- Owl in a towel! [Imgur]
- On why ramen is dead: “The country’s noodle scene is currently awash in deeply porky broths and stifling homogeneity…which is the antithesis of ramen.” Sadly, no mention of instant ramen. [Grub Street]
- Brooklyn’s waterfront has been invaded by Chinese developers. (Okay, that’s an exaggeration.) The Oosten, set to open in Williamsburg next year, will become the first solely Chinese-owned building to be erected in the United States. [WNYC]
- Astronauts: stop littering. There are 96 bags of urine on the moon. [The Takeaway]
- Expansion Notice: The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) has raised $330 for its $450 million capital campaign. Houstonians should be happy about some of the planned renovations which plan on making the campus more pedestrian-friendly. This from a city where people look at you funny if you’re walking instead of driving. [Glasstire]
- Everyone is planning for motherfucking Valentine’s Day already. If you like boobies, and you live in Chicago, you can pay to go on a “Naked at the Art Institute Scavenger Hunt” tour. $41 will give you and a date all the boobs, balls, and buttholes on view in the museum. [Fleshbot]
- El Museo del Barrio curator Rocío Aranda-Alvarado responds to our reporting last year on the Gramsci Monument. She advocates for a less cynical outlook on art in general, and views the monument as a community-based experience which goes “beyond the self”– “turning regular capital into social capital.” (At the time, skepticism about funding, colonialism, and the artist’s intentions surrounded the monument.) This, and other responses will continue on A Blade of Grass. [A Blade of Grass]
- Here’s the supplement to the modern love story in the Times we linked to yesterday: It’s the set of questions you ask your partner to fall in love. [The New York Times]
- Art critic Rodrigo Cañete has noticed that MoMA plans to sell a Monet to benefit its acquisitions fund. This is justified by a spokesperson who notes that Impressionism doesn’t fit the museum’s modern painting collection. [Taboofart]
- Tom Moody has some thoughts on our blogroll and our recent statements on Ryder Ripps. Generally speaking, I think he gives critics a little too much power, but it’s good to hear the perspective regardless.[Tom Moody]
- Moody also argues that Ripps’ “Art Whore” is “no more offensive” than Andrew Norman Wilson’s “Virtual Assistance Project,” a year-long mutual collaboration with a presumably low-paid overseas assistant, for art. This is unfair to Wilson, who worked extensively with his assistant Akhil and returned the favor by building a mini-plane and making a video, which Akhil requested. While this does not forward the assistant’s career, Wilson doesn’t align his own creative work with his assistant’s. He also doesn’t view him as a whore. [Tom Moody]
- Margarine consumption happens to correlate almost perfectly with the divorce rate in Maine, and other random trends that correlate. This site is amazing. [Spurious Correlations]
Tagged as:
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{ 14 comments }
Andrew Norman Wilson’s curiosity about the global “other” could have been satisfied privately, without dragging an outsourced “man Friday” into the bordering-on-meaningless world of US academic conceptual art — for an entire year. The term “Friday” originates with Daniel Defoe — you should watch Luis Bunuel’s version of Robinson Crusoe, that’s basically Wilson patiently tutoring his Friday about a “self-reflexive inquiry and experimental engagement [to] strategically expand and diffract/rematerialize the already present communicative and creative commonalities made possible by network capitalism.” Global outsourcing is offensive; “working within the system” to enhance the Get Friday brand is equally offensive. Ryder Ripps engaged two non-art worlders for one night of art making to make a point that you consider dubious or ill-considered. You’re getting all prissy about the use of the terms “whore” and “sex worker” and glossing the relative merits of these two projects.
As far as your power, you’ve in effect announced an embargo of Ripps’ future shows. Rhizome has tarred him with the phrase “ethically unsound.” You both severely over-reacted. That has consequences for an artist’s career.
I’ll let Whitney respond to the Andrew Norman Wilson thing since that’s her link. But to answer the power question, I think it should be noted that we did not announce an embargo on all of his shows, just the one at Postmasters. And as I said in comments elsewhere, if the show is different than its PR, we can always reevaluate.
I didn’t frame Ripps’ basic interaction, paying people to make drawings, as offensive in itself– just that he calls himself a “whore” for some relatively minor case of underpaid art exposure. This is a pattern of complaints that he’s being mistreated because his own art is undervalued.
Wilson describes his interactions with his Get Friday assistant as simply asking his assistant about his interests, and building a more reciprocal relationship than the usual pay-for-anonymous-service. Yes, global outsourcing is offensive, that’s the point of Wilson’s work. The point of “ART WHORE” was to air personal complaints which are ridiculous when you compare them to the reality of sex work.
And we’re not the only people tearing into this project. The piece compiled similar comments from Facebook and were a few of hundreds.
if by consequences you mean the phrase “signal boost” that came up in a few places during discussion of the piece, I supposed Paddy and Rhizome did do something for Ryder’s career. The main effect of the controversy was to further cement his bad boy brand. I’d say everything worked out fine for everyone involved, even giving commentators the opportunity to express righteous moral outrage and contrarians the opportunity to mirror them by haughtily criticizing them for it.
So it all works out neatly, doesn’t it. Why are we talking?
Your last point is a little rich is all; Ryder doesn’t need your protection from artfcity and rhizome. He got a solo show at Postmasters out of it for chrissakes
To be absolutely fair, he didn’t get a show at Postmasters out of the controversy. It had been planned prior to that.
that’s a good thing to have clarified, though I maintain my basic claim in light of the publicity for the Postmasters show that the piece got him
Postmasters had Ripps’ Adrianne Ho paintings in the back room during their Anton Perich opening. One was hanging in a front room, clearly visible from the street. That was October 18, three weeks before the “controversy.” Clearly a show was in the offing. Your theory is fascinating but possibly dead wrong.
further clarifying after Paddy doesn’t change that Ryder doesn’t need your help and doesn’t prove me “dead wrong” about that either. This show will certainly benefit from the attention, even if it’s negative. “oh the humanity! another young artist destroyed by bloodthirsty critics” is bull and you know it.
Your theory about the origin of the show is wrong, and so is your speculation about my motivations. One minute it’s “contrarianism” and the next it’s being overly protective. Not sure why I’m responding except maybe others have similar confused impressions.
“You both severely over-reacted. That has consequences for an artist’s career.”
That’s hard not to interpret as two critical institutions deeply wronging the career of an artist. But Ryder isn’t just any artist, he’s a particular one whose career will be shaped differently than other artists and he’s the one under discussion, so this pronouncement that you end on in your first comment isn’t vague and it is misleading about what actually happened in the aftermath. The consequences seem to have hurt him about as much as a slap on the wrist might and It really doesn’t matter if he directly received the show as a result; that it will run in a respected commercial gallery as planned is a tacit endorsement of his ongoing career. Criticizing artfcity and rhizome on this is a contrarian move because it opposes popular opinion (contrarianism defined) in defending someone who doesn’t need the defense, all the while ignoring the objective observation that his career hasn’t suffered and probably won’t.
There might be reasons other than defending Ryder or “contrarianism” for objecting to two NY non-profits lowering the ban hammer on an artist. It sets a bad precedent. Saying you’re not going to review a future show because of someone’s previous art, or using a phrase like “ethically unsound” (which has a vaguely Soviet ring to it) ought to be addressed, so I did it. I’ve mentioned other artists who might also be provocateurs, yet haven’t been dissed by the art authorities. Andrew Norman Wilson’s takedown of the Google badge system was pure click magic, and see my questions regarding Antonellis’ “Poland Spring” piece on AFC today. This is not an issue related to one particular attention-hungry artist, but you seem to have fixated on that.
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