Thursday Links: Brooklyn, 2019

According to a report by City Realty, Brooklyn’s skyline is well on its way to looking like the one Bruce Willis inhabits in The Fifth Element. Over the next four years, Brooklyn is expected to add a much-needed 22,000 new apartments. Many of those will be in huuuuuuge towers. Scroll through the renderings, which predict a chain of high rises that stretches from Greenpoint to Prospect Heights. But as commenters pointed out, the borough would need to add 70,000 units each year to meet demand, so don’t expect too much relief from escalating housing costs. [Curbed]

On Nicki Minaj, Ovid, and the long history of men fucking statues. [The Guardian]

Vodka! Art! Millenials! Liquor brand Absolut is the internet’s newest art dealer. Why? But mostly, can you even imagine their Miami parties come December? [artnet News]

ISIS doesn’t fuck around. Khaled al-Asaad, the director general of the Palmyra Directorate of Antiquities and Museums from 1963 to 2003, was beheaded Tuesday by the group in Palmyra. He was 82 years old, and executed for refusing to give up the location of artifacts that were relocated from the city’s archaeological site and museum when ISIS invaded the city. Typically these treasures end up on the black market and are used to fund the group’s terrorist activities. Not to state the obvious, but these are terrible, terrible people. [Hyperallergic]

Russia’s right-wing Christians don’t fuck around either. The conservative group calling themselves “God’s Will” attacked the exhibition Sculptures We Don’t See in Moscow, destroying artworks they claim violated Putin’s strict censorship laws which prohibit “offending religious feelings”. ISIS would probably love Russia. [Artforum]

Related: the interview we’ve all been waiting for. Brooklyn artist Mark Porter discusses his infamous sculpture of Baphomet, which the Church of Satan has been using to protest in support of the separation of church and state. [Observer]

Molly Soda’s well-known, but does it benefit the artists to market the show she curated for Stream Gallery as though it were a solo show? The gallery’s called it “Molly Soda’s Same.” Anyway, Hyperallergic mostly panned the work in the show, which is about seeing yourself in other people’s images. The work is described as complacent, underdeveloped and self-indulgent—and worst of all, out of date. “Without an evolutionary push forward, perhaps by including other methods of production or reproduction more evocative of life online, the show feels a couple years too late.” [Hyperallergic]

Speaking of the evolution of net artists, is Wi-Fi screwing up your sperm? Have no fear, new underwear can protect your junk. [Dezeen]

Doesn’t the headline “Congolese artist who died of malaria to have solo show at London art fair” sound like someone died of malaria in order to have a solo show at a London art fair? At any rate, the Africa-focused fair 1:54 will be displaying photographs of Kinshasa by the tragically-deceased artist Kiripi Katembo. [The Art Newspaper]

A gallon of Canadian maple syrup is worth more than a barrel of crude oil. So, uh, Stephen Harper… why aren’t you planting more trees instead of digging up more tar sands? [The New York Times]