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 visiting2 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:
I grew up with a British mother and an American father in a small German town with a population fewer than 9000 people. Celebrities were my lingua franca and my guide to living like an American kid in the ’80s—something I was determined to do even halfway across the globe….I eventually threw away my New Kids on the Block sheets, but my interest in celebrities and what they can represent continues today. I’m routinely condescended to by intelligent people who “don’t even own a TV” and see stars as the ultimate waste of time and brainpower. But celebrities can help us theorize the relationship between the surface-level, lowbrow, and easily accessible and the deep, highbrow, and complex in incredibly fruitful ways.
In lieu of buying a last minute plane ticket, I’m posting excerpts from Faith Holland’s 2013 GIF series “Chelsea Manning Fan Art,” part of 2 Freaky 2 Friday. Peace out, y’all—it’s Friday night, so I leave you for the weekend with the now-classic Lady Gaga and Beyoncé video for “Telephone,” from which the GIF takes its lead.
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.
We’ve rated New York’s darkest upcoming art shows from “one tube of black lipstick” for “somewhat bleak” to “five tubes of black lipstick” for “this gallery is essentially a food court full of crying mall goths.” Our picks, arranged by opening date:
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]
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]
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.
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.” Walking through Pace Gallery’s current exhibition Blackness in Abstraction, I began to think about that title line from Marlon Riggs’s final film—taken from the prologue of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Even more than the pervasive “Black is beautiful,” this curiously ambiguous phrase hints at the multitude of meanings, voices, and questions surrounding blackness in the exhibition.
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. [Baer-Faxt]
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. [The Awl]
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]
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.
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.
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:
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 
