- Putting a live cat through an x-ray machine at airport security: not a good idea. It seems this has happened more than once. [NBC Los Angeles]
- Adorable wombat. [Facebook Video]
- A flag-burning event in Fort Greene turns into what sounds like an opera (if you squint your eyes and imagine everyone singing). A group of protesters planned to burn the Confederate and American flags. They brought grills. Nobody protested the BBQ of the Confederate flag, even though police stood nearby in an unmarked vehicle. Grilling the American flag brought out an angry biker gang. There were crying veterans. And a dog. [Animal]
- Salon Media’s editorial staff plans to unionize. [Writers Guild of America East]
- Talking about affect in video games: ” These conflicting sentiments of close affinity and distant helplessness in Angela are perhaps the most nuanced display of political grief that I’ve seen in any videogame, or indeed contemporary artwork in any medium.” [Rhizome]
- House museums are restoring historical bedrooms, because if we learned anything from watching MTV’s Cribs, “this is where the magic happens.” [The New York Times]
- Artist Hunter Jonakin has is showing an arcade game “Jeff Koons Must Die!!!” as part of the exhibition Fire and Forget: On Violence in Berlin. Players can blow up balloon dogs. [Art Review]
- In memory of the late, great Sturtevant Frieze dug out an in-depth biography piece on the artist who made a name for herself from copying Warhol. [Frieze]
- Sotheby’s Contemporary Auction in London under performed last night, so there’s lots of commentary on that. Via his newsletter, Josh Baer said, “Tonight’s sale totaled 130.4 million gbp, the strongest total ever for London with 84% of lots sold. The sale had complicated results that any single market explanation would not suffice for – there were winners and losers. The art market is not monolithic and is case by case – take Bacons tonight – 2 absolute home run sales for 30m gbp from one collection then a BI for 25 million gbp. I’m sure the 2 consignors would describe the art market very differently tonight.” [The Baer Faxt]
- Marion Maneker from the Art Market Monitor attributes record sale fatigue to the auction’s whimpering results and notes that many of the big name art works that did poorly were not well loved. He also quotes the Art Newspaper’s Anny Shaw, who observed that the middle market (low hundreds of thousands) did just fine. This is one sale at the end of the season, though. We need to see more to know if these results reflect an increase in strength of the middle market. [Art Market Monitor]
- At the Stay in New York conference, the lack of protection for commercial tenants was highlighted as a contributing factor for escalating gentrification. To combat this issue, San Franciscans are proposing a granting program to help “legacy businesses” cope with the city’s astronomical rents. [Next City]
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The Frieze piece is great, though it only gives a brief sense of how acerbic Sturtevant could be when asked questions she thought beneath her. Reading the Artnet piece the other day about this whole zak arctander thing in which she, Deborah Kass and Sherrie Levine are characterized as “punching up, rather than down”, I couldn’t help but think that if Sturtevant were alive she would have told everyone involved to go fuck themselves.
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