- Oh god no. The website Polyvore lets fashionistas “curate” user-generated shopping boards with different themes. Someone thought it was a good idea to make one inspired by Shabat Gula, the Afghani orphan famously photographed in a refugee camp for the cover of National Geographic. When I think of war orphans living in refugee camps, $95 cardigans, Abercrombie jeans, and sparkly “Dolce Vita” flats don’t generally come to mind. [Polyvore]
- Jamshed Bharucha, the Cooper Union’s hugely unpopular president, has announced his resignation. This comes on the heels of five trustees resigning from the art school’s board and years of student protests in response to Bharucha’s policies. [Hyperallergic]
- Apparently the buyer of the $141.3 million record-breaking Giacometti sculpture was hedge-fund billionaire Steven A Cohen. [The New York Times]
- Emma Sulkowicz—the Columbia University student who carried a mattress to protest the school’s refusal to expel her alleged rapist—has a new, controversial web-based artwork. Ceci N’est Pas Un Viol or “This is Not a Rape” comprises surveillance camera footage of the artist and a male friend engaging in violent (but consensual) sex. [Huffington Post]
- Analog special effects legend Rick Baker has closed his studio and auctioned off beloved props and prosthetics from some of the 20th century’s most iconic films. He discusses how CGI killed the industry, leading to the somehow boring explosion-fest blockbusters we now have to sit through all summer. [VICE]
- Baynard Woods, musician and journalist, laments the trend of studio spaces and venues in Baltimore’s Station North Arts and
Gentrification Entertainment District continually being closed for “code violations” and then redeveloped as office space. [City Paper]
- Keith Tillford critiques Dis’s “Style and Customs in the 2020s”, a characteristically tongue-in-cheek set of crowd-sourced predictions for the next, likely horrible decade. It’s next to impossible to disagree or agree with him because both manifestos are so opaque: Dis’s perspective is of course veiled in ambiguity and irony, while slogging through Tillford’s art-speak is a maddening challenge. It took me 3 reads to comprehend this sentence: “Philosophies conditioned by universally oriented political thought and action, or artistic practices interested in their intersections with the topologies of the political can do better than a Beckettian ethics and a militancy of incompletion self-medicating on fidelity to dead signifiers” [e-flux]
- An interview with Sean Fennessy, who shoots gorgeous photos of the Australian Gold Coast and Dubai’s built environments and beaches. [Vice]
- More Nazi-looted art drama. A California judge has dismissed a claim made by the family of Lilly Cassirer against the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. The museum owns a Pissarro that Cassirer was forced to sell to a Nazi art appraiser. The judge said the case of the painting is an issue for Spanish courts to decide. [The New York Times]
Tagged as:
Cooper Union,
DIS Magazine,
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shabat gula,
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{ 2 comments }
In an interesting coincidence tangentially linking stories mentioned in this post, Sulkowicz’ father Kerry is a psychoanalyst who was hired by Cooper Union’s board as a consultant late last year (http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-cooper-union-tragedy ; http://www.wsj.com/articles/cooper-union-president-and-board-chairman-clashed-at-harvard-club-1429491722).
interesting you refer to the boy emma sulckowitcz is publically humiliating/bullying as an ‘alleged rapist’.. a harsh bully smear and just as meaningless as if i were to call paddy johnson my rapist.. will you please begin referring t paddy johnson as an alleged rapist in future articles michael? thanks in advance.. -Karlo
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