Wednesday Links: Yes to Dancing, No to Meat

• Don’t eat Chinese meat. 100,000 tons of meat, some from the 1970s, have been seized across China. [Sinosphere]
• Feminist artist Miriam Schapiro—and one of the first artists to make art with a computer—passed away at the age of 91. [ARTnews]
• If you feel like escaping New York this weekend, there’s always Wilco’s three-day music festival at  MASS MoCA. [MASS MoCA]
• Don Featherstone, a sculptor and inventor of the pink plastic flamingo, has died at the age of 79. [The New York Times]
• A new study finds that creative-sector jobs—those in fields like acting, design, and fine art—grew in New York City within the last decade. This, despite rising rental costs and mounting student debt. And, of course, Manhattan is on the outs: Brooklyn’s creative class rose by 60%, compared with just 10% in Manhattan. [Crain’s New York Business]
• Um, get ready to giggle at some overstatement in this article about how “the role of the starving artist is quickly dying.” It begins with the story of artist Ashley Longshore—who owns a Luis Vuitton handbag! [Forbes]
• According to Peter Malone at Hyperallergic, Ohad Meromi’s “Sunbather,” the sculpture commissioned by the Percent for Art program that Long Island City residents all hate, is only the second artwork to spark outrage in the PFA’s history, which includes over 300 commissioned works. John Ahearn’s bronze figures in the Bronx were deemed racist and demeaning and ultimately removed. [Hyperallergic]
• Japan’s “no dancing” law has finally been lifted. [The Independent]
• Christian Viveros-Faune reviews four Vincent van Gogh floral still lifes at the Met. He really likes them, and proposes that van Gogh’s personal history of mental illness distracts the public from the genius of his paintings. Really? We thought that history served as additional evidence of his “genius”? Plus, as Corinna Kirsch pointed out in the office today, all anyone has to do is look at the paintings to know that he’s doing something extraordinary with his brushwork. [The Village Voice]

Tagged as: creative-sector, dancing, Don Featherstone, jobs, john ahearn, meat, miriam schapiro, Ohad Meromi, percent for art, pink flamingo, poor artist, rich artist, the rent is too damn high, Van Gogh