phone manufacturing startup that hopes to make the electronics industry less evil—is getting attention even from The Wall Street Journal, print bastion of capitalism. [The Wall Street Journal]
The Guggenheim’s exhibition Åzone Futures Market is essentially an exchange for a new cryptocurrency developed collaboratively. Even after reading this twice, I’m still not sure what this means. Is the message behind all these artist forays into financial markets that no currency makes sense and the economy is totally arbitrary? [Hyperallergic]
Memes generated by an AI are the best memes. Meet Shitpostbot 5000, the internet’s least self-aware content generator. [Geek.com]
Brooklyn’s Trestle Gallery is seeking a new Curator in Residency. [Trestle]

GIF of the Day: Black. Lives. Matter.

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 17:26:02 +0000

Back-to-back videos of black men being gunned down by police officers have sent waves of sadness and outrage around the world over the last two days. It’s hard to express the horror we feel seeing Alton Sterling and Philando Castile have their lives taken. In a statement released this afternoon, President Obama spoke broadly, “all Americans should be deeply troubled.” Addressing the video of Sterling’s death, Larry Wilmore was more direct, poignantly ending his segment with the question, “doesn’t Alton Sterling’s life matter?”

How To Turn a Museum Into An Arcade

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 15:21:24 +0000

"Atari Football" (1978) Photo credit: Thanassi Karageorgiou / Museum of the Moving Image.

Now that our culture has crossed the hurdle of recognizing that video games are more than just a time-wasting triviality that rots your brain, institutions have to grapple with how to preserve and present the rapidly forming canon. The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens was the first museum to collect video games and its currently showing off some prime gems in the exhibition, “Arcade Classics: Video Games from the Collection.” (on through October 23rd)

Thursday Links: At The Corner of Bill Cunningham and 5th

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 09:48:11 +0000

The corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue is temporarily being renamed “Bill Cunningham Corner.” The Mayor is allowed to rename a street for a week, in order to make it permanent, the change would have to be approved by the city council. [DNAinfo]
ArtList, an app startup for anonymous secondary market sales of art has shut down. Artnet News spoke with art advisor Todd Levin about the startup's downfall. His view is that internet-based platforms aren't ready for high-end work and can only hope for "momentarily younger hotter artists like Parker Ito, Kour Pour, and Ibrahim Mahama, who don’t always stand up to the test of time." [artnet News]
Under the Sun, the documentary about North Korea has been released and currently has an 83% score on Metacritic. The film was controversially pulled from MoMA's Doc Fortnight Festival over fears of retaliation from North Korea. That decision resulted in longtime assistant curator, Sally Berger, being fired. [Metacritic]
Young Thug says there is no such thing as gender. While no one should hurt themselves trying to pat him on the back, homophobia is a rampant problem in the hip-hop world and it's kind of a big deal that those words are coming from the most-hyped rapper around. [Dazed]
A reminder that you do not have to enter a police station to 'catch 'em all' in the new Pokemon augmented reality game. [Polygon]
28 years later, Anthony Haden-Guest explains how he did NOT kill Jean-Michel Basquiat.[artnet News]
Vice has bought a majority stake in Garage magazine, a Russian oligarch's wife's "art, architecture, fashion and design" publication. Having never read Garage we can't speak to the quality of the art coverage. But, they have an app where you can check out issues and if you use it to scan Kendall Jenner's photo at the following link you'll "bring her to life." [Recode]
You have exactly one extra second to get those grant applications in this year. [Phys.org]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Happy Birthday Frida Kahlo

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 20:12:30 +0000

Okay, this GIF shouldn’t be considered NSFW at all, but today is Frida Kahlo’s birthday and it’s the only vaguely “inappropriate” animated GIF I can find, shockingly. It’s a scene from the 2002 biopic Frida, depicting a mostly-clothed Salma Hayek in the titular role painting a topless self-portrait while smoking a cigarette. Why would this possibly be NSFW? Because Facebook hates art historical nudity. Paddy knows all-too-well how annoying violating Facebook’s decency rules can be.

AFC's Guided Bushwick Gallery Tour and Dinner

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 17:04:52 +0000

Rachel Stern from her show, "Yes, Death", at Black & White Gallery

Thursday July 21 5:00 PM - 9:00 PM or Saturday July 23 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM *Please note that ticket admit the purchaser to one of the two tour dates listed above

Selected Galleries: Knockdown Center, Black & White Gallery, NURTUREart, Secret Dungeon, Interstate, Studio 10, Luhring Augustine

#FOMO in Suburbia

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 12:44:45 +0000

Detritus from SOFIA RETA Corporation's " T AND T A N AND C," paper and ink, 2016.

Love Me and Delete Me Curated by Anoushe Shojae-Chaghorvand CCBC Essex Gallery 7201 Rossville Blvd, Rosedale, MD On view until September 10th Artists: Kyle England, Andy Storrs, Stephanie Barber, Joshua Sender, SOFIA RETA Corporation, Nicki Apostolow Weaver, Zoe Burke, Killian Barnes, Lexie Mountain, Maralie, Esteban, Matt DeLong, and Kory Shoja-Chaghorvand

People Have The Power: “Of the people” At Smack Mellon

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 12:00:38 +0000

Installation view of "Of the people" at Smack Mellon including Isabella Cruz-Chong's Line of Breath (center) (Photo by Etienne Frossard; image courtesy Smack Mellon)

Of the people Smack Mellon 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY On view until July 31, 2016 Artists: Lauren Frances Adams, Daniel Bejar, Guy Ben-Ari, Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine (Mildred Beltre & Oasa DuVerney), Isabella Cruz-Chong, Peggy Diggs, Esteban del Valle, Emily Greenberg, Alicia Grullon, Jeremy D. Olson, Sheryl Oring, Ben Pinder, Brittany M. Powell, Kate Sopko, t.Rutt (Mary Mihelic & David Gleeson), Martha Wilson and Leah Wolff

Wednesday Links: Tinder For Art Is A Real Thing

Wed, 06 Jul 2016 10:22:08 +0000

Jillian Mayer, "The Slumpie," because smartphone posture.

It finally happened: “Tinder for art”. There’s a crowded field of mobile apps trying to “disrupt” how people find and engage with art, but this one, Wydr stands out because you literally get to swipe left and right. [Tech Crunch]

In other tech news, it’s a bad month for Tesla motors. A gallerist just survived a scary-sounding rollover crash in Pennsylvania while the car was in autopilot mode. This comes just days after reports that a Florida man died by watching Harry Potter instead of looking at the road while using the carmaker’s autopilot feature. Can we stop pretending self-driving cars are going to be a panacea for the country’s transportation problems? [Detroit Free Press]

China’s colonial ambitions in Africa, and a growing African immigrant population in the Pearl River Delta, have caused quite a few cultural/political frictions between the two regions. But now there’s hope that Chinese collectors’ newfound interest in African contemporary art can help lubricate the cultural exchange lagging behind the continent’s economic relationship with China. Let’s just hope the art market’s dealings are a little more equitable than the resource extraction industry or labor agreements. [South China Morning Post Magazine h/t Sugarcane Magazine]

Artist Jillian Mayer has a new line of lumpy, glittery fiberglass furniture created in response to the horrible posture we’re all getting from staring at smartphones all day. They’re called “The Slumpie” and they let users stay comfy while their muscles slowly atrophy. [Huffington Post]

Art world leaders have surprisingly little to say about the Brexit, other than echoing platitudes about how museums and artists should remain united to cooperate across national borders. It’s almost as if no one intelligent can process that something this fucking stupid is actually happening enough to formulate a response. [The Art Newspaper]

People are really upset about Minnesota using federal affordable housing funds to build artist housing because the overwhelming majority of the apartments go to white people. I (Michael) lived in a similarly funded apartment in Baltimore, and that building was pretty diverse. Maybe the problem here is that Minnesota is just really, really white? Blaming artists for a lack of affordable housing seems like the wrong battle to be fighting: let’s just demand more affordable housing units instead of resenting the people who get them. [The New York Times]

Wow. American architects are among the most likely groups in the country to commit suicide. Given the state of architecture in this country, I don’t find this too surprising. I actually gave up on my dream of being an urban planner after attending public planning charrettes in college because I don’t think I could cope with constant disappointment. Bleak. [Dezeen]

GIF of the Day: Take the 5:10 to Dreamland

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 17:22:09 +0000

In honor of MoMA’s new retrospective, “Bruce Conner: It’s All True," we present a GIF from Conner’s 1976 film, “Take The 5:10 to Dreamland.” While the film is comprised of found footage, Conner did insert his hand by tinting it all with a sepia-tone that provides visual consistency. This GIF perfectly represents the sleepy in-between space that the title evokes. A flickering candle emits energy that is being transmitted, but how long until it’s extinguished?

This Week's Must See Events: Summer Art Party!

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 13:49:38 +0000

The art world continues its post-holiday slow period with an absence of big-time blockbusters but plenty of smaller shows. No big loss. This week we’ve got a party as art performance courtesy of BHQFU and a party for art, to celebrate the on-going contributions of the Black Contemporary Art Tumblr. There’s also an elaborate multi-media play at Flux Factory. Pretty much everything they do is a party. Let’s get to it.

Tuesday Links: The High Cost of the Star-Spangled Banner

Tue, 05 Jul 2016 10:04:41 +0000

The U.S. military’s marching band budget is almost three times as large as the annual sum being allocated to the National Endowment for the Arts. That’s $437 million dollars going to renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner and an Air Force rock band called Max Impact. Seriously, check out that rock band link. On a related note, it’s estimated that Americans spend $675m a year on fireworks. [New York Times]
Is Donald Trump the villain that protest art has been craving? Hyperallergic’s Carrie Dunne takes a look. Also, speaking of the Donald, the great George Saunders joins the 'respected writer attends a Trump rally' club. [Hyperallergic, New Yorker]
Iranian pop artist, Parviz Tanavoli, had his passport confiscated by authorities in Tehran this weekend. He was scheduled to attend a lecture in London that focused on his book, “European Women in Persian Houses.” As of July 4th, Tanavoli still did not know why he wasn’t allowed to travel. [The Art Newspaper]
Abbas Kiarostami, director of great films like “Where Is The Friends House?” and “Close-Up,” as well as a large body of photography and installation work has died at the age of 76. He was reportedly undergoing treatment for cancer. [Al Jazeera]
Pieces of Christo’s Floating Piers have already appeared on eBay following the closing of the piece on July 3rd. The work is intended to be recycled but it seems some industrious person managed to snag a few chunks. The special socks that visitors wore are also available for $1000. [artnet News]
The United Nations has passed a nonbinding resolution that makes internet access a basic human right. [Gizmodo]
Pirates are now using YouTube’s 360° panorama feature to hide full-length films from the streaming video services automated content id systems. The resulting videos have an odd, online gallery showroom quality. While it's a clever trick, as it is, this probably won't become a widespread problem because it just looks weird. [Kill Screen]
Wow, you might want to think twice before co-signing for a student loan in New Jersey. Specifically, if the student dies the loans will not be forgiven. One bankruptcy lawyer describes the program as “state-sanctioned loan sharking.” [The New York Times]
While the verdict is still out on whether public interest will be able to sustain the new wave of virtual reality, Japan’s first VR porn festival was an overwhelming success. Mobs of people attended the gathering in Tokyo, causing organizers to shut off entry. Most of this stuff looks really uncomfortable. [The Next Web]

GIF of the Day: He's Got The Whole World In His Hands

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 17:23:29 +0000

Maybe not the most patriotic GIF for this Fourth of July weekend, but Putin’s looking pretty gangster.

ICP Enters the 21st Century with a Bunch of Mirrors

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 16:32:29 +0000

Exhibition as funhouse.

For a prime example of ambitious curating standing in the way of excellent artwork, look no further than the convoluted mess of a show at the International Center for Photography’s brand new Bowery location. While I’m always up for seeing art that takes advantage of technology and addresses our weird wired world, this show is filled with wrong-headed assertions, painful hanging choices, and eyeball-straining design.

That's not a conclusion I'd hoped to come to. This is the museum's first show since moving downtown from their old digs. They need to get people in the door, so I really wanted to find something positive to say. I did, but it definitely took some effort.

Teenage Daydream Bedroom: An Interview with Nick Alciati on “xoxo, Darlene”

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 12:00:17 +0000

Installation view of Nick Alciati's xoxo, Darlene at SVA Photo, Video and Related Media's 2016 MFA Thesis Exhibition (Photo by Jeremy Haik/all images courtesy the artist)

Artist Nick Alciati’s bedroom installation xoxo, Darlene feels immediately familiar to anyone who was a teenager in the early 2000s. Photographs of Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Madonna and Alicia Keys almost completely paper the walls. Trendy clothes lie strewn on the bed and floor. High school yearbook photos are wedged in a mirror above a row of cutesy thrift store tchotchkes. Even if your bedroom wasn’t a pink shrine to mainstream pop culture, Alciati’s contribution to the SVA Photo, Video and Related Media’s 2016 MFA Thesis Exhibition is accurate enough to spark memories of classmates’ similar spaces.

Friday Links: A Good Day For LGBT Rights

Fri, 01 Jul 2016 10:28:07 +0000

The Pentagon has announced that the ban on transgender citizens serving in the military will be lifted. What’s more, transgender recruits will receive full coverage of medical expenses, including hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery if a doctor determines the procedures to be medically necessary. [CNN]
Two planned buildings in New York’s affordable housing program will be making specific efforts to be more LGBT-friendly. The buildings are aimed to provide housing for low-income, elderly New Yorkers. Programming will include Pride Month celebrations and events that highlight LGBT artists and writers. The initiative is designed to make people in the community feel safer when applying for senior services. [Curbed]
Candy Coleman, the director of Gagosian Gallery’s Los Angeles location has resigned and will be joining Sotheby’s. Her role will be to increase the auction giants west coast operations. [ArtNews]
After 176 years in business, the world’s oldest photography studio is shutting down. Bourne & Shepherd, in Koltaka, India, opened sometime around 1840. Reports say that business has slowly been in decline after a fire destroyed significant portions of their archives, 25 years ago. [artnet News]
Australia has been experiencing severe funding cuts to their national arts program. In addition to 50% small to medium arts organizations being left without funding, 1,300 arts workers are expected to lose their jobs. The Guardian has an insider account of the activist campaign to raise awareness and make this an election issue. [The Guardian]
Tesla has announced that a man died while using the company’s autopilot feature. He is the first known casualty and unfortunately it may be the electric automaker’s fault. Maybe slow down hopes for those driverless cars coming sooner rather than later. [Forbes]
Roberta likes MoMA’s new Bruce Conner retrospective. This thing sounds massive, it features 250 works including Conner’s drawings and assemblages. We’re looking forward to this one. [New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Segway Slippage

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 17:19:52 +0000

There are few things that are more embarrassing than being seen riding a Segway. One of those things is being seen falling off a Segway. So, as far as we’re concerned, Joe McKay’s series, “Falling from Segways,” ranks among the best chronicles of embarrassment out there.

Thursday Links: A Billionaire Art Center and Elite Sex Parties

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 10:31:50 +0000

Ron Perelman is donating $75m to a new performance arts center that is planned for the World Trade Center site. It will be named after the billionaire. The center was originally planned to be designed by Frank Gehry, but when the project stalled, his designs were shelved. Good. Too much Gehry. A new architect hasn’t been chosen yet, but Perelman says that he’s considering designs by Joshua Prince-Ramus. [New York Times]
Pulse has put out an open call for video artists to be part of its Miami edition this year. Selected artists will not need to be working with a participating gallery to be featured. Those who are interested in submitting work for consideration have until August 31st. [artnet News]
The Rauschenberg Foundation has announced the winners of its annual Artists as Activist Fellowship. 10 winners will split $775,000 that will be distributed over two years. One project, by the performance group Los Angeles Poverty Department, will attempt to devise “informal community policing vehicles that maintain respect for the well-being” of the residents on Skid Row. [L.A. Times]
Following the massive viral success of its Bob Ross stream, the live video platform, Twitch, is launching another art-related program: watching people eat. Warhol would be proud. [Polygon]
Holland Cotter loves PS1’s Vito Acconci retrospective. He likes it so much that there’s pretty much nothing negative here. That means he gets to spend the entire review just talking about the work. It’s a good read. [New York Times]
Speaking of good reads, Hilton Als has an excellent, long profile of Nan Goldin. We recently were surprised to find that critics were able to say something new about her “Ballad of Sexual Dependence.” It’s almost as surprising to find new nuggets from her well-worn biography. This is a must. [New Yorker]
We've seen post-Brexit results from Phillips and Sotheby's so far this week, now it's Christie’s turn. Following the surprise withdrawal of a 1994 Abstraktes Bild that was expected to sell for about £14m, the overall night exceeded the low-estimate with a £33.7m take and 92% sell-through rate. As for why the Richter was withdrawn, the owner reportedly did not want to reduce the reserve price. Collector Alain Servais said "There is no direct relation to Brexit except—as for the whole art market—we are living in more uncertain times.” [The Art Newspaper]
Josh Baer reminds us that currency issues have little to do with prices paid at auction, “A weak pound lets buyers in other currency bid 10% higher, which works out roughly the same. The only time it “saves” money is if there is just one bidder”. [The Baer Faxt]
Just in time for Summer beach season, go inside an elite Hamptons sex party. Or don’t. [Marie Claire]
Prosperity Dumpling, the dumpling house patroned by many art lovers and beloved for its insanely cheap dumplings is moving. Apparently, news of its back alley and roach infestation sunk the business. Still, sad news that they weren’t able to clean up their act. They are now moving all the way out to Bensonhurst in Brooklyn. We had to look that up to figure out where it is (way out by Dyker Heights). [Bowery Boogie]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Shave Your Cheeks

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 17:37:58 +0000

Scorpion Dagger’s Tumblr is populated with Monty Python-style cutups of Renaissance paintings. Some are safe for work, others aren’t. Can’t say for sure where this one falls, but this dude definitely needs a wax. Listen to your body man, it’s trying to tell you something.

DEADLINE EXTENDED: Apply for Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program!

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:41:46 +0000

Good news! The deadline to apply for the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program has been extended until July 15th.

Here at AFC, we’re big fans of Two Trees efforts to grow the cultural community in DUMBO by providing affordable workspace for artists and organizations. As a participants ourselves, we can testify to the fact that the below market rents offered to awardees can be transformative. The workshops, open house and ongoing programming we run simply wouldn’t be possible without it.

The Real Estate Blues Again: ”If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!!” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 12:00:26 +0000

Detail of Andrew Castrucci's Untitled (Donald Trump) (all photos by author for Art F City)

Martha Rosler: If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!! Mitchell-Innes & Nash 534 West 26th Street, New York, NY On view until July 9, 2016

One of the first works you see in Martha Rosler’s exhibition If you can’t afford to live here, mo-o-ve!! is a dark and ominous portrait of Donald Trump. Leaning against a wall, the Trump tableau sits behind three glass bottles filled with urine. Is the piece a biting comment on Trump’s pissant Republican presidential campaign? Is it a playful but terrifying foreshadowing of his future official White House portrait?

Wednesday Links: Art Mimicking Products, Products Mimicking Art

Wed, 29 Jun 2016 11:14:04 +0000

DIS responds to critics of the Berlin Biennale. The collective says that "people may leave feeling angry or uncomfortable, which is a valid response, and it’s better than them feeling gratified as if they’d just recycled, or donated to a cause." They go on to say that “the big mistake people make is to see this as a disillusioned or cynical or fatalist perspective.” The interview sounds a lot smarter than the show looks. [Ocula]
If the auction at Sotheby’s yesterday is any indication it seems that international players are taking advantage of the devalued British currency. Works by Keith Haring and Jenny Saville broke records and overall sales were characterised as “reassuring.” London dealer Harry Blain said that “It’s such an international market. If you are looking at something in terms of sterling it is a lot less expensive than it was three days ago.” [The Art Newspaper]
A ranking of all 156 Amazon dash buttons. There’s something unsettling about the branded devices that reorder common items like detergent or toilet paper with a single button press. This list gets it right with Trojan condoms coming in at number one. [Motherboard]
Airbnb is suing San Francisco over on-going regulatory disputes that were initially kicked off by affordable housing advocates. The city decided on June 7th to fine Airbnb $1,000 a day for every unregistered host on the site. This follows a move by New York to fine users of Airbnb who rent a whole apartment for fewer than 30 days. [New York Times]
Stella Schnabel has opened a “music club that’s like an art gallery.” How is it more like a gallery than a venue? That remains unclear. It sounds as if Ms. Schnabel is just unaware of the large DIY venue scene in New York and her music space is more like an art gallery because it is not Madison Square Garden. Also, they serve fruit punch instead of alcohol. [Wall Street Journal]
You can rent photographer Annie Leibovitz’s former four-floor townhouse in the West Village for a mere $13,500 a month. It’s shaped like a triangle, so good luck doing anything interesting with the space. [Curbed]
Once again, the New York City Rent Guidelines Board approved a rent freeze on all one-year leases. [Capital New York]
Artists are no longer flocking to New York, according to artnet News. Instead, they are opting to stay in their city of origin—Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Indonesia, etc. Not exactly news to most art professionals, but good to see the fact that these so-called peripheries are a big deal to artists acknowledged. [artnet News]

GIF of the Day: Snowy Calm for a Hot Summer's Day

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 18:46:36 +0000

Krist Wood and Bunny Rogers, “Corners Hiems,” 2015

Although he’s one of the most influential figures in the early net art scene, Krist Wood keeps a pretty low-key online profile. His personal site has almost no navigation and very little of his work from over the years. That unassuming quality makes him a great fit for this collaboration with Bunny Rogers who’s work also has a modest, deliberate quality. It’s hot out and this is the GIF we needed today.

This Week's Must See Events: Beach Blanket Bingo

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 18:07:29 +0000

It’s Fourth of July weekend! Or it will be at least. And that means all of the art events will peter out over the next few days. But before then, there are a ton of group shows opening up. We’ve pulled some of the most promising ones from every neighborhood in the city. We start with films by Lois Weber, a nearly forgotten female filmmaker from the dawn of Hollywood. The week will start closing out on Thursday when Zwirner let’s the lunatics run the asylum with a massive staff group show.

IMG MGMT: Pixel-Shaming

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 14:56:13 +0000

The iconic black censorship band has come to symbolize outdated moral shock, to the extent that we primarily understand it now as a gag prop for Halloween costumes and mock-1950s tchotchke in the West. But in Turkey, the media still embraces its original use: under sensational headlines about sexual abuse, such as “He was found not guilty after he impregnated a 15-year-old girl,” the band covers the eyes of women, animals and even objects, implied to protect the identities of the victims.

The Berlin Biennale: An Act of Passive Compliance

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 13:35:54 +0000

Courtesy Berlin Biennale

Since the last Berlin Biennale, Europe has undergone a currency and debt crisis, watched far right political entities grow from obscure clusters of nutjobs into massive populist movements, dealt, badly, with the millions of people fleeing conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, and been subjected to terrifying and brutal acts of terrorism by all manner of extremists.

Tuesday Links: ICP Gets Obliterated and Post-Brexit Auction is Sluggish

Tue, 28 Jun 2016 11:06:55 +0000

Phillips ran their 20th-Century and Contemporary Art auction yesterday with lackluster results. The sale totaled 11.9 million GBP, a 34.6 percent drop from last year. The sell-through rate was only 68 percent. Could the Brexit have contributed to the mood? Josh Baer seems to think the effect will be minimal with the market being global. But doesn’t globalism mean that we’re all connected so we’re more not less sensitive to shifts in the economies of others? [The Art Newspaper and Baer Faxt]
Another day, another huge museum gift at work. The Philadelphia Museum is showcasing the collection of Keith and Katherine Sachs—a collection that, according to Newsworks, is expected to transform the museum into a powerhouse of contemporary art. [Newsworks]
That universally mocked, live action Tetris movie trilogy really is happening. Its producer says that it has to be a trilogy because the story they are telling is just TOO BIG. He added, “We’re not going to have blocks with feet running around the movie. But it’s great that people think so. It sets the bar rather low!” [The Guardian]
In the latest effort to teach kids the principles of coding from an early age, Google has made a set of electric toy blocks. When the blocks are snapped together they can create real computer programs like a musical instrument or a messaging app. They’re also pretty great to look at. [Wired]
Wow, Jason Farago haaaates the inaugural selfie exhibition at the ICP’s new space on the Bowery. He complains that they set aside no space for their permanent collection of 150,000 photographs (the space isn’t large enough for that, though) and that the current show is little more than an aggregation of artworks, reproductions, considered pieces and throw-away snaps. “This is an exhibition that should have remained a Pinterest board”, Farago concludes. Ouch. [The Guardian]
Hyperallergic’s Elyssa Goodman seems to get a lot more out of the exhibition but we’re a bit confused about the message. In one passage she discusses photographing herself in a mirror used to display Warhol Polaroids, purposefully obscuring her face with the Warhol so that “self-identification and public visibility” actually overlap. What does this mean? [Hyperallergic]
A new investigation has concluded that Nazi-looted art was sold to high-ranking Nazis at a deflated price rather than being given to victims families. The art was originally recovered by the Monuments Men and was turned over to the Bavarian government on the condition of it being used as restitution. [artnet News]
A 5000-year-old pay stub now in the possession of the British Museum shows that ancient workers were paid in beer. At the time beer was a hearty, starchy brew that could double as a meal. [ars technica]

Gif of the Day: Jason Statham's Leopard Print Undies

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 17:50:44 +0000

Before he was the star of "Latest Punch Guy in Face, Drive Fast Movie" Jason Statham was boogying down in the background of the music video for The Shamen's "Comin On." I was unaware of The Shamen before seeing this little masterpiece of 90's green-screen-edalia, but I kind of like them. They have a low-rent vibe that's like the KLF with a little C+C Music Factory thrown in. Plus this thing looks like a Jacolby Satterwhite video gone horribly wrong.

The video itself has an aesthetic that would fit nicely in today’s media landscape. I could definitely see it in MTV’s net art-inspired station identification rebranding. Sadly, the director, Nico Beyer, seems to have graduated to slick commercials for companies like BMW and Adidas. He should get weird with it again. But even if he doesn’t, he’ll always be the guy who directed the finest work that Jason Statham has ever done.

Monday Links: The Force Is Not With George Lucas's Chicago Museum

Mon, 27 Jun 2016 11:10:23 +0000

Well, this can’t be good. New MOCA CEO Chantal Pontbriand has left MOCA after only eight months on the job. This is nothing short of shocking news for the organization, which in the course of a year has transformed its name, mission, and location. In March, she even announced that the organization would be expanding its footprint from three to five floors in its new location as well as a building across the street. It’s unclear whether those plans will stay in tact now that she’s departed.

For the first time, Jesus tomb is getting refurbished and will be opened for an archeological dig. [Daily Beast]
George Lucas plans for a major museum in Chicago have been foiled by a two-year legal battle and he is reportedly looking for an appropriate location in California. People involved in the tentative planning say that San Francisco will probably be the first choice. [The Art Newspaper]
For those people who didn't already hate golf, there is now a custom hoverboard that carries players around the course. It's called the GolfBoard. [GolfBoard]
The strategy game Civilization 5 will be used in classrooms to teach kids about diplomacy and the ways in which Ghandi was a power hungry, nuke flinging sociopath. [Motherboard]
Jenny Holzer will mount her "first site-specific" work by carving her signature "poems on cliffs, monumental boulders and on bedrock" in Ibiza. [The Art Newspaper]
Legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham has died. Of the pieces we’ve read thus far, the Washington Post has been the best. Though the Times obituary staff did a fine job. [Washington Post]
Legendary writer and journalist Michael Herr has died. [Daily Beast]
Legendary Sculptor Tony Feher has died. Paddy Johnson recalls a talk he gave at Rutgers University and explains why his work is so significant. [AFC Newletter]
A round-up of some old school video albums that pre-dated Lemonade. Before Beyonce was putting Becky with the good hair on blast, Don Johnson was rocking sleeveless shirts on Max Headroom's soundstages. [MEL]
Douglas Coupland is looking for a model that looks just like Van Gogh and will the person who looks the most like the famed artist $5k. [The Guardian]
Beloved record shops, Other Music and Rebel Rebel, both closed their doors this weekend. This is a nice opportunity to revisit Karina Longworth's excellent investigation into what happened to Kim's video collection. [Brooklyn Vegan]
Prince's "Yellow Cloud" guitar has been auctioned. The lucky bidder spent $137,500. [Vulture]

GIF of the Day: The Brexit

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 20:30:58 +0000

Has anyone been reading anything today that’s not about the Brexit vote to leave? Like pretty much every other member of the art world, I don’t think this was a positive outcome. It leaves the EU unstable in a time of great instability, it has already affected British markets, and it almost certainly will create problems for arts institutions overseas.

But my thoughts are not nearly as interesting as what I saw online today. A few headlines worth a look if you haven’t seen them already.

Scary Stories To Tell In A Gallery: An Interview with Langdon Graves on "Spooky Action At A Distance" at Victori + Mo

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 12:00:35 +0000

Langdon Graves, Home Circle, 2016, wood, vinyl, acrylic paint and a pearl (all images courtesy the artist and Victori + Mo, New York)

Langdon Graves: Spooky Action At A Distance Victori + Mo 56 Bogart Street, Brooklyn, NY Open now until June 26, 2016

Walking the darkened halls of 56 Bogart Street, a pulsating pink glow radiated from the open door of Victori + Mo. I felt like I was in The Shining’s Overlook Hotel and told artist Langdon Graves as much when we met to speak about her current exhibition Spooky Action At A Distance. “Yeah,” Graves responded, “That’s not the first Kubrick reference I got.”

Friday Links: Bad News From the Other Side of the Pond

Fri, 24 Jun 2016 11:07:38 +0000

Just so we're clear, nobody here sees the waterfalls and butterfly outcome on the other side of that door.

Well, it's happened: The Brits voted in favor of leaving the EU, fearing waves of immigrants. Let this be a warning to all of us here in the US. Trump could happen. It won't be pretty. [The Internet]
According to the Art Newspaper a survey sent to members of the Creative Industries Federation showed that 96 % of those surveyed supported remaining in the EU. If the economy suffers—as everyone is predicting it will—arts organizations are likely to be hit hard. [The Art Newspaper]
Is social media good for art? Carolina Miranda asks the question after several artists (including AFC) were banned for posting material users reported as violating facebook community standards. Lauren Cornell, a curator at the New Museum compares showing your art on Facebook to displaying it in a corporate showroom. "It's a compromised space," she says. [Culture High & Low]
Seven Mexican Artists You Need to Know Now. On the list, Manuel Solano who is BLOWING UP right now. His name is everywhere. [Amuse]
Trump's brand is so strong that people are mistaking the T.RUMP art bus for Trump and attacking it. [Hyperallergic]

GIF of the Day: Me, Every Weekend

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:49:55 +0000

Cheers.

Carbon-Based Lifeform: Hermonie "Only" Williams at Gallery Four

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 18:44:13 +0000

Hermonie "Only" Williams, "Suttee," charred wood.

Hermonie "Only" Williams: Not Now Gallery Four 405 West Franklin Street, 4th floor Baltimore, MD On view until July 22nd, 2016

One of the first pieces a viewer encounters in Not Now is “Suttee,” two spiraling bundles of charred, sharpened dowels on side-by-side plinths. The title refers to the archaic Hindu tradition of a widow committing suicide by jumping into her husband’s funeral pyre. As in much of Hermonie “Only” Williams’ work, the notion of symmetry is problematized.

Goodbye To All That: "InFinite Futures" and "The Past Will Be Present" at ABC No Rio

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 13:10:20 +0000

Brian George and Kelly Savage's installation in InFinite Futures at ABC No Rio (all photos by author for Art F City)

InFinite Futures and The Past Will Be Present ABC No Rio 156 Rivington Street, New York, NY Open now until June 24, 2016

In the contemporary Lower East Side–a neighborhood of unlimited brunch spots, luxury condos and pristine white-walled galleries, artist-run punk haven ABC No Rio stands defiant as a welcome anachronism. Whether interpreted as a graffiti-covered blight or a monument to the heavily romanticized culture spawned downtown in the late 20th century, ABC No Rio has acted as a hub for a community of artists for over three decades. The space remains inexorably tied to the last gasps of the neighborhood’s gritty essence, which is why the plans for its sleek renovation seem almost shocking.

We Went to Philly Part 2: ICA

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 10:32:51 +0000

Rodney McMillian, "Many Moons," 2015. Latex, acrylic, and ink on paper mounted on fabric.

ICA Philadelphia 118 S 36th St, Philadelphia, PA All shows up until August 14th

What’s on view: Rodney McMillian: The Black Show, a solo exhibition; Paper Louise Tiny Fishman Rock, a retrospective of the Philadelphia-born painter Louise Fishman; Descent, a group show about “inheritance” organized by Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow Charlotte Ickes; and Open Video Call, a selection of work from local video artists.

Thursday Links: New Housing Cost Calculator Tells Art School Grads They're Screwed

Thu, 23 Jun 2016 10:27:48 +0000

The year: 1986. The Cure are about to play a concert in suburban Maryland, and a local news station is on hand to interview “kids these days.” It’s a real gem. [Baltimore City Paper]

Best listicle/slideshow: “12 Masters of the Creepy Uncanny Before Jordan Wolfson.” [Blouin Artinfo]

Dawn Chan points out that a number of Asian cultural products, as well as American cultural products that depict Asians, are more often than not set in the future. But why are Asians so underrepresented in the present? [Artforum]

Speaking of Asia-influenced futurism, Dave Addey has meticulously dissected every shot in Blade Runner to discuss the props’ graphic design and typography. [Typeset in the Future]
The New York Times asks Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen “Is the Idea of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ a Sign of Social Privilege?” Thankfully, neither of them respond by directly addressing that obnoxious question. [The New York Times]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Biting Snake Crotch

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 18:09:58 +0000

What counts as work safe seems to be a matter of interpretation. Take this woman with a biting snake coming out of her crotch. Facebook thinks it's totally fine. (It's where I found this GIF — thank you Jerald Blackstock). Who knows why this cleared their censors. My only guess is that the fact that it comes from a black and white movie is confuse the people who flag this stuff. What I do know, is that there is little chance of this GIF ever making it past any other corporate filter, ever. So make of that what you will. And in the meantime, enjoy.

How to Make a Budget for a 20-Foot Butter Sculpture of Donald Trump's Face

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 12:29:25 +0000

Editor’s Note: This post is an auxiliary component of The AFC Workshops: 21st Century Survival for Artists, a two-part series of courses led by artists, educators and art-world insiders designed to give artists the tools to get ahead. Eleanor Whitney, who led our “Grant Applications, The TL;DR Overview” course has written a post on grant writing and is back today to discuss budgeting. Whitney is a Brooklyn-based community manager and marketer, writer, and educator. She is currently the Community Marketing Manager at Dev Bootcamp and has also worked at Shapeways, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Rubin and the Brooklyn Museum. Her budgeting workbook pages can be found here.

Wednesday Links: #PLANTS

Wed, 22 Jun 2016 10:21:35 +0000

Yesterday, almost immediately after we published a piece in which Whitney Kimball states “I think it’s safe to say by now that plants are no longer a trend; they are a medium (except for potted palms)” the Mexico City art center/residency Casa Maauad posted the above image on Facebook. It’s titled "They are these or they may be others/ ‪#‎PLANTS‬ (2015) Meme digital" from Cristina Garrido, whose exhibition "Un acuerdo tácito" opens there later this month. The plant invasion is real. Even potted palms. [Facebook]

Continuing their “Making it in New York” series, WNYC asks “Are Artists Abandoning NYC?” The answer: yes. And also, no. Plenty of artists are decamping for cheaper places, but the city’s artist population just keeps growing as new waves of debt-saddled art school grads arrive to pay more and more, replacing the disenfranchised who leave. What a depressing cycle. [WNYC]

Yesterday, revelations leaked from an investigation into Michael Jackson’s child molestation charges included the discovery of animal sacrifice photos, weird porn, and drugs started trending across social media. And also art books. Apparently the police were concerned that MJ was using images from artists including Jake and Dino Chapman, Raymond Pettibon, Mike Kelley, Elizabeth Peyton, Takashi Murakami, Larry Clark, Rineke Dijkstra, Paul McCarthy, Richard Prince, Gilbert & George, and others to “groom” young boys by exposing them to explicit material. [Hyperallergic]

Tomorrow, Terence Koh will be broadcasting the names of Orlando shooting victims into space, as part of a performance at Andrew Edlin Gallery. What if this is the first evidence of life on Earth an alien civilization receives? [Observer]

Okay, this blog post is from 3 years ago, but I’m reposting it because I just saw it and I wish it had been required reading in art school. It’s a pronunciation guide to artists’ names. For example: “Ugo Rondinone - OO-go Ron-di-NO-nay”. God, this is so useful I’m surprised there’s not an app for that. [Artspace]

The man who made Ashlee and Jessica Simpson has a new creative endeavor: photography. Meet Joe Simpson, the pop stars’ father who picked up his old hobby after his divorce and now has a terrible-looking show in a Los Angeles gallery. Dear LA: things like this are the reason it’s taken so long for the East Coast to take you seriously. [Format]

Washington art incubator CulturalDC sold its downtown office space, including the home of Flashpoint art gallery. That means there will no longer be a single gallery left in “Gallery Place”. Oops. [Washington City Paper]

I’ve mentioned before that I really love the new Tate Modern addition by Herzog & De Meuron. Now, you can watch a time-lapse video of its construction, which is insanely hypnotic. [Dezeen]

Le Consortium, a nonprofit art space I’d never heard of in Dijon, France is apparently the secret carreer-making venue for tons of famous artists. [The New York Times]

HaeAhn Kwon, the lone holdout student still enrolled in the trainwreck MFA program at USC’s Roski School of Art and Design, has withdrawn. That means the school successfully alienated and lost an entire year of students. [Los Angeles Times]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Lorna Mills

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 18:48:23 +0000

It’s been almost a year since we started our weekly tradition of posting a “NSFW GIF of the Hump Day”. In all that time, I can’t believe it never occurred to me to reach out to GIF maven Lorna Mills and see what NSFW goodies she has in her expansive GIF collection.

Until today.

And holy shit, how the floodgates have opened. Lorna’s work is like the entire internet compressed into jagged little pills our eyes must swallow. That means there’s a whole lotta porn in there. And puppies! And also dicks fucking a trombone, people masturbating on bicycles, and all manner of creatures fucking every conceivable thing that’s ever been compressed into 256 gloriously dithered colors.

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Summer in the City

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 17:20:58 +0000

Wendy White, "Santa Cruz," 2016, acrylic on canvas, cotton rope, plexiglas, hardware, 84 x 120 inches

When I started compiling a list of art events for this week, I thought “this is going to be slim pickings.” There’s a stereotype that New York in the Summer sucks because everyone’s gone to the beach except tourists who stupidly vacation in Manhattan instead of also going to the beach. But that’s totally not true!

IMG MGMT: Land Art and the Nuclear Landscape

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 14:41:43 +0000

Weapons Depot, Tonopah Valley, Nevada
Michael Heizer et les risques du sublime technologique, by Serge Paul, 2012

Michael Heizer, City: Complex One
Photograph by Tom Vinetz

Sedan Crater, Nevada Test Site
Government photograph (AEC688375), c1962

We Went to Philly Part 1: Vox Populi

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 11:10:29 +0000

Sri Chowdhury, “Affected Painting,” site specific installation: wood, linen, oil paint, concrete, glass, plants, light gels, shadows, ceramics, 2015.

Five shows through June 19th Vox Populi 319 North 11th Street, Philadelphia

What’s on view: Three solo shows, and a plant-centric group show curated by Caroline Picard. A giant T-shirt, an old phone connected to a voice message, posters celebrating vaginas, a seed vending machine, and a cat feeder that looks like Donald Trump are among the more fun highlights in the project spaces.

Tuesday Links: All In

Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:49:46 +0000

Damien Hirst created the above art work in support of Britain staying in the EU.

Artists and curators overwhelmingly do not support the Brexit. [Frieze Magazine]
“If the medieval herald, a town crier, existed today, it would likely be a brand ambassador for Airbnb, or maybe a freelance creative-infiltrator shouting aphorisms about being self-made. Sammak’s works are a constellation of urban surpluses and negations, mapping out the city-as-paradox illustrating separate spaces and times the infiltrator and the native occupy. The high-rise and the nail house facilitate starkly different livelihoods for their respective occupants. Town Crier is a successful testament to the malignant practices of the gentrifier. The modern city project isn’t aesthetic revitalization, it’s disaster relief.” —F.T. Hinton on Borna Sammak: Town Crier at American Medium. This show sounds, and looks, really good. Sammak recreates candy-colored signage and detritus from a slightly more over-the-top version of contemporary Brooklyn. [aqnb]
Douglas Coupland speculates on the future of tech, art, and the long-anticipated event horizon where they both collapse in on one another. Chiefly: what if there are no more big, revolutionary advances coming in either field? Maybe we’ll never have another moment as transformative as Warhol or smartphones. And maybe (likely) we shouldn’t be looking to Silicon Valley—whose cultural proclivities are conservative or kitschy—to define/shape the future of art. [e-flux]
Have we reached peak think-piece-ery? Here’s a letter-to-the-editor/reply from the author (over a review of Nicole Eisenman’s new show) that is so disposed to the semantics of identity politics that the art and the artist are almost absent from the conversation. Is the reality of contemporary art discourse just listing the demographics of artists and writers and critical theory references? I can’t even figure out what this is about, except for that fact that the painter is queer and female and the author is Asian. [Hyperallergic]
TSA New York’s annual Flat File program has put out a call for entries. Submit 4 images of small, unframed work by July 31st for the chance to be shown in the gallery in December and have your work kept on file for sale through next year. [Tiger Strikes Asteroid]
John Reuter, a man who has been working to stave off the extinction of one of the world’s largest cameras—the 20x24 inch Polaroid camera—is throwing in the towel. He cites lack of demand. Chuck Close is interviewed for the piece and is not happy. [The New York Times]
What kind of bullshit is this? In early June New York’s City Council passed a measure that would impose a time limit on the public review process at the Landmarks Preservation Commission—(one year for individual properties, two for historic districts). Protestors are asking Mayor Bill DeBlasio to veto the bill. [Curbed]
Artist Jumana Jaber and her family, including her son, a dissident musician, were able to flee Syria with the help of the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund. Now she teaches at Montclair State University (and make great assemblage-paintings) and her family can be as outspoken about the Syrian regime as they wish. This is exactly the kind of story we should be hearing more of out of the crisis. Sadly, their J-1 exchange visitor and companion visas will expire and they need to go through the insanely complicated process of applying for refugee status. [PRI]
Alissa Walker hails “The Floating Piers” in Sulzano, Italy as “Christo's First Truly Important Work of Art.” Yes, many of Christo’s other pieces have been beautiful, but these temporary bridges could be a prototype for climate-change-related disaster relief, including a temporary bridge between Williamsburg and Manhattan during the Sandy-necessitated L train shutdown. [Gizmodo]
Missouri is installing energy generating photovoltaic tiles along a section of Route 66. These street pavers were invented by Scott and Julie Brusaw, a couple who claim that replacing all of America’s roads and parking lots with their pavers would generate more than three times the country’s electricity consumption in 2009. Let’s hope this process goes well. [Curbed]

GIF of the Day: Sky Museum by Avoid Obvious Architects

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 20:48:35 +0000

Avoid Obvious Architects created this fantastical museum proposal for the city of Suncheon, South Korea. Traditionally, Korean museums are set in a natural landscape, but since Suncheon doesn’t have much open space, Avoid Obvious Architects propose an elevated structure that gives visitors a view of the sky. The coolest feature: it’s shaped like a crane so artists and curators can dangle artwork for the public to see from below.

Why Artists Make Better Landlords: An Interview with Akin Collective’s Oliver Pauk and Michael Vickers

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 13:37:21 +0000

From left, artists Michael Vickers and Oliver Pauk, pictured in Akin Collective's Lansdowne Studios. (Credit: Akin Collective)

The belief that artists are too independent or focused on their career to self-organize needs to die. Artists have the capacity to be both generous and great.

Take, for example, the affordable housing movement, and the artists dispelling the traditional artist-as-gentrifier-enabler role. Theaster Gates transformed vacant and abandoned buildings in his neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side by establishing a foundation, and then partnering with the city and developers to rehab a public housing complex into mixed-income housing. In Houston, Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses covers six blocks in the Third Ward, providing affordable housing for low-income tenants. Mark Bradford’s Art + Practice not only brings contemporary art programming to Los Angeles’s Leimert Park, but also provides social services for youth in the city’s foster care system. Artists have the potential to readdress urban displacement and ensure affordable space still exists for art by pulling up their sleeves and playing a bigger entrepreneurial role in real estate development.

Monday Links: Kurt Cobain, Nan Goldin, Chewbacca Mom All Still in the News

Mon, 20 Jun 2016 10:49:42 +0000

OMG. Hasbro made a custom “Chewbacca Mom” action figure for the accidental Facebook celebrity. How has her "15 minutes" stretched this long?[TIME]

Great news on the housing affordability front: the New York senate has passed a bill banning short-term rentals of entire apartments. This means individuals or management companies can’t hoard apartments to sublet via Airbnb. That’s a trend that’s been well-documented as a major drain on affordable housing stock in places such as San Francisco and Barcelona. The downside is, if you live alone, it’s going to be a lot harder to sublet your already exorbitantly expensive place if you leave town for less than a month. Is this going to push the Airbnb hustlers across the Hudson into Jersey City? [The Verge]

Whoa! Kurt Cobain apparently made a bunch of visual art, and now it’s going on tour. Jeff Jampol runs a company that manages the estates of deceased rockstars, and he’s working with Courtney Love to put the exhibition together. [Vulture]

Curbed kicked off a comment storm over the weekend by asking readers what they thought the ugliest building in New York is. The takeaway: Curbed readers are not fans of modernism and have clearly not spent much time in Queens. [Curbed]

Here’s a nice Father’s Day art story: influential photographer William Eggleston and his textile-designer daughter Andra have teamed up to translate his abstract drawings into collaborative fabric prints. [CBS]

Anyone seeking to re-live the extraordinary excess of Art Basel Miami? We rediscovered this instagram post by AES+F over the weekend and haven’t been able to stop watching it. [@aesplusf]

I questioned whether Nan Goldin’s “Ballad of Sexual Dependency” really needed to be reviewed when I first saw the headline on artnet. It’s a great piece, but hasn’t everyone who reads that magazine seen that work 100 times over by now? It shows everywhere. But then I read Christian Viveros-Faune review and was reminded why we read reviews in the first place: they add another layer of experience to the work. From the review, “Sitting through Goldin's 700-image slideshow felt, I realized just days ago, not unlike waking up to news of another mass shooting. Virtually overnight, people whose youth had been electric with possibility were cruelly no longer in the picture. Meantime, their photographic likenesses morphed from simple snapshots into something else: portraits that turned elegiac, hopeful, monumental even.” [artnet News]

Star Trek actor Anton Yelchin died this weekend in a bizarre car accident. The 27 year-old actor, who played Pavel Chekov in the new “reboot” films, was run over by his own car after he parked on a hill and was standing behind the vehicle. [CNN]

Dylan Schenker writes about the International Digital Arts Biennial and what happens when the programming and aesthetics of a machine butt up against the will of humans—a theme within the biennial. [Creative Applications]

Other creative industries are waking up to the crisis the art world has been justifiably freaking out over: gentrification is draining talent from the capitals of the culture sector. This piece does a pretty good job of outlining just how problematic the increase in housing costs can be, through the eyes of fashion designers. [Business of Fashion]

GIF of the Day: Podcast Fire Cauldron

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 18:27:05 +0000

The artists at Spirit Surfers all post anonymously, so who made this GIF is anybody’s guess. Here, the podcast icon is either being sacrificed or exalted. Whatever the case, the icon is a beacon of light and promise—thus bearing the qualities of pretty much any online tech company logo.

The 150th Wing: Medium Quality Screen Captures

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 18:00:56 +0000

We at AFC decided to start exploring the 150th Wing of the Internet to assuage concerns that the internet was becoming increasingly more horrible and less weird. But weird and horrible don’t have to be mutually exclusive, and there’s a Facebook community to prove it.

Last year, someone added me to the Facebook group Medium Quality Screen Captures. Suddenly, my newsfeed was full of even more inane or absurd content, cheesy viral marketing, and clickbait than I was accustomed to filtering out. Or rather, documentation of the above net detritus. In screen capture format, the viral videos don’t play, the outrageous headlines can’t be clicked on, and the maddening ill-informed political rants can’t be replied to. These base junk-products of the endless stream of web content are reduced to a neutered archive through the miracle of “post-photography”. In a sense, the informal collective performs a similar function to the VHS-remixing art group Everything is Terrible—skimming the surface of the media we’re semi-non-consentually bombarded with daily online rather than mining the bowels of late-night infomericals and low-budget religious films. In either case, the results are hilarious.

The Printing's on the Wall: Eva Wylie at ICA Baltimore

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 15:40:29 +0000

Eva Wylie, "Down The Line," silkscreen on wall, 2016.

Eva Wylie: Down the Line Presented by ICA Baltimore SpaceCamp 16 W. North Ave, Baltimore, MD On view until July 1

I wasn’t quite sure how to photograph Eva Wylie’s mural “Down the Line,” which has been silkscreened directly on the wall at Space Camp. It’s most enjoyable in macro close-up, where the amount of meticulous labor and number of precisely-aligned layers of color are visible. But an image of these tiny images doesn’t really tell us much. They’re just mundane houseplants, crumpled blankets, or birds. Each individual panel could be a twee greeting card. Others areas appear to be based on out-of-focus photographs. Viewed in succession, they evoke a video collage more than a print. To fully appreciate the scope of Wylie’s undertaking, one must stand across the room, but then we’re presented with a chaotic, seemingly unfinished wallpaper with no apparent rhyme or reason other than an irregular grid of “X’ shaped compositions.

Friday Links: Punk's Not Dead at Art Basel, Begs to Be Euthanized

Fri, 17 Jun 2016 10:38:15 +0000

Huh. For some reason, someone made a kawaii commercial for Donald Trump. [Youtube]

The DAO has been attacked. The distributed autonomous organization which had centralized in one fund over $150 million in crytocurrency was hacked early this morning, with hackers siphoning off so far over $3.5 million ether, the DAO’s digital currency. To put in perspective: ether is trading at $17.50 per coin, putting the value of the stolen currency at over $60 million. [CoinDesk]

Here’s a GIF of a grandmother (the Queen) telling her grandson (the Prince) to stand up during her 90th birthday celebration. [Indy100]

Last month, Texas troubadour Guy Clark passed away. One of his final wishes, it turns out, was to have his longtime friend, singer and artist Terry Allen, make a sculpture using his ashes. “I think it was kind of like a ‘Fuck You, Terry,” joked Allen. [Glasstire, Rolling Stone]

What’s the next frontier? For Star Trek, which is marking its 50th anniversary with a new movie and TV series, turns out its unifying ts fanbase. Trekkies basically invented fandom — slash fiction, for instance, was famously coined from all the “Kirk/Spock” stories written by female fans as far back as the early 1970s — and it looks like their fan films are now competing with the official franchise productions. At the center of this is Axanar, a fan film that crowdfunded a seven-figure budget, and is now being sued by Paramount and CBS for copyright infringement. [BuzzFeed]

San Francisco poet Bill Berkson has passed away. Linked to the New York School of poets and artists, Berkson went on to become a prolific art critic, publishing reviews in Art News and Artforum. He also taught art history and critical writing at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1984 to 2008. [SF Gate]

According to this list of punk-inspired artworks for sale at Art Basel, punk’s not dead. But Jesus Christ, if it were it would be rolling in its grave. [The Art Newspaper]

Here’s good news: even if you suck at making art, the act still reduces stress hormones, according to researchers. [The Creators Project]

Sun Ping has been expelled from the official China Artists Association because, according to the CAA, Ping "ruined calligraphy at will and trampled on civilization.” Ping’s crime? A video of a woman writing calligraphy with her vagina. [artnet News]

Privately-owned “public art” can be sold or destroyed without governmental approval, in most cases. Now, Pittsburgh is trying to brainstorm ways to keep track of, and hopefully preserve, all the artwork in the public sphere that the public doesn’t actually own. [Next City]

Holland Cotter writes about the Antonio Lopez survey that just opened at El Museo del Barrio. As this show charts, Lopez created an out-gay art and helped change the ethnic profile of the fashion industry. Cotter gives the show two thumbs up, calling his art “true L.G.B.T.Q., loud and proud and unguarded.” [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Captain Picard Day Overload

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 20:12:12 +0000

Captain’s Log, stardate 47457.1. We are in holding position, as I am being forced to interrupt my afternoon tea time with an art contest for the Enterprise’s schoolchildren. Yes, it is the unfortunate annual Captain Picard Day, where the observation lounge will be decked out with a crayon and paint scrawled banner allowing the floodgates to open on bad kids art. On top of it, the work is all based on my likeness. It is awkward, as I don’t necessarily feel comfortable with these voudou doll-like renditions. (Just between us, but I asked Admiral Blackwell to send a priority one message so I can cut it short.) I can’t stand how Troi indulges these misdirected creative escapades among the crew’s children. Sure, I consider myself a role model, but I also exceed warp speed limitations! I really don’t see why we have to do this every year.

Inaugural Toronto Art Book Fair Pages City's Independent Print Culture

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 18:18:12 +0000

Joi Arcand's "The Beautiful NDN Supermaidens" (2014). The photo-based artist is one of the guest speakers at the Toronto Art Book Fair. (Credit: Arcand/TOABF)

The rise of art fairs has not been all that bad. Yes, we’re stuck with the same galleries showing the same work, but we’ve also seen a rise in alternative venues, the most common being art book fairs. Whether it’s LA or New York, the fairs often have a frenetic energy, particularly the sections dedicated to artist-made zines, which in addition to artist books, often include performances, the sale of related ephemera (think buttons and stickers) and zealous trading. Fair sections divide exhibitors by rare book dealers, distributors and artists. Even the poorest of us can afford something at the fair, which means every visitor can leave with a sense of being able to directly support the livelihood of artists.

Thursday Links: Make It So

Thu, 16 Jun 2016 11:05:41 +0000

Artnews SA, the Polish Company that briefly owned ARTnews and Art in America, has filed for bankruptcy and will be liquidating all its assets. The bankruptcy was filed just two weeks after Peter Brant assumed all the assets for both publications, and announced that Brant Publications has become their legal owner. [artnet News]
“‘The Present in Drag’ errs by so uniformly investing in the corporate gaze that any radical vision of emancipation from this aesthetic comes off as puritanical. Consumer options are tragically offered as real options. How do we reconcile this corporate violence — which reduces our bodies, wants and needs to data with such cruel effect — with its embodiment by artists, however self-aware?” Karen Archey reviews DIS’s curation of the Berlin Biennale. [Frieze]
Anti-ISIS hacktivists have hit the Internet Archive. The open-access digital library and host of the WayBack Machine were hit with a DDoS attack yesterday because they inadvertently host user-uploaded ISIS propaganda materials. [Motherboard]
Brazilian artist Vik Muniz has a show at Mauritshuis in The Hague showcasing life-sized models of the flip-sides of famous paintings. Expectedly, the details are mundane — ”Mona Lisa” has a written message that says “this way up”, while Matisse’s “Red Studio” is covered in chicken wire. “The back reflects the artist’s studio, it has nails, it has hardware and is always changing. It shows the museum’s role as conservator, too,” says Muniz. [Guardian]
A long-list Gauguin floral still life has been rediscovered in a Connecticut auction house. [Art Newspaper]
Half of the Corcoran art school’s full-time faculty were laid off last month. To put in perspective, out of 19 full-time faculty, only 9 are coming back in the fall.The loss coincides with the school’s class of 2016 graduation ceremony, but also comes at a time of budget cuts, a shrinking student body, and the school’s integration into George Washington University. The latter has become a growing concern for the historical art school’s community, who have felt that the ongoing merger has had a lack of transparency in its proceedings. [Hyperallergic]
Diana Y. Chou has been hired by the San Diego Museum of Art as its new associate curator of East Asian art. Chou has organized museum shows in the United States and Taiwan for the past 15 years, and consulted with the Carnegie when it was reinstalling its Asian art galleries. At the San Diego Museum, she’ll be overseeing a collection containing 7,000 works, organizing shows and being involved with its acquisitions. [Artforum]
Former MoMA film curator Lawrence Kardish weighs in on the institution’s controversial firing of long-time assistant curator of film Sally Berger: “I no longer understand what goes on in my old stomping grounds… Doesn’t a curator have the right to pick and choose what is to be shown under his/her auspices?” Berger’s firing last week was tied with the wrongful cancellation of “Under the Sun”, a documentary about North Korea from February’s Doc Fortnight festival. [Indiewire]
We’ve been looking forward to this all year: it’s Captain Picard Day, so here’s all the Earl Grey recipes you ever needed. [Nerdist]

NSFW GIF of the Hump-Day: Jessica Wilson's Tongue Penis

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 19:34:55 +0000

In the animal kingdom, detachable penises are fairly common. Look at the argonaut. This species of octopus have polarizing size difference between genders: the female can grow as large as four inches, while the male can only grow 3/4 inch. So when the male wants to mate, his hectocotylus fills up with sperm, but then will detach from its body in order to insert itself in the female’s pallial cavity. This is sadly the male’s only chance: he typically dies soon after mating, while the female lives long and prosperous.

This is all being said in light of Jessica Wilson’s “Tongue Penis”, a GIF that was included in Rollin Leonard’s Anatomize GIF show, which closed out his Trunks, Stems & Heads solo at Transfer in 2013. (Full disclosure: I was among the 50 participating artists in the show.) Here, the detachable swimming penis spars with a tongue, with neither body part making contact. GIF after the jump.

Chroma Lives: This is What a Tasteful Condo Showroom Looks Like

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 15:56:43 +0000

Installation view of Chroma Lives. Credit: Lili Huston-Herterich

Chroma Lives

Curated by Erin Alexa Freedman and Lili Huston-Herterich

The New Residences of Yorkville Plaza (21 Avenue Road)

On now until June 30

Artists: Joshua Brolly, Connor Crawford, Laura Dawe, Mike Goldby, Heather Goodchild, Oliver Husain, Tim Jocelyn, Laurie Kang, Jeremy Laing, Brittany MacDougall, Tammy McClennan, Pasha Moezzi, Manden Murphy, Roula Partheniou, Shakeel Rehemtulla & Dynasty, Wanze Song, Kristian Spreen and Brad Tinmouth

Wednesday Links: Before Orlando, There was UpStairs Lounge

Wed, 15 Jun 2016 11:07:48 +0000

One of the only artifacts from the Upstairs Lounge in Skylar Fein’s “Remember the UpStairs Lounge” (2008) at the Prospect.1 biennial in New Orleans. This “Farnese Hercules” was recovered from the 1973 fire of the New Orleans gay bar and kept by a patron for decades. Credit" Hyperallergic

“So, we’re American. And when the enemies of the US want to strike at US symbols, they now strike at us! LGBT equality would seem to be another American export than can be resented and attacked as American. For anyone used to being an pariah, this will take some getting used to.” In 2008, Skylar Fein’s “Remember the UpStairs Lounge” showed at New Orleans’ Prospect.1 biennial. The installation recreated aspects of the popular 1970s gay bar that was tragically set fire by an arsonist and killed 32 people. In light of Orlando, Hrag Vartanian revisits the work, and talks with the artist about the US’s complicated history of anti-LGBTQ violence. [Hyperallergic]
A change of guard: Barbara M. Vogelstein will succeed Elizabeth A. Sackler as chair of of the Brooklyn Museum’s board of trustees. Vogelstein has three decades experience in private equity investing, and served on the institution’s board from 2001-2010 and then again since 3015. Vogelstein was involved in the search for the museum’s new director, and she and her husband endowed the museum’s contemporary art curator position in 2005. [Artforum]
Adrian Searle glowingly reviews the Switchhouse, the Tate Modern’s new extension. The off kilter pyramid matches Herzog & de Meuron’s original conversion of Bankside power station into contemporary art gallery in 2000. And the show’s pretty good! Actual conversations between art works occur. [The Guardian]
Rose Eveleth just launched a new column exploring design bias in medical research and products. First up, artificial hearts. Even though women are more likely to die on transplant lists, artificial hearts aren’t designed for them — in fact, an artificial heart typically fits 80% of men and only 20% of women. [Motherboard]
London’s public transportation system has a new screen-friendly typeface. The new typeface, a revamp of the original 100 year old Johnson typeface, has a lighter weight made for mobile reading, while retaining certain idiosyncrasies like the “bulbous ‘U’”. [The Verge]
Yes, this happened today: UK Independent Party leader Nigel Farage and Bob Geldof had a boat war on the Thames. The Brexit debate just got real. [Telegraph]
Merray Gerges chats with Montreal’s GothShakira, who has been getting a lot of media traction for her intersectional feminist image macros on Instagram. [Canadian Art]
By 2020, the New York skyline will look f-ugly. Get ready for skyscrapers—a rendering by CityReality. [Curbed]
The International Association of Art Critics has announced that this year’s winner of AICA Incentive Award for Young Critics, will receive a trip to Havana, Cuba, to attend the AICA Congress this October. Submit a review by July 29th. [AICA via: ARTnews]
At the VIP opening of the new Tate Modern opening, over 150 feminist activists protested the institution’s decision to show work by Carl Andre, chanting “oi Tate, we’ve got a vendetta, where the fuck is Ana Mendieta?”. Organized by the WHEREISANAMENDIETA movement, the protesters are decrying the exhibition of Andre’s work — not to mention the failure to show Mendieta’s work in the same space, even though the Tate has five works in storage — as a glorification of violent men within the art institution. [Dazed]
Talk about exploitation: Jenny Lorenzo and Brittany Ashley, both popular producers/personalities for Buzzfeed’s Motion Pictures company, were fired for appearing in “Gente-Fied”, a web series produced by actor America Ferrera. Why? Because Lorenzo and Ashley apparently breached the non-compete clause in their contracts. Even though non-compete agreements are fairly common in tech and engineering jobs, digital media companies like Buzzfeed are now adopting them. It’s a backwards revival of the old Hollywood studio system, back when stars signed ironclad 7-year contracts. [Politico]
Breaking: Bloomberg’s art market reporter Katya Kazakina confirms billionaire Leon Black has won ownership of Picasso’s “Bust of a Woman” plaster sculpture. At the center of an international legal drama between Gagosian and the Qatari royal family, the dispute stemmed from Picasso’s daughter, Maya Widmaeier-Picasso, selling the work not once but twice to both parties. [@artdetective]
Art Basel reports are coming in: Dealers are bringing their best work to counter-act the narrative that says the market is down. [ARTnews]

IMG MGMT: Ruin Value

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:51:56 +0000

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is a series of essays produced by artists. This week's author Aaron Williams is an interdisciplinary artist working in Queens. Through sculpture, photography and video, his work takes a critical look at common art-making practices and ideologies.

His work has been exhibited in New York at spaces including Max Protetch, Baumgartner Gallery and Mulherin Projects, where he most recently showed at their Spring Break Art Fair booth; at LaMontagne Gallery in Boston and the Portland Museum, as well as various galleries and project spaces in the US and abroad.]

I keep a folder of images on my desktop, culled from internet searches and random meanderings around the net. Many of these phenomena continue to have a prominent presence on the internet, and my interest is partially based on their persistent cultural fascination. There isn’t much curation involved in these images, and I’m not always sure why an image calls to my collection, but themes arise nonetheless. A unifying quality is the sense of reality which sets in after the breakdown of a system: bygone expressions of power like Brutalist architecture, panopticons, and military camouflage. I feel ambivalent about these images; as an artist, I'm attracted to their formal qualities, and as a citizen, I am equally repulsed by the images of mass control. From an artistic standpoint, does one type of viewership take precedence over the other? Does form preclude content?

Tuesday Links: The End of the World as Routed Through an Aaliyah Video

Tue, 14 Jun 2016 10:43:56 +0000

Cécile B Evans, "What the Heart Wants" at the Berlin Biennale

In this podcast, Darren Walker of the Ford Foundation discusses keeping artists in New York and the city’s affordability crisis. Confession: I haven’t heard the whole piece, but apparently the foundation is shifting its focus to inequality. [WNYC]

Jason Farago is not a fan of the DIS-curated Berlin Biennale. It’s too sarcastic, it’s offensively aloof in the context of unfolding humanitarian crisis, the organizers seem to have given up faith in the goodness of art in favor of courting LOLs—these all sound like valid criticisms. We haven’t seen the Biennale yet, but it seems as if DIS was more concerned with keeping the curation “on brand” than making sure works didn’t get drowned out in a sea of normcore sameness. Which is a shame, because DIS’s politics and cleverness beyond surface could’ve really shown through with a project on this scale. Still, Farago notes highlights. On Cécile B Evans’ video installation: “Evans imagines the end of the world as routed through an Aaliyah video, in which love itself has been commoditised, and slickness is no escape from psychological or ecological meltdown.” [The Guardian]

Art Basel’s Unlimited section—where work that’s too big for traditional galleries is presented—has a record breaking 88 massive pieces on view this year. It’s curated by Gianni Jetzer of the Hirschorn Museum, and a lot of the work looks pretty boring but very big. A notable exception, Hans Op de Beeck’s concrete “The Collector’s House” is so cool I would live in this installation. [Artsy]

Liste charges a fee to galleries that present work by artists who are more than 40 years old. Its focus remains on youth. Is it any good this year? Anything remarkable about the fair? Impossible to tell from Nate Freeman’s report, which mostly just says it’s retained its youthful spirit. [ARTnews]

Ah, the convoluted web of art, real estate, and bankruptcy. Ace Gallery in Los Angeles is in serious financial straits, paying massive rent on a building that’s become central to their brand identity. But I’m not sure real estate alone is to blame for Ace’s dilemma—friends who have worked with Ace tell me it’s a mess across the board, from rumors about attempting to sell work it didn’t technically own to last-minute pull-outs from art fairs. Ace sounds like it’s been poorly managed on many fronts. [The Art Newspaper]

¡Escandalo! The Clark Art Institute has loaned 28 paintings from the Prado Museum—including work from Titian, Tintoretto, Guercino, Guido Reni, and Peter Paul Rubens— for an exhibition about art the Spanish royal family had to hide from the Catholic Church because it was too sexy. The exhibition is called Splendor, Myth, Vision, (really? That sounds like a New Age self-help book, not an exhibition about secret sexy paintings) and runs through October. [Observer]

Kaleidoscopic GIFs by Anna Taberko. [Colossal]

Bret McCabe reviews Hasan Elahi’s latest show and I really want to see it. Elahi obsessively documents his movements, meals, and minutia as an absurdist critique of the surveillance state. The truly ironic thing about his work, though, is that it actually discloses less than most people’s social media presences. [BmoreArt]

GIF of the Day: Cheer Up with AB Soto Dancing GIFs

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 19:36:42 +0000

For the past month or so, my boyfriend and I have had this inside joke thing where one of us will surprise the other with an animated GIF of AB Soto dancing whenever the other one is sad or stressed-out or otherwise feeling blue. It’s uncanny how effective Soto’s dancing is at instantly cheering us up. Like, it’s impossible to gaze upon this glittery master of cha-cha and not smile.

This Week's Must-See Events: Queer Power Edition

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 18:04:03 +0000

Illustration by Antonio Lopez, whose retrospective opens Tuesday at El Museo del Barrio.

Monday’s been a rough day for us here at AFC as I’m sure it has for many readers. We’re still processing the horrific news of Orlando’s mass killing Sunday morning and it’s made writing much of anything difficult. Is there anything that can be said on the subject of guns, prayers, Islam, hate crimes and ISIS that social media hasn’t covered?

Monday Links: Art Market Gazes at Navel, Approves

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 11:03:20 +0000

John William Waterhouse, “Echo and Narcissus,” 1903.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Black Friday” guide to shopping at art fairs recommends pretty much everything that would piss off gallerists short of “touch the art”. [The Wall Street Journal]

Here’s an excellent explanation of the features and policies of suburbia that make it such a soul-crushing realm. [Quartz]

We’re relieved to hear that Kenya Michaels—the tiny Puerto Rican drag queen who won America’s hearts on Rupaul’s Drag Race and countless GIFs—escaped the shooting at Pulse in Orlando. Kenya performed at the club at midnight, and apparently managed to make it out shortly after the shooting starting. [Paper Magazine]

Jonathan Jones makes a pretty compelling argument that space photography is the best photography. [The Guardian]

WNYC has launched a new week long series discussing affordability in New York for artists, called “Making it in New York”. The first feature gives a very broad overview of the problem. Naturally, PS109, an artist only affordable workspace launched by artspace is featured, along with plenty of discussion about gentrification. [WNYC]

This year’s Art Basel First Choice VIP card gets holders exclusive access to exhibitions, private lounges, champagne toasts, brunches… and free rides on Basel’s public transit? Yep. Leave the chauffeur at home, because your little pink card is good for unlimited tram and bus rides. [artnet News]

As Art Basel approaches, the art market stories come fast and furious. Here’s a comparison between venture capitalist backed unicorns (tech start-ups valued at over 1 billion) and the art market. The take home? Evaluate the product not its monetary value. [The New Yorker]

A couple of interesting snippets from the first of a four part series on the art market produced by Artsy and UBS. First, an unidentified collector explaining that for artists, being acquired by a private collection is actually better than a museum because they give artists more show freedom than a museum would. The second being Josh Baer postulating that there are not art movements—except the art market. LOLOLOL. Does the art market really need an ad for itself? Because that’s essentially what this series is. [Artsy]

Wow. An anarchist collective that runs a live/work performance space in Detroit just beat a developer in a competition for lots adjoining their property. This is unusual good news in the gentrification wars. [Detroit Free Press]

GIF of the Day: Grow Cable by Iizawa Mio

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 18:58:40 +0000

Grow Cable by Iizawa Mio

Whenever I forget my cell phone at home, it feels as if I left my third arm behind. Now, you can actually manifest your co-dependence to your mobile device with this curiosity. Buy this weird umbilical cord phone charger, Grow Cable by Japanese Artist, Iizawa Mio on Etsy for $5,751.97. Featured in Discover Magazine as a recommended "geeky gift," Mio says the cable "represent(s) people’s dependence on their iPhones, just as a growing baby depends on its mother."

I Won the Housing Lottery & Got a Poor Door

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 14:04:16 +0000

The original image has been removed at the request of the owner

One of the most common questions artists ask each other at openings is, “Where do you live?” Perhaps equivalent to the typical New Yorker’s “What do you do?”, most of the artists I’m meeting these days live in Brooklyn. On the rare occasion an artist like me answers “Manhattan,” eyebrows raise.

At least this has been my recent experience, so I quickly caveat with, “I won the housing lottery.” This usually provokes responses like, “Wow, that’s like winning the lottery!” Yes, it is. In fact, the odds were approximately 0.06%.

Friday Links: Cutest Ass in Hammock

Fri, 10 Jun 2016 10:23:52 +0000

We’re not usually up-to-date with pop culture gossip, but Johnny Depp is apparently in the midst of a fucked-up divorce, during which allegations of abuse were made against him. In anticipation of it being a pricey legal affair, Depp is selling his collection of Basquiats at Christie’s later this month. Can somebody please buy these for a museum so they don’t end up in a mutual fund’s storage locker in Delaware for 50 years? [The Daily Mail]
Alex Rotter will join Christie’s as their new chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art Americas. Rotter left Sotheby’s in February during a round of buy outs and the hiring of Amy Cappellazzo’s art advisory group. [The New York Times]
I have heard nothing but good things about Martin Creed’s solo show at the Armory, which I haven’t seen yet. Except that it’s kind of disgusting (yet endearing at the same time). You can play with balloons, but also watch videos of his mother chewing food, a woman taking a shit, and various people vomiting. I guess there’s something for everyone. [Observer]
The Statue of Liberty Museum only receives about 5000 people day, but that number hasn’t deterred the National Park Service and the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation from planning a new, much larger museum. The new museum would be about 15,000 square feet and privately funded. They are looking for donors. [Curbed]
Canadian Art’s publisher and CEO Jill Birch is leaving for greener pastures. In a statement, the magazine’s board said they were looking forward to their September 22nd Gala. Any press release is an opportunity to fundraise, huh? [Canadian Art]
Instagram has been on a food-related censorship rampage lately, banning everything from the hashtag #eggplant to the account of artist Stephanie Sarley, who posts erotic photos of fruit. They even banned Sue Moseley’s photo of a cake because an algorithm decided it looked too much like a breast. Does the Instagram AI have some sort of sexual/food-related complex? Do androids dream of electric Peeps? Let’s hope they get this porn-or-food dilemma sorted out by the Fourth of July, or we’re going to be looking at a lot of users getting banned for selfies with hot dogs. [SCAD Connector]
Carolina Miranda reflects on the new SF MoMA, what it means for the already gentrified city, and what its inaugural uber blue-chip show signifies. At the very minimum, change.

Wow. Leave it to Scandinavia to solve two problems with one unlikely solution. Thanks to researchers in Iceland, we can now pump captured carbon dioxide gas and rising sea water into volcanos to create solid rock. I can’t even begin to fathom how this process works, but I guess we can look forward to basalt carbonate being the most bountiful art material of the future. [TIME]

GIF of the Day: Pussy Riot by Edith Carron

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 19:14:48 +0000

This is a GIF of Pussy Riot doing their thing by illustrator Edith Carron. It’s cute and colorful but a little rough, just like their brand of punk. The color palette reminds me of my favorite Pussy Riot music video (actually, probably one of my favorite songs of all time) Kropotkin Vodka:

In the video, the band attacks businesses owned/patronized by the Moscow elite who support Putin and turns them into guerrilla concerts. It's pretty fucking badass. Every time I like to think "wow! I'm sure taking a stand by boycotting Apple products!" I have to remind myself that Pussy Riot lit a fashion show on fire with the threat of Russian prison (or likely, worse) hanging over their heads. Rock on, and stay un-arrested you fabulous queens!

SLIDESHOW: Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies; The Animated GIF as Place at GRIN

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 16:57:33 +0000

Last week, GRIN Gallery in Providence opened the AFC-curated exhibition Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies: The Animated GIF as Place. It’s the IRL version of our online exhibition with Providence College—Galleries and will be installed until July 2nd. GRIN sent us these install shots, and it’s pretty remarkable how different and complimentary the physical component feels to the online show.

In the gallery, we displayed GIFs included in the online exhibition from Hugo Moreno, Sara Ludy, Petra Cortright, Dina Kelberman, Ying Miao, Clement Valla, and Gizelle Zatonyl as well as different works from Nicolas Sassoon and Wickerham & Lomax. We also installed two pieces from Victoria Fu—the only artist not included on the website—the video projection “Velvet Peel 2” and animated neon sculpture “Pinch-Zoom.” These are all about the way bodies relate to screens and illusionistic space, so Fu was a perfect fit for an IRL exhibition about digital spaces. For Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies’ physical iteration, the tension of image-as-place was a theme we strove to explore with scale. In GRIN, Dina Kelberman’s Star-Trek-sourced “Doors” are projected nearly life-size on opposite walls, a nod to the fictional holodeck. Using the same projector set up, Gizelle Zatonyl’s sweeping window views of an alien landscape feel immersive beyond the screen when sized and positioned to surround the body. On the other hand, displaying Hugo Moreno and Sara Ludy’s respective GIF series on Electric Objects screens hung like paintings nods to proto-cinematic relationships between location and representation—the sequential stained glass window or sublimist landscape updated for the digital age.

Thursday Links: Selfie Statue Backlash

Thu, 09 Jun 2016 10:19:26 +0000

John Seed has a tongue-in-cheek idea to boost museum attendance: advertise the value of the artwork on display. [The Huffington Post]

Biogenic tattoos are apparently a thing now. Also known as morbid ink, the originally fringe practice of mixing tattoo ink with biogenic materials like cremated ash and even carbonized hair is going mainstream, and has been embraced by biotech startups. [Motherboard]

Our friends at Platform Arts Center in Baltimore have had a break-in, where power tools and exhibition materials such as display monitors were stolen. Please consider donating to their Paypal! [Platform Arts Center]

Houston’s planned mega-suburbs have some weird public art, as Corinna Kirsch discovered in The Woodlands. Now rival enclave Sugar Land has installed a bronze sculpture of two girls taking a selfie. Predictably, the internet is losing its shit about it. [CNET]

The sacrilege of it all: conservators will likely shudder over the recent discovery that a 14th century Italian altarpiece in the collection of London’s National Gallery fell from an easel and broke in half… 27 years ago. [Art Newspaper]

Moscow’s Garage Museum just announced it will be organizing the first Russian art triennial in March 2017. [Artforum]

After seven months behind bars, Russian dissident artist Pyotr Pavlensky is free. Found guilty of setting fire to the door of Russia’s Federal Security Service headquarters as part of a conceptual art piece, the artist avoided jail time but has been fined almost 1 million rubles for damages. He’s refusing to pay the fines, and has asked his supporters not to pay either. [Observer]

Cuba’s National Museum of Fine Arts in Havana has stopped loans to the United States over fears that Cuban expats could sue to have the state-owned artworks seized as retribution for the country’s wealth re-distribution in 1959. Until this situation is resolved, the Bronx Museum’s forthcoming exhibition of contemporary Cuban artists, Wild Noise, will be postponed. [Art Newspaper]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: Vintage Sausage Party

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 19:28:52 +0000

Porntendo is maintained by an elusive figure who GIFs gay porn. Much of the archive features tags like “just bros being bros” (NSFW) or my personal favourite, “it’s a slow-burn fanfic.” Porntendo is especially thorough, even tagging GIFs based on their pixel-widths.

Of particular interest, however, are their growing collection of GIFs from old Bob Mizer softcore films. The queer pioneer basically invented “beefcake” photography, and seeing these GIFs is a Stonewall time capsule of joyful penis swinging.

DYNASTY HANDBAG: img mngmnt

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:21:19 +0000

Hello Fans and Fans I haven't made yet,

Collage is one of my many talents, though I don't use it. All of the images you see here were taken by professional photographers in order to promote my performance work. I hope you enjoy this portfolio, documenting my illustrious career as rubberband-bodied mind janitor.

This isn't to promote a show, more to welcome a new famous child into the world.

Wednesday Links: Eggplant Emoji Forever

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 11:08:33 +0000

Will any of the above new emojis replace the eggplant as the definitive dick symbol? According to a mobile keyboard expert, probably not. [Motherboard]
Carey Dunne delves into the Smithsonian Archive’s collection of artists’ hand-written letters, and the insights it reveals into their lives and work. Ray Johnson’s letter to gallerist Eva Lee is child-like and to the point: “EVA — HELLO / RAY”, and ends with his signature bunny head. Meanwhile architect Eero Saarinen, who designed JFK Airport, had dyslexia, and while precise, his writing was sometimes reversed. [Hyperallergic]
Norway’s not in hot diplomatic waters when it was discovered that a drive from its Royal Embassy to Israel was arrested last week for attempting to smuggle a stash of ancient artifacts. The car was travelling from Jordan and was stopped along a checkpoint to Jerusalem. Worst is that due to protocol, diplomatic vehicles are typically not searched, making this a huge security breach. [The Art Newspaper]
Francesco Bonami on the changing role of the curator in the past ten years: “we became self-delusional main characters and at the same time totally irrelevant in relation to the market and the artists’ career.” [artnet News]
Buffalo’s Albright-Knox has announced it’ll go with Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, to oversee its $80 million expansion. [New York Times]
One of Zaha Hadid’s final buildings will be built at 220 11th Avenue. [Curbed]
Book Marks, dubbed the “Rotten Tomatoes for books”, launched this week, and it seems like none of the books have a letter grade rating below B-. So why does Book Marks have such a hard time separating the good from the mediocre? According to Alex Shephard, this simply reflects the current state of literary criticism, and its problem with grade inflation. [New Republic]
In primary news, as expected, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to claim a major party’s presidential nomination last night. [The New York Times]
A bipartisan Senate bill could help make it easier for Holocaust victims to reclaim art looted from them. The bill would allow claims made within six years of when the families discover the art and has been tabled by two senators we never thought would agree on anything—Ted Cruz, the gun-slinging Republican from Texas and Charles Schumer, the popular New York state Senator. [The New York Times]

GIF of the Day: Luchador and Ostriches Attack Convenience Store

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 18:35:53 +0000

This GIF of surveillance camera footage showing a luchador and some ostriches exploding into a convenience store has been making the rounds of social media lately, with lots of comments like “only in Mexico!” …Even though this act of convenience-culture crime weirdness would more likely be the work of Florida Man in that other oddly-violent Spring Break destination.

But obviously, this GIF is too weird (and professional) to be true. Reverse Google-Image-Search leads us back to a YouTube post, and the comments section speculates (likely correctly) that this is a piece of “viral marketing” shudder for a Mexican gum brand. I have to say, this GIF in no way makes me want to purchase gum or instills any sense of brand recognition… so I guess it’s a fail on that front. But it’s still the GIF of the Day, because it’s both proof that your art school degree can still be fun even if applied to a career in advertising. And it’s one more piece of evidence in the “Gentrification of the internet” panic: they’ve come for our GIFs.

Call for Submissions: We Are SO Not Getting the Security Deposit Back; a Guide to Defunct Artist-Run Spaces.

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 15:18:22 +0000

Sigrid Lauren, shot by The Copycat Project (Alex Wein and Rob Brulinski) in her former live/work loft.

Look around the sanitized streets of any contemporary city, and there’s a secret, often subversive history at risk of being forgotten. What’s now the nanny’s room in Brownstone Brooklyn might’ve been a tiny gallery in a riotous punk house. An American Apparel could have once been home to a cooperatively-run storefront space. And undoubtedly, those renovated loft condos once housed artists’ exhibition and studio spaces. Our cities are elephant graveyards of generations’ of artist’s aspirations and hard work made temporarily tangible. We ought to remember the artist-run space.

Tuesday Links: Dick Drawn on Rondinone Sculpture in Super-Original Defacement

Tue, 07 Jun 2016 10:09:04 +0000

A visitor to SFMOMA tripped and fell in into Andy Warhol’s “Triple Elvis .” The museum estimates damage was minimal, but it’s been removed from display and is being evaluated by conservators. [The Los Angeles Times]

Ugo Rondinone's “Seven Magic Mountains,” a public sculpture comprising stacked, brightly-painted boulders, has been vandalized. It’s installed in the desert outside of Las Vegas, and predictably, someone drew a dick on it, in addition to "666" and the text "HELLA SPIDER", whatever that means. [artnet News]

Did the Louvre do something to piss of the Old Testament God? Just after the record-breaking floodwaters receded away from the museum, a fire broke out at a construction site on the block. The museum is planning to reopen tomorrow, pending no earthquakes or plagues of locusts. [The Telegraph]

The town of Elgin, Illinois, has removed the Dave Powers mural “American Nocturne” from public view and into an indoor cultural center. The mural depicts a lynch mob, but was on display for about a decade before it was deemed too offensive for outdoor display. [Blogging Censorship]

Gilbert & George, the controversy-courting queer art pioneers, are opening a nonprofit art center in the East London neighborhood where they’ve lived and worked since 1969. [The Art Newspaper]

Andrew Russeth identifies the trend of nearly-empty, cavernous exhibition spaces, beginning with Andrea Fraser at The Whitney. [ARTnews]

This Week's Must-See Art Events: Old School Survival

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 17:58:48 +0000

Nan Goldin's "Misty, Taboo! And Jimmy Pauletter dressing, NYC 1991" from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Credit: bhavcreativearts.com

Urban survival, whether it’s the cost of living in New York or even riding along Sag Habour in a self-sustaining houseboat, looms largely in this week’s events. Tonight’s lecture at the Morbid Anatomy Museum suggests that this dates back to Weimar Berlin’s era of anarchy and decadence, where fake fakirs — religious ascetics who live solely on alms — got by with their gnarly nails and pins piercing. Flash forward to Saturday’s MoMA opening of Nan Goldin’s famous 1986 visual diary “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”, and those piercings became the battle scars of surviving the East Village’s punk bohemia. Today, we’re thankfully more practical in eking out our incomes: we look to the sun and its instruments (see this Thursday’s opening of the “Heliotropes” group show at Geary Contemporary) or envision terrible futures in our analogue pasts (“that old school dystopia” at Theodore:Art on Friday). But sustainability, if we quickly cut to the chase, really involves supporting each other, which is why this weekend’s workshops around the nuts and bolts of artist finances or even writing and editing an artist statement will get you ahead. No need for any physical scars.

.ART Re-Emerges as "The Art World's Exclusive Domain"

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 13:59:16 +0000

Screen shot of .ART's new website.

Will the days of describing the internet as an ungentrified space finally be over? As the internet becomes an overcrowded domain space, ICANN’s new generic Top Level Domain (TLD) program is showing signs of an emerging virtual real estate boom—or at least that’s been the story for the last several years.

At the center of all this is .ART, which went live last week. The website, dotart.domains, comes less than a year after the widely-contested Top Level Domain (TLD) went to highest bidder UK Creative Ideas Limited. Judging by the art fair-esque logo and elevator pitch calling itself “the art world’s exclusive domain”, it seems the centralized online entity that is now .ART has truly been exploited by commercial interests.

6 Recommendations for Storing File-Based Artworks

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 12:02:35 +0000

Editor’s Note: last month, we launched AFC Workshops: 21st Century Survival for Artists, a two-part series of courses led by artists, educators and art-world insiders designed to give artists the tools to get ahead. Due to the positive response to our May 21 workshops, we decided to run on the blog a series authored by the facilitators summarizing their course’s key takeaways. (If you’re interested, there are a few spots still available for our upcoming June 18 workshops.)

Monday Links: After the Floods

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 10:58:57 +0000

The Zouave statue during Paris's flooding. Credit: CBC

In the wake of the worst flooding Paris has seen in three decades, the Grand Palais exhibition hall reopened as floodwaters slowly recede. The Louvre, which had to move 250,000 works from their basement storage last week at risk of flooding, won’t reopen until Wednesday. [CBC]
St Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum has unveiled a Rubens painting unseen for the past 80 years. “The Resurrection of Christ” only began to be restored in 2012 — it had become warped and darkened over the years — when the institution opened its own restoration center. [The Art Newspaper]
The new website for the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA) is gorgeous. The navigation has shifted away from prioritizing on the front page programming at CCA’s physical space toward a curatorial framework that brings new and old materials on contemporary issues in architecture. “Can a museum be a magazine?” asks Cincinnati Art Museum curator Brian Sholis. “Pushes the Walker Art Center model further.” [@briansholis]
The rise of the surveillance age has inevitably led to a new cottage industry: stickers and plastic slides designed to cover up the front-facing cameras of our laptops, phones and even televisions. [Guardian]
Seph Rodney recaps the American Alliance of Museum’s recent conference, which was focused on the theme of “Power, Influence and Responsibility.” The conference inevitably led to discussions around whether the large organization could truly enact policies that expanded diversity, as well as what portion of the museum field is hostile to ideas like intersectionality; according to Rodney, at one panel focused on museum jargon, the term was referred to by panelists as a “problem” word. One panelist even bafflingly said “I think it’s just a stupid-ass word. It’s pretentious.” [Hyperallergic]
The nonprofit that coordinated the Panama Papers project is suffering cutbacks. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is moving out of its offices to cut costs, and has let go of three contract journalists who helped with the project. [New York Times]
Only at a Japanese baseball game do characters from The Grudge and The Ring throw the first pitch. [Hypebeast]
A eulogy for the “Internet”, the deferential capital-I term that was awestruck by the vast computational “information highway” network. [The Atlantic]
“Why don’t organizers of for affordable space see arts graduates as partners? Because arts graduates haven’t demonstrated an ability to organize and contribute to existing movements for affordable spaces.” Artist, teacher and organizer Caroline Woolard outlines ways artists can contribute to the affordable housing movement. [creativz]
Meanwhile, will we “remember the de Blasio years as the era when real estate ran the city”? Given that the administration has cut generous deals with donor-developers, and one of his much-heralded new housing zones, Flushing West, was cancelled, probably! [NY Daily News]
Of course Muhammad Ali had a personal magician. [Vox]

GIF of the Day: Amber Flash Card

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 19:06:11 +0000

Zach Doughtery’s fossilized SD memory card evokes a future in the great geological time scale where our digital storage could wash up on the shores as Baltic amber. Entitled “Quaternary2015”, the recent work from the the Portland-based artist refers to the current geological time period, and seems to be part of a new series exploring a future where children play outdoors with an Oculus Rift headset on. The rapid spin and black background also recalls the aesthetic of stone and minerals videos found on Youtube, suggesting a preciousness of our electromagnetic data.

What Happens Now That Peter Brant Officially Owns a Big Chunk of the Art Media Landscape?

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 12:02:37 +0000

From left: a dead bird, Peter Brant, and his wife, Stephanie Seymour, at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in 2012. Credit: Art Observed

The concentration of media ownership is never a good thing. Integration leads to anticompetitive behaviour in the marketplace — especially among publications owned by the same parent company. So should the art world be concerned by the recent news that Brant Publications, owned by powerhouse collector Peter Brant, now owns all the assets of Art in America, The Magazine Antiques, Modern Magazine and ARTnews, which joins his flagship, Interview Magazine?

Friday Links: The Breakfast of Champions

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 10:44:28 +0000

Credit: Extra Crispy

How does Jerry Saltz and Roberta Smith do breakfast? Neither cook, so according to this AM-focused interview with Saltz, he goes to a nearby deli and gets four cups of coffee, then puts them in the fridge, and when they’re chill, dump them into big 7-11 Double Gulp cups with ice. Instant iced coffee! [Extra Crispy]
Photographer Tod Seelie is leaving New York for LA because he’s been outpaced by the cost of living, and LA is similar, except it has “huge communal households that are building crazy bikes and tree forts in their yards.” [Gothamist]
A week of heavy rains in Europe has led to serious flooding, and its cost is now hitting institutions. The rising levels of the Seine, for instance, has flooded Paris streets, and and is at its highest level in nearly 35 years. Curators at the Louvre moved 250,000 works from its basement storage upstairs to avoid damage. [CTV]
Early career artists working in digital media, there’s an award for you. Equitable Bank’s Emerging Digital Artists Award is now accepting applications. The award comes with a $5,000 prize, and the judging panel includes myself, artist Alex McLeod and curator Amber Christensen. Deadline is September 15. [EDAA]
Definitely not attachment parenting here: a 7 year old Japanese boy, who had been missing for nearly a week after his parents left in a forest as punishment, was found unharmed. Even though the forest was known to include bears, the parents left him there because he had been throwing rocks at people and cars while playing at a river. [CBC]

GIF of the Day: Happy Birthday, Lotte Reiniger!

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 18:30:28 +0000

Lotte Reiniger's Thumbelina (1954) (all GIFs via Curbed)

Wondering who is responsible for that adorable and whimsical silhouetted animation playing on your desktop in today’s Google Doodle? That would be groundbreaking German director and animator Charlotte “Lotte” Reiniger who would have turned 117 years old today. Not only remembered by Google, Reiniger’s pioneering artistic innovations are also celebrated by a series of fantastical GIFs via Curbed, created from a selection of her over forty films.

The Ramsey Clark Interviews: Defending Saddam Hussein

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 12:30:34 +0000

Rachel Mason, “The Ambassadors” (2008)

I met former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark right after the video of Saddam Hussein’s grisly execution was uploaded to YouTube. Clark had defended Saddam Hussein before the Iraqi Special Tribunal in 2004 and had sincerely hoped that Hussein would live.

The circumstances were strange, since, at the time, I'd been sculpting a series of portrait busts of leaders of global conflicts in order to better understand their humanity. I brought the busts to our meeting, and Clark referred to each subject as a friend; he looked at the little Manuel Noriega and said that people often called him Pineapple Face, a term he hated, because of his acne scars. He had spoken on the phone to both Bernard Coard (deposed president of Granada) as well as Fidel Castro very recently.

The Ramsey Clark Interviews: Strange Birthday With the Kennedys

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 12:03:42 +0000

Ramsey Clark in the White House, 1968. Courtesy of wiki commons

In 2007, I began questioning what it meant to be an artist making expensive commodities in America during a time of war. When I thought about how my creative output connected to global conflicts, I realized that, at the center of everything, was human beings. And I wanted to know about the human beings who were at the center of the conflicts.

Thursday Links: Brexit and Broken Relationships

Thu, 02 Jun 2016 10:36:29 +0000

Michael McTierny's poster (Photograph: Michael McTierny/BSIE; via The Guardian)

Fourteen artists including Tacita Dean, Anthony Gormley, Wolfgang Tillmans and Bob & Roberta Smith have created posters in support of keeping Britain in the EU. The series was commissioned by Britain Stronger In Europe. [The Guardian]
Related: what does the art market have to lose or gain in the June 23 referendum? Many agree that London artists and institutions would lose out on important EU funding and subsidies. Others believe that unnecessary EU legislation — like the artist’s resale right scheme, which was supported by artists but not the rest of the industry — has put the London art market at a severe disadvantage. [artnet News]
Participant Inc.’s founder Lia Gangitano receives a much-deserved profile, recognizing how she has, according to David Colman, “brought witty, raucous and challenging works to the art world’s attention on a modest budget.” Our favorite part of the feature is artist and performer Vaginal Davis’ comment on Gangitano’s collaboration with difficult artists: “I am VERY difficult…I have a disdain for the wealthy and privileged. I offend easily, and am ready to throw down at the slightest provocation.” [New York Times]
Yoga and controversial public sculptures don’t mix. The New York Department of Parks and Recreation is demanding the removal of the noose from Aaron Bell’s 16-foot sculpture Stand Loud, Stand Tall, which is supposed to represent, as Bell explains, “zero tolerance for any and all manifestations of hatred.” Slated to appear in Riverside Park as a part of the parks department’s partnership with the Arts Student League’s Model to Monument Program, the department became concerned because the park also holds “passive recreational activities such as yoga, pilates and senior movement.” [Artforum]
The shortlist for Canada’s Sobey Prize has been revealed. The artists include William Robinson, Jeremy Shaw, Brenda Draney, Charles Stankievech and Hajra Waheed. The winner will be announced in November, and takes home a $50,000 prize. [Canadian Art]
Following Paddle8’s merger with Auctionata, more than a dozen staffers have been laid off or left the online auction house. The departures continue with the exits of chief marketing officer Susan Cernek and Sarah Goulet, head of communications. [ARTnews]
How will they split the collection? Real estate developer Harry Macklowe and his wife of 57 years, Linda Macklowe, are ending their marriage. It appears Macklowe is leaving the former curator and current member of the board of trustees at the Guggenheim for his new girlfriend, Patricia Landeau, president of the the French Friends of the Israel Museum. The couple has a huge postwar and contemporary art collection; valued at $1 billion, it includes works by Franz Kline, Gerhard Richter and Mark Rothko. [artnet News]
Last month, the Senate Finance Committee sent a summary of their findings regarding the practices of tax-exempted private museums to the IRS. Julia Halperin obtained a copy of the report. Key findings include the fact that almost half the 11 museums surveyed — which includes the Brant Foundation, The Broad and the Rubell Family Collection — report fewer than 6,000 visitors per year, and none of them report loans of donated art back to the founders. [Art Newspaper]
Another gallery is fleeing Chelsea, however this time, they’re going to Midtown rather than the increasingly popular Lower East Side. Anton Kern Gallery, which has been in Chelsea for 15 years, will head to a new location on 55th Street, between Madison and 5th Avenue. The gallery’s Chelsea space was sold in 2014 to a condo developer for $24.25 million. [ARTnews]
What is left after a failed relationship other than a broken heart? A lot of random crap as the Museum of Broken Relationships shows in their recently opened Los Angeles location, which displays these previously adored artifacts such as a dinosaur piñata and a Betty Boop doll. The Museum was originally founded by Olinka Vištica and Dražen Grubišić in Croatia as a way to deal with the “emotional collapse” of a breakup. [VICE]
Will artists become obsolete as technology advances further? Google’s newest project Magenta, which will attempt to create original art and music through artificial intelligence, certainly raises that question. [Hyperallergic]

NSFW GIF of the Hump Day: LAZY MOM's Errant Wiener

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 19:13:19 +0000

In April, processed food-obsessed duo LAZY MOM collaborated with art and design studio Eyebodega on “SFW” GIFs for GIPHY. Picture, if you will, a colorful birdhouse giving fellatio to an un-peeled banana, or a donut-like nipple pestle. (At least that’s how I interpreted the tweaked kitchenware — at first I thought it was a rock used for a game of curling.)

It seems LAZY MOM has continued to give perverse food stylings to engineered foods filled with chemicals and additives, this time focusing on the arrow-like adventures of an errant hot dog wiener. More after the jump.

Smoke 'Em if You Got 'Em: “Frida Smoked” at INVISIBLE-EXPORTS

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 18:16:28 +0000

Installation view of Genesis Belanger's Best Blue arrangement #1 (2016), Peter the Last Drag is for You (2016) and Bubble Gum arrangement #1 (2016) (Courtesy the artist and INVISIBLE-EXPORTS)

Frida Smoked INVISIBLE-EXPORTS 89 Eldridge Street, New York, NY On view now until June 19, 2016 Artists: Genesis Belanger, Anne Doran, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Ilse Getz, Irini Miga, and Amanda Nedham

Wednesday Links: Stay Gold, Maltese Eagle Statue

Wed, 01 Jun 2016 10:54:21 +0000

Ron Shore's missing gold and diamond-encrusted eagle (image via Gawker)

In a story straight out of The Maltese Falcon, a five million dollar gold and diamond-encrusted eagle sculpture was stolen right out of the hands of its owner Ron Shore in British Columbia. Shore, who also auditioned 11 times for Donald Trump's The Apprentice, told CNN: “Without the eagle, I have nothing.” With an emerald from the Spanish Atocha shipwreck, the eagle was strangely constructed as a marketing ploy for The World’s Greatest Treasure Hunt, a book series planned to raise money for breast cancer. [CNN]
Artist Darja Bajagić is crying censorship over a decision by Bucharest’s Galeria Nicodim to not show her artwork Bucharest Molly, a fountain depicting a woman wearing jeans that say “Heil Hitler” holding a teddy bear emblazoned with a swastika, in an exhibition on the aesthetics of evil. In a long statement posted to her Tumblr page, Bajagić skewers the gallery’s understanding of the work, exclaiming “your evil act of censorship justifies exactly what it is that Molly is reflecting. Your unwillingness to allow a light to be shone onto a looming darkness gives life to the very darkness you desired to repress.” [ARTnews]
LACMA’s associate curator of contemporary art, Jarrett Gregory, and Eric Shiner, the Warhol Museum’s director, have been appointed curators of the 2017 Armory Show. [Artforum]
An interview with William Villalongo, one of the artists in the Brooklyn Museum’s Disguise: Masks and Global African Art show, elaborates on how European modernists appropriation of African masks became a point of reference for his paper collage masks. “The masquerade is a place of fiction. The viewer’s imagination is an important part of its activation,” he says, believing it is ultimately “a way to think through such historical gestures.” [After Nyne Magazine]
Tate director Nicholas Serota is not a fan of Guggenheim-style global satellite expansions for museums: “a gallery should be fundamentally rooted in its community—it should grow out of that community and reflect that community—and if you parachute in, I think it’s extremely difficult to achieve. You can make a visitor attraction, but it’s very, very difficult to create something that really grows out of the soil.” [The Art Newspaper]
LA’s infamous homeless neighborhood, Skid Row, continues to be mired in rezoning politics and remains a contentious civic issue as the downtown core becomes revitalized but ignores the area’s entrenched poverty issues. Local artist Rosten Woo and activist-performance art group the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) are creating a faux nine-hole golf course in response — which received $50,000 from the Mike Kelley Foundation — to explore the area’s history of zoning, and how the city organizes itself. [Guardian]
Doreen Carvajal profiles the Millennium Iconoclast Museum of Art (MIMA), a museum of “culture 2.0” i.e. street art, skateboarding and other urban art, located in Molenbeek, a largely Muslim neighborhood of Brussels. Opened in the wake of the terror attacks in the city, MIMA aims to engage the local community–many of whom feel isolated by Belgian society–including a cultural exchange with a nearby boxing academy. [New York Times]
Invited to a fancy gallery dinner but feeling too riddled with social anxiety to attend? Artnet News presents a series of 11 tips to survive gallery dinners, which seem too general and bland such as “don’t be a schlub” and “don’t flake out.” What about Emily’s go-to strategy–drink too much free wine and blurt out regrettable comments? [Artnet News]
Peter Beard settled his lawsuit with model and artist Natalie White whose upcoming show made AFC’s Must See Events this week. White sued the well-known photographer claiming that she spent her life-savings helping Beard create a series of Polaroid collages with iconic models like Iman. Beard and his wife counter-sued, alleging White plied Beard with booze and drugs to sign a business contract in a nightclub. [New York Observer]
The last time Emily went to a DIS installation, she found herself drinking Red Bull and vodka out of a Starbucks cup shoved into a Croc. This year, DIS curates their “first and only biennial,” the 9th Berlin Biennale. Titled “The Present In Drag,” the collective takes to Artforum to discuss their aesthetic influences and curatorial approach to the Biennale, which will likely involve copious ironic consumer products. [Artforum]